The cattle town of Calgary is now a matter of history, and the old cattle men who rode the western plains when Alberta was a wilderness have nearly all passed away. Indeed, it is hard to believe that this up-to-date place is the frontier town I found here some years ago. Then cowboys galloped through the streets, and fine-looking Englishmen in riding clothes played polo on the outskirts. The Ranchers’ Club of that day was composed largely of the sons of wealthy British families. Many of them were remittance men who had come out here to make their fortunes and grow up with the country. Some came because they were ne’er-do-wells or their families did not want them at home, and others because they liked the wild life of the prairies. They received a certain amount of money every month or every quarter, most of which was spent in drinking and carousing. The son of an English lord, for instance, could be seen almost any day hanging over the bar, and another boy who had ducal blood in his veins would cheerfully borrow a quarter of you in the lean times just before remittance day.
Calgary, chief city of the prairie province of Alberta, is less than fifty years old. Beginning as a fur-trading and police post, it now has sky-scrapers and palatial homes.
At Macleod, in southern Alberta, the headquarters of the Mounted Police are in the centre of an important live-stock region, where, in the early days of open ranges, cattle thieves were a constant menace.
Others of these men brought money with them to invest. One of them, the son of Admiral Cochrane of the British navy, owned a big ranch near Calgary on which he kept six thousand of the wildest Canadian cattle. Every year or so he brought in a new instalment of bulls from Scotland, giving his agents at home instructions to send him the fiercest animals they could secure. When asked why he did this, he replied:
“You see, I have to pay my cowboys so much a month, and I want to raise stock that will make them earn their wages. Besides, it adds to the life of the ranch.”
“I went out once to see Billy Cochrane,” said a Calgary banker to me. “When I arrived at the ranch I found him seated on the fence of one of his corrals watching a fight between two bulls. As he saw me he told me to hurry and have a look. I climbed up beside him, and as I watched the struggle going on beneath, I said: ‘Why, Billy, if you do not separate those bulls one will soon kill the other.’ ‘Let them kill,’ was the reply. ‘This is the real thing. It is better than any Spanish bull fight, and I would give a bull any day for the show.’
“We watched the struggle for more than an hour, Cochrane clapping his hands and urging the animals on to battle. Finally one drove his horns into the side of the other and killed it. To my protest against this wanton waste of valuable live stock, Cochrane replied: ‘Oh! it doesn’t matter at all. We must have some fun.’”
Another famous character of old-time Calgary was Dickie Bright, the grandson of the man after whom Bright’s disease was named. Dickie had been supplied with money by his grandfather and sent out. He invested it all in a ranch and then asked for a large remittance from time to time to increase his herds. He sent home florid stories of the money he was making and how he was fast becoming a cattle king. Shortly after writing one of his most enthusiastic letters he received a dispatch from New York saying that his grandfather had just arrived and was coming out to see him. The boy was in a quandary. He had spent his remittance in riotous living and he had no cattle. Adjoining him, however, was one of the largest ranch owners of the West. Dickie confided his trouble to this man and persuaded him to lend a thousand head of his best stock for one night.