Winnipeg

“ And fast though Winnipeg has grown, or because she has grown at such a pace, one can still see the traces and feel the spirit of the old spacious days in her streets. They are long streets and so planned that they seem to have been built by men who knew that there were no limits on the immense plains, and so broad that one knows that the designers had been conscious that there was no need to pinch the sidewalks and carriage-ways with all the prairie at the back of them. ”

“ The country retains individuality, and yet puts on romance, especially the rough, shaggy region between Port Arthur and Winnipeg. For four hundred miles there is hardly a sign that humanity exists on the earth's face, only rocks and endless woods of scrubby pine, and the occasional strange gleam of water, and night and the wind. ”

“ At any rate, whether because the state of affairs is yet unsettled, or because of the invisible subtle spirit of optimism that blows through the heavily clustering telephone-wires and past the neat little modern villas and down the solidly pretentious streets, one can't help finding a tiny hope that Winnipeg, the city of buildings and the city of human beings, may yet come to something. ”

“ After lunch, they spent an hour or two in the prairie city, waiting until the train came in. Ridged with mazy wires and towering telegraph-poles, and open to all winds, Winnipeg stands at the side of its big, slow river in the midst of a vast sweep of plain. Boasting [Pg 246] of few natural attractions, there is the quick throb of life in its streets. As Carrie and her aunt made their way through bustling crowds, past clanging cars, they gradually observed an undertone of slackness in the superficial activity about them. ”

“ Perhaps nowhere has a village so suddenly sprung up into a city as at Winnipeg, which first obtained notoriety by the advent of Lord Garnet Wolseley, then a young man, who came to suppress the rebellion raised there by a half-breed of the name of Riel, a daring young French Canadian, wily as a savage, brilliant and energetic. ”

“ Up to the North and Home Again THE MUSIC of a foaming torrent mingles with the softened hum of mowers and roar of heavy trains rushing wheat to the steamers at Fort William, as we plane up—not down—to the south-east corner of the Province. The crisp music is the voice of Winnipeg River, busy making electric light and power for the city and the towns beyond.
Right about turn. There is the very same water, spread out and sleeping in the shallow expanse of Lake Winnipeg. The shimmer of the surface breaks into flashing points of light as hundreds of Icelandic settlers pull out the fish. ”

“ It is a slender hope, not to be compared to that of the true Winnipeg man, who, gazing on his city, is fired with the proud and secret ambition that it will soon be twice as big, and after that four times, and then ten times... ”

“ Winnipeg is the West. It is important and obvious that in Canada there are two or three (some say five) distinct Canadas. Even if you lump the French and English together as one community in the East, there remains the gulf of the Great Lakes. The difference between East and West is possibly no greater than that between North and South England, or Bavaria and Prussia; but in this country, yet unconscious of itself, there is so much less to hold them together. The character of the land and the people differs; their interests, as it appears to them, are not the same. Winnipeg is a new city. ”

“ It was a dismal afternoon in early spring when I lounged disconsolately about the streets of Winnipeg. The prairie metropolis had not then attained its present magnitude, but it was busy and muddy enough; for when the thaw comes the mire of a Western town is indescribable. Also odd showers of wet snow came down, and I shivered under my new skin coat, envying the busy citizens who, with fur caps drawn low down, hurried to and fro. One and all wore the stamp of prosperity, and their voices had a cheerful ring that grated on me, for I of all that bustling crowd seemed idle and without a purpose. ”

“ In England it takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat elevator, red against the setting sun.
The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and fetid alleyways. ”

“ Winnipeg has been from the first a predestined centre of commerce. It is the metropolis of the transcontinental lines and is the one supreme gateway through which all travellers and all traffic from ocean to ocean must pass. No other city on the western continent has such an absolute monopoly of all transit from the east to the west, or the reverse.
Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, most attractive in its beauty of locality, stands on the bold bluffs of the Saskatchewan. ”

“ I venture you have never felt so much alive. The city stretches out on all sides for miles. Office buildings and stores are going up, new shingle roofs shine brightly under the winter sun, and we can almost smell the paint of the suburban additions. Within fifty years Winnipeg has jumped from a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post of two hundred people to a city of more than two hundred thousand, and it is still growing. The value of the buildings erected last year amounted to more than half that of the new construction in Montreal. ”

“ Winnipeg is a live wire city. That does not have to be proven. Almost any one of its progressive business men will admit that, if cornered, but it is doubtful if in its couple of hundred thousand or so of people it holds as many distinguished “live wires” as did the muddy, generally disreputable village that in, say, 1873, with a thousand or perhaps fifteen hundred people, straggled along Main Street from Portage Avenue to Brown’s Bridge, near the present site of the City Hall, and sprawled between Main Street and the river. ”

“ Ignorant people like the wheat-sellers of Winnipeg, speak of this settlement as a new place, a mushroomic upstart of yesterday, whereas it was an old post before Winnipeg was thought of. North of the Landing, there are thirty thousand people who depend on the local rivermen to bring down their year's supplies, so that this is a place of no small concernment and it has seven streets, you might say. As yet, its houses and public buildings do not run to paint or useless ornamentations, and there is a stolid practicability about its front doors. ”

“ Prof. Geikie says:—“Winnipeg is a surprising place for so far distant a region. Here are some 25,000 inhabitants: it is quite a considerable town—with churches, theatres, etc., etc., and a Scientific Society.” Speaking of his journey eastwards he says:—
We left Winnipeg on Wednesday (20th) and travelled all day through rough rolling ground, very rocky and sprinkled with my friends—boulder-clay, morainic gravel and sand, and large erratics. The country was upon the whole rather dreary, dense thickets of spruce fir covering the rocky knolls, and swamps and morasses lying in the hollows. ”

“ I have never seen a more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success of my journey. ”

“ Winnipeg alone must need a big supply. The little settlement which had such a stormy and romantic infancy has grown into the largest city of the West, with nearly 200,000 inhabitants, including 30,000 Slavs, 14,500 Hebrews, 6,700 Scandinavians and 6,200 Germans and Dutch. It is noticeable, by the way, that seventy per cent of the people in the five biggest prairie cities—Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton—are of “British” stock, including “Americans” of British descent; though they are only fifty-six per cent of the whole population of the three Provinces. ”

“ Civilisation has made rapid and giant strides, especially during the later years of the century. The wave has rushed far and deep over the old boundaries, and now the flourishing city of Winnipeg, with its thousands of inhabitants, occupies the ground by the banks of the Red River, on which, not many years ago, the old Fort Garry stood, a sort of sentinel-outpost, guarding the solitudes of what was at that time considered a remote part of the great wilderness of Rupert’s Land. ”

“ Winnipeg the Wicked In its early days, Winnipeg was reputed to be one of the two wickedest places in Canada. The other was a small Ontario town—Paris, if I remember aright. Winnipeggers didn’t object very much to having the doubtful distinction attributed to it, but they kicked like steers when linked with a small eastern village, where it would naturally be supposed the only outward and visible sign of sin would be the innocent little lambs gamboling on the green. ”

“ Winnipeg is of the West, new, vigorous in its way, of unknown potentialities. Already the West has been a nuisance to the East, in the fight of 1911 over Reciprocity with the United States. When she gets a larger representation in Parliament, she will be still more of a nuisance. A casual traveller cannot venture to investigate the beliefs and opinions of the inhabitants of a country, but he can record them all the better, perhaps, for his foreign-ness. It is generally believed in the West that the East runs Canada, and runs it for its own advantage. ”

“ Therefore many legitimately interesting episodes of the old days must go unrecorded rather than that the men of enterprise, energy, foresight and patriotism who put Winnipeg on the map in the years from ’71 to ’82 should be misunderstood.
The men who, so to speak, put the “Win” in Winnipeg deserve the best that those who are the heirs of their efforts and successes, or even failures, can say or think of them. The occasion was great, and they were men of the occasion.
The First Iron Horse The arrival of the first locomotive in Winnipeg was a red-letter day for the whole Canadian West. ”

“ Long as I have been hearing of you and your wild doings, it is only here that I have reached you on the confines of the far-stretching Winnipeg. It is no easy task to find you now, for one has to travel far into the lone spaces of the Continent before the smoke of your wigwam or of your tepie blurs the evening air. ”

“ Winnipeg has Things in abundance, but has learned to put them beneath her feet, not on top of her mind, and so is older than many cities. None the less the Things had to be shown—for what shopping is to the woman showing off his town is to the right-minded man. First came the suburbs—miles on miles of the dainty, clean-outlined, wooden-built houses, where one can be so happy and so warm, each unjealously divided from its neighbour by the lightest of boundaries. One could date them by their architecture, year after year, back to the Early 'Nineties, which is when civilisation began ”

“ Other great cities have grown up anyhow, usually on lines that suggest that their greatness was thrust upon them unexpectedly. Winnipeg too has grown big—beyond all expectation one would have thought—yet it suggests in its lines that it never felt, even in those far-off days when Main Street was the Hudson Bay trail, that it would be anything but tremendous. Very likely it is an accident that Winnipeg did possess this power of expanding and Winnipegers did not deliberately foresee and provide for its future vastness. ”

“ Winnipeg is forty-eight hours from Montreal, fifty-three from Quebec, and only forty-five from New York. No city on the western continent is more splendidly equipped than Winnipeg for business enterprises, great conventions, and large convocations of all orders. Besides the spacious and superb Fort Garry Hotel, she has more than fifty other guest-houses and one of the largest departmental stores on the continent; she has parks covering more than five hundred acres ”

“ Selkirk Avenue was not then the congested district that it is to-day. Then happy homes, not many on the street, but each with a nice large plot of ground and its own garden shaded with maple trees, covered the district where now stores and offices and tenement blocks are trying to shut out the sunshine. Never did a braver, more generous, kinder-hearted people dwell together than those of North Winnipeg in the good old days when each was known to all and all to each. ”

“ The mouth of the Winnipeg is divided into two channels by a large island; the lower, on which we were, is a succession of rapids each more beautiful than the last. Skirting the shore through a pretty, wooded path, we reached a bare hill above the highest rapid. ”

“ At Saint Norbert one steps down out of the car to be met by a colourful wayside sign of the Jefferson Highway, “From New Orleans to Winnipeg”, with “Palm to Pine” illustrations in colour. The Romance covered by this sign, cosmopolitan as any on the continent, lies in the complete metamorphosis suffered by Winnipeg and the middle west for which it stands, in the matter of distance. Distance with a big “D” has been wiped out. You are as near to the world, in touch with it as intimately in Winnipeg as anywhere else in Canada or over the American border. ”