Some of our daily friends in the early nineties, who still remain, dwindling to a small, reclusive band, had known the sovereignty of “The Company”, had seen the Queen’s uncamouflaged Government assume sway over the immeasurable territory. They had passed through the first Riel rebellion of 1869, with its execution of Scott, and the administration of affairs during the subsequent winter with Riel as President of the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land. Lawful authority was beleaguered, a thousand miles from the nearest centre of British power, and could only be restored by a military expedition which must travel over inland seas, through uncleared forests, and upon streams unfamiliar to military men—a wilderness unpopulated save for a few barbarians and isolated traders.
Caesar in Gaul, and the Crusaders bound for Jerusalem had no such resistance of primeval nature to overcome as was involved in the Wolseley relief of 1870, in which the Duke of Connaught shared, and which gave his name to Prince Arthur’s Landing, later to be changed by Van Horne to Port Arthur.
In the Red River Expedition of 1870 was Charlie Bell, a drummer boy of sixteen, son of the registrar of South Lanark. When the artillery was brought up against Fort Garry, the gate was open, Riel had fled from the breakfast table; and the crusade’s object was accomplished without an angry shot being fired. Charlie Bell did not return to Ontario, but became as much a Westerner as if he had been so born.
Sometimes he was in the public service, officially. He was always in the public service, temperamentally. For a generation he was the annually-elected secretary of the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, and saw it grow from almost nothing to the biggest wheat mart in the world. He kept the Board of Trade straight while it was located in the City Hall, which was built in sure and certain hope that the boom would become a normalcy, and which still houses the civic administration. Western literature has had in him a faithful practitioner, and Masonry a pillar, even to the thirty-third degree. During more recent years he developed a strain of feeling of which Ontario folk may take notice. He came to believe that the average Ontario man going West carries a disposition similar to that of the thoughtless Englishman, who said of Canadians generally, “We howns ’em.”
It is a curious and somewhat delusive phenomenon in community life that men seem vaster in a large city than they do in a little town. Somehow, a Winnipeg leader is supposed to be a bigger man in that city of over two hundred thousand than the same man was when the population was about as big as Brantford’s is to-day. That could not really be. Lord Strathcona, among the exaltation of Imperial London, was not truly greater than Donald Smith was, buying pelts and wheat at Fort Garry, keeping Riel quiet, and, later, parleying with bishops over the school question.
Heavy railroad building, during the periodic flow of capital from a rich and loaning country, is an easier task than starting a small railway in a small community with very small resources. In this connection one thinks of a man who had an extraordinarily vivid career during the strenuous decades of his Western life. I mean Hugh Sutherland, who in 1874, was sent to Winnipeg as a superintendent of the Dominion Public Works Department.
He built the quarters for Governor Laird, and the mounted police barracks at Battleford, when the capital of the North West Territories was moved from Fort Pelly, near the headwaters of the Assiniboine, north of Kamsack, the first Canadian Northern divisional point west of Dauphin. Charlie Bell watched Hugh Sutherland’s midwinter arrival at Fort Garry with his dogs, and always describes him as the handsomest man he ever saw.
It is like going back to prehistoric times to hear Hugh Sutherland tell of how he found it desirable to soothe the Indian mind by representing that the smokestack of an engine that he had brought into the country to saw lumber for the public works, was a cannon. It is amusing to hear him describe how, when treaty was being made with the Cree chief at the place where Battleford was to be built, he invited the Paleface to sit with him on a log; and how the chief, not being too clean, nudged nearer and nearer, until the retreating Sutherland, finding himself at the log’s end, was told that that was what was happening to the Red Man in his own country, and was asked how much further this sort of thing was intended to go?
When we have read of wars and rumours of wars because some country like Bulgaria or Serbia wanted access to tidewater, it has seemed a strange perversion of the proprieties of commerce that there should be so much anxiety to control the anchorage of shipping. But the urge to the sea has been a feature of Western Canadian life ever since the difference of five cents on a bushel of wheat has meant the difference between a Windsor chair and a Morris to a Manitoba landowner. Only, instead of longing for the glistening blue of the Aegean or the Adriatic, the prairie country has hungered for the leaden mists of the Bay, which Lord Grey, with a poetic licence not habitual with him, once called the Canadian Mediterranean—thinking, no doubt, of Fort Churchill and York Factory as the Cannes and Mentone of a too quiescent Riviera.
To make a grain route of Hudson Bay was an early and a latter ambition of the Winnipeg business man, to whom ice floes are not the same obstacle to business as they are to those who never knew what it is to trade while the thermometer is fluttering between forty and fifty below. When Hugh Sutherland had passed from the unexciting functions of a Government job, and was up to the eyes in developing the country, he became the chief propagandist for a Hudson Bay Railway. While I was pursuing the even tenor of my way at the Portage, he, with an apostolic fervor, was holding meetings and painting pictures in the capital, to the end that the road towards the Bay, through the flat country between Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, might begin.