CHAPTER
3
Stealing through the woods in the night, four customs agents tracked their prey. Revolvers drawn, they fired again and again, 20 shots in succession. But not a shot hit the fugitive, and he danced away unwounded in the dark, ready to smuggle again another day.
The customs agents were well distant from the West Coast that night in December 1888, staking out their man in Sand Beach, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Huron. But the tentacles of the opium-smuggling octopus were long indeed. The Detroit/Windsor/Sarnia corridor seems to have been a well-used conduit for opium originating in Victoria. In 1887, the New York Times suggested:
For some years past, the smuggling of opium from British Columbia to California for the Chinese trade has been a source of immense profit to men engaged in the business . . . The customs officials on the Pacific coast have been making a strong fight against this trade for some time, and about a year ago succeeded in making it so warm for the smugglers that the traffic in that part of the country was practically stopped.
But alas, the trade was soon on again, and the opium was now moved east across the border on small boats or in other ways by middle men, then back west again by train to San Francisco and other coastal points.
The target of the Sand Beach standoff was a Captain Durant. “Everyone around Sarnia knows him to be one of the most daring smugglers who ever exchanged shots with the Customs House officers,” reported the Times. The story of the non-capture of Durant made the newspapers from Victoria to Brooklyn to Marysville, Kentucky. Durant and two other suspected smugglers reappeared in Sarnia, Ontario, the week after Durant’s narrow escape, “all of them . . . young, educated and respected by all who know them,” according to the papers. “They are known as the most daring smugglers that ever eluded a revenue officer, and to be agents of a rich syndicate.”
Durant and his friend were at their ease in “the swell hotel” of Sarnia and happy to talk with the reporter sent from Chicago to interview them. They had been smuggling opium, wrote the reporter, for two years, often in the capacious pockets of specially sewn coats. Durant wasn’t confessing a thing. He had, he claimed, never seen opium, but if he were transporting large amounts of it across the border, that was his own personal business.
According to the newspaper story, people in the know were aware that Durant was “one of the trusted agents of a rich syndicate that was organized several years ago for the express purpose of smuggling opium into the United States from the manufactories at Victoria, British Columbia. The syndicate has $5,000,000 behind it, and is largely controlled by C.J. Joslyn of Victoria.” Also known as Boss Harris, Joslyn was immensely rich, the reporter claimed, and had told a cashier in a bank that his group had made millions from smuggling opium. He took no risks other than losing money: “He never ventures across the border, for he knows that a big price has been put upon his head.”
Did Joslyn/Harris in fact exist? The Victoria Daily Colonist repeated a truncated version of the story early in 1889, but made no comment on the man who was said to live in the capital city and was purportedly the shadowy boss of the smuggling ring. He does not show up elsewhere in the annals of opium smuggling out of Victoria. It would be surprising if he were not known in the city where he was said to reside, but perhaps he was successful in keeping out of the public eye.
Other stories indicated that huge quantities of opium were moving east by rail from Vancouver to St. Thomas, Ontario, then on to Windsor. The boxes were clandestinely moved across the border, then shipped from Detroit by train to San Francisco. Agents of the smuggling ring moved from the West Coast to the east and back again.
Some were less successful at evading official eyes than others. The convoluted case of E.A. Gardner, sometimes misidentified as Irwin Gardner, another miscreant altogether, filled the papers in 1888. Gardner first came to notice as the chief inspector of customs at Port Townsend, where he presumably made the acquaintance of Lady Opium. Together with a man named Chester Terry, he was charged with smuggling 500 pounds (230 kilograms) of opium into the United States aboard the steamer George Starr, in a conspiracy with other customs inspectors. He and the other accused, it was alleged, had devised a scheme to switch opium-filled trunks and empty trunks along a route from Victoria to the eastern border of Washington State and back to Portland, then north again to Seattle. Gardner was found not guilty, mainly because the smuggling scheme had been so complex that “the entire absence of opium shown or proven in the case” left ample room for doubt.
Terry, however, was less lucky. Rather than face trial, he skipped out to British Columbia. Despite amassing much money and living in luxury in Victoria, he was reported to have gone insane, and then—or perhaps simultaneously—to have got religion. The great revivalist D.L. Moody came to Victoria in October 1888, and Terry went to listen to him. “He would be the first to enter the hall,” at each of the religious meetings, “and the last to leave.” He listened with ears and mouth wide open, and “experienced religion in a most ardent form, and it is said his reason has been dethroned.” Perhaps it had. His new-found religion caused him to return to the United States to face the smuggling charges, offering land he owned near Tacoma in partial settlement of claims against him.
Even before his trial, Gardner was off to conquer new territory. He was arrested in February 1888 and charged with trying to bring 1,500 pounds (680 kilograms) of opium in a sleigh across the border from Canada to northern New York State. Out on bail, he was rearrested in August on new charges of trying to defraud the government. Once more Gardner was a master of misdirection, and the trail was extremely muddy. He warned police they had better look closely at the “opium” they had found, which turned out to be wooden blocks the size and weight of small opium boxes. “It is plain that the dummies had a double purpose,” said the Times, first to mislead the government, then to swindle the eventual purchasers. But real opium had been confiscated from the sleigh in the earlier case. Ever eager to confuse the authorities and recover his property, Gardner and his partners stole this opium from the customs lockup.
All the complicated finagling was to no avail. Gardner was found guilty on various charges, including smuggling, and sentenced to a total of 6 years—or 14 according to some accounts—in prison. At least one of his accomplices, a lawyer, turned state’s evidence and was not prosecuted.
This Time, We’ve Really Got It Stopped
We’ve made a major dent in the opium smuggling trade, crowed the officials of the United States government in 1888 and 1889 and 1901 and almost every year that they arrested and convicted a Gardner or a Terry, or confiscated a cache of opium. With each big drug-shipment seizure and with every arraignment of suspects, they declared another battle won against the opium smugglers. But these victories never added up to an end to the war: a porous border, myriad routes from Canada to the United States and a customs agency vulnerable to bribery and sometimes staffed with incompetents made it impossible to stop smuggling.
The enforcers—customs officials, federal agents and state and civic police—were almost always outgunned and outnumbered. The smugglers used newer and faster boats to fly through the channels between British Columbia and the United States. For many years, the Coast Guard had to depend on the revenue cutter Oliver Wolcott, a sturdy but slow ship that could rarely sail faster than four knots. Even Larry Kelly’s sloop could move faster than that in a fresh breeze, and Wolcott couldn’t enter the narrow or shallow waterways used by the smugglers. Most smugglers knew these channels far better than the officials did, and they could choose any time and any place to move through the territory and unload their cargo. The only things the enforcers had going for them were the whispered words of informers and their knowledge of the eventual destination of the opium.
Nonetheless, they tried. Washington Territory governor Watson C. Squire became a US senator once the territory became a state in 1889. Though he shouldn’t have been, he was surprised by the extent of opium traffic in his home region. After confessing that customs officials had been unable to stop the traffic in the preceding nine years, he declaimed, “I have repeatedly urged the Treasury Department to take a more vigorous policy in stopping the proceedings . . . The force of the Government employees there does the best it can, but there are not enough of them there.”
The best they could do that year was to capture the steamer Walla Walla with two barrels put aboard in Victoria, supposedly containing sauerkraut, and on another date with three barrels marked skid grease. Both times, the barrels were found to contain opium when they were opened at the dock at Port Townsend. Walla Walla was held under a bond of $5,000, and law enforcers thought they could cause the ship a great deal of trouble, though the ship’s officers denied knowledge of the opium—a common defence in those days and these. But it seems they caused Walla Walla no trouble at all, for it continued to steam between Victoria and San Francisco for the rest of the year.
A member of the Committee on Immigration of the joint houses of the American government, Squire made recommendations to help stop the smuggling of both opium and Chinese. A bill had been passed authorizing the purchase of two small steam launches that could help the revenue cutters chase down smugglers. “The launches were to cost $5,000 each, to be swift, easily handled, and constantly on duty. They are to play among the islands as police and detective boats. They will be able to do much more effective work than the larger vessels.”
Squire recommended that the government add more agents to the West Coast. But, he warned, as long as the duty on opium remained high, “the profits are such that unscrupulous men will take considerable risks. In my opinion, all opium should be prohibited from the country, except for use in the arts or for medicinal purposes. It should be made contraband goods.” This would happen two decades later, but Squire would be completely wrong about ending smuggling by making drugs illegal.
A newspaper noted in 1891 that about a ton of opium was stored in the customs house in Port Townsend, “the result of many months’ work on the part of the customs officers.” The opium, however, was likely to be auctioned off, and if previous auctions were any indication, the smugglers would buy it back for a fraction of its nominal worth, and it would once more be on its way to the eventual user, this time legally.
The US revenue cutter Wolcott was overmatched in the battle against smugglers: old and slow, she could neither catch up with the smugglers’ boats nor follow them into the narrow passages of the San Juan Islands. Nonetheless, ship and crew did capture a number of smugglers and seize their cargos of illicit opium.
US Coast Guard
Wolcott and its crew declared a victory in 1891 when they captured five different groups in 15 days, and “the smugglers were all driven to the land for a chance to operate successfully . . . the activity of the Wolcott is practically breaking up all smuggling on the straits, which during the last two years has been a perfect harvest to scores of men.”
The good work continued. In October of 1891, Wolcott captured 13 men on San Juan Island. The Portland Oregonian gave credit to the cutter’s captain, who had sent one of the steam launches to guard the island the previous week and then dispatched several men to pose as shipwrecked sailors. “They went to the cabin of the smugglers and asked for shelter. After being there for two days, and having secured sufficient evidence against the smugglers, they sent for the cutter.” Wolcott and its crew apprehended the men and “cut off the escape for the rest.” They expected to capture the entire gang, but “the smugglers are said to be well organized and their operations extend over a wide territory.”
The new steam launches had arrived in 1891, yet smuggling continued apace. By September 1893, American officials were even more outraged by the practice, and two more revenue cutters were ordered to Puget Sound, one from New York and one from Lake Erie. Both boats were to be armed with rapid-fire batteries of four guns each. The boats duly arrived, but not without criticism: one correspondent to the New York Times suggested the assignment was incredibly foolish, for “the unlawful trade referred to is carried on in those waters under cover of night mostly, and in boats, row and sail, through divers bays and inlets, creeks and other shoal waters, where vessels of the revenue cutter service cannot go in chase.” It would be far better, he suggested, to break up the “nefarious trade” with more steam launches that could chase down the smugglers’ boats.
The cutters did make their laborious way west, but there were problems no ship could solve. Customs officials and police turned out to be eminently bribable, and even a special treasury agent was found to be part of a smuggling ring. Customs and transport officials dismissed for cause, or not, continued to snuggle up to the smugglers, selling information they had gleaned through their jobs. Far from being considered the good guys, efficient agents earned “the bitter hostility of those who have not learned that smuggling is an infraction of the statutes of the United States, and as such is regarded as a crime.”
Even diligent and relatively honest officials could not stem the tide of opium smuggling, for a successful operation usually captured only a small fraction of the opium smuggled into the United States. Something more was needed, thundered the New York Times in 1903:
For thirty years, Puget Sound has been the seat of the greatest opium and Chinese smuggling operations in the country, and the Government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in attempting to stop small sloops from Victoria or other British Columbia ports . . . They have every opportunity to escape among dozens of islands, and an immense fleet of revenue cutters would be necessary to thoroughly patrol every passage and island coast.
And something more was introduced. The revenue cutter Grant was fitted with telegraphic apparatus and could be rapidly dispatched to chase and capture any suspected opium smuggler. The Times continued, “Capt. Tozier, who has chased smugglers for years, declared wireless telegraphy will stop smuggling.”
But smuggling continued. Six months later, secret agents seized 2,000 pounds (910 kilograms) of opium, worth $30,000. It was the largest amount of opium ever seized in the United States—or so they claimed. They also hauled in one of their Mr. Bigs: “Big” Stevens, along with two other leading smugglers, thus breaking up, they declared, a smuggling ring that had been operating on the sound for more than a year. The catch was credited to a secret agent seconded from New York two months earlier.
And so it went, with special agents, revenue cutters, wireless telegraphy, informers, arrests and confiscations all thrown into the battle against the opium smugglers. But everyone knew the truth: they could reduce the traffic, but as long as demand existed, it could not be stopped.