Infinite labour, infinite patience, because of infinite delays, and, in the constructive sense, infinite imagination, went into that launch of an enterprise which has halted men with larger resources and Governments with vaster powers than ever came Hugh Sutherland’s way. But the labour and the patience and the romance that went into a truly heroic adventure did result in forty miles of railway being built, from Winnipeg to Oak Point—and there the money was exhausted, though the desire to spend it on reaching the Bay wasn’t. Since then, as part of the Canadian Northern, the branch was extended practically the whole length of the peninsula, to Gypsumville—a name which tells why.
The lieutenant-governor of Manitoba was Sir John Schultz. What a career, Western of Western, he had had, to be sure. He was a medical student of Queen’s University, Kingston, and came West in 1857, the year in which gold was reported on the Saskatchewan river, and the first party of explorers was sent to the prairies by a Canadian Government. At Fort Garry he practised medicine, and in the early sixties bought a share in the first Western newspaper, “The Nor’Wester”. The sovereign Company exercised its powers rather arbitrarily, particularly against anything that looked like an infringement of its monopoly of the Indian trade. Schultz was an ardent free trader, and fought The Company in his paper, and through a trading firm he established. He found himself in jail and bound with ropes as a sidekick to a dispute with his former business partner turned sheriff, and therefore a creature of The Company.
Schultz was later imprisoned by Riel. Convinced by what he overheard his guards say, that he was marked for execution, he escaped, after eight hours’ work on a hole in the wall, made by a gimlet and penknife smuggled to him by his wife. This happened while Donald Smith was arranging with a convention for a Bill of Rights constituting the Provisional Government of Rupert’s Land—all in anticipation of the arrival, during the coming summer, of troops, and also, as the purchase of Rupert’s Land from The Company for £300,000 had been arranged, of its entry into the Canadian Confederation. Dr. Schultz became the first member of Parliament from the new province which was established in 1870; then senator, and finally lieutenant-governor and a knight.
Perhaps there was no more compact embodiment of the emergence of Winnipeg from a frontier post to a Metropolitan capital than an old friend of all who were ever associated with him, J. H. Ashdown, who died while these pages were in the press. It is difficult for any of this generation who talked with a man whom a veracious writer called the merchant hardware prince of Canada, who was an alert, on-the-minute modernist, and whose appearance long belied his years, and discern in him the tinsmith of Fort Garry, who served against Riel in ’69, was put in jail with Scott, Schultz and Charles Mair, and was lucky to escape the fate of the murdered Scott.
Mr. Ashdown was literally one of the city fathers. Before he was Mayor in 1905—and he was called the best Mayor Winnipeg ever had—he was an alderman. Before he was alderman he was a leader in the movement to incorporate the city. Indeed, ever since his arrival, in 1868 he was a forefronter in every sort of civic advance, because he was built that way.
Natively, Mr. Ashdown was a Londoner. He came to Canada in 1853, at nine years of age. He learned tinsmithing at Hespeler, in Ontario, under the old apprenticeship system, which inculcated obedience and frugality, until its subject was long past the period at which, in these times, young hopefuls are post-graduates of the School of Bringing Up Father. The Ashdown apprenticeship was decided on after finding a sixpence on the road he walked over from Guelph to Hespeler. That lucky sixpence brought these payments: board, lodge and laundry, twenty-five dollars the first year, thirty dollars the second year, and thirty-five dollars the concluding year.
The apprenticeship over, he ventured to Chicago and Kansas before sallying north. To reach Fort Garry he walked nineteen days from St. Cloud. Fort Garry, in 1868 furnished a fair livelihood to an expert metal worker, and illimitable outlook to a seer. Ashdown was both, and would go a long way to advance his business or broaden his grasp of the future. For a pioneering story this is as good as any that even the apocryphers have produced:—
A neighbouring hardware merchant becoming tired of his prospects offered to sell his stock, store and goodwill to Ashdown for a thousand dollars. Ashdown said he hadn’t the money, but asked for a little time to turn the proposition over in his mind. It was Friday afternoon.
Monday morning the hardwareman met Ashdown, who said he couldn’t buy the business. He had walked to Portage la Prairie, hoping to raise the thousand dollars, and had been turned down. The return trip, Winnipeg to Portage la Prairie, meant a tramp of 112 miles.
Against the background which the personalities of these typical men faithfully represent, one always thinks of modern Winnipeg in terms of historical glamour. Its business was always substantial and always anxious, the future being very tantalizing. There was an almost continuous procession through the papers of plans for great Western development. Railway schemes were the most intriguing and impressive. They were divisible into two main streams of endeavour—to defeat the monopolistic entrenchments of the C.P.R., and to build and magnify branches from the main artery of traffic, under independent control.