The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (44 page)

He pricked balloons, jeered at the newly rich, attacked the bluestockings, poked fun at boosterism, jibed at humbug and bombast. His paper struck a chord with those settlers who had fled the bureaucracy of Europe, the snobbery of England, or the hypocrisy of the Eastern Canadian establishment. It tickled them when Edwards attacked Harry Corby’s elevation to the Senate because he made bad whiskey or wrote that “the
CPR
, Clifford Sifton and the Almighty comprise the Trinity of Canada, ranking in importance in the order named.”

In an era when a circulation of seventy-five hundred was considered hugely profitable, the
Eye Opener
reached a peak of thirty-five thousand. It could make and unmake politicians. R.B. Bennett ascribed his federal defeat in 1904 to Edwards. The mayor of Calgary refused to run for re-election when the
Eye Opener
opposed him. No wonder Edwards made enemies. At one point the
Eye Opener
was denied the mails. The
CPR
banned it from its trains. The ministerial association attacked it. Edwards was even challenged to a duel. But he prevailed, even though his paper often missed several issues in a row and rejected advertising for any product Edwards felt he couldn’t support. He was more than a humorist; he was a genuine prairie reformer, “a Robin Hood of the pen” in the words of the Winnipeg jurist Roy St. George Stubbs. He opposed restrictive divorce laws and Sunday blue laws, was sympathetic to prostitutes, suffragettes, and trade unions, and regularly exposed shady and fraudulent deals, some of them the work of community pillars.

His was a one-man operation, run from a cluttered one-room office by an editor who kept no accounts, no subscription lists, no receipts, and who refused to solicit business. Edwards wrote almost every word in his paper, with painstaking care and impeccable grammar, for he had been a university gold medallist in Scotland before emigrating. His literary antecedents were impressive, his grandfather having been
that same Chambers whose name appears to this day on one of the best of the international encyclopaedias.

In Canada, after his arrival in 1894, Edwards had pursued the career of an itinerant journalist; but except for a brief, unhappy period as an employee in Winnipeg, he controlled his own destiny and ran his own individualistic and irreverent journals – the Wetaskiwin
Free Lance
, the Leduc
Strathcoholic
, the High River
Eye Opener –
before he settled permanently in Calgary in 1904.

His greatest appeal was his refusal to take himself or his newspaper seriously, although he was deadly serious in his attacks on grafting politicians and rapacious real estate interests. He once wrote that the three biggest liars in Alberta were “Robert Chambers – Gentleman; Honourable A.L. Sifton – Premier; and Bob Edwards – Editor.” Arthur Sifton tried to sue him for that, whereupon Edwards offered to collaborate in a joint suit since Edwards, the Editor, had also slandered Chambers, the Gentleman. The Premier quickly retreated.

Another public figure who threatened suit but thought better of it was the austere High Commissioner to Great Britain, Lord Strathcona, the former Donald Smith, who in 1885 had driven the last spike of the newly completed
CPR
. The
Eye Opener
was always a curious pastiche of fact and fancy, hard news and invention. But everybody (or
almost
everybody, as it turned out) knew at once when Edwards was being serious and telling it straight and when he was indulging in satire. Characters real and imaginary romped through his news columns, the most imaginative being Peter J. McGonigle, the hard-drinking editor of the Midnapore
Gazette
, from whose non-existent columns Edwards claimed to be printing items.

In October 1906, Edwards decided to satirize the succession of public banquets being tendered to various dignitaries by announcing that the Calgary Board of Trade had given one in honour of McGonigle to mark his release from penitentiary after a conviction for horse theft. At this imaginary affair letters, purportedly from various dignitaries, were read aloud, one allegedly from Strathcona:

“…  The name of Peter McGonigle will ever stand high in the role of eminent confiscators. Once, long ago, I myself came near achieving distinction in this direction when I performed some dexterous financing with the Bank of Montreal’s funds. In consequence, however, of C.P.R. stocks going up instead of down, I wound up in the House of Lords instead of Stony Mountain.”

To John Willison, the sober editor of the equally sober Toronto
News
, this was sensational stuff. Willison may have been the dean of Canadian journalists, but in this instance he was remarkably gullible. The idea of the Canadian High Commissioner in London paying tribute to and admitting kinship with a horse thief struck him as big news. Like many a journalist before and since, he did not stop to ask himself if the story might be a hoax; he was, after all, the Canadian correspondent of the equally gullible
Times
of London and this was good copy. Not long afterwards, the humourless Strathcona was jolted from his breakfast kippers by a full account in the British Thunderer of the spurious banquet and his equally spurious telegram.

Strathcona was purple with fury, not only at the effrontery of the quoted cable but also, one suspects, because there was more than a grain of truth in the fiction. He
had
after all, performed some dexterous and quite illegal financing with Bank of Montreal funds in his early railway ventures. Off went a peremptory telegram to James Lougheed, the establishment lawyer in Calgary, ordering him to sue Edwards for libel. It took all of Senator Lougheed’s considerable diplomatic talents to persuade the outraged peer to withdraw the action and save himself from becoming the laughingstock of Western Canada.

Those who knew Bob Edwards from the
Eye Opener
alone might be pardoned for conjuring up an image of him as spurious as that of McGonigle. There were those who thought of him, no doubt, as a wild-eyed roisterer, slapping backs in local saloons, as fiery and as loud as his paper, always at the centre of the crowd. He was anything but that – the direct antithesis, in fact, of the image he projected in print. He was a plump, bright-eyed, rumpled man with a sparse, sandy moustache, who dressed in sombre suits and sported a wing collar. He was diffident, uneasy in a crowd, and taciturn with any but a small circle of friends. Nobody could persuade him to make a public speech. Like an actor who exists through his stage roles, he came to life only in the columns of his paper.

He had more culture in his big toe than most of Calgary’s upstart establishment exhibited in their entire bodies. He was a lover of the theatre, of music, and, above all, of good literature. Before he was thirty he had seen most of Europe and had even edited a small journal on the Riviera. He had experienced the watering places of the gentry and wanted no part of them; instead, he chose Calgary and the long bar of the Alberta Hotel.

He was a solitary creature. All his life he had been a loner, marching to his own music, never part of the band. His parents had died before he was five, and he was raised in Scotland by two maiden aunts. A
bachelor, he knew something about loneliness, for he lived by himself in a hotel room and worked alone in his office. Thus, he could sympathize with the thousands of others who, like him, had come to a strange land, friendless and womanless. Much has been written about the loneliness of farm wives during the period of Western settlement, much less about the plight of the thousands of single men, roaming the streets of the burgeoning cities. But Edwards knew.

“You who have your own firesides do not know what you possess,” he wrote at Christmas, 1905. “You do not know what it is to go without having anyone say to you: ‘Goodbye, will you be gone long?’ Or to come back without anyone to welcome you and say, Oh, how late you are!’ Think at this time of the year of the many young men far from their own homes back east, living in Calgary with no place to go of an evening, moping in their $8 a month rooms reading Frenzied Finance or hanging round hotels hitting up the booze. Give them a thought.”

Edwards himself hit up the booze, hard and often, and made no secret of it. “Every man has his favorite bird,” he wrote. “Mine is the bat.” He was not a steady drinker, but when he fell off the wagon – “leaped” would be a better word – he landed hard. During those sprees the
Eye Opener
failed to publish and the whole town knew that Edwards was drunk. There were others in Calgary who drank as much, but they did not proclaim it to the world.

“Most of our tragedies,” he once wrote, “look like comedies to our neighbours.” Edwards was under no illusion about his own tragedy; he knew that “gallons of trouble can come out of a pint flask.” Though he could not control his alcoholism, he could and did advocate the closing of Calgary’s saloons and campaign strongly for prohibition.

Why, then, did he drink? To blot out, one suspects, consideration of the What-Might-Have-Been.

Stubbs, who knew Edwards, wrote that he drank because only in alcohol could he find a temporary solution to problems he could not solve when sober; that just as he kept no books of account for his newspaper, he kept none for himself, “so that he could find out where he stood as he went along.”

It is said of Edwards that if he had not gone to drink he might have been a Canadian Mark Twain or, had he stayed in Europe, he would almost certainly have become a major literary figure. Perhaps in those rare moments of self-examination that led to the inevitable spree and the inevitable drying out at Holy Cross Hospital, Edwards himself contemplated those possibilities. If he did, he missed the point. Although his work has escaped the dubious immortality of the school
text, he
was
the Canadian Mark Twain; he became and remains a major literary figure. He is constantly being rediscovered, anthologized, eulogized. His aphorisms have stood the test of time:

Don’t meet trouble half way. It is quite capable of making the entire journey
.

Too many people salt away their money in the brine of other people’s tears
.

The good don’t die young; they simply outgrow it
.

No man does as much today as he is going to do tomorrow
.

It’s as easy to recall an unkind word as it is to draw back the bullet after firing the gun
.

In Calgary an annual luncheon is held in his honour and an annual Bob Edwards Award marks his memory. No other figure from the West of that era, literary or otherwise, merits such an accolade.

Although Edwards’s journalism might seem reckless to his readers, he was far more cautious than he appeared. His friend and drinking companion, Paddy Nolan, the best-liked lawyer in town, checked every line he wrote. The only time Edwards was forced into a legal retraction was by another lawyer, E.P. Davis, who, Edwards suggested, was seeing snakes as a result of being stranded on an island with a dozen bottles of Scotch. Edwards hated Davis, who had been his opponent in the famous McGillicuddy trial, the most spectacular event of his career.

The incident, which drove Edwards temporarily out of Calgary, almost certainly had its origins in the
Eye Opener’s
report on Clifford Sifton’s Ottawa dalliance at the time of his resignation in 1905. Sifton did not sue Edwards; he merely bided his time. In 1907 an Eastern journalist, Daniel McGillicuddy, launched a new newspaper, the Calgary
News
, with the announced intention of putting the
Eye Opener
out of business. It was McGillicuddy’s boast that he had Sifton’s backing and encouragement.

On October 6, 1908, three weeks before the federal election, the
News
launched a personal attack on Edwards that for virulence and savagery has never been equalled in Canada. The attack took the form of a two-column letter on the front page, written by McGillicuddy but signed “Nemesis.” It referred to the
Eye Opener
as “a disreputable sheet, the mission of which has been blackmail and the contents of which [are]…slander and smut.” It called Edwards a “ruffian,” a “moral leper,” and a “skunk … whose literary fulminations cannot but
create the impression that he was born in a brothel and bred on a dungpile.” That was only the beginning. Edwards was “a four flusher,” “a tin horn,” and “a welcher on poker debts.” Nemesis promised more in future issues: “I intend to show that he is a libeller, a character thief, a coward, a liar, a drunkard, a dope-fiend, and a degenerate.” Nemesis promised to prove all these charges, but before the next issue appeared a shaken Edwards had, with the help of Paddy Nolan, sued McGillicuddy for libel.

The trial made national headlines. The defence went to Vancouver for Davis, the top lawyer in the West. McGillicuddy could not prove his charges, and after five hours of deliberation, the jury found for Edwards. Alas, it was a pyrrhic victory. McGillicuddy was fined a nominal one hundred dollars without having to pay costs. The jury expressed disapproval of the
Eye Opener’s
stories, and the judge rebuked Edwards, describing the paper’s articles with such words as “debasing and demoralizing.” None of this had any effect on the
Eye Opener’s
fortunes. The paper’s circulation increased while the
News
foundered; a few months later McGillicuddy sold the paper and vanished from the scene.

But Edwards was disenchanted with Calgary. In April 1909, shortly after the trial, he left for the East, first to Toronto, then to Montreal, finally to Port Arthur, where the
Eye Opener
resumed publication. It didn’t work; he needed the Western environment. In December he moved to Winnipeg and for the next year published the
Eye Opener
there. Many of his faithful readers in Calgary and even his advertisers supported him, but Winnipeg wasn’t really
Eye Opener
territory. In 1911 he was back in Calgary. In two months the
Eye Opener’s
circulation zoomed to 26,000.