The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (15 page)

In that demented winter people no longer asked, What will the land produce, only, What will it sell for? “People seem to have forgotten,” the Edmonton
Bulletin
wrote, “that towns cannot live of themselves.” In Winnipeg scarcely a week passed that did not see a new community extolled in print. Towns that did not exist, such as Garfield, were given nonexistent suburbs such as North Garfield. “It stands,” Coolican’s huge advertisement disclosed, “Upon An Eminence, From Which The Land Slopes Gradualy [
ÄC
] Down To Garfield Itself.” One series of lots purporting to be in the West Lynn subdivision (on the banks of the Red River just opposite Emerson near the border) sold for ten thousand dollars. Actually the property was two miles away, far out on the empty prairie.

For the moment at least the railway was king; it seemed to bring the Midas touch to the smallest shack-towns. Like a golden highway, the
CPR
had brought prosperity to Manitoba beyond the wildest dreams of the most optimistic pioneers. The very whisper of a railway –
any
railway, real or imagined – drove people to greater and greater financial excesses. Local councils offered fat bonuses for
CPR
branch lines to their communities; rumours of newly formed railway ventures were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm and a resultant rise in real estate prices. As George Grant, the principal of Queen’s, commented: “Gray-haired men seemed to lose not only their old-fashioned honesty, but their senses. They talked as if half a million or a million people could be poured into a country by one road in a year or five or six months, and a wilderness of stubborn glebe turned into the garden of the Lord by affixing names to townsites and locating railway stations.” The day would come when the people of Manitoba, in their grief and disappointment, would turn against the railway; but in the early months of 1882, the
CPR
could do no wrong.

Emerson, the customs point on the Pembina Branch of the
CPR
, confidently expected that it would be
the
great railway centre of the North West, the largest metropolis in western Canada, easily outdistancing Winnipeg, since it had been for some time the only point of entry into Manitoba. It had two newspapers and a population of fourteen hundred; it appeared to be the logical gateway to the rich farm lands of southwestern Manitoba, “the great country whose fame is now the theme of almost every tongue,” as one eastern visitor described it. “Nothing is to be heard but ‘boom,’ ‘boom,’ ‘boom,’ in every hamlet you pass; ‘boom’ in
every person’s mouth. In fact the excitement is fully as great as if a mountain of gold had been discovered near Toronto.”

That was in the first week of January, 1882. Three weeks later it was Selkirk’s turn. “The ‘boom’ so long looked for by the people of Selkirk at last struck that pretty little town early this week,” a correspondent recorded on the twenty-third. The excitement stemmed from a new by-law guaranteeing a bonus of seventy-five thousand dollars to the
CPR
to construct a branch line into the community. In addition, a bridge was planned across the river so that the rails would connect the town directly with Portage la Prairie and the trunk route west. The news instantly raised real estate prices in Selkirk and reporters on the scene could hardly contain themselves: “In the carrying out of this the owners of lots in Selkirk see a great city rising to rival, and possibly eclipse, Winnipeg.”

In the same week, lots in “Manitoba City” began to boom with the news that the terminus of the Pembina Mountain branch line of the
CPR
had been settled upon. A syndicate had already purchased the town-site and was busily advertising lots in the new and still unpopulated community, while decrying the neighbouring settlement of Archibald, three miles away, which now found itself bypassed and which would shortly become a ghost town.

Minnedosa, “the railway centre of the North West,” had also been bypassed but it was booming anyway. In mid-February it experienced a new flurry of excitement on the strength of a report that it would be the seat of a judicial district. “Thank fortune, the ‘boom’ has also struck Minnedosa!” the
Times’
s resident correspondent burbled. “Happy name! High flown and sweet sounding. A place with such a name and such a vicinage, and, shall I say it? such people, could not but boom. Again, I say, the boom has struck Minnedosa.…”

Though Manitoba’s population, in 1882, was only sixty-six thousand, a casual newspaper reader in a foreign country, perusing the advertisements, might have believed it to be the crossroads of the continent, teaming with people and jammed with great cities. There was Crystal City, “the featured great city of Manitoba”; Mountain City, “the embryo city”; Dobbyn City, “the future great manufacturing city of the Souris district”; St. Vincent, “one of the leading cities of the Great North West … booming beyond imagination”; Manchester, “the future great manufacturing town of the North West”; Clearwater, “the Brandon of Southwestern Manitoba”; Nelson ville, “the largest town in Southwestern Manitoba”; Kildonan, “the Yorkville of Winnipeg”; Rapid City, “the Minneapolis of the North West”; Malta, “situated in the garden of the North
West”; Cartwright, “unquestionably the best situated and rising town in the province”; Pembina Crossing, “the most prosperous town in Southwestern Manitoba”; and High Bluff, “the best chance of the season.”

As the frenzy continued, unabated, the advertisements became larger and shriller, the methods used to peddle property wilder and more unscrupulous, and the paper communities more ephemeral. William White, in his brief stay in Winnipeg, recalled walking into one auction room and being attracted by the sale of lots in “Minnedosa the Beautiful.” An immense map of the community covered an entire wall. “It had to be large in order that the river flowing through the town, called the Little Saskatchewan, should be properly displayed.” Majestic steamers were shown sailing down the river or moored at handsome landing docks. White decided to visit Minnedosa the Beautiful and was glad that he had done so before speculating in lots there. The Little Saskatchewan was so little that in midsummer a man could jump across it. There were no steamers to be seen and the only landing docks were the ones painted on the map. The town itself was a hamlet.

The land sharks used patently transparent devices to victimize the newcomers. Two men from Barrie, Ontario, were persuaded to buy, sight unseen, for sixty thousand dollars, a piece of swamp five miles from Winnipeg. The sellers played upon their greed: As the easterners were mulling over the deal, a third man came up and, pretending to believe the transaction was closed, offered them eighty thousand dollars for the property. It did not occur to the two that the offer was bogus and that the new buyer was operating as a shill. They handed over the money cheerfully and ended up in possession of a piece of useless land.

Such tales filtering back east helped to drive a wedge between settled Canada and the new North West. “At this moment Winnipeg is filled with thousands of the vilest villains,” the Bobcaygeon
Independent
declared in an editorial in late March, “and it is possible that never before on this continent was there assembled together so large a congregation of scoundrelism. Lead ville may, perhaps, in its early days, have approached Winnipeg in the number and intensity of its rascality, but it never quite equalled that which now exists in Winnipeg. It is a saddening spectacle to observe the universality of this disgusting degradation. It is confined to no class. You read on the walls notices of pastors selling off to go to Manitoba, just as you hear of Tom, Dick and Harry starting off for the same purposes of fraud and swindling.… It is an outbreak of the worst passions of human nature.… The business of men’s lives in Winnipeg … is the gratification of that vile lust of gold which completely overpowers the
moral sense, extinguishes reason, annihilates the sense of responsibility, renders crime no longer repulsive, and unfits the miserable and wretched beings for any other companionship than that of themselves and the devil.”

To this Victorian invective, the Winnipeg
Times
made a scoffing reply: “Listen to the sage of Bobcaygeon,” it sneered, “- and laugh.” One of its own editorial writers, C. R. Tuttle, had himself become a leading Winnipeg speculator.

The
Globe
, which carried a good deal of Manitoba real estate advertising, uttered several gingerly warnings (“Beware Of Paper Town Site Frauds!”) while generally approving of the boom: “The man who does an honest business in the transfer of properties is rendering a service.… The evil arising from untruthful representations addressed to inordinate cupidity is one against which people cannot be too earnestly warned, but it is one which is unfortunately inseparable from the circumstances. Wherever there is room for fraud there will always be found defrauders in abundance.…”

The
Globe’s
man in Winnipeg described his own experience with land sharks. An old Ontario friend had approached him about “a big thing” in the wind: “There’s a thousand for every dollar you put up.” When the reporter showed his interest he was introduced to the organizer of a new syndicate, who pulled from his pocket a preliminary agreement in the form of a half-sheet of foolscap, “dirty as a stage document,” purporting to be a legal instrument whereby the owner of a certain half section agreed to transfer his rights for $2,880. The
Globe
reporter wrote that “the extraordinary resources of the average curbstone organizer may be inferred from the fact that instead of purchasing … the broker in question proposed a Syndicate of no less than 90 shares at $32 each.” The 320 acres were to be chopped up into 32,000 lots to be peddled in Ontario at $20 a lot. An attractive name had already been settled upon, surveys were to be undertaken immediately, and “brilliantly illuminated plans were to be constructed.” Great store would be set on the news that a railway would run through the property, “but the other fact that the railway in question had been abandoned in favour of a shorter cut, through better country, was to be studiously concealed.”

In spite of all this, the
Globe’s
man admitted that he had actually bought a share in the syndicate. But by this time it was early April; there was a feeling of let-down in Winnipeg; the share was clearly worthless. “Our eyes have been open,” he wrote, “and we have seen silly fish ready to jump at every fly, and the fish have been tempted and landed on
the banks. We now perceive that the pool is nearly empty, and we have returned to legitimate business.”

4
The bubble bursts

Two events, one man-made and the other natural, following hard upon each other in mid-April, killed the great North West boom. The first
bursts
was the sale of Edmonton lots beginning April 12, which soured the most optimistic speculators. The second was the three-week rampage of the Red River which began a week later, causing the most serious flood in memory, drowning the railway line, and cutting off the city from the outside world.

Fort Edmonton lay on the very rim of the unknown. Perhaps for that reason it caught the fancy of the Winnipeg land buyers. As soon as rumours began to fly about an impending sale of lots almost a thousand miles to the North West, they began to hoard their funds for a new investment. The word was that the Hudson’s Bay Company had surveyed the environs of the old trading post into town lots and was about to throw them onto the market. On April 12, the news was made public in gigantic advertisements by Arthur Wellington Ross, “
EDMONTON! EDMONTON!”
the ads screamed, “
EDMONTON AT LAST
!” The settlement – it contained scarcely five hundred souls – was referred to in the press as “the future Golden City of the Dominion” and was described in block letters as the country of “Gold, Coal, Timber, Minerals and Wheat … Bounded on the South by the grazing land of the Bow River District, on the North by the Peace River and on the West at a distance of seventy miles by an uninterrupted forest of timber.”

The lots went on sale immediately and Ross’s office was jammed with purchasers. The previous fall, lots in Edmonton had been sold for an average of twenty-five dollars; now three hundred went in a single night at prices ranging between two and four hundred. Yet Edmonton could scarcely be said to be booming. In the interval only five buildings had been constructed on the three thousand acres of its townsite. John A. McDougall, the Edmonton trader, who was in Winnipeg at the time, gazed in astonishment upon the huge painted maps of his town showing subdivisions on land he knew to be dense bush. McDougall put his knowledge to good use. He had taken an option on a group of lots for ten
thousand dollars, putting five hundred dollars down and promising to pay the remainder within a month. He turned them over in Winnipeg within hours for twenty thousand dollars, paid off his debt, and pocketed the rest.

McDougall was one of the very few who profited from the brief Edmonton land boom. A strange thing happened that week. On April 13, scores of speculators poured into Arthur Wellington Ross’s office, waving marked cheques for thousands of dollars, intent on picking up Edmonton lots. The following day, almost all of them tried to sell the lots at a profit, but there were no buyers. The boom was collapsing, though nobody would yet admit it.

Coolican, the auctioneer, tried to resuscitate the good times. On April 14, the day of the Edmonton collapse, he engaged a private train for himself and a group of Winnipeg businessmen and steamed off to St. Paul to sell Manitoba lots. It was a gala excursion, a kind of last gasp by Winnipeg’s leading speculators. Coolican’s car, “Selkirk,” was “laden with the good things of this life. McCaffrey of the Hub had such a selection as ought to please the most fastidious epicure.” Dan Rogers, also of the Hub, was on hand with the wine. “If the eagle eye of the custom officer at St. Vincent can only be escaped the members of the party will have a jolly time,” the
Times
predicted. Since Coolican was promising to turn St. Vincent into a great “International City,” straddling the border and including within its limits all of Pembina, Emerson, and West Lynne, it can be assumed the customs officers were not too vigilant.