Calgary Cavalcade

Calgary Cavalcade
From Fort to Fortune
Copyright 1975 Western Producer Book Service
200 pages,
ISBN 0-919306-50-0.

The Baker Company

Two weeks after their arrival at the confluence, police heard the rattle of heavily loaded wagons and the profane shouts of "bull drivers." The Baker Company freight was coming in from Fort Macleod, and in due course two ox-drawn outfits forded the Elbow River and stopped in the midst of the police tents.

One wagon outfit carried food, winter clothing, and stoves for members of the Force, and the other delivered Baker men and equipment to build the fort. The company was living up to its reputation of never refusing a business opportunity. As demonstrated repeatedly, company men would build a fort anywhere, conduct banking at an outpost, deliver a herd of longhorn cattle, buy buffalo hides, trade in groceries, or sell a United States two-cent stamp for a quarter of a dollar with the assurance they'd carry the stamped letter to Fort Benton and mail it there. On at least one occasion, company men undertook to handpick a wife in the city of St. Louis and deliver her by freight wagon to a needy bachelor living close to Fort Calgary.

The company was the freest of free enterprisers and served the Mounted Police in dozens of ways in addition to freighting. It was not surprising that the company was named to be the official representative of the North West Mounted Po1ice in the United States.

Behind the company was the enterprise of I.G. Baker, who came to lawless Fort Benton in 1865 and almost immediately set himself up to trade-with Indians and miners. Supplies came by riverboat from St. Louis-12½ cents a pound for freight. Boats docking at Benton in the year 1866 numbered thirty-one. From that point on the Missouri River, freight went out over the prairie trails by bull teams, and from 1870 the Baker Company had its own steam boats and its own bull teams to make it the leading transportation institution in the Northwest.

With the Baker crew arriving to build the fort at the confluence was the company foreman, D. W. Davis, a man of action who became well known on the frontier. He was a Vermont man who had seen service in the Civil War and came as a trader to the Canadian prairies in 1869-came with Howell Harris. To the Indians this earliest builder of Calgary was "the Tall Man," six feet and one inch in height, erect, heavily bearded and imposing. His roles in frontier life were many and varied. When the Mounted Police, after selecting the site for Fort Macleod, returned to check on trading activities at Fort Whoop-Up, the man in charge was D. W. Davis, who received them most cordially and fed them.

With neither delay nor needless formalities, Davis sent the members of his fort-building crew upstream on the Elbow to cut pine and spruce logs of suitable size. A log boom was fixed near the mouth of the river and the building timbers floated down to it.

Before long the fort was taking shape, its low log building roofed with poles and sods, and its stockade fence being constructed by placing thirteen-foot logs upright in a three foot trench. The mens' quarters and storehouses were no more luxurious than the stables for fifty horses. By means of a whipsaw enough boards were obtained to make the doors; and John Glenn, who was settling at Fish Creek, undertook to construct the stone fireplaces. All things considered, the fort was no show place; but it offered welcome shelter from the chill of oncoming winter.

Having finished the fort, the Baker men turned at once to the construction of a company store, another low building, about 100 feet long and situated opposite the police barracks, southward. Thus it was on land which, according to a map of 1883, was held in the name of W. G. Conrad. It was a fraction-about twenty acres-of the southwest quarter of section 14, on the west side of the Elbow; there, also, the W. G. Conrad house with dirt floors, sod roof, and a single window was built, the first home after the police arrived.

For more than a year D. W. Davis remained to direct operations at the Baker store, and in 1877 G. C. King took over the management. Under both men the store was the business and social center on that side of the river. It attracted travelers, Indians, and Indian dogs. Day or night, Indian ponies could be seen tied to hitching posts placed on all four sides of the building. It even attracted mice; and there being no cat in the community, the rodent problem assumed serious proportions until Davis, hearing of a settler who had brought a cat from Ontario, negotiated a deal-traded a horse for the cat and concluded that he had made a profitable exchange.

Outside of the police barracks, the company store was for long considered the best place for a dance. Frequently, at weekends, merchandise was pushed against the walls, fiddlers took places on the store counter, and police, freighters, and a few favored Indians, who furnished most of the blanket-clad female companions, danced throughout the night on dirt floors.

They might have termed it a Community Center. The long shed like structure, which was a dance hall on Saturday night, was a church hall on Sunday-available to any denomination wishing to use it. Methodist John McDougall preached Calgary's first Sunday sermon at the Mounted Police barracks late in 1875, but early in the next year he began services at the Baker store. The preacher stood on the counter and members of the congregation sat on barrels or slumped on the floor. The store was open for business seven days a week, but sales were suspended temporarily for the hour or two when a religious service was in progress.

When Reverend Angus Robertson came to Calgary in 1883, he conducted the community's first Presbyterian services there in the Baker store and then made plans which led to the building of Knox Church.

At any time, day or night, the place to meet one's friends was at the Baker store. Half-breed and other wayfarers came to loiter as well as to buy, but activity reached its peaks after the periodic arrivals of Baker Company bull teams-in from Fort Benton and Fort Macleod with everything from groceries to walking plows and cough medicine. Most of the huge freight wagons on the trails during the 70's and 80's were Baker outfits, wagon units drawn by fourteen or sixteen oxen and each ox branded on the left shoulder with the Baker "B" and on a horn with the figure "38."

The company was in the cattle business in other ways. Its employees would buy a settler's cattle at any time. Simultaneously, it also operated the company herd of breeding cattle and, it may be noted, thirty Baker cowboys were responsible for bringing the big Cochrane herd to its new range west of Calgary in 1881, the biggest herd of ranch cattle to be released on the Canadian range up to that time.

As Calgary grew and the business center shifted, a Baker store was built on the corner of McTavish and Stephen (Centre and 8th Avenue). The new store at that location was one of the finest in the early city. Later it was renovated to become the Imperial Bank Building.

In 1882 the firm's founder retired and the business was taken over by the Conrads - W. G. and C. E. Conrad-who entered the firm as clerks. And after a few more years the company retired from the Canadian scene, having sold to the more ancient Hudson's Bay Company, which built its first Calgary store on the east side of the Elbow in 1876.

"Almost everyone will regret that the old reliable firm of I.G. Baker Company has seen fit to go out of business in Alberta," Calgarians read in their newspaper in 1891 (Calgary Tribune, January 28, 1891). "They were in the early days of the country the wholesale merchants, bankers, postmasters, chief traders and general dealers, and they have always been ready to assist every new enterprise."

As for Davis, to whom Calgarians felt a prideful claim, he was the first white person to be naturalized at Fort Macleod and had the greater distinction of sitting in the Canadian House of Commons between 1888 and 1896, the first representative from the ranching country. But this builder of forts and communities couldn't resist the attractions of new country and he died in the Yukon in 1906. It was then that somebody recalled the prophecy of "Tall Man" Davis, father of ex-Mayor Ryder Davis of Fort Macleod: "We're building a store now but someday there'll be a big city - right here beside the rivers."