The Robbery and the Shootout

On Monday, August 2, 1920, Thomas Bassoff, George Akroff, and Ausby Auloff boarded Canadian Pacific Railway Train #63 at Lethbridge, Alberta with tickets to Crow’s Nest, a small town in the Crowsnest Pass, perched on the Alberta and British Columbia border. They remained unobtrusive until the train departed the town of Coleman, when suddenly they pulled revolvers and held up the train. Maskless, they robbed male passengers of their cash and some jewellery but chose not to harass the women and children. When the train unexpectedly pulled into Sentinel, a siding stop between Coleman and Crow’s Nest, they panicked and fled. In a last act of thievery, one of the bandits stole the train conductor’s new pocket watch—a decision he would come to regret.

Shortly after noon on Saturday, August 7, two of the bandits, Thomas Bassoff and George Akroff, came out of hiding, entered the Crowsnest town of Bellevue, and boldly strolled down its main street. They paused briefly to stare in the office window of the local Justice of the Peace, Joseph Robertson, and then proceeded next door to the Bellevue Café, entered a curtained booth, and ordered lunch.

Alerted to their presence, Alberta Provincial Police (APP) Constables James Frewin and Frederick Bailey, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Corporal Ernest Usher headed to the café, intent on making an arrest. Bassoff and Akrof were enjoying coffee when Constable Frewin and Corporal Usher rushed into the booth, challenging them with the accusation of being the train bandits, and demanding their surrender, with Constable Bailey as backup, lurking behind them. They refused to comply.

As Akroff reached for his coat, Constable Frewin saw the barrel of a gun protrude from a pocket. He panicked and immediately began shooting. His was the opening salvo, heralding one of the most tragic days in Alberta policing history. Within minutes, Corporal Usher, Constable Bailey, and George Akroff lay dead in the street. Bassoff, though wounded, escaped. During the manhunt for the escapee, Special Constable Nick Kyslik, sworn in to assist with the manhunt, would tragically die from a police bullet. The bandit, George Auloff, fled immediately following the train robbery.

The Backstory

It was sometime in July 1920, while residing in Great Falls, Montana, the trio made their fateful decision to rob Canadian Pacific Railway Train #63, southern Alberta’s connection through the Crowsnest Pass to Cranbrook in southeastern British Columbia. The Montana Standard in Butte Montana, and other state newspapers later made unsupported claims that Bassoff was part of a gang that had committed several robberies in Great Falls the previous summer. Bassoff later claimed that the idea for the train robbery had originated with Akroff and Auloff, the latter having furnished the train tickets for the dubious and ill-fated venture, while the former provided a gun. Initially, the intention was to rob His Majesty’s Mail, but Bassoff, fearful of the consequences, threatened to quit the venture, so the focus shifted to robbing the train’s passengers instead. Auloff without fear of contradiction after Akroff and Bassoff were safely dead, and faithful to the dictum that there is no honour among thieves, squarely laid the blame on his companions. Under the threat of being shot by Akroff and Bassoff, Auloff lamented, he was forced to proceed with this criminal enterprise.

It is not difficult to imagine that the work life reality the three Russian bandits endured had something to do with their eventual engagement in criminal activity. Men of Bassoff’s background and experience, would have been attracted to American towns such as Butte, Montana, by the available employment in metals mining and the ethnic diversity in which they found shelter. One estimate is that in 1920 a third of Butte’s population were foreign born.

Mining life across North America was, at this time, noted for its deadly and difficult working conditions, and the brutal response of state and employer to organized labour’s efforts to improve the lot of working men. Conditions in Butte, where Auloff, Akroff, and Bassoff sojourned during 1919 and 1920, were no exception. Anti-union feelings ran so high that a union organizer was murdered in 1917, a crime for which no one was held to account. On April 21, 1920, ‘Bloody Wednesday’, also known as the Anaconda Road Massacre, security guards opened fire on hundreds of striking miners wounding fifteen, two of whom died from their wounds. Being a member of a union resulted in being blacklisted and banned from work in the mines bringing an abrupt ending to one’s ever precarious livelihood.

Conditions were no better in Canada where the trio often turned their attention to earning a living when the US environment was less welcoming. Concurrent with ‘Bloody Wednesday’ in Butte, miners in the Crowsnest Pass were flocking to the One Big Union in the hope that union solidarity would improve notoriously bad and deadly working conditions, uncertain work, and wages that left them impoverished or as often as not dead. One study reveals that between 1917 and 1921 fatal and serious accidents in the Alberta Crowsnest did not fall below fifty per year and in 1917 and 1921 exceeded sixty casualties. The risk of injury or death from explosions, gas, tunnel collapse, and human caused and mechanical accidents, was ever present.

Coincident with this reality was that the period immediately following World War I “saw the full flowering of a relatively new and virulent form of anti-immigrant sentiment” attached to the belief that large numbers of foreign workers from south, central, and eastern Europe harboured radical sympathies. Government, industry, and Canadians in general, no doubt, perceived foreigners as a threat and often responded with violence during periods of labour unrest. There was much in society and industry to make an immigrant wish for an easier means from which to wean profit or gain.