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George Channing Haddock, one of the first martyrs to the cause of Prohibition, was born at Watertown, New York, on 23 January1832, a descendant on his mother’s side of the famous preacher Lorenzo Dow. Reared under the best influences, he gave his support to the anti-slavery and temperance reforms as a matter of course. He received his education at the Black River Institute and in 1860 began his career as a Methodist Episcopal minister in the Wisconsin Conference. He was always outspoken in his denunciation of the liquor traffic. Once, while presiding elder of the Fond du Lac district, he was brutally assaulted by three armed me, saloon sympathizers.
For many years a Republican, in 1884 he allied himself with the Prohibition Party and became one of its most efficient workers. In 1885, he was stationed at Sioux City, Iowa, a town with 20,000 inhabitants, 15 churches, and about 100 saloons running in defiance of the State prohibitory law. The saloon men had threatened to burn all the churches if their business was interfered with, and no one had the courage to fight them until Mr. Haddock began to fulminate from his pulpit. He lectured, raised funds, signed petitions for prosecutions, and, in every way possible, fought the liquor men. Or course, he incurred their bitter hatred, and on the evening of August 3, 1886, while riding back to Sioux City from the neighboring town of Greenville, where he had gone to secure evidence in a liquor case, he was set upon by a crowd of brewers, saloon-keepers, and roughs, and one of them, John Arensdorf (as, in the judgement of most intelligent people, the evidence at the trial indicated), thrust a pistol in his face and fired. Haddock fell and died almost instantly. Arensdorf and his associates were apprehended and tried, but acquitted. How much influence was exerted in their behalf by the liquor men, especially the large brewers of the West, it is, or course, impossible to state.
— Data from An Album of Representative Prohibitionists (1895)
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