Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 675
It is argued that the waterway project is of no use because ocean boats are not lake boats and vice versa. One of the most interesting of the recent magazine articles on the subject contrasts the typical ocean boat with the typical lake boat. An average of ten modern upper-lake freighters shows a length of 535 feet to a beam of 58 feet and a draft of 27-½, along with 303 horse power. But the corresponding ocean freighter has a length of 427 feet to a beam of 55, and a draft of 32 and the horse power is 533. The lake freighters’ hatches are in a continuous series on 24 feet centres, the ocean boat quite diversified. The lake boat is loaded and unloaded by gear on the dock, the ocean boat carries its own cargo gear. But the variation of draft surely only reflects the draft of the present Welland Canal and surely all this only means that unified traffic will change the type of boat, that terminal facilities for loading and unloading will also be unified. To argue from the plant existing now as if nature made it so for ever, is like arguing the impossibility of a modern railway from the existing fact of a narrow gauge line, with a wood burning engine and hand brakes. Take a big wide look and it all alters. All that we know is that, on the whole, boats of fourteen feet draft are not suitable for both services. But a boat of twenty-five foot draft is purely another matter. And we have to remember that in discussing the project in a large way we are to think not of the boats afloat now but of the boats to be built then. Ocean boats, it is said, cost more per ton than lake boats: but the new type of boat may, as it were, split the difference. The extra cost per ton may still be economical by the saving of transhipment.
One turns to the question of cost; if our share of the waterway costs $200,000,000 and carries an annual interest charge of $7,000,000 where, it is asked do we get the money? The answer is, we have it now. In the years 1930-35 the Dominion of Canada, as apart from provinces and municipalities, spent $183,000,000 on the relief of idle men and loaned to the provinces for similar purposes $97,000,000. It is better to spend the money on new canals than to pay unemployed men to sit and fish in the old ones. If there is anything in the old economics, it is that money wisely and properly spent on public development, must in the end bring a return: and if there is anything in the new economics it is that the secret of economic activity is to ‘start something’, so that the coagulated wealth of the rich, clotted into the ore, called invesement, is smashed into the small coin of ‘purchasing power’ in the hands of the many. In the old days of Barnum’s circus a man in front of the tent used to shout ‘Roll up, tumble up, if you can’t get up any other way, throw your money up’. We need that man back.
The only trouble for us Canadians lies in the words “honestly and properly”. We no sooner see government money in sight than we line up in sections, with local interest everywhere clamorous. Worse than that, if one may say it very gently, in dealing with government money we are individually not just quite exactly what you’d call honest. In our private lives we are straight as a string. We wouldn’t cheat a bar-tender out of a nickle. We can sit down to a game of poker and never use more than four aces. We wouldn’t give a lead quarter to a taxi-man. But let us deal with the Government, and this is different. We have somehow grown up with the idea that the Government is there to be cheated, that, of course, it must pay too much, get too little, expropriate high and sell low.
So when we do begin to build the waterway, let us open the first canal with prayer.
CHAPTER THREE
SO THIS IS WINNIPEG
WINNIPEG A WORLD City — The Winnipeg that Was — The First Manitoba Boom — Fool’s Paradise or Golden Age? — What About the Next Boom?
The visitor to the West, — the kind of visitor who writes up his visit, — is supposed, on his first morning in Winnipeg, to throw wide open his window and say, ‘So this is Winnipeg’! I didn’t. It was too cold. And there was no one to hear me except the waiter with the tea, and he knew that it was Winnipeg.
But I kept thinking it just the same. For Winnipeg in a sense means more to me, or at least goes back further in my recollections than it does even to most of the people who live in it. It carries me back to the days of the first Manitoba ‘boom’, and the recollections have with them all the colour and wonder of the first recollections of childhood.
* * * * *
“Winnipeg, the capital of Manitoba and chief city of Western Canada, situated at the junction of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers, 60 miles N. of the United States and 45 m. S. of Lake Winnipeg,” — so runs its eulogy in the most truthful of the encyclopedias. The Canadian census of 1931 adds, “pop., 218,000”.
Winnipeg is one of the world’s cities. Everybody everywhere who has heard of anywhere has heard of it. This is not because of its size. Cities of 218,000 are so common in the world that many of them have never even heard of one another. Winnipeg is a good deal smaller than Stoke, or Dayton, or Stuttgart or Akron: Chin Kiang is twice the size of it, and Bradford and Memphis and Dallas and Mannheim all beat it easily. In the outside world, if it is not wicked to say so, Winnipeg is far better known than Toronto. Indeed I have always found that the only thing in regard to Toronto which far-away people know for certain is that McGill University is in it. Now the betting would be that practically everybody in Bradford and Dallas knows where Winnipeg is, but hardly anybody in Bradford knows where Dallas is, and in that they’ve nothing on the people in Dallas.
When then is Winnipeg a world-city, a city known to all the world?
At first sight it seems a little hard to see why. Its name only means “dirty water”. Its two rivers lost all economic meaning years ago. They are only useful now to build bridges across. As to being 60 miles north of the United States, you would say the same of Bowmanville, Ontario, and who cares about that?
Worse than that. Winnipeg is cold. It is all right to say that the place has a cosmopolitan atmosphere, — I admit that it has, — but even a cosmopolitan atmosphere needs a little steam heat. Winnipeg has “six month’s winter”. So at least its warm admirer Vilhjalmur Stefansson admits in his defence of its climate. The average temperature in January is, — I forget what, — dam cold, anyway. Even admitting that on bright winter days the thermometer often rises to zero, the place is cold.
Those who love Winnipeg, — and they all do, — explain that though it is cold it is “dry”, and that being dry, you don’t feel the cold. People always defend their home town in this way: London explains away its fog, Pittsburgh its smoke and Aberdeen its rain. It appears that the fog is not fog at all but mist, that the smoke is only carbon, and that the rain isn’t really wet. So with that plea that Winnipeg is “dry”. It may be, I saw no sign of it while I was there, — it seemed, — indoors anyway, — wetter than Aberdeen.
More than that, — the place is not only cold, it’s drafty. It has the two widest streets of any capital city in the world, — Main Street and Portage Avenue, — but even they can’t hold all the wind. With the thermometer at 30 below zero, and the wind behind him, a man walking on Main Street, Winnipeg, knows which side of him is which.
No; the only way to defend the climate of Winnipeg is to go the whole way with Vilhjalmur Stefannson and accept the doctrine the “colder the better”. In that priceless book of his called The Northward Course of Empire he explains that Mankind needs the cold, needs the stimulus of it and the energy that’s in it. The languor of the tropics kills, the rigour of the north inspires and elevates. The progress of mankind is made by the cold, fights northward into the cold, using each new art of life and artifice of science to live further and further north.
It’s a grand theory. Think of it next time you walk on Main or Portage with the January wind astern. Leave the tropics for the bums, the loafers and the poets, — let them have “a book of verses under a bough, a cup of wine and thou, singing beside them in the wilderness.” But give me a tenderloin steak in a grill room on Main Street with a full-sized woman raised in the cattle country.
* * * * *
No, — Winnipeg is an all the world city, because its rise was part of the history of the world, — because its creation was one of the romances of the development of North America, — and because its fate, — its ‘booms’ and collapses, ardent hopes and bitter disillusionments, lie as it were close to the central mysteries of our economic life.
Winnipeg is a world city because the circumstances of its birth drew to it the eyes of all the world. It was like the sudden rise of San Francisco on the shores of the ‘Southern Sea’ or of Johannesburg on the unknown veldt of South Africa. It marked the invasion of mankind into a new and unoccupied territory. Till then ‘Rupertsland’ was one vast unknown emptiness. The stars circled in the Arctic sky over the snow that crackled at 40 below zero. And then, in no time as it were, all was changed, and the Winnipeg that replaced Fort Garry was as widely and as suddenly known to all the world as the Johannesburg of ten years later.
This is why to many people who, like myself, had never seen it, Winnipeg has been a city of far-away memories, that carries in its name all the vividness, the poignancy and the meaning that goes with the memory of childhood.
I remember how the place was born, and those about me, the grown-up people of my family, had a part in its rising fortunes.
* * * * *
The ‘boom’ was of the years ‘80 and ‘81, and ‘82, but the great change began ten years before that with the taking over of the North West Territory as part of the Dominion of Canada, and the setting up of a little corner of it as a province. Till then Fort Garry was a fortified trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company at the junction of the Assiniboine and the Red Rivers. ‘Winnipeg’ was just a name locally given to a group of houses and trading stores scattered along the wagon-road beside the river where it met the portage track that led across the neck of land to the Assiniboine. Here lived the ‘free-traders’, men not connected with the company but trading and dealing on their own.
The creation of Manitoba made a shift in the whole scene, — like the “transformation scenes” of the theatre, so wonderful half a century ago. The whole place, Fort Garry and all, went right-about-face, and looked south. Till then, access had been from the north by the one ship a year that the Company sent through the Hudson’s Straits: by this way came Lord Selkirk’s colonists of 1811: by this way came, in 1842 to the service of the company, R. M. Ballantyne, the story writer whose books for a generation of English children were the only twilight that lit up the northern snow.
The route was over the ocean and through the straits and across the bay to Fort Churchill, up the river to Lake Winnipeg, then 45 miles up the Red River to Fort Garry. Ballantyne took from the middle of May till the end of September to make the journey from Gravesend to Fort Garry.
Quicker access than that was needed now. Lord Wolesley’s Expedition had helped to develop the route by Fort William and the Lake of the Woods. The rapid settlement of Minnesota offered a still easier approach. The railways had reached St. Paul in the middle 60’s. From there stage coaches ran, even in the 60’s, three hundred miles across the Minnesota prairie to Georgetown, Minnesota, on the Red River. They made the trip in five days, — fast going! From there, as the crow flies, it was 250 miles to Fort Garry: but the little Red River steamer, “The Pioneer”, was no crow: it followed the river and made it 500 miles and took 8 days to it. From railhead to Fort Garry was a fortnight’s trip, but you had to wait for the steamer, from one day to three weeks according to circumstances.
As soon as the province was established, everything moved with a rush. There was created a sort of economic vacuum and the air, an inblowing of men and goods, came rushing in. To begin with, settlement was pouring into the Minnesota district. It was beginning to be known in the outside world that the alluvial soil of the Red River district was even richer than Minnesota. Lord Wolseley’s expedition had left behind it a regiment of British soldiers and after that had gone, there remained an ‘Ontario Battalion’ for which supplies must be brought in. There was the government to be housed, buildings to be made, and new settlers to be provided for.
So here was Winnipeg, — a little place of 250 people in 1870, — with its hands full and its beds overfull and its saloons more than overfull, — hammering away night and day to make houses, and clamouring for lumber and transport — and traders and adventurers and behind them, slowly gathering to a head, the rising wave of real settlers.... The economic vacuum kept the little place at high pressure. Lumber that was worth seven dollars a thousand feet in Ontario sold for seventy dollars, coal oil, worth fifty cents a gallon ‘back east’, sold for five dollars ‘out west’. No wonder the freighters could charge four dollars a hundred pounds for the Red River trip alone. It was, — in the ‘economic’ sense,— ‘worth’ it.
That meant, if you analyze it out economically, that there was lots of money in Winnipeg to buy things and few things to buy; that there was the ‘money’ sent for the soldiers and the money for the government and the private money of the new traders and store-builders and merchants; and this means, after complete analysis of what we call ‘money’ and ‘credit’ that there were a lot of people in Winnipeg who had a ‘claim’ on the goods and services of the East and could say ‘send me this and send me that’: and the only trouble was to find the transport, the way to get it there.
Then came the intensification of economic activity called a ‘boom’. And the whole thing was sound, absolutely. No wind, no bubble about it; just solid economic fact, that can be repeated over and over again, — on the Peace River, in British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, in Northern Ontario, more or less all over Canada, wherever undeveloped resources, labour, capital and directing brains all come together. We have never understood the nature of a ‘boom’. We look at it as a sort of economic fever. Not at all; a ‘boom’ is a burst of economic health.
* * * * *
No wonder things move fast in such a world, — where everything was young, everything to be done, and where everybody could make money out of everybody else, — nothing needed but transport, more transport, and more goods. These were the days when the railroad came into its own, — when people laughed and shouted and danced at the sight of the first train and loaded it with flowers, with the bell ringing and with merry girls riding on the cow-catcher! Alas, how different to the grim iron octopus of today, the huge debt-carrier, the farmers imagined enemy! Something must be wrong somewhere.
Things moved! Especially all sorts of ‘first things’. The ‘first’ parliament met (1871) in ‘Mr. A. G. Bannatyre’s house’, in the sitting room, — three entire rooms being assigned to its use, one upstairs and two down. The ‘first oysters’ came to Winnipeg in February 1871. In the same month came the ‘first barber’: but his business, I am sure, was trimming beards, not removing them: Winnipeg knew no such effeminacy as a clean shave till many years later. With the barber appeared shortly a ‘first baker’ and a ‘first harness maker’. It was like the days of Pharaoh. Dr. C. J. Bird in the summer of 1871 set up the ‘first soda water fountain’: they had a whiskey fountain already. More ominous still is the chronicled record that on December 14, 1870, Mr. Stewart-Mulvey gave the ‘first public lecture’ in Winnipeg. He chose as his topic, “True Greatness”, and we are told that he was listened to “with great pleasure”. It’s a cruel phrase to use of any lecturer. Laughter, if you like, derision, anger, excitement, — but not “great pleasure”.
Music also sprang to life and woke to harmony. We read in the charming volume on Winnipeg’s Early Days, written by my old friend, Mr. W. J. Healy, the Provincial Librarian, that “the first hand organ was played in Winnipeg in 1876”. Mr. Healy adds that it was the only one, then or since, but does not say where the man was buried. But the main thing in the morning of the life of Winnipeg was the initiation of public enterprises, — especially with a charter (from Mr. Bannatyre’s sitting room) or, simpler still, — application for a charter. Each new idea was taken up with a hurrah! and if no money came in, they dropped as easily and no one cared. There was a “Bank of Rupertsland,” — hurrah! — and then another, the Bank of Manitoba! Neither of them happened. There was an application for a joint stock company for the construction of a railway “passing through the town of Winnipeg to connect with the nearest of the Minnesota railways” — ; a “Bridge company”, that never built bridges — a “General Manufacturing and Investment Co.” that never went further and a “Manitoba Brewing Company” whose future was fully realized.
All this in the early days before the real ‘boom’ began. Measured statistically progress was slow. There were 250 people in Winnipeg in 1870, and 817 in St. Boniface and only 1,565 pure white people in all Manitoba. By 1872 the town still had only reached 1,467, but even in 1882, when all the world had heard of it, the population of Winnipeg was still only 7,900 and that of all Manitoba only a little over 60,000.
But the ground swell that indicated the tidal wave that was to come, appeared years before the boom in the high, the staggering prices paid for real estate while the place was still little more than a hamlet. In 1872 the Hudson’s Bay Company, so Grant tells us, sold as building lots thirteen of their five hundred acres about Fort Garry and received $7,000 an acre for them.
* * * * *
The real boom could not come in these early years. The setting was not ready: but the course of the next ten years prepared it. The ‘railway’ reached Winnipeg, by way of St. Paul and Minnesota in 1878. The Homestead Act of 1875 and the surveys that followed it opened up the Northwest for all the world. And the great depression of the 70’s that lay with increasing dead weight on Europe, and impoverished the farmers of Ontario set loose the great migration to the land of hope.
* * * * *
It is here that my own personal recollections, as a boy of eleven years connect with the period. I give them, not for any personal value, but as reflecting the men and things of the ‘boom’ period, the circumstances that occasioned the migration from older Canada to Manitoba, the ardent hopes that went with it and the bitter disillusionment in which it ended. To my mind the tragedy of the ‘boom’ is that it never should have collapsed. Good old Colonel George Ham called it in his memoirs a ‘fool’s paradise’. If so it was a paradise lost. We must regain it.
