Canadians of the nineteenth century not only watched horse races on ice, but curled on outdoor ponds, and played their first hockey games on natural surfaces subject to fluctuating temperatures. By all accounts citizens of the day accepted such experiences as normal and, in their own way, part of the charm of living in a northern climate. Work was something to which they generally did not commute, particularly if they lived in the countryside. The greatest hazard may have been removing snow from overloaded roofs, getting lost on roads covered in drifting snow, or falling afoul of the era’s restrictive social codes.
Recalling those days when young women and men occasionally tested limits to their freedom, Grant said:
Of all those winter pastimes of boyhood days in Barrie, probably the one with the greatest appeal to those now many years absent from the old town were the skating parties on the bay, especially when the arrival of a clear expanse of ice and a bright moonlit night happened at the same time.
There were many times when the surface of the entire lake was frozen over, and a skate to Big Bay Point and even to Orillia was enjoyed. On one occasion, however, I had the pleasure of being one of a crowd of half-a-dozen couples who, one moonlit night, skated from in front of Barrie station down past Big Bay Point, across a corner of Lake Simcoe to the mouth of the Holland River and up the river to the railroad bridge, half a mile or so south of the Bradford station, and returning on the midnight train, which at that time was the transcontinental one.
It would never do at this late date to mention the girls’ names, as some of them are grandmothers now, and besides, we had no chaperone on the trip.
From such a daily engagement with winter on a daily basis, conditions began to change significantly for Canadians in the last part of that century. The growth of large-scale industry and manufacturing in urban centres occurred alongside the associated termination of smaller operations in rural towns. Fixed-link transportation afforded by trains contributed to the centralization of many cultural and sporting activities once distributed over a wider geographic region, while waterfront industries powered by steam power, made big city living an economic powerhouse in which people with higher incomes could purchase consumer goods unimaginable a generation before. The daily press, the department store, theatres, and commercial sports made the city a destination for increasing numbers of rural dwellers.
By the early twentieth century, a further transition was occurring. The private automobile and alternating-current electricity made suburbanization possible as well as the gradual redistribution of industrial production from its downtown locations. All this did, however, was make the city bigger. Its rural counterparts, and their associated memories, grew weaker. There would be no going back to a supposedly “simpler” age.
Meanwhile, in the countryside by the 1880s, improvements in agricultural mechanization and competition from the wheat fields of the West resulted in an almost fifty-year period of rural depopulation, as many in eastern Canada flocked west to take advantage of the virgin farmlands of the prairies.
Fred Grant was one of those, but for him this was a new territory of winter pleasures to explore:
In December 1898, I had the pleasure of being a member of a bunch of hockey players in Golden, B.C., who journeyed to Banff, Alberta, to meet the team of that place in a game on the Bow River, and among the entertainers were four former Barrieites — Mr. and Mrs. “Bob” Campbell, the former the principal of the public school there, a player on the Banff team, now a resident of Calgary and a member of the Alberta Legislature, and a very pronounced opponent of the party led by his fellow townsman Premier Stewart; Tom Wilson, the owner of a large outfitting business for tourist and mountaineering parties, frequently a guide to Dominion Government Geological parties, and probably the best-informed man in Canada on the famous Lake Louise and Yoho Valley Districts; and Billy Alexander, then and now in the jewellery business.
Thomas Jebb, a local enthusiast in Orillia at the start of the twentieth century, enjoys the winter weather.
A whole story could be written about this wonderful national park [Banff] and its many novel attractions from its spray falls and truly wonderful “Cave and “Basin,” [Historic Site] where swimming in the open air takes place amid a forty-below-zero temperature and high piles of snow up to the very edge of the pool in which the overflow water from the ever-bubbling warm sulphur springs of “The Cave” makes things comfortable so long as you keep immersed, up to the magnificent CPR Banff Springs Hotel, which seems to be suspended up among the clouds when viewed from the “Valley of the Bow.”
Among the many entertaining features provided for the visitor was a sleigh ride through the park, past a big herd of buffalo running loose pretty much as they did in the wild state, and browsing on buds of the young trees and bushes, and many a scurrying coyote who hiked for cover upon approach of humans.
Urbanization by itself was no reason for winter to have a declining role in the daily lives of Canadians, but perhaps in retrospect it was inevitable, at least during the first formative decades of the twentieth century. City homes with central heating were, for all their primitive protection, far more comfortable than country places in which wood-burning heat might only be provided to a few rooms and turned off completely at night.
Quickly lost from memory were the ways in which winter in the country had been a respite from at least some outdoor chores for both adults and children. In the absence of the world of modern media, a young child in particular anticipated the coming winter season as a world exemplified by perfect natural ice on an open pond, or at least according to Fred Grant:
When the ice was first formed on the ponds or bay, of course it was always some venturesome small boy who was first out. It was impossible to control him when the whole bay was open to him, but when only a small surface was available the town constable — Tom Blain or Jim Marrin or Jimmy Carson — was very conservative about allowing anyone on until it was perfectly safe, though they might be assured, “That ice is strong enough to hold a herd of elephants. When are you going to let us on?”
If everyone would content himself or herself with decorous straight-away skating everything would be satisfactory, but it would require the Arctic Ocean to give safe room for the scooting kids in a game of tag, and a bunch of girls doing a combined figure eight, while some fellow cut a swath the whole width of the pond with his outside edge, or spread-eagle, scissors or smoothing iron; and did you ever see a couple doing the double grapevine who turned out of their course for anyone?
But the most disastrous skating menace was the scorcher with humped shoulders who raced ahead until he met some struggling couple or an earnest exponent of some of the above stunts when there would be a heap of ruins.
Winter, however, was only a minor hindrance to daily employment in the industrial city. Work was no longer necessarily in one’s own neighbourhood and usually required travelling on crowded streetcars, or, if one was more fortunate, a poorly insulated private car. City streets required one’s personal labour to be cleared of snow, while icy hazards had to be avoided by wary pedestrians, such as broken bones from falls. Winter, in short, was increasingly a nuisance and not something to be embraced. Indeed for these early city “pioneers” there was likely less engagement in winter sports then for later generations of city dwellers.
This photo of John Campbell of Parry Sound, circa 1895, recalls an era when winter was king.
Part of this was due to “blue laws” emerging from the Sabbatarian movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. They restricted Sunday activities in many cities so that by 1912 tobogganing was banned in places like Toronto’s High Park on the one day that most people might have the leisure time to enjoy it.
Urban poverty, long working hours, and then two wars and a depression ensured that a return to the glory of winter activity similar to that of the countryside past would have to await more affluent lifestyles of the post–Second World