(fl. 1880s), journalist. Stilwell, having previously been the editor of the Fort William Echo, arrived in Alexandria in Aug. 1885 as the editor of the Alexandria newspaper, the Glengarry Review. Under his direction, this Liberal newspaper was changed to a Conservative newspaper from about the beginning of 1886. At this time, also, its name was changed to the Glengarrian. The local Conservative magnate R.R. (Big Rory) McLennan was thought to be the behind-the-scenes operator who arranged and financed this change of political allegiance. While this was happening, the Glengarrian was the sole newspaper in GC. The Glengarry Times, of Lancaster, had ceased publication in 1883 (see J.C. McNEIL), and the Glengarry News, founded as a Liberal organ to counteract the Glengarrian, did not begin publication till 1892.

     Stilwell played his part with vigour in the fiercely contested GC general election campaign of 1887, with the result that he was charged with libelling the Liberal candidate Patrick Purcell. Purcell would probably have let the charge drop, but Stilwell rashly reactivated it by charging Purcell with false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. The outcome was that Stilwell was sentenced to a fine and a month in Cornwall jail. He was released, almost certainly through Purcell’s intervention, on an order from the governor general before the month was up. Back in Alexandria, his safe and other property were seized by John A. McDougald for non-payment of rent. Stilwell must by this time have been in acute financial difficulties; in any case his troubles had mounted, and at the end of 1887 he fled from Alexandria.

     His replacement as editor, A. E. Powter, wrote unsympathetically that Stilwell “had seen fit to leave Alexandria for parts unknown without having given any previous intimation of his intentions.” Powter promised a new course of good behaviour on the part of the Glengarrian. When Stilwell revisited Cornwall in 1897, he was reported to be a detective employed on the “celebrated Fair will case in San Francisco.” (Cornwall Freeholder 23 April 1897) Beyond this date, nothing has been discovered about him. Among 17 Canadians (mostly representatives abroad of Canadian firms) who retired from the Home Guard in Britain in late 1944, was a C. Stilwell of Alexandria. (Standard Freeholder 5 Dec. 1944) On chronological grounds, this is most unlikely to have been the journalist (though not absolutely impossible), but it may have been his son.

     Stilwell was a journalist of considerable skill and eloquence. He may have been the author of what is no doubt the best satire ever published on the Glengarrians, the anonymous mock obituary of a Glengarrian called Thomas Clay. At the conclusion of the obituary, Clay turns out to be a horse. Stilwell was, presumably, the author of the best-known letter-to-the editor ever to be published in a GC journal. This letter, which was a ferocious attack on the morals of Purcell (as a tippler, Sabbath-breaker, and seducer), appeared in the Glengarrian of 11 Feb. and 13 May 1887 and was signed with the name of the heroine of the ‘45, the legendary Flora Macdonald. Shortly before leaving Alexandria, Stilwell described himself as publishing “a metropolitan paper, in a place which is actually too mean to support the poorest rural sheet.” So far as the surviving evidence indicates, the remarkable political and journalistic commotions in which Stilwell was involved in Alexandria seem to have been managed, on the part of the local people, without deep ill feeling of anybody for anybody else. Instead, these events share the boisterous competitiveness and uproarious fun of small town sports events; but Stilwell was in the embarrassing position of being without money while having to deal with relatively affluent principal supporters and enemies, and the position he occupied seems most unenviable. Some unnerving disturbances one night in Stilwell’s (rented) house or lodgings in Alexandria during his tenure as editor have been made the substance of one of Glengarry’s relatively few ghost stories.

MacGillivray & Ross 168-169, 183, 188-189, 689, for a more detailed history of Stilwell’s troubles in Alexandria, and for notes on the basic sources (essentially, contemporary newspapers and the Big Rory McLennan Papers in Archives of Ontario) * Ostrom 272 (newspapers section) * Powter in Glengarrian 30 Dec. 1887 (editorial surviving in a clipping in papers of Mgr Ewen Macdonald in Archives of Ontario * Thomas Clay satire: Glengarrian 7 Oct. 1887, and note on it (with summary), Bibliography of Glengarry 16-17 * ghost story: Glengarry News 8 Feb. 1952; Dumbrille, U, 58-59; see also Bibliography of Glengarry 131 for GC ghosts * arrives in Alexandria, Cornwall Freeholder 14 Aug. 1885, cited DTL Standard Freeholder 11 Aug. 1945 * injured in runaway when returning from Williamstown Fair, CF 25 Sept. 1885, cited DTL SFH 25 Sept. 1948 * vandals enter his stable, cut off tail and mane of his horse, CF 10 Sept. 1886, cited DTL SFH 13 Sept. 1947 (cf. the ghost story) * libel charge and conviction, CF 22 July, 4 Nov. & 2 Dec. 1887, and Stilwell’s earlier but politically related assault and battery conviction and fine, CF 17 June 1887 (see also Senator Donald McMillan).