The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 by Pierre Berton Page A

1881, the day on which Arthur Wellington Ross officially secured title to Section 23 and on which J. W. Vaughan, a Winnipeg surveyor, arrived to subdivide it into avenues, streets, blocks, and lots. The main street was named after General Rosser,who decreed that the lots should be small, since more money could be made from the land in that way. The survey took until mid-August but the lots went on sale long before it was completed. Once the location of the new town was known, people began to appear and tents to blossom all along the high bank of the Assiniboine.
    After the realtors, the first businessman on the scene, not unnaturally, was a lumber merchant: Charles Whitehead, the son of Joseph Whitehead, the railway contractor who had beggared himself building Section Fifteen of the government line in the muskegs that lay along the Ontario-Manitoba border. Whitehead, whose descendants would own the Brandon Sun , purchased the first parcel of land sold by the CPR .
    On Whitehead’s heels, in late May, came a doctor, a grocer, and a hotel-man. The grocery store was the one that had been erected the previous month at Grand Valley, but when it became clear that the original settlement was dying, the proprietors moved it in sections by barge to the new townsite. The McVicar brothers were stubbornly trying to sell lots on the old site in the wistful hope that the CPR might locate a station on their land, but their neighbours were less sanguine. By June, two more stores and a billiard hall had been moved to Brandon.
    The CPR’S clear intention was to destroy Grand Valley as a community. Lots on both townsites were advertised in mid-May and went on sale at the end of the month. A brief advertising war took place in the columns of the Winnipeg papers, with “Mc Vicar’s Landing” proclaiming that it was the CPR crossing and Ross advertising the as yet unnamed city of Brandon as “the site of the next great city on the CPR .” The name of the new town first appeared on May 30. The Brandon lots sold swiftly at prices that ranged from $63 to $355. Grand Valley lots went badly and sold for an average price of $33. The original community was clearly doomed by the decision to move the station two miles west.
    The first newcomers had great difficulty finding Brandon at all. James Canning, who had trudged across the prairie from the end of track looking for work, arrived at the corner of Tenth and Rosser and asked a man who was helping to erect a new building where the town was.
    “Right here,” came the reply.
    Canning climbed up on the windowsill of the half-completed structure and looked around him. There was only one other building in sight, a house on First Street being put up by Joseph Woodworth.
    “I don’t see any town,” Canning said, as he climbed down.
    “Well it is only a paper town yet,” his acquaintance replied.
    The paper town blossomed swiftly into a tent community. The first post office was nothing more than a soap box with a slit in it placed outside the tent of L. M. Fortier and his new bride. The first restaurant was a plank laid across two barrels on the trail that was to become Pacific Avenue. The proprietor was an eccentric, white-bearded cockney named Tom Spence whose entire stock consisted of a keg of cider, a bottle of lime juice, a couple of pails of water, and two drinking glasses. To attract trade, Spence had chained a live badger to a nearby post, “just far enough from the counter to be unable to bite the customers.”
    The first church service was held out of doors in a driving rainstorm in June by the Reverend Thomas Lawson, a Methodist. The local harness-maker held an umbrella over the minister’s head while the congregation, composed entirely of young men, sang lustily, oblivious of the downpour. Lawson was able to move his service indoors thanks to the hospitality of a Mrs. Douglas, “a motherly lady of no mean proportions,” who operated one of the two tent hotels. The beds of this