Newfoundland Stories by Eldon Drodge Page B

man who met such an untimely death on Gander Lake? His name was Noel Boss, and history records that he was a furrier who trapped and traded furs in the Notre Dame Bay area of Newfoundland’s northeast coast in the early to mid 1800s. It is known that he was of Mi’kmaq descent and that he was well known to many of the European settlers living in that area, and had, in fact, on a number of occasions visited the home of John Peyton, Jr., a renowned merchant in Exploits who later became the magistrate of Twillingate.
    It is clear that Boss was a competent and experienced woodsman, and was in that respect not unlike many other furriers who operated in the area at that time. But there the similarities end. For he was something else – something far more sinister. He was reputedly a hunter of humans, a predator who stalked and ambushed men, women, and children and killed them indiscriminately. He was arguably one of the worst murderers that Newfoundland has ever known. He not only killed people, he kept count and openly boasted about his foul deeds. At the time of his drowning, his tally stood at ninety-nine, and his stated objective was to “kill an even hundred” before he was through.
    Unbelievably, this man was never charged or prosecuted for his crimes even though they were well known and he himself made no effort to conceal them. For his victims were not white settlers. They were Beothuk Indians. Although laws had been enacted by the early 1800s to prevent the persecution of the Beothuk, they were rarely enforced, and the killing of natives, which had started not long after John Cabot made his landfall at Bonavista in 1497, continued unchecked.
    One of his intended victims was Shanawdithit, the young woman believed to have been the last of the Beothuk race. In her captivity, she related how she had been cleaning venison by the side of a brook one day when she looked up and saw him aiming his long gun at her from the opposite side. She fled and escaped, but not before receiving shotgun wounds to her arm, hand, and foot. Although she survived her injuries, she walked with a limp for the rest of her life. The fact that Boss himself escaped death until he met his demise by his own traps on Gander Lake attests to the man’s cunning and woodsmanship, for undoubtedly he was well known to the Beothuk and would have been one of their prime targets.
    If viewed from the perspective of the size of the entire Beothuk population, which some historians suggest never exceeded more than a thousand, the contribution of Noel Boss and a few others of his ilk to the eventual extinction of the Beothuk people is nothing short of staggering.
    Two hundred years or more have elapsed since the incident on Gander Lake, and the shameful eradication of the Beothuk race is now a distant part of our history. Our museums offer displays of Beothuk artifacts, and at Boyd’s Cove in Notre Dame Bay an actual Beothuk encampment site has been discovered and preserved. Some knowledge of the language and culture of the Beothuk race has been handed down to us by Shanawdithit and her aunt, Demasduit (Mary March), during their brief stays in captivity. And somewhere in the murky depths of Gander Lake lie the bones of a murderous villain of the worst order.
    This depiction of Noel Boss is based primarily on information contained in Joseph R. Smallwood’s Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s: Newfoundland Book Publishers Limited, 1967, 1981) and The Book of Newfoundland (St. John’s: Newfoundland Book Publishers Limited, 1967). Some other publications, such as Michael Crummey’s River Thieves (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001) and James P. Howley’s The Beothucks or Red Indians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), portray him in a kinder light, emphasizing the colourful nature of his character and his prowess as a hunter and woodsman, while downplaying any predatory tendencies he may have had