National Adult Literacy Database

November 2, 1998

Aloma Zastre

Aloma Zastre was born in Eriksdale, Manitoba. She now lives in Selkirk and has done so for about the last 15 years. She has helped organize conferences for learners in Winnipeg and in Selkirk. She was the first student in the Selkirk Adult Literacy Program to graduate and become a tutor. Aloma currently works at a grocery store and she also babysits. She has fun all the time.

 

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Percy Moggey - A Man Who Was on the Run

by Aloma Zastre

There was a man whose name was Percy Moggey. He was originally from Portage la Prairie but his family moved to Gypsumville where he grew up as a boy. Percy did some crimes in Manitoba, then he got caught for the crimes and ended up doing time at Stoney Mountain Penitentiary.

In the early sixties Percy Moggey committed crimes in the United States but he did not get prosecuted for them. About 35 years ago Percy Moggey, an escaped convict on the run from Stoney Mountain Penitentiary, decided to go and hide where no one would know him so he could hide from the law. He hitched a ride from someone in a car or hitched a ride in a boxcar of a train and travelled all the way to a small town in Manitoba.

Percy Moggey landed in the small community of Eriksdale. He decided to build a sod cabin which was underground in a sparsely populated but well-treed swampy piece of crown land about six kilometers north of Eriksdale, which now is a gravel road between Eriksdale and Mulvihill and now named Moggey's Road. He lived for nearly a year from the time he scaled the high wall of Stoney Mountain Penitentiary in 1960 and no one knew that Percy was hiding there until someone spotted him nearly a year later. He was recaptured and spent more years in jail.

One can travel to Eriksdale and Mulvihill on highway number six. One see's in the town of Eriksdale a fire hall, the orange hall, post office, a hotel, 2 restaurants, 4 garages, 2 schools, 3 churches and etc. The town hasn't changed much since 35 years ago since Percy hided there. Percy's route to the cabin is close to a hay meadow trail that hundreds of people from far and wide would travel over during the summer of 1961 after he was recaptured. Percy would casually trick the posse of law men in Lundar. He also built another hideout underground in a gravel pit near Spear Hill, also he involved Dauphin, Portage la Prairie and other interlake communities. Percy would take things that he needed from stores and people's sheds and stole things from St. Laurent and Lundar while he was hiding out at Eriksdale but also he stole from stores in Stoney Mountain. But Percy was an honest crook, sometimes he would leave money for things that he took. The people in the community did not know that he had been there. They wondered why things would be missing and then they would find money then wondered where it had come from.

Finally some people were digging up Seneca Root and noticed a cabin underground. They talked with the stranger that they met there. When they went home they decided to tell the police that there was a strange man hanging around the area.

Someone phoned the police then they alerted the F.B.I. who had a Wanted poster out on Percy Moggey. A couple days later the cop cars roared up the muddy gravel road, helicopters dropped out of the sky. The policemen had automatic guns and machine guns and then they arrested Percy Moggey and then he went back to jail.

They named the place where Moggey's cabin was and called it Moggey's Road. It is very popular because the teenagers or older people take their girlfriends or boyfriends there to gaze at the stars and have a romantic night out with the ones they love, also it is where young teenagers like to drink there and thats why they call it Lovers Lane.

Moggey's cabin is run down but the structures is still there, and now there are hydro poles and people's farms are near there. People did not know that this man lived in their community until the people found him.

They are going to put a monument on his place and fix up a road with a road sign saying Moggey's Road. Nobody knows if he's still alive or dead. The story of Moggey's Road will live on because everyone talks about it. But I heard that Percy Moggey died in jail.