Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (37 page)
Law and order, of course, was something the American immigrants did not understand – at least in the Force’s view. The Mounted Police tended to despise the grassroots democracy that had produced elected peace officers south of the border. After all, John J. Healy, the most implacable of the Montana whiskey traders whom the police had driven out of southern Alberta, had also been sheriff of Chouteau County! “I suppose,” Commissioner Perry wrote to Ottawa in 1903, “that the peace of the Territories may seem assured to those who are in the East.… They know little of the reckless class of American outlaws to the south of us.”
But the Americans who came to Canada were mainly well-to-do farmers, the most peaceable of all classes. American badmen were so unusual in Canada that when the occasional one crossed the border he made headlines – such as Ernest Cashel of the Butch Cassidy gang, who was hanged in Calgary, or Cowboy Jack Monaghan who tried to terrorize Estevan, Saskatchewan, and was jailed for six months, or the infamous Idaho Kid, who tried to shoot up Weyburn, Assiniboia, in 1903.
The Idaho Kid sits on the verandah of Beach’s Hotel in Weyburn, shooting holes in the ceiling. It is late afternoon of a warm June day, and the townspeople have taken cover because the Idaho Kid is shooting up the street. When one curious citizen pokes his head out of his hotel window, the Idaho Kid, whose name is Brandenburger and who hails from Montana, not Idaho, shoots his hat off and tells him to stick his head back inside or he will turn him into a sieve. The citizen obeys and the Idaho Kid takes another drink
.
Another citizen, bolder than the rest, makes his way down the street. The Idaho Kid brandishes his revolver and orders him to hold out his hat. When the citizen complies, the Idaho Kid fills it full of holes. This angers the citizen, who tells the Kid he’d better stop or the Mounted Police will run him in. But there are no Mounted Police in town, and the Kid alleges that no one has ever run him in – no Montana sheriff has ever dared tackle him
.
The Idaho Kid says he will die with his boots on if necessary, but that
is unlikely because if any Mounted Policeman butts into his game, he will eat his liver cold. He is too hard and too wild for any Canadian constable, the Idaho Kid declares, and offers to bet twenty-five dollars that no one can take him alive. At that, three other citizens who have taken cover become emboldened by avarice, swallow their timidity, and come out into the street to cover the bet
.
The local justice of the peace is urged to send for a Mounted Policeman to settle the wager. Off goes a brief wire to the nearest detachment at Halbrite: “Come up next train party running amok with revolver.”
Enter Constable H. “Larry” Lett, burly and bullet-headed, five feet nine, 170 pounds, father of two, veteran of eight years in the Dragoon Guards and six on the Force. Having flagged down a freight train, he arrives in town to deal with the party running amok. The constable attempts to swear in a citizen or two to help him tackle the Idaho Kid, but no volunteer comes forward
.
The Idaho Kid is now holed up in his hotel room with his wife and a bottle. Constable Lett persuades the J.P. to stand within calling distance, then proceeds to bash down the door of the Idaho Kid’s room. The Idaho Kid reaches for his gun. The constable jumps him. The Idaho Kid’s wife jumps the constable. A rough-and-tumble follows
.
The citizens wait outside the hotel, listening to the sounds of the struggle, wondering if their money is safe. They need not worry. When the pair emerges, the constable is carrying the Idaho Kid’s gun and the Idaho Kid is wearing the constable’s handcuffs. For this demonstration of British coolness and pluck in the face of American anarchy, the Force is duly grateful. Constable Lett is swiftly promoted to corporal for proving that British Canada wants no truck or trade with the wild and woolly West to the south
.
Chapter Eight
The Sifton Scandals
1
The Minister’s reputation
Historians have dealt gently with Clifford Sifton, relying until recently on the gospel according to John Dafoe:
Clifford Sifton in Relation to His Times
, which Dafoe himself, not surprisingly, called “a labour of love and an obligation of friendship.” The Sifton that emerges from Dafoe’s laudatory biography is the Sifton of history: the man who changed the face of the prairies, a highly intelligent, strong-willed, ambitious politician with a capacity for leadership and organization, and the energy to go with it – a man who did not suffer fools, who hated incompetence, who could be agreeable in private life if chilly publicly, staunch and unswerving in his friendships, and indifferent to praise and contumely alike.
This is a reasonable assessment, but it fails to come to grips with one question that hangs over the Sifton years. To what extent did this minister whose job it was to protect the settlers and the native peoples from exploitation conspire in that exploitation? To what extent did he use his position improperly to benefit his friends and colleagues? To what degree did his well-known loyalty to political comrades collide with the public interest? And why did he condone flagrant wrongdoing among the senior members of his department?
In the period between Sifton’s resignation and the federal election of 1908, three major scandals in the department under his ministry came to light. These dealt with the farming out of European immigration propaganda to a mysterious group known as the North Atlantic Trading Company; the granting, under dubious circumstances, of a vast acreage of timber leases to Sifton’s lumberman brother-in-law, Theodore Burrows; and the granting, in equally dubious circumstances, of closed grazing leases in southern Alberta to Sifton’s political cronies. Dafoe in his biography glosses over all three, and historians have taken his word for it that nothing untoward took place. A careful study of the evidence suggests the opposite. Sifton’s response in the House to his accusers may indeed have been a
tour de force
, as Dafoe called it, but it evaded much of the sworn testimony heard by a series of parliamentary committees. And Dafoe entirely ignored the fourth and worst scandal – the profiteering on Indian lands by James Smart and two colleagues – which was not publicly exposed until the middle of the Great War.
It has been said that Sifton’s opponents held back until after he resigned, afraid of facing the Minister in the House because of his powerful debating skills. This is not true. The Opposition suspected malfeasance, but the principals in the Sifton scandals had been adept at covering their tracks. They hid behind the names of nominees, concealed their affairs by using legal firms as fronts, and escaped being found out by inventing bogus “companies” whose only address was a post office box. In one case the real principals behind a dubious transaction were revealed only because they eventually issued a stock prospectus in Great Britain, where the laws were tighter than in Canada.
The Liberal government was equally adept at resisting demands for public inquiries. The Moose Mountain Indian Reserve scandal – there is no other name for it – was not revealed until after the Conservatives took office and in 1913 appointed a royal commission of inquiry under T.R. Ferguson. The Ferguson report has vanished; no copy can be found. Fortunately, it was quoted at length in the press and in Parliament and should have served to destroy the reputations of three of Sifton’s closest allies – Smart, Pedley, and White. But by then the war was at its height and such exposés weren’t much more than a three-day sensation. The Canadian electorate has rarely shown much concern over political scandals. The Liberals in 1908 easily survived the Conservative onslaught just as later administrations under Mackenzie King survived even worse revelations. Any party that rides the crest of an economic boom, as the Liberals did in Canada’s first decade, need not worry too much about revelations of wrongdoing. Sifton is remembered as the man who brought people and prosperity to the West, not as the minister who presided over a corrupt department.
2
The mysterious company
Shortly after Sifton’s resignation, the Conservatives began to ask questions about the mysterious organization known as the North Atlantic Trading Company. “Mysterious” is the right word, for the company wasn’t a company at all, and it didn’t do any trading in the North Atlantic. Its job, for which it was paid handsomely by the Canadian government, was to persuade European farmers to migrate to the Canadian West. But to this day nobody knows exactly what the company was, who its principals were, who formed its board of
directors, or, indeed, how many immigrants it actually persuaded to come to Canada.
The company was organized – “invented” would be a better word – at the instigation of W.T.R. Preston, the Canadian Inspector of Immigration in London. For most of its existence, Preston acted as if it were his corporate child. And so, to understand the political row over this particular immigration scheme, it’s necessary to look into Preston’s background and reputation.
They were, to put it mildly, unsavoury. “Malodorous” is the adjective most commonly used. No one laboured more diligently in the Liberal vineyards than Preston – or more awkwardly. For twenty years he had been an organizer for the Ontario Grits, rewarded twice with a political job in the legislative library. He was a wiry man with a sharp, terrier’s face and a clipped military moustache, skilled in the art of electoral manipulation. Nobody cared that Preston cut corners; after all, bribery, corruption, and ballot-box stuffing were all standard techniques in the elections of the day. The trouble was that Preston kept getting caught; his efforts in support of the party were herculean but clumsy. When, for example, he offered a former Liberal M.P., Hermon Henry Cook, a Senate seat for ten thousand dollars, the matter became public as the result of a court case.
Worse was to come. As chief Liberal organizer for the province of Ontario, Preston masterminded the West Elgin provincial by-election of January 1899, an election the Toronto
World
called “the most scandalous in the history of Canada.” Preston imported carloads of ward heelers from Toronto, hid them in the homes of the West Elgin faithful, and filled their pockets with cash to bribe voters, the average price being five dollars a vote. He went further. He arranged a masquerade in which strangers were brought into town to impersonate bona fide voters. The sheriff was persuaded to accept as returning officers strangers disguised as prominent citizens of the riding, who collaborated in stuffing the ballot boxes and vanished the next day without claiming their fee. One fake returning officer was discovered with a drawerful of blank ballots and a piece of pencil lead concealed under his fingernail with which to mark them. Some boxes were spirited away to be returned the following morning by men who hadn’t any official connection with the election.
Preston’s techniques in West Elgin were so blatant that the defeated Tory candidate prepared a list of two hundred charges of corruption against his Liberal opponent, Donald Macnish. Macnish knew when
he was licked. He resigned his seat immediately and, to prevent the worst sort of dirty linen being laundered in court, admitted everything.
The ex-candidate tied Preston neatly to the West Elgin chicanery by quoting a telegram Preston had sent him the day after the election. “Hug the machine for me,” Preston had wired. From that moment on, Preston was known in the Conservative press as “Hug the Machine Preston.” Much hilarity also stemmed from the revelation that Preston, a prominent Methodist and temperance leader, had led his Sunday School class in singing “There Is Sunshine in My Soul” the day following the Liberal’s fraudulent victory.
But Preston was soon out of reach. Immediately after the by-election, the federal government spirited him out of the country, creating for him the new post of immigration inspector in London.
The North Atlantic Trading Company has had a clean bill of health from historians, many of whom, following Dafoe’s lead, have tried to suggest it played a key role in bringing European immigrants to Canada. But any investigative reporter poring over the sworn evidence taken before two parliamentary committees must come to the conclusion that it was very largely a boondoggle created by Preston for his own personal profit with the connivance of Sifton’s deputy, James Smart.
Smart, who quit his job shortly before Sifton left office, turned up a few weeks later as Canadian manager of the mysterious company. His testimony and Preston’s before the Public Accounts Committee is slippery in the extreme. Both men suffered convenient lapses of memory, were caught in contradictions and circumventions, and, on occasion, uttered explanations so patently evasive as to be fraudulent.
Preston’s reputation as a prevaricator was in no way redeemed during these hearings. His disgruntled colleague Alfred Jury testified that he wouldn’t believe anything Preston said, even under oath. Similar testimony about Preston’s disregard for the truth had been given some time before in another court case, when Preston’s uncle brought a series of witnesses to the stand, all of whom swore they would never believe Preston. As for Smart, he was, as we shall see, perfectly capable of using his position as an immigration official to line his own pockets.
Preston’s argument for farming out all immigration propaganda in continental Europe to a private firm seemed to make sense. Because most European countries discouraged the open solicitation of prospective settlers, the government wanted to be at arm’s length from any
scheme that might be viewed as illegal. The law varied from country to country, being toughest in Germany, which specifically banned any inducement designed to lure away its population.