Ugly Feuds

In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century.

On a cold night in February, 1884, just metres north of the border on Sumas Prairie, BC, an Indigenous boy named Louie Sam was lynched by a mob of mounted vigilantes. The vigilantes had ridden up from Nooksack Valley in Washington Territory, hell-bent on avenging the murder of one of their neighbours, which they had pinned on Sam. The American origin of the mob, and the fact that Sam's murder was one of only two recorded lynchings in Canadian history, have led historians and writers to represent it as an isolated and foreign incident—disconnected from people and events north of the border and an aberration from the norm of Canadian history.