The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (13 page)

Coolican, “the Real Estate King,” was perhaps the most ebullient and resourceful real estate man in Winnipeg, a rotund and florid Irishman with a huge black moustache, his plump fingers and silk tie glittering with “real diamonds,” in the phrase of the day. (The
Sun
invariably referred to him as “the jewelry king.”) At work he wore a snappy black velvet jacket; on the streets he sported the status symbol of the city – a five-thousand-dollar sealskin coat with matching cap. He, too, was building what was described as a “palatial residence” on the Assiniboine to which he was conveyed in a magnificent carriage known as an English state coach, the first of its kind ever brought into the North West.

Coolican’s advertisements for the paper towns he auctioned off – often a half or a full page in size – were masterpieces of hyperbole, studded with exclamation marks and superlatives rendered in heavy black type. In a single fortnight in February he spent four thousand dollars on newspaper advertising. It was worth it; in the same period he auctioned off almost a million dollars worth of property. He did his business at the very hub of the city, in the Exchange at the corner of Portage and Main which he was forever enlarging to handle the crowds, “a transformation more wonderful than anything experienced in the Arabian nights.” The Exchange had begun as a hardware store, with a frontage of sixty feet. Coolican, who paid a hundred thousand dollars for it, turned it into a combined auction room, hotel, restaurant, and billiard parlour.

He was an expansive and popular figure about town. One night when lots were selling particularly well, he bought out the entire stock of a passing apple vendor and scattered the fruit “promiscuously amongst the audience.” The next night he gave away seven hundred cigars to his customers. This was in mid-February, when Coolican had placed the entire
“city” of Cartwright on the market. “Cartwright Leads Them All,” his ads screamed. “Unquestionably the Best Situated Rising Town in the Province.” Coolican’s silver tongue moved Cartwright lots at the rate of twenty thousand dollars a night. The town itself, as the investors discovered, consisted of a single building, a general store that also did duty as a post office. Everything else – the advertised shops, mills, schools, and churches – were, as one investor ruefully put it, “the merest castles in the air.”

For every two hundred permanent residents in Winnipeg that winter there was a liquor store or a saloon. Champagne replaced whiskey as the class beverage. On the same day that Coolican auctioned off the Cartwright lots an entire carload of champagne arrived in town in specially heated cars. “It was nothing unusual to see a lucky speculator throwing away $100 a week, if not oftener, on champagne suppers,” one reporter recalled after the boom subsided. So great was the run on champagne that on one occasion the city’s entire supply gave out and a fashionable wedding had to be celebrated without it – a disaster grave enough to be reported as news. One man actually bathed in champagne. He was Captain Vivian, a monocled English aristocrat who had arrived in the summer of 1881 with a thousand pounds in his pocket. Vivian sank the entire sum into a quarter section homestead in the Brandon district, which he proceeded to sell at inflated prices. By February he was said to be worth four hundred thousand dollars. Unable to drink up all the champagne he had purchased, he filled a bathtub with it and invited his friends to watch him splash about. The affair cost him seven hundred and fifty dollars.

The scene is no more unreal than Winnipeg itself was that winter and spring. It seemed as if all belief had been temporarily suspended, all rational conjecture swept aside. A young lawyer from Hamilton named William White who moved through the town early in 1882 wrote that money meant nothing: “Everything was ‘jake’ to use a Western expression denoting perfect satisfaction with life generally.”

Coolican and Ross were not the only
nouveaux riches
who indulged themselves with mansions and carriages. One easterner wrote home that “women, who a few years ago were cooking and washing in a dirty little back kitchen, now ride about in carriages and pairs, with eccentric looking individuals for coachmen sitting in the back seat driving, the mistress looking as if the world were barely extensive enough for her to spread herself in.” But it was not easy to secure such servants.
The Times
of London reported that “you find that your hackney coachman is a landowner, and cease to feel surprised at this when he declines to drive you five miles for less than $4 or to drive you at all at any but his own pace.”

It was a winter of conspicuous extravagance. Diamonds became baubles on scores of fingers; Coolican’s sealskin coat was widely copied. “Twenty gold pieces were just nothing.” Next to the advertisements for lots were others for crystal ware, mantle ornaments, music boxes, choice gas fixtures, fine Etruscan jewellery, India and China tea, Weber pianos, cornice poles, and “beautiful dado hand painted shades.” The Palace Hotel advertised quail on toast, and no luncheon could be considered complete without the customary dozen oysters on the half-shell. Woltz, “the princely Toronto jeweler,” set up shop in March. “Even if you buy nothing,” the
Sun
told its readers, “the rich splendor of his wares will feast you with the artistic and educate you in the beautiful.” Woltz was identified as a member of “one of the most extensive and most trusted firms in Toronto … [who] offers nothing snide. From the tiny house-fly worked on a locket up to a watch worth hundreds, his wares are the choicest and the best.”

Woltz pressed a gold watch as a gift upon the reporter who wrote that embroidered prose. It tells something about the times, and about the state of the press, that he not only accepted it with alacrity but also boasted about his good fortune in print. In Winnipeg that year, the accumulation of sudden and unexpected wealth was looked upon with favour and greeted with applause. Speculators were heroes, profiteers were the new nobility. Businessmen, normally reticent, boasted openly about their killings and gave interviews to newspapers detailing their worth. The
Sun
, revealing some of the largest of the new fortunes, reported that the mayor himself led the list with an accumulation estimated at three hundred thousand dollars. Cabinet ministers, back-benchers in both parties, and the Queen’s representative were all speculating in real estate in the most open manner possible.

“Yesterday,” the
Globe
reported on February 23, “the Hon. M. Cauchon, Lieut-Gov. of Manitoba, who is at present in Ottawa, received a telegram from his agent at Winnipeg in effect that he had sold 470 acres of his land at St. Boniface, opposite Pt. Douglas, for the handsome sum of $283,000. This is but one of a number of good speculations made by Mr. Cauchon, and he is still the holder of many other parcels of land which are daily increasing in value. It is said that he has cleared a million dollars so far out of his knowledge of Northwest speculations.”

Clearly, it was a mark of considerable status to have made a fast dollar. M. C. Cameron, one of the powers in the Liberal Party, made a seventy-five-thousand-dollar killing in Winnipeg real estate and cheerfully gave the details to the newspapers. The property was quickly resold for
one hundred thousand, but Cameron announced that he was perfectly satisfied with the lower figure, “having got the price he asked.” The point was implicit: no one had put anything over on M. C. Cameron. Shrewdness was more highly prized than virtue during the boom.

The
Globe’s
man in Winnipeg, himself caught up in the land craze, ventured to admit that “the moral aspect of this real estate fever is a cause for considerable anxiety, more especially in the Eastern Provinces.” He hastened to reassure his Ontario readers that nothing could be further from the truth: “No doubt to many the whole movement appears to be evil in the extreme.… To us, however, who are living on the ground … the matter appears in a different light. The transactions are largely for speculative purposes, it is true, but we claim that there is a perfectly solid basis on which it rests.… There is no reckless enthusiasm in Winnipeg. Every man studies the matter calmly and carefully, and if he has any spare funds puts it into what he knows is a sure investment.… I would be very sorry to countenance gambling in any way, but I look on speculation here, when legitimately conducted, as perfectly safe and proper. If one can grasp the magnitude of this North-West and believe in its rapid development he can invest his money in city or farm property without any anxiety or chidings of conscience.”

Everybody in Winnipeg, it seemed, was affluent – or believed himself to be. Visitors remarked on the absence of beggars in the streets and the total lack of copper coins. J. C. McLagan remarked on “the almost entire absence of pauperism, or anything approaching to squalor.” The Winnipeg city council, in 1881, had not found it necessary to distribute so much as one hundred and fifty dollars for charity.

The signs of prosperity were everywhere. By March, one hundred and eighty of Alexander Graham Bell’s newly developed telephones were in operation. Gas lighting, hailed the year before, was already becoming obsolete. On June 13, three sample electric lights were installed on the grounds of the
CPR
station at the head of Main Street, which was “illuminated as if by sunlight.… Books and newspapers could be read with ease.” In April, a syndicate which included Arthur Wellington Ross, Mayor Alexander Logan, and A. G. Bannantyne, a former Liberal Member of Parliament – all heavy land speculators – was formed to sell shares in a floating bath complex to be moored on the river at the foot of Post Office Street.

“It almost seems too good to be true that anyone in this prosperous dollar-worshipping city should have had the leisure even to entertain the idea,” one citizen wrote wryly to the
Times
. “…  who will not gladly lend a
helping hand to procure this public boon, especially where the glitter of the eternal dollar need not be lost sight for a moment even when we plunge beneath the waters, but when we may in possession of shares not only wash and be clean, but wash and be richer. Many waters cannot quench love, and it appears that they cannot avail to drown the dollar. Oh, Red River, who would have thought to have found both health and wealth in thy waters.”

Long before the winter snows swelled those waters to flood heights, thousands of adventurers were preparing to set out from the cities and towns of eastern Canada for “the New Eldorado,” as the Winnipeg
Times
dubbed the North West. In March, the Brantford
Telegram
reported that every day the “Manitoba fever” was strengthening, “and scores of young and old are only waiting for spring to open to start for the land overflowing with milk and honey.” The same week, the Ottawa
Free Press
wrote that “the 10 p.m. train of the
C.P.R
. was crowded last evening with victims of Manitoba fever, and it is expected that the evening trains for some time will have full fares for Manitoba.” The irreverent
Sun
insisted that Phineas T. Barnum, then at the peak of his fame, was advertising in Ontario for a man who was
not
going to Manitoba to travel with his show as a companion curiosity to the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. The paper solemnly added that the showman had not been able to find such an oddity.

By early April, every train from St. Paul was bringing in hundreds of immigrants from eastern Canada and from every part of the world. One traveller taking an immigrant train from Toronto to Winnipeg described the scene: the men, women, and children crowding aboard at every stop with their kits and baggage and all their household goods, “their faces beaming with satisfaction at being at last on the way to Manitoba.” During the journey, “nothing was talked of but Manitoba and the Northwest.…”

Everybody who was anybody, it seemed, was heading for Winnipeg and beyond – from Peter Redpath, “the sugar king,” to Captain Boycott, the Irishman whose name had gone into the language. Some of them pushed on to the very shadow of the Rockies. Mr. Brassey, “the celebrated contractor of London” (his firm had built the Grand Trunk), was one; he bought three hundred square miles of ranchland in the Bow River valley as soon as the Kicking Horse Pass route was chosen. Senator Matthew Henry Cochrane of Quebec was another; he acquired one hundred square miles near by. “It is stated that several Englishmen intend to follow these illustrious examples,” the Manitoba
Free Press
reported. It went on to
complain that “at this rate Canada will soon be landless and our magnificent heritage a cattle ranch.”

The influx of newcomers created an unprecedented demand for space to which the overcrowded community was unequal. Since the previous May when, in the words of the
Free Press
, “a shake-down is a luxury that is not always obtainable,” Winnipeg’s hotels had been scandalously overtaxed. By the spring of 1882 they were so crowded that every available space was used for sleeping accommodation, including parlours, corridors, and lobbies. Beecham Trotter, who lived in Winnipeg during the boom, had trouble getting so much as a corner in a public room. Finally he put up at a “miserable hotel” on Main Street, where he paid two dollars to spend a night in a chair. Even a chair was a rarity that winter and spring, and the same was true in the outlying towns. Rev. James Boydell, who arrived in Brandon in January to take up his mission, felt himself lucky to get a room in a boarding house on Rosser Avenue; by nightfall, men and women were lying in their furs in the passageways. A fellow clergyman and his wife were turned away in thirty below zero weather but returned, unable to find any space in town. The proprietor took pity on them and found them each a space on the crowded floor.

One mathematically inclined newcomer to Winnipeg figured out that in the house where he was boarding each occupant had exactly twenty-eight square feet of floor space for his own use, compared to an average of between two hundred and fifty and three hundred square feet in Ontario. Meal times, by all accounts, were savage: “…  long ere the dining room doors are thrown open, a crowd gathers, eager to charge the tables and anxious to satisfy the cravings of the inner man. Frequently weak men are seriously injured in these jams. The tables have to be cleared and re-set several times ere the guests are all dined.” At one of the leading hotels the crush was so great that one diner suffered a broken arm.