George W. Ross: One Big Bass in a Small Pond

Lyn Mikel Brown

George Warren Ross was, at various times in his life, a proprietor, postmaster, game warden, a state detective and the town’s deputy sheriff. He ran the railroad hotel and restaurant, owned a confectionery and ice cream shop, had an interest in the roller skating rink, co-owned the Armstrong Picture House, and ran a filling station. George, one might say, was a big bass in a small pond.¹

Ross moved to Vanceboro before the town incorporated in 1884, even before President Grant himself opened the European & North American Railway in 1871. Born on July 11, 1858, the oldest of five, the son of a latch mill worker in Winn, Ross was fifteen when he was sent to apprentice as a clerk at his uncle, Michael L. Ross’s railroad hotel and restaurant. In 1882, twenty-four years old, he married Mary Bishop from Prince Edward Island and two years later welcomed his first child, a son named Warren. 

Warren died in infancy and it appears Ross threw himself into work and community. In 1887 he bought out his uncle’s interest in the hotel and restaurant and then ran the whole affair for another nine years. He nurtured his various dealings and properties, accepted the role of postmaster general, then deputy sheriff and took to the rails as a state detective, ferreting out petty thieves traveling the dinky from Vanceboro to Bangor. During the summers he travelled with different circuses as a legal adjuster. By the time Mary delivered a daughter, Marion, twelve years later, in 1896, George had built them all quite a successful life.

The Georges and The Downeast Game War²

At forty, George W. Ross joined the Maine Warden Service. It was 1898, and a slew of new game laws had just come into effect. As deputy sheriff, he already had the power to arrest poachers, but the additional warden pay plus half the fines and all the carcasses for each conviction would have made the job especially appealing. Within a year he was in an all-out battle of wits with notorious poacher George Magoon.

In some obvious ways, the two Georges were a lot alike. They married the same year. Both jumped into family and community life. Both were short and stout with clear moral principles and endless energy for the things that mattered to them. Persistent, determined, and enterprising, each in their own fashion, it seems, was larger than life.

They were also different. George Magoon was nineteen when he bought a hardscrabble farm near Love’s corner in Crawford, a full fifty miles south of Vanceboro. He didn’t have much as a kid, but he was no stranger to hard work. At twenty, he married Etta Love and together they had seven children. They raised cattle and pigs, tended a big garden and a large apple orchard. Magoon worked the lumber camps in the winter, the river drives in the spring, and he hunted year round for food and profit as was his right, or so he felt.

Ross and Magoon met on the Crawford battlefield for the next seventeen years. Ross shot Magoon’s best deer dog, arrested him for hunting, issued search warrants for his property, and resorted to clever entrapment schemes. Magoon thwarted Ross at every turn, escaping from the Machias jail, enlisting lawyers to fight Ross’s harassment and entrapments, and with the help of his many loyal friends, evaded Ross more often than not.

Nonetheless, George W. Ross’s dogged determination landed him the chief game warden job and newspaper headlines. The winter of 1915, when he announced his upcoming retirement he was the darling of the warden service and the press. The local edition of The Maine Woods sent him home strutting like a rooster. “Famous as a Game Warden” the title of the article announced.³

“Chief among his assets is his versatility. He can give a horse thief a good start and then catch him, trim out the cleverest scheme which the poachers of his county have invented; drive one horse or a dozen, run a circus, hunt and fish, tell stories of the woods galore, and take a hand in politics when necessary.”

Given the chance, George Magoon, who was still poaching deer and moose after Ross’s retirement might have told a different story.

The Deputy Sheriff and the German Saboteur⁴

On January 30, 1915, German reservist Werner Horn, dressed in a rough coat and cap, stepped off the train from Boston. The Great War was on. Canada was engaged, but the United States had not yet entered. Horn immediately drew attention in Vanceboro. Two young people, Mr. Hunter and Miss Armstrong, reported seeing him place a large brown suitcase behind a woodpile before walking toward the railroad bridge. Questioned by an American immigration inspector, Horn identified himself as Olaf Hoorn and explained that he was Dutch businessman looking to buy property.

Horn stayed a few days at the Exchange Hotel, run by a twenty-six year old Aubrey Tague and his sister Bertha. The German checked out on a frigid cold evening of Feb 1 and instead of catching the train to Boston made his way to the bridge. At 1:10am that next morning, a loud blast woke the community. Windows broke in a number of homes and businesses, including the hotel. People thought it must be a steam engine accident or an explosion in the heating plant. Deputy Sheriff Ross, it seems, did not get up to investigate.

When, soon after the explosion, a near frozen Horn returned to the Exchange Hotel, a suspicious Aub Tague put on his coat and followed the man’s footprints across First Street and down the hill to the railroad tracks. At the pump house he met Fred Mills and a few other station workers. The stink of burnt sulphur still in the air, he relayed his suspicions. Someone called the superintendent of the Maine Central railroad in Mattawamkeag who called the border patrol who called the Canadian authorities who called the county sheriff. After sorting through the international bureaucracy, deputy sheriff George W. Ross, it seemed, was the local man in charge.

Ross and two Canadian constables marched up the hill to the hotel, where Tague directed them to Horn’s room. Ross arrested Horn and led him to the station’s immigration holding cell. There he learned further details of how Werner Horn, first lieutenant of the German army, sent from Central America to Vanceboro to prevent war supplies from traveling through the United States to St. John and overseas, had attempted to sabotage the bridge with eighty pounds of dynamite. Because the bomb exploded on the Canadian end of the bridge, however, Ross’s only choice was to charge Horn with illegal transfer of explosives and mischief for breaking windows in Vanceboro.

Word spread fast and by that afternoon crowds from both sides of the border were gathered outside the building, clamoring for information and justice. A World Wide News crew arrived by train the next morning. There to greet them in his best suit and tie was George, mustache and hair neatly combed, badge shining bright on his lapel, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He alone posed for pictures alongside a stunned Horn. Asked to re-enact the arrest, George complied. Captured on film by a young newsreel cameraman from Boston, Louis de Rochemont, the incident made national news.⁵

After a time, George received a personal copy of the World Wide Web news reel in the mail. When friends visited, he directed Frank Gatcomb, the projectionist at the Armstrong Picture House, to play the film as a short before the feature. His deputy sheriff star gleaming, his shoulders back, a determined look on his face, the audience cheered George as he rushed the hotel room, threw open the door, drew his big horse pistol and arrested the German saboteur. When the newsreel ended, Frank, on cue, turned up the house lights and George stood and took his bow. It must have been everything a millworker’s son could dream of.

George and the Big Shows

Mary Ross, George’s wife, died in 1920. George continued to travel the United States and Canada by rail as an advance man and legal adjuster for circuses like Hagenbach & Wallace and Howe’s Great London. When a show came to town, people said, he walked around with fifteen or twenty passes, handing them out to all his friends.

Vanceboro’s Deputy Sheriff to the End

Throughout his life and into old age, George W. Ross immersed himself in Vanceboro. He was a member of the Knights of Pythias and a Free Mason, attending the Baskahegan Lodge in Danforth, and was a contemporary of early town business leaders such as Stillman Armstrong, E.A. Holbrook, and Horace Kellogg.

No one knows when or where George W. Ross became known as Pooch. But one can well imagine why. Ross plied his skills sniffing out poachers at home and Vanceboro was a dry town in Ross’s time. Plenty of local characters tried his patience, shooting deer out of season, making home brew to get through the long winters, smuggling spirits across the border, fighting or generally causing a ruckus. The dogged little man with the bushy white hair and side burns, wide girth and sharp bark, had been hot on their trails for years.

Travel and adventure behind him, George settled into his life in Vanceboro. He ran Ross’s Good Gulf Gasoline filling station on the convergence of Railroad, Water Street and Salmon Brook Road and lived with his daughter, Marion. In early 1933 he was reappointed, at 74, the oldest deputy sheriff in the state.

Footnotes:

1. Local observations of Ross are attributed to Lindy Brown (1922-2006), who shared memories of the deputy sheriff with his family. ↩︎
2. Much of the information in this section has been gleaned from the Sandy Ives book, George Magoon and the Downeast Game War. University of Illinois Press, 1993.  ↩︎
3. Maine Woods, Vol. 37 Issue 46 – June 10 1915 (Local Edition) ↩︎
4. A great many stories exist of this event. For many details here, I rely on The Inside Story of Werner Horn, The World’s Work Magazine, April 1918 and 1915 Vanceboro international bridge bombing. ↩︎
5. A copy of this news reel, is housed at Northeast Historic Film and can be watched here: https://tinyurl.com/2s35rkx7 ↩︎