The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (55 page)

It was obvious that unless the sale was carefully managed a riot would ensue. To forestall it, the company decided to hold a lottery to determine which lucky persons would have a chance to buy up to four lots in the new subdivision. Tickets, numbered consecutively from 1 to 1,500 (more than there were lots available), would be placed in a drum at an undisclosed address. That address would not be announced until the first edition of the
Edmonton Bulletin
appeared on Monday morning, May 13. At two that afternoon the draw would commence.

The tickets were to be drawn, one at a time, until all fifteen hundred were dispensed. On the following day, May 14, the man holding ticket No. 1 would be given first choice of lots at the company’s office. The other ticket holders would follow in numerical order, selecting their lots until all were sold. The company expected it would take five days to complete all the sales. Thus it was not enough simply to hold a lottery ticket because, if every ticket holder bought to his maximum, the lots would all be gone after ticket holder No. 325 made his selection.

That possibility deterred nobody. By Sunday, May 12, the city was taut with excitement. Everyone was asking: where will the draw be held? The company had taken extraordinary precautions to keep the address secret. The advertisement announcing the location would not reach the offices of the
Bulletin
before midnight, and all the employees of the paper were sworn to secrecy. The first copies were scheduled to roll off the presses at 5:30 a.m. Every important real estate man in town had runners with fast automobiles waiting at the door to seize a copy and speed away to the secret site. But long before this happened that secret was out.

At five the previous afternoon, a local grocer, F.T Aitken, was
strolling down 103rd Street on his way to a Sunday band concert. His course took him past the Gospel Hall, between Athabasca and Peace. There he spied a group of men carting a typewriter and a safe into the building. Aitken guessed, correctly, that the lottery would be held there. He went to the Empire Theatre, enjoyed the band concert, then returned to the Gospel Hall and squatted on the front doorstep. He was soon joined by six real estate employees who had been nosing about the city searching for clues to the secret.

It took several hours for the news to filter through town. Few noticed the small group standing or sitting in front of the Gospel Hall. But by nine that evening the word was out, and for the next six hours a steady stream of humanity flowed toward the site.

It is 10 p.m., May 12, 1912, and we are waiting patiently in the human crocodile winding down the street from the Gospel Hall. The line has already turned the corner onto Athabasca, and now as more join it – women, children, men in their seventies, even – it moves down another block, turns the corner onto Second, and begins to snake its way down Second to the Castle Hotel. As the hours lengthen, so does the queue. By one in the morning it has circled the block. By 4 a.m. there are close to fifteen hundred people waiting with us for a chance to pull a low ticket from the drum when the lottery begins at two this afternoon
.

The people sit on upended boxes, nail kegs, inverted buckets, lawn and kitchen chairs. Youngsters run up and down the line, hawking old boxes at a dollar and broken chairs at two dollars. Others offer to go a block for coffee and sandwiches, a fifteen-cent value now inflated to a dollar. The people are orderly except for one man who tries to break into the queue and clings to a fence, refusing to relinquish his spot, until four men begin to pummel him, and a policeman saves him from a worse beating
.

A foursome plays bridge in the light from an automobile. Others, keeping a sharp lookout for their places in the line, throw quoits at a mark. Real estate men walk up and down offering large sums for a spot. Thousands of dollars are offered to the first ten men in line, but the price drops as the hucksters work their way farther back. One man offers $3,000 for three places in the 200s; he gets no takers. But place No. 341 goes for $140, and place No. 734 for $50. At the end of the line people hold up signs offering to sell their places, but those closer to the front refuse all offers
.

Dawn breaks. One group lights a bonfire and starts cooking a breakfast of toast and coffee. The people are cold, tired, and a little nervous. Who can be sure if this is the right spot? Maybe it was all a ruse by the company to throw the hunters off the scent! Some real estate men have covered their bets by posting runners at the
Bulletin
office as well as in the queue. One firm has a hundred men in the lineup
.

At last the news arrives: the paper is out; the Gospel Hall it is! A sigh of relief passes down the waiting hundreds and circles the block. It is Monday morning. The jobs of many standing here all night are threatened. But no one budges. Teachers who should be preparing for the classroom cling to their places, chancing reprimand or even dismissal. Who cares about tomorrow if Lady Luck will smile on him today?

The big real estate men arrive with coffee and sandwiches for their weary employees. Now the crowd grows restless. With more people standing in line than there are lots available, why wait until the afternoon to start the draw? A petition makes its way down the line urging immediate action. We all sign. Off to the Queen’s Hotel trots a young law student to present the document to the Hudson’s Bay land commissioner, who is eating a quiet breakfast and refuses to be disturbed. An hour latera
Bulletin
reporter returns with the news. The company will not budge. The sale has also been advertised in the out-of-town papers. Hundreds will be arriving this morning by buggy, train, and automobile. If they were to find the sale has been held without them there would be a dreadful protest, even though none has a chance of getting a ticket
.

We all groan at this intelligence. It is nine o’clock. We have been waiting all night. But the man at the head of the line won’t get his ticket for another five hours. And it could be another four before the entire queue is accommodated. And even then, if every early ticket holder selects four lots, almost three-quarters of us will be out of luck. We can only wait and hope
.

Two o’clock came at last. A company employee, Jessie Kinnaird, churned the big drum containing all the tickets. Up stepped Aitken, the grocer, who had waited all night at the head of the line and turned down fifteen hundred dollars for his place. Miss Kinnaird put her hand into the drum and pulled out a ticket. Aitken had drawn No. 910, which meant that 909 others in the queue would have a chance to buy
lots before his chance came. If even half chose to purchase their maximum of four lots each, he would be out of luck, his long vigil wasted.

The drawing continued at the rate of seven tickets a minute. More than two hours later, James Walsh, a retired farmer living in the Richelieu Hotel, stepped into the hall and waited for Miss Kinnaird to pull his ticket. She looked at it, looked at Walsh, looked at it again in surprise, and handed it to him. He gazed at it several times and then allowed a deep sigh to escape him. He had drawn the coveted ticket No. 1. When the crowd grasped the fact, three cheers went up. Walsh stepped out of the building to a second ovation. Somebody immediately offered him twenty-five thousand dollars for his ticket. He turned it down.

Others sold their tickets. Arthur Davies, the former mayor of Strathcona, who had paid forty-five dollars for a place in line at 1:30 a.m., drew ticket No. 87 and sold it for a thousand dollars. Ed Alexander, a young visitor to the city, drew ticket No. 5 and sold it for five thousand dollars; his friends had rousted him out of bed to take part in the all-night vigil. Real estate men bid briskly for low numbered tickets. Those in the twenties brought up to three thousand dollars; anything lower than 200 was good for five hundred dollars.

At last the lottery ended, the excitement died down, and suddenly the heart seemed to go out of the city. The entire community had been intoxicated by the land boom; the spree had reached its climax on this one demented night; and now Edmontonians were suffering a hangover. As they sobered up they began to ask themselves, as topers often do: did we really do all those crazy things? Did someone actually offer one man twenty-five thousand dollars for a chance to select four city lots, even before he
bought
those lots? By what logic was a place at the head of the queue worth any more than a place at the rear, when all had an equal chance at any ticket? Were all those sleepless, hungry hours worth it? Was the property itself worth it? Was it sensible to expect the boom to go on forever?

When an auction sale of the tickets was held in Edmonton’s Separate School, the place was packed with the curious. Oddly, few tickets were sold. Those who had refused large sums for low-numbered tickets now tried to peddle them in barber shops, pool halls, and drugstores, only to discover that there were few takers. The fever had broken. In the end, the Hudson’s Bay Company found that it could not sell all its lots. For Edmonton, and shortly for the West, the boom was at an end. Disillusionment, too, was catching.

5
Shattered dreams

In 1912, at the height of the boom, an itinerant evangelist, haranguing passersby on Calgary’s Eighth Avenue, cried out: “Woe unto you, real estate men; your folly is like that of Sodom. Repent before you reap destruction.” Few listened. Repentance did not come until 1913, and by then it was too late.

It’s easy to look back on this period and wonder why thousands of otherwise sensible people went crazy over real estate. It seems obvious that given the inflated prices based on paper profits, the bubble would burst. But it wasn’t so simple when the fever was at its height. When you learned that a Boston grain merchant had stopped off in Edmonton en route to California and made six hundred dollars in four hours, it was difficult not to plunge in. With low down payments, it didn’t cost much, and it didn’t matter if your lot was on a cliffside or in a swamp. All your neighbours, friends, and colleagues were dabbling in real estate. If you didn’t join the crowd you became an object of contempt or pity.
“Get out of your rut!”
the real estate ads screamed. Had you really come west, endured all the toil of homesteading, saved and scraped to move out of that sod house, only to be left behind? Most settlers had taken a chance, gambled with their future, seized an opportunity to better themselves. Now, with opportunity hammering away at the door, they were ready to gamble again.

They hadn’t learned from history, and that is strange because history was repeating itself with blinding speed. There were thousands in Winnipeg and Edmonton who could not help but remember the great boom of 1881, when the golden highway of the
CPR
inflated land prices and touched off an almost identical craze; when lots in Portage sold for fifteen hundred dollars and property on Winnipeg’s Main Street went for as high as two thousand dollars a front foot; when Coolican the Real Estate King peddled property in the paper community of Cartwright at the rate of twenty thousand dollars’ worth a night; when there was one realtor in Winnipeg for every fifty people; when names like Dobbyn City, Clearwater, Rapid City, and Minnedosa were on everybody’s lips; when Edmonton was a fool’s paradise, with lots worth twenty-five dollars going for four hundred; when little girls gambled in lots for dolls’ houses and everybody from the Lieutenant-Governor of the Territories to new brides answered the pleas of the speculators to come in and get their feet wet. When that bubble burst
in 1883, 75 per cent of the businesses in Manitoba were broke; but nobody apparently remembered.

The euphoria of 1910–12 was virtually identical. It seemed almost supernatural, this instant growth. As one returning Saskatoon citizen put it: “…  you wonder if you are in a dream city or can this really be the little village of yesterday? Saskatoon has risen like a magic city.…” There was indeed a dreamlike quality to the boom. In the magic city of Saskatoon there was a subdivision actually called Utopia, one of fifty-two being touted at that time. The name was chosen in a public contest, won by a Miss Constance Cameron, who received a prize of fifty dollars from the developers – in gold, naturally. Another Saskatoon subdivision, to be known as Factoria, was to have “large factories and big shops with their noisy whirr of machinery, their huge stacks sending up great volumes of smoke and their shrieking whistles summoning hundreds of wage-earners to their daily labour.” Factoria, it was said, would attract a million dollars’ worth of industries and would have a population of two hundred in its first year. “When a man stops dreaming, he stops
PROGRESS
,” one advertisement read. “A short time ago ‘
FACTORIA
’ was a dream – but the dream has come true.…” But the dream didn’t come true; the project was dead by 1913. As for Utopia – a quarter-section of scrub brush – it wasn’t developed until the late 1950s.

There were warnings, but few listened. In June, 1913, Sir Max Aitken, the future Lord Beaverbrook, no stranger to Western Canada, reported that the English money markets were drying up because the West was overborrowing. “The west … has been going too fast in a great many ways … Alberta financially has been anything but wise. The western municipalities generally have also been going it at a pace a great deal too rapid.…”

The same year, Henry Howard of the
Investor’s Guardian
in London revealed that Saskatoon had nearly reached the limit of its credit. Most Western cities found themselves in the same predicament. The loan companies were out of money. Too many people had borrowed to buy land, too many businesses, riding the wave of boosterism, had overextended themselves. Interest rates leaped from 3 per cent to 9. “Tight money” became the phrase of the day.

Yet it was considered close to treason to hint at disaster. The newspapers continued to act as if the boom were in full swing. As late as July, 1913, the
Herald
was enthusing that “never before in the history of Calgary was there a more prosperous outlook for the city.”
The Mayor dismissed gloomy reports about the city’s finances; these were merely being spread by the city’s enemies, he charged. That was the general line. When several American papers began to report the collapse of the boom, the
Herald
blamed it all on “knockers.” But the knockers were right. A month later Calgary withdrew all its debentures from the bond market; they weren’t selling. By this time the recession was in full swing.