The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (53 page)

Few in the East, least of all Sir Wilfrid, had believed that Mackenzie and Mann could transform the jerrybuilt sections of their line into
another
transcontinental road. They reckoned without the Western hunger for railways. Not only were the prairie provinces eager to shore up the Canadian Northern’s credit by guaranteeing its bonds, but the federal government also found, in the end, that it too must support the upstarts. Between 1903 and 1911, Mackenzie and Mann got $56 million in bond guarantees from the Laurier administration. By 1914, Robert Borden’s Conservatives had poured in another $49 million. But who cared? The Canadian Northern was stitching the country together with ten thousand miles of steel. The West had what it wanted. Only the insiders realized the hollowness of the victory.

2
The land frenzy

Winnipeg throve and grew fat on the railway boom. By 1911 no fewer than twenty-four separate lines of steel radiated out from the miracle city of the prairies. Its balloon-like expansion could not keep pace with the demand. More wheat poured into Winnipeg in a year than into any other market on the continent. The Canadian Northern’s new yards at St. Boniface could handle twenty-five hundred cars, the new
CPR
yard at Transcona thirteen thousand. And it still wasn’t enough.

The world’s eyes were focused on Winnipeg. A Chicago paper announced that no city in the United States had “such an absolute and complete command over the wholesale trade of so vast an area.” The New York
Commercial
predicted its population would reach three-quarters of a million by 1920. The
Canadian Annual Review
predicted a million.

The city buzzed with the clamour of construction. By 1910, Eaton’s had completed an eight-storey building and was planning to go to twelve storeys. Fourteen banks moved their regional head offices to the city. By 1912 the Empire’s largest stockyards were completed to handle the flow of cattle to Europe. Seventy-one apartment buildings, sixty-eight industrial buildings, thirty-seven warehouses, and fifteen movie theatres were under construction that year. Contractors couldn’t handle all the business; there wasn’t enough cement.

Winnipeg merchants enriched themselves by opening branches in the new towns along the extended lines of steel. Some communities sprang up even before the railway reached them. Elbert Hubbard, the American businessman turned writer – his best-known work was the popular
A Message to Garcia –
visited Winnipeg in 1913 and was astonished at what he saw: “Business booms and bustles.… Skyscrapers go up overnight. You remain away from Winnipeg six months and when you come back you have to hire somebody to conduct you around the town.”

Winnipeg, then, provided the spark that ignited the prairie land boom. Winnipeg’s real estate men invaded the cities of the Far West, buying up blocks of property, sub-dividing the bald prairie, pushing development, inflating prices. One Winnipeg syndicate owned 250,000 acres of land in Edmonton. Another bought $800,000 worth in Moose Jaw for subdivision. The entire townsite of Dunsmore, Alberta, at the eastern terminus of the Crow’s Nest Pass, was owned and promoted by Winnipeggers.

The specifics of the land boom boggle the mind. Everybody – clergymen, actresses, academics, farmers, politicians, blacksmiths – went insane over real estate. As Bob Edwards put it, everybody had a lot on his mind. The boom began in 1906 following the creation of the two new provinces. In February of that year the Calgary
Herald
nervously reported “some of the earmarks of a genuine boom,” and said that the more conservative citizens were worried about it reaching the frenzied stage. The danger ended with the recession of 1907–8, but the frenzy was not long in coming after the recovery of 1909. By the
following year everybody was affected, including Calgary’s “more conservative citizens.” By midsummer, 1911, it was moving ahead at full steam. By November it was out of control.

Clerks, barbers, motormen, storekeepers all became instant realtors. In 1908, Saskatoon had eight real estate brokers; by 1912 it had 257. In the same period, with both the Grand Trunk Pacific and Canadian Northern moving in, the number of real estate brokers in Calgary jumped from 54 to 443. They employed some two thousand salesmen, which meant that 10 per cent of the adult males in that city were involved in selling land. So great was the demand that Calgary’s forty-eight architects couldn’t keep up with it. Some contractors had to go as far as Australia to get their buildings designed.

To be a realtor one needed no more than a hole-in-the-wall office, a counter, a table and a few chairs, a typewriter, and some correspondence paper. This was all that D.E. MacIntyre and his partner had when they opened a real estate office in Moose Jaw in 1910. MacIntyre had been a storekeeper; now, with an investment of one hundred dollars and no experience, he meant to cash in on the boom; and he did. In their first month the partners cleared eight hundred dollars. “Better than storekeeping,” said MacIntyre, “and no butter to handle!”

In Edmonton, a conductor and a motorman actually opened a real estate office in a streetcar, displaying maps of a subdivision in the motorman’s compartment so that any passenger could take a fling while riding to his destination. This was small stuff compared to success stories such as that of Bert A. Stringer, a former cattle buyer who turned himself into a realtor and made so much money out of real estate in Calgary and its environs that by 1912 he was planning a modern building on Eighth Avenue, complete with a glass-enclosed roof garden, “a luxurious catering establishment which will rival the cafe in the clouds of the Call Building, San Francisco, and excel anything of which Canada now boasts.” Stringer, whose brother Arthur was one of the country’s leading writers, was listed in Bradstreet’s as “one of Calgary’s busiest, brainiest boosters.” And he was only thirty-two years old.

Edmonton was also in the grip of the land frenzy. Some four hundred real estate offices lined Jasper Avenue to First Street and ran all the way to 97th. Each office employed runners – as many as ten – who pushed subdivisions on commission. Unlicensed curbside brokers operating near the railway station grabbed strangers off the trains and foisted lots on them. Their profit was enormous, for they had no
overhead and they could option a lot for as little as a dollar and peddle it for as much as one hundred dollars. Some sold non-existent lots and pocketed all the cash. One smart young man from Saskatoon, Seth Isaac Cook, invented a title for himself – “Cook and Bruce” (there was, of course, no Bruce) – sold an unfortunate newcomer named J. W. Caldwell two lots for a down payment of two thousand dollars, and then decamped with one of the city’s prettiest girls. When Caldwell tried to claim his property he found it was already owned by a man in Ontario.

The frenzy fuelled itself. People scrambled to buy property, terrified that the best real estate would be gone before they got their chance. In Moose Jaw in 1913, a British visitor was astonished at the spectacle of a drunk, staggering about the streets and crying jubilantly, “I’ve got some lots! I’ve got some lots!” Drunks didn’t count, but when some famous and extraordinary figures were also caught up in the euphoria of the moment, they lent credence to the mania.

Sarah Bernhardt stimulated sales in Calgary when, on one of her farewell tours in January, 1913, she announced through her manager that she intended to purchase lots in that city. Jan Kubelik, the great violinist, made a similar announcement in Winnipeg. The tallest man in Canada, Joseph Lawrence, was photographed buying the first lot in the instant community of Maharg, which advertised itself as “The Debtless City.”

At the Saskatoon Methodist Conference in 1912, Dr. A.J. Sparling felt the need to rap the knuckles of certain men of the cloth who, he said, were spending more time in the real estate offices than in visiting the homes of their congregations. His chief target, the Reverend M.M. Bennett, was unmoved. “I have bought real estate and still hold it and thank God I have it,” he declared.

Real estate and local politics became hopelessly entangled. City councils tended to be influenced and often dominated by realtors who used their political power and inside knowledge to make paper fortunes. In Edmonton in 1911, one streetcar line was diverted to serve the subdivision of Inglewood, in which several councillors had an interest. In 1909 the real estate lobby on the Calgary council pushed construction of a streetcar line, which increased property values. The following year, certain Calgary councillors leaked valuable details of the Grand Trunk Pacific’s route into the city to their real estate friends; by 1912, the value of property along the route had risen to one thousand dollars a front foot. The presence of a new rail line always
meant astronomical profits for property owners along the right of way. One single lot along the Canadian Northern’s route into Calgary, close to the new terminal, sold in 1911 for a staggering thirty-seven thousand dollars.

At the same time the Canadian Pacific announced it would build car shops at Ogden, four miles from Calgary. The project would cover six acres and eventually employ more than five thousand men. F.C. “Freddy” Lowes, the founder of the largest real estate business in the West, was the first to grasp the profit potential of this move. In what was described as the biggest real estate transaction in the city’s history, he paid $775,000 for a subdivision directly to the south of the new locomotive sheds. In gratitude, no doubt, he called it “Ceepeear.”

No single Westerner symbolized the real estate boom as handsomely as did Freddy Lowes. He flung money about like a gambler, which, of course, he was. In 1912, the same year in which he launched Ceepeear, he laid out another $650,000 for residential property in Edmonton. He controlled five million acres of farm land in the province, had offices in all the Alberta settlements, and was planning to open more, not only in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal but also in New York and London, for it did not enter Freddy Lowes’s handsome head that Western progress was finite, that booms do not go on forever, that fevers burn themselves out, and that much insanity is temporary.

The English were charmed by Lowes and caught up in the magic of his success. The papers wrote romantic pieces about him, all exclamatory. The
Sphere
, which carried an article under his by-line extolling Western Canadian real estate (“The Romance of City Building”), called him “the master builder of the Canadian West.” Well it might; he had induced English investors to sink half a million dollars in Alberta properties.
Master builder
: that had a nice, substantial ring.

Lowes fitted the Calgary entrepreneurial image. A one-time amateur boxer and lacrosse player from Brampton, Ontario, he had arrived in the city at the start of the first boom in 1906 – a good-looking, square-jawed insurance agent, clean shaven, hair parted neatly in the middle, a pearl stickpin in his tie, smooth as silk and a born salesman. By 1911 he had his first million, and he acted the part. He lived expansively, breeding carriage horses and winning first prizes for his entries in the Calgary horse show. Cars were his passion as well as horses; and it was impossible not to notice his passing, for he drove a five-thousand-dollar Pierce Arrow sedan. That wasn’t enough for Lowes: he owned two Pierce Arrows. In fact, at one point, he had
four
cars. Once, while
visiting California, he turned up at the Santa Monica auto races and was so taken with one entry that he bought the car on the spot. That was Lowes’s style: act on impulse. He encouraged his customers to do the same.

Calgary warmed to Freddy Lowes. He refereed boxing matches, turned up at hockey games to cheer the local team, thought nothing of bringing in an American landscape architect to beautify one of his subdivisions. Once, on an impulse, he wrote out a cheque for ten thousand dollars for the
YMCA
, the biggest single donation in the association’s history.

For Lowes was another who thought big. To create his best-known subdivision, Roxborough Place, he tore down a hillside with hydraulic nozzles and raised a valley to form a plain, on which he installed sidewalks, curbs, and streetlights. The investment cost him $7.5 million, but that did not faze him. “Here, where the great railway companies meet and the farmers … come in ever-increasing numbers … the pace of progress is astonishing and shows no sign of slackening,” he declared in 1913. But the signs were there for the prudent to see, and the pace was already slackening as he would soon learn to his dismay. Three years after he penned those words, Freddy Lowes was broke.

3
Get your feet wet

Something fundamental was happening to the West. Hundreds of thousands had come for land. Land was something to hold on to, to grow with. Land was productive; it required hard work; but it was, in the long run, like the principal in a bank account, something that provided a regular income and therefore should not be dissipated.

But now land was merely a chip in a game of chance in which every man saw himself as dealer. People were buying land not to cultivate but to turn over as quickly as possible for the highest possible profit. When J. Burgon Bickersteth, the young theological student, arrived in Edmonton from England, he was struck by the fact that all the people talked about was real estate profits – not crops or production or new farming methods. How serious they were, he thought, so single-minded! They never seemed to relax. The Westerner, he concluded, “gives one the impression of being engaged in a great dollar-making campaign – a campaign which is lifelong, knowing no peace, not even a truce. Real estate and business matters are his one topic of conversation.”

Of course, it was a distorted view. Not all Westerners were like that; on the farms men still tilled the soil, and women toiled with them. But when Bickersteth arrived in Alberta at the height of the property craze the only topic in the cities
was
real estate profit. The boom mentality was a disease that people caught from each other. Like young men who rush off to war, not for reasons of patriotism but because everybody is doing it, so thousands followed their peer groups in the mad scramble to purchase property; it was the thing to do. Not much more than a decade before, the Klondike strike had touched off a similar mania. Now the West was caught up in a different kind of gold rush, and the newspapers were again full of stories of those who had struck it rich.