The 340 acres were christened the Great Eastern Estate. Dr. Bain was sent to England to put it on the market. His expenses for two months totaled nearly $12,000—in which he was a true ante-type of some modern foes of frugalism. He induced a syndicate to buy the property for $1,250,000. Some of this was paid; and, owing to the course of events, most of it wasn’t. About ten years afterwards a competent valuator said the land was worth at the outside $20 per acre. The roundhouse that cost $5,000 was blown down before it had been up a year. Finally, the timber was bought by a farmer for $50. The land reverted to its original owners, along with the cash payments that had been made upon it. The North Western’s dream of riches through the sale of lots was over.
The bubble was all out of the western boom long before I landed in Portage la Prairie. Many of the town’s fifty real estate operators had gladly worked on North Western construction. The effects of inflation were all around. The morning after a real estate orgy is apt to last till very late in the afternoon. For practically the whole of my ten years’ connection with the Manitoba and North Western it was very much financial afternoon for the good town of Portage la Prairie.
We had about a hundred railway employees in Portage, including machine shop men, train crews, and the office staff, of which I was the head, and coincidentally with which a variety of other functions seemed to gravitate my way. The railway, when I came to it, was running to Birtle, 138 miles, and had a branch to Rapid City, of less than 20 miles. In 1883 it had obtained a Dominion charter, with authority to build to Prince Albert—an objective which was not reached by a direct line passing through Portage, until 1905, when the Canadian Northern arrived by way of Dauphin, Swan River and Melfort. Of course, in 1886 the Canadian Northern was no more dreamed of than the radio was. The famous partnership of Mackenzie and Mann had not begun.
The Manitoba North Western also had come into the hands of Sir Hugh Allan and associates—as to which it can be seen how strong the passion for laying rails and ties is in the human breast where once it has found a lodgment. Sir Hugh Allan’s syndicate, on which Sir John Macdonald’s first Government had foundered, did not build the C.P.R.; but the old steamship man did have a hand in a prairie railway, after all. He did not long survive his advent to the headship of the North Western, and in my time the president was Mr. Andrew Allan, his brother.
Like other branch lines which later struggled into existence, only to fall into the big fellow’s hands, our road had more anticipations than way-bills. Indeed, in the West, it was a devout saying, “Faith, Hope and Charity—and the greatest of these is Hope.” The season before I joined the line it had carried a total of 362,952 bushels of grain. In 1886-7 we brought 427,650 bushels to the terminal, and handed them either to the C.P.R. or to the mill. The total grain shipment from the whole line then, was only what became a very common season’s business at station after station on the Canadian Northern, not so many years later. The other exportable freight were cattle. We couldn’t roll in wealth, when the carloads of stock handled for the years 1885-9 averaged fifty for the whole system.
Even so we were a goodly portion of the financial backbone of Portage la Prairie. We managed to pay the wages, without which the merchants’ cash takings would have had a very low visibility. We were identified with the life of the community in a way that is not so easily recognized in large cities where railway employees are a small percentage of the population. As the Portage was and is typical of Western Canadian development, a sketch of it as a newcomer learned to become assimilated with it, is probably worth while.
During the early history of the West the Portage was on the map; for traders portaged the fifteen miles across the plain from the Assiniboine River to Lake Manitoba. Its modern history began when, in 1851, Archdeacon Cochrane, seeing that the Fort Garry settlement was becoming saturated, as far as the then conditions of population could be judged, founded a mission and settlement near the old post on the Assiniboine, fifty-six miles west of Fort Garry. The land was a little lighter than in the Valley of the Red, and was likely to ripen crops a week or ten days earlier than on the lower level. The supereminence of the Portage Plains as wheat growers was later to justify the noble archdeacon’s foresight.
The population was mainly of Metis and Indians. The white farmers who came in were few indeed. John McLean, the first, was a good deal like Nehemiah, for, so to say, he cut his hay with one hand and held his rifle with the other, on account of the somewhat summary quality of Indian manners. In the seventies, after Riel’s rebellion had ended, and the province of Manitoba was set up within the Canadian Confederation, there was a fairly steady influx of farmers, largely from Ontario. Until 1869 the whole country belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company which, under the charter of Charles the Second, exercised sovereign rights over the people. “The Company” built its Portage store at the extreme west of the settlement, and refused, as commerce developed, to sell land any distance east to other traders. The east and west rivalry that was long a feature of the town life thus began; but the company was defeated by events, and later had to move east.