The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (44 page)

For all of the railway construction period, the Mounted Police were locked in a battle of wits with the whiskey peddlers. Every device that human guile could invent was used to smuggle liquor into the North West and to keep it hidden from official eyes. Egg-shells were blown of their contents and alcohol substituted. Imitation Bibles, made of tin, were filled with intoxicants and peddled aboard
CPR
passenger cars; metal kegs of alcohol were concealed in the centre of barrels of kerosene; mincemeat soaked in brandy and peaches marinated in Scotch were also common. At Silver City, not far from Calgary, the police seized nineteen tins of corn, peas, and tomatoes which, on inspection, were revealed to contain alcohol, not vegetables – all shipped by an Ontario distiller. Eleven barrels supposedly filled with pork, imported into Calgary, were found to contain 1,584 bottles of liquor, which, at five dollars a bottle – the regulation price in those days – would have realized almost eight thousand dollars, a tidy profit at a time when whiskey sold for something like fifty cents a gallon in eastern Canada.

On the treeless prairie where concealment was difficult, the ingenuity of the bootleggers met its greatest test. One favourite hiding place was the boiler of a disabled or wrecked locomotive laid up on a siding. Another was one of the many carcasses of pack horses that lay strewn along the route of the line. It was said that hundreds of these dead animals were used to conceal bottles of liquor. The “dives,” as they were called, were always close at hand – innocent-appearing log huts unmarked by any sign and totally empty of whiskey. A thirsty man knocking on the door might be met by a rough-looking proprietor, who, on being asked for a drink, would crawl out to the apparently empty prairie, poke around for a loose sod, lift it, and produce a small bottle, or – in more elaborate cases – actually pump the liquor from the bowels of the earth with a pocket instrument.

“The low cunning … used by these serpents … is marvellous,” one eyewitness declared. “Nothing but the able assistance of his satanic majesty himself could enable these men to conceive of half their truly unique schemes.” One good-looking man in a plug hat, white tie, and black
coat shipped an organ to End of Track, ostensibly for the use of the navvies during divine service. It was actually a hollow shell lined with tin, loaded with spirits. Another walked the line carrying the familiar knapsack which apparently contained nitro-glycerine canisters; he bore a red flag in his hand, which kept the Mounties away – as well as everybody else. As the
Globe
remarked dryly, there was not much deceit in that: “The whiskey will kill almost as quick as dynamite.” Known variously as Chain Lightning, Tangle Foot, Death on Wires, and Injin Killer, it was generally a fearsome concoction made by mixing a gallon of good liquor with nine gallons of water into which was sunk a quantity of blue-stone and oil of smoke and later, for colouring, a little black tea. The price, in the dives, was twenty-five cents a glass.

Perhaps the most ingenious of the whiskey peddlers on the prairies was a Mrs. Hobourg of Regina, “a woman of daring and originality” who used to arrive back in town from a trip to the wet cities of Winnipeg and Brandon looking more than pregnant from a circular rubber bag she wore around her waist. Another of her devices was to dress up a keg of liquor to resemble one of her offspring asleep on the seat beside her or to disguise it as a pillow on which she might rest her head while the police rummaged vainly through her old-fashioned bag. Mrs. Hobourg boasted that she “could down all the police in the Northwest,” but she was finally caught one June day and fined two hundred dollars and costs for importing two barrels of “beef and beans.”

Under the prohibition laws the Mounted Police in the North West Territories could legally enter and search any premises at any hour of the day or night. This “detestable duty,” as Sam Steele called it, did not add to the popularity of the force. The constables themselves indulged, on occasion, in some private bootlegging. When John Donkin, the former British Army trooper, first went out to Regina to join the Mounties, he noticed that his escort had purchased in Winnipeg “a cargo of whiskey,” which he stored in his baggage to distribute to his fellow policemen. “Each member of the force,” Donkin wrote, “is expected by his comrades when entering the territory to bring a libation of ‘old rye’ or ‘bourbon’ with him, from the more favoured regions. This is a pretty commentary upon the prohibition law.”

Donkin’s gloomy description of Regina’s sporting life explains the fervour with which the occasional furtive bottle, no matter how villainous, was welcomed:

“The solemnity which perennially reigns in a North-West hotel is beyond words. Long-faced men sit silent around the stove, only varying the
grim monotony by an occasional expectoration of tobacco juice. Sometimes they may break out, and engage in the congenial pastime of ‘swapping lies.’ The bar dedicated to teetotalism (cider is sold and hop beer) makes a ghastly attempt at conviviality and jocoseness, by having an array of bottles of colored water and cold tea marshalled upon a series of shelves and labelled ‘Old Tom,’ ‘Fine Old Rye,’ Hennessy’s ‘Silver Star,’ or ‘Best Jamaica.’ With what hideous humour do these tantalizing legends taunt the thirsty tenderfoot from ‘down East.’ ”

In sharp contrast to this morose spectacle were the occasional orgies of drinking that broke out in the North West, especially when a party of surveyors or traders was leaving civilization for an extended period for “the purity of the uncontaminated prairie,” as the
Globe
called it.

“It is generally night. As the men feel the affects [sic] of the treacherous mixture the noise becomes dreadful. Indians, Half-breeds, camp followers, and navvies join in the hideous orgy.

“Men have been known to be torn from their beds, dragged to the spot, and forced to drink. Yells, curses, howlings, ribald songs fill the air and if a pile of ties can be fired it adds hugely to the effect. This lasts all night but morning finds them strewn everywhere in a drunken stupor or deadly sick. Men have died after one of these terrible orgies.…”

Brandon, on the edge of Manitoba, was the farthest western point at which liquor could be sold. That, no doubt, explained why a visitor from Fort Macleod remarked on the number of men “staggering about the streets considerably under the influence of the juice of Bacchus.” The first station west of Brandon was Moosomin, and here the train was supposed to be searched for whiskey but, according to Donkin, “a constable or corporal merely promenades with clanking spurs down the aisles of the cars.”

Sometimes, however, the search was more intensive, as Nicholas Flood Davin discovered. Davin had been attacking the Mounted Police vigorously in the
Leader
, especially Superintendent W. M. Herchmer. He had the ill luck to be on the same train as Herchmer on August 4, 1884, when a constable came through on a routine liquor check at Moosomin. Davin had a small flask of whiskey lying on the seat behind him. The constable pounced. Normally, the practice was to order the offender to pour the liquor out and leave it at that, but Davin got special treatment. He was charged and haled into court in Regina, where the magistrate was none other than Herchmer himself.

Davin the journalist gave way to Davin the lawyer. Appearing in his own defence, he charged that Herchmer was interpreting the liquor act in
a narrow and capricious manner for personal reasons. In an impassioned address, he declared that he had never imported liquor into the Territories, that he never carried it, and that he was being trapped “into appearing as to be a lawbreaker.” His eloquence was of no avail; he was fined $50.00 and $15.50 costs.

The following day in the
Leader
, Davin struck back at “the tyranny of Colonel Herchmer,” attacking “the alarming powers temporarily placed in his hands.” Herchmer had “caused the law to be strained in order to gratify what everybody knows, was a desire to avenge fancied wrongs suffered by himself … because of comments imposed on us from time to time as public journalists, by the conduct of this or that member of the N.w.M.p.” In this, Davin was supported by most of the North West and Manitoba newspapers, many of which had been attacking him on the subject of Regina as a capital city.

The Prime Minister, to whom Davin wrote a “half crazy letter” on the matter, felt, however, that the editor could only hurt himself by keeping up the battle. “His continual attacks on Herchmer … will be considered as an evidence of spite against a public official for doing his duty. This will destroy his prestige and that of his paper.” The Prime Minister suggested Davin would have been better advised to pay the fine without fuss and pass the whole matter off with a laugh.

Davin was probably more embarrassed at being publicly found with liquor than he was by being arrested, since, in his newspaper, he had been a strong temperance advocate. Most frontier editors were hard drinkers, but because temperance was as popular a cause in the eighties as pollution was ninety years later, the majority publicly embraced it. Everybody, indeed, seemed to pay lip-service to the principle, including the worst topers. Davin himself thrived on whiskey. Before preparing a speech it was his habit to lock himself in his room with a shelf of books and a full bottle. The more the wine flowed, the greater became his powers of improvisation. At one well-lubricated banquet in eastern Canada, he was called upon to speak every half-hour or so, as the glasses were filled and refilled, and did so, in several languages, until four o’clock in the morning. Though he paid public homage to prohibition, he did not go so far as to approve the spilling of confiscated liquor on the ground, an accepted practice which must have caused many an inward shudder. Davin suggested editorially that it ought to be sold and the proceeds given to the editors of North West newspapers. The Moose Jaw
News
took this facetious remark seriously and piously declared that “we hereby give notice that we do not want whiskey money and will not take it. Our mind is made up.”

There was only one way in which the settlers, railwaymen, and temperance advocates of the North West could legally purchase alcohol and that was on the time-hallowed grounds of health. “Now that the Governor is here,” Davin wrote on Queen Victoria’s birthday in 1883, “he will be pestered for permits by vigorous pioneers who want a gallon or two of whiskey, to be used for ‘medicinial’ purposes. Even five and ten gallons, we believe, have been asked for on medicinal grounds.”

Prohibition or no, a good deal of liquor was consumed along the
CPR
right of way during the construction period. Edwin Brooks, migrating with his brother from Quebec in 1883, was stopped by a Mounted Policeman on the treeless alkali desert between Brandon and Qu’Appelle and asked if they had any liquor. The brothers replied that they were temperance men, whereupon the constable remarked acidly that nearly everybody on the road was a temperance man but a great deal of whiskey was getting through in spite of that. Sam Steele, who resented the strict laws and the nuisance of enforcing them, went so far as to claim that “the prohibitory law made more drunkards than if there had been an open bar and free drinks at every street corner.” That is scarcely credible. When Brooks reached Regina in August he was able to write to his wife Nellie: “I can tell you they (the police) look after these whiskey dealers awfully sharp. One never sees a drunken man in this
N.W.T
. or if ever very seldom.…” The truth was that because of prohibition the
CPR
was able to keep its men on the job and, in spite of occasional sprees, stabilize a work force whose training and precision made it possible to drive almost nine hundred miles of steel in fifteen months. When it was all over and the trains were running from Winnipeg to the base of the Rockies, the Moose Jaw
News
summed it up:

“The order and quiet which have prevailed during the construction of the Canadian Pacific, where thousands of men, proverbially not of the tractable kind, have been employed far in advance of civilization and settlement, have been unexampled in the history of any similar enterprise.”

4
The magical influence

Langdon and Shepard completed their contract in mid-August, 1883, when the rails reached Calgary. (The last two stations on their contract were named after the partners.) Until that moment, the old Hudson’s Bay fort and its cluster of adjacent log buildings – Roman Catholic and Methodist missions, freighters’ cabins, I. G. Baker store and two hotels – had been more closely linked with the United States than with Canada.
The chief mode of travel to Fort Benton, Montana, was by bull train – an American transportation device – rather than by Red River cart, and all the mail carried United States stamps because it was posted south of the border.

To a newcomer from the East, such as William Murdoch, the harness-maker who put up the first commercial sign on the site in May, the embryo town seemed like a distant planet. “I was dreaming about home almost all last night,” Murdoch wrote in his diary on a bitter, windy June day. “How I long to see my wife, mother and little ones. My heart craves for them all today more than usual.” Murdoch, who would become Calgary’s first mayor, could not get so much as a sliver of dressed lumber, for there were no sawmills in the foothills. All that was available were rough planks, whip-sawed vertically by hand. Fresh fruit was so rare that when half a box of apples arrived they were sold at fifty cents each (the equivalent of more than two dollars in modern terms); they were the first that had been seen in that part of the North West.

The railway was to change all that. It was even to change the location of the town, as it had in the cases of Brandon and Regina.

Until the railway arrived, Fort Calgary was situated on the east bank of the Elbow River near its confluence with the Bow. As usual, there were squatters living in rough shanties, hired by Winnipeg land speculators to occupy the most likely ground until the townsite was subdivided.