_Telling how Manitoba struggled through an era of expansion and the
war of Fort Whyte._
Winnipeg was at a peculiar stage of its growth at the time of my
transfer there from Portage la Prairie when, in 1893, the Manitoba
North Western went into a receivership, because it couldn’t pay its
fixed charges and the Allan interests became tired of finding them
from private sources. Probably not many of the well-known men of the
city appreciated that they were participants in a phase of North
American history which would soon become almost as extinct as the
dodo, and would be clothed, for those who had eyes to see, with a
certain glamour of the age of chivalry.
The knighthood that flowered among the Indians, fur traders, and
original farmers of the Great Lone Land, has not yet been accorded
the idealism of the Crusades, or the picturesqueness of Robin Hood.
The country had few ladyes fayre. The dusky maidens who became the
queens of many mixed unions were attractive enough in their way,
though they were never protected by moats and drawbridges; nor were
their favours courted with armour and lance. But there were other
elements in a unique style of living to which, one day, the touch
of some wizard of romance will be applied. The buffalo was to be
replaced by the plowman, the Indian to be superseded by a more
industrious relative, and the ironless Red River cart to be run off
the trail by the iron horse.
Some of our daily friends in the early nineties, who still remain,
dwindling to a small, reclusive band, had known the sovereignty of
“The Company”, had seen the Queen’s uncamouflaged Government assume
sway over the immeasurable territory. They had passed through the
first Riel rebellion of 1869, with its execution of Scott, and the
administration of affairs during the subsequent winter with Riel as
President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land. Lawful
authority was beleaguered, a thousand miles from the nearest centre
of British power, and could only be restored by a military expedition
which must travel over inland seas, through uncleared forests, and
upon streams unfamiliar to military men--a wilderness unpopulated
save for a few barbarians and isolated traders.
Caesar in Gaul, and the Crusaders bound for Jerusalem had no such
resistance of primeval nature to overcome as was involved in the
Wolseley relief of 1870, in which the Duke of Connaught shared, and
which gave his name to Prince Arthur’s Landing, later to be changed
by Van Horne to Port Arthur.
In the Red River Expedition of 1870 was Charlie Bell, a drummer boy
of sixteen, son of the registrar of South Lanark. When the artillery
was brought up against Fort Garry, the gate was open, Riel had fled
from the breakfast table; and the crusade’s object was accomplished
without an angry shot being fired. Charlie Bell did not return to
Ontario, but became as much a Westerner as if he had been so born.
Sometimes he was in the public service, officially. He was always
in the public service, temperamentally. For a generation he was the
annually-elected secretary of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, and saw
it grow from almost nothing to the biggest wheat mart in the world.
He kept the Board of Trade straight while it was located in the City
Hall, which was built in sure and certain hope that the boom would
become a normalcy, and which still houses the civic administration.
Western literature has had in him a faithful practitioner, and
Masonry a pillar, even to the thirty-third degree. During more recent
years he developed a strain of feeling of which Ontario folk may take
notice. He came to believe that the average Ontario man going West
carries a disposition similar to that of the thoughtless Englishman,
who said of Canadians generally, “We howns ’em.”
It is a curious and somewhat delusive phenomenon in community life
that men seem vaster in a large city than they do in a little town.
Somehow, a Winnipeg leader is supposed to be a bigger man in that
city of over two hundred thousand than the same man was when the
population was about as big as Brantford’s is to-day. That could not
really be. Lord Strathcona, among the exaltation of Imperial London,
was not truly greater than Donald Smith was, buying pelts and wheat
at Fort Garry, keeping Riel quiet, and, later, parleying with bishops
over the school question.
Heavy railroad building, during the periodic flow of capital from a
rich and loaning country, is an easier task than starting a small
railway in a small community with very small resources. In this
connection one thinks of a man who had an extraordinarily vivid
career during the strenuous decades of his Western life. I mean Hugh
Sutherland, who in 1874, was sent to Winnipeg as a superintendent of
the Dominion Public Works Department.
He built the quarters for Governor Laird, and the mounted police
barracks at Battleford, when the capital of the North West
Territories was moved from Fort Pelly, near the headwaters of the
Assiniboine, north of Kamsack, the first Canadian Northern divisional
point west of Dauphin. Charlie Bell watched Hugh Sutherland’s
midwinter arrival at Fort Garry with his dogs, and always describes
him as the handsomest man he ever saw.
It is like going back to prehistoric times to hear Hugh Sutherland
tell of how he found it desirable to soothe the Indian mind by
representing that the smokestack of an engine that he had brought
into the country to saw lumber for the public works, was a cannon.
It is amusing to hear him describe how, when treaty was being made
with the Cree chief at the place where Battleford was to be built,
he invited the Paleface to sit with him on a log; and how the chief,
not being too clean, nudged nearer and nearer, until the retreating
Sutherland, finding himself at the log’s end, was told that that was
what was happening to the Red Man in his own country, and was asked
how much further this sort of thing was intended to go?
When we have read of wars and rumours of wars because some country
like Bulgaria or Serbia wanted access to tidewater, it has seemed a
strange perversion of the proprieties of commerce that there should
be so much anxiety to control the anchorage of shipping. But the
urge to the sea has been a feature of Western Canadian life ever
since the difference of five cents on a bushel of wheat has meant
the difference between a Windsor chair and a Morris to a Manitoba
landowner. Only, instead of longing for the glistening blue of the
Aegean or the Adriatic, the prairie country has hungered for the
leaden mists of the Bay, which Lord Grey, with a poetic licence not
habitual with him, once called the Canadian Mediterranean--thinking,
no doubt, of Fort Churchill and York Factory as the Cannes and
Mentone of a too quiescent Riviera.
To make a grain route of Hudson Bay was an early and a latter
ambition of the Winnipeg business man, to whom ice floes are not
the same obstacle to business as they are to those who never knew
what it is to trade while the thermometer is fluttering between
forty and fifty below. When Hugh Sutherland had passed from the
unexciting functions of a Government job, and was up to the eyes
in developing the country, he became the chief propagandist for a
Hudson Bay Railway. While I was pursuing the even tenor of my way
at the Portage, he, with an apostolic fervor, was holding meetings
and painting pictures in the capital, to the end that the road
towards the Bay, through the flat country between Lakes Winnipeg and
Manitoba, might begin.
Infinite labour, infinite patience, because of infinite delays, and,
in the constructive sense, infinite imagination, went into that
launch of an enterprise which has halted men with larger resources
and Governments with vaster powers than ever came Hugh Sutherland’s
way. But the labour and the patience and the romance that went into
a truly heroic adventure did result in forty miles of railway being
built, from Winnipeg to Oak Point--and there the money was exhausted,
though the desire to spend it on reaching the Bay wasn’t. Since then,
as part of the Canadian Northern, the branch was extended practically
the whole length of the peninsula, to Gypsumville--a name which tells
why.
The lieutenant-governor of Manitoba was Sir John Schultz. What a
career, Western of Western, he had had, to be sure. He was a medical
student of Queen’s University, Kingston, and came West in 1857,
the year in which gold was reported on the Saskatchewan river,
and the first party of explorers was sent to the prairies by a
Canadian Government. At Fort Garry he practised medicine, and in
the early sixties bought a share in the first Western newspaper,
“The Nor’Wester”. The sovereign Company exercised its powers rather
arbitrarily, particularly against anything that looked like an
infringement of its monopoly of the Indian trade. Schultz was an
ardent free trader, and fought The Company in his paper, and through
a trading firm he established. He found himself in jail and bound
with ropes as a sidekick to a dispute with his former business
partner turned sheriff, and therefore a creature of The Company.
Schultz was later imprisoned by Riel. Convinced by what he overheard
his guards say, that he was marked for execution, he escaped,
after eight hours’ work on a hole in the wall, made by a gimlet
and penknife smuggled to him by his wife. This happened while
Donald Smith was arranging with a convention for a Bill of Rights
constituting the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land--all in
anticipation of the arrival, during the coming summer, of troops, and
also, as the purchase of Rupert’s Land from The Company for £300,000
had been arranged, of its entry into the Canadian Confederation.
Dr. Schultz became the first member of Parliament from the new
province which was established in 1870; then senator, and finally
lieutenant-governor and a knight.
Perhaps there was no more compact embodiment of the emergence of
Winnipeg from a frontier post to a Metropolitan capital than an old
friend of all who were ever associated with him, J. H. Ashdown, who
died while these pages were in the press. It is difficult for any
of this generation who talked with a man whom a veracious writer
called the merchant hardware prince of Canada, who was an alert,
on-the-minute modernist, and whose appearance long belied his years,
and discern in him the tinsmith of Fort Garry, who served against
Riel in ’69, was put in jail with Scott, Schultz and Charles Mair,
and was lucky to escape the fate of the murdered Scott.
Mr. Ashdown was literally one of the city fathers. Before he was
Mayor in 1905--and he was called the best Mayor Winnipeg ever had--he
was an alderman. Before he was alderman he was a leader in the
movement to incorporate the city. Indeed, ever since his arrival, in
1868 he was a forefronter in every sort of civic advance, because he
was built that way.
Natively, Mr. Ashdown was a Londoner. He came to Canada in 1853, at
nine years of age. He learned tinsmithing at Hespeler, in Ontario,
under the old apprenticeship system, which inculcated obedience and
frugality, until its subject was long past the period at which,
in these times, young hopefuls are post-graduates of the School
of Bringing Up Father. The Ashdown apprenticeship was decided on
after finding a sixpence on the road he walked over from Guelph to
Hespeler. That lucky sixpence brought these payments: board, lodge
and laundry, twenty-five dollars the first year, thirty dollars the
second year, and thirty-five dollars the concluding year.
The apprenticeship over, he ventured to Chicago and Kansas before
sallying north. To reach Fort Garry he walked nineteen days from St.
Cloud. Fort Garry, in 1868 furnished a fair livelihood to an expert
metal worker, and illimitable outlook to a seer. Ashdown was both,
and would go a long way to advance his business or broaden his grasp
of the future. For a pioneering story this is as good as any that
even the apocryphers have produced:--
A neighbouring hardware merchant becoming tired of his prospects
offered to sell his stock, store and goodwill to Ashdown for a
thousand dollars. Ashdown said he hadn’t the money, but asked for a
little time to turn the proposition over in his mind. It was Friday
afternoon.
Monday morning the hardwareman met Ashdown, who said he couldn’t buy
the business. He had walked to Portage la Prairie, hoping to raise
the thousand dollars, and had been turned down. The return trip,
Winnipeg to Portage la Prairie, meant a tramp of 112 miles.
Against the background which the personalities of these typical men
faithfully represent, one always thinks of modern Winnipeg in terms
of historical glamour. Its business was always substantial and always
anxious, the future being very tantalizing. There was an almost
continuous procession through the papers of plans for great Western
development. Railway schemes were the most intriguing and impressive.
They were divisible into two main streams of endeavour--to defeat the
monopolistic entrenchments of the C.P.R., and to build and magnify
branches from the main artery of traffic, under independent control.
First, something about the anti-monopoly fight, in which the battle
of Fort Whyte has a place all its own in economic and political
warfare; and then a few recalls from the long and wearisome trail of
lateral development, up to the point where an insignificant line was
built, which was not destined to fall into the capacious hands of the
Canadian Pacific, but was the beginning of the longest, though not
yet the most prosperous, system in the world--the Canadian National
Railways.
The battle of Fort Whyte arose from the monopoly clause in the C.P.R.
charter, and the wide and deep feeling that the C.P.R. was more an
enemy than a friend of Manitoba; plus, of course, the prospective
advantages which politicians saw in fomenting trouble. The monopoly
clause prevented the building, by any other company, of branch lines
south of the main line of the C.P.R. and within fifteen miles of the
American boundary. The prohibition was held to be in the interests of
Canadian solidarity. If the American lines which were pushing through
Minnesota and North Dakota had free access to Canadian territory
the Canadian road would be starved, and the basis of Dominion-wide
prosperity, on which the Confederation was established, would be
destroyed.
C.P.R. rates for hauling grain to Lake Superior were higher than they
became later; but, in fairness, it should never have been forgotten
that they were lower than rates on the Northern Pacific and Great
Northern, in similar territory across the line. With crops uncertain
and prices low--I have already told how the finest grade wheat of the
1887 crop sold for forty-eight and fifty cents a bushel in the heart
of Manitoba--the proportion of the farmers’ total receipts that went
for haulage to the head of the Lakes seemed high.
In the spring of 1887 the Norquay Government proposed to authorize
a line from Winnipeg to the boundary to connect with the Northern
Pacific. The C.P.R. denounced this as a breach of faith, and
threatened to move its shops to Fort William if, as it said, it were
treated as a public enemy. An Act was passed in June, by the Manitoba
Legislature and was forthwith disallowed at Ottawa. Another Act was
promptly passed, and the company chartered by the province began
construction.
The Dominion Minister of Justice obtained a temporary injunction
restraining both Government and company, the C.P.R. having already
laid a spur across the path of the new line. Public temper became
very hot, and Premier Norquay declared that the line would be built,
“at the point of the bayonet if necessary”.
In November the injunction was made permanent, but by that time there
was no more money for construction, and the Norquay Government had
gone the way of all its kind. An extremely brief life was the portion
of a Government formed by Dr. Harrison, and the Greenway Government
succeeded it early in 1888, with the vociferous lion of Portage la
Prairie, the unique Joe Martin, as attorney-general.
All winter the racket about the anti-monopoly line continued.
Greenway and Martin besieged Ottawa, and, undoubtedly, had a united
province behind them. They raised vigorously the issue of provincial
rights. Sir John Macdonald, not wanting to make a bad matter worse,
induced the C.P.R. to waive its monopoly clause in consideration
of certain financial guarantees, and promised to disallow no more
Manitoba railway legislation.
All seemed set fair for railway expansion, especially from the point
of view of Portage la Prairie, which had never ceased to cherish
the hopes on which the Manitoba North Western had been built. At
the beginning, you remember, an estate had been bought south of the
C.P.R. and nearly two miles from where the North Western terminals
were finally located, in expectation of an extension of the line some
day to the boundary.
With our own member as attorney-general, and, as it was said,
the strongest man in the Government, the swift clean-up of the
crossing trouble that had been left by the Norquay Government, and
the imminence of a general election which, it was expected, would
cinch power for Greenway, made the time opportune for starting the
long-desired railway from Portage to Winnipeg, to connect with the
new line that was reaching the boundary from there.
The Portage line was to cross the C.P.R. track to Emerson at
Headingly, a few miles out of Winnipeg. The consent of the Railway
Committee of the Privy Council was necessary to any crossing of a
Dominion railway. Permission to cross the C.P.R. was slow in coming.
It was alleged that C.P.R. influence caused the delay. Grading began
on both sides of the C.P.R.; and, when permission did not arrive from
Ottawa, the indignant Winnipeggers teamed rails, ties, and a diamond
out to Headingly; and laid them during the night, eventualities being
provided against, as it was thought, under the attorney-general’s
inspiration.
Two years before this, a former brakeman and superintendent of the
Credit Valley Railway had been sent to Winnipeg as superintendent of
the western lines of the C.P.R.--he became Sir William Whyte. In the
morning, on discovery of the doings at Headingly, and on instructions
from Van Horne, Mr. Whyte took a gang of men to tear up the diamond.
The attorney-general had sworn in twenty special constables who were
guarding the “jewel”, as the diamond was called.
The defenders were in charge of ex-poundkeeper Cox. Whyte told him
he would remove the diamond at any cost, though he was unwilling to
use violence. Cox prepared to resist, but a punch in the eye from a
warmly loyal C.P.R. navvy changed his mind.
The diamond was removed and hauled in triumph to the C.P.R. yards,
and the battle of Fort Whyte was on, with General Whyte commanding
his forces from his private car. An engine was ditched at the
crossing, and Whyte stayed by, with two hundred and fifty men
from the C.P.R. shops to see that the supporters of the Manitoba
Government didn’t move it. In his car were about twenty special
constables.
Joe Martin and several high provincial officers were on the ground.
He caused the provincial chief of police to inform Whyte that the
appointments of his special police had been canceled. A handy
magistrate swore them in again. More men were brought up by the
provincial powers, and it seemed as if they would attempt to make the
crossing afresh. Whyte attached a hose to his locomotive, which stood
close to the ditched engine, and said he would turn live steam on
any gang which tried to work against him. It was impossible for the
provincialists to get up steam against such steam; and so closed a
perfectly Martinesque day.
The double dare continued for five days of venomous but harmless
hostility. Then Martin swore in a hundred and twenty constables and
called out the military, under Colonel Villiers, who pitched their
tents on the battlefield. A threat was made to lay the diamond
further down the line, and Whyte built a fence, and kept his watchful
forces waiting behind it.
A battalion of farmers appeared carrying sundry woodware. They talked
of lynching “Smooth William”, but retired, discerning that valour may
be compounded with discretion. Whyte vowed that he would stay there
as long as the crossing was unauthorized even if he had to tie up the
C.P.R. from East to West to preserve its rights.
For a fortnight the armies faced each other, and then the C.P.R.
tired of waiting on Ottawa, sought an injunction restraining the
provincial road from trespass. The courts refused the injunction,
Superintendent Whyte called off his engines, his cars and his men,
and Fort Whyte went into the history of bloodless campaigns.
In the Van Horne biography the episode is called “as merry a
game of bluff as he had ever known.” That there wasn’t a serious
casualty list was due to the inherent good temper of men on both
sides--perhaps most of all to the imperturbability of Mr. Whyte, who
was on the whole, the West’s most outstanding citizen for more than
a quarter of a century, and who wasn’t called “Smooth William” for
nothing.
One could not count the ambitious railway schemes that were conceived
or cradled in Winnipeg during the eighties and nineties; some born to
blush unseen, some to waste their prospects on the prairie air, and
some to suffer a dolorous existence till they were gathered to the
boundless bosom of the C.P.R. Often enough, the poorer the outlook of
an enterprise, the more grandiose was its name.
What is now a part of the Souris branch of the C.P.R., began as the
Oregon and Transcontinental, and ended at the then forlorn station of
Starbuck. The Great Northwest Central had a charter from Brandon to
Battleford. It crawled for fifty miles northwestward and then stalled
till the inevitable happened.
We heard repeatedly of projected lines in what, from the meridian of
Winnipeg and the Portage, seemed the Never-Never Country, bounded
by Prince Albert and Edmonton, four hundred miles apart on the
North Saskatchewan. At last they were built. Of the granting of
one charter by the Dominion Parliament so far as one can recall, no
definite information filtered through to the accounting department
of the Manitoba North Western, though it was freighted with more of
Canadian destiny than all the others put together. It was obtained
by the Davis firm of contractors, and carried a land grant and
authority to reach Hudson Bay--the charter of the Lake Manitoba
Railway and Canal Company. It lay like a derelict upon a tideless
shore, and appeared to have no chance of activity for years after the
Never-Never country had been traversed by two sets of rails.
The Regina and Long Lake line was built from Regina to Prince Albert
in 1889 and 1890 for a company whose moving power was the firm of
Osler, Hammond and Nanton of Toronto and Winnipeg. The construction
was across a virtually uninhabited stretch of two hundred and twenty
miles between the Qu’Appelle River at Lumsden and the town of Prince
Albert. Most of the track was put down during a summer at the end of
which according to Joe Work who had charge of laying the rails, and
later became chief track layer for the Canadian Northern, it was not
safe to ride or drive a horse at night, because the cracks in the
ground made by the drought were so wide that hoofs could be caught in
them, legs broken and steeds destroyed.
Saskatoon, at the crossing of the South Saskatchewan river, was in
the midst of what was often called “The Desert”. Its main business
came from its being the station for Battleford, eighty miles away.
Ten years after the line was laid there was only one homesteader
between Saskatoon and the Qu’Appelle. The land grant was considered
worthless--I believe it was written down optimistically by one
presumed authority as being worth fifty cents an acre.
About the same time the Calgary and Edmonton was built, the steel
reaching Red Deer the first season, and Strathcona, across the river
from Edmonton, the next fall. The country passed through had more
rainfall than the Regina-Prince Albert territory; but there were
practically no settlers in it. Following this, track from Calgary to
Fort MacLeod was laid, to procure Lethbridge coal, and later to the
Kootenay where Dawson and Tyrrell in 1883 had proved that there were
almost illimitable deposits of fuel.
That is where railway development in the West stood when I was
removed to Winnipeg in 1893. Prices were lower than ever on the
prairie. Wheat sold for 35 cents a bushel. Milch cows could be bought
for less than thirty dollars. Eggs at eight cents a dozen, bought the
farmer’s wife no silks or satins.
For three years, while the North Western was hoping against hope that
it would be able to stand ultimately on its own feet, and Mr. Nanton,
the Sir Augustus of these more expansive years, was keeping an
extremely watchful eye on all expenditures, I was doing my best for a
small family. At night I was the first auditor of the Canadian Fire
Insurance Company, the creation of R. T. Riley, who doesn’t live as
many anxious days now as he did then, and who was later to become
a highly valued colleague on the National Railways’ directorate.
At night also, I was the first auditor of the Manitoba Gas and
Electric Company, and the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, which
was controlled by the contractors who had built the lines to Prince
Albert and Edmonton.
It was that auditorship and the neglected charter of the Lake
Manitoba Railway and Canal Company which brought me to Toronto, ten
years later, as third vice-president of the Canadian Northern, a
railway which, though its name appears to be dead, will be alive, as
railways live, I think, for evermore.