The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (7 page)

In April, General Rosser paid a visit to John McVicar and made him an offer for his property as a future townsite for the
CPR’S
divisional point. The accounts of exactly what took place are conflicting. One of the
CPR’S
surveyors, J. H. E. Secretan, said that he, Rosser, and John McTavish, the
CPR
land commissioner, had settled on Grand Valley as the divisional point, offering McVicar fifty thousand dollars for his property. The farmer could scarcely believe that that much money existed. A discussion followed and some “ ‘wise guys’ of neighbours and relations,” as Secretan called them, were invited in. Around dawn, McVicar was persuaded by his friends to demand sixty thousand. Charles Aeneas Shaw, another of Rosser’s locating engineers, gives a different version in his memoirs. Shaw wrote that Rosser empowered
him
to deal with McVicar and that he was given a maximum of thirty thousand dollars to buy the McVicar land for the
CPR
station and surrounding property. Shaw had dinner with McVicar but “some speculators had got hold of him, and he would not hear of anything less than eighty thousand dollars.” Beecham Trotter, a Brandon pioneer who also related the story in his memoirs, reported that when Shaw and Rosser had offered McVicar twenty-five thousand, McVicar immediately demanded fifty thousand dollars down and a half interest in all future sales. Whereupon Rosser is said to have retorted: “I’ll be damned if a town of any kind is ever built here.”

Whatever the details of the legendary incident, one thing is clear: When McVicar, goaded by speculators, tried to bargain with the railway, the railway simply moved the site of its station two miles farther west. This would be the pattern in all future dealings when private individuals tried to hold up the company for speculative profits.

According to Trotter, General Rosser turned on his heel, ordered the horses saddled, crossed the Assiniboine, and made straight for the shack of D. H. Adamson, a squatter on the south bank of the river in the Brandon Hills. The site cost the
CPR
a fraction of the Grand Valley price, and its choice marked the end of Grand Valley as a viable community and the beginning of the town of Brandon.

What was not realized at the time was that Rosser and his immediate superior, Alpheus B. Stickney, the general superintendent of the western division of the
CPR
, were themselves speculating in real estate, using the inside knowledge that their positions provided them. This had, apparently, been one of the conditions of Rosser’s appointment as laid down by Stickney, who had been Jim Hill’s construction boss on the St. Paul railway; clearly, it had been the practice of himself and his colleagues in the various railway adventures in which he had been engaged. It is doubtful, however, from the course of later events that the directors of the
CPR
, with the possible exception of Jim Hill, were aware of it. Certainly it was not public knowledge at the time. When Charles Shaw’s brother Duncan, who had homesteaded three miles south of the embryo community, learned from his brother of the impending development, he could easily have made himself wealthy from land speculation, but he refused to do so for fear of prejudicing Charles’s position.

Another insider who could have made a fortune but refused to do so because of his calling was the Reverend George Roddick, who with his wife and seven children had left Pictou, Nova Scotia, in 1879 and come out across the prairie from Winnipeg in an ox cart loaded with all the family’s possessions, including an organ and a grandfather clock. Like most pioneers in the days before the railway, the Roddicks had been forced to turn their cart into a scow, caulking the wagon box with mud, in order to cross the swollen Assiniboine. Shortly after that adventure they settled down in the Brandon Hills, their log home being the chief habitation between the river and the border and a favourite stopping place for travellers, who were assured of all the boiled potatoes and hot tea they could devour as long as they attended Sunday service. One Sunday evening in May, after service, two of the Roddick boys overheard a whispered conversation between two Winnipeg visitors and realized at once that the strangers had
a clue to the new townsite. They asked their father for permission to go over at once and squat on the ground.

“No,” Roddick replied, “it would not be honest. Besides, the Roddick family are in the country to live as farmers; and good neighbours are more valuable to us than land.”

Others had fewer scruples. Charles Reay, a delegate of the Northwest Colonization Society of Montreal, reported in mid-May that the country between Grand Valley and the Brandon Hills was alive with land sharks:

“We met them at the place where the railway crosses the Assiniboine, they having squatted on every available location. Their operations were not confined to this locality, but wherever there was a prospect of a village these land sharks were to be found. Their movement was rapid. At first they put up tents and put men to guard them, and ploughed a furrow or two – and these are improvements! Time would not allow, however, for them to go to all this trouble, so frequently they dispensed with the formality of erecting the building (tent), and merely ran a furrow. I don’t know how many sections were squatted on in this way, but if the Government recognizes their claim, a gross injustice will be perpetrated. They do not intend to settle. They have no intention of cultivating the land. They only desire to secure choice locations, sell out their improvements at from $20 to $30, and give up their pretended claims; or else to get up a ‘city,’ sell lots, and amass a small fortune out of its proceeds by auction sale at Winnipeg.”

One of these squatters was D. H. Adamson, who had family banking connections in Winnipeg. It was to his hastily built shack on Section 23 that General Rosser proceeded in early May after his abortive attempts to buy up a station site at Grand Valley. Adamson, however, had little claim to the land. First, he had not registered title to it, and second, all odd-numbered sections were closed to homesteaders anyway; they could be purchased but they could not be homesteaded. Late in April, the most astute real estate man in the North West, Arthur Wellington Ross, arrived on the scene apparently on the railway’s behalf, or at least with the knowledge of its Winnipeg officials, and proceeded to wangle the land away from Adamson. It is doubtful if Adamson had inside knowledge of the railway route; Ross certainly did. Ross was to become one of the most powerful figures in the approaching land boom; he would make and lose an immense fortune in the space of two years. On April 27 he made an agreement with Adamson whereby he would secure title to the land and Adamson would retain a one-seventh interest. Ross secured the title on May 9 and sold the property, which was to become the centre of the city of
Brandon, on May 30 to A. B. Stickney, acting for the
CPR
. The price was $2,560; Adamson got $350. On the same day, Ross’s firm was advertising lots for sale in the new community.

One of the squatters mentioned in the press was Joseph Woodworth, a hearty man with black side whiskers and a flowing moustache, “a great mixer and free spender” and an influential Nova Scotia Conservative. Wood worth and his brother D. B., a former Nova Scotia
M.P.P
., took the even-numbered section, Number 24, adjoining Adamson’s and were careful to secure title to it in March and April. It was one of more than twenty properties that they had taken a chance on. Woodworth, whom Charles Reay referred to as “a discredited politician” and the Liberal
Free Press
called “a Conservative adventurer,” went personally to Ottawa in May to have his homestead confirmed. As the
Free Press
predicted, his “grab game” was endorsed by the government (“…  what could commend a man more to Sir Charles Tupper than utter unscrupulousness and confirmed shamelessness?”), possibly because of his political connections but also, no doubt, because he had been careful to plough and seed thirty acres in conformity with the homestead act. In July, Woodworth divided the property into lots and sold several to General Rosser for twenty thousand dollars. Rosser, it is said, turned them over at a profit of ten thousand. Woodworth eventually made two hundred thousand dollars from his property and “cheerfully confessed his wealth.” In his expensive sealskin coat he swiftly became a familiar and popular figure in the town. He ran for mayor and was defeated but went on to oust J. W. Sifton, the Liberal railway contractor, in the forthcoming Manitoba provincial election.

Woodworth was prescient enough to give away free land for schools, churches, and public buildings. Beecham Trotter, who knew him well, recalled that “he had his own ideas of how to give a dollar so as to get three. It was that sentiment, rather than a passion for incorruptible justice, which led him to give a free site for the court house.… He believed the court house would attract the lawyers to its neighbourhood as their residential district. Where lawyers flocked, he thought, other rich men would flow, and the price of lots would rise.” The lawyers would include the two sons of his political rival Sifton, who set up a law office in the new town and laid the base for two outstanding political careers.

Brandon’s beginnings can be traced to May 9, 1881, the day on which Arthur Wellington Ross officially secured title to Section 23 and on which J. W. Vaughan, a Winnipeg surveyor, arrived to subdivide it into avenues, streets, blocks, and lots. The main street was named after General Rosser,
who decreed that the lots should be small, since more money could be made from the land in that way. The survey took until mid-August but the lots went on sale long before it was completed. Once the location of the new town was known, people began to appear and tents to blossom all along the high bank of the Assiniboine.

After the realtors, the first businessman on the scene, not unnaturally, was a lumber merchant: Charles Whitehead, the son of Joseph Whitehead, the railway contractor who had beggared himself building Section Fifteen of the government line in the muskegs that lay along the Ontario-Manitoba border. Whitehead, whose descendants would own the Brandon
Sun
, purchased the first parcel of land sold by the
CPR
.

On Whitehead’s heels, in late May, came a doctor, a grocer, and a hotel-man. The grocery store was the one that had been erected the previous month at Grand Valley, but when it became clear that the original settlement was dying, the proprietors moved it in sections by barge to the new townsite. The McVicar brothers were stubbornly trying to sell lots on the old site in the wistful hope that the
CPR
might locate a station on their land, but their neighbours were less sanguine. By June, two more stores and a billiard hall had been moved to Brandon.

The
CPR’S
clear intention was to destroy Grand Valley as a community. Lots on both townsites were advertised in mid-May and went on sale at the end of the month. A brief advertising war took place in the columns of the Winnipeg papers, with “Mc Vicar’s Landing” proclaiming that it was the
CPR
crossing and Ross advertising the as yet unnamed city of Brandon as “the site of the next great city on the
CPR
.” The name of the new town first appeared on May 30. The Brandon lots sold swiftly at prices that ranged from $63 to $355. Grand Valley lots went badly and sold for an average price of $33. The original community was clearly doomed by the decision to move the station two miles west.

The first newcomers had great difficulty finding Brandon at all. James Canning, who had trudged across the prairie from the end of track looking for work, arrived at the corner of Tenth and Rosser and asked a man who was helping to erect a new building where the town was.

“Right here,” came the reply.

Canning climbed up on the windowsill of the half-completed structure and looked around him. There was only one other building in sight, a house on First Street being put up by Joseph Woodworth.

“I don’t see any town,” Canning said, as he climbed down.

“Well it is only a paper town yet,” his acquaintance replied.

The paper town blossomed swiftly into a tent community. The first post office was nothing more than a soap box with a slit in it placed outside the tent of L. M. Fortier and his new bride. The first restaurant was a plank laid across two barrels on the trail that was to become Pacific Avenue. The proprietor was an eccentric, white-bearded cockney named Tom Spence whose entire stock consisted of a keg of cider, a bottle of lime juice, a couple of pails of water, and two drinking glasses. To attract trade, Spence had chained a live badger to a nearby post, “just far enough from the counter to be unable to bite the customers.”

The first church service was held out of doors in a driving rainstorm in June by the Reverend Thomas Lawson, a Methodist. The local harness-maker held an umbrella over the minister’s head while the congregation, composed entirely of young men, sang lustily, oblivious of the downpour. Lawson was able to move his service indoors thanks to the hospitality of a Mrs. Douglas, “a motherly lady of no mean proportions,” who operated one of the two tent hotels. The beds of this “pretentious hostelry” were built double-decker fashion along one side of the tent, screened by Pullman-style curtains. A lean- to at one end served as a kitchen. The rest of the tent did duty as dining room and lobby and, on Sundays, as a church. An early Brandon settler, J. A. Smart, who was a regular attendant, remembered noticing with some amusement the ample landlady accompanied by her daughter emerging silently from a corner of the tent, “dressed in her most stately attire, not omitting bonnet, coat and gloves,” creeping out the back flap through the kitchen, manoeuvring round to the front, entering through the front flap, and marching up before the congregation “in high reverential style” to a front seat a few feet from the curtained bunks from which they had just emerged.

In that golden summer of 1881, the pattern of the new Canada began to take hesitant shape along the line of the railway. Brandon was the beginning – the first of the scores of raw communities which would erupt from the naked prairie. Its birth pangs would be repeated over and over again as the rails moved west. There was a kind of electric feeling in the atmosphere – a sense of being in on the start of a great adventure – which those who arrived in Brandon that summer would never forget. In future years, when recollections of later events became blurred, they would still retain unclouded the memory of those first months when the sharp, spring air was pungent with the incense of fresh lumber and ringing with the clamour of construction; when lasting friendships were forged among the soiled tents on the river bank; when every man was young and strong and in love with life; and when the distant prairie, unmarked by shovel or
plough, was still a mysterious realm waiting to be claimed. Some forty years later, J. A. Smart, who had stood out in the rain during that first church service, wrote about those days “when the world, full of opportunity and hope,” lay before him. “No small town in Canada or elsewhere,” he wrote, “could possibly have contained a happier army of young men than did Brandon in its earliest years.”