Rhodes Grant wrote, “During the middle part of the nineteenth century the whole countryside for miles around was terrified by the misdeeds of what was called the MacIntosh Gang, also known as the Roxborough Gang. It was suspected that the captain was a MacIntosh–hence the name, and that there was a Chisholm and a MacDonald and a MacMillan and a Frenchman in the Gang. There were several others under suspicion too.” Rhodes Grant also says that two members of the gang were convicted and imprisoned, and that “After they got out they reformed and lived model lives.” He reports also that the crime wave was alleged to have extended to Ottawa and to Kingston and to Malone in New York State, and that local legend-makers attributed more crimes to the gang than they could plausibly have committed. The Montreal Daily Transcript of 13 Nov. 1862 (copying from a newspaper called the British Sentinel) reported that Mayor William Cox Allen of Cornwall had assisted in the arrest of certain desperadoes, who had been hiding their plunder in a swamp near St. Andrew’s and were led by a certain Donald Daniel McDonald, who was “associated with a person named McIntosh.” This was perhaps the same group as those known as the MacIntosh Gang; at any rate, the newspaper stated that “In Martintown their repeated robberies passed unpunished from the fact that the sufferers entertained a dread of their vengeance against any person who sought redress. If they did so their houses were sure to be burned, their cattle killed or maimed, their property destroyed, &c.…”

     Also, The Advertiser (Cornwall, Ont.) of 3 Jan. 1866 reported a disgraceful assault committed by two ruffians (“one of them armed with steel knuckles”) at Eamers Corners, near Cornwall. “One of these men, William Macintosh, better known as ‘Bully Bill,” is one of that terrible gang of Burglars, robbers, and horse and cattle thieves, that has so long infested this section of country,…” The other man committing the assault was a Chisholm. The newspaper claimed that Macintosh was the younger brother of Alexander McIntosh, a Roxborough Township farmer who was warden of SDG in 1863. The Advertiser was a violently anti-Sandfield paper, and the news report is evidently biased by an attempt to discredit John Sandfield Macdonald, the warden’s political friend. It seems unlikely that there are surviving sources sufficient to allow the preparation of anything but the most sketchy history of the MacIntosh Gang. The Cornwall Freeholder of 15 Dec. 1865 noted that still another group of criminals who had appeared were “a second edition of the ‘Roxboro’ gang’ who infested these counties a few years ago.” Rhodes Grant, of course, gives Roxborough Gang as an alternative name for the MacIntosh Gang.

     The Brockville Recorder of 10 May 1866 mentions “the McKinnon gang” as a criminal group of GC connections. It would seem from other press references, however, that this was a term for a few alleged swindlers or confidence men, and that they did not constitute a gang in the “Wild West” sense the MacIntosh Gang supposedly did. The McKinnon participants may not even have been described as a gang in the GC area.

     On the subject of crime and violence, see also the entries for John James Craig and J. Slavin for other desperadoes belonging to the later part of the century.

Rhodes Grant, i, 143 * crime and violence in 19th-century GC: MacGillivray & Ross 124-126, 136-137, 191 * Warden McIntosh: Harkness 225-228 (with portrait) * McKinnon Gang: Brockville Recorder, 10 May 1866, Cornwall Freeholder 15 Dec. 1865. There are also reports CF 30 March 1866, 13 July 1866, 2 Nov. 1866, 26 April 1867, 28 June 1867, 27 Sept. 1867, which deal with this issue and, more narrowly, on the arrest in Ottawa, imprisonment at Quebc City, and ultimate discharge without trial of one Archibald MacKinnon, of Alexandria, who was charged with forgery, and seems to have been regarded as the leader of this McKinnon Gang.