About 1875
NELSON’S MONUMENT
The building on the left is the house originally built in 1720 by Baron de Becancourt. It became the store of the Campagnie des Indes, which in the French times answered to the Hudson’s Bay Company. This was also the residence of the Hon. James McGill, founder of McGill University. It was demolished in 1903.
After the Gazette there came the “Canadian Courant” founded at Montreal in 1807 by Nahum Mower, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts. There came with him Stephen Mills, who was born in Rozalton, Vermont. The latter remained at Montreal till 1810, when he went to Kingston, where he founded the Kingston Gazette. He became a minister in 1835. These two New Englanders placed a distinctly American stamp on the new paper. The name “Canadian” was revolutionary to the old British colonists, but it pleased the French. The “Courant” lasted until between 1835 and 1840. That it should have continued its existence so long, looked on with suspicion by the chief English residents as democratic and revolutionary, would suggest that it was subsidized either by American merchants, for the trade relations now between the two countries were becoming intimate and profitable, or by the government of the United States, who, baulked in their revolutionary designs hitherto, were still desirous of seducing the neighbouring “Fourteenth” colony from its allegiance.
Nahum Mower left in 1829, and in his valedictory he claims to have made good his pledge in the first number that he “should make it his duty to become a good subject and endeavour others to continue so.” He worshiped, till 1813, when he sold his pew, in St. Gabriel’s Church, the only non-Anglican church then in existence, and the temporary home of all English-speaking non-conformists. Still he was accused of undue intimacy with the enemies of the British Connexion in Canada, especially during the troublous times of 1812 and the years of apprehension after.
The Canadian Courant had an early rival in the Montreal Herald, which published its first number on Saturday, October 19, 1811. Its first printer and founder was a young Scotchman, William Gray, of Huntly, Aberdeenshire, born on August 12, 1789. He arrived in Montreal in June, 1811. In 1812, May 25th, he was married to Agnes Smith, of Aberdeen, by the Reverend Mr. Somerville. William Gray, as surmised by Doctor Campbell in his “History of St. Gabriel’s Church,” seems to have been related in some degree of cousinship to Alexander Skakel, the most noted of the Montreal early British schoolmasters. He died at the early age of thirty-three, on February 28, 1822, having caught a cold on a journey in a Durham boat on his way from Toronto to attend to his business affairs, on hearing that in his absence his office had been mobbed by a crowd of French-Canadians, displeased with the tone of some of his articles. This young editor has left behind him a record of personal probity, good discernment and strong personal courage. His task in 1811 was no easy one—to establish an independent and unsubsidized paper in a small town.
The files of the early Herald give a contemporary picture of life of the community. Canada then had about four hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom most were in the Lower province; about four thousand five hundred regular British troops were mostly stationed there, also. Upper Canada consisted of only a few settlements, scattered here and there on the highways. Fur trading was the basic industry of the colony and its headquarters was at Montreal, the home and storage centre of the wealthy fur traders of the Beaver Hall Club. Agriculture was neglected till after the War of 1812, when it became realized that farming should be the staple industry of the colony. Unskilled labour was then performed by French Canadians, for there was yet no British immigrant labouring class. The skilled artisans came mostly from across the border, but the lesser storekeepers and merchants, chiefly Scotch, with an admixture of English and Yankees, were beginning to build up the permanent commerce of the city that was not always to be exclusively that of the fur trade. Among the business men then building up Montreal trade who were already well established before the war of 1812 were Alexander Henry, auctioneer; Benaiah Gibb, merchant; John Dillon, lumber merchant; James Brown, book-seller and owner of the Gazette; Peter McCutcheon, merchant; James and Andrew McGill, Forsyth, Richardson & Company, Maitland, Garden & Auldjo, Woolrich & Cooper, John Shuter, Samuel Gerrard, John Molson & Son, brewers and steamboat proprietors; Daniel Arnoldi, surgeon, and others.
The first home of the Herald, as far as ascertainable, was the 23 St. Paul Street given in Doige’s Directory of Montreal in 1819, the first systematic list of Montreal addresses. There is no proof of its having moved from elsewhere since 1811. On either side of it were two taverns, the Montreal Academy, a famous school kept by William Ryan, the residence of Joseph Papineau, eminent notary and public notary and father of the famous Louis Joseph, who was to become the “patriot” leader, and a small bookshop kept by a J. Russell. Near at hand, following Doige’s numbering, was the commissariat office and the residence of Colonel McKey, of the Indian Department, while a few doors away was the house of Peter McCutcheon, the famous merchant who afterward took the name of McGill. The “Canadian Courant” was established at 92 St. Paul Street, barely thirty doors from the Herald, and shared its premises with Daniel Campbell, a grocer. William Gray lived above his printing premises, as did his editor in 1819, Doctor Christie, and probably the latter’s predecessor, Mungo Kay, who was a Montreal merchant before he took to the journalist’s pen. At that date, and indeed for many long years, most of the storekeepers on St. Paul Street lived over their places of business. St. Paul Street was then the chief retail street; it ran the southern length of the town from the eastern fortifications of the Quebec suburbs to the western ones, ending at the present McGill Street. At either end there was a generous supply of taverns to meet the needs of those coming in from the country. In between them was a close succession of groceries, tailor shops, dry goods houses, hardware stores, druggists, bootmakers, glaziers, plumbers and the like. The Gazette at this period had its home on St. François Xavier Street.
The newspapers of the period received an addition by the advent of the first French-Canadian paper issued in Montreal, the “Spectateur.” They frequently had “brushes” with one another. In 1814, on July 2, a writer for the Herald, probably Mungo Kay, addressed an ode to a French-Canadian writer in the Spectator whom he calls “a certain gros bourgeois” and rallying him concerning a story, evidently known, of his efforts to cozen a certain negro: