The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (40 page)

Like Theodore Burrows, McGregor was adept at hiding his tracks. A mysterious Englishman named Guy Tracy Robins now entered the picture and with a partner managed to get a vast irrigation concession – 380,000 acres – in the same area. Robins was a wealthy tennis-playing Englishman who knew nothing about irrigation and was simply a front for an unregistered syndicate consisting of McGregor and his partner Hitchcock. Once again, the Department of the Interior had made a contract with a company that had no corporate existence, that could not be sued, and whose ownership was secret. The company was required to make a down payment of only five cents an acre and was
allowed to have the land for a dollar an acre on condition that it spend three-quarters of a million dollars irrigating part of it over a ten-year period. But it didn’t have to pay up until 1914 if it did the work. Thus it tied up the land for a mere $19,000. Now the way was clear to form a limited stock company and raise the needed money from British investors.

By January 1907, McGregor and his friends had merged everything – grazing lands and irrigation lands – and, through a promoter, sold the package to the newly formed company in Britain: the South Alberta Cattle Company. The so-called cattle company’s main interest was in selling land to settlers at a profit, once the irrigation scheme was complete. It paid off McGregor and the others in cash and stock. The Robins property went for $485,000, the grazing lease for considerably more at $654,000, an inflated price because McGregor controlled the water supply and also because the principals wanted to evade the tough British corporation laws and conceal the promotional costs of the venture. Only at this point was the Opposition able to learn from the company’s printed prospectus exactly what was going on. The managing director of the new company was J.D. McGregor.

The profit to the favoured few was enormous. And nobody in the government, apparently, gave a hoot about the settlers. In 1893, one of the main planks in the Liberal platform had been that “no middlemen in land transactions should be allowed to come between the government and the settler.” But in this case, a whole platoon of middlemen were scrambling for their share of the boodle. The price of land soared to twelve dollars an acre, and there was nothing the government could do about it.

In an earlier and similar transaction involving irrigation lands, Sifton’s department had been careful to insert a protective clause putting a maximum sale price of five dollars an acre on the land. But in the case of Robins’s irrigation company, this clause was not included, even though the head of the Irrigation Branch had recommended it. Once again, McGregor and his friends had been granted a special privilege.

Sifton was out of the ministry by this time, but he was the main catalyst in McGregor’s land scheme. For it was he who broke trail for his old campaign manager; had the path not been so smooth, it couldn’t have happened. McGregor had no trouble grabbing the land without rent even before the original leases were granted. He had no trouble getting the leases extended irrevocably for twenty-one years.
He had no trouble selecting the finest acreage for a pittance. Sifton had more than a thousand applications on his desk for similar leases in the year before he left office. Only a handful were granted before the door was slammed, and these all went to the Minister’s closest supporters: a Liberal senator for one; several prominent liquor wholesalers; and, of course, Big Jim McGregor.

McGregor had his finger in more than one southern Alberta land scheme. He was also the man behind another mysterious figure, one Hugh P. Brown of Great Falls, Montana, who had somehow got one of the valuable twenty-one-year leases: almost one hundred square miles of grazing land directly across the river from the McGregor property. This was a murky business. Brown applied for the lease on May 26, 1902. The airplane hadn’t yet been invented and the mail was even slower then than now, but Brown’s letter must have had wings, for it was stamped “Received” in Sifton’s department the day after it was mailed. But Brown didn’t sign the letter. His signature was marked “Per J.D.M.” The indefatigable Tory M.P. Herbert Ames, poring over the departmental correspondence, decided to match those scrawled initials with one on a similar document signed “James D. McGregor.” They were, as he suspected, identical.

McGregor, then, had initiated the Brown lease, and everybody in the department must have known it. Brown was actually a bookkeeper for a Great Falls butcher, but the department kept up the charade of dealing with him in Montana – or trying to.

Suddenly, the mails, which had carried Brown’s original application to Ottawa with telegraphic speed, slowed to a crawl. Letter after letter went off to Brown, telling him he had the lease, asking him to pay rent. No answer. But the department didn’t cancel the lease: in some magical fashion Brown’s holdings were increased from 32,000 to 60,000 acres.

A year elapsed. Letter No. 6 went off to Brown. Again, no reply. Eleven settlers in the area had petitioned the government, protesting the lease and urging its cancellation. But the unreachable Mr. Brown had the inside track; the settlers were told the land wasn’t available.

In fact, by this time Brown had nothing whatever to do with the matter. He’d never been more than a convenience for an interlocking group of Liberals, all closely tied to Sifton, who wanted to get control of Alberta land without the public or the Opposition catching on. McGregor peddled the lease to the Galway Horse and Cattle Company, which wasn’t a company at all but another name for A.J. Adamson, a prominent Western Liberal. Adamson’s brother-in-law was one of
Sifton’s key employees, the Dominion Lands Commissioner, J.G. Turriff, the same man who had opened the curiously worded timber bids of another brother-in-law, Theodore Burrows.

Adamson we have also met before. He was the key political figure in another deal – the sale of a quarter of a million acres of Saskatchewan land to an American syndicate, the only time the government sold homestead land outright rather than parcelling it out into free blocks for settlers. The sale was kept secret and did not become public knowledge until questions were asked in the House a year after it was consummated.

Adamson, thanks to his pal McGregor, now had something that was, on the face of it, worth nothing: a non-existent lease, unsigned and never paid for, on behalf of a firm that had no corporate existence. Even Frank Oliver, when he succeeded Sifton, knew nothing about it:
he
was still trying to get Brown to answer his mail! But on July 17, 1905, Adamson, now a Member of Parliament, popped into Oliver’s office to reveal he’d been carrying the Brown lease around in his pocket for twenty-two months and hadn’t even bothered to pay a nickel of rent. Oliver told him to pay up or the twenty-one-year lease would revert to an ordinary two-year lease.

Adamson agreed and vainly tried to peddle the lease. But now Turriff entered the picture. He, too, had become a Liberal Member of Parliament and, as such, put pressure on Oliver, who wilted and agreed the lease would be irrevocably closed for twenty-one years. With that assurance Adamson had no trouble selling it. The purchaser was a bona fide cattleman, John Cowdry, who had been in Ottawa trying to get a grazing lease for himself. The price was said to be $22,500, which in 1984 dollars would be more than $200,000.

It was a nice profit for Adamson and also, of course, for Big Jim McGregor, who had made the whole deal possible. Adamson did not bother to run for Parliament in the election of 1908, but his brother-in-law, John Gillanders Turriff, the man who helped grease so many wheels within the department, continued his successful career in politics, being named to the Senate in 1918. As for J.D. McGregor, further honours awaited him. When Theodore Burrows died in office in 1929, Big Jim replaced him as Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba. It was, after all, an obvious choice.

5
Cheating the Indians

Canada’s Century had scarcely dawned when the three key civil servants in Clifford Sifton’s Department of the Interior entered into a successful conspiracy to defraud the two bands of Assiniboine Indians in the Moose Mountain agency of the Assiniboia District of forty-five thousand acres of prime farm land. The three covered their tracks so well that no whisper of scandal leaked out until a royal commission under Thomas Robert Ferguson, established by the Conservative government, brought down its report in 1915. By then it was past history.

The three men in question were James Allan Smart, Deputy Minister of the Interior as well as Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs; Frank Pedley, Superintendent of Indian Affairs; and William J. White, inspecting officer of the Immigration Department. We have met them all: Smart, the former mayor of Brandon and Sifton’s right-hand man; Pedley, the Toronto lawyer and Liberal organizer whom we last saw facing Nicholas Zibarov in the first of the Doukhobor demonstrations; and White, the former editor of the Brandon
Sun
, who masterminded the department’s propaganda in the United States.

As early as 1898, Smart had cast a speculative eye on the Moose Mountain country near Moosomin, Assiniboia, and described it as “magnificent.” It was, he intimated, far too good for the Indians. “If it is at all like a portion of the country under cultivation near it, it cannot be excelled, possibly, in the territories,” Smart told Sifton, adding that there were only about 220 Assiniboines on the reserves “and it seems ridiculous to lock up such a splendid piece of land for so very few people.”

Everybody seemed to agree that it would be more convenient for the agency if the Assiniboines of the Pheasant’s Rump and Ocean Man reserves were moved off their land and settled among the Crees on the White Bear Reserve on the other side of the mountain. It would also bring considerable savings in agency salaries and rations if the three reserves were amalgamated into one.

No one worried about the effect on the Indians, who had by the end of the century become agriculturally self-sufficient – the primary objective of the department’s policy toward the native peoples. They were of Assiniboine and Sioux descent. The Indians of the White Bear Band,
however, were of Cree and Salteaux descent, spoke a different tongue, and were continuing their traditional activities of hunting, fishing, and trapping. They were not agriculturally inclined and were not self-sufficient. The removal of the two farming bands could only reduce their self-sufficiency, decrease their standard of living, and make them a disadvantaged minority on the White Bear Reserve. Why move them? Their yield of grain per acre had been increasing year by year, and in the words of the government instructor “they appear perfectly contented … are manly in their dealings and give no trouble.”

In December 1898, however, James Smart, who was charged with the welfare of all Western Indians, moved to get the Assiniboines off their land. H.R. Halpin, the Moose Mountain farm instructor, was told to sound out the Indians. Halpin reported that three of the four chiefs opposed the move but added that, should they want too much money for the land, they could easily be brought to heel by packing a future meeting with young Indians from across the mountain.

What was the land worth? Smart in 1898 had thought it the finest in the Territories, but in 1899 wrote: “I am inclined to think that $ 1.00 per acre is all the land would be valued at as it stands.” Now Frank Pedley and Will White got into the act. Up to Ottawa to talk with them came White’s Chicago agent, Wilbur Bennett. Shortly thereafter an offer came in from an American syndicate to buy the land, and after some wrangling the price was set at Smart’s estimate of a dollar an acre. The membership of this syndicate was never made clear to the department, which exhibited a total lack of curiosity regarding the principals. The president was supposed to be Joseph C. Armstrong, an Omaha banker, but it’s doubtful if he’d ever heard of the company as Bennett had apparently forged his signature. The other principal was Bennett’s brother-in-law, F.G. West, a subagent from Omaha.

Whatever the makeup of the so-called syndicate, its offer gave Smart the excuse he needed to force the Indians off the land. He wrote to Sifton on March 5, 1901, urging that the American offer be accepted and, directly contradicting his earlier assessment, added: “I am inclined to think [his favourite phrase] from my observation that there is not a great deal of first class land on the reserve.” Smart explained that the department’s assessment valued the land at seventy-five cents an acre but magnanimously suggested the Indians get at least a dollar. By contrast, adjacent
CPR
land had sold for three dollars. As for the Indians, Smart declared that they were “anxious that this arrangement be carried out.”

Events moved swiftly. Sifton agreed to the final terms on March 8. A fortnight later a meeting with the Indians took place on the White Bear Reserve with David Laird, the Indian Commissioner of the North West Territories, representing the government. According to the Assiniboine interpreter, Xavier James McArthur, there were many objections from the band until Laird, in a fury, stamped out of the room, warning them that if they didn’t agree to the terms the police would evict them forcibly. In the end, the Indians gave in and almost immediately vacated the land.

Laird had promised that as soon as the land was sold the Assiniboines would receive a five-thousand-dollar bonus from the Americans to cover the cost of putting up houses and barns in their new home. But the land wasn’t sold. A group of prominent Liberals protested that they wanted to buy the land themselves. Sifton gave in. The government announced it wasn’t prepared to complete the sale. But the Indians weren’t allowed to go back to their homes, nor were they given funds to build new houses.

The government’s announcement led the public to believe that nobody – least of all Americans – could make a profit from speculating in Indian lands. The plan now was to put up the acreage for auction, parcel by parcel, as soon as it was surveyed. With autumn fast approaching, the Assiniboines continued to ask for money to build shelters. There was none.