by Bruce Cherney (part 1 of 2)
After two years of drought on the prairies, the spring of 1915 again brought rain and the prospect of a bumper wheat crop. The good weather encouraged farmers to increase the amount of land under ...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 6 of 6)
On September 1, 1912, the Manitoba government-owned elevator system was leased to the Grain Growers’ Grain Company (soon after renamed the United Grain Growers, or UGG). The system continued to ...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 5)
The practice of equally dividing grain among the elevators owned by members of the North-West Grain Dealers’ Association was known as pooling receipts. It was a practice used at r...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 4)
Prairie farmers may have harvested a bumper wheat crop in 1887, but when the year 1888 began, they were unable to ship their grain to eastern markets due to what they termed the Canadian Pacific Railwa...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 3)
John M. Egan, the general superintendent for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in Winnipeg, wrote the membership of the Manitoba Farmers’ Union on August 29, 1884, explaining the...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 2)
Patricia Vervoort, a professor of art history at Lakehead University, wrote in Towers of Silence: The Rise and Fall of the Grain Elevator, that the CPR didn’t consider elevators important enough ...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 1)
The image is indelibly etched into people's minds — a tall unbending sentinel stretching skyward abruptly emerges at the edge of a wheat field whose grain-laden heads bo...
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by Bruce Cherney
Although he was the leader of a political party which long ago vanished from Canadian politic after a brief tenure at the national level, Thomas Alexander Crerar was named in 2004 by the f...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 3 of 3)
A March 4, 1930, Manitoba Free Press editorial pointed out that five-cents an ounce would allow a letter to be sent to any point in Canada or the U.S. by air and rail. A letter cou...
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by Bruce Cherney (part 2)
It wasn’t until the first days of March 1930 that James Armstrong Richardson was prepared to fulfill the obligations of the contract that was awarded to Western Canada Airways (WCA) by the Canadi...
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