James “Jimmy” Longmore Detweiler had criss-crossed North America since the dawn of the twentieth century, chasing opportunities for adventure and fortune. His August 1919 homecoming to Vancouver’s Coal Harbour was shrewdly calculated. Dreams of an impending, unsurpassable golden (liquid) opportunity-rum-running-circulated in the salted air of this floating village and would soon be taken to sea.
More whisky a-go-go, than rum-running, the business involved smuggling alcohol by ship to the United States, into a quenchless, black market.1 That demand was ignited by the US Congress’s enactment of the National Prohibition (Volstead) Act, on January 17, 1920.2 Like trying to stop a torrent with a rake, wife Hannah could only watch as Jimmy hit the water running. Lucrative, exhilarating, secretive, seductive, rum-running became Jimmy’s mistress. Not a clandestine affair: Hannah knew things, as evidenced by evaporating wisps of family lore and long dormant notes of notoriety, which, when distilled, reconstitutes the spirited adventures of British Columbia’s longest serving and very last rum-runner.3
Jimmy was aboard the northern (BC) running Teco when one of its captains, upcoming rum-runner Edward Swank, inaugurated runs into Washington state just prior to the onset of America’s “Great Drought.”4 Yet, even if Teco’s captains were abstinent into 1921, Jimmy assuredly moonlighted: “Our skipper’s mind was always (on) how to make a buck.”5
In the summer of 1921, whisky, dollars, and Jimmy coursed along the “Scotch pipeline” between Vancouver and San Mateo County, California.6 This pipeline of ships was based, bankrolled, and helmed in Vancouver
