Claude Heroux

Claude Heroux, a French-Canadian lumberman, stands as one of the most violent figures in Derry's bloody history, a man whose 1905 axe-murder of four men in the Silver Dollar saloon was both a personal act of revenge and a manifestation of the town's cyclical, supernatural violence. His story, as recorded by Mike Hanlon from the account of the elderly Egbert Thoroughgood, reveals a man driven by love and rage, and a community that, under the influence of a dark force, allowed the slaughter to happen as if in a trance.

Background and Motivation

Heroux was a "bad Canuck son of a whore with an eye that would roll at you like a mare's in the moonlight," according to Thoroughgood. He was a sly and mean man, but his life was transformed by his devotion to Davey Hartwell, a charismatic union organizer. Heroux followed Hartwell into the labor movement, not out of political conviction, but out of a dog-like love for the man. In the spring of 1905, Hartwell and another organizer, Amsel Bickford, were brutally murdered by men in the pay of the lumber barons. Hartwell's body was found in the Kenduskeag with his legs severed and his mouth stuffed with his own toes. Heroux escaped the initial attack and became a ghost, moving through lumber camps and vowing revenge on the men he held responsible: Hamilton Tracker, William Mueller, and Richard Bowie. He also began setting forest fires, which burned throughout the long, hot summer.

The Massacre at the Silver Dollar

On September 9th, 1905, Heroux walked into the Sleepy Silver Dollar saloon carrying a double-bitted woodsman's axe. He ordered a beer, ate two hard-cooked eggs, and then walked to a back table where four of Mueller's men—Tinker McCutcheon, Floyd Calderwood, Lathrop Rounds, and Eddie King—were playing poker. Without a word, he began to chop them to pieces. He severed Calderwood's hand, split McCutcheon's head, and disemboweled King. The men at the bar, including Thoroughgood, continued their conversations about the weather and the coming winter, seemingly oblivious to the screams and the blood. Heroux pursued Rounds, who tried to flee, and decapitated him. The only survivor, Stugley Grenier, escaped by crawling through the outhouse hole. The massacre was a public, gruesome event that the patrons of the bar simply allowed to happen, a phenomenon Mike Hanlon later attributes to the town's dark, passive complicity in violence.

Aftermath and Lynching

After the killing, Heroux was docile and was led away by deputies. However, as the night wore on, a mob of over seventy men, fueled by drink and a righteous fury, stormed the jail, dragged Heroux out, and lynched him from an elm tree over the Canal. The lynching, the only one in that part of Maine's recorded history, was not reported in the Derry News. Egbert Thoroughgood, who was part of the mob, recalled seeing a "comical sort of fella" doing flips and juggling in the Bloody Bucket saloon that night—a figure Mike Hanlon identifies as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the town's ancient, malevolent entity. Heroux's rampage and subsequent lynching served as the bloody climax to the cycle of violence in 1905, a sacrifice that quieted the town until the next cycle began.