Of White Squaws, Murders & Memoirs

From The Mail and Empire, Toronto, dated March 23, 1935, comes this clipping of the story for a renewed search for Maud Gillespie -- 40+ years after she was "kidnapped by Indians".


Leaving definitions & connotations of the word "squaw" to those far more suited to such endeavors (and I highly recommend you read it; regardless of your initial interest), I'm fascinated by such a story...

So many details are missing... Like the age of Maud when she was "kidnapped" or otherwise disappeared... Why her family members aren't listed by names, rather than crediting John Findlay... And, of course, did they find her?

Then again, is this even true?

If we can believe John Wilson Murray, Ontario's first salaried "Provincial Constable" appointed to act as "Detective for the Government of Ontario", it is true -- and they did find her.

From chapter 47 of Memoirs of a Great Detective: Incidents in the Life of John Wilson Murray:

"A few weeks after my return from St. Paul and Aeneas, there was another disappearance. It occurred hundreds of miles from the old home of Aeneas. About five miles from Thessalon, on the shore of Georgian Bay in the district of Manitoulin, lived a family of farmers named Gillespie. There was a pretty thirteen-year-old daughter, Maud Gillespie. Early in August 1888 she went out to pick berries and did not return. She was seen last near a trout stream, and a bully good trout stream it is, as I happen to know. Searching parties went out and hunted for days, but could find no trace of the child. On August 11th I went up to Thessalon and began another search. I organised parties and apportioned the territory, and sent some on foot and others in boats, and for days and nights we scoured the islands and the shores of Georgian Bay. We visited scores of Indian camps, and pushed on into the wilds, but could not find her. I knew she had no life insurance, and was not a county treasurer, and that her disappearance therefore was not suspicious, so far as she was concerned. Her parents were well-nigh distracted, and I determined to make a final effort to find her. With a small party I went far up to remote Indian camps, and in one of them I found an old squaw, who nodded and grunted to me, and I went outside with her.

"'White girl?' she asked.

"I nodded. The old squaw held out her hand.

"'Give,' she grunted. 'Give.'

"I drew out some money. She sniffed. I felt in my pockets. I had a couple of trout flies in some tinfoil; I took them out. The old squaw seized the glittering tinfoil eagerly, taking my last trout flies with it. She tucked it in her jet black hair, coarse as a horse's tail.

"'Me — see — white girl,' she muttered slowly. 'She go — so — so — so ——,' and she waved far north with her long arm.

"'Alone?' I asked. 'She go alone? Indian take white girl?'

"But the old squaw only grunted and played with the tinfoil and trout flies in her hair. We searched farther north, and twice we heard from Indians of a white girl who had passed that way. When further trailing was hopeless we turned back and made our way to Thessalon. It was a long, hard tramp. On the fourth day I came to the trout stream, where the little girl last was seen. I was tired, and I stretched full length on the ground and idly gazed at the blue sky through the trees, and then rolled over and stared at the water. It was a lovely stream. It glided beneath the over- growth into a broad, deep pool, on whose placid surface the reflection of the waving trees rose and fell amid patches of mirrored blue. Farther down the stream narrowed and rippled over rocks, splashing and gurgling as it went. But there must be no drifting aside into a fish story. I lolled by the stream until my men came up, and we moved on. No further trace of little Maud Gillespie was found, and I returned to Toronto. Fifteen years passed. In May 1903 a surveying party was exploring in New Ontario north of Lake Superior, over four hundred miles from the Gillespie home. They came upon a white woman living with the Indians in the wilderness. She was the wife of a big chief. She possessed a rare beauty of the wilds, yet was not wholly like her associates. She lived as an Indian, and exposure had tanned her a deep, dark brown. At first she was unable to talk with the white men, then gradually her power of speech in English returned until she could talk brokenly and remember a few English words. She finally recalled her name, Maud Gillespie, and her mother. They asked her if she wished to go back to her mother. She said she did, and they communicated with her people and she went back to them, a woman almost thirty years old. She had gone away a little girl of thirteen, fond of her mother, and constantly talking or singing in her childish way. She returned a silent, reserved woman, with the habits and manner and speech of an Indian. She had lost her language, she had become an Indian. Gradually her people are winning her back. It is like taming a wild creature, but eventually the inborn instincts will assert themselves, and much of the Indian life will fall away. They have been teaching her to speak her own language again, and she readily learned anew the songs she sang as a little child.

"This loss of language is a singular thing. I met an Englishman in South America who had lost his language, and he was distressed almost to distraction because of it. I have seen other cases, too, passing strange."

While there is a huge difference between the "more than forty years" the newspaper clipping claims and the fifteen years stated in Murry's memoir (memoirs themselves are imperfect recollections, and there is even some confusion regarding the memoir itself *), and this clipping was apparently published some 30 years after Murray's memoir (did she return to her Native American life and they went looking for her again?), there at least seems to be some proof to the story of Maud Gillespie... Or it's a continuing spoof story.

In my research I also discovered that there is another Findlay connection: Ralph Findlay, who did have a brother named John, was murdered and Murray was on the case.

From the University of Toronto's biography of John Wilson Murray:

Murray’s effectiveness is demonstrated by the first case in which he was involved after taking up his full-time appointment, an inquiry into the murder of Ralph Findlay, a Lambton County farmer. While local constables scurried about seeking clues to the perpetrator, suspecting that it was a stranger surprised while stealing horses, the county attorney, Julius Poussett Bucke, demanded the assistance of the government detective. It was Murray, it appears, who wrung a confession from the dead man’s wife that she had assisted her lover in the deed.

You can read Murry's recollection of the events in chapter XV of his memoir, in which he dates the murder to September of 1875, and describes a rather noble John Findlay.

* According to the University of Toronto, the first published edition of Memoirs of a Great Detective: Incidents in the Life of John Wilson Murray was published in London in 1904, without a mention of Victor Speer; however Speer is identified (as compiler and editor respectively) in the Toronto and New York editions of the book the following year.