Part 12 (1/2)
Revered as the Empire's pre-eminent visionary, Strathcona became Londons favourite colonial character. Ever courteous, more British than the British, painfully anxious to please, Strathcona as he grew older caused minor protocol problems for his London hostesses. He could never quite remember the proper precedence. One regal maven complained that ”it was very difficult indeed to persuade him to 'stand in the order
During the 1980s, the regiment, now armoured and 500 strong, fielded Canada's last ceremonial cavalry troop consisting of a configuration of fourteen horses and eighteen men as riders and equipment personnel. It was saved from extinction by another Scottish-born philanthropist, Alan Graham, head of Calgary's Cascade Group, 200 LABRADOR SMITH.
of ]us going.”' But the highly publicized generosity of his South African contribution had earned Strathcona wide repute and rescued the Hudson's Bay Company from social oblivion. ”He is Canada in a swallow-tall coat,”
marvelled A.G. Gardiner, editor of the London Dally News. ”You talk with him, and it is as if Canada stands before you, telling her astonis.h.i.+ng story.”
CHAPTER 8.
THE RECKONING.
Too weak to stand or even to read his own remarks, he sat before a representative gathering of the Company's shareholders like a stuffied effigy of himself- mute, barely emitting any vital signs, yet still there, the Governor and a Bay man to the end.
,rHE BOER WAR HND CRACKEDTHE MIRROR of imperial glamour. While the British could claim a military victory, it had been achieved in a sequence of senseless slaughters. The Empire finally had to ma.s.s 450,000 troops to crush 35,000 elusive Boer warriors. In the process, the invaders ravaged the countryside, burned the Boers' farms, and imprisoned their families in detention camps. There, 20,000 wornen and children died, son-ie of the youngest casualties being victims of ground gla.s.s mixed into their morning porridge. The conflict put an end to the na*fve Victorian notion of 61gentlemen's wars,” and Britain's ”splendid” isolation now became real.
At the same time, technological change was making the grip of Empire less tight. Electricity began to take over from steam, and Marconi's transatlantic wireless transmissions shattered dreams of cable and telegraph monopolies.
Few of these momentous changes disturbed Lord Strathcona's personal world. His already spectacular financial prospects changed only for the better. The CPR
203.
204 LABRADOR SMITH.
was finally realizing its traffic potential, the Bank of Montreal was setting new profit levels, and the soinnanibulant I ludson's Bay Company became one of the London Stock Exchano~e.s most fas.h.i.+onable investments.
Wbile trade in furs faced an uneven future, the Company's landholdings took on new significance. Since 1898, settlers had been funnelling into the Canadian West in ever-increasing numbers, and as they became successful farmers, even more were attracted. The influx triggered a land rush. Three million immigrants settled the barely inhabited Prairies before the outbreak of the Great War. Land values doubled, then doubled again. BN 1903, the 1111c was able to sell nearly 400,000 acres to willing homesteaders at five dollars an acre, though Strathcona A ould live to see the price quadruple to inore than twenty dollars.
As land values soared, stock quotations shot up. The Economist, which hadn't thought about the IJBC for thirty years, noted that the Company was showing ”remarkable vitality in its old age.” Share prices moved from ItM in December 1889 to YI 29.5 in November 1906, while dividends reached 24 percent and rocketed up to 50 percent-their highest level since 1688-though even at 50 percent this worked out to only 3.1 percent on the par value of the stock.*
Instead of sharing some of this new-won affluence with the field hands whose efforts had created and rnaintained the Hlic's land empire, at the Company's 1904
*A fringe benefit of the fortunes made from the rise in value of IJBC stock was the foanding of Dublin's renowned Abbey Theatre. Forerunner of the Little Theatre movement and the first state-subsidized stage in any English-speaking country, the Abbe ' V was able to open in its own building in 1904 thanks to .CI,3()O in 1113C stock profits donated by Annie Horniman, a London theatre manager.
THE RECKONING 205.
annual ineeting Strathcona delivered these worthy veterans the coup de grdce. He proposed that a pension plan be established (paying a top annual rate of $1,500 to Chief Factors witli thirty years' continuous service) but specifically excluded aiding those who were already retired. Not only were the former traders to be deprjve~ of any sustaining income but the Y~50,000 left in the Servants' Pension Fund after abrogation of the fur partners.h.i.+ps by surrender of the Deed Poll in 1893 was absorbed into general corporate revenues. When retired Chlef Factor Roderick MacFarlane complained, urging Strathcona ”to aid ill doing the right thing by those ... [who] have suffered many hards.h.i.+ps, and endured many privations in the performance oftheir onerous duties in the interior,” his pathetic appeal was disinissed with a curt note pointinIg out that it was really quite useless to trouble the board with correspondence relating to a period with which the existing Hudson's Bay Company had only ”an historical concern.”
That brutally dismissive phrase relegating more than two centuries of steadfast dedication by generations of loyal employees to the oblivion of ”historical concern” served as the corporate epitaph to the HBC's fur traders, if not the fur trade.
It seemeo an easy, if heartless, decision because the land boom kept accelerating. When Rudyard Mpling came back from a trip to Medicine Hat (where he had seen flares of natural gas blazing like torches) and reported the town had ”all h.e.l.l for a bas.e.m.e.nt,” Strathcona quickly realized the underground potential of mineral rights and ruled that the 11BC would henceforth retain them on all the lands it sold. The High Commissioner's interest in speeding up the already hectic pace of land sales was not limited to his mandate as Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. He was also a controlling investor of the Canada North-West Land 206 LABRADOR SMITH.
Company, formed in 1882 to acquire five million acres of the original CPR land grant. In case emigrants to Canada failed to enrich his purse through purchase of a homestead, there was always the s.h.i.+pping line. During Strathcona's London tenure the CPR, in which he remained a dominant shareholder, established steams.h.i.+p connections between Liverpool and Montreal. The new fleet immediately became part of J.R Morgan's North Atlantic maritime cartel, which was estimated to have extracted frorn newcomers to North America a surcharge of $44 million until U.S. courts broke the back of the trust in 1911. Canadian Pacific vessels used in the service were already subsidized by the Canadian government. Yet both Sir Richard Cartwright, the Liberal Minister of Finance (and later ofTrade and Commerce), and his Tory successor, Sir George Foster, substantiallv increased these subventions, then enacted regulations that only goods travelling to Canada on steams.h.i.+ps sailing directly to Canadian ports would be eligible for preferential British tariffs.
The rush to Canada was partl~ the result of the propaganda flooding Great Britain. The new Dominion was variously described as ”the dutiful daughter of Empire,” 16a hunter's paradise,” ”the wild and woolly west” and ,,the land of golden opportunity.” ”It little mattered ... if the Rocky Mountains sometimes penetrated into Saskatchewan or that no foothills ever dotted the fictional landscape,” noted R.G. Moyles and Doug Owram, who have studied the promotional literature, ”or whether the intrepid hero really could, simply by ,turning to the right-hand seek the rugged haunts 4thc grizzly bear ... or, by turning to the left, ride after the buffalo on his own undulating plain.' . . . It was best that nothing be too specific or accurate; that setting be an impre.”ion only, an impression of a 'great wilderness' where . . . 'the red man and the buffalo roamed at will, THE RECKONING 207.
and the conventionalities of civillsed life troubled them not.”' Settlers'
guides were distributed on British street corners; every railway station featured a poster glorifying some aspect of Canadian agriculture. Adventure novels of the period even hinted at erotic murmurs in the grain fields.
(”Caleb would stand for long moments outside the fence beside the flax. Then he would turn quickly to see that no one was looking. He would creep between the wires and run his hand across the flowering, gentle tops of the growth.
A stealthy caress-more intimate than any he had ever given to woman.”) The reality faced by immigrants was very different, of course: after the Atlantic crossing, cramped into steerage bunks, to be unloaded, cattle-like, in Halifax or Quebec; then the climb aboard wooden railway cars equipped with cookstoves but no mattresses for the long journey west.
There the newcomers were dumped onto the flat, sloughpitted prairie to scrub for a hidebound life. But at least their fate was their own, and within the cycle of the seasons they cultivated the virgin soil, bought an ox, then a horse, built a house, made a life. Out of their labours emerged not only a new land but a new nationality.
Much to the surprise of almost every official involved (except Strathcona, who had been on the grol-nd and appreciated the area's rich potential), the Prairies turned out to be almost as good as advertised. Even better, when Charles Saunders, an inspired cerealist working at a federal experimental farm, perfected a strain of wheat that required two weeks less to ripen than the standard Red Fife and produced top-quality flour. Even earlier, the prairie had been producing more than 100 million bushels of wheat, and as farmers consolidated their holdings, villages, towns and eventually cities simmered up. The local HBC trading posts were quickly overshadowed by general stores, train stations, grain elevators and bank branches-opened by young clerks sent west from head 208 LABRADOR SMITH.
offices in Montreal andToronto with a thousand-dollar bill pinned inside their coats to provide the initial capital. ”There isn't a tmhorn gambler left in Nevada,” exclaimed an American journalist after touring the West.
”They're all selling town lots in Canada!”
Winnipeg came fully into its own. By 1911, it was Canada's third-largest city, and, at the height of the land boom, Winnipeg's hotel accommodations were so hard to come by that proprietors charged travellers willing to sleep on stairways a dollar a night. By 1904, Winnipeg's railway yards had grown into the world's largest-and busiest-with as man) as 1,800 cars shunted through per day'. While the city's North End became the centre of immigrant cultures, mansions of Winnipeg's rapidly expanding merchant cla.s.s were thrown up on the south bank of the a.s.siniboine, forming Wellington Crescent and its environs, where many of the leading figures in Winnipeg gathered. They included, over the years, the Aikins family, the Allans, Alloways, Ashdowns, Bawlfs, Drewrys, Flatons, Galts, Heimbeckers, Heubachs, McMillans, Nantons, Oslers, Pitblados, Richardsons, Rileys, Searles and Sellerses.
In the summer of 1909, when Lord Strathcona paid his first visit to Winnipeg in two decades, the local business establishment turned out in force. They organized a two-mile triumphal parade from the Canadian Pacific railway station to Government House, under arches and banners glorifying (and exaggerating) his connections with the city. Giggles of maidens dressed in white spread flowers before his carriage, and the crowds cheered at the verv mention of his name. It was a marked contrast to his firsi furtive visit forty years earlier, when as Donald Smith he had slipped into town and was promptly placed under house arrest by Louis Riel. Strathcona enjoyed the celebration but could not find it in himself to forgive Winnipeggers for having voted against him in the 1880 THE RECKONING 209.
Lord Stratbcona unveiling a plaque on the Fort Garry Gate during bis ~,isit to Winnipeg in August 1909
federal election. ”hen a local deputation asked him for a million dollars to help establish the Selkirk Exhibition, he politely heard them out and said he would give his decision on his return through Winnipeg from ajourney to the Rockies. On his instructions, the CPR schedule~ that arrival to bring his private coach into the Winnipeg station at midnight. The organizers were on the platform, but no one was invited to enter his darkened and shuttered railway car.