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ADOA 2019By Brian Brennan? 2019I like the theme of your conference: "Welcome to the West! We are open for business!" It's got strong historic significance. That's the message we would have sent out to the world before the national railway came through here in the 1880s, and that's the message we continue to send out to those who want to settle here and make a life for themselves. "Welcome to the West! We are open for business!" Premier Kenney obviously likes the slogan too, because he’s been using it since he came to power.As most of you know, we in Alberta are a young province. At the turn of the 20th century, we didn't exist. We were part of a huge sprawling chunk of Canada known as the North-West Territories. Not the Northwest Territories that we know today, but a much larger version. Coloured pink on the map there, it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to Alaska and British Columbia in the west. And it wasn't owned by any government. For two hundred years, it had been owned by the Hudson's Bay fur trading company, headquartered in London, England.So in 1870, two hundred years after the Hudson’s Bay company was founded, it finally decided to sell this big sprawling territory – the North-West Territories – to the British Crown. The price was $1.5 million, which doesn't seem like a lot of money today, but probably was a big chunk of money back then. The British Crown, in turn, decided to give the territory to the new Dominion of Canada, which had been formed just three years earlier, in 1867. During the 1870s, there wasn't much in the way of permanent settlement in this region. A few Roman Catholic and Methodist missions, and that was about it. Also some trading posts, and whiskey forts, and police forts to keep the whiskey trade in check.When the Canadian Pacific Railway came through what is now southern Alberta in 1883, Calgary – though it did have a strong North-West Mounted Police presence – was still unincorporated. So was Edmonton. That meant, of course, that any kinds of land use regulations and municipal planning were still far off in the future. But if there wasn't any planning going on, there was plenty of land dealing. In Calgary, for example, a young lawyer named James Lougheed – the grandfather of the future premier – was buying up properties strategically located around the area where the CPR's main station terminal was going to be located, in the centre of Calgary's downtown. And how did Mr. Lougheed know which properties to buy? Some say it was because the CPR happened to be one of his regular clients and he may have had access to privileged information.So Lougheed did very well with his real estate investments. So did people in other parts of the province during the years before we had laws around subdivisions and restrictive covenants. In Red Deer, for example, a homesteader named Leonard Gaetz offered a half-interest in his farm, which was 1,200 acres, to the Calgary and Edmonton Railroad Company if the company would build a bridge and have the railway cross the river – the Red Deer River – on his property. The company readily accepted the offer and the next thing Gaetz knew was that a new townsite was being surveyed on his farmland. That's when the future city of Red Deer was born. But not all who invested big-time in Alberta real estate ended up with money in their pockets. In Edmonton, for example, a Scottish-born boat builder named John Walter did very well for a while when he moved across the North Saskatchewan River to what was then the hamlet of Strathcona. He built a home on the southern riverbank, built riverboats for the Hudson's Bay Company, operated a profitable ferry, and opened a coal mine and a sawmill.As I said, Walter did very well for a while. In fact, he became Strathcona's first millionaire. He built two additional homes on his Walterdale property as his business interests expanded, and he was active in community affairs as a school district trustee and town councillor. But then a series of disasters struck. A fire in his coal mine resulted in the deaths of five men, a flood washed away his lumber business, and a crooked manager embezzled a big chunk of his money. His wealth dissipated and he never recovered fully from his losses. But he did leave a legacy. The three homes he built on his property were preserved and are now part of the John Walter Museum in Edmonton's Kinsmen Park, and his name was also given to the nearby Walterdale Bridge and the Walterdale Hill. So to return to the theme of your conference: "Welcome to the West! We Are Open for Business," who are some of the others who would have answered the call back in the day? Well, I happen to have a particular soft spot for the characters, the scoundrels and the scallywags. I think many of us like those guys, the rogues and the rebels. Of course, we also pay lip service to saluting our heroes and our great leaders. But deep down, I think we prefer the oddballs and the unconventional types. Because they usually are much more interesting. Now, of course, we can't give knighthoods to our scoundrels and scallywags, because we don't live in England. But we do like to honour them in other ways. Take, for example, Peter Pond. What do we know about him? Well, we know he was a Yankee fur trader who moved north during the 1770s. And we know he was a pretty violent guy because he killed one man in Detroit before he got here, and he killed two more after he started trading in the Athabasca region in the early 1780s. So, three murders in total. After the third one, his fellow traders decided Peter Pond was just too hot to handle, so they kicked him out of the North West Company and sent him packing back to the States. Although he was never charged with any of the murders – in Detroit he claimed he acted in self-defence and in Athabasca he was beyond the jurisdiction of any legal system because the killings occurred within the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company – Pond still had become a liability as far as his fellow Nor-Westers were concerned. And so they replaced him with his second-in-command, Alexander Mackenzie.So how is Peter Pond remembered in the Athabasca region? Well, in Fort McMurray they named a shopping centre after him. A shopping centre, that's right. Why? Well, it clearly didn't have anything to do with his violent past. It had to do with the fact that Peter Pond is generally credited with being one of the first non-aboriginals to see evidence of what we now know to be the largest oil reserve in the world outside of Saudi Arabia. Pond drew a map based on his travels through the uncharted territories of the Canadian northwest, and he marked sites along the Athabasca River where he had seen the bitumen deposits. So there you have him, Peter Pond, the guy who first documented the existence of the oil sands. You might say he fit right into the adventurous tradition of this province long before anyone could have predicted the kind of place it was going to be. Then we have John Rowand, another white hustler who caught the scrappy spirit of Alberta long before it became a province. He was a big Hudson's Bay Company factor who ruled with his temper and his fists. That, as we discovered when we talked about Peter Pond, seems to have been an essential attribute back then if you wanted to become a successful trader. You had to have a pugnacious personality or you weren't going to make it. And John Rowand made it big because he controlled a huge fur-trading empire for 30 years from his headquarters at Fort Edmonton and, at the end of the day, left a sizable estate, valued at thirty thousand pounds.Rowand used to tell people that he believed only in God and the Hudson's Bay Company and, if he had to choose between the two, God would lose. And, typical of the man, he died in a fistfight. As he had lived, so did he die.Now one man who wasn't quite so violent, far as I can tell, was Kootenai Brown. He was an Irishman who came to Canada in the 1860s, settled in the Waterton Lakes area, and played two contrasting roles. On the one hand, he was a promoter who encouraged developers to exploit the oil resources that he found in the Waterton Lakes area. On the other hand, after making some money on his oil claims, Brown decided that he didn't want any more oil drillers destroying the environment in his back yard. So he stopped being an oil and gas development promoter, became a forest ranger, and fought to protect the wilderness and the wildlife.One of my favourite stories about Kootenai Brown is that he found all kinds of uses for the oil after he first discovered the seepages near Cameron Lake. He soaked up the oil in gunnysacks to use as a lubricant for his wagons. He also used the oil as medicine for his horses. And, get this, he even mixed the oil with molasses and served it as a cocktail to the local First Nations people. He allegedly told them that if they ever tasted or smelled anything as good as this, to be sure to let him know.Now, when I say allegedly, it's because – as you can probably guess – this story about the molasses and the oil cocktail is totally fictitious. But sometimes you can't let the facts stand in the way of a good story. So when the National Film Board made a documentary in 1966 called "Helicopter Canada," they included the story about the molasses and the oil cocktail as if it was the gospel truth. Kootenai Brown, as I said, was an Irishman. He came from the County Clare and basically reinvented himself as a frontiersman when he got to Canada.There were a lot of people who did that: Came here from someplace else and reinvented themselves.Take Bill Peyto, for example. He was an Englishman, from London, who came to Canada in the 1880s because he thought England was becoming too industrialized and he wanted to live in the wilderness. He settled near Banff, taught himself how to ride a horse, and became a tourist guide. Tourists thought he was the real thing, a genuine western frontiersman like Kootenai Brown, until he opened his mouth and they heard his Cockney accent. Peyto had quite a reputation as an eccentric. One of his habits was to snowshoe into town from his cabin outside Banff, buy a steak at the butcher shop, and make a big show of eating it raw while he was heading home. He refused to use a razor and always shaved himself – badly – with his hunting knife. And, after he got a job as one of the first park wardens in Banff, he made money on the side by trapping wild animals and selling them to the Banff zoo. One of these animals that he trapped was a lynx that he captured in the mountains, put to sleep with chloroform, and then hauled into Banff to sell to the zoo. On his way to the zoo, Peyto stopped off at a saloon for a drink. The lynx woke up and instead of recapturing it right away, Peyto just let it wander around the bar for a while so he could laugh at the drunken patrons scrambling out of the way. There are a couple of reminders of Bill Peyto in the Rockies. Up the highway, as you go towards Jasper, there's the beautiful and much-photographed Peyto Lake. And in Banff itself, there's the popular Wild Bill's Legendary Saloon. There used to be a couple of other reminders, including a Banff shopping centre called Peyto Place, and a welcome sign on the highway that you could see as you entered the town of Banff. But the shopping centre has now been refurbished and renamed, and the welcome sign was replaced about four years ago by a sign that emphasizes the name of Banff rather than the name of Bill Peyto. Now Peyto and Kootenai Brown, as I said, reinvented themselves after they moved from the old country to Alberta. Another guy who reinvented himself – big time – was a man who called himself Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance. His real name was Sylvester Long. He came from North Carolina and when he arrived in Calgary in 1919, he claimed to be a Blackfoot chief and a war hero. Both of these were lies. He did have Indigenous roots but he wasn't a chief. And while he did serve with the Canadian Expeditionary Force at Vimy Ridge, he didn't receive any awards for bravery. So he arrived in Calgary and while he didn't have any experience as a journalist, he did manage to get a job at the Calgary Herald, which hired him to write about city hall. Long Lance found city hall boring. So to spice things up he threw a fake bomb into the council chambers one day, and wrote a story so rich in insider detail that one of the editors got suspicious. When Long Lance finally admitted that he was the culprit, the paper fired him. And reported the firing on the front page. That made him the first and, far as I know the only, reporter in Herald history to be fired on the front page. But that temporary setback didn't slow him down. Long Lance simply left town and moved to Hollywood, where he became like Grey Owl: starring in the movies as a genuine Canadian Indian chief, which of course he wasn't at all. That's the poster for a movie he made in 1930 called The Silent Enemy.But eventually his lies caught up with him. The American Indian Affairs Bureau denounced Long Lance as a fraud, he took to drinking heavily, and eventually shot himself to death.And where did he fire the fatal bullet? In a Los Angeles residence that subsequently was featured in the television series, Fantasy Island. Long Lance had lived his life as a fantasy, so perhaps it's fitting that he ended it in a place that will always be associated with fantasy. People say his ghost still haunts that Fantasy Island residence where he died. Now, speaking of fantasy, here's a man, George Dupre, who earned his 15 minutes of fame with a remarkable flight of fancy. He managed to convince millions of people, including the editors of Reader's Digest and the Random House publishing company, that he had been a spy in occupied France during the Second World War. Dupre started his deception when he got back to Calgary after the war. He told his wife, and anyone else who would listen, that he hadn't served with the RCAF in England, as he had said in all of his letters home. He had been working with the resistance movement in France, posing as a garage mechanic. He told the story several times, embellishing the myth in each retelling, and eventually it came to the attention of an American war correspondent named Quentin Reynolds. He wrote a book about it entitled The Man Who Wouldn't Talk, which was serialized in the Reader's Digest. The story began to unravel when a reporter for the Calgary Herald, Doug Collins, was sent to interview Dupre. Collins had also worked in intelligence during the war, and he caught Dupre in a lie when he said to him, "Which section were you with, A, B or C?""I was in Section B," said Dupre. "Well, then," said Doug Collins, "you must have known Colonel Kitchingham, right?""Oh yes, I knew him very well," said Dupre.Well, of course, there never was a Colonel Kitchingham. That's how Collins knew Dupre was lying. He exposed the hoax in the Calgary Herald the next day, and won a National Newspaper Award for the story. Random House reclassified the book as fiction, Dupre disappeared into obscurity, and he died in Victoria in 1982. Collins, meanwhile, went on to achieve recognition across Canada as a newspaper columnist and television journalist. But he damaged his reputation in the 1990s when he became the first journalist in this country to face human rights complaints over comments that he made about the Jews. He questioned the Holocaust and he denounced the movie Schindler's List – he called it Swindler's List – as propaganda. The human rights tribunal found Collins guilty, and he and his newspaper were ordered to pay $2,000 in damages to a man who alleged that Collins had exposed Jews to hatred.So getting back to George Dupre, the spy that never was, how did he get away with his hoax for so long? Partly because of the traditional official secrecy surrounding intelligence work. The Secret Service would never publicly refute Dupre's story, so he was able to promote his lies without fear of contradiction. Which invites an obvious question: Why did he do it in the first place? He never had a satisfactory answer. Dupre told the reporter Collins that his only intent was to spread the message that survival depended on faith in God. He might have made up the facts, he said, but the message was pure truth. Why did he do it? That's a question that might also have been asked of this man, John Brownlee, who was the premier of Alberta during the early 1930s. Why did he go to court to settle a sexual misconduct case when he could have just written a cheque to make it all go away?Brownlee had achieved some notable victories as premier before the sex scandal brought him down. He had won back control of the province's natural resources from the federal government – which was quite a coup for the province, especially after big oil was discovered in Leduc in 1947 – and Brownlee had ended Prohibition, which also put some money into the provincial coffers. Then came the lawyer's letter that effectively put an end to his political career. In 1933, Brownlee received a notice accusing him of having illicit sex with a young government stenographer named Vivian MacMillan. She was 18 years of age. He was 47, and married with two children.Now, the smart thing for Brownlee to do would probably have been, simply, to give her some money and tell her not to pursue the matter any further. But Brownlee wanted to go to court and be publicly vindicated. Why? Because he believed his political enemies were responsible for Vivian MacMillan's accusations, and he wanted to prove them wrong.Big mistake. Brownlee was found guilty under an obscure section of the law related to the protection of female servants from abuse by their male masters. He was fined a total of $15,000. The case went on appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, where Brownlee was still found guilty. It then went to the Privy Council in England, where he was found guilty again. That marked the end of Brownlee's political career. It also marked the end of his party, the United Farmers of Alberta. They lost the next election, in 1935, to William Aberhart's Social Credit Party. Now, Aberhart was one of those larger-than life characters who dominated Alberta politics, as premier of the province, from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s. He was a Calgary school principal who had never been in politics before he first ran for office. During the Depression, he became frustrated by the inability of the provincial government – or any government, for that matter – to solve the economic problems of the Depression. So, he came up with this untested economic theory called social credit that had been devised by an amateur economist in England. Aberhart tried to have the Alberta government adopt it. The Alberta government wasn’t interested. This economic theory had never been adopted by any government anywhere, and the Alberta government wasn’t about to take it on. So Aberhart formed a political party, named it Social Credit, ran for election and won. Why? Because his party was going to print its own money, lower the cost of living in Alberta, and pay $25 a month to every adult citizen in Alberta. This was during the Depression, if you can imagine. After the Social Credit party won the election in 1935, a huge crowd of people lined up outside the provincial legislature in Edmonton, looking for the $25 dividends that they had been promised. But of course there were no dividends. The cupboard was bare. Yet despite that disappointment the electors kept voting for Social Credit in every election over the next 36 years because somehow the party always managed to convince them that they could do a better job than any of the other parties in the province. And over time they moved away from the radical monetary theories that had defined them in the beginning and evolved into a fundamentally conservative, free-enterprise government. Aberhart was premier for eight years. He died in office, at the age of 64, the only serving premier to die while in office. He was succeeded by Ernest Manning, who was premier for 25 years, and was at the helm when big oil was discovered at Leduc in 1947.Manning was an important figure in Alberta politics. Aside from a bizarre misstep in 1959, when he seriously thought it would be a good idea to set off a nuclear bomb in the oil sands to separate the oil from the sands, he did a very good job of running this province. He put all the policies and regulations in place that now govern the operations of the oil and gas industry, the driver of the Alberta economy. And he kept the province in good shape financially. We are still the only province in Canada without a provincial sales tax.There's a personal story I'd like to tell you about Ernest Manning. It involves the former prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and most of you probably know that Trudeau wasn't particularly well liked in Western Canada. He was perceived as being arrogant and haughty. He came across as being remote from the people, didn’t show any empathy for the problems of western wheat farmers, and so on.Now, I was working for a radio station in Prince George, British Columbia when this story took place. And I should mention that, as well as being premier of Alberta, Ernest Manning was also the spiritual director of a religious radio program called Back to the Bible. This program was broadcast every evening on the radio station where I worked, and the instruction from the station management was that the program should never be interrupted for news headlines, weather reports or sports scores. Only in very special cases could we break into the program and put a news bulletin on the air.So, one night I was working the evening shift, when the bulletin alarm bell sounded on the wire machine. The news gave me a shiver of excitement. The bachelor Trudeau, who was then 51 years old, had secretly married the 22-year-old daughter of a former federal cabinet minister. The young bride’s name was Margaret Sinclair. I ripped the story from the wire machine, sprinted into the news studio, asked the deejay to interrupt the broadcast of Back to the Bible and assumed my best on-air radio voice:“Good evening. This is a news bulletin from CJCI Radio. Prime Minister Trudeau was married in North Vancouver tonight. More details coming up on the news at 10 o’clock.”My phone was ringing off the hook when I got back to the newsroom. I had committed a no-no. The first five callers were outraged that I had cut into the Back to the Bible program. These listeners didn’t want to hear anything about Trudeau. They wanted to hear Ernest Manning preach.But the sixth caller was different. He was in a jubilant mood. “I’m ready to celebrate,” he said. “Did you say that Trudeau was murdered tonight?”Blame it on my Irish accent. I left the radio business shortly afterwards.So, getting back to the Brownlee affair and Vivian MacMillan, she went down in history as the woman who precipitated the demise of Alberta's most powerful politician. After it was all over, she went back to her hometown of Edson and married the owner of a local ice cream parlour. Now, another woman who precipitated the demise of a few male politicians in her time was Julia Kiniski of Edmonton. But she didn't need a sex scandal to make it happen. She just needed guts and determination. Starting in 1945, she ran for alderman fourteen times before finally being elected in 1963. After that she was unbeatable. She won four successive terms.They called her Big Julie because she stood six feet tall. Once elected, she swept through city hall like an invading army, upsetting the administration and fellow council members with her accusations about uncontrolled spending and graft. "These wolves in sheep's clothing are taking the taxpayers to the cleaners while they fill their own pockets with gold," she said. She had good reason to be concerned. On one occasion, she discovered that a city commissioner had submitted an expense invoice for $6,800 related to a business trip to Japan. She wanted to know what he spent the money on and was told that it included limo trips and gifts for Japanese businessmen. Kiniski was not impressed. She said there was no reason for the taxpaying public to be paying for city officials to "eat canary hearts" and shower foreign business types with expensive largesse.On another occasion, Kiniski went after the mayor, William Hawrelak. This was the prominent politician whose demise she precipitated. Kiniski knew that Hawrelak had been forced to resign in 1959 over some dubious land dealings and she wondered if he was still involved in land dealings in 1965. It turned out that he was. She discovered, through persistent and aggressive questioning, that the mayor owned more than a 25-percent interest in a company that had sold land to the city for park use. The mayor was forced to resign for a second time, and Kiniski was vindicated. Kiniski worked hard for her constituents at city hall, busy on the phone throughout the day and often past midnight. She took calls from people with legitimate grievances and from cranks such as the woman who wanted Kiniski to silence a neighbour who was outside repairing his car at 3:00 AM. Kiniski suggested that the woman go outside to help the man and then all three of them would be able to get some sleep. But burning the candle at both ends eventually took its toll. During the 1968 election campaign Kiniski complained about being tired and suffered chest pains. She did win the election but died the following year, of a heart attack at age 70. Her vacant aldermanic seat went to her son Julian. Another one of her sons, Gene Kiniski, make his mark as a professional wrestler during the 1970s and 1980s. Now, the mayor that Julia Kiniski had forced to resign, William Hawrelak, was quite the comeback kid of Edmonton municipal politics. He was twice forced to quit the mayor's office because of questionable land dealings, yet still able to rebound because the voters were ready to ignore his past misdeeds. Hawrelak first got into trouble in 1959, during his third term as mayor. A judge ruled he was guilty of gross misconduct because he used his influence as mayor to have city property transferred to his brother-in-law for motel construction. Hawrelak was forced to resign and was out of politics for the next four years. But he came back. In 1963, he was re-elected only to run into trouble again in 1965 when Julia Kiniski discovered he had a stake in a company that sold land to the city for a park. This time he remained in the political wilderness for nine years. He did try to come back in 1966 but he didn't make it. It wasn't until 1974 that Hawrelak was finally able to make his third comeback, when the voters were ready to forgive and forget. There's now a park in Edmonton that's named after him.Now if the Edmonton voters were ready to forgive and forget, the Calgary voters certainly were not. The mayor at the centre of the Calgary scandal was Don Mackay. He is probably best known as the municipal politician who promoted the tradition of giving white cowboy hats to visiting dignitaries. He first came to national attention in 1948 when he travelled with 300 football fans to Toronto and saw the Stampeders win their first Grey Cup game. He wore his white hat all the time when he was down there and, when he came back, he made a deal with Smithbilt Hats to be the official supplier of white hats for handing out to visiting celebrities. Mackay was mayor for ten years and then suddenly his career came to an end with the thump of 35 cement bags. An anonymous newspaper report accused him of taking the cement from the city public works department to pour the foundations of his holiday home in Banff. City council ordered a judicial inquiry, and the judge found him guilty of deriving an improper benefit from his position as mayor.Mackay didn't resign and council didn't removed him from office. But when he ran for re-election in 1959, the voters had their say. They kicked him out of office and gave the job to a man named Harry Hays.Mackay never tried running for office again. He moved to Phoenix, Arizona and tried to promote curling as a winter sport there. That didn't work out. No surprise there. The people in Phoenix couldn't stop laughing when he showed them a video of men with brooms chasing after rocks. Eventually Mackay moved back to Calgary, where he worked first as a sales rep for the convention centre and then sold real estate. He thought people might have forgotten about the cement scandal, because it had happened 15 years previously, but people don't forget things that easily. In the end, he was remembered as the politician who put his own interest ahead of the interests of the citizens. Now, when I started this talk, I mentioned a couple of people involved in land dealings – James Lougheed in Calgary and Leonard Gaetz in Red Deer – who did well for themselves during the years before there were laws in Alberta that regulated development. Now I'd like to mention a couple more who were active in land dealings from the 1950s onward, when of course land development was being regulated.Both called themselves builders. The first, Fred Charles Mannix, was the son of a man, Fred Stephen Mannix, who came to Calgary before the start of the First World War and made his fortune in construction, mostly infrastructure projects, roads, bridges, and so on. When he was in junior high, Fred Charles started working summers on his father's construction sites, and probably expected to take over the business when his father retired. However, the father put the company out of his son's reach by selling it to the Idaho construction giant Morrison-Knudsen, which had been involved in the building of the Hoover Dam and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. But Fred Charles was an astute businessman. By the time he turned 40, in 1953, he had made enough money from investing in Alberta's expanding oil business that he was able to buy back his father's company from Morrison-Knudsen. And from the 1950s onward, the Mannix companies – Fred Charles established several of them and collectively referred to them as the outfit – were involved in such projects as the Toronto subway system, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Trans-Canada Highway and the Comox airport. Now, Fred Charles was a very private individual who never gave interviews to the press and who had public relations officers on staff whose job it was to keep the Mannix name out of the newspapers. So anything that ever appeared in the papers about the outfit was always a mix of conjecture and speculation. When I wrote about the history of the outfit, in the Calgary Herald back in 1998, I couldn't find anyone to talk to me officially about it. But I did have a contact, who happened to be married to one of Fred Charles' sisters, and he gave me a lot of solid information that I was able to use in the story. Fred Charles, as I say, didn't like the limelight. But he was forced into it, reluctantly, in 1981, after he sued the Peter Lougheed government. A big chunk of his ranch property had been expropriated to build Fish Creek Provincial Park and the government offered him $5 million for the land. Mannix went to court and sued the government for an additional $35.8 million. Now an interesting aside here is that Peter Lougheed had worked for Mannix as a company lawyer during the late 1950s. And when he became premier in 1971, Lougheed received a visit from Fred Charles, who wrote some names on a piece of paper. "These," he said to Lougheed, "will be the members of your first cabinet." After Fred Charles left the room, Lougheed put away the piece of paper and not one name from the list made it into the first Alberta Conservative cabinet.So I guess there wasn't much communication between Lougheed and Mannix after that. And when the Fish Creek case went to court, it took several appeals before Mannix was able to squeeze an extra two million bucks out of the government far short of the 35 million he was seeking. Now, on his gravestone – Fred Charles died in 1995 – there's just one word for his epitaph: Builder. And that's the word one also applies to this man, Ralph Scurfield. He trained as a schoolteacher in Manitoba, came to Alberta in the 1950s, when he was in his early twenties, and parlayed a talent for carpentry into a successful career as a home builder.In 1957, Scurfield took advantage of an opportunity to buy a stake in Nu-West Homes, then a near-bankrupt Calgary company with a book value of only sixty thousand dollars. Over the next 25 years, Scurfield built it into a phenomenally successful multinational conglomerate worth $1.5 billion.Nu-West built quality homes in most of Calgary's subdivisions, helped initiate Alberta's new-home warranty program, expanded across Canada and into the United States, and diversified into petroleum and the commercial areas of construction and real estate. Then came the economic downturn. In the early 1980s, the huge Nu-West empire began to crumble under the weight of soaring interest rates. By 1984, it was $1.4 billion in debt. Scurfield stepped away from the company, sold its assets to the Americans, and began to spend more time on the ski slopes than in the office.And that's how he died. He was killed in a helicopter skiing accident in 1985, at the age of fifty-seven. So let me finish off today by telling you about another couple of colourful characters that I came across during my explorations of Alberta's history. One was named Paddy Nolan. The other was Mother Caroline Fulham. Nolan was a lawyer and a humourist, a clown prince of the courtroom. Mother Fulham was a street character, known around town as the Pig Lady. I have a soft spot for these two because they both came from Ireland. They answered the call, too: "Welcome to the West! We are Open for Business!"They arrived in Calgary at around the same time, toward the end of the 1880s. Nolan was a twenty-seven-year-old flour merchant’s son from Limerick. Mrs. Fulham, who was about thirty-seven, was a Navy pensioner’s wife from Dublin.Their first encounter came in April 1890, shortly after Nolan was admitted to the bar of the Northwest Territories, when he represented Mother Fulham in an assault case. He had no hope of winning, or even of being paid, but he felt an obligation toward a fellow immigrant.Here’s how he described her in a letter to the folks back home: “With Irish moss growing in her hair, and Irish belligerence in her fists, she must be Calgary’s most notorious female citizen.”Being Irish, for Nolan, was all that counted He claimed to have been born on St. Patrick’s Day, though he was, in fact, born on March 3, and he viewed Calgary approvingly as his home away from home in the Canadian wilderness. “It’s going to be bigger than Dublin someday,” he confidently predicted when the permanent population of Calgary was less than four thousand. “From what I’ve seen, I’d say a quarter of the population living here right now came from Ireland—or their parents came from Ireland—and about half of those who run the affairs of the town have Irish names.” He suggested the name of the town should be changed to Little Dublin.Nobody knows why Nolan decided to come to Calgary. He had achieved distinction both as a law student and as a lawyer, after he was called to the Irish bar in 1885. Yet, after practising for four years, suddenly, he said, “in a moment of impulse I visited the steamship office, booked a passage, and paid the required twelve pounds for a ticket that would take me to Toronto by way of New York.”I can understand that impulse because I did something similar when I was 23. I had been working in the Irish civil service for five years but was bored with my job. I went to the Canadian embassy one day and asked about immigrating to Canada. I did have a good job at the service, with a pension and good promotion prospects, and yet I threw it all away. Why? Spirit of adventure, I suppose. I wanted to see what life was like on the other side.And I guess Paddy Nolan may have felt the same way. A fellow traveller tried to persuade him to settle in New York rather than in this “Canadian village" where, he said, "they’re still experimenting with civilization and not sure that they want it.” But Nolan wanted to see this wild-west place where he heard that Texas longhorns roamed the streets by day and “men figure they aren’t decently dressed for work until they have their revolvers loaded and hanging on their belts.”Within a few months of his arrival, Nolan became the ninth lawyer to be registered in the North-West Territories, and the junior law partner of a fellow immigrant named Lafferty. “Mother” Fulham, as Lafferty called her, was one of Lafferty’s regular clients, and he was happy to pass her on to Nolan because he regarded her as a colossal nuisance. Nolan did not object. He liked to hear laughter in court and could recognize good entertainment value when he saw it. Mother Fulham, he figured, was the ideal character for his kind of courtroom comic opera. Mother Fulham was already well known to Calgary law enforcement authorities when Nolan took her on as a client. She lived downtown, kept a horse and cow as well as the pigs in her backyard, drank with the men at the Alberta Hotel, and often clashed with the police. They usually needed three men to subdue her whenever she became drunk and disorderly—which was often. Her husband, Jack, lived on a ranch in the foothills west of town and, though she could not read or write, she would wink at the judge and give as her occupation, “my husband’s secretary.” The courtroom was so full of spectators when Nolan represented Fulham the first time that the case had to be moved to the nearby town hall to accommodate the crowd. Nolan did not disappoint them, though he did lose the case. It involved an altercation between Mother Fulham and a hotel worker who punched her when she tried to take slops for her pigs from the hotel’s garbage can. She punched him back, of course. That’s how she ended up being charged with assault. If it had been a Broadway show, it would have been a box-office smash. The Calgary Tribune newspaper reported, “Even the stairway of the town hall was full of people. For an hour there was a first-class circus.” While Nolan usually drew the laughs, Mother Fulham was often good for a few laughs as well. Here’s an example: When a Canadian Pacific Railway train killed her cow after it wandered onto the tracks near her home, she asked Nolan to sue the company for damages. The CPR refused to accept responsibility. They said that a “No Trespassing” sign was prominently displayed near the scene. “Right,” says Mother Fulham. “And I suppose you thought my cow could read?”Two other stories, which are now part of early Calgary folklore and perhaps fictitious, show how Mother Fulham became Calgary’s unofficial town fool at a time when people needed some comic relief from the hardships of frontier life. One tells of the time she accused a policeman of ripping some hair from her head. When the evidence was checked, she had to admit that the hair came from her horse’s tail. The other tells how a doctor noticed her limping one day and offered to examine her leg. When she rolled down her stocking, he exclaimed, “I’ll bet you a dollar there’s not another leg in Calgary as dirty as that.” “Right,” says Mrs. Fulham. And she rolled down her other stocking.Mother Fulham sold her property in 1903 when her husband died, and she moved to Vancouver. In 1905 she returned briefly to Calgary and announced, “The coast is no fit place for a decent body to live.” After that, Mother Fulham headed off to parts unknown and was never heard from again. As for Paddy Nolan, he continued to provide Calgarians with comic relief for another eight years after Mother Fulham left town, until he died suddenly of a heart attack at age fifty.His pal Bob Edwards, the editor of the Eye Opener newspaper, wrote that “All the best criminals go to Paddy Nolan” and that Nolan was “a well of humour that never runs dry.” There are many examples of that humour. Here’s one of them. It’s about the time that Nolan faced his archrival Richard B. Bennett, who was a well-known lawyer in Calgary before he went into politics and eventually became prime minister. They faced off in a case where Nolan defended a Canadian Pacific Railway worker who was charged with stealing from his employer. Bennett, as the chief counsel for the CPR, presented the case for the prosecution. Accompanied by an articling student, he arrived at the courtroom weighed down with an armload of law books.Bennett did an effective job as prosecutor. Whenever the judge asked him to cite precedents, he turned to his assistant. “Boy, bring me Phipson on evidence,” he commanded. “Boy, fetch me Lewin on trusts.” The judge was impressed. So was the jury.Nolan rose to address the jury. He didn’t have an assistant, and he didn’t have an armload of books, but he did have a strategy. Turning to an imaginary assistant, he snapped his fingers and barked, “Boy, bring me Bennett on bluff.” Nolan got his acquittal.Nolan never did return to Ireland. Nor does he seem to have seriously considered doing so. He took Calgary to his heart, even with its tough winters, and he never looked back. And I did the same, as a matter of fact. I've now been living in Calgary for 45 years, which is twice as long as I lived in Dublin before I moved here.In 1892, Paddy Nolan married the former Minnie Lee of Toronto—he told her jokingly that he intended to ask Mother Fulham to be her bridesmaid—and he said that while the marriage was not made it heaven, it was made in Calgary and “that had to be the next best place.” When he died in 1913, his pal Bob Edwards – who was famous for writing satire in his newspaper – was uncharacteristically serious for a change. Edwards wrote that “In life, Paddy Nolan always left them laughing when he said goodbye. But in this last goodbye, tears take the place of laughter.”Now to wrap things up, I'd like to tell you a little bit more about Bob Edwards. His Calgary newspaper, The Eye Opener, circulated nationally and was very popular. It had a circulation of 18,500 and 4,000 of those copies were sold in Toronto. And how did Toronto get to hear about it? Because Bob Edwards did the smart thing. He put out 1,800 copies of the paper to sell on the Canadian Pacific Railway trains travelling back and forth across the country. And when the people got off in Toronto or Winnipeg, if they liked the paper – and they generally did – they would send away to Calgary for a subscription. Now, because he wrote satire, and frequently insulted the people or the institutions he was writing about, Bob Edwards got sued a lot. He got sued by the Prime Minister, Robert Borden, he got sued by Lord Strathcona, the Canadian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, and he got sued by the Canadian Pacific Railway, when he attacked the railway’s irrigation project east of Calgary. The railway was represented in that case by R.B. Bennett, who later became prime minister of Canada. And even though the case was dismissed, Edwards never forgave the CPR, or Bennett, for launching the suit. Every time there was a derailment or a train crash near Calgary, Edwards would publish a picture of the crash in the Eye Opener, and label it, “Another CPR wreck.” And if there weren’t any train crashes in Calgary that week, he’d run a picture of R. B. Bennett and caption it, “Another CPR wreck.” But later on his attitude toward Bennett softened. Edwards predicted in the paper that one day Bennett would become prime minister of Canada. And indeed he did.That's it from me, today. Thank you very much. ................
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