When Canada was first settled, most immigrants came to Canada for the opportunity to get free land and farm. Whether they came from Germany, Prussia, France, England, Scotland, Ireland, USA, or any other country, freedom from political strife, and the opportunity to farm your own land were the main reasons to choose Canada.
The county that I was born and live in was surveyed and settled by semi-retired army personnel. They understood very well that most unrest and wars were started over a difference in religion and or language. A great attempt was made to place the new immigrants in areas where both the religion and language of the immigrants were the same as those who already lived there. Hence the strife and fighting that our pioneers had left behind in the country that they came from did not exist in our county.
Many of my Brownlee ancestors settled between the Fifth and Ninth Line of Clarendon (as did their Richardson cousins) who both came from the same county in Ireland. This was just west of Clarendon Centre, now called Shawville. But one of the Brownlee boys farther up river went to homestead in the little clay belt near Englehart, Ont.
Another Brownlee brother, Ermine, chose the excitement of the railroad and worked with CPR and lived in Ottawa, Ont. Ermine made many transcontinental rail trips during his life working with CPR. On one of these trips across Canada, the train was transporting money to the west, as well as passengers.
Because of the gold rush in Canada’s north west a considerable amount of money was required each week to pay the mine workers. On one of these money runs which we must remember was before Brinks trucks or even trucks existed to transport money, at a small area called Ducks Station about 17 miles east of Kamloops, BC a train robber named Bill Miner and his masked assistants stopped the train and uncoupled it just behind the express car which contained baggage and freight. They probably knew that money was transported by train every week.
After driving the engine, coal car and express car several miles down the track they riffled through the baggage. They only found a few dollars in the luggage. They missed the $40,000 in cash that was transported in a sack, in the baggage car that they took. They didn’t know that $35,000 in gold was transported in the next freight car back which they had uncoupled and left back with the passengers. As soon as the robbers left with the front part of the train, Ermine Brownlee and the rest of the train crew who had been left behind telegraphed the RCMP and CPR officials to report the robbery.
The RCMP closest to the attempted robbery was immediately dispatched and began tracking the robbers. Within hours, the RCMP had located and surrounded the robbers who had stopped where they thought they were safe in the wilderness of BC. The robbers were arrested without even a shot being fired and no one was injured. The robbers had completely botched the robbery and missed over $75,000. The main bandit Bill Miner was tried and sent to jail in BC for life but escaped jail only a year after.
My great-grandfather Edward Thomas Brownlee purchased the grand champion Holstein at the 1895 Aylmer, Quebec Fair which was started before the Ottawa Fair. His brother, Ermine Brownlee led the prize winning Holstein for 50 miles over dirt roads for two days to be the first purebred Holstein in Pontiac County and take up residence at the Brownlee farm in Clarendon. From this early cow walk to Pontiac County and the bloodlines that followed, Ermine’s nephew Clarence Brownlee bred the first excellent Holstein cow in the province of Quebec.
This story was told to me by Ermine Brownlee’s grandson Graeme Brownlee who is now retired and living in Clarendon. Ermine Brownlee lived to be more than 100 years old and is buried in Beachwood Cemetery in Ottawa.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
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