1. At dawn on this day 221 years ago, a man named John White found himself standing in a frozen field with a pistol in his hand. He was there to fight Toronto's first duel.

2. It was the third day of the year 1800. Toronto was still just a tiny frontier town called York back then.

Only a few hundred people called the new settlement home; it was little more than a few houses tucked between the towering Canadian forest and the depths of Lake Ontario.

3. York had been founded just 6 years earlier to be the new capital of the new colony of Upper Canada — built on what had been Indigenous land for thousands upon thousands of years (recently seized with a fraudulent treaty).

4. It was a small, insular place filled with petty government officials who fought and squabbled with each other over power and privilege.

5. John White was the attorney general — the top lawyer in the new province, given the job of bringing British justice to the distant Canadian frontier. He was powerful and generally well respected, with a handsome salary and a seat in parliament.

6. But 1799 had not gone well. His marriage was in tatters. He was deep in dept. His health was failing. He was depressed, bickering with other settlers, disillusioned with Canada & his life here. He felt “banished, solitary, hopeless, planted in the desert ... without prospect.”

7. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Over the last few weeks, what was left of John White's life had been torn apart.

All through the holidays, over Christmas and New Year's, York had been gripped by a sordid sex scandal. And White was at the centre of it.

8. It all started at a Christmas party.

In a town as small as York, it was impossible to keep people’s paths from crossing. Not only was John’s wife Marrianne at the ball, so was his former mistress:

Elizabeth Small, the wife of another important official.

9. In the midst of all the holiday revelry, Elizabeth Small snubbed Marrianne White, ignoring her when she tried to say hello. It was the spark that set the scandal ablaze.

10. John White was outraged by the snub and raced to his wife’s defence. The next day, he showed up at the Smalls’ house demanding an explanation.

When he didn’t get one, he confided his terrible secret to a close friend: He & Elizabeth Small had had an affair.

11. Infidelity wasn’t that rare an occurrence in the tiny capital; York’s first priest reported there were at least six “kept mistresses” in town.

But White wasn’t done there. He kept piling on the insults.

12. He claimed the Smalls weren’t legally married; that Elizabeth had been the mistress of a famous nobleman back home in England who had paid John Small to take her off his hands and sail her away to Canada.

13. He also claimed he'd broken up with her, “from fear of injury to his health from the variety & frequency of her Amours with others" — that he'd dumped her because she was sleeping with so many other men he was scared of getting an STD. A shocking insult.

14. White's claims were made all the more believable by the fact that his affair with Elizabeth Small wasn’t his only infidelity. He’s believed to have had a secret second family: two children with a mistress by the name of Susanna Page.

15. His accusations were enough to destroy Elizabeth Small’s reputation. Thankfully, White’s friend promised to keep all this scathing gossip a secret — with permission to tell only one other person.

But that, of course, isn't what happened at all.

16. Over the course of the holidays, the rumour spread like wildlife through the town. It didn’t take long for word to reach Elizabeth Small’s husband.

Determined to defend his wife’s honour from such terrible insults, John Small challenged John White to a duel.

17. At dawn on the third day of the new century, they met here: in a field just behind these parliament buildings on the waterfront (a spot that's now right next to the Distillery District).

They took up their positions a few metres apart...

And fired.

18. John Small's shot hit the attorney general with full force.

The ball struck White on his right side, tore through his ribs & carved its way through his flesh all the way to the other side, where it lodged in his spine.

19. White was in agony. He taken here: to nearby Russell Abbey, the home of his close friends the Russells — one of York's most notorious slave-holding families.

20. The ball had struck a bundle of nerves, leaving White in severe pain, his body rocked by spasms. To Russell it looked like “the most excruciating torture.”

21. White was still conscious and able to speak, but there was nothing to be done; it was clear the attorney general didn’t have long to live. For the rest of that day, all through the night, and into the morning, his life ebbed away.

22. “Knowing his dissolution to be inevitable,” Russell later wrote, “he submitted to his fate with a most pious and Christian resignation to the divine will and forgiveness of all his enemies.”

23. The end came on the evening of the following day. John White finally slipped into unconsciousness thirty-six hours after he was hit by the fatal shot. Within an hour of that, he was dead.

The story of John White had come to a bloody end.

24. As for John Small...

In the wake of the duel, he was arrested & charged with murder — put on trial by the same judicial system White had helped to establish.

25. White had often complained that juries in Upper Canada were too lenient, lamenting the fact that no one accused of murder here had ever been convicted of the crime, no matter how clear the evidence against them.

This time would be no different.

26. Officially, duels were illegal. But they were also relatively common in Upper Canada, seen as an honourable way to settle passionate disputes, including affairs of the heart. Men who fought duels fairly tended to get acquitted despite the law.

Including John Small.

27. The jury accepted the idea that no one had actually seen Small fire his gun. They may have been swayed by the fact that the sheriff clearly approved — he served as Small’s second during the duel. And so, John White’s killer was found not guilty.

Small walked free.

28. For his wife, however, the suffering was just beginning. Where the justice system failed, gossip stepped in.

We can never even know for sure if Elizabeth Small really did sleep with White, or it was just a vicious rumour he created as revenge. Either way, she paid the price.

29. She was ostracized for her role in the scandal, banished from respectable society, left off all the most important guestlists. Any event she was invited to was boycotted by the other leading ladies of York. She was a social pariah. No one would even shake her hand.

30. And so, the Smalls were left to live a lonely life in their home on the edge of town, not far from the scene of the fatal duel. In a town as small and petty as York, scandals and rumours could ruin lives.

Sometimes, they could even end them.

Thanks for reading! This story appears in The Toronto Book of Love along with many other tales of romance & scandal — inc. what happened when Elizabeth Small *did* try to re-enter society.

You can get it from your fave local bookshop. (Big evil ones too: http://www.tinyurl.com/bookofloveAmazon)