The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (16 page)

The mayor himself appeared at the station to wish the party Godspeed. He was supposed to go along to St. Paul but his time was fully occupied trying to establish a real estate bank in the city, “one not restricted in its dealings to purely commercial transactions, but which should entertain applications for discount on bona fide real estate paper or other good security” – a bank, in short, that would continue to underwrite the boom.

Coolican and his friends took St. Paul by storm. “There is a smack of enterprise, push and dash in the Winnipeg boomers who are now visiting St. Paul which commands admiration,” a local editor wrote. It was strange to see such phrases applied by Yankees to Canadians; for years it had been the other way around.

“It is true that they are speculators,” the St. Paul journalist admitted, “but as one of their speakers remarked Saturday night, it is speculation which opens the country and builds towns and cities. It is speculators who build the railroads out upon the prairies in advance of population in order
to bring their property into market and build up business.”

The Winnipeg press covered the expedition with its own men on the scene. The Coolican party was reported to be having “a high old time.” The boomers had left “an excellent impression, not only as businessmen but socially as well.” In Sherman’s Hall, St. Paul, Coolican sold one hundred thousand dollars worth of Canadian border lots.

There was only one problem: the boomers could not get back to Winnipeg. The Red River was on the rise. Bridges were being ripped away before the onslaught of mountains of water. Entire communities listed the previous week as attractive buys were half submerged. Many of the lots sold in St. Paul had turned to lakes, and the
CPR
line between Minnesota and Winnipeg was washed out.

It began with the mud – the terrible, tenacious, glutinous mud of Winnipeg, to which every traveller for a decade and more made spirited reference. The unseasonably hot sun of April had caused a sudden thaw, sending torrents coursing down the hills and turning the streets of the city into a quagmire. The crossroads and thoroughfares were afloat with what one Torontonian described as “a black, shining fluid that looks not unlike stove-pipe varnish.” Everybody sought out metaphors to describe Winnipeg mud. To Sandford Fleming, the surveyor, it was exactly as if you were walking on treacle. To Alex Stavely Hill, a visiting British Member of Parliament, it was a mixture of putty and birdlime. To a former British Army trooper, John Donkin, it resembled cement. Donkin had served at Constantinople and thought he had seen the worst mud in the world until he came to Winnipeg. For “fixity of tenure” there was nothing to beat it. Another Englishman, a retired army officer, wrote that the mud was “so tenacious that it will take the hair off a horse’s legs in attempting to brush it off.” That was the special quality of the gumbo that clogged Winnipeg’s streets that April. To step into it was like stepping into a pot of glue. When a horse became mired in it, twenty men on ropes were sometimes required to pull the beast free. The mud dried in a few hours and was of such a consistency that it did not convert to dust but packed solid as wax on footwear and clothing. It was said that you could enter a private home caked with Winnipeg mud without fear of leaving a trace on carpet or furniture.

The mud was only the prelude to greater disaster. As the mass of snow vanished with terrifying suddenness, the Red began to rise at a rate of two feet a day. For the so-called International City, the result was catastrophic. The bridge at Emerson was swept away on April 16. By April 19,
West Lynne had almost disappeared beneath the waves. Across the river, Emerson’s citizens were forced to live for weeks on their second floors. The steamer
Cheyenne
, pushing a barge-load of lumber, steamed right up the main street and unloaded its cargo at the steps of the Presbyterian church.

The crest hit Winnipeg on April 19. The water had been rising steadily all night, and when a field of ice, acting as a dam, broke away it rose another three feet. Shortly after one o’clock that afternoon, the Broadway Bridge, nine hundred feet long, began to surge and sway until it plunged down the river on the breast of a six-mile current, its piers toppled by tumbling ice floes. Hundreds thronged the banks to watch the dazzling spectacle of a river out of control – a seething mass of ice, boiling, twisting and writhing, the bright sunshine glistening on the huge blocks “with all the prismatic hues of the diamond.”

The bridge collapse seemed to confirm Sandford Fleming’s original selection of Selkirk as the crossing point for the
CPR
. Fleming had always maintained that the past history of floods on the Red made Winnipeg a poor choice, but he had been overruled for political reasons. Now he was seen as a Cassandra.

By April 23, train service to and from St. Paul was suspended because of washouts along the line. Thousands were thwarted in their desire to reach the boom town. Two thousand people were stranded between St. Paul and the border. Another fifteen hundred immigrants were held that day in the Minnesota capital. The same afternoon five more coaches arrived in St. Paul, all packed with immigrants vainly trying to reach Winnipeg. Four more arrived at midnight; another fifteen were being loaded in New York with Europeans fresh off the Cunard steamer
Bavaria
.

Winnipeg was like a morgue. Mail failed to arrive. Freight was at a standstill. Some immigrants managed to reach the city by barge and boat, but since no food was carried, shortages began to drive the prices higher and higher. Bread went up to fifty cents a loaf – half a day’s pay for a Toronto working man. Beef rose to fifty cents a pound. Building operations came to a standstill. Half-constructed homes, offices, boarding houses, and hotels stood silent; there were neither nails nor lumber available. Trade fell off because the merchants had no spring goods to sell. People were wary of placing orders for fear they would not be filled until late summer. Mechanics arriving by boat, expecting to work at high wages, found there was no work for them at any price. On May 4, the
river crept to within eighteen inches of the Assiniboine Bridge. That same day, one of the two newspapers in Emerson, the
International
, was forced to suspend publication.

By the time the floods subsided, the boom was finished. The railway blockade lasted for three weeks and did irreparable harm to Winnipeg’s business community. The gigantic advertisements vanished from the newspapers as swiftly as the snows. The
Free Press
was forced to reduce its size. The
Sun
on April 28 dropped the title of its lively column “The Big Boom” and ran such information as there was under the heading of “Real Estate Transactions.” On some days such news did not occupy more than two paragraphs.

By this time the
CPR
had moved against the speculators by changing its regulations for the sale of prairie lands. The nominal price was raised from $1.25 to $5.00 an acre, a quarter of which had to be paid at the time of sale and the balance in five years without interest. But the rebate for land placed under cultivation was also raised to three-quarters of the original five dollars. Thus bona fide settlers who were prepared to work the land actually got it for $1.25 an acre. Those who bought land in the hope of a quick turnover paid four times as much.

Coolican, who finally managed to get back to Winnipeg by boat on April 28, took one last advertisement on the front pages headed:
“COOLICAN’S RETURN
! and the Boom Returns Also!” But the boom did not return. When Coolican tried to auction off lots in Prince Albert a month later, there were no takers. In vain real estate dealers announced: “No paper cities! No humbug! A new boom in a new quarter!” The public was not buying. Coolican was reduced to auctioning off carpets and tapestries.

Arthur Wellington Ross also tried again, offering lots at Port Moody, British Columbia, the terminus of the
CPR
. Ross, too, was at the end of his financial rope. When real estate values plunged, he lost most of his huge fortune. He was forced to give up his land holdings – he owned hundreds of acres in the northern and western portions of the city – for taxes. It is said that seven thousand dollars would have cleared the property, but once the boom was over, seven thousand became an impossible figure. Ross did not have it and his credit was exhausted.

Of those who speculated in land in Manitoba in 1881 and 1882, it was estimated that only about five per cent made any money at all. The lucky ones broke even. The less fortunate ended their days in destitution – like Harry Armstrong’s Toronto friend, Helliwell, “who cleaned up sixty
thousand dollars, put it in his pocket, went broke and walked the streets till he died,” or a Brockville man named Sheppard, whose obituary appeared in the dying days of the boom: “The rumour current Sunday evening was that he had lost $30,000 in speculating and hanged himself in consequence.”

As a result of the bubble’s sudden collapse, Winnipeg and, to a lesser degree, Manitoba entered into a period of recession which had far-reaching effects. Confidence in the North West was badly shaken. The international financial world began to look askance at any venture in the new Canada; the
CPR
would feel the pinch especially. The breach between West and East widened; the depression left by the boom – psychological as well as financial – prepared the climate for the farm agitation that followed, with all its attendant bitterness. People who had once extolled the railway as a bearer of gifts now looked on it darkly as the source of their misfortunes.

The immediate effects were devastating. It was estimated that seventy-five per cent of the business institutions in the province wilted away. A good example was the meat market built in Portage la Prairie during the flush of optimism in 1882. The city already had a perfectly satisfactory meat market; still, nothing would do but that another larger and more ambitious establishment be erected. When the boom collapsed the scheme fell through. The meat market was converted into a biscuit factory. That failed. The biscuit factory became a manufacturing establishment. That failed, too, and the building was finally converted to a hard-tack shop.

Such insecurity was reflected in small business tragedies all over the province. Robert Hill, Manitoba’s pioneer historian, wrote eight years later that men “once deemed honest and good for any amount, were turned out of house and home, their goods and chattels liened on and sold by the sheriff, in many cases not bringing the latter’s fees.” The wide-open credit system, which saw properties sold for small downpayments, was the real culprit. People had been speculating with money they did not have. Buggies, buckboards, and wagons were shipped to Manitoba in wholesale lots by Ontario manufacturers and sold to anyone who would buy them on time. So extravagant was the spirit of optimism engendered by the coming of the railway that any newcomer who claimed to have taken up a farm or who said he had come to stay was granted almost instant credit as a safe risk; indeed, it was considered well-nigh an insult to turn him down. As a result of this reckless policy, scores of farms and, indeed, entire townships fell eventually into the hands of the loan companies.
Worse, bona fide settlers, hacking away at the tough prairie sod, found they could get no further loans for stock, farm equipment, or seed. The boom collapsed just as the first great wave of immigration reached the prairies. The newcomers ran squarely into a wall of pessimism. The financial hangover that followed was one of the reasons why so many were forced to leave their new-found homes and retreat to the East and why the immigrant tide, which seemed to be unending during that roseate spring, eventually slowed to a halt for another generation.

In the years that followed, the pioneers of Manitoba looked back upon those bizarre months and wondered how they could have been so foolish. There was the case of J. A. Little, a blacksmith from Portage la Prairie who threw up his job in 1881 to sell real estate – so successfully that he soon became an acknowledged authority on the value of property. Little made one hundred thousand dollars during the boom. He was so flushed with success that he resolved to build a residence elaborate enough to eclipse any similar structure in the North West. He had completed the stable and the cellar when the end came. All the remaining years of his life were spent trying to earn enough money to pay back his crushing debts. He did not quite succeed. Shortly before he died in 1890 the stable was sold to a livery company and the great cellar, the last remaining testament to his folly, was filled in.

There was also the tale of Roderick McLeod, who owned a river lot of two hundred and forty acres. He sold it for fifty thousand dollars of which fifteen thousand was the down payment. When the boom burst, the purchaser, unable to pay the balance, offered to return the land. Such was McLeod’s avarice that he refused and the case went to court. In the soberer climate of a later period, the judge saw that the land had been overvalued. McLeod did not receive a nickel more for his inflated property; worse, the legal expenses gobbled up all of his original fifteen thousand and his homestead as well. Perhaps he contemplated, ruefully, the irony of his stand. Stretching off from that disputed parcel of real estate, in every direction, were millions of acres of prime farmland, available for homestead or pre-emption, all free for the asking.

The boom had a sobering effect on Winnipeg. All during the decade of the seventies it had been a lusty infant of a village. In one incredible winter it had reached its adolescence and sowed its wild oats. By the fall of 1882, it had matured to become a sadder and wiser city. As men recall their lost youth, old timers recalled wistfully those halcyon days before the bubble broke. One of these was George Ham, who wrote in 1921 that
“since the boom of 1882, the soul of Winnipeg has never been what it was before.”

“The later Winnipeg may be a better city,” Ham admitted, but he regretted the good old days. “It was a short life from ’71 to ’82, but while it lasted, it was a life with a ‘tang’ to it – a ‘tang’ born of conditions that cannot be repeated and therefore cannot be reproduced.”