Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 763
The description is that of the closing days, of a towing steamer hauling the raft all the way. Such a journey took the raft from Kingston to Montreal, barring heavy bad winds or other delays, in three days. But in early days there was no motive power but the sails and the current. It took weeks to get to Quebec. The river current on a still day would give a “speed” of three miles an hour, the broad flood of Lake St. Francis or Lake St. Louis scarcely any. From the earliest days to the last passengers took trips on the St. Lawrence rafts for the sheer strangeness of it, to loaf and read and dream. Many of us even now might dream of such a passage, floating on a windless summer day on Lake St. Francis, reading, let us say, Egyptian history.
But when the rapids came, the loaf and the dream were suspended. The first rapids came below Prescott. The rafts went down the Galop Rapids and the Rapide Plat (Morrisburg) all in one piece, heaving and lifting and quivering to the swells. But just above the Long Sault (Aultsville) the raft was stopped; a special crew of about fifty men came on board; the raft was disjointed into its six drams, and away they floated in the fast water, faster and faster, the crew strung out in a row across each end, with every man at a long oar, ready to row sideways — a sight to make the Royal Navy laugh. But they could do it. As the dram splashed and heaved, pounding even a rapid white, they could just swing the raft enough to make the difference between stranding and going clear, till down she floated into the quiet water below. Off got the special crew, on went the raft, past Cornwall and down Lake St. Francis with a new crew for the Coteau Rapids, then on down Lake St. Louis. They came to the final descent in the maelstrom of Lachine. The raft was stopped well above, broken into drams, and away they went down the foam, too late now for salvation if anything went wrong. They took it all. Canoes used to take to the sides of the rapids. Steamers pick the channels; but the timber-raft drams took the whole rapid. At the foot of it the drams floated into the La Prairie basin, to be remade there, or go through Montreal Harbour and be remade below. From Montreal to Quebec the raft went in peace.
Anyone who has looked at a picture of the Montreal Harbour of earlier days, anywhere from 1830 to 1880, will notice that the artist has put into it what seems to be the tragic spectacle of a few unhappy survivors on a small but very heavy raft, the kind people die on in the Indian Ocean, with some kind of canvas or wood shelter rudely erected on it and their few poor belongings lying beside them. What makes the picture all the more harrowing is the apparent utter disregard of their distress on the part of the officers and crew (for there must be such) on board the huge frigates and various other craft in the harbor. What we are looking at here is the artist’s symbolic imagination of a timber raft.
Photography came to the world just in time.
But in justice to the artist of such drawings we have to say that he may be trying to depict a “firewood” raft such as used to be brought down to Montreal Harbour by farmers from Châteauguay and such places immediately upstream. These, however, were not square timber, but logs waiting to be cut up into cordwood, commonly sold at $2.00 a cord. They used to be anchored alongside the shore. Unhappily such pictures seem to depict something which is neither the one thing nor the other and is wrong either way.
Midway in this period came to the Port of Montreal the record flood of 1886 which helped its progress along, as a swift kick accelerates movement. The flood, that is to say, helped to initiate the subsequent bold and comprehensive effort that led presently to what seems the final conquest of the St. Lawrence.
The rise and fall of water in a tidal harbor is a thing that can be measured, predicted, and circumvented from day to day, from tide to tide. But the spring flood of a great river, a Mississippi or a St. Lawrence, which carries down the waters liberated from the winter’s ice, is another matter. It no sooner makes a record than it breaks it with a new one. Flooding waters had always been a feature and a factor in the development of Montreal, the more so because of the ill-adjusted nature of the riverbank. It no sooner rises to an all-the-year dry altitude (Notre Dame Street) than it falls off again (to Craig Street) far below the spring level and sideways to what was once the sunken bed of the Little River. Floodtime has been part of its history. Champlain with his peculiar prophetic vision tried out the prospect of flood by setting up a sample piece of wall in the plan of his Place Royale to see what the river would do. He was not there the following season to see what it did, but we can guess. Near this spot was Maisonneuve’s first cemetery, grimly desecrated each spring by the river. All the land in that area (now at the foot of McGill Street and along the Harbour Front) has been raised since. In the Old Regime the town moved up to high ground, its skirts withdrawn from the water. But the spring flood washed round it and below it. When the British town spread later on into Griffintown on lower ground the waters followed it.
It is quite impossible for steamship visitors to Montreal, looking down from the heights of the deck and the dock on the river far below, to realize the extent to which the spring flood of the St. Lawrence, just before navigation begins, can lift the water of the river. When they see, inside the railway tracks that run along the docks, the sturdy revetment wall of solid stone they can hardly realize that this wall, rising above docks, tracks, and all, is intended to keep out the St. Lawrence.
Yet the river flood takes us back to the earliest history and down to the latest.
The unhappy settlement of Griffintown, as said, built on lowland for the working class, who must take what they can get, was subject to annual high water that in seasons turned to submergence under a flood. The flood of 1857 saw the lower stones of the houses flooded, the people coming and going as best they could in boats.
The spring flood of 1861 was long remembered. The river, with appalling suddenness, invaded the city in the evening of Sunday, April 14; so fast it rose that it poured into the churches of the lower town. St. Stephens in Dalhousie Street and the Methodist Church, Ottawa Street, extinguished all lights and left the congregations marooned in the dark with six feet of water over the pews. Boats rescued some. Others “roosted” all night. Bitter cold set in, and in the days following there came a fierce blizzard. Traffic was impossible. The new Grand Trunk Railway was all flooded out as far as Lachine. One quarter of Montreal was under water. Boats carried the people from the islands that had been the wharves and buildings on the water front and landed them up on St. Paul Street. Other boats carried them to Beaver Hall Hill to get to the upper suburbs. Such was the ferocity of the river, nature’s protest against man’s contrivance.
Then came the great flood of 1886, destined to hold the record, a steady-rising inundation that put the water five feet deep over the feeble wooden wall, the revetment wall of the river slope. It filled all Craig Street with an inland lake, reaching high up on Beaver Hall Hill. It lasted a week.
But times had changed in the twenty-five years since the Methodist ministers waded in four feet of water in the dark to bring help to their roosting congregations. The ingenuity of commerce here stepped in to replace prayer by a five-cent ferry from St. James Street to Beaver Hall Hill.
But it was felt that the river had gone too far. The aid of Ottawa was invoked; a heavier and higher revetment held back the river until later, but not till the new century was there built (1901) the present all-stone wall, braced wide and squat, gated like a fortress, and thus far the last word against the St. Lawrence.
An odd departure of the Port of Montreal, which proved, however, a blind alley, was the attempt to facilitate transriver traffic by running trains over the ice.
An attempt to use the Montreal ice was also made in a quite different way, to make of it not a railway track but a palace. Here begins with the year 1883 the first building of the Ice Palace of Montreal, for which the city acquired such a name, and which ended from the fear that the name was the wrong one.
Montreal, of course, had always had its winter sports. From the old French days had come snowshoeing, in its real purpose a means of locomotion, and heavy and tiresome at that, but a thing which can in proper company and for lack of anything better pass as a sport. Skating similarly had always been a necessary feature of winter life beside Canadian rivers and lakes and lent itself naturally to winter amusement. Curling, with its proper accompaniments, had been imported early from Scotland. As a consequence there had been in Montreal various kinds of winter celebrations long before the Ice Palace of 1883; indeed, it had become the custom to hold a yearly winter carnival as a regular event, with lesser and children’s carnivals at odd intervals.
The Ice Palace was a new departure as proposing to let in outsiders on the Montreal winter. This was a delicate point and on this the Ice Palace was in the long run shipwrecked, or melted. There has always been a great misunderstanding and a great sensitiveness about the climate of Canada in general and of Montreal in particular. The truth about the climate of Montreal is that it is not a cold climate in any brutal sense. The winter has its “spells” of cold, lasting three or four days or even longer, with the thermometer well below zero at night and struggling to get above it by day. But each spell is succeeded by a sort of meteorological repentance, bright sun on pure snow, blue skies with just a fleck of cloud, and a kiss of soft wind on the check to heighten beauty and encourage audacity; a climate when it is delightful to be out of doors and glorious to come in again.
There is indeed no comparison as between Montreal and really cold places such as will be found in the Far West. These are inland places on exposed prairies, many miles further to the north than Montreal. Those of us who love Canada and admire the West maintain in this matter a conspiracy of silence. But we know — and say it to one another and in whispers — that such places are not really fit to live in. It has been truthfully said that on the day of a blizzard in — let’s leave the name unsaid — a man walking with his back to the wind has no difficulty in knowing which side of him is which.
But only recently have Montreal people thrown off all misunderstanding and false shame about the climate. In the past the very praise they gave it was apologetic, as if to explain that it wouldn’t really hurt anybody. Here before us lies a little booklet of 1883 to advertise the great Winter Carnival and the Ice Palace that began its life that year. How ancient it looks already, this little booklet Over the Snow, with its faint type, its mild advertisements, its moderation! How little they knew how to shout in 1883. “We cannot,” says the little book, “put up samples of our dry, cold, clear and healthy winter . . . but when on the spot you can see what absurd opinions have been held of our climate.” There are four pages of this, including a statement that the London Times is mistaken in saying that our thermometers in winter have to be brought into the houses at night to be thawed. The author almost gets hysterical about it, stating that the Montreal snow is “like feathers” and that he can roll in it and come out dry “almost any day in winter.”
This attitude of Montreal toward its winter, midway between apology and praise and at best something like the defense of an old friend gone wrong, is well illustrated by the history of the Ice Palace. This famous structure first appeared in 1883. The palace, like those that followed it in successive years, was built on Dominion Square, our in front of the New Windsor Hotel. In aspect it was made to look, and was officially declared to look, like a medieval castle, with a tall central tower and corner turrets, with battlements and crenelated walls. It measured one hundred and sixty-five feet in length and sixty-five feet in depth; its central tower stood one hundred feet high. Each block of its ice was forty-two by twenty-four inches and weighed five hundred pounds; the whole Palace contained forty thousand cubic feet of ice and fifty men at a time worked to build it. The last item of information about the Palace, given out to stagger the public, was that it cost no less than $3900. This item has lost its direct power to stagger but gets it in reverse gear. It now means that you can have, or could have, a first-rate ice palace for less than $4000. People who, in the mad winters before the depression, spent as much as that, and ten times as much, for a single party at the “coming out” of a daughter might think of having one now “come out” of an ice palace as a snow princess.
Winter Sports in Montreal in 1884, with a Picture of One of the Ice Palaces.
Culver Service
The Ice Palace was the scene of terrific doings, “fêtes de nuit” with thousands of snowshoers in line, all with torches, with fireworks, with a “bombardment” of rockets and an assault and defense, and after that the rounds of “scotch” well deserved after such a fete. Of all this nothing is left today except the last item. A single girl and a pair of skis supplies the rest of the fete. Our grandfathers went a long way to get a little.
For the Ice Palace fell on evil times. Business decided that it was “a bad ad,” that it looked too much like winter, and cut it out, just as business decided that the beautiful big elm trees in Phillip Square looked too much like summer and cut them down, as bad for business. Those of us not in business often wonder why it can’t just be natural.
Later attempts were made to revive the Palace. One in particular will be recalled when it was put on Fletcher’s Field, just under the mountain. But somehow it wouldn’t work. Perhaps the mountain overshadowed it; at any rate it looked small. It was no use telling us that it measured this or that. It couldn’t have. Then the thaw and the rain came all wrong and the Ice Palace began to drip like a wet hen. They made a brutal attempt to freeze it with ice water from hoses, but it didn’t work; cracks opened in it; the sun came through; it began to tilt over, and when somebody said it looked just like the Middle Ages that ended it. They let it thaw.
A beautiful monument stands in Dominion Square to commemorate the South African War which rounded out the century for Montreal as for the Empire. The huge stone block graven with the Dutch names of British victories surmounted by a spirited figure-group of trooper and charger is admirable as sculptured art. Montreal specially connects with the war through the name of Baron Strathcona, at that time in the intervals of his London service as High Commissioner, a resident of Montreal in a beautiful stone house on Dorchester Street, which frequently served, through his generosity, as Government House for the visits of the Governor General, like the Hotel de Vaudreuil in the old French days. At Strathcona’s cost was raised and equipped the famous troop of Strathcona’s Horse. Of the value of the gift and of the war itself time alone can judge. South Africa must be united; it cannot now, it could not then, exist in security and prosperity as two antagonized communities of Boer and Briton. Bur whether it would have been better united in the long run with the South African War or without is a question which history has not yet answered, and may be answering now.
FOOTNOTES:
Ob. 1941.
J. Murray Gibbon, Steel of Empire.
A. M. Lower, The Trade in Square Timber, 1933.
D. D. Calvin, In a Quiet Corner, 1941.
CHAPTER XI. Montreal in the Twentieth Century
Montreal Moves Uphill. The Electrical Age Spreads the Town. The Tunnel. The Search for Clean Government. Growth of Finance and Fortune. The Plutocrats of Plutoria. Annexation and the Lion’s Den. Westmount in the Woods. The Great War and Its Aftermath.
RIP VAN WINKLE fell asleep, but, after all, when he woke up again he reappeared in his own village. Not so, if he’d fallen asleep in Montreal. Let us say that he fell asleep in what he understood, fifty years ago, to be Montreal and to be the premises of the well-known house of Henry Morgan and Company. When he woke up he would find himself still in the arms of Henry Morgan and Company, bigger arms than ever, but apparently no longer in Montreal, but transported somewhere away uphill, among leaves and lanes, clear away to the country, to a pleasant road called St. Catherine’s. Near by he would find, as he walked about, other familiar names and would realize that Montreal had moved uphill — had moved or was on the move. A few old Rips like himself still lingered on in the old town below, leaning over empty counters and fumbling at empty tills. The old place was gone, the grand old shopping district of Great St. James Street, once gay with bright dresses and loud with the sleigh bells of society on the shop.
The change which Rip observed, and which probably killed him, was well under way as a feature of the opening twentieth century, the removal of the shopping district uptown. St. James Street, too great for shops, now shelters only banks, brokers, finance, shipping and communications, and the metropolitan press. Such little shops as remain are tucked in edgeways, as neat and bright as ever, selling cigars to the brokers, neckties to bankers, expensive silverware and diamonds to anyone whose stocks have suddenly risen, and umbrellas for those out of luck. You couldn’t buy a corset, let alone a pair of them, within half a mile.
The foresight of Henry Morgan and Company, the pioneer explorers of St. Catherine Street, was fittingly rewarded by the success and celebrity of their colossal store. Their example was widely followed in the whole orbit of retail and domestic trade. A few firms, even department stores, lacked faith to look upward and died a lingering death below. A famous fish firm moved halfway up and couldn’t bear to go further from the water. An enterprising Scottish house, too well-known to name, moved too far: the town hasn’t caught it yet; being Scottish, they’re waiting for it.
This move of Montreal uptown came along with, indeed arose out of, the new electric age. Fast urban transport spreads a city out; telephones put the suburbs within talking distance; lighted streets and comfortable streetcars invite movement abroad, and on the heels of all that the motorcar puts anybody anywhere. People are forgetting now the limitations of earlier days. Consider this. On the slope we now call Westmount, an occupant of any of the few but pleasant homes there situated sixty years ago, if sudden illness came to his house at night, must needs go out to the stable (every house had a stable), hitch up a horse, and drive to Montreal at full speed (eight miles an hour) to fetch a doctor. Such an expedition attended the coming into the world of some of the present elderly barristers and businessmen of today whose people moved out into Westmount in its St. Antoine days. On this scene broke the telephone in 1880 with four hundred subscribers. As elsewhere, and as with the telegraph before it, the telephone suffered from its first reception as an amusing toy. It was, as we now see it, slow in coming into its own. The Montreal streetcar had gone tinkling along the streets ever since the “Montreal Passenger Railway Company” of 1861 put their horsecar on Notre Dame Street. With its extension to the upper part of the city began the long agonies of the streetcar horse, hauling a cluster of human beings clinging like bees to the rush-hour car up a cruel slope, exactly equal to the utmost power of the animal. Then came electric cars in 1893, and the streetcar horse found its first rest in death.
