What is contained in this huge book (it must weigh twenty pounds) is pretty amazing stuff, and especially so since 1889 was the year of a very sensational Buffalo crime—the hatchet murder of Matilda Ziegler by her alleged common-law husband, peddler William F. Kemmler. Kemmler has the dubious distinction of being the first person put to death in the electric chair (in August 1890). The event is famous not only as a first of its kind, but also for the gruesome ‘slow-cook’ method used to electrocute Kemmler.

(The electric chair itself, incidentally, was invented and promoted by another Buffalonian, one Dr. Alfred D. Southwick, a professor of dentistry at the University at Buffalo. In an early example of holding an end-zone celebration with the ball still on the one-foot-line, a fist-pumping Southwick strode triumphantly from the Auburn Prison death chamber only moments before the partially electrocuted Kemmler lurched wheezing back into something like life. It took several more jolts, and eight minutes, to finish him off; the ghoulish experiment was concluded only after Kemmler’s scalp caught fire. Afterward, the officials in charge expressed shock at the botched execution–after all, in a practice run only the day before, they had successfully electrocuted a horse.)

Now imagine—in 1889-90, when all that was going on, this very ledger was sitting on a desk at Buffalo’s Eighth Police Precinct station at 484 William Street in East Buffalo (not 647 Fillmore, to which address it was later relocated). The Eighth’s original station, barn, and patrol wagon shed (for the Black Maria (muh-RYE-uh), as the patrol wagon or ‘paddy wagon’ was called then) are all gone now, but from our ledger we can reimagine a time when cops, horses, and wagons were coming and going at all hours of the day or night.

There were ten men assigned to each of two platoons assigned to two squads: the Day Patrol and the Night Patrol. (It’s a safe bet that no Police Department funds were spent on marketing consultants to dream up those names, incidentally.)

Patrolmen walked a defined ‘beat’ or circuit, and checked in with their home station at various points along the way using call boxes (a kind of simple telegraph/time clock). Each was armed with a nightstick or billy club—longer than the two-handled batons cops use today—and only occasionally with a sidearm. (Police in the 1890s—and particularly Niagara Falls’s (sorry NF)—were notoriously poor shots. Only a fraction of them took any firearms training at all, and when they did they were armed typically with .32 caliber, five-shot revolvers.)

Most of the time, though, the cops preferred the stick, and used it liberally. Arrests were typically made after ‘scraps’ or physical altercations between the police and the crook—even handcuffs were not universal, and more than one newspaper article describes how a patrolman would ‘escort’ a suspect back to the precinct house by an ear.

There are websites that will tell you that the Eighth Police Precinct was called ‘the Bloody Eighth’, supposedly either after a Civil War unit or because there was so much bloodshed in that area of Buffalo. I can’t say nobody called it that for such reasons, but that’s not where that nickname originated, nor what it originally referred to. The ‘Bloody Eighth’ moniker was first applied in 1855, six years before the start of the Civil War, to what was Buffalo’s original Eighth Ward, in the Canal District.

Election violence (usually under the influence of the free liquor used to buy votes) being common at that time, whenever the polls in the Eighth Ward opened, there were spasms of fisticuffs and the occasional stabbing. Such shenanigans were at least as prevalent in the neighboring First Ward (also called the ‘Bloody Oneth’).

Urban legend or no, that doesn’t mean for an instant that the Eighth Police Precinct didn’t see its fair share of bloodshed. That part of East Buffalo was only a fifteen-minute stroll from the epicenter of the rowdy red-light district at Michigan and Vine, and William Street itself was lined with saloons. So there were plenty of ways to get in trouble, and added to that was the relatively new ‘Polish Settlement’ or ‘Polish Colony’ just east of the precinct house.

The area’s old-timers (mostly ethnic Germans) and the Polish newcomers did not always get along, and so the records are full of conflict between them—and yes, sometimes bloody.

You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.

Robert’s novel, The Unsealing, is inspired by the “true crime of the century” — with new research, it is thought that Robert has solved the crime — read The Unsealing today!