The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (56 page)

The West was suffering from too much success. Like a celebrity who cannot cope with instant fame, it was done in by the pace of its development. It grew too quickly. Businessmen who had once been lauded for their “faith in the future” (a common expression in those days) now found the future had caught up with them. Few had paused to consider that the miraculous expansion of the first decade was not limitless. In the words of F. McClure Sclanders, Saskatoon’s hard-headed trade commissioner, “the lily of the field never exhibited greater indifference for the morrow.” Anybody felt they could do anything, Sclanders said, because credit was granted promiscuously and with almost prodigal generosity.

Land booms always collapse when prices become inflated, but there was more than that behind the slump of 1913. Though few faced up to it, this was the end of an era – an era of free land, wide-open settlement, easy money. The period of swift expansion was over because most of the free land was gone. The West was no longer empty of farmers. By 1913, 65 per cent of all prairie immigrants weren’t going to the farms at all but to the burgeoning cities. In 1912, a special report had warned the government that its immigration policy must change: money should now be moved into the scientific development of the land.

With the European powers at each other’s throats and the threat of war increasing, the international market for wheat was contracting. And, in spite of all the railway expansion, freight rates remained high because the railways were in trouble. They had helped produce the boom; now they contributed to its death. British investors could no longer be expected to carry the enormous burden of government and railway debt that was crushing the country. Building the federally owned National Transcontinental was costing twice as much as contemplated. The Grand Trunk Pacific was foundering on the cost of the mountain section. The Canadian Northern was in worse shape.

Mackenzie and Mann had got millions in provincial guarantees by promising to cover the West with a network of branch lines. Now, in order to pay for the mountain and eastern sections, they were forced to
abandon construction of further feeders. Once again, the West saw itself sacrificed for outside interests.

The provinces were in no position to meet their guarantees. Saskatchewan had made an enormous commitment to the Canadian Northern. If the railway could not meet its interest payments, the province would have to. But that sum was equal to half its annual budget. Mackenzie, looking haggard, worn out and twenty years older in the description of Lauder’s Conservative successor, struggled to keep the tottering railway alive. The Prime Minister drove a hard bargain. The two partners were forced to forgive a $20-million debt owed them personally by the company and, in return for a new federal guarantee, to give up to the government another $40 million in stock. The final blow came when war was declared in Europe. Guarantees or no guarantees, Canadian Northern bonds were no longer marketable in London. The Canadian government still flinched from nationalizing the railway, but that, too, was inevitable. Apart from Russia, Germany, and the United States, Canada now had more miles of steel than any country in the world. It could not afford three transcontinental roads. Like the dream cities, the dream lines collapsed. The Canadian Northern became a government railway, like the National Transcontinental. The Grand Trunk Pacific slipped into bankruptcy and, with its parent, was eventually taken over. Thus was formed the Canadian National Railways System, which for the next half century would be saddled with a burden of debt produced by the boosterism of that first turbulent decade.

As the boom wound down, the prairie cities were left with vacant lots, scattered clusters of houses, half-finished buildings, empty subdivisions. By 1913, all business in Saskatoon had come to a stop. The much-touted Fairhaven subdivision, which went on the market in 1910 and was virtually sold out by 1911, was not opened for development until 1976. In Edmonton, seventy-five thousand lots went back to the city in lieu of tax payments. The Hudson’s Bay Reserve, which had caused such excitement in 1912, stood empty for more than a quarter of a century, a desolate acreage of brushland, cut diagonally by Portage Avenue, renamed Kings way in honour of the 1939 Royal Visit – an imposing boulevard, eight lanes wide, with scarcely a building on it. The reserve was not fully built up until the 1960s. In Calgary the story was the same: ten subdivisions stood empty until the 1960s. Who today has heard of Balaclava, Pasadena, Sarceedale, or Hiawatha?

Real estate operators such as Freddy Lowes, who continued to
borrow when others pulled back, went magnificently broke. Lowes’s half finished mansion stood for years in southwest Calgary, a monument to overoptimism. Bert A. Stringer followed Lowes into oblivion, his roof garden cafe a dream turned into a nightmare. As Bob Edwards, the sanest voice in town, wrote in 1912: “Calgary never hears the truth about herself. Even though she did she wouldn’t listen. The great trouble with the West is that it is never told the truth, men are afraid to open their mouths.…”

Edwards had it right. Even as the boom collapsed several Western cities were still contemplating grandiose schemes designed to enhance their prestige. Edmonton in 1913 was laying plans for a magnificent city centre surrounded by park land, gardens, fountains, and tree-shaded boulevards. Plans were still being drawn upas lateas 1915, but the project never got past the drawing board.

Saskatoon brought in C.J. Yorath, a noted English planner, as city commissioner to redesign the community. Caught up in the traditional Western enthusiasm, Yorath failed to notice what was going on. “I believe the high optimism of Saskatoon is justified,” he declared in 1913. “We are on the threshold of greatness.” He had some difficulty superimposing the baroque features of a European circular plan on the narrow grid system of the Dream City, but his final drawings were impressive, showing broad avenues, boulevards, and parks. Unfortunately, the drawings are all that survive.

The real estate interests that controlled city planning had thought in terms of the largest number of lots on the smallest amount of acreage. The grid system of the prairie cities was by far the most profitable but by no means the most inviting. Tragically, by the time the city fathers in the West began to realize the need for city planning, the collapse of the boom made it financially impossible. Calgary, Regina, and Winnipeg brought out one of the best-known landscape architects and city planners in the world, Thomas Mawson. Regina managed to complete his scheme for Wascana Park, but Winnipeg didn’t even bother to pay his bill. As for Calgary, his ambitious drawings for a new city ended up lining the walls of a garage. Mawson’s plan might easily have turned Calgary into the Paris of the prairies, for he envisaged a circular system of roads with wide boulevards and arcaded sidewalks fronting on a civic square and leading to the
CPR
station, classically designed with pillars and statuary. But the plans for Calgary, like the plans for Utopia, remained a dream.

The dreams of the West were shattered finally by the nightmare of the Great War. The dreamers themselves went off to the battlefields and were themselves shattered. Thousands who had crossed the ocean in search of the dream now re-crossed the water to defend it. Thus ended the golden years of the Canadian West, not with a whimper but with a bang.

In a single generation, the land between the Red River and the Rockies had been transformed. In that brief period, the West, a nation within a nation, had experienced infancy, childhood, adolescence, and now maturity. As a result, Canada itself was a different country, its character and outlook altered by the prairie miracle. After just eighteen years of settlement and boom, it could never again be the same.

Epilogue: On the Winnipeg Platform

It is a little before six on the afternoon of Saturday, August 15, 1914, and we are standing on the platform at the
CPR
station in Winnipeg, looking back at the packed depot, watching the new recruits of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry bidding their friends and families goodbye
.

It is a not unfamiliar scene. The tear-stained faces, the sea of fluttering handkerchiefs, the last-minute embraces are reminiscent of other farewells on other platforms and docksides in the years since 1896
.

We have been here many times before. We stood on the Winnipeg platform at the beginning, when Josef Oleskow came through in 1895 on his way to the empty West, seeking a haven for his people. We were here two years later when the Humeniuk family and their Galician neighbours leaped through the train windows, refusing to go farther. We were here again that fall of 1897 to watch Prince Kropotkin board the westbound train after his trolley tour of Winnipeg; and we were here when the first of the Doukhobors arrived to be greeted by a harried Bill McCreary and pots of soup made by the women of the city. At Christmastime, in 1902, we stood on this same platform to watch the commanding figure of Peter Verigin step from his coach, and on a cold March midnight in 1908 we saw William Shepherd and his son George shiver their way from the colonist cars to the warmth of the immigration hall
.

And we have stood on other platforms: at Brandon in 1896, to see the triumphant homecoming of Clifford Sifton; at Saskatoon in 1903, to watch the Barr colonists tumbling off the cars; at Calgary in 1906, to witness the American invasion; at Edmonton in 1911, to observe the crowd of curbside brokers mulcting the would-be fortune hunters as they, too, stepped from the train
.

The railway platform, like the sod hut and the grain elevator, is a genuine Western artifact, a springboard to settlement; and the railway itself, more than the beaver or the maple leaf, is our true national emblem. For if the symbol of American expansion is the covered wagon, then the symbol of Canadian expansion has been the colonist car, with its slatted seats and its single glowing stove
.

We stand now, as the bugles sound and the flags flutter, at the neck of the funnel through which almost every homesteader has been squeezed on his journey to the promised land. This worn platform at Winnipeg bears the marks of hundreds of thousands of feet – boots and oxfords, brogues and moccasins, shoe packs and slippers
.

But now we are witnessing a reversal of the familiar process, a departure, not an arrival. Five hundred and fifty young men recruited for the new regiment are saying their last goodbyes and lining up to leave the West, some of them forever. They come from all across the prairies: 74 from Winnipeg, 64 from Saskatoon, 14 from Prince Albert, 260 from Calgary and Edmonton, and now, as another train puffs in, 123 from Moose Jaw, these last in full uniform, purchased with their own money
.

The others are still in mufti – labourers in soiled overalls, farmers in field clothes, office workers in ready-made suits and starched collars. As they are herded from the depot to line up in fours on the platform, the tears begin to flow. A woman rushes forward and pushes a baby into one man’s arms; he carries it as far as the gate, covering its face with kisses. Then he hands it back and is gone with the others
.

They pull in their stomachs and chins, thrust out their chests as the Veterans’ Band strikes up the National Anthem. The farewell words of the district officer commanding, Colonel Sam Steele, Big Jim McGregor’s old adversary, ring in their ears as they board the eighteen-car special: “This land has been your home for some time and I hope you will return in good health and spirits.… Shoot well and be men all the time.”

Tens of thousands will follow, and if we were to stay here on the platform watching the troop trains pull out, month after month, year after year, we would recognize some familiar faces: Rattlesnake Pete, the remittance man from Edmonton, one of the first to rush to the colours; Mike Mountain Horse from the Blood Indian reserve, who discarded his Indian dress at the residential school; the Shepherds’ young son, Harry, who will have a close call at Amiens; D.E. MacIntyre, the Moose Jaw storekeeper turned real estate salesman, who will rise to be a lieutenant-colonel and win a D. S. O. at Vimy; and others whom we recognize only in the mass – all the anonymous Dutchmen and Scots, Icelanders and Danes, Barr colonists and displaced Ontario farmers, together with so many of their sons, grown to manhood on the harsh prairie and destined for a grave in Flanders, including some of those same children who, on a bright September day
in 1905, stood in Victoria Park in the Queen City of the Plains, waving their flags, singing of Wolfe the Conquering Hero, and listening to their governor general tell them that some day they must be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their country, for the sake of the Promised Land
.

Author’s Note

The Promised Land
is the final volume in a tetralogy dealing with the opening of the Canadian North West in the half-century following Confederation. It begins with
The National Dream
, which describes the beginning of the vision of a nation extending from sea to sea.
The Last Spike
details the culmination of that vision: the building of a railway to the Pacific Coast.
Klondike
is the tale of the gold rush that focused the eyes of Canadians on their own northland. The present volume completes the story.

The book has had a long gestation period. My intention was to complete it immediately following the publication of the revised and expanded edition of
Klondike
in 1973. I did a year of preliminary research with the assistance of Glen Wright but in the end decided the task was too formidable and put it aside. In the years that followed, I published nine other books, but this one was always in my thoughts. Finally, in 1981, I decided to tackle it again with the help of Barbara Sears, who has been my research assistant on six other books.

The result is not meant to be definitive. No single volume could be. I have not gone into detail, for example, about every ethnic group that came to this country before the First World War; their experiences, after all, did not differ greatly from those I have described here.