In two very different versions of a story of rum-running along the British Columbia-Alberta border in the Crowsnest Pass in the early 1920s, Sharon Pollock and John Murrell replay history as tragedy. Murrell's libretto for the opera "Filumena" captures the passion and pathos of the exceptional true-life story of a young woman, who at the age of twenty-two was the last woman to be hanged for murder in Canada. In the context of an Italian community compromised by bigotry and ambition, "Filumena" is rehabilitated and written back into history as a woman who resists a transplanted patriarchal authority. Pollock's play "Whiskey Six Cadenza" dramatizes the story as the consequence of personal choices complicated by socio-political forces: the doomed heroine is the evitable casualty of misguided loyalty to a powerful patriarch.