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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.

SIR DONALD MANN

(P. 248)

“Whose capacities are in keeping with the solidity of his physical frame”SIR WILLIAM MACKENZIE

(P. 241)

“Faced a heavier task than anything that confronted Stephen, Smith or Van Horne”

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. Hubbub.

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.