Who Is “The Trader”?
A statue of an unnamed Indigenous man and Edmonton city founder John A. MacDougall pays homage to the city’s early business culture. How did MacDougall acquire his wealth and what shoudl be done with the statue?
Just across the street from the library, there’s a big mural with the following phrase painted in huge lettering: Take a Risk. It’s the most Edmonton Thing you can do.
So, yeah, here we are in front of a sculpture featuring a turn of the century European businessman and an almost-naked Indigenous man. On a very cold June day. On a crumbling plaza behind a gleaming new library. Edmonton is a city of contradictions, a city where the past is often seen as an inconvenience to progress. But I want to know more about this statue.
When I told Tim that I wanted to do a history podcast about repressed stories, Tim told me to check the statue out. The more I stare at it, the more questions I have. Not just about the nearly-naked Indigenous man, but about the named Trader, Mr. John Alexander McDougall. Fortunately, I think I’ve found some answers. This episode I talk to Rob Houle about this statue, and what should be done with it. It’s a pretty complicated history, and, as you’ll see, the history of McDougall ends of hitting pretty close to home in ways I didn’t expect.
This episode: The Trader. You’re listening to History X, the show about what they didn’t teach you in school. I’m Russell Cobb and we’re broadcasting from the mighty CJSR 88.5 in Edmonton. Stay. Right. There.
Hey everyone, Russ here. When Rob mentioned hiring people to impersonate Metis in order to obtain scrip, it didn’t quite register with me. I let that one go. But listening back to our interview, I thought this was extraordinary. If this was true, it meant that two of Edmonton’s most powerful businessmen at the turn of the 20th century were fraudsters.
So I decided to take a closer look at what happened with John A McDougall and Richard Secord around this time. Now, keep in mind that McDougall and Secord were at the center of everything in Edmonton around 1900. Their general store sold everything from harnesses to hats to toys to groceries. But the real money — then as now — was in real estate, early in the 20th century McDougall and Secord got in the business of city development, lending money for new houses and business ventures. McDougall later said
By 1909, McDougal and Secord’s loan operation was the biggest in all of Alberta. British investment was flowing into Alberta and the first boom was underway. But Rob was pointing me to a hidden history of swindles. And there’s plenty of evidence for what he’s saying. Metis people were issued scrip in the form of land certificates that could be redeemed for cash or for land at a later time. People like John A McDougall, well, they made fortune buying up that scrip and reselling it as the boom got underway.
It took me a while to understand how this happened. But then I found an article by Dr. Frank Tough at the University of Alberta that broke it down. Now, in theory, the whole operation was supposed to be simple. In exchange for extinguishing Metis title, individual Metis people got this paper — scrip — that could be exchanged for 240 acres of land or money to buy land. The scrip holder just had to go to a Dominion Lands Office and fill out a bunch of paperwork. Dominion Land Offices were scattered throughout the Prairies, sometimes with more than 800 KM distance between them. Land developers knew Metis people would be coming to the land offices and did everything in their power to get legal title to the land. Millions of acres of prime farmland and future urban development was at stake. In some cases, land developers paid off impersonators to get scrip, who then signed it over to the developer for a small fee. Sometimes deals were made under the influence of alcohol and sometimes physical threats were made.
Even if the applicant made it past all the paperwork, double-dealings, and harassment, they could wait years to actually receive title to the land. In one case, a Metis woman waited 8 years to receive her title, only to sign it over to a speculator. This was not an outlier. In a study of Metis applications for scrip in Lac la Biche, out of 751 total applications, only 1 person actually ended up with the patent to a piece of land.
Now, what does this have to do with our statue? Well, McDougall and Secord cashed in bigtime on Metis scrip. Secord was caught facilitating a forgery for Metis scrip in 1921. It appeared to be a clear violation of the criminal code. So, with the help of Senator James Lougheed, the law was changed. A three year statute of limitations was enacted, protecting those who had swindled the land earlier in the 20th century from ever facing prosecution.
You’re listening to History X, the show about what they didn’t teach you in school. I’m your host Russell Cobb and we’re broadcasting from the Mighty Mighty CJSR 88.5fm in Edmonton. This episode: The Trader — a statue and a little known history of Edmonton’s first boom. I’m talking with Rob Houle, whose researched John A McDougall and the statue that honours him in downtown Edmonton.
