Colonial Despatches

William Armitage, originally from Liverpool, murdered Thomas Clegg in the Williams Lake area. Authorities arrested Armitage but never caught his accomplice (although a body was discovered in the Thompson River and based on the tattoos on the body authorities supposed it to be the accomplice).1 At a meeting of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Lillooet on 15 October 1863, Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie sentenced Armitage to death.2 On 24 November 1863, Armitage was hanged from the infamous “Hangman's Tree.”3 Some sources claim that William Armitage was an alias for a man named George Storm.4

• 1. Douglas to Newcastle, 14 September 1863, 10454, CO 60/16, 152; Walter B. Cheadle, Cheadle's Journal of a Trip Across Canada, 1862-1863 (Canada: TouchWood Editions, 210), 216-217.
• 2. Douglas to Newcastle, 9 February 1864, 2920, CO 60/18, 39; Teresa Cline, Local Travel: The Hangman's Tree, Kamloops This Week.
• 3. Teresa Cline, Local Travel: The Hangman's Tree, Kamloops This Week.
• 4. Art Downs, ed., Cariboo Gold Rush: The Stampede that Made BC (Toronto: Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd., 2013), 100-101; Richard Clark, Executions in Canada from 1860 to abolition, Capital Punishment U.K..