The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (51 page)

“How about the girl who coughs so much?” asks Nellie McClung. “Couldn’t she be given a few days off with pay to get built up a bit?”

“The company is not a charitable institution,” the manager tells her. “…  If the girl is sick she can always quit!”

Roblin edges toward the door and escapes into the protection of his limousine
.

“I still can’t see why two women like you should ferret out such utterly disgusting things,” he says
.

Once again they urge upon him the need to appoint a trained social worker as a woman factory inspector
.

The Premier grows impatient at the harangue. “I tell you it’s no job for a woman,” he says. “I have too much respect for women to give any of them a job like this.” He admits he’s greatly disturbed. He didn’t know such places existed in the highly publicized Chicago of the North. He’ll speak to his people about the problem. But he promises nothing
.

Out of this encounter was born the Political Equality League to fight for women’s rights. The provincial Liberals, more sensitive to the winds of change than Roblin’s Tories, jumped on the bandwagon and included a female suffrage plank in their platform. The Premier sneered at that, declaring it was supported only by “short haired women and long haired men.” When a delegation appeared before the provincial legislature on January 27, 1914, asking for the vote for women, Roblin was at his pompous best.

“Any civilization which has produced the noble women I see before me is good enough for me,” the Premier intoned. “Gentle woman, queen of the home … set apart by her great function of motherhood … and you say women are the equal of men.”
Dramatic pause
. “I tell you you are wrong. You do your sex an injustice, which I shall not allow to pass unchallenged. Women are superior to men, now and always!”

Roblin did not realize that he had fallen into a trap. Mrs. McClung, watching every gesture, memorizing every phrase, was about to take the role of the premier in a satirical presentation and to throw his words back at him.

The next night, in the Walker Theatre, the league produced its drama
The Women’s Parliament
, set in an all-female legislative assembly in a mythical province where only women held office and no man had the vote. The climax of the evening would come when a delegation of men appeared before the lady premier, abjectly appealing for the franchise, asking for joint guardianship of their children and a right to their own earnings. Nellie McClung, of course, took the Roblin role.

The play was presented twice in Winnipeg and again in Brandon and was an enormous success, thanks to Mrs. McClung’s parody of
the Roblin style. Almost every sentence produced a roar of laughter:

“…  man is made for something higher and better than voting. Men were made to support families. What is home without a bank account?… In this agricultural province, the man’s place is the farm. Shall I call man away from the useful plough and harrow to talk loud on street corners about things which do not concern him? Politics unsettle men and unsettled men means unsettled bills – broken furniture and broken vows – and divorce … When you ask for the vote you are asking me to break up peaceful, happy homes – to wreck innocent lives.…”

In the provincial election that followed both Mrs. McClung and J.S. Woodsworth campaigned for the Liberals. She stumped the province, addressed one hundred meetings, was even burned in effigy in Brandon, and loved every minute of it. Years later she recalled that “every day felt like the day before Christmas” during that tempestuous campaign, a campaign of which it was said that “never again will any politician in this province have the temerity to scorn women’s power.” Roblin won, but by a slim margin. The following year he was driven from office after Dafoe in the
Free Press
published revelations of political corruption. With the Liberals in power in 1916, Manitoba granted its women the vote, the first province in Canada to do so. This free wind, blowing out of the West, was soon to have its effect on the entire nation. That was something the boosters might have proudly proclaimed in their expensive real estate pamphlets, but by then the boosters were muted. For the boom had collapsed and sanity had returned to the Canadian West.

Chapter Eleven
Boom and Bust

1
Railway madness

2
The land frenzy

3
Get your feet wet

4
The lottery

5
Shattered dreams

1
Railway madness

By the time the prairie land boom reached its peak, the West had gone railway mad. Two new transcontinental lines were snaking across the prairies and piercing the wall of the Rockies to do battle with the
CPR
. Branch lines wriggled over the West, crossing and criss-crossing the plains, turning the land into a vast spider’s web of steel. Every community, no matter how small, felt itself entitled to at least one railway. Almost every community got one, and some got several.

Nobody seemed to care if rail services were duplicated. For seventy miles out of Saskatoon, two transcontinental lines paralleled each other, a mere gunshot apart. In one forty-mile strip east of Brandon, there were no fewer than eight east-west lines. Fourteen separate ribbons of steel crossed the Manitoba border into Saskatchewan. Who worried? The railway boom was the product of boosterism, and boosterism, in turn, thrived on the sound of clanging metal.

The railways created instant towns, “built while you wait,” in the words of a Chicago journalist, W.J. Shunks, who visited the West in 1911 and was astonished by what he saw: “Half way between Lake Superior and the Manitoba prairies, in the heart of the virgin forest, the Grand Trunk Pacific town builders put their pencils on the map and give orders. Presto! The new town of Graham, with its divisional railway shops, its roundhouses, its stores and banks, springs into being. At the edge of the prairie section they decree another larger railway city with immense repair shops, car works and foundries. Transcona is born! As the rails are flung Pacificward across the prairies, there springs into being a string of communities with important divisional centres of the Melville, Watrous, Wainwright and Edson type at regular intervals.”

One such town was Mirror, Alberta, named for the London
Daily Mirror
and located half way between Edmonton and Calgary, a divisional point on the
GTP
’s line from Winnipeg. The Mirror townsite was placed on the market on July 11, 1911. In just eleven hours, 577 town lots were sold, a rate of almost one a minute. The total purchase price was a quarter of a million dollars. Before the town was a month old, it had two banks, five stores, three lumberyards, a hotel, three restaurants, two pool rooms, a sash and door factory, and a newspaper.

To everyone in the West, railways spelled profit and progress.
Merchants saw their businesses skyrocket. Real estate men saw land prices zoom. Politicians gained power by promising a railway and stayed in power by getting one. Back in 1900, the veteran Prince Albert politician T.O. Davis had ensured his re-election when, with Clifford Sifton’s help, he got the Canadian Northern to announce the start of grading in the Melfort area. The previous year, Theodore Burrows had saved his political bacon with a similar ploy: when a construction train laden with rails puffed into his constituency, Burrows won his provincial seat easily even though his party was badly shattered elsewhere.

The railway boom was the product of prairie optimism, political opportunism, local boosterism, and the traditional hatred of the
CPR
. In the depression of the nineties, the Canadian Pacific managed to pay its dividends by keeping freight rates high and refusing to spend a dollar on branch lines; between 1893 and 1896, it didn’t build a mile of track. One can scarcely blame it for this policy – by contrast, the
CPR
’s American counterpart, the Northern Pacific, went into receivership in 1893 – but the West did blame it. Every town considered itself the victim of the
CPR
monopoly; thus the climate was ripe for the arrival on the scene of those two remarkable entrepreneurs, William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, whose Canadian Northern Railway grew piecemeal, in a Topsy-like fashion, bit by bit, here and there, thriving on the railway hunger and financed by bonds guaranteed by two levels of government.

The two partners, both knighted in 1911 for their achievements (not long before those same achievements began to pale in the taxpayers’ eyes), were a remarkable if dissimilar pair. Mackenzie, a wiry, sharp-featured financial wizard with a neat imperial beard and an agile mind, was the physical antithesis of his massive, slow-moving partner, a bluff and rough-hewn ex-blacksmith with a black spade beard. Mackenzie was a Conservative, Mann a Liberal. Mackenzie was a swift thinker, Mann slower to make up his mind. Yet the two complemented one another, Mackenzie working on his Tory friends while Mann handled the Grits. Like police interrogators who operate in pairs, the two entrepreneurs played alternate Good Guy – Bad Guy roles in their dealings. One would use the other’s obstinacy as an excuse to drive a harder bargain, explaining that any other position would cause the breakup of the partnership.

Railways were their real politics and their only passion. Mann’s three brothers were railway men, and Mann himself had brought the first locomotive into Winnipeg in 1876. Mackenzie, when asked why
he refused to sell out to the rival Grand Trunk, replied, “Because I like building railroads.” It was true. The acquisition of money for money’s sake was of less interest to both men than the actual financing and construction of lines of steel. It was just as well, since both were destined to end up with very little.

Both were workaholics in the best Calvinist tradition and both were intensely religious. Mackenzie was a Methodist, Mann a Presbyterian. In his early days as a
CPR
contractor in the mountains, Mann used to spend his Sunday evenings hammering out Sankey hymns, accompanying his own clear tenor on a piano he had brought with him. Behind that rough, cigar-chewing façade was hidden a sensitive, even mystical character. Donald Mann was more at home on the frontier than in the boardroom. He preferred solitary walks in the wilderness to the clamour of the city. Like Mackenzie, he believed implicitly in the power of prayer, and when his partner died in 1923, Mann publicly urged the country to pray for him.

The two first met in the summer of 1884 when both were working as contractors for the
CPR
. Mackenzie was forty, Mann thirty-six. Mackenzie, the humourless ex-schoolteacher from Kirkfield, Ontario, had attempted several vocations with varying success. He had opened a lumber business near his home, which failed to prosper. He had worked cutting ties for a railway north of Toronto and then, with that experience, had eased himself into contracting. Faced with the need to raise a five-thousand-dollar performance bond on a small contract between Lindsay and Haliburton, Mackenzie, who was broke, managed to borrow the money from the mother superior of a Montreal convent, which his wife, a Roman Catholic, had attended. That technique – to build railroads on borrowed funds – was to be used again and again in the years to come. To build the Canadian Northern, Mackenzie and Mann would eventually borrow more than three hundred million.

Mackenzie’s reputation for getting the job done on time eventually brought him a contract on the
CPR
’s mountain section. Mann was already in the West. He’d risen from blacksmith to lumberman to railway contractor, a great, brawny figure of a man with an unconventional reputation. There is a story that Mann was once challenged to a duel by a pompous German army officer. Invited to choose the weapons, Mann opted for broadaxes. That mordant decision ended all talk of duelling.

The two men teamed up in 1886 to help build the
CPR
’s branch line
through Maine, but conditions in the West were such that nothing could be accomplished on the prairies until 1895, when Mann convinced Mackenzie to help him buy the charter and finish building the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company line. Mackenzie by then had established a double reputation as a result of his successful amalgamation and electrification of the Toronto tramway system. On the one hand he was known for his financial acumen and for always completing his contracts on time. On the other, thanks to some shady dealings in Toronto, including the bribing of public officials, he was also known as a sharp and unethical operator. But the Bank of Commerce cared less about ethics than it did about results. With Mackenzie’s name linked to Mann’s company, it advanced the money to finish the railway. The two partners repaid the bank with more borrowed money – the proceeds from the sale of bonds, which, being guaranteed by an eager Manitoba government, were almost as good as cash.

That was to be the pattern followed by the partners for the next two decades. Mackenzie handled the money, Mann the construction. At first they had no other plan than to build or buy up small rail lines. Then, in 1899, they formed the Canadian Northern “from a series of disconnected and apparently unconnectable projections of steel hanging in suspense,” to quote David Blythe Hanna, their new superintendent and future vice-president. It was an astonishing performance. Hanna likened it to the main title of a motion picture in which a handful of sticks, tossed into the air, miraculously form themselves into words.

In 1901, the two men got their jerrybuilt enterprise under way by using Manitoba’s anti-
CPR
sentiment to outbid the older railway for the unfinished Northern Pacific lines projected from Duluth to Winnipeg. In this they had the support of the press and the politicians of both parties who had been working for two decades to get freight rates reduced. By guaranteeing a rate reduction, and promising never to amalgamate with the
CPR
, the partners struck a fantastic bargain with the Manitoba government, which agreed to lease the Northern Pacific line with an option to purchase and turn it over to Mackenzie and Mann. More, it also agreed to guarantee the partners’ bonds on a line to the lakehead, which would compete with the
CPR
, as well as on the unfinished extension south of the border to Duluth. In short, a Canadian province was backing bonds on railway construction in another province and also in another country.