About William E. McLeod
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William E. "Bill" McLeod spent most of his adult working life as a community college professor. He taught business courses at Cambrian College of Applied Arts & Technology in Sudbury from 1969 to 1998 when he retired. During that period he published and consulted extensively in the fields of life insurance, mutual funds, tax shelters and financial planning.
Bill was born and raised in Chapleau, Ontario, and has had a life long interest in the history of that part of Northern Ontario. One of his first retirement projects was to write and publish The Chapleau Game Preserve: History, Murder and Other Tales. Released in 2004, the book is an account of Bill's family connection with the Game Preserve and the fur trade in Northeastern Ontario. Included are many anecdotes and accounts of a number of murders and disappearances that occurred in the Chapleau area between 1922 and 1959.
Of particular interest to Bill was the removal of the Brunswick House Band from the Game Preserve in 1925 and the subsequent ill treatment of this small group of Cree who were bounced from Elsas to Tophet to Duck Lake near Chapleau where their descendants live today. A large part of this sorry tale involved the Anglican Residential Schools in Chapleau that first opened in 1907 and closed in 1948.
After the Game Preserve book was published, Bill was able to gain access to a number of additional sources of information about the 1954 murder of Steve Klapouschak, the teacher in the one room school in Dalton, Ontario. After two trials, Robert Bruce Ducsharm was convicted of the murder and was hanged in the jail in Sudbury, Ontario on June 15, 1956. An additional police file on the case enabled Bill McLeod to write a completely new book about the murder. Titled Murder in the Schoolhouse - Sudbury, Ontario's Last Hanging, the book was published in 2007.
In the fall of 2018 Bill McLeod published his fourth Chapleau area book titled St. John's (Anglican) Residential Schools, Chapleau, Ontario, 1907 to 1948. It is a 408-page history of the two schools in the context of their location in Chapleau in the first half of the twentieth century. Considerable space is allocated to the children who died at both schools, where they are buried and to the racism that was rampant in the community of Chapleau.
William E. McLeod holds an Honors Degree in Business Administration (Wilfrid Laurier University - 1964) and a Master's Degree in Business Administration (Michigan State University - 1966).
He is married to Sheryl M. Ade, R.N., and they have three grown children and three grandsons. The McLeods live in Sudbury, Ontario.
Please click on the links below to read the Bill's tales of how he came to write each of his books:
Why I wrote The Chapleau Game PreserveWhy I wrote Murder in the Schoolhouse
Why I wrote Chapleau: Retrospective
Why I wrote St. John’s (Anglican) Residential Schools, Chapleau, Ontario, 1907 to 1948
Growing up I heard many stories about the Chapleau Residential Schools and I wanted to make sure that they were not forgotten.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William E. “Bill” McLeod is a retired Community College business professor.
He has published extensively in the fields of family finance and life insurance.
His latest book is about the Chapleau Residential Schools
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