"A barricade of ships, guns, airplanes and men": arming the Niagara border, 1920-1930.

On April 19,1929, Chief Boatswain's Mate Hubert E. Wilbur and Surfman Orville M. LaGrant, both members of the US. Coast Guard, began a routine patrol of the Niagara River. The patrol, which nearly ended in bloodshed, provoked an international incident that took almost a year to resolve. The episode resulted from the United States' arming its borders to an unprecedented extent in an effort to win the Canadian government's assistance in enforcing Prohibition laws. Perceived by Canadians as an integral part of American policies that took Canadian sovereignty lightly the arming of the border jeopardized U.S. treaty obligations and brought extraordinary violence to border communities. (1) This federal activity south of the border threatened to negate local efforts to enhance along-successful borderlands community. Thus, Wilbur and LaGrant's experience illuminates a seldom-told story of cross-border relations between the United States and Canada.

A number of historians point out that Prohibition was a singularly divisive factor in relations between Canada and the United States. The American desire to assert greater control over U.S. borders, they note, often conflicted with a growing Canadian nationalism that sought to assert an independent identity. These historians approach the issue in a variety of ways: Richard N. Kottman comments that Canadian support for assisting Americans with Prohibition enforcement varied regionally. His analysis pays little attention to events on the interior border as a factor in Canadian-American relations, however; he focuses instead on the U.S. Coast Guard's sinking of the Nova Scotian schooner I'm Alone in the Gulf of Mexico in 1929. Stephen T Moore elaborates on the cross-border community between Washington and British Columbia, noting that violent activities of liquor hijackers, coupled with evidence of government corruption, threatened to disrupt a local heritage of cross-border cooperation. That disruption, in turn, led to regional support for cooperating with the United States in Prohibition enforcement. Sean T. Moore has considered the ways in which outside law enforcement disrupted a binationallocal economy in northern New York, causing locals to abandon support for Prohibition. (2) None of these historians takes into consideration the extent to which the United States tried to force Canadian public and political opinion into line with American government demands by posting a heavily armed, uniformed military force along the border. This article attempts to add another piece to the puzzle.

Prelude

In a public spectacle in the summer of 1927, the United States, Canada, and Great Britain showcased the familiar story of cross-border relations. On August 7, 1927, before 100,000 people and an international radio audience that may have reached as many as 50 million, Edward, Prince of Wales, United States Vice President Charles G. Dawes, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, and a host of other dignitaries (including the governor of New York, the premier of Ontario, and the U.S. secretary of state) met at Buffalo to dedicate the Peace Bridge, a new commercial link facilitating automobile traffic between the east coast of North America and the interior. It was a major international event. All of the speakers praised the 100-plus years of peace that had prevailed among the United Stales, Great Britain, and Canada since the War of 1812. The "piers of a bridge of friendship" now replaced two hostile forts, Mackenzie King observed. Acknowledging the recent exchange of ministers between the United States and Canada, Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg observed that between the two countries there "are no racial animosities, no great international antagonism," and that differences "can be settled with the exercise of tolerance and patience, and the application of good common sense." Calling it "a bridge of understanding," Dawes said that the Peace Bridge had been built upon both "the firm bedrock of the Niagara, and the peace of the English-speaking peoples." (3)

Indeed, a strong, stable, vibrant binational community existed along the Niagara border. Many Buffalonians had summer homes on the Canadian Lake Erie shore, and others availed themselves of recreational opportunities afforded by excursion boats making regular trips to the amusement parks and racetrack on the Canadian Niagara peninsula. Americans and Canadians crossed the border daily from homes in one country to jobs in the other. Buffalo colleges and professional schools enrolled substantial numbers of Canadian students. Professional baseball teams from Buffalo and Toronto played in the same league. Even the cross-border Rotary district had been a Canadian-American institution since 1918. As the Peace Bridge opened, urban planners and chambers of commerce on both sides of the border envisioned combining municipalities in Canada and the United States into a single "international city" The Development Committee of the Niagara Area proposed a binational industrial development plan to take maximum advantage of regional resources by linking them with better roads, canals, railroads, and bridges. (4)

While the binational community was stable, it was not without tension. Even as the dignitaries spoke at the bridge, there were signs that solidarity was under stress. The York Times report of the dedication appeared under the headline "Dawes Criticizes Failure of Geneva Parley in Peace Bridge Speech." (5) That headline, referring to Great Britain's resistance to American overtures about naval disarmament, was ironic because, as the world listened to the celebration of peace, U.S. Prohibition enforcement activities made the Niagara River anything but peaceful.

Prohibition and Border Tensions