The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (54 page)

Elbert Hubbard came back from Saskatoon with his notebook crammed full of stories of fabulous overnight wealth: O.M. Helgerson was so broke in 1908 he almost had to pawn his watch; but in seventeen months he had made $238,403.87. (How impressive that decimal figure sounded: Helgerson’s fortune could be counted to the last penny!) And look at J.F. Cairns: in 1902 he opened a bakeshop; in 1912 he owned a department store. Charlie Wentz subdivided his lumberyard when the boom struck.
Presto!
He made a profit of a quarter of a million. Charlie would never have to work again (although he did keep on working, piling up more and more property). Nor would N.G. Boggs, the former button clerk from Donegal who made a million, buying and selling town lots one at a time, or Frank Cahill, M.P., who had gone broke in Sault Ste. Marie and started out once more with a one-eared mule and a cow, and would now again be worth at least two million if he liquidated. But, of course, Frank Cahill had no intention of liquidating; like everybody else he was certain the boom would roar on.

No wonder people were dazzled: there were lots in Calgary that jumped in price from $2,000 in 1905 to $300,000 in 1912. Some lots changed hands three times in three hours. D.E. MacIntyre, the prairie storekeeper turned realtor, sold the same house twice in one day. The Mayor of Edmonton said it was a slow day when he didn’t make a profit of fifty dollars over lunch. In 1912, a quarter-section homestead on the edge of Edmonton doubled in price so that the new owner who had paid $35,000 in thirty days was asking $73,000.

But that kind of profit was illusory. Nobody paid cash in full. “Low down payment” was the clarion cry. You could get a lot in Pleasant Park, Saskatoon, for a dollar down. You could buy lots in Calgary’s Belfast and Fairview districts for payments of a dollar a week for five years. By then, it was said, the property would be at the city’s heart “with big skyscrapers going up all around.” Property was turned over again and again on the down payment principle. Profits looked big – on paper.

The real estate promoters in each city fanned the flames of hysteria with screaming full-page advertisements that flattered, seduced, cajoled, and even bullied the customers but which were as spurious as those for cancer cures that ran in the same papers. One Calgary entrepreneur, C.T. Lewis, invariably referred to himself in his full-page advertisements as “Millionaire C.T. Lewis,” a title that fitted the Western get-rich-quick image as surely as “Baron” or “Duke” fitted a European peer. “The first installment of my millions has arrived,” Lewis declared in one of his paid pronouncements. “I will now start giving them away.”

The real estate hucksters, in urging prospective customers to “come on in and get your feet wet,” used various standard come-ons:

1.
Flattery
. The really smart, go-ahead individual who has brains and foresight will get in on the ground floor before prices rocket.

2.
Greed:
We’re here to make you rich: don’t delay. Let us help you
NOW
to become a millionaire.

3.
Shame:
You fool – are you going to let opportunity pass you by, with your stick-in-the-mud attitude? Repent! Buy now or you’ll regret it.

4.
Security:
These are “snaps,” sure-things; there’s absolutely
NO
risk; profit is virtually guaranteed
IF
you act
NOW!

WHY STICK IN A RUT?
Show the world you are going to do something more than merely exist…

• • •

DONT DIE POOR…
Take a pointer from your neighbour who has become a millionaire…
Do as he did…
• • •

THE CERTAINTY NOT THE POSSIBILITY OF PROFITS
A Little Buys a Lot in Hampstead…

• • •

MR. MAN-IT IS YOUR MOVE
Do You Want the Profit?
“Get It While You Can”
Do Not Be Stampeded Into Unbelief, But,
Instead, Be Influenced by Investigation…

• • •

THE LATCH STRING OF OPPORTUNITY
Is Albert Park. We invite you to
lift this latch; it is to your
advantage to do so…

• • •

There was something tantalizing about the text of these gigantic advertisements with their flaring headlines and their vast but inviting expanses of breathless prose. They belonged to the same literary tradition as the earlier pamphlets of the Immigration Department, for they offered hope, opportunity, security, and success. But they were far more florid, far more extreme. Yet it is possible to believe that many who read them had been softened up by the earlier pitchmen and made susceptible to this new assault on their imaginations. By 1912, many who had made good in the West were ready to believe that the printed literature that brought them to the new land wasn’t too extreme. It might have been harder going than they had expected, but the promise had been fulfilled. They had prospered, hadn’t they? Now they were being invited to prosper again.

Reading, say, the big advertisement by the McCutcheon brothers for Connaught Park, a projected subdivision in Regina six blocks from the nearest streetcar line, a settler might easily have been persuaded to invest some of his savings. “Big Money Is Going to Be Made by the Man Who Buys in
CONNAUGHT PARK NOW
” the headline shouted. “
IT IS BETTER THAN A GOLD MINE:

…Any man or woman who has a hundred
dollars to invest should not hesitate to
secure one or more lots. They will be worth
double the money in a few months.

We advise you to buy just as quickly as
you possibly can. In doing this we are advising
you as we would a friend. You cannot lose:
it is safer than a gold mine; it is sure. You
can see it growing in value.

The people who achieve success, are the men
who enjoy the good things of life that money
buys, are the men who think quickly and act
unhesitatingly. If you put this matter off
until some other time the chances are you
won’t get in at all.…

Since nobody intended to live on any of this land but only to turn it over for the fastest possible profit, large numbers of investors didn’t even bother to inspect their property. Out-of-towners bought Calgary lots below the high-water mark of the Bow River. Thousands owned lots so far out on the empty prairie that it would be half a century before the land was actually developed. By 1911 all land within three to five miles of the Calgary post office was in the hands of speculators and selling for between fifty and three hundred dollars a lot. One section five and a half miles from the city sold for a million dollars. And there were at least ten subdivisions more than ten miles from the town centre. In Saskatoon, even after its boundaries were extended, there was enough subdivided land beyond the city limits to accommodate houses for half a million people.

“I’m subdividing my farm,” an Edmonton lawyer told a friend in 1911. “It’s half way between Edmonton and St. Albert. I haven’t decided yet whether to make it a subdivision of Edmonton or St. Albert.”

Western optimism, that admirable quality that sprang out of the painful but ultimately rewarding experience of settlement, was running out of control. The Calgary
Herald
of 1911 gloated over “a future of marvellous and ever-increasing prosperity reaching out ten years hence.” It was only reflecting the giddy conceits of the city fathers who were planning electric trams to run to Banff, Lethbridge, and Medicine Hat and even talking of diverting the course of the Elbow River to
accommodate the Canadian Northern. Nothing was considered too grandiose, too impossible in those heady days.

Even a devastating tornado in July, 1912, failed to dampen the spirits of Regina. The twister wrecked thirty-six blocks in the city’s heart, destroying five hundred buildings and causing three hundred injuries and thirty-one deaths at a cost of $5 million. The Regina
Leader
brushed it all away as a man brushes an insect from his shoulder: “Nothing – mark the word – nothing – can check Regina’s progress.… There is no fear of discouragement, no fear of the future. Trouble, difficulty, they are but spurring on our people. Disaster cannot check the advancement of a city with Regina’s opportunities and with the spirit of her people.”

Disaster of a different kind was already looming on the financial horizon, but few saw it coming. The most intelligent and, arguably, the most perceptive men in the West were blinded by the get-rich-quick frenzy. The president of the University of Alberta and an academic colleague owned a double corner lot at Whyte and 103rd in Edmonton, which they had purchased before the land boom. In 1912 they were offered thirty-three thousand dollars cash for the property. But like almost everybody, they had stars in their eyes and so turned it down. A few years later, unable to afford to keep up the tax payments, they lost it all.

4
The lottery

As the land boom roared to its climax, Westerners thought nothing of standing in queue for hours to pay inflated prices for property they had never seen. In Calgary, on a chilly April day in 1912, men stood in the pouring rain right through the night for a chance to buy a maximum of two lots, each priced at eleven hundred dollars, in a
CPR
subdivision optimistically named Sunalta. In Lethbridge, hundreds came prepared to camp for days in front of the land office to file for title to farm land until the authorities solved the problem by chalking a square on the pavement to mark each man’s place and photographing him standing on it.

But the most astonishing queue of all formed up in Edmonton on the night of May 12, 1912, when some fifteen hundred people waited as long as sixteen hours, not to buy a lot, but simply to take part in a lottery that
might
allow them to buy a lot.

The land was part of the reserve deeded to the Hudson’s Bay Company as part of the agreement made in 1870 when the firm ceded its territorial rights in the North West Territories to the new confederation of Canada. It was seen as prime property, six thousand acres surrounding the old trading post near the heart of the city. With the land boom at its height, the company decided to put up thirteen hundred lots for sale and agreed to spend half a million dollars on Portage Avenue, which ran through the heart of the new subdivision. In its turn, the city promised to add a double-track streetcar line. In the eyes not only of Edmontonians but also in those of real estate developers everywhere in the West, this property was truly a gold mine. How could it miss? With prices leaping up from day to day, each of these lots was the equal of a handsome bank account.