Beaver Hall Hill massacre of 1853 - nine killed

Mayor Wilson

Mayor Charles Wilson was blamed for the worst thing that ever happened on Beaver Hall Hill.
   He panicked during the visit of the anti-Papal Catholic Gavazzi June 9, 1853.
  Forty people were injured or killed in the riot sparked by Irish Catholics opposed to the visit of a critic of the Pope.
   Nine died.
   Wilson changed the venue of the speech from the Bonsecours second floor hall to the Zion Church on Beaver Hall.
   French people didn't care about Gavazzi either way but those darn Irish Catholics, never knowing their place, tried to storm the building and the Cameronians - whose duty had started that very day - panicked and started shooting into the crowd, killing nine. (The body count seems buried in most accounts of the event).
   Officials tried to figure out what happened and accounts were varied, one woman said that a mischief-making Irishman yelled an order that was meant to sound like a fire order and the snipers started shooting. Another account suggests that Wilson panicked and ordered the shootings, which he always denied.
   Beav Edgar Andrew Collard suggests that the Cameronians (aka 2 divisions of the 26th Scottish Regiment) had enjoyed a liquor filled-inaugural party upon their arrival and were still hammered when they shot up the crowd. (BTW, Collard's '77 article references a never-published-or-seen Montreal diary from the era that might be of interest today).
   The Montreal Daily Witness, which heavily blamed Wilson, incurred the wrath of the Catholic Church, whose readers were forbidden to read it upon pains of excommunication and the paper went broke.