Great interest prevailed in political circles when the seat of government was removed to Montreal on March 5th of this year, and the House met on July 1st.
On November 12th, such an election was held that many of the oldest inhabitants remember it still. It was the days of open voting and sometimes lasted for weeks. Axe handles were used, heads were broken, the “claret” flowed, and the opposing parties used to keep men drunk in the taverns so that the other side could not get their men to the polls. Such scenes were long repeated, notably in the “Barney” Devlin and D’Arcy McGee election contests. The fight on this occasion was between Drummond and Molson. Drummond was Irish and it was recalled that he had been the defending lawyer for the rebels in 1837. The French-Canadians, therefore, rallied to his support and Molson was beaten. Parliament met on November 28th.
On March 27, 1845, Parliament was prorogued and on July 1st the new governor, Lord Cathcart, arrived. This year various educational movements were furthered. Bishop’s College, Lennoxville, was opened and the Mechanics’ Institute, so long in existence as an educational force, was incorporated. In December, John Dougall issued his specimen Witness and the first weekly Witness was published on January 5, 1846. Meanwhile the commission appointed in 1845 to investigate the rebellion losses indemnities was sitting and on April 18, 1846, it presented its report that the sum of £100,000 would be sufficient to pay all real losses. Already bitter feeling was being aroused among the English on this point. But the railway era, then commencing, diverted some attention from their grievances. In June, James Ferrier and others sought a charter for a railway from Kingston to Prescott and John A. Macdonald, then beginning his parliamentary career, and others, sought one from Montreal to Kingston, John Molson and others demanding one from St. Johns to the international boundary. On August 10th, on the Champ de Mars, a gathering of 2,000 Montrealers resolved to have a railway to the sea. Men were seeing visions and the Hon. John Young wrote this year to the Economist, advocating a bridge across the St. Lawrence. His dream was to come true.
The year 1847 saw the line from Montreal to Lachine opened. Otherwise the year was one of disaster—that of the ship fever. In this year 100,000 emigrants, mostly from Ireland, escaping the scourge of typhus fever and famine, came to Canada, but being exposed to ship fever nearly 10,000 became its victims; hundreds and hundreds died. The quarantine station of Grosse Isle was the most pestilential spot in the country. Every ship that could be chartered, good, bad and indifferent, was engaged in transporting emigrants. They were all slow-going vessels. Through want of sufficient room, neglect of ventilation, need of eatable food and cleanliness, the worst form of typhus soon appeared. “On the 8th day of May,” says Maguire’s “Irish in America,” “on the arrival of the ‘Urania’ from Cork, with several hundred immigrants on board, a large proportion of them sick and dying of the ship fever, it was put into quarantine at Grosse Isle, thirty miles below Quebec. This was the first of the plague-smitten ships from Ireland which that year sailed up the St. Lawrence. But before the first week of June as many as eighty-four ships of various tonnage were driven in by easterly gales. Of all the vessels there was not one free from the taint of malignant typhus, the offspring of famine and of the foul ship-hold.”
Montreal suffered terribly, also. There the Government caused to be erected three sheds of provisory hospitals from 100 to 150 feet in length and from 40 to 50 feet in width on the river banks at Point St. Charles. Soon eleven sheds had to be erected to receive the sick. In June, the city was in consternation and many fled to the country. But there were many who did noble service. The governor general, Lord Elgin, who had made his first coming to Montreal on January 29th, visited the sheds; the mayor, John E. Mills, also made frequent visits and in November his assiduous devotion brought him low in death, a martyr to civic duty. The clergy, the doctors and the women of the city, Catholic and Protestants, were heroic in their services. The priests hurried down to the sick who were mostly Catholics, but only a few, two Sulpicians and a Jesuit, du Ranquet, could speak English adequately. In this extremity the rector of the Jesuits, who had returned to the city since 1842, sent to Fordham University, and two priests, Fathers du Merle and Michael Driscoll, were sent to assist Father du Ranquet, who was the first of the Montreal priests on the ground. This devoted man found the sick or dead lying in rows stretched on the bare ground, and there he ministered till 3 o’clock in the morning.
Conditions were soon improved by the municipal authorities. Wooden bunks were built to hold two patients; there were no mattresses but only straw strewn under them. Oftentimes the living lay side by side with the dead. To add to the horror, the letters of this period tell us that “after a few weeks’ service these wooden structures contained colonies of bugs in every cranny; the wool, the cotton, the wood were black with them. Double the number of nurses and servants would not have sufficed to keep this monstrous hospital clean.”
Things were better when the tents to be given to those who, unable to find shelter in the sheds, were placed on the banks of the St. Lawrence with a blanket over them, under the trees. Fortunately it was summertime.
Bishop Bourget called upon the nuns to act as nurses. The Providence Sisters were the first approached, on June 24th. Each one answered simply, “I am ready.” Next morning twelve of these brave women were driven in carriages to the sheds. There they found hundreds of the sick crouched upon straw, wrestling in the agony of death; little children weeping in the arms of their dead mothers; women, themselves stricken, seeking for a beloved husband, amid a doleful chaos of suffering and evil odours. Other nuns were called out; even the enclosed Sisters of the Hôtel Dieu were allowed to leave their cloisters for the sad work of tending the dying and burying the dead in their hastily constructed, rude coffins of planks. Fifty or sixty died each day and their bodies, awaiting burial, were placed in an immense charnel house erected on the river banks. In this were some that were buried alive. Many of the orphans were adopted in the city or cared for by the nuns. For this the Irish population of Montreal love the city with a personal love.
Not only did the mayor die, but numerous others, physicians, clergy and nurses, and the police officers of the city.
The events of 1848 include the flooding, on January 15th, of Wellington and Commissioners streets, and the run on the Savings Bank of the city on July 15th, which was shortly followed by a re-deposit. Educationalists will note the opening of the Jesuits’ College on September 20th in the improvised school at the corner of Alexander and Dorchester streets.