Winnipeg the Wicked
In its early days, Winnipeg was reputed to be one of the two wickedest places in Canada. The other was a small Ontario town—Paris, if I remember aright. Winnipeggers didn’t object very much to having the doubtful distinction attributed to it, but they kicked like steers when linked with a small eastern village, where it would naturally be supposed the only outward and visible sign of sin would be the innocent little lambs gamboling on the green. If they were no worse than the Canadian Parisians—well, it was confoundedly humiliating—and they were somewhat ashamed of being put in the amateur class. Probably Paris might have a few who were “a devil of a fellow in his own home town,” but Winnipeg looked down in scorn on that mush-and-milk brand of real sporty life. Of course the city was pretty rapid, with lots to drink and plenty to gamble, and horse racing galore and similar sports were the rage. With dances, operas, swagger champagne suppers, and late hours, it was one continuous merry round. But gay life in Winnipeg was grossly exaggerated, because it was a comparatively small place, running speedily ahead of other places of even larger size in its daily round of gaiety. Hideous crime itself, as it is seen in the cities of its size to-day, was totally unknown. There was scarcely even a murder or a shooting scrap and very few scandals. The demi-mondaines were numerous and hilarious as were their patrons, but the police regulations were usually strictly enforced, and, while the bars were kept open until all hours of the night, the liquor was of a good quality, and there were fewer drunken people staggering on the streets than could be seen in other places which made greater pretensions of a monopoly of all the virtues. The police court records prove this. So while it was called wicked, it held no real genuine carnival of crime. It was simply a wide open frontier outpost of civilization.
Early in its infancy, it was invaded by a band of crooks from the south, who started in on the bad man act, but Chief Justice Wood soon put them where the dogs couldn’t bite them with long sentences in jail or Stoney Mountain penitentiary. Those who didn’t come up before the Judge made a mad dash for liberty across the line. There were a couple of executions, but only one Winnipeg murder, and the Gribben murder, where a whiskey peddler along the line of railway construction shot a cabin boy of one of the river boats to death. Taking it all in all, life in Winnipeg was as safe as it is in Westmount to-day—but a dashed sight more exciting.
Down at Fisher’s Landing in Minnesota, immigrants who there transferred from train to boat were unmercifully fleeced by Farmer Brown, who, driving a sorry looking yoke of oxen and wearing a bucolic make-up, victimized the immigrants with sad, sad tales of sorrow and misfortune, and when their sympathies were aroused through his unfailing flow of tears, he would trim them to a standstill at three card monte, at which he was an adept. There were other sharpers, of course, as there always are where there is a movement of people, but they did nothing actually sensational.