KREW KUTS: The Goose Lake Line: Part 4
By Bernie Krewski
Infrastructure like railways are systems shaping our world, as Deb Chachra describes in her new book “How Infrastructure Works.” Although many of us take this for granted, they are mechanisms meeting our basic “biological needs,” serving a “public good” and fostering new economic and social relationships.
Plans to construct the Goose Lake rail line from Saskatoon to Calgary was unquestionably a large infrastructure project. Its aim was to advance the food supply of grains, especially wheat, “the most important cereal in the world” according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. Having confined Aboriginal peoples onto “reserves,” a rail line was expected to entice an influx of new settlers from Britain, the U.S., central and eastern Europe. It would address the necessities of local transportation, creating towns every ten to twenty km, accommodating the challenging realities of farming with the economic requirements of railroading. This, elected officials argued, would enhance the growth of the Canadian economy.
The first task for CNR officials was to establish a right-of-way, purchasing thousands of acres of prairie land. Farmers know a lot about owning land. My family lived in a railway house in Alsask from 1943 to 1952. It rested on railway land!
CNR wisely turned to an outsider, a non-railway official, someone who was highly knowledgeable about “the lay of the land.” This was not a simple process of physically examining the terrain, as that term once suggested. Rather, it necessitated understanding the potential use of the land for its original owners, its future occupants, and the impact on people in the surrounding area.
The man CNR chose to achieve that task, I have recently discovered, was the mystical Clarence Graham (1859-1935). He arrived in Saskatoon inconspicuously one day around 1908 - 1909 according to a later news report. Without announcement or making known his intentions, he chartered a horse and buggy with a driver. This duo left Saskatoon early one morning for the southwest, finding their way on the open prairie devoid of trails, “disappearing” for many days and nights. Graham was described as someone who possessed “a remarkable sense of direction.”
This headline, “A Trail Blazer and Practical Dreamer Spied Out Land For the Goose Lake Line” was published on August 5th, 1935, at the time of Graham’s death.
Since no one has written a history of the Goose Lake Line, and it is not cited in the 1070-page “Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan,” Graham’s legacy is deeply buried in the past. News reports, however, offer compelling glimpses of this western Canadian.
His father, a United Empire Loyalist, migrated from the U.S. to the Peterborough area of Ontario, northeast of Toronto. The population of Ontario in 1867 was about 500,000, less than half the current size of Calgary. Thus, it was not too surprising that frequent visitors to the Graham home were two founding Fathers of Confederation John A. Macdonald, Prime Minister, and Charles Tupper, Minister of Railways and Canals (1879-1884). In other words, Clarence Graham had political connections, although never elected to public office.
In 1879, age 20, and single, (remaining so throughout his life), he arrived in Winnipeg, a city incorporated in 1873. It was in the early stages of rapid growth, becoming the third largest city in Canada by 1911. Immediately, Graham became engaged in what we would now call real estate – the development, purchasing, and the selling of properties.
Like other patriots, he joined General Middleton’s militia forces in suppressing the North-West (Riel) Rebellion in 1885, a dispute over entitlement to land. That event was also interrelated with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway – opposition to its route across Canada and its very existence.
Having become an expert on Western lands, he was subsequently engaged in settling disputes between farmers and ranchers in southern Alberta and southwest Saskatchewan. He also led land-seeking parties from the U.S. into the Canadian West for many years.
After firmly establishing the pathway for the construction of the Goose Lake Line, Graham took on an even larger project – building a railway to Hudson Bay. Called the “On-to-the-Bay” movement, it briefly implicated the village of Oyen. Freight rates then, as later, were constantly hot political issues.
A delegation consisting of J.R. Wilson, a Saskatchewan politician and former mayor of Saskatoon, John MacLean, an On-to-the-Bay Association executive from Winnipeg, and J.J. Kelly, a local lawyer representing Oyen’s Board of Trade met with the Premier of Alberta in August 1924. They were seeking Herbert Greenfield’s support to establish a new and more efficient outlet for the transportation of grain through Hudson Bay.
Greenfield refused to support the project, indicating that “Alberta has heavy railway liabilities already on its hands compared to Manitoba and Saskatchewan.” Graham proceeded, nonetheless, celebrating the successful completion of the Hudson Bay Railway at the Saskatoon Exhibition in July 1929, driving in a symbolic last spike!