Take two illustrations of how the force of a small railway headquartered in a small town can be more of a community factor than is possible in a large centre. Mr. Baker, the North Western manager, was a public-spirited citizen, and, like many Englishmen, a strong supporter of sports. He fostered cricket and other games. A summer picnic to Lake Manitoba, originated by himself, became a very popular institution. During the agonies of the incendiary period, the lack of a suitable bell that would sufficiently alarm the neighbourhood was keenly felt. Money was too scarce for a bell and belfry to be thought of. The railway came to the public’s aid.
This was the period, young people may be reminded, when the towers in the Toronto fire stations contained bells that were rung, two-four, five-seven and other strokes, announcing the locality of the fire, in accord with the chart that hung in every house. Mr. Baker had a monster triangle made out of a steel rail. It was hung on a frame, thirty feet high. When the alarm was given it was a noble duty for the proper official to strike the leviathan lyre—and it could be some lyre. It hadn’t been up very long before a mighty wind blew down its unbraced frame. Afterwards a bell was bought and put into a tower of its own. It also blew over, cracking the bell. Whereupon the bell was hung in the town hall, where the only dangerous winds blew from inside, and there it never failed to raise its cracked but effective voice at the appropriate moment.
About the time I went to Portage la Prairie electric lighting was coming into vogue in ambitious, progressive cities. The first joint stock enterprise in which I was a shareholder was the Central Electric Light Company, organized with eight shareholders and a capital of forty thousand dollars, and of which I was a director and secretary-treasurer. The president was Bob Watson, M.P. for Marquette, the only Liberal member west of the Great Lakes, and now senator. One of the directors was Joe Martin. The manner of his ceasing to be a director is a diverting story of how a resignation offered in haste can be accepted at leisure. The pranks which the meters of those times played would enable another tale to be unfolded—when the unfolding is good.
We rather fancied ourselves as the first electric lighting company between Winnipeg and the Pacific ocean. Despite the dumps that had followed the boom, many of our leading citizens still believed that the Portage was destined to be a vast emporium of western commerce. I doubt, though, whether these hopes were cherished by three such typical men, all happily living, as Judge Ryan, Michael Blake and Bob Watson. Of these probably the present senator was the most typical of the steady-going qualities which, after all, have transformed the empty Rupert’s Land into the three populous provinces of this period.
Bob Watson was a mechanic. He was sent in 1876 by the Goldie, McCullough Company of Galt, to install the machinery in the first mill erected at the Portage. He also put up a mill at Stonewall, and started in business for himself. He was in the town, and of the town. The fire brigade had no more vigorous member. His machine shop was a place of popular resort. The farmers knew no more consistent, more lenient friend. Largely because of his popularity he was sent to Ottawa in 1882 as M.P. for Marquette. A partnership with his brother was formed in 1886. After ten years at Ottawa he joined the Greenway Government in 1892, as a conscientious, hard-working Minister of Public Works; and stayed with it till its end in 1900, when the Senate claimed him.
Everybody calls him Bob, and everybody will agree that though there have been more brilliant Portage men—a former premier of British Columbia and a former premier of Canada, Mr. Meighen, both graduated into statesmanship from their modest offices on Saskatchewan Avenue—there have been none more admirable than the senator.
Red Fife was not as popular a wheat as it afterwards became, thanks largely to the experiments of a much-abused railway. The still earlier Marquis had not been evolved by Dr. Saunders. On the Portage Plains, where frozen wheat is now a rarity, it was then too common a drug on the market—I could tell of a man bringing a load into town that he could not sell at any price.
The danger of frost is when the milk is in the ear. In those days it was thought that a smoke over the land would prevent the freezing temperature reaching the ground, and that smoke and its accompanying warmth would keep a current of air moving over the fields of grain and thus save it from damage. The farmers cut weeds, and put them and straw in windrows round their fields, ready to be fired at the critical hour, which was usually about four or five o’clock on August mornings. We installed a big light on a staff at the top of the highest building, the Farmers’ Elevator. We kept in touch with the meteorological office at Winnipeg, and if we were advised that frost seemed to be imminent, about midnight the big arc lamp was set going, and in the dark hours before the dawn the protective fires would be seen flickering across the plains.
It cannot be told precisely whether this procedure really saved anything to the farmers. But it is true that, not only was it to our interest to do what we could to assure good crops to the farmers, on which the town’s prosperity depended, but the element of public service entered actively into this revival, for agriculture’s sake, of the beacon method of warning against fleshlier invaders than Jack Frost.
The rural telephone was not a possibility of those times. Life may have been more meagre then than it is now; though, looking back, it does not seem that it lacked any of the best elements of happiness. The town of five thousand people has distinct advantages over the city of five hundred thousand. Everybody may know more of everybody else’s business than is always good for anybody; but there is a greater neighbourliness in the smaller community. On the whole despite poverty, firebugs and politics, the Portage of the late eighties was a goodly place to dwell in.