Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Canada

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  Join the Club

  James Bond and Mad Men ad executive Don Draper drink Canadian Club. So did Queen Victoria and Al Capone. Canada’s most famous whiskey has been one of the country’s most effective ambassadors since its first barrels rolled out in 1858.

  Hiram Walker

  Strike up the Ban

  If it weren’t for that puritanical streak that seems to emerge every few decades in the United States, Canadian Club whiskey might have been called “Detroit Club” or “Club USA.” Hiram Walker would’ve been perfectly happy distilling whiskey in the back of his Detroit grocery store. There was only one problem: Prohibition, the first go-round. In 1846 Maine passed a state law restricting the sale of alcohol except for medicinal, manufacturing, scientific, or sacramental purposes. In 1855 Michigan did the same thing.

  Walker was prepared. Less than a mile across the Detroit River from his home, he had bought some land outside Windsor, Ontario. He intended to build a distillery on it, not only escaping U.S. laws but also getting the tariff benefits that Canadian companies enjoyed with England. (Because Canada was part of the commonwealth, it didn’t have to pay the same import taxes the United States did to sell products in Great Britain.)

  In retrospect, all that finagling wasn’t really necessary. Walker didn’t know it at the time, but Michigan’s prohibition laws would be enforced only in conservative areas; the cities refused to limit liquor sales or close down distilleries. Still, playing it safe turned out to be a profitable decision.

  Hiram Walker built his distillery in Canada (shown in the early 1900s) to escape U.S. liquor laws.

  Welcome to Walkerville

  Walker had big plans. He knew that the civil authorities in small towns could have a profound effect on any area businesses (by passing laws, instituting taxes, and so on). So he wanted to build his own town that he could run as he saw fit.

  In 1857 Walker commuted daily from his Detroit home to supervise construction of a distillery, grocery store, and steam-powered gristmill. To make even more money, he bought a herd of cattle that he fattened up on distillery swill (the mash left over after liquor is made), creating what eventually became one of North America’s largest dairies. Two years later, to save commuting time, Walker moved his family across the river into his new town—dubbed Walkerville—and set them up in a farmhouse he called the Cottage.

  In 1858 the Hiram Walker Company’s first whiskey rolled out of the new distillery. It had aged only a few months and wasn’t particularly good, but Walker was still able to find a market for it among nondiscerning whiskey drinkers. Walker, however, didn’t want to be just a low-end distiller, so he went to work on experimenting and blending new varieties. By 1882 he had 27 different types of whiskey available, with names like Magnolia, Excelsior, and Walker’s Old Rye. Many of them sold well, but Walker didn’t feel that he’d quite hit the mark yet.

  The Money’s in the Brand

  Finally, he produced a batch that was really good—Walker called it “Three Star.” To drive home the brand, he started actually burning “3 STAR” onto the barrels with a branding iron, something few people did back then. And when Walker discovered that Three Star was popular in the men’s clubs that were becoming fashionable among the affluent, he changed the brand to Three Star Club and finally just Club, a name he trademarked in 1882. Walker’s idea was to position Club as a premium liquor at a time when most whiskey was sold unbranded. He played up that his whiskey was aged seven years in wood barrels, when most whiskey barely got one year (and some not even that). Walker also started bottling Club, allowing for more sales and more opportunities to burn the brand into the public consciousness.

  Despite his big plans, sales started out slow, and exports to the United States were even slower. In 1884 only 87 cases of 12 bottles each made it across the border. Five years later, exports still hadn’t reached a modest 5,000-case level. But 1889 was the turning point, thanks to a small change Walker made to the label—he added CANADIAN to the top to differentiate his whiskey from the heavier, rougher liquors from Scotland, Ireland, and the American South. It was this “Canadian Club” that made Walker’s fortune. Canadian Club, or Canada Club (both names were used pretty much interchangeably in the early years), achieved great success in Canada and the United States. Then, thanks to Queen Victoria’s physician, who recommended it to her as a digestive aid, the British upper classes adopted Canadian Club as their own. The Hiram Walker Company became the only North American whiskey maker that was ever an official supplier to the queens and kings of England.

  Willistead Manor was a massive mansion that Walker’s son Edward had built in his father’s company town in the early 1900s.

  Hire ’Em into Walkerville

  Through all the success, Walker hadn’t forgotten about his town, and he wanted Walkerville to be “suitable” for his workers (even if it wasn’t quite good enough for his children, who returned to their Detroit home in the 1880s). From his own pocket, he paid for paved streets, running water, police, firefighters, streetlights, and even state-of-the-art sewage pipes to dump the town’s wastes “cleanly and efficiently” into the Detroit River.

  Ultimately, the town had a population of about 600 people. But Walkerville was never the workers’ town. Walker retained ownership of all properties and insisted that his employees live there. In fact, he wouldn’t hire anyone who seemed reluctant to relocate. By having a town populated by people who were dependent on his factories, houses, and good graces, Walker controlled the local government, the stores, and businesses. People could even deposit their paychecks directly into Walker’s own private bank. He built a church called St. Mary’s in honor of his wife Mary, who died in 1870, and encouraged his workers to attend. And then in 1890, when Walkerville officially incorporated as a town, Walker made sure that his nephew was elected mayor.

  Gangster Al Capone almost single-handedly kept Walker’s company afloat during Prohibition.

  Al Capone to the Rescue

  Hiram Walker died in 1899. His distillery and Walkerville, both now run by his sons, thrived in the first part of the new century. But that ended abruptly when the United States closed its border to all whiskey imports in 1917. And the ban was just the beginning—Canadian Club was in for another disaster: Prohibition.

  Ontario passed prohibition laws in 1916 that banned the sale of recreational alcohol. (Prince Edward Island and Alberta had passed similar laws; Quebec tried, but those were repealed almost immediately due to public outcry.) The United States followed in 1920, and by all expectations, those laws should have been the death-blow for distilleries like the Hiram Walker Company (later called Hiram Walker & Sons). But the company found a loophole big enough to drive a liquor truck through.

  The Canadian government—eyeing the taxes it would miss out on if the distilleries shut down—said that any liquor made exclusively for export was still legal. Sure, the United States had also made alcohol illegal nationwide, but that wasn’t Canada’s problem. The government declared that any whiskey transported out of Canada was a legal export.

  Enter American gangster Al Capone, who became one of Hiram Walker & Sons’ most prolific Prohibition-era distributors. He smuggled thousands of cases of whiskey over the Detroit River in yachts, fishing boats, sailboats, and even rowboats. When that route became too risky, he diversified, arranging for shipments to go through remote border checkpoints in Alberta and Saskatchewan and on ships through the Maritime Provinces. Capone’s sales kept the distillery afloat through Prohibition, and Ontario finally repealed its anti-liquor laws in 1927; the United States also came to its senses in 1933.

  The Walkers Amble Away

  By then the Walker family was no longer in the liquor business. In 1926 they sold the company to Canadian liquor magnate Harry C. Hatch. Since then, Hiram Walker & Sons has bounced from owner to owner, most recently the French company Pernod Ricard, which also owns Seagram and Absolut Vodka.

  And Walkerville? It’s now just a small historic spot within a lar
ger city, assimilated into Windsor. The Cottage, where the family lived, is still there. So is St. Mary’s Anglican Church and the plant, which still gives the neighborhood a distinctive smell and still makes Canadian Club on the site where it all began.

  About that Accent…

  What’s the reason for the stereotypical “Canadian” accent—which sometimes sounds to Americans like it turns “about” into “aboat”? Linguists think it’s a result of French speakers and their descendants moving over to English.

  Highway Petrol

  In 2004 Canada officially jumped from number 20 in world oil supply to number 2, second only to Saudi Arabia. How did that happen?

  Oil in Them Thar Sands

  When oil prices went sky-high in the mid-2000s, Alberta’s oil sands suddenly became a valuable commodity. The cost of extracting petroleum from sand or clay can run up to $20 a barrel—generally too expensive compared with the few dollars it takes to simply pump it from the ground. But suddenly, as oil prices jumped from about $25 a barrel to $45 in 2004 (and then to $147 in 2008), that production cost became bearable. Almost overnight, Canada’s estimated reserve of extractable oil went from 5 billion barrels to an astonishing 180 billion, second only to Saudi Arabia’s 262 billion and knocking Iraq’s 115 billion barrels into third place.

  Not bad considering that Canada was long thought of as an also-ran in the oil business…ironic, considering the country drilled the first oil well in North America.

  The Oil Museum of Canada in Oil Springs is located on the site of the first commercial oil well in North America, dug in 1858.

  Well Enough

  Popular histories (particularly those written in the United States) tend to give credit for North America’s first oil well to the 1859 strike at Edwin Drake’s well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. But that’s wrong.

  Four years before, Canadian James Miller Williams struck black gold in what’s now the town of Oil Springs, Ontario. In 1855 Williams purchased the International Mining and Manufacturing Company, Canada’s first commercial petroleum company. Its founder, Charles Nelson Tripp, had chartered the company in 1854 to look for oil deposits in the land around Enniskillen Township, Ontario. The ground was marshy and prone to flooding, though, and the venture quickly turned into a money pit. Disgusted and broke, Tripp was happy to cash out. After Williams took over the site, his workers complained about a lack of fresh drinking water in the marshes. In 1858, while digging a water well, Williams accomplished—20 meters (65.6 feet) down—what Tripp had gone bankrupt trying to do: he hit oil.

  Benjaminn Silliman

  Why Petroleum Before Cars?

  Back then, oil didn’t mean what it means today—the primary source for gasoline. Before the internal combustion engine, gasoline was considered a waste product. So why were men like Williams and Drake so interested in finding oil? Because even before cars, petroleum-based products were important. “Rock oil” (from which we get the word petroleum; in Greek petra means “rock,” and in Latin, oleum means “oil”) had been in use since ancient times. The Chinese were the first to refine crude oil for fuel, and the ancient Greeks were first to invent a petroleum-based weapon—“Greek fire,” a type of primitive napalm. Petroleum seeping up from the ground was also used for waterproofing, medicine, and paving. And First Nation canoe-builders used Canada’s coal tars to waterproof their vessels.

  Before the mid-1800s, people used crude oil as a fuel and lubricant, but in the 1850s, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, demand began to climb significantly. Canadian inventor Abraham Gesner synthesized coal into a lamp oil that he called “keroselain” (what we know today as kerosene). Then, in 1855, American Benjamin Silliman discovered that Gesner’s process also worked with crude oil, laying ground for a boom in North American oil industries. (Before that, lamp oil had come from whales, making it an expensive commodity that cost the equivalent of about $60 per gallon today.)

  A Gesner oil lamp

  Oil and Brimstone

  With James Miller Williams’s 1858 discovery of oil in Ontario, speculators and entrepreneurs descended on the area to sink their own wells around a new boomtown dubbed Petrolia. Equipment was still primitive and often homemade, resulting in “refineries” that looked more like backwoods whiskey stills, distilling kerosene with simple equipment in rickety shacks. Problems developed. The Ontario “sweet crude” was soured with sulfur compounds. Even with refining, its kerosene retained a faint rotten-egg smell that made the oil less desirable to buyers. Worse, the wells in Ontario were not producing as much oil per well as were those in the United States and eastern Europe, adding to the costs of exploring and drilling. Then, in the 1880s, electrical lamps started to replace kerosene lamps. As Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto went electric, the Canadian oil industry, already ailing, seemed destined for a long decline.

  Gaseous Clay

  But then came the internal combustion engine, and Canada’s oil industry received a stay of execution. By 1913 there were 50,000 registered cars in Canada, up from just a few dozen a decade earlier. That sent oil producers scrambling for new and better oil fields.

  Alberta showed early promise in the late 1800s with an accidental natural gas strike. A team from the Canadian Pacific Railroad, drilling for water, hit a pocket of natural gas, which is often a sign of oil below. After a substantial oil strike in 1914 at Turner Valley, southwest of Calgary, investors formed more than 500 oil companies within a few days. (Three years later, most of them had gone out of business.)

  By the 1930s, the Turner Valley wells were showing signs of playing out. So in 1946, the Imperial Oil Company dug 133 “wildcat” wells around Alberta and Saskatchewan. Wildcats are exploratory wells; there is no guarantee that they’ll produce anything. That was certainly the case for Imperial—all 133 came up dry. In desperation, the company also tried an unpromising site 15 kilometers (9 miles) west of Leduc, south of Edmonton. There, they struck oil—a lot of it—and that was the birth of Canada’s modern oil industry. The Leduc fields were the great reservoir of petroleum the Canadian oil industry had been searching for. By the time the Leduc No. 1 site played out in 1974, it had produced 50,300 cubic meters (320,000 barrels) of oil and 9 million cubic meters (320 million cubic feet) of natural gas. What was next?

  The Leduc No. 1 site (pictured) produced oil for 40 years.

  Strip-Mining Alberta

  What came next was oil sand, and Alberta has a lot of it. Under the province’s forests and peat bogs lie 140,200 square kilometers (54,132 square miles) of oil sand, containing an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil. Getting it out, however, can be problematic. Only about a tenth of the total amount is close enough to the surface to make it economically feasible to extract, though on paper it sounds easy: scrape away the topsoil, strip-mine the oil sand, send it off to the refinery, replace the topsoil, and plant some trees to replace the old forests. No problem!

  Well, not really. There are obvious environmental concerns about strip-mining that much land, not to mention using the extra water and energy needed to process the oil sand. Added to that problem is the fact the United States is Canada’s biggest customer. And since about 40 percent of America’s oil consumption goes to passenger cars, many Canadians wonder if it’s worth despoiling the Alberta countryside and releasing pollution and greenhouse gases just to enable American SUVs to release even more pollution and greenhouse gases. And so the debate over Alberta’s oil sand continues…probably just until the next spike in oil prices, though.

  Don’t Forget the Barrel, Part II

  Here are some more tales of adventure from the daredevils of Niagara Falls.

  William “Nathan Boya” Fitzgerald

  Date: July 15, 1961

  Method: Rubber ball

  Result: Survived

  As far as Canadian authorities were concerned, the death of daredevil William “Red” Hill Jr. in 1946 was the last straw. They made it illegal to go over Horseshoe Falls without a permit, and made it clear that permits were not going to
be easy to come by. For 10 years, nobody tested that law, but then came 30-year-old William Fitzgerald. He’d learned the lesson of Jean Lussier’s light rubber ball—in fact, he’d consulted with Lussier when designing his own rubber-ball craft. On July 15, 1961, at about 11 a.m., Fitzgerald loaded himself into his rubber ball and headed down the river. By lunchtime, he was fished out of the water below the falls by employees of the Maid of the Mist boat tour company…and was promptly arrested. When asked why he’d done it, Fitzgerald answered, “I had to do it, I wanted to do it, and I am glad I did it.” After paying a fine of $100 (plus $13 for court costs), he headed home to New York City. Fitzgerald’s feat was especially unusual in that he was the first African American to make the trip, and he hadn’t done it for fortune and fame. In fact, it wasn’t until much later that people even discovered that William Fitzgerald was a maintenance man for IBM and an aspiring novelist with the pen name of “Nathan Boya.” Fitzgerald went on to become a doctor of sociology.