The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (12 page)

A newspaperman from St. Catharines purchased several lots on Portage Avenue well before the boom. In September, 1881, a friend dropped in and offered him twenty-five hundred dollars for one lot. When the reporter hesitated the friend increased the offer to three thousand. The news of the available property travelled swiftly. The following morning, as the St. Catharines man walked down the street he was besieged with offers that seemed to increase block by block. An acquaintance rushed up to him and offered to buy all his lots at three thousand apiece. A few hundred yards farther along, a man popped his head out of the window and raised the price to thirty-five hundred. Another few hundred yards and he was
stopped by a stranger who offered four thousand dollars per lot. He had scarcely moved another block before the figure had reached six thousand.

Harry Armstrong, who had helped survey the government line between Thunder Bay and Red River and who was working in the
CPR’S
engineering department in Winnipeg early in 1882, managed to buy a lot on Portage Avenue for fifteen hundred dollars before the boom began. He sold it late in 1881 for ten thousand dollars. A short time later it was resold for forty thousand.

Such tales crowded the world news out of the papers. Even the exploits of Billy the Kid and the revelations of Robert Ford, the man who killed Jesse James, were overshadowed by more piquant items:

“W. J. Ovens used to sell nails for a cent in a hardware store in Yorkville four years ago but he can draw his check for $100,000 to-day.”

“A man who worked on the street here last spring, wore a curly dog-skin coat this spring, smokes 25 cent cigars and talks with contempt about thousands.”

“Mr. Wm. J. Twigg, of Thompson, Twigg & Co., Real Estate, has retired from business after making one hundred thousand dollars.…”

It puts matters in perspective to realize that twelve hundred dollars a year was considered, in 1882, to be a very good income. A hundred-thousand-dollar profit then could keep a man and his family in luxury for life. No wonder John A. McDougall, the pioneer Edmonton trader, wrote to his brother from Manitoba that he intended to invest every dollar he could spare in land: “Any person with experience, good judgment and a few thousand dollars can make his fortune.…”

But many of these fortunes were paper ones. George Ham, one of the great raconteurs of the West, who later went to work for the
CPR
, was staying that winter in the Queen’s Hotel along with La Touche Tupper, a government employee who was deeply involved in land speculation. “He was a fairly good barometer of the daily land values,” Ham recalled. “Some days when he claimed to have made $10,000 or $15,000 everything was lovely. The next day, when he could only credit himself with $3,000 or $4,000 to the good, things were not as well, and when the profits dropped, and some days they did, to a paltry $500 or $600, the country was going to the dogs. We faithfully kept count of La Touche’s earnings, and in the spring he had accumulated nearly a million in his mind.”

The Reverend James Boydell, who was appointed Church of England
missionary to Brandon in 1882, recalled that “nothing but lots was talked about day in and out. I was perhaps an almost solitary exception, not because I was a parson, but because my pocket was empty.” In mid-February, one minister preaching a sermon about Lot’s wife had to make it clear to his congregation that it was not his intention to talk about real estate. A performer at a skating carnival that same week costumed himself as a coffin on which was inscribed: “Talked to death by a real estate agent. Lots for sale.” In Brandon, the first wedding was provoked by an offer from the municipal council of a free lot to the first bride and groom. A man named Robbins immediately proposed to a woman popularly known as English Nell. One old timer recalled that “no questions were asked whether it was a love match but most folks were satisfied it was principally to get the city lot.” The nuptials were celebrated at the city hall and then the entire congregation, singing “One More River to Cross,” followed the newly-weds across the Assiniboine, where the city fathers delivered up to them the certificate and title.

Children and teenagers were caught up in the speculative fever. “Little girls gamble in lots for doll-houses,” the astonished representative of
The Times
of London reported, “and when two youthful partners begin whispering earnestly in the intervals of a dance, the chances are that their theme is not love, but land.” In Selkirk, in February, an old resident, Major Bowles, was so bucked up by a local real estate boom touched off by rumours of additional railroad facilities that he was inspired to christen his infant son “Selkirk Boom Bowles” in honour of the event.

Everybody from the lowest tradesman to the leading citizens of the province was involved in land speculation. General Rosser was not the only highly placed official who used inside information to turn a profit. The chief commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company, James A. Grahame, and his land commissioner, Charles Brydges, together with the company solicitor, all of whom had inside knowledge, bought fifty-six of their company’s lots at Fort Garry for $280,000 and within eleven days sold eleven of them for $275,000. The company’s surveyors speculated in land as did ordinary clerks, all of them privy to information regarding Hudson’s Bay property that had not yet been advertised to the public. The inspector of Indian agencies, Lawrence Herchmer (a future commissioner of the
NWMP)
, Alexander Galt’s son Elliott, Macdonald’s old law partner Alexander Campbell, the Senate leader, and Edgar Dewdney, the Lieutenant-Governor of the North West Territories, were all involved in buying and speculating in lands from the Hudson’s Bay Company reserve; all undoubtedly had inside information from the company’s officials.

So all-pervasive was the talk about real estate that it did not occur to the
average citizen that there could be any other topic. In January, a stranger seeking a church service inquired of “a respectable elderly gentleman” where the town hall might be, since it did double service as the Presbyterian meeting place. The Winnipegger jumped to the obvious conclusion that the stranger wanted to buy the property and informed him that it had already been sold at eight hundred dollars a front foot. He “was unable to realize the possibility of any one coming to Winnipeg for any other purpose than to learn how real estate was going.”

Certainly, the dividing line between God and Mammon was blurred that hectic winter. Early in February, the trustees of Knox Presbyterian Church succumbed to the craze. The church occupied a valuable corner lot at the junction of Fort and Portage; it had cost twenty-two thousand dollars to build; the land had been secured for a few hundred. The trustees announced that the building would be auctioned off on February 18, 1882, to the highest bidder. Not surprisingly, the crowd that attended in the basement formed the largest congregation the church had ever known. An eyewitness described the scene:

“At the hour announced for opening the sale the basement was filled to its utmost capacity with what undoubtedly constituted the wealthiest, as well as the most intelligent, audience that ever gathered in any similar building in Canada. The auctioneer occupied the platform from which thoroughly orthodox Calvinistic doctrines had been so frequently and acceptably preached. The trustees occupied seats behind him. The crowded audience was decidedly given to the worship of the ‘God of Mammon.’ Not a hat removed. The puffing cigars held in several hundred mouths soon rendered the atmosphere of the sacred edifice disagreeable in the extreme.…”

The trustees had reckoned on realizing between seventy-five and a hundred thousand dollars from the sale. But the first bid was $110,000 and his was rapidly increased until the property was knocked down for $126,000 to a syndicate headed by two men from Chatham, Ontario. (The minister was immediately voted a bonus of two thousand dollars by his exultant parishioners.) A man in the audience instantly offered to lease the building as it stood, without any alteration, for five years for an annual rental of $17,500 and taxes. The syndicate turned the offer down and resold the church, realizing a cash profit of fifty thousand dollars. The first tenants included the Bank of Montreal and the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The Anglicans were not far behind the Calviniste. (The Methodists were already renting out their Wesley Hall as a theatre, of all things, on week nights.) On February 26, the congregation of Holy Trinity learned from their rector that a meeting was being planned “for the purpose of considering
whether it was advisable to sell the church.” That was too much for one aggrieved parishioner. “To what are we tending?” he cried, and then he quoted St. Paul’s familiar dictum about the love of money being the root of all evil – an admonition which for all that winter had been ignored by Christian and heathen alike. Few paid him any attention.

2
Fool’s paradise

“If there ever was a fool’s paradise,” wrote George Ham, “it sure was located in Winnipeg. Men made fortunes – mostly on paper – and life was one continuous joy-ride.”

The joy-ride lasted from June, 1881, until mid-April, 1882. For all of those eleven months, the business section of the city resembled nothing so much as a giant carnival, which seemed to run day and night. Almost every visitor remarked on the immense crowds jostling each other on the streets, on the general air of wealth, on the feeling of hustle and energy, and on the smell of money. J. C. McLagan, in a contemporary essay, wrote that all was “bustle and excitement.” He talked of cabmen and bus drivers “plying their vocation with lusty lungs,” of immense piles of baggage blocking every available space, of conveyances of all descriptions clogging the winding streets, “magnificent turnouts with coachmen and footmen fully equipped,” ox sleds laden with lumber and produce, dog trains of great length yapping their way through the throngs, farmers, newly rich, driving spanking teams. “Men, old and young, hurry along with anxious looks – eagerly intent on business – and, as a rule, a roll of plans under the arm or a notebook in the hand.…”

Two-thirds of those on the streets were men. “I doubt if to-day any other city on the continent, according to its population, can boast of so many wealthy, young and middle-aged men,” one eyewitness wrote in March. “In physique and general appearance no place can produce their equal. This is the general theme of conversation indulged in by all newcomers, who stand in utter amazement admiring the busy throng as they pass by. Eagerness and determination are depicted on every countenance.” It was a cosmopolitan crowd. McLagan noted that the “vast congregation” in the churches on Sunday, which were as crowded as the hotels, was composed of “the very bone and sinew of other lands.”

Samuel Benfield Steele, one of the original detachment of North West
Mounted Police that went west in 1874, saw Winnipeg in its salad days and recalled it in his memoirs. “People were ready to buy anything,” he remembered. “The hotels did a roaring trade and the bars made profits of hundreds of dollars a day.… In the forenoon the speculators were at their writing tables going through their correspondence; the city was quiet, though crowded with men. At noon there was the usual hearty luncheon; at 3 p.m. the fun began, and was kept up until a late hour. Those who had made money were ready to re-invest it, and the real estate offices were crowded with men ready to buy or sell lots.”

The most unlikely people became real estate entrepreneurs. The Winnipeg dailies were full of stories of long-time employees being presented with gold watches or silver tea services because they were leaving their jobs in the post office, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the government service, or even the press itself to go into the land business.

The “king of the land,” in the Winnipeg
Sun’
s phrase, was 36-year-old Arthur Wellington Ross,
M.P
., the agent who had been first on the scene at the founding of Brandon. A small, thin man with a dark spade beard, Ross was reputed to be worth half a million dollars at the height of the boom, owning for a period almost all of the Fort Rouge subdivision where he was constructing one of the most palatial residences in the West. Ross was an opportunist. He had begun life as a school teacher and was later a school inspector in Ontario but had gone back to school himself to study law. After he moved to Winnipeg he became a solicitor for the Mackenzie administration, but in 1882 he switched his allegiance to the party in power and ran successfully as a Conservative, first for the Manitoba legislature and then, in 1882, for the federal seat of Lisgar. He was a man who clearly made it a practice to be in with the right people. He also had a shrewd eye for land. As early as 1878 he was buying lots in St. Boniface for three hundred dollars an acre; within three years their value had increased eightfold. He always seemed to know where opportunity lay; wherever the
CPR
went, there was Arthur Wellington Ross, quietly moving ahead of it, buying up property, always unobtrusively. He was, the
Sun
declared, known for his tact. He was also known for his Calvinist principles: “While others played, he worked. While others were enjoying themselves in social festivities, he was thinking and working and he has only himself to thank for his present success.”

Ross’s real estate advertisements overshadowed the slender columns of news on the front pages of the Winnipeg papers from the very first day of the boom, when his firm put the
CPR’S
original Brandon subdivision on the market. Shortly thereafter two other names became household words in
Manitoba – those of the two colourful real estate auctioneers, Jim Coolican and Joseph Wolf. Wolf, “portly and indefatigable,” sold half a million dollars worth of real estate in the first six months of the land fever. He was known as the Golden Auctioneer because he operated from the Golden Hotel and Real Estate Exchange. When the
CPR
decided to place a second Brandon section on the market in February, it was Wolf who was chosen to handle the bidding. The crowds were so huge that no auction room in the city was able to accommodate them and so the city hall itself was transformed into a real estate office. Wolf worked for three nights in a row and sold $133,000 worth of North Brandon lots. His personal fortune was estimated at two hundred thousand dollars, but his exertions were so great that he suffered a collapse in the late spring and was ordered east by his doctor for a five-week rest.