The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (48 page)

Saskatoon was just as angry. The federal census in 1911 put its population at 12,002 but gave its rival, Regina, 30,210. That, cried the mayor, was “absolutely unreasonable, unbelievable and absurd.” Nothing would do but that the board of trade and the leading real estate men should organize their own census. By counting “every living being” in town, including transients, they managed to come up with a figure of 18,000. Even that wasn’t good enough; somehow Saskatoon had to get closer to Regina’s size. The following year, the city claimed a population of 27,000, arguing that many of its Chinese and other foreign citizens avoided the census takers for fear of having to pay the poll tax.

Like Pat Burns, the prairie cities saw no limit to their expansion. Most Westerners believed Winnipeg would soon be the largest city in Canada, outstripping both Toronto and Montreal. In November, 1906, Calgary’s boosters, determined that the city should reach a
population of 50,000, organized themselves into a Fifty Thousand Club for that purpose. The boosters boosted so valiantly – with a monstrous parade, a display of fireworks, and an automobile show – that, dazzled by their own enthusiasm, they voted immediately to change the name to the One Hundred Thousand Club. That didn’t last long. Six years later the city’s population had yet to reach 50,000, but the boosters insisted on changing the name again. In 1912 it became the Quarter Million Club. Perhaps they thought that wishing would make it so; it didn’t. Half a century would pass before the city reached that figure. Other prairie communities were even more optimistic. Medicine Hat predicted in 1913 that it would have a population
of half a million
by the time its young men reached middle age.

Again, for sheer, goofy optimism, Saskatoon was far ahead of its sister cities. In 1910, its mayor predicted a population of 100,000 within a few years. That was considered far too low by a group of real estate promoters who forecast a population of between 400,000 and 600,000 by 1940. Yet that seemed too low: in 1912, a full-page newspaper advertisement predicted a future population of one million. Even the academics were caught up in these statistical absurdities. The president of the University of Saskatchewan firmly believed that by 1931 his institution would be as big as the University of Toronto.

Boosterism was quantitative. Each city boasted of the number of miles of street paving, water mains, and sewers it had installed, carefully qualifying the statistics to give the most favourable impression. In 1913, for instance, Calgary was able to boast that it had laid “more miles of street paving than all other cities in the middle west excluding Edmonton” and in miles of sewers built that year “had surpassed the total of all cities in the middle west excluding Saskatoon.” Its building growth eclipsed “any city of comparable size in the history of the world.”

Size – that was the goal: size in population and also size in acreage. City fathers were obsessed by acreage. Villages wanted to be called towns and towns struggled to become cities, partly to increase their tax bases and partly because they were pushed into it by the real estate interests. In order to become incorporated as a town in 1903, Saskatoon needed a population of 450. It achieved this by counting all the hotel guests during the spring immigration rush. Two years later, by using similar tactics it achieved city status.

And it
still
wasn’t enough. In 1911 Saskatoon arbitrarily doubled its acreage. That same year Regina quadrupled in size. Calgary, with only
sixteen hundred acres in 1884, kept annexing surrounding land not once but six times, until it had reached almost twenty-six thousand acres by 1912. Edmonton went one better by undergoing
seven
expansions between 1896 and 1914. As a result, the population was thinly distributed; in fact, in some outlying areas it was non-existent. Of Canada’s twenty largest cities, these four – Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, and Edmonton – had the lowest population ratios per acre. Forty years were to pass before they again extended their boundaries.

The taxpayers subsidized the boosters. The business and real estate interests who controlled the local councils used public money to hustle their message. The Winnipeg-dominated Western Canada Immigration Association spent fifty thousand dollars, almost half obtained through government grants, pushing prairie cities. The
Free Press
praised the operation as “of invaluable benefit to the country,” but immigration officials disagreed. As Will White pointed out, the message wasn’t directed to settlers but to speculators interested only in booming land values. To Obed Smith it was “nothing less than a big real estate concern” using tax money for private profit. Nonetheless, the boosters marched ahead unhindered, drums beating, trumpets blasting. In March 1912, the Calgary Board of Trade announced an Advertise Calgary Day, in which every soul in the city – man, woman and child – was expected to write a letter to a friend or relative somewhere else in the world boosting Calgary as a place to live and own property. We have no record of how many loyal Calgarians actually took up the challenge.

2
Slums and brothels

The boosters weren’t concerned with social conditions; it was the image of their community that obsessed them, and woe to those who persisted in revealing the reality behind that image. These people were derided as heretics, or, in the vernacular, “knockers,” who were bringing bad publicity to the community. The sins of the flesh were tolerated in the West. The real sin was to expose them.

The boosters’ image of the expanding prairie cities didn’t always mirror reality. Behind the handsome new buildings springing up along the main streets were some of the worst slums in Canada. Saloons and brothels, tawdry hotels, wretched overcrowded shacks were concomitants of the boom era.

The cities stank of horse manure. Calgary was the worst, “the horse smellingest town I ever remember,” in the words of an old-timer. In 1910 the down town area had fifteen livery stables and twelve blacksmith shops. One gigantic barn on 11th Street housed sixty teams of dray horses that produced a mountain of ordure, which, after a rain, assailed the nostrils of passengers boarding the train at the
CPR
station across the tracks.

There was little attempt at street sanitation. Clouds of dust rose from the new excavations and from the vast mounds of coal heaped in the railway yards. When the rain fell, the dust and horse droppings formed a liquid gruel six inches deep on Calgary’s narrow streets. A passing dray could throw several gallons of this filth a distance often feet, showering the unfortunate pedestrians.

On Tenth Avenue West, near First, the Chinese launderers dumped the contents of their tubs into the street and lanes. “They have not the slightest idea of cleanliness and sanitation,” one alderman said of the Chinese, but in fact the North Americans weren’t any better. In the open shops along Eighth Avenue layers of dust caked the fruit and vegetables while fish and fowl were covered with flies. The sidewalks were slippery with spittle and tobacco juice. Outside the Royal Hotel, where loafers congregated day and night, men leaning against the side of the building sent streams of tobacco juice in the paths of women trying to reach the
CPR
station from the streetcars. The police were finally goaded into taking action, with little result: the first man arrested got off when he explained to the court he had merely been combing his moustache.

All the prairie cities were hideously overcrowded, a direct result of the city fathers’ hunger for more and more people. In Calgary in 1905, in spite of soaring rents, the demand for space exceeded the supply by ten to one; thousands lived in tents, barns, and shacks. In Edmonton in 1907, 1,550 homeless newcomers were living under canvas. Calgary’s booster pamphlets showing James Lougheed’s resplendent Beaulieu, with its landscaped terraces, its ornate fountains, its Italian marble and Spanish mahogany, or Pat Burns’s sandstone castle with its ten bedrooms and four bathrooms, its oak panelling and stuffed trophy heads, didn’t portray the immigrant shantytown near the Langevin Bridge.

To those newcomers who had not found their dream homestead and were confined to the cities, looking for work or taking any job they could get, the traditional Western boast about a classless society must have sounded hollow. In Winnipeg in 1909, thirty-two men were
discovered crammed into a boarding house licensed to hold seven. A few doors away, in a similar house, twenty-five men and women were crowded together without distinction as to sex. The situation in Regina was appalling: 60 per cent of all its houses were overcrowded. Again and again, five-room houses were found to contain ten double beds. In spite of this, scores had no shelter. One March night in 1910, a newspaper reporter counted four hundred homeless men walking the streets.

Each city had its immigrant section across the tracks, usually named “Germantown” after the largest of the urban ethnic groups. In Regina’s Germantown, in the city’s East End, members of twenty-two separate nationalities were crowded into an area six blocks square. Here were more than six hundred dwellings, many little better than shacks, jammed together on twenty-five-foot lots. Only forty-eight had plumbing; only fifteen had baths. When it rained, the area became a quagmire. J.S. Woodsworth, who studied it in 1913 at the request of the Methodist Church, found one house where a man was forced to sleep in a clothes closet, another in which three families were crammed into four small rooms, a third in which one couple and six boarders shared four rooms with a flock of chickens.

Under such conditions, babies sickened and died. In July of 1913, a Winnipeg woman reporter, Genevieve Lippett-Skinner, appalled at the high rate of infant mortality in the city, paid a visit to the tenements on Barber Street in Winnipeg’s North End – “fearfully and wonderfully made death traps,” as she called them.

“Yes, I know a lot about children,” one German immigrant mother told her. “I had ten. They are all dead but three.”

In one rabbit warren of a tenement, when a baby died, the parents kept the corpse for three days before a neighbour phoned the city’s health department. In another room, Miss Lippett-Skinner found a young woman whose five-month-old infant was covered with flies; the odour was overpowering. Downstairs she encountered a tear-stained Greek woman living with her family in a single room. Insects had bitten her baby so badly that the child had been hospitalized. The mother’s arm was a mass of poisoned bites. For this unfurnished room the family paid seven dollars a month.

In the backyard of this same building, a deserted mother and two children shared a woodshed with rats and other vermin. The father had been gone for more than four months, but the wife refused to move for fear he might return and not be able to find his family.

In Calgary that winter, while the boosters were still inflating the
census figures and urging their fellow citizens to write letters to bring in more people, the superintendent of the associated charities uttered a plaintive appeal for private aid to the city’s poor: “There are lonely widows in Calgary who sit shivering in poorly heated rooms. There are bed ridden invalids who draw insufficient bed clothing around their chilly forms. There are scores of underfed and poorly clad children who watch with anxious glances their rapidly diminishing coal heap and wonder what will happen when that is all done, for mother said she hadn’t any more money. For over a fortnight, the thermometer has been ranging between 15 and 20 degrees below zero. Will you try to imagine what that means to the poor of the city?”

But the local authorities were less concerned about the poor than they were about the get-rich-quick opportunities the Western boom was providing. There was little public charity, let alone money for parks or recreational facilities. The loneliness of the sod house was paralleled by life in the urban Germantowns. After a ten-hour working day, some men found their only relief in the saloon, the brothel, or the dance hall. In Regina’s Germantown there were five hotels with saloons, seven pool halls, but only three dance halls. These were crowded and noisy, frequented by prostitutes, and plagued by drunken brawlers, but for many a lonely immigrant they provided the only respite from a harsh existence.

“I like this better than to lie on my dirty bed all the time,” one young man in Regina explained. “The room where I am staying drives me mad. I am not satisfied with these people with whom I live and my job is hard in the day time. So I am very willing to spend my 50 cents twice a week because I have here an hour of life.”

“For the poor,” wrote Woodsworth, “there is no substitute for the barroom.” On six blocks of Winnipeg’s Main Street were twenty hotels, all serving liquor; twenty-four more stood shoulder to shoulder on the side streets. Convictions for drunkenness in Manitoba were double those for Ontario, triple those for Quebec.

In spite of an active temperance movement and considerable lip service paid by politicians at every level, from the mayor of Winnipeg to Clifford Sifton, those in power shied away from direct prohibition. Woodsworth noted that in Regina, which had a Liberal administration, the president of the Liberal organization kept a liquor store and the chairman of the East End Liberal committee ran one of the licensed hotels. “It would appear,” he wrote, “that the liquor men hold a strong grip on the political situation.”

For there was money in drink and even in drunkenness. In 1910, a
group of live wire Calgary businessmen took advantage of the situation and opened an Institute for Drunkenness, proclaiming, in full-page advertisements, that there was
HOPE FOR BROKEN HEARTED WIVES AND BALM FOR THE MOTHER’S TEARS
. For a fee, the institute offered to cure anyone of chronic alcoholism in just three days.

The overwhelming presence of saloons in the West is no more surprising than the overwhelming presence of brothels. The nature of Western settlement made large-scale prostitution inevitable. With 100,000 bachelors on the prairies, most of them young and virile, the bawdy houses did not lack for customers. Every city had its red-light district, winked at by the authorities, such as Calgary’s Nose Creek Flats and Moose Jaw’s notorious River Street. According to one madam, Edmonton alone had by 1914 between four hundred and five hundred prostitutes; Winnipeg probably had more.