The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (34 page)

The Sifton-Mackey scandal died down and was forgotten. There was no divorce – that would have required a special act of Parliament – and the Mackeys remained in Ottawa until 1910. The press never again referred to the story nor did the historians of the period, except in the most guarded and subtle way. Though Sifton may have
been a loss to the cabinet, his task was really finished. Through his drive, his stubbornness, and his imagination he had solved for his country and his party the problem of the empty West. In the face of mounting opposition, he had bulled through his policies, ignoring the cries of mongrelization, secure in his own conviction that the best prairie immigrants were practical farmers, whether they came from Krakow or Bukovina, Kronoberg or Saxony, Ayrshire or Idaho. The times were in his favour, but it is doubtful if anybody else in the Laurier cabinet could have done the job with the dispatch and the efficiency that Sifton brought to it.

He was not the most popular minister in the Government. James A. Macdonald went so far as to say, in 1911, that during his ten years as editor of the
Globe
, Sifton “was absolutely the heaviest and most irksome burden we had to carry.” Once the compromise with Laurier was effected, it was widely believed that Sifton would return to the cabinet. He did not. “There are a variety of reasons for this which I am hardly at liberty to explain,” he told a Winnipeg friend. Whatever these reasons were – and it would require exceptional naïveté to believe that the autonomy question was the only one, or even the most important one – Sifton was wise to leave office when he did. The Conservatives had wind of a series of major scandals within his own department involving grazing leases and timber rights, which they intended to exploit to the fullest. These involved most of the senior members of the Sifton organization, up to and including his own deputy. It was clear that an era was over, another beginning. The great movement that Clifford Sifton had launched was accelerating under its own steam. Sifton had been the catalyst that helped transform the West; now his usefulness was at an end.

2
The new era

The extent of Lauder’s disenchantment with his former minister may be gauged by the selection of his successor. Sifton had recommended Walter Scott for the post. The former editor of the Regina
Leader
, dispenser of patronage for the region, and the man who defeated the redoubtable Nicholas Flood Davin as Member for West Assiniboia, Scott was the best Westerner, in Sifton’s view, to carry out his policies. Scott was not chosen and went on to lead the Liberal party in
Saskatchewan to victory and to become the province’s first premier. Instead of Scott, Laurier gave the ministry to the one man who was diametrically opposed to the Siftonian concept of open immigration – to Frank Oliver who, in 1901, had cried out in the House that “we resent the idea of having the millstone of this Slav population hung around our necks.” The appointment was unexpected in Edmonton where it was widely believed that Oliver would become the first premier of Alberta.

It was inevitable that Oliver would drastically modify the open door policy in favour of a more selective approach to immigration that would, in his words, build up “a kindred and higher and better civilization in the country.” Anything else, Oliver believed, was simply “railway traffic.”

Both Sifton and Oliver were powerful politicians who knew how to use the devices of patronage, gerrymander, and, when necessary, out-and-out bribery to gain electoral victory. Ten years before, Sifton had seconded Oliver’s nomination as Liberal candidate for Alberta, declaring that he was “Liberal enough to suit him and independent enough and honest enough to be a North West man first, last and all the time.” Both men were also ardent prohibitionists as well as committed Westerners, but there the similarities ended. In almost every other sense the two were opposites. Sifton, with his cold eyes and plump cheeks, posing for his portrait in his riding pinks, was every inch the Ottawa sophisticate. Oliver, with his cadaverous Irish features, his deep-set eyes, rugged cheekbones, and vast handlebar moustache, was still the rough-hewn prairie pioneer. Sifton was a pillar of the Ottawa Hunt; Oliver was president of the Edmonton bicycle club. Sifton kept as tight a rein on his emotions as he did on his geldings; Oliver was passionate in his oratory and explosive in his editorials. Sifton hired an editor to speak for him in print; Oliver was his own editor, the
Bulletin
his personal organ.

“His is the temperament of the pioneer,” Sifton’s own newspaper wrote in April, 1905, in a eulogy of the new minister. Certainly no other member of the House had seen so much of the pioneer West. An itinerant journeyman, Francis Robert Oliver Bowsfield (he shucked off his father’s name when he left the Brampton farm after his mother’s second marriage) was helping to print the
Free Press
in 1873, long before it became a Sifton paper. Three years later he joined a bull train, following the ruts of the famous Carlton Trail to Fort Edmonton. He bought the first lot in town, opened a store in a log cabin – the first
emporium to be independent of the Hudson’s Bay Company – and in December 1880 started the
Bulletin
. He printed it himself on a secondhand press in an abandoned smokehouse not far from the Edmonton Hotel. Potential subscribers were exhorted to “read the
Bulletin
and the Bible.” It was the first newspaper in Alberta.

Oliver called himself an Independent Liberal, with emphasis on the adjective. As an editor and a politician – he was elected to the North West Council in 1883 – he fought the establishment. He wanted the Crow’s Nest Pass railway to be publicly owned, and he opposed the twenty-year tax exemptions on real estate granted to the
CPR
in the original contract. His public speeches and his editorials made up in vehemence what they lacked in grammar. He and his paper made enemies, especially in Tory Calgary. The shrill
Herald
called the
Bulletin
“the meanest paper published by the meanest man in Canada.”

He was no paragon. Shortly after he entered the cabinet, he allowed the Grand Trunk Pacific to pump fifteen thousand dollars into his paper secretly through a nominee. It was a serious conflict of interest; the railway at the time was dealing with the new minister on land acquisitions involving rights of way, townsites, and terminals. No other paper received such largess. On another occasion he leased out the mineral rights on his Alberta ranch and during a six-year period enjoyed the royalty on eighteen thousand tons of coal mined on his property. He didn’t own the mineral rights, and he knew it; the government owned them. But Oliver pocketed the money. He also parcelled out fake squatters rights to political friends in the Riding Mountain forest reserve so that they could take up free homesteads when the acreage was withdrawn from public settlement. These were Liberal hacks who got valuable land they had never seen, much less squatted on.

The most blatant case of personal profiteering by Oliver was his handling of Christopher Fahrni, who had bought twenty-three sections of the Michel Indian Reserve west of Edmonton for $25,000. When Fahrni couldn’t keep up his payments, Oliver’s department cancelled the sale. But Oliver’s lawyer, John J. Anderson, who was also his son-in-law, moved in and grabbed the property from the luckless Fahrni for $5,000, the amount of the original down payment. With that the sale was miraculously uncancelled. Anderson transferred the property to Oliver, who got a mortgage at once by swearing the land was now worth $71,460.

After the Liberal win in 1896, Oliver became the most powerful politician in the West after Sifton. Now, with Sifton out, he was calling the tune. Although Calgary was the larger city, Edmonton became the pro tern provincial capital, thanks to Oliver’s influence. Calgary still had hopes of claiming the prize when an elected provincial government was formed, but these hopes were dashed by Oliver’s backstage manoeuvres. He managed to gerrymander the electoral boundaries of the new province to give the northern (Liberal) half of Alberta a numerical advantage in the legislature not warranted by population. That ended Calgary’s aspirations and renewed the fierce traditional rivalry between the two cities.

He was not, as we have seen, one of Sifton’s admirers. Oliver favoured British immigration above all others and, after that, to a lesser degree, immigrants from Scandinavia, Holland and Belgium, France, and the United States. Like Clifford Sifton, the men in sheepskin coats had had their day. By the time the two new provinces celebrated their status with drumroll and rocket, Frank Oliver was truly in charge.

We are standing on South Railway Street, Regina, the Queen City of the Plains, on this, the most important day in her history – September 4, 1905. The old capital of the North West Territories is about to become the new capital of the Province of Saskatchewan, and everybody from the smallest Indian tot to the Governor General himself is here to preside at the ritual
.

The weather has co-operated. A brilliant sun bathes an ocean of ochre-coloured wheat fields in a morning glow. A cloudless sky rolls on, seemingly without end, to the distant line of the horizon. Along the muddy little Wascana, the poplars show a touch of yellow, but this is still summer, with the harvest yet to come
.

Excursion trains loaded with thousands of celebrators have already steamed into town from the outlying communities. The city is awash with flags, pennants, decorations – a kaleidoscope of bunting. Four triumphal arches have been raised, two constructed of cereal grains, two of evergreens. Mottoes abound: “God Bless Our Provinces,” they read, for Saskatchewan is also including Alberta in today’s festivities. Over Mickleborough’s store a huge horseshoe proclaims: “Peace, Prosperity and Progress.” These, after all, are the three benefits that most people have come west to enjoy
.

It is 9 a.m. and a thousand children are on the march, the girls in white and the boys in caps and sashes, each carrying a flag and heading
for Victoria Park to be greeted by Governor General Earl Grey and his lady, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and a host of other dignitaries including Sir Gilbert Parker, poet, journalist, and cleric, the doyen of Canadian literature and the closest thing to a media celebrity the country can muster
.

The children sing of Wolfe, the Conquering Hero, and all the little flags flutter – a sea of vibrating scarlet. The Governor General speaks. Children of the King, he says, you must be ready to die if ever the occasion should arise that you are called upon for your service. More cheers, more flag waving follow these words at the prospect of sacrifice in the service of the Empire. Then the Prime Minister speaks. He would rather be down there among them singing “God Save the King,” Laurier tells the children, than occupying the high position he holds
.

But the official party must hurry away because another parade is forming. Eight bands, thousands of marchers pass the reviewing stand on South Railway Street. Here comes the 90th Rifle Regiment, resplendent in dark uniforms and white helmets, South African campaign medals glittering on chests; then the Indians, feathered and painted and led by their wrinkled chief, the famous Piapot; more than twenty years before, he and his braves had tried to halt the westward drive of the
CPR
, but all that is forgotten today. Without the
CPR
there would be no Regina, no Province of Saskatchewan. Then why, everybody asks, is the
CPR
station undecorated when every other building in town is festooned? But the
CPR
is a law unto itself
.

More bands blare past us, more marchers. The old-timers stumble along to the music of fife and drum – as wrinkled and as brown as the Indians. A gigantic float, bearing the flower of Regina’s womanhood, drawn by four richly caparisoned horses and titled “Our Fair Dominion,” comes into view. Each Canadian province is represented by a young woman, the two newest, appropriately, by little girls. The entire fire brigade is here complete with steam engines, reels, and ladders, followed by a body of Germans representing the largest foreign language group in the area (loudly cheered) and a stream of carriages carrying politicians and ex-politicians including the former premier of the North West Territories, Frederick Haultain, who, being a Conservative, has been deposed in favour of a Liberal. Then finally – an incongruous spectacle in this land of antelope and gopher – the camels and elephants of the Floto Circus
.

The great procession winds its way through Regina’s dusty streets and finally back to the reviewing stand. Now the crowd in its thousands
breaks away and dashes for the
CPR
depot. The railway is part of the celebration after all. Its trains depart every fifteen minutes for the Exhibition Grounds, where there will be more speeches, more ritual, games of lacrosse and pushball, the musical ride of the Mounted Police, and, of course, the reason for all this day-long, night-long extravaganza: the official swearing in of Amédée Emmanuel Forget as first lieutenant-governor of the new province
.

3
The Indian dilemma

The two groups who received the loudest cheers in Regina’s great parade were also the most colourful and the most romantic, the reminders of an era past: the Indians and the Mounted Police. Each had dressed for the occasion in unaccustomed finery, the Indians discarding their dark and shabby suits for feathers, necklaces, and war paint, the Police doffing their working fatigues for scarlet serge.

The cheers rang out not only for the men on horseback – the Indians on mottled cow ponies, the Police on jet black steeds – but also for what these gaudy riders represented: the romantic version of the West, the Old West of nostalgia; a West that had never quite lived up to its billing and that was now officially ended. Many of those who watched on the sidelines as the riders cantered past had been seduced by that image: feathered and painted natives, fearless red-coated horsemen brandishing guns, hordes of savage animals. An extraordinary number had invested much of their capital in buffalo knives and firearms. The Barr colonists arrived armed to the teeth and, as we have seen, the Shepherd family of Ramsgate were to bring a veritable arsenal to the West, even including a naval cutlass. As young George Shepherd put it, “Thus armed, the family felt confident of their ability to stand off attacking bands of redskins, long enough at least for the Mounted Police to hear the firing and dash to the rescue.”