Winnipeg was at a peculiar stage of its growth at the time of my transfer there from Portage la Prairie when, in 1893, the Manitoba North Western went into a receivership, because it couldn’t pay its fixed charges and the Allan interests became tired of finding them from private sources. Probably not many of the well-known men of the city appreciated that they were participants in a phase of North American history which would soon become almost as extinct as the dodo, and would be clothed, for those who had eyes to see, with a certain glamour of the age of chivalry.

The knighthood that flowered among the Indians, fur traders, and original farmers of the Great Lone Land, has not yet been accorded the idealism of the Crusades, or the picturesqueness of Robin Hood. The country had few ladyes fayre. The dusky maidens who became the queens of many mixed unions were attractive enough in their way, though they were never protected by moats and drawbridges; nor were their favours courted with armour and lance. But there were other elements in a unique style of living to which, one day, the touch of some wizard of romance will be applied. The buffalo was to be replaced by the plowman, the Indian to be superseded by a more industrious relative, and the ironless Red River cart to be run off the trail by the iron horse.

Some of our daily friends in the early nineties, who still remain, dwindling to a small, reclusive band, had known the sovereignty of “The Company”, had seen the Queen’s uncamouflaged Government assume sway over the immeasurable territory. They had passed through the first Riel rebellion of 1869, with its execution of Scott, and the administration of affairs during the subsequent winter with Riel as President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land. Lawful authority was beleaguered, a thousand miles from the nearest centre of British power, and could only be restored by a military expedition which must travel over inland seas, through uncleared forests, and upon streams unfamiliar to military men—a wilderness unpopulated save for a few barbarians and isolated traders.

Caesar in Gaul, and the Crusaders bound for Jerusalem had no such resistance of primeval nature to overcome as was involved in the Wolseley relief of 1870, in which the Duke of Connaught shared, and which gave his name to Prince Arthur’s Landing, later to be changed by Van Horne to Port Arthur.

In the Red River Expedition of 1870 was Charlie Bell, a drummer boy of sixteen, son of the registrar of South Lanark. When the artillery was brought up against Fort Garry, the gate was open, Riel had fled from the breakfast table; and the crusade’s object was accomplished without an angry shot being fired. Charlie Bell did not return to Ontario, but became as much a Westerner as if he had been so born.

Sometimes he was in the public service, officially. He was always in the public service, temperamentally. For a generation he was the annually-elected secretary of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, and saw it grow from almost nothing to the biggest wheat mart in the world. He kept the Board of Trade straight while it was located in the City Hall, which was built in sure and certain hope that the boom would become a normalcy, and which still houses the civic administration. Western literature has had in him a faithful practitioner, and Masonry a pillar, even to the thirty-third degree. During more recent years he developed a strain of feeling of which Ontario folk may take notice. He came to believe that the average Ontario man going West carries a disposition similar to that of the thoughtless Englishman, who said of Canadians generally, “We howns ’em.”

It is a curious and somewhat delusive phenomenon in community life that men seem vaster in a large city than they do in a little town. Somehow, a Winnipeg leader is supposed to be a bigger man in that city of over two hundred thousand than the same man was when the population was about as big as Brantford’s is to-day. That could not really be. Lord Strathcona, among the exaltation of Imperial London, was not truly greater than Donald Smith was, buying pelts and wheat at Fort Garry, keeping Riel quiet, and, later, parleying with bishops over the school question.

Heavy railroad building, during the periodic flow of capital from a rich and loaning country, is an easier task than starting a small railway in a small community with very small resources. In this connection one thinks of a man who had an extraordinarily vivid career during the strenuous decades of his Western life. I mean Hugh Sutherland, who in 1874, was sent to Winnipeg as a superintendent of the Dominion Public Works Department.

He built the quarters for Governor Laird, and the mounted police barracks at Battleford, when the capital of the North West Territories was moved from Fort Pelly, near the headwaters of the Assiniboine, north of Kamsack, the first Canadian Northern divisional point west of Dauphin. Charlie Bell watched Hugh Sutherland’s midwinter arrival at Fort Garry with his dogs, and always describes him as the handsomest man he ever saw.

It is like going back to prehistoric times to hear Hugh Sutherland tell of how he found it desirable to soothe the Indian mind by representing that the smokestack of an engine that he had brought into the country to saw lumber for the public works, was a cannon. It is amusing to hear him describe how, when treaty was being made with the Cree chief at the place where Battleford was to be built, he invited the Paleface to sit with him on a log; and how the chief, not being too clean, nudged nearer and nearer, until the retreating Sutherland, finding himself at the log’s end, was told that that was what was happening to the Red Man in his own country, and was asked how much further this sort of thing was intended to go?

When we have read of wars and rumours of wars because some country like Bulgaria or Serbia wanted access to tidewater, it has seemed a strange perversion of the proprieties of commerce that there should be so much anxiety to control the anchorage of shipping. But the urge to the sea has been a feature of Western Canadian life ever since the difference of five cents on a bushel of wheat has meant the difference between a Windsor chair and a Morris to a Manitoba landowner. Only, instead of longing for the glistening blue of the Aegean or the Adriatic, the prairie country has hungered for the leaden mists of the Bay, which Lord Grey, with a poetic licence not habitual with him, once called the Canadian Mediterranean—thinking, no doubt, of Fort Churchill and York Factory as the Cannes and Mentone of a too quiescent Riviera.

To make a grain route of Hudson Bay was an early and a latter ambition of the Winnipeg business man, to whom ice floes are not the same obstacle to business as they are to those who never knew what it is to trade while the thermometer is fluttering between forty and fifty below. When Hugh Sutherland had passed from the unexciting functions of a Government job, and was up to the eyes in developing the country, he became the chief propagandist for a Hudson Bay Railway. While I was pursuing the even tenor of my way at the Portage, he, with an apostolic fervor, was holding meetings and painting pictures in the capital, to the end that the road towards the Bay, through the flat country between Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, might begin.

Infinite labour, infinite patience, because of infinite delays, and, in the constructive sense, infinite imagination, went into that launch of an enterprise which has halted men with larger resources and Governments with vaster powers than ever came Hugh Sutherland’s way. But the labour and the patience and the romance that went into a truly heroic adventure did result in forty miles of railway being built, from Winnipeg to Oak Point—and there the money was exhausted, though the desire to spend it on reaching the Bay wasn’t. Since then, as part of the Canadian Northern, the branch was extended practically the whole length of the peninsula, to Gypsumville—a name which tells why.

The lieutenant-governor of Manitoba was Sir John Schultz. What a career, Western of Western, he had had, to be sure. He was a medical student of Queen’s University, Kingston, and came West in 1857, the year in which gold was reported on the Saskatchewan river, and the first party of explorers was sent to the prairies by a Canadian Government. At Fort Garry he practised medicine, and in the early sixties bought a share in the first Western newspaper, “The Nor’Wester”. The sovereign Company exercised its powers rather arbitrarily, particularly against anything that looked like an infringement of its monopoly of the Indian trade. Schultz was an ardent free trader, and fought The Company in his paper, and through a trading firm he established. He found himself in jail and bound with ropes as a sidekick to a dispute with his former business partner turned sheriff, and therefore a creature of The Company.

Schultz was later imprisoned by Riel. Convinced by what he overheard his guards say, that he was marked for execution, he escaped, after eight hours’ work on a hole in the wall, made by a gimlet and penknife smuggled to him by his wife. This happened while Donald Smith was arranging with a convention for a Bill of Rights constituting the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land—all in anticipation of the arrival, during the coming summer, of troops, and also, as the purchase of Rupert’s Land from The Company for £300,000 had been arranged, of its entry into the Canadian Confederation. Dr. Schultz became the first member of Parliament from the new province which was established in 1870; then senator, and finally lieutenant-governor and a knight.

Perhaps there was no more compact embodiment of the emergence of Winnipeg from a frontier post to a Metropolitan capital than an old friend of all who were ever associated with him, J. H. Ashdown, who died while these pages were in the press. It is difficult for any of this generation who talked with a man whom a veracious writer called the merchant hardware prince of Canada, who was an alert, on-the-minute modernist, and whose appearance long belied his years, and discern in him the tinsmith of Fort Garry, who served against Riel in ’69, was put in jail with Scott, Schultz and Charles Mair, and was lucky to escape the fate of the murdered Scott.

Mr. Ashdown was literally one of the city fathers. Before he was Mayor in 1905—and he was called the best Mayor Winnipeg ever had—he was an alderman. Before he was alderman he was a leader in the movement to incorporate the city. Indeed, ever since his arrival, in 1868 he was a forefronter in every sort of civic advance, because he was built that way.

Natively, Mr. Ashdown was a Londoner. He came to Canada in 1853, at nine years of age. He learned tinsmithing at Hespeler, in Ontario, under the old apprenticeship system, which inculcated obedience and frugality, until its subject was long past the period at which, in these times, young hopefuls are post-graduates of the School of Bringing Up Father. The Ashdown apprenticeship was decided on after finding a sixpence on the road he walked over from Guelph to Hespeler. That lucky sixpence brought these payments: board, lodge and laundry, twenty-five dollars the first year, thirty dollars the second year, and thirty-five dollars the concluding year.

The apprenticeship over, he ventured to Chicago and Kansas before sallying north. To reach Fort Garry he walked nineteen days from St. Cloud. Fort Garry, in 1868 furnished a fair livelihood to an expert metal worker, and illimitable outlook to a seer. Ashdown was both, and would go a long way to advance his business or broaden his grasp of the future. For a pioneering story this is as good as any that even the apocryphers have produced:—

A neighbouring hardware merchant becoming tired of his prospects offered to sell his stock, store and goodwill to Ashdown for a thousand dollars. Ashdown said he hadn’t the money, but asked for a little time to turn the proposition over in his mind. It was Friday afternoon.

Monday morning the hardwareman met Ashdown, who said he couldn’t buy the business. He had walked to Portage la Prairie, hoping to raise the thousand dollars, and had been turned down. The return trip, Winnipeg to Portage la Prairie, meant a tramp of 112 miles.

Against the background which the personalities of these typical men faithfully represent, one always thinks of modern Winnipeg in terms of historical glamour. Its business was always substantial and always anxious, the future being very tantalizing. There was an almost continuous procession through the papers of plans for great Western development. Railway schemes were the most intriguing and impressive. They were divisible into two main streams of endeavour—to defeat the monopolistic entrenchments of the C.P.R., and to build and magnify branches from the main artery of traffic, under independent control.

First, something about the anti-monopoly fight, in which the battle of Fort Whyte has a place all its own in economic and political warfare; and then a few recalls from the long and wearisome trail of lateral development, up to the point where an insignificant line was built, which was not destined to fall into the capacious hands of the Canadian Pacific, but was the beginning of the longest, though not yet the most prosperous, system in the world—the Canadian National Railways.

The battle of Fort Whyte arose from the monopoly clause in the C.P.R. charter, and the wide and deep feeling that the C.P.R. was more an enemy than a friend of Manitoba; plus, of course, the prospective advantages which politicians saw in fomenting trouble. The monopoly clause prevented the building, by any other company, of branch lines south of the main line of the C.P.R. and within fifteen miles of the American boundary. The prohibition was held to be in the interests of Canadian solidarity. If the American lines which were pushing through Minnesota and North Dakota had free access to Canadian territory the Canadian road would be starved, and the basis of Dominion-wide prosperity, on which the Confederation was established, would be destroyed.

C.P.R. rates for hauling grain to Lake Superior were higher than they became later; but, in fairness, it should never have been forgotten that they were lower than rates on the Northern Pacific and Great Northern, in similar territory across the line. With crops uncertain and prices low—I have already told how the finest grade wheat of the 1887 crop sold for forty-eight and fifty cents a bushel in the heart of Manitoba—the proportion of the farmers’ total receipts that went for haulage to the head of the Lakes seemed high.

In the spring of 1887 the Norquay Government proposed to authorize a line from Winnipeg to the boundary to connect with the Northern Pacific. The C.P.R. denounced this as a breach of faith, and threatened to move its shops to Fort William if, as it said, it were treated as a public enemy. An Act was passed in June, by the Manitoba Legislature and was forthwith disallowed at Ottawa. Another Act was promptly passed, and the company chartered by the province began construction.

The Dominion Minister of Justice obtained a temporary injunction restraining both Government and company, the C.P.R. having already laid a spur across the path of the new line. Public temper became very hot, and Premier Norquay declared that the line would be built, “at the point of the bayonet if necessary”.

In November the injunction was made permanent, but by that time there was no more money for construction, and the Norquay Government had gone the way of all its kind. An extremely brief life was the portion of a Government formed by Dr. Harrison, and the Greenway Government succeeded it early in 1888, with the vociferous lion of Portage la Prairie, the unique Joe Martin, as attorney-general.

All winter the racket about the anti-monopoly line continued. Greenway and Martin besieged Ottawa, and, undoubtedly, had a united province behind them. They raised vigorously the issue of provincial rights. Sir John Macdonald, not wanting to make a bad matter worse, induced the C.P.R. to waive its monopoly clause in consideration of certain financial guarantees, and promised to disallow no more Manitoba railway legislation.

All seemed set fair for railway expansion, especially from the point of view of Portage la Prairie, which had never ceased to cherish the hopes on which the Manitoba North Western had been built. At the beginning, you remember, an estate had been bought south of the C.P.R. and nearly two miles from where the North Western terminals were finally located, in expectation of an extension of the line some day to the boundary.

With our own member as attorney-general, and, as it was said, the strongest man in the Government, the swift clean-up of the crossing trouble that had been left by the Norquay Government, and the imminence of a general election which, it was expected, would cinch power for Greenway, made the time opportune for starting the long-desired railway from Portage to Winnipeg, to connect with the new line that was reaching the boundary from there.

The Portage line was to cross the C.P.R. track to Emerson at Headingly, a few miles out of Winnipeg. The consent of the Railway Committee of the Privy Council was necessary to any crossing of a Dominion railway. Permission to cross the C.P.R. was slow in coming. It was alleged that C.P.R. influence caused the delay. Grading began on both sides of the C.P.R.; and, when permission did not arrive from Ottawa, the indignant Winnipeggers teamed rails, ties, and a diamond out to Headingly; and laid them during the night, eventualities being provided against, as it was thought, under the attorney-general’s inspiration.

Two years before this, a former brakeman and superintendent of the Credit Valley Railway had been sent to Winnipeg as superintendent of the western lines of the C.P.R.—he became Sir William Whyte. In the morning, on discovery of the doings at Headingly, and on instructions from Van Horne, Mr. Whyte took a gang of men to tear up the diamond. The attorney-general had sworn in twenty special constables who were guarding the “jewel”, as the diamond was called.

The defenders were in charge of ex-poundkeeper Cox. Whyte told him he would remove the diamond at any cost, though he was unwilling to use violence. Cox prepared to resist, but a punch in the eye from a warmly loyal C.P.R. navvy changed his mind.

The diamond was removed and hauled in triumph to the C.P.R. yards, and the battle of Fort Whyte was on, with General Whyte commanding his forces from his private car. An engine was ditched at the crossing, and Whyte stayed by, with two hundred and fifty men from the C.P.R. shops to see that the supporters of the Manitoba Government didn’t move it. In his car were about twenty special constables.

Joe Martin and several high provincial officers were on the ground. He caused the provincial chief of police to inform Whyte that the appointments of his special police had been canceled. A handy magistrate swore them in again. More men were brought up by the provincial powers, and it seemed as if they would attempt to make the crossing afresh. Whyte attached a hose to his locomotive, which stood close to the ditched engine, and said he would turn live steam on any gang which tried to work against him. It was impossible for the provincialists to get up steam against such steam; and so closed a perfectly Martinesque day.

The double dare continued for five days of venomous but harmless hostility. Then Martin swore in a hundred and twenty constables and called out the military, under Colonel Villiers, who pitched their tents on the battlefield. A threat was made to lay the diamond further down the line, and Whyte built a fence, and kept his watchful forces waiting behind it.

A battalion of farmers appeared carrying sundry woodware. They talked of lynching “Smooth William”, but retired, discerning that valour may be compounded with discretion. Whyte vowed that he would stay there as long as the crossing was unauthorized even if he had to tie up the C.P.R. from East to West to preserve its rights.

For a fortnight the armies faced each other, and then the C.P.R. tired of waiting on Ottawa, sought an injunction restraining the provincial road from trespass. The courts refused the injunction, Superintendent Whyte called off his engines, his cars and his men, and Fort Whyte went into the history of bloodless campaigns.

In the Van Horne biography the episode is called “as merry a game of bluff as he had ever known.” That there wasn’t a serious casualty list was due to the inherent good temper of men on both sides—perhaps most of all to the imperturbability of Mr. Whyte, who was on the whole, the West’s most outstanding citizen for more than a quarter of a century, and who wasn’t called “Smooth William” for nothing.

One could not count the ambitious railway schemes that were conceived or cradled in Winnipeg during the eighties and nineties; some born to blush unseen, some to waste their prospects on the prairie air, and some to suffer a dolorous existence till they were gathered to the boundless bosom of the C.P.R. Often enough, the poorer the outlook of an enterprise, the more grandiose was its name.

What is now a part of the Souris branch of the C.P.R., began as the Oregon and Transcontinental, and ended at the then forlorn station of Starbuck. The Great Northwest Central had a charter from Brandon to Battleford. It crawled for fifty miles northwestward and then stalled till the inevitable happened.

We heard repeatedly of projected lines in what, from the meridian of Winnipeg and the Portage, seemed the Never-Never Country, bounded by Prince Albert and Edmonton, four hundred miles apart on the North Saskatchewan. At last they were built. Of the granting of one charter by the Dominion Parliament so far as one can recall, no definite information filtered through to the accounting department of the Manitoba North Western, though it was freighted with more of Canadian destiny than all the others put together. It was obtained by the Davis firm of contractors, and carried a land grant and authority to reach Hudson Bay—the charter of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company. It lay like a derelict upon a tideless shore, and appeared to have no chance of activity for years after the Never-Never country had been traversed by two sets of rails.

The Regina and Long Lake line was built from Regina to Prince Albert in 1889 and 1890 for a company whose moving power was the firm of Osler, Hammond and Nanton of Toronto and Winnipeg. The construction was across a virtually uninhabited stretch of two hundred and twenty miles between the Qu’Appelle River at Lumsden and the town of Prince Albert. Most of the track was put down during a summer at the end of which according to Joe Work who had charge of laying the rails, and later became chief track layer for the Canadian Northern, it was not safe to ride or drive a horse at night, because the cracks in the ground made by the drought were so wide that hoofs could be caught in them, legs broken and steeds destroyed.

Saskatoon, at the crossing of the South Saskatchewan river, was in the midst of what was often called “The Desert”. Its main business came from its being the station for Battleford, eighty miles away. Ten years after the line was laid there was only one homesteader between Saskatoon and the Qu’Appelle. The land grant was considered worthless—I believe it was written down optimistically by one presumed authority as being worth fifty cents an acre.

About the same time the Calgary and Edmonton was built, the steel reaching Red Deer the first season, and Strathcona, across the river from Edmonton, the next fall. The country passed through had more rainfall than the Regina-Prince Albert territory; but there were practically no settlers in it. Following this, track from Calgary to Fort MacLeod was laid, to procure Lethbridge coal, and later to the Kootenay where Dawson and Tyrrell in 1883 had proved that there were almost illimitable deposits of fuel.

That is where railway development in the West stood when I was removed to Winnipeg in 1893. Prices were lower than ever on the prairie. Wheat sold for 35 cents a bushel. Milch cows could be bought for less than thirty dollars. Eggs at eight cents a dozen, bought the farmer’s wife no silks or satins.

For three years, while the North Western was hoping against hope that it would be able to stand ultimately on its own feet, and Mr. Nanton, the Sir Augustus of these more expansive years, was keeping an extremely watchful eye on all expenditures, I was doing my best for a small family. At night I was the first auditor of the Canadian Fire Insurance Company, the creation of R. T. Riley, who doesn’t live as many anxious days now as he did then, and who was later to become a highly valued colleague on the National Railways’ directorate. At night also, I was the first auditor of the Manitoba Gas and Electric Company, and the Winnipeg Electric Railway Company, which was controlled by the contractors who had built the lines to Prince Albert and Edmonton.

It was that auditorship and the neglected charter of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company which brought me to Toronto, ten years later, as third vice-president of the Canadian Northern, a railway which, though its name appears to be dead, will be alive, as railways live, I think, for evermore.