_Portraying scantily the lives of a poor prairie line and a beloved
prairie town._
On the way to the office one morning I heard that Mr. Baker, general
manager of a railway in Manitoba, was looking for an accountant. A
first effort to meet Mr. Baker failed, and, hearing that he had gone
to Ottawa, I found him there. He offered me the post, at a salary
of $150 a month, which was little more than I had received in New
York. But the prospects in the newest section of a new country seemed
better than elsewhere; and so I became the accountant of the Manitoba
and North Western Railway, at the headquarters in Portage la Prairie.
The summer of 1886 was the first during which there was direct train
service between Montreal and Winnipeg. Leaving Montreal Monday
morning, the train reached Winnipeg on Thursday morning, and Portage
la Prairie in the afternoon. Through the wilderness around the lakes
the C.P.R. had innumerable wooden trestles, since filled in. Some of
the engines still burned wood. With a new and unsettled roadbed, it
was impossible to make very fast speed.
Port Arthur was still the C.P.R. port at the lakehead. The change
to Fort William, because Van Horne and the town couldn’t agree
about taxes, was one of those civic tragedies the effects of which
time only partially obliterates. Van Horne said he would make grass
grow in Port Arthur streets. The prophecy was fulfilled. For years
after the removal to Fort William, it was said, all Port Arthur’s
local debts were paid by the circulation of the only twenty-dollar
bill preserved to the town. Port Arthur began to amount to something
when the Canadian Northern came through from the West, and the
seven-million-bushel elevator arose, like a temple of prosperity,
on the waterfront, at the beginning of this century. Up to that
time the C.P.R. had been everything in the West, and, as a natural
process, had gobbled up everything in the way of feeders and rivals,
including the Manitoba and North Western. An end was to come to this
unchallenged supremacy, but nothing could deprive the C.P.R. of its
primacy in the West and East--a primacy which has been used, broadly,
for the advancement of the country. Every sane Canadian is proud of
the C.P.R.
Mr. Baker, my new chief, was originally a railway man. He was an
Englishman and had been private secretary to Lord Dufferin, the
governor-general. He was on Van Horne’s staff in Winnipeg when the
meteor was upsetting many precedents, four years before. The Manitoba
and North Western was projected in 1880, as the Portage, Westbourne
and North Western. The line was to start somewhere near Portage,
and was to reach the northwestern boundary of the province. The
town gave the railway a bonus, and so secured the terminals. The
line was the first feeder of the C.P.R. in the prairie country. Its
constructing engineer was Major Rogers, who discovered the Rogers
Pass through the Selkirks, and refused to cash his gift cheque for
$5,000.
Those were the days of the first western real estate boom--in some
respects the fiercest financial cyclone that ever struck Canada. In a
way, the accountant of the Manitoba North Western fell heir to a few
of its lugubrious legacies; so that some things about its course in
Portage la Prairie will be in order--it goes into the background of
the more solid development of the wheaten empire of the plains.
The C.P.R. enjoyed a monopoly in the West. The promoters of the North
Western wanted connection, in the future, with some American line
at the boundary. They located their terminus at the extreme east of
the town, and south of the C.P.R., and, they thought, pre-empted a
crossing of the C.P.R. They bought 340 acres for $70,000, nearly two
miles from where the terminals were finally established, and built a
roundhouse for two engines. It wasn’t then clear which way the town
would grow--there was for many years a rivalry between the west and
east ends. For an ambitious railway to buy 340 acres, and build a
home for two locomotives was regarded as a pretty good insurance of
the town developing eastward, and it was confidently expected lots of
money could be made out of the sale of the land.
The 340 acres were christened the Great Eastern Estate. Dr. Bain was
sent to England to put it on the market. His expenses for two months
totaled nearly $12,000--in which he was a true ante-type of some
modern foes of frugalism. He induced a syndicate to buy the property
for $1,250,000. Some of this was paid; and, owing to the course of
events, most of it wasn’t. About ten years afterwards a competent
valuator said the land was worth at the outside $20 per acre. The
roundhouse that cost $5,000 was blown down before it had been up a
year. Finally, the timber was bought by a farmer for $50. The land
reverted to its original owners, along with the cash payments that
had been made upon it. The North Western’s dream of riches through
the sale of lots was over.
The bubble was all out of the western boom long before I landed in
Portage la Prairie. Many of the town’s fifty real estate operators
had gladly worked on North Western construction. The effects of
inflation were all around. The morning after a real estate orgy is
apt to last till very late in the afternoon. For practically the
whole of my ten years’ connection with the Manitoba and North Western
it was very much financial afternoon for the good town of Portage la
Prairie.
We had about a hundred railway employees in Portage, including
machine shop men, train crews, and the office staff, of which I was
the head, and coincidentally with which a variety of other functions
seemed to gravitate my way. The railway, when I came to it, was
running to Birtle, 138 miles, and had a branch to Rapid City, of
less than 20 miles. In 1883 it had obtained a Dominion charter,
with authority to build to Prince Albert--an objective which was
not reached by a direct line passing through Portage, until 1905,
when the Canadian Northern arrived by way of Dauphin, Swan River and
Melfort. Of course, in 1886 the Canadian Northern was no more dreamed
of than the radio was. The famous partnership of Mackenzie and Mann
had not begun.
The Manitoba North Western also had come into the hands of Sir
Hugh Allan and associates--as to which it can be seen how strong
the passion for laying rails and ties is in the human breast where
once it has found a lodgment. Sir Hugh Allan’s syndicate, on which
Sir John Macdonald’s first Government had foundered, did not build
the C.P.R.; but the old steamship man did have a hand in a prairie
railway, after all. He did not long survive his advent to the
headship of the North Western, and in my time the president was Mr.
Andrew Allan, his brother.
Like other branch lines which later struggled into existence, only
to fall into the big fellow’s hands, our road had more anticipations
than way-bills. Indeed, in the West, it was a devout saying, “Faith,
Hope and Charity--and the greatest of these is Hope.” The season
before I joined the line it had carried a total of 362,952 bushels
of grain. In 1886-7 we brought 427,650 bushels to the terminal, and
handed them either to the C.P.R. or to the mill. The total grain
shipment from the whole line then, was only what became a very
common season’s business at station after station on the Canadian
Northern, not so many years later. The other exportable freight
were cattle. We couldn’t roll in wealth, when the carloads of stock
handled for the years 1885-9 averaged fifty for the whole system.
Even so we were a goodly portion of the financial backbone of
Portage la Prairie. We managed to pay the wages, without which the
merchants’ cash takings would have had a very low visibility. We were
identified with the life of the community in a way that is not so
easily recognized in large cities where railway employees are a small
percentage of the population. As the Portage was and is typical of
Western Canadian development, a sketch of it as a newcomer learned to
become assimilated with it, is probably worth while.
During the early history of the West the Portage was on the map;
for traders portaged the fifteen miles across the plain from the
Assiniboine River to Lake Manitoba. Its modern history began when,
in 1851, Archdeacon Cochrane, seeing that the Fort Garry settlement
was becoming saturated, as far as the then conditions of population
could be judged, founded a mission and settlement near the old post
on the Assiniboine, fifty-six miles west of Fort Garry. The land was
a little lighter than in the Valley of the Red, and was likely to
ripen crops a week or ten days earlier than on the lower level. The
supereminence of the Portage Plains as wheat growers was later to
justify the noble archdeacon’s foresight.
The population was mainly of Metis and Indians. The white farmers
who came in were few indeed. John McLean, the first, was a good deal
like Nehemiah, for, so to say, he cut his hay with one hand and held
his rifle with the other, on account of the somewhat summary quality
of Indian manners. In the seventies, after Riel’s rebellion had
ended, and the province of Manitoba was set up within the Canadian
Confederation, there was a fairly steady influx of farmers, largely
from Ontario. Until 1869 the whole country belonged to the Hudson’s
Bay Company which, under the charter of Charles the Second, exercised
sovereign rights over the people. “The Company” built its Portage
store at the extreme west of the settlement, and refused, as commerce
developed, to sell land any distance east to other traders. The east
and west rivalry that was long a feature of the town life thus began;
but the company was defeated by events, and later had to move east.
A prominent man in the town when I arrived there was an Englishman,
E. H. G. G. Hay, familiarly known as Alphabetical Hay. He ran a
machine shop at the east end of the town. He had been the leader of
the Opposition in the infant Legislature of Manitoba and had shared
in presenting to the world Portage la Prairie’s unique contribution
to the evolution of constitutional government under the British
crown. He was one of the participants in the loyal republic of
Manitoba, from which the province of Manitoba takes its name.
There had come to Fort Garry in 1866 a Mr. Spence, who called himself
a land surveyor, and said he had been an officer in the British army.
He was a born disturber of the political peace. In a little while
he called a meeting at the Court House to consider the future of
the settlement. With four others he held the meeting an hour before
the appointed time, and passed resolutions in favour of joining the
Canadian Confederation, then about to be consummated. An hour later
a very indignant meeting rescinded these proceedings, but they were,
after all, the real beginning of the annexation of Rupert’s Land to
Canada.
The next year--1867--Spence moved to Portage. Fort Garry was in
the district of Assiniboia, which was administered by a governor
and council, whose jurisdiction did not extend to the Portage. The
place and the very sparsely settled country round about had no
administration of the law locally, because there was no law to be
administered. Spence procured co-operators, who formally constituted
the Republic of Caledonia with very indefinite boundaries. Afterwards
the name was changed to Manitoba.
A council was set up with Spence as President. The first need was a
court house and jail. To get the money for a building the council
imposed a customs tariff; but the Hudson’s Bay Company factor refused
to pay taxes to the new republic-within-a-monarchy--for Spence and
his coadjutors avowed their loyalty to the British Empire, and denied
the common allegation that their ultimate object was incorporation
with the United States.
[Illustration: SIR DONALD MANN
“Whose capacities are in keeping with the solidity of his physical
frame”
(P. 248)]
[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE
“Faced a heavier task than anything that confronted Stephen, Smith or
Van Horne”
(P. 241)]
At High Bluff was a shoemaker named McPherson. He started the story
that the customs collected for the temple of justice were being spent
on beer and whiskey. Refusing to recant his charges he was arrested
and tried, with President Spence as accuser and judge. Farmer John
McLean interfered, in his broad dialect, and turned the trial into
a farce. The republic died a natural death, Spence having vainly
appealed for recognition to the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of
Buckingham.
This republican episode is mentioned partly because it will be news
to many people, and partly because it indicates that more than a
mere spice of originality went into the infancy of communities like
Portage la Prairie, and coloured their maturer years.
Our public meetings were always well attended, and almost invariably
produced their own rows. They were our only movies and were strictly
home-made. The town nerve was on edge for many years, due, to a
considerable extent, to the financial embarrassments that were
legacies of the boom. In the year after I came whole blocks of land
were sold for a dollar. Anywhere else the lots I bought at tax sales
would have created a land baron. They merely impoverished me.
The town’s debentures were of so precarious a value that a Government
Commission was created to suggest how the civic liabilities should
be met. In the midst of these economic difficulties the place was
smitten by an epidemic of fires, beginning with the destruction of
the fire hall itself, and the disabling of the engine. In the end a
firebug was run down, when it turned out that he had been incited to
and paid for arson by a prominent hotelkeeper. The incendiary went to
jail for five years. The inciter was let off on the ground that he
only gave coal oil to the other man when he was drunk. He accepted an
invitation to depart.
Railroading may seem to have been a humdrum business in the
midst of excursions and alarms like these during a period when
provincial politics were furiously on the boil, with the one
time republican Portage the centre of many a blistering splash.
How could it be otherwise when our most prominent lawyer was the
redoubtable Joe Martin, who died last year, after having been in turn
attorney-general of Manitoba, M.P., at Ottawa, Premier of British
Columbia and member of the British House of Commons--the only man in
history, I believe, who sat in four British Legislatures.
The Martin firm, even after its head became attorney-general,
was very keen in fighting for its own hand in local affairs. The
east-and-west bitterness lasted right into the post-firebug period,
as I very well know. The civic government became demoralized.
Something like a fresh start was imperative. The Manitoba and North
Western accountant, auditor and man-of-all-work generally, was
persuaded to become one of the Town Council of six. A new fire hall
was needed. We proposed to put it in the centre of the town, where
it now stands. There was a demand that it be placed in the east end.
Smith Curtis of the Martin firm was active to that end. He called an
indignation meeting to protest against what the council was expected
to do. The council met early the same night.
The council used to meet where the fire engine was installed, and
sometimes the citizen spectators of our doings would be seated on the
engine. As the protest meeting was going on the council filed in,
and there were calls for the chairman of the finance committee, who
happened to be the accountant aforesaid. He rose and said only that
the contract for the new fire hall had been signed half an hour ago.
H u b b u b.
If municipal experts are looking for something novel in fire
protection they may find it, possibly, in a phase of Alphabetical
Hay’s civic patriotism. After we lost our first fire hall and
engine, he got an idea that the engine could be made to work again.
The town had lent him money. He was to be forgiven the debt if he
could restore the engine. He restored the engine, but owing, to
temperamental difficulties, didn’t hand it to the town for a year,
during which time several fire-bug conflagrations were extinguished
by the town’s engine, through courtesy of Mr. Hay.
Take two illustrations of how the force of a small railway
headquartered in a small town can be more of a community factor than
is possible in a large centre. Mr. Baker, the North Western manager,
was a public-spirited citizen, and, like many Englishmen, a strong
supporter of sports. He fostered cricket and other games. A summer
picnic to Lake Manitoba, originated by himself, became a very popular
institution. During the agonies of the incendiary period, the lack of
a suitable bell that would sufficiently alarm the neighbourhood was
keenly felt. Money was too scarce for a bell and belfry to be thought
of. The railway came to the public’s aid.
This was the period, young people may be reminded, when the towers in
the Toronto fire stations contained bells that were rung, two-four,
five-seven and other strokes, announcing the locality of the fire,
in accord with the chart that hung in every house. Mr. Baker had a
monster triangle made out of a steel rail. It was hung on a frame,
thirty feet high. When the alarm was given it was a noble duty for
the proper official to strike the leviathan lyre--and it could be
some lyre. It hadn’t been up very long before a mighty wind blew down
its unbraced frame. Afterwards a bell was bought and put into a tower
of its own. It also blew over, cracking the bell. Whereupon the bell
was hung in the town hall, where the only dangerous winds blew from
inside, and there it never failed to raise its cracked but effective
voice at the appropriate moment.
About the time I went to Portage la Prairie electric lighting was
coming into vogue in ambitious, progressive cities. The first joint
stock enterprise in which I was a shareholder was the Central
Electric Light Company, organized with eight shareholders and a
capital of forty thousand dollars, and of which I was a director
and secretary-treasurer. The president was Bob Watson, M.P. for
Marquette, the only Liberal member west of the Great Lakes, and now
senator. One of the directors was Joe Martin. The manner of his
ceasing to be a director is a diverting story of how a resignation
offered in haste can be accepted at leisure. The pranks which
the meters of those times played would enable another tale to be
unfolded--when the unfolding is good.
We rather fancied ourselves as the first electric lighting company
between Winnipeg and the Pacific ocean. Despite the dumps that had
followed the boom, many of our leading citizens still believed that
the Portage was destined to be a vast emporium of western commerce.
I doubt, though, whether these hopes were cherished by three such
typical men, all happily living, as Judge Ryan, Michael Blake and Bob
Watson. Of these probably the present senator was the most typical
of the steady-going qualities which, after all, have transformed the
empty Rupert’s Land into the three populous provinces of this period.
Bob Watson was a mechanic. He was sent in 1876 by the Goldie,
McCullough Company of Galt, to install the machinery in the first
mill erected at the Portage. He also put up a mill at Stonewall, and
started in business for himself. He was in the town, and of the town.
The fire brigade had no more vigorous member. His machine shop was a
place of popular resort. The farmers knew no more consistent, more
lenient friend. Largely because of his popularity he was sent to
Ottawa in 1882 as M.P. for Marquette. A partnership with his brother
was formed in 1886. After ten years at Ottawa he joined the Greenway
Government in 1892, as a conscientious, hard-working Minister of
Public Works; and stayed with it till its end in 1900, when the
Senate claimed him.
Everybody calls him Bob, and everybody will agree that though there
have been more brilliant Portage men--a former premier of British
Columbia and a former premier of Canada, Mr. Meighen, both graduated
into statesmanship from their modest offices on Saskatchewan
Avenue--there have been none more admirable than the senator.
Red Fife was not as popular a wheat as it afterwards became, thanks
largely to the experiments of a much-abused railway. The still
earlier Marquis had not been evolved by Dr. Saunders. On the Portage
Plains, where frozen wheat is now a rarity, it was then too common a
drug on the market--I could tell of a man bringing a load into town
that he could not sell at any price.
The danger of frost is when the milk is in the ear. In those days it
was thought that a smoke over the land would prevent the freezing
temperature reaching the ground, and that smoke and its accompanying
warmth would keep a current of air moving over the fields of grain
and thus save it from damage. The farmers cut weeds, and put them
and straw in windrows round their fields, ready to be fired at the
critical hour, which was usually about four or five o’clock on August
mornings. We installed a big light on a staff at the top of the
highest building, the Farmers’ Elevator. We kept in touch with the
meteorological office at Winnipeg, and if we were advised that frost
seemed to be imminent, about midnight the big arc lamp was set going,
and in the dark hours before the dawn the protective fires would be
seen flickering across the plains.
It cannot be told precisely whether this procedure really saved
anything to the farmers. But it is true that, not only was it to our
interest to do what we could to assure good crops to the farmers,
on which the town’s prosperity depended, but the element of public
service entered actively into this revival, for agriculture’s sake,
of the beacon method of warning against fleshlier invaders than Jack
Frost.
The rural telephone was not a possibility of those times. Life may
have been more meagre then than it is now; though, looking back, it
does not seem that it lacked any of the best elements of happiness.
The town of five thousand people has distinct advantages over the
city of five hundred thousand. Everybody may know more of everybody
else’s business than is always good for anybody; but there is a
greater neighbourliness in the smaller community. On the whole
despite poverty, firebugs and politics, the Portage of the late
eighties was a goodly place to dwell in.
The winters were severe--nobody ever succeeded in reducing forty
below zero to a poetic phantasy. But there was a snowshoeing
club; there was plenty of social intercourse; the choir would give
concerts at Burnside or High Bluff, under the leadership of one who
had heard his father’s pitch pipe in the Original Seceders’ kirk
at Pollokshaws. From that choir, by the way, there went out into a
great career on the concert platform Edith Miller, whose father was
postmaster, and whose husband is heir to a baronetcy.
In some of the churches the ultra-strictness of the Puritan faith and
practice rigidly obtained--or rather among some of the church people.
There was old Hugh Macdonald, for instance, who wouldna’ drive his
horses the twa miles to church on Sabbath. He warned me against being
entangled with “sae mony wimmins” who, to their shame, sang without
their hats on, alongside the idolatrous box of whustles that degraded
the pulpit in the hoose o’ God.
The Baptist minister was also a Macdonald. He was once announced
to preach on a week-night in Gaelic, and Hugh and his freen Grant
repaired to the church to consume choice spiritual fare. They walked
solemnly in, deposited their tam o’ shanters beneath the seats,
and awaited the meenister. But the harmoniumist appeared while yet
the preacher tarried in the vestry. There she sat, the bold thing,
trilling her fingers over the keys--a voluntary they called it. That
was no way to precede a sermon in Gaelic, and Hugh and his freen
forsook the place more solemnly than they had entered it.
By the way, the land for the Presbyterian church in which we
worshipped was given by Michael Blake, a Roman Catholic. Peace be to
him.
Perhaps the next misdemeanour to making too joyful a noise before
the Lord in the sanctuary was promoting appreciation of music in
secular circles. One’s reluctance to claim any sort of literary
credit is well-founded on experience. For years I contributed a
musical column to “The Portage la Prairie Review”, signed “Baton”.
The harmonious intent of these effusions was as sincere as the
occasional attempts to flavour the column with a little cheerful
humour were unappreciated, where they might have been heartily
welcomed. I remember giving a local application to the story of Sir
Michael Costa, who, annoyed by conversation in the audience while
his orchestra was in its most classical throes, suddenly commanded
silence, above which was heard a lady’s voice, “We fry ours in
butter.” As a literary fun-provider the sequel to this venture
indicated that accountancy and musical journalism were not a charming
combination.
A trifling outgrowth of the Minnesota massacres by Sioux Indians is
said to have led to one of those allusions to Canadian life in the
British Press which from time to time enrich “colonial” observations.
Billy Smith was a prosperous farmer and miller, in whose scrupulosity
about weights, those who sold him wheat had not unlimited confidence.
Billy lent out a great many grain sacks on which “W. M. Smith” was
printed. He lost track of several score of these sacks, and for some
time suspected that they had been taken by certain critical customers.
Among the Indians near Portage la Prairie was a band who had come in
from Minnesota after the frightful massacres of the early sixties.
They received no treaty money from the Dominion Government, and
were locally called Bungay Indians, for a reason of which we were
ignorant. Soon after Billy Smith missed his sacks, Indian bucks,
squaws and papooses began to appear in town, breeched in trunks
primitively adapted from what the miller intended to carry only two
bushels of wheat; with “W. M. SMITH” appearing where the easy-going
man, though a fool and poorly educated, could not fail to read.
The Indians got their clothes and the town got its fun, at Billy
Smith’s expense. The fun lasted longer than the breeches, for news
came that a writing tourist, seeing some of the Smith-tailored
Indians on the station platform, wrote in a widely circulated
English periodical that the most striking evidence he had seen of
the transformation of, and good order among the Indians of the
Far West, was at Portage la Prairie, where the aborigines had not
only assumed the good old English patronymic of Smith, but carried
it conspicuously on their attire, which was approximating, though
somewhat crudely, to European models.
But it will not do to become more garrulous about a Manitoba town of
nearly forty years ago. In 1893 the North Western was handed over
to a receiver, the present Sir Augustus Nanton. The accountant and
auditor was transferred to Winnipeg, whence the salvage operations
were more effectively directed by the future knight, whose railway
experience frequently made him certain that it is sometimes more
blessed to give than to receive.