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Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 16
by William Naftel FoundationIncorporation On May 1881 the Cochrane Ranche Company was incorporated by Letters Patent
The company was capitalized at $500,000 divided into 5,000 shares of $100 each. At incorporation $270,000 worth of stock had been subscribed of which ten per cent was paid up. The ownership of the shares was divided as follows: Senator Cochrane, 1,000 shares; McEachran 1,000 shares; James Cochrane, 500 shares; James Walker, 100 shares and J. M. Browning, 100 shares.2 Reaching this stage had meant a busy winter for Cochrane and his associates, particularly McEachran who was taking a leading part in the affairs of the company. First there was the organization of the company, which meant setting up arrangements for the on-site facilities and haggling with the Department of the Interior over the terms of the lease. In February, leaving the winding up of these matters to McEachran, Cochrane left for England to purchase the purebred stock.3 The Cochrane Lease The first recorded approach the senator made to obtain a grazing lease was a letter written to J. S. Dennis, deputy minister of the Interior, dated 26 November 1880.4 In it Cochrane expressed his hope that, in view of the number of applications for leases, he would be favoured in the selection of lands in the Bow River district. It is evident from the general tone that Cochrane and Dennis had discussed the matter previously. This was followed on 17 December by a letter to Sir John A. Macdonald which evidently constituted a more formal application. Accompanied by maps, the letter outlined in some detail the plans for stock raising in the Northwest, plans which, amplified and modified by a further letter of 10 February, constituted an impressive package. The entire proposal involved an investment of half a million dollars in breeding horses, sheep and cattle. The stated objects of the company were to replace the American outfits which to date had supplied the Canadian government's beef requirements in the Northwest; to enable incoming settlers to purchase stock at a reasonable price, and to build up a profitable overseas export trade.5 So far as the arrangements respecting the lease were concerned, Macdonald himself had said that the enterprise would receive "every legitimate encouragement" from the government6 and Cochrane was just the man to wring every possible scrap of meaning from that statement. The continual pressure that Cochrane exerted over the next few months ensured that the general outline of the ranching regulations would be attractive to large-scale corporate investors; however, he failed to obtain many of the details he suggested since many of his "requirements" were too opposed to the public interest, even for a favourably disposed administration.
Cochrane made it clear that he expected the government to exert itself to accommodate his needs. He agreed to the government proposal that the term of the lease for the grazing lands be 21 years, but suggested that the government should have the option of resuming the land and cancelling the lease only after 7 or 14 years, if required for agricultural purposes, and then by giving 3 years' notice. He further suggested that if such cancellation were considered necessary, the leased land ought not to be sold in areas of less than a township, with the lessees having the option of purchase under the same conditions as the settlers. Further, the lessees should have the right to select and purchase up to 5,000 acres of the leased land at $1.00 per acre at any time during the first two years. Cattle, horses and other stock would be admitted free of duty in 1881 and 1882, along with farm implements, wagons, harness, and so on required for the purpose of ranching.7 Cochrane proposed generous terms for himself and it is a measure of his brand of self-confidence that he would even suggest such a lease. It is scarcely surprising that, with the exception of the proposal to admit stocker cattle free of duty, the actual lease, the terms of which were generous enough, bears only a general resemblance to this proposal. The objections of the investors relative to the government lease, as put forward by McEachran during Cochrane's absence in England, were not unreasonable from a strictly ranching point of view, but with its visions of settlement in the future the Department of the Interior was not willing to shift its position much. McEachran noted that the option to cancel the lease after two years meant that despite the enormous investment required, what they were getting was a two-year lease, renewable every two years for a like period. It would, he claimed, be at least five years before any return on investment could be expected and if the lease were cancelled after, for example, six years, ruin would surely follow. Even if it were only cancelled in part, a latecoming lessee or settler could in those pre-barbed wire days turn his cattle among the new, improved and acclimatized herd and reap the benefits of interbreeding free of risk and expense. A much more attractive proposition in the eyes of the businessmen behind the Cochrane Ranche Company would have been an uninterrupted 21-year lease with the right to purchase in whole or in part on its expiration.8 These objections were too radical for a department whose main commitment was settling families on homesteads, but the form of the lease which was approved (but not until March 1882) did resemble the Cochrane proposals in its provisions for large-scale operations. There was one point of conflict in the leasing provisions over which Cochrane was reluctant to admit defeat. This involved the right to buy outright a substantial acreage within the limits of the lease for use as a "home farm." The first attempt to persuade the government of the need for this concession was made in his letter of 17 December 1880 and he elaborated further in his letter of 10 February when he asked to be assured of the sale of a tract of 10,000 acres within the lease. This was rejected by Macdonald, but in a memorandum drafted for council on 17 February the prime minister went so far as to accept the premise on which the request was based — the need for a secure base of freehold land from which to operate — anticipating Dennis's recommendation of 9 May. Macdonald was not, however, willing to admit that the ranch needed any more security than 5,000 acres at $2.00 per acre.9 For some reason, the memorandum embodying these views was never incorporated into an order in council at this time, if indeed it were ever submitted. Instead, a private agreement was reached at a meeting on or about 11 May between Macdonald, Cochrane and Wiser. The agreement, substantially as Macdonald had proposed but with the price of the land lowered to $1.25 per acre,10 was incorporated in the order in council of 20 May and applied to the entire ranching industry. On this order in council, according to Cochrane's later statements, was based much of the appeal to potential investors who were probably told that if the ranch failed, the sale of the land would enable them to recoup their investment.
In politics, however, nothing is certain and the order of 23 December 1881 revising the conditions under which grazing leases would be awarded did no more than permit the lessee to "purchase land within his leasehold for a home farm and corral."11 In other words, the amount of land sold would be decided by the Department of the Interior. Cochrane protested, but to no avail, for although he maintained that only the 20 May 1881 order applied to him, the department stated that, as his lease was signed in August 1882, the December order must prevail. Some two years of letter writing and personal interviews availed him nothing and eventually the Department of the Interior simply ignored his letters on the subject.12 In the end, Cochrane received his due, for the cancellation of the original leases announced in October 1892 permitted holders of those leases to buy up to ten per cent of their leasehold the following spring at a price of $1.25 per acre. Ironically, the price was established on the grounds that it was only fair to sell at the amount announced in the initial set of regulations of 20 May 1881.13 In other respects, however, his influence proved more potent. He was able to persuade the government to entirely forbid sheep grazing on the grounds that they would do extensive damage,14 and it was only the personal intervention of the Marquis of Lorne that in the end forestalled him. His Excellency pointed out that such a blanket prohibition was a "most harsh measure . . . calculated to provoke great dissatisfaction among the smaller graziers" and while he did not refuse to sign the order in council (with the attendant constitutional complications), he held it back, thereby preventing its publication until he could persuade Macdonald to modify it by introducing a system of ministerial permits for sheep grazing15 Nevertheless, there was still bitterness; the "advice of a certain ranching senator" was not well regarded by those who had taken out leases with the idea of sheep ranching until forestalled by "this monstrous restriction."16 In the matter of choosing the necessary grazing lands, the senator was to demonstrate a remarkable capacity for getting his own way. Certainly he left the departmental officials in no doubt as to their relative positions in his scheme of things. "I have always understood that I was to have first choice" he write, "I may, after personal inspection, decide to locate in quite a different part from that which you have assigned to me even approximately, and before I go into the country I want authority to select where I choose, irrespective of any applications made by others, provided I take it in a block."17 The Ranch Manager One of the most important aspects of organization was to locate a suitable ranch manager. McEachran's official title was "Resident General Manager," but his other interests were so extensive that it would seem unlikely he ever intended to do much more than supply advice when required. There is no evidence that he did more than that, though this advice was, in the beginning at least, given priority. At any rate, efforts were early made to locate a suitable ranch manager who could get the new venture off on the right foot. Lieutenant Governor Edgar Dewdney had, in the course of his official duties, come to know Superintendent James Walker of the North West Mounted Police well, and no doubt admired the cool efficiency which marked the latter's performance of his duties. For example, Walker had distributed over $100,000 among the various Indian agencies of the territories during the summer of 1880, facing a number of crises with restless Indians with the aplomb that was becoming characteristic of the Mounted Police. Accordingly, in conversation with Cochrane, Dewdney mentioned Walker as the ideal man to manage the ranch and the senator took up the suggestion at once. Whether by accident or design, Walker arrived in Ottawa late in 1880 as escort to Mrs. Dalrymple Clarke, widow of an officer who died at Fort Walsh and niece of Lady Macdonald. The proposal was put to him by Sir John A. Macdonald. The annual salary offered was $2,400 compared to the $1,400 he received in the Mounted Police and Macdonald advised him to accept. He did so in the new year, no doubt bearing in mind the favourable impression he had received of the proposed ranch site on his previous travels.18 The Cowboys The cowboys employed on the Cochrane ranch were probably a rough lot and many would have been American as a definite effort was made to hire hands from the outfits that brought the drives up from the United States.19 There was at least one exception as to nationality on the Cochrane spread, the foreman Ca Sous, a Mexican half-breed who was a fine cowboy, but had an abrasive personality that made it difficult for him to get along with the men. Yet despite the cowboys' backgrounds in the American West, it is almost a truism that the history of the Canadian West was one of peaceful development. Perhaps when McEachran sighed with relief on crossing the border on the way to Calgary from Fort Benton and when he claimed that there was a perceptible difference as soon as they reached British territory, it was more than chauvinism.20 Whatever their nationality, the cowboys impressed the correspondent of the Toronto Globe on his western tour in 1882.
The perquisites of a cowboy's existence seem to have been not too unpleasant if F.W.G. Haultain's description is at all realistic. In the early summer of 1885 he visited Cochrane's son William, who was managing the operation on the southern range, and Haultain described to his mother what he observed from the visitor's viewpoint:
Round-up was the most difficult time for the cowboys, for the hours were long and the work was fast and hard. Morning came early for a round-up crew, already ten miles from camp when the sun rose. Compensation was the early supper hour of 4:00 P.M., a consequence of the cattle needing some time to graze and settle in before they would bed down in new surroundings. In wet weather life was miserable. Everything down to matches and to bacco was wet and soggy, horses were mean and food was cold.23 Yet it was a free, open and independent life out in the western air and far from teeming humanity. As a way of life it drew many converts from the East along with those brought up to it. The Breeding Stock The results of Cochrane's visit to England in February to acquire pure bred stock for the ranch must have reassured the government if ever it had any doubts as to the bona fides of the scheme. On 12 April 1881 the Dominion Line steamer Texas arrived at Halifax with what was termed the largest consignment of purebred cattle ever imported into Canada.24 The shipment raised eyebrows even in England and the journal The Colonies and India noted,
The bulk of the shipment, under McEachran's charge, was destined for the ranch although at least 75 sheep went to Hillhurst. Nor was this shipment the only one of its kind during the year. In late October James Cochrane sent to Canada 86 Hereford bulls which he had selected with some care from the herds of such celebrated breeders as Lord Polworth and the Earl of Latham.26 These aristocratic animals represented only a fraction of the proposed total herd, although upon their blood lines depended the success or failure of the venture. Over the next few years these bulls would mingle with some 8,000 range cattle and over that period would, through their offspring, gradually raise the quality of the entire herd. These thousands of range cattle would naturally come from the nearest and cheapest source, the western United States. Choosing the Ground By the end of May 1881 the Cochrane Ranche Company had not yet finally decided on a specific location for its operations, although Cochrane made it clear enough that he wanted it in the Bow River district which he may have visited the previous summer. At the beginning of June, in company with McEachran, the senator set out for Calgary to look over the ground and determine the limits of the lease. Despite a provision in the regulations of 20 May requiring that the leases be auctioned off, this was not to stand in the way of the Cochrane ranch; the deputy minister of the Interior had on 9 May already presented a report to the minister containing the names of those to whom promises of grazing leaseholds had been made.27 One of these, of course, was Cochrane. On the strength of this report which, while confidential, Cochrane must have seen, operations went ahead as though the lease had been granted, though it was to be a year before this was an accomplished fact.
At this stage in the development of the North-West Territories, it was still necessary to go to Calgary via the United States by railway and steamer to Fort Benton, Montana, then northward to Fort MacLeod and Calgary via horse or bull train. The trip was a long one and by the time the senator's patty reached Calgary, Walker had staked out the ranch site at Big Hill, an aptly named location about 23 miles west of Calgary. The location suitably impressed the directors.
Walker had been sufficiently confident that his choice would be approved to mark out the boundaries preparatory to its being surveyed. Nor was he disappointed; the directors agreed to his selection and based the formal application to the government (not made for nearly a year) on his choice. As has been noted, the Cochrane lease was not finally signed until August 1882 (although the designation of 46 leases, including Cochrane's, was made in March), by which time the Cochrane Ranche Company had been in occupation of its site and in actual operation for over a year. The months before the signing of the lease had been put to good use not only on the site but also back East. There was more to ranching than just obtaining a lease of one's own; it was necessary as well to ensure that one's neighbours were the right kind of people. As early as May 1881 Cochrane undertook to impress upon the Department of the Interior that he would greatly prefer it if Wiser held the neighbouring lease rather than any of the other applicants. Further, he pointed out, it had always been his understanding "that I was to have first choice and Mr. Wiser next."29
In view of Wiser's business and other interests, it is not surprising that Cochrane was anxious to have him as a neighbour and it is possible that there was some plan to combine operations into one large-scale ranch. It is a measure of his stature in the business world that when Wiser visited Ottawa at the end of April 1881 to look into the matter of obtaining a lease, the visit and the reason for it were reported the following day in financial pages of the Montreal press.30 His actual connection with the Alberta ranching industry did not in fact develop along the lines which these initial approaches indicated, but the connection with the senator remained close. At some point it was decided to expand this plan and out of it grew the Dominion Cattle Company, incorporated 23 September 1882.31 As originally stated, this company was intended to carry out
The applicants for the charter were, W. B. Ives, MP, of Sherbrooke; Senator Cochrane; Senator Ogilvie; J. P. Wiser, MP; R. H. Pope, cattle breeder, MP (1889-1904) and senator (1911-14), from Eaton Township, Quebec; Hugh Ryan, Perth, Ontario; Harlow C. Wiser of Prescott, and William Presser Herring of Emporia, Kansas. The authorized stock of the company was $800,000 divided into 8,000 shares of $100 each.33 The actual Letters Patent of Incorporation differ somewhat from the information given above in that references to the American operations had to be dropped because the purposes for which applicants might be incorporated could only be those to which the legislative authority of Canada extended.34 The Setting For the first year or so the ranch was one of the few white settlements in a still empty land, otherwise broken only by the Indian mission of the Reverends John and George McDougall at Morley and the North-West Mounted Police post at Calgary. The latter place "then consisted of four or five log huts, i.e., The Hudson Bay Store, I. G. Baker's, the police pallisaded post and the police officer, Captain Denny's house."35 Morley, named in honour of the Reverend Morley Punshon who served as chairman of the Canadian Methodist Conference from 1867 to 1873, was almost the larger of the two settlements. Established in 1873, it had by this time a church, a day school, a mission house, a store, various stables and an Indian encampment.
Communication with the outside world was slow. Supplies were brought in by the freight teams of I. G. Baker and Company of Montana which hauled all merchandise north from Fort Benton and Fort MacLeod. The bull trains were imposing when encountered on the prairie. As many as 15 yoke of oxen made a team pulling three wagons (the lead, the swing and the trail) and any number of teams made up a train. Each train was supplied with a cook and a mess wagon. Their slowness was legendary. On one occasion when Walker arrived at Fort MacLeod on his way to Calgary from the East, he was told, on asking for his mail, that it had left two weeks before on the bull train. Calgary being 102 miles north of MacLeod, Walker headed north expecting to pick up his mail at his destination. He learned his error 40 miles out from Calgary where he met the train placidly crawling north. With good weather, the foreman told him, they would make it to Calgary in ten days.36 Initially the future of Calgary was held in such little regard by the authorities that Fred White, comptroller of the Mounted Police in Ottawa, initially tried to persuade Cochrane and Walker to take over the police reserve, which covered much of the land in and around the townsite, as a site for the ranch headquarters.37 Matters did improve, however, particularly with the announcement that the CPR would take the southern route via the Kicking Horse and Rogers passes rather than the northern route through the Yellowhead Pass. When Frank White arrived in September 1882 to replace Walker as ranch manager, there was a fairly bustling little community with a modest social life. By 1883 there was sufficient population to support a newspaper, the Calgary Herald, and with the arrival of the railway in 1885 Fort Benton was displaced as the source of supply for the Alberta district and Calgary became the distributing and shipping point for the area.
The Indians were still one of the major problems which faced the ranchers. Those tribes in the immediate vicinity of the Cochrane operations were the Blackfoot, Blood and Piegan which formed one of the most aggressive of the western Indian nations, the Blackfoot. In 1882 Commissioner Irvine worried about the effect of the incoming whites on these people.
While Irvine's report was perhaps a bit out of date, the problem was still serious and initially the directors of the Cochrane ranch were not unsympathetic. McEachran observed that
This sympathy was to become somewhat dulled in future years as the Indians, restless either from boredom or hunger or seeking to enhance their prestige among their fellows, continued stealing horses and cattle. While the loss thus experienced was never particularly serious, it was a constant annoyance and the methods used — starting prairies fires to drive horses toward a reserve — often angered the ranchers more than the theft itself.40 Furthermore, the Indian was a highly visible target for a rancher's indignation in contrast to the many acts of God which beset him but had to be suffered without seeking recompense. Nevertheless the ranchers generally tended to blame the Indian Department rather than its charges on the grounds that had the government lived up to its responsibility to feed and educate the Indian, there would have been much less of a problem. Representative of those acts of God against which man and beast were totally helpless were the insects which, during a wet June, July and August, made life unbearable. Cattle and horses were driven frantic and often bled and sometimes died from the bites of bulldog flies. Mosquitoes breeding in the tall grasses and in the sloughs covered animals so thickly that it was impossible to tell their colour. Frequently horses fled upwind for long distances to escape the torment. The only possible relief was a "smudge," of which every ranch and camp had at least one. This consisted of an enclosure about six feet square surrounded by a strong fence and in the centre a smouldering fire of wood, sagebrush and sods. The smoke kept the insects away to some extent and around the smudges the stock would crowd and jostle one another to get the best effect. Men dressed in gauntlets and nets suffered somewhat less except at mealtimes when they either starved or ate in the smoke of the smudge.41 These, then, are some aspects of the environment in which the Cochrane ranch was to operate and which the Montreal capitalists set out with unbounded confidence to exploit.
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