a time honoured sporting tradition from The Edmonton Bulletin, April 15, 1909 from the column on baseball:
Transcript:
...It is a pretty safe bet that Edmonton will be somewhere in the first three at the finish of the league and if any of the sports in Calgary or elsewhere in the west are carrying around a nice fat roll that they wish to lose on this proposal they will find plenty of takers in Edmonton.
...
Even should the extremely improbable possibility come to pass that Edmonton should be lower than third place there will be one consolation anyway. Calgary will be lower still. The team from the cow town plumbed the lowest depths in '07 and the word baseball was tabooed in the dry belt. They are very game, however, down south and selecting an old Edmonton player as manager of their team they determined after considerable cogitation to try again.
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I've joked that Ed's best memories are the 80 years before Cal existed but I'll answer more seriously.
[ OC Asks ]
I'd say that both of them have at least one fond memory of an early Christmas from their childhoods, even though they both grew up in periods and cultures (scottish) when Christmas celebrations were pretty subdued and solemn.
We have a record that describes a Fort Edmonton Christmas in 1846, this is from Paul Kane's Wanderings of an Artist, chapter XXII.
"No table-cloth shed its snowy whiteness over the board; no silver candelabra or gaudy china interfered with its simple magnificence. The bright tin plates and dishes reflected jolly faces, and burnished gold can give no truer zest to a feast."
"At the head, before Mr. Hariett, was a large dish of boiled buffalo hump; at the foot smoked a boiled buffalo calf. Start not, gentle reader, the calf is very small, and is taken from the cow by the Caesarean operation long before it attains its full growth. This, boiled whole, is one of the most esteemed dishes amongst the epicures of the interior. My pleasing duty was to help a dish of mouffle, or dried moose nose; the gentleman on my left distributed, with graceful impartiality, the white fish, delicately browned in buffalo marrow. The worthy priest helped the buffalo tongue, while Mr. Rundell cut up the beavers' tails. Nor was the other gentleman left unemployed, as all his spare time was occupied in dissecting a roast wild goose. The centre of the table was graced with piles of potatoes, turnips, and bread conveniently placed, so that each could help himself without interrupting the labours of his companions. Such was our jolly Christmas dinner at Edmonton' and long will it remain in my memory, although no pies, or puddings, or blanc manges, shed their fragrance over the scene."
(of course, dinner was followed by some very colourful, loud and intense dancing!)
And likewise we have a NWMP memory from Cecil E. Denny of a Christmas at Fort Calgary in 1874, I don't know which of his memoirs this is from but it could be The Law Marches West. He recalls dinner including buffalo, roast turkey, potatoes, dried fruit, and "real plum pudding." Here's another description from Denny in The Riders of the Plains, chapter xiv:
"A jolly time was had, and some of those old time dances, held at Macleod and Calgary the first few years the police came in, went far ahead for fun and good hearty exercise, of any of the prim and select affairs held since the country has come to be settled."
✂️ - What is one of your OC’s worst memories?
So much to choose from! Since we are talking early history above, let's continue that. One of the things I've touched on is Ed during the 1915 flood. I think he's been through worse since, but that's probably something that stuck with him for a while.
I haven't touched on this before that I know of, but a more human-made problem would have had quite an effect on Calvin at a young age. At some point in the 1870s Fort Calgary was held hostage by the Sarcees, who were starving and demanded food and goods. After three days, the NWMP were able to diffuse the situation, but it must have been very tense for everyone. Here's Denny again from The Riders of the Plains, chapter XXIII:
"We had very hard work for them; for three days they refused to move and even threatened us in the fort. We had to nearly all keep on guard day and night, as it looked very much as if they would attack us, and they no doubt would have done so had we not shown a bold front. We, as they say in this country, “bluffed” them off, and on the third day they promised to go the following morning, and asked help to move their tents and goods, as their horses were all very poor. This I promised them in the shape of carts, and also told them that if they did not move on the following morning, I would pull down their tents and take them off. This was a pretty bold threat, but we had to see it through."
The team has finally arrived in the city from Toronto, and the first Edmonton vs. Calgary game of the season is coming up. The Edmonton Bulletin is being extremely normal about it.
Transcript:
The Calgary fans have had their ears to the ground for the past few days and the sounds they hear from the capital are calculated to make them sit up and take notice. The fat roll which they intended to wager on the opening game still reposes in their pockets and by the time they size up the Edmonton bunch tomorrow morning they will probably transfer it to their socks and say nothing.
Note that the new team manager, Dinny McGuire, had some previous ties to Toronto, which the Bulletin is also being sooo normal about.
Transcript:
Dinny Burnt His Bridges.
Take heed, oh ye cow-punchers, and read aright the signs of the times. On Monday morning Dinny McGuire brought his braves in over the C.N.R. and burnt his bridges behind him. If you don't believe this go down to Lloydminster and you will soon find out. This can mean only one thing. He has determined to never turn back in his triumphant march for the pennant. After a few games it is probable that Charlie Crist will take pattern after Dinny and burn all the bridges over the Bow and the Elbow but with the team on the inside, and then sigh for sweet oblivion to make him forget what might have been.
The Bulletin also has a few choice words for the Calgary Albertan:
Transcript:
"Dopester," in the Calgary Albertan, is still trying to delude himself and other fans in the dry belt into the belief that tomorrow's game will be a pipe cinch sort of an affair for the Cowpunchers, with a score of 20 to 0 or so for the home team. "Dopester," has shot wide of the mark so often this spring however, that the Calgary sports have a right to be little dubious. He it was who said that the name "Dinny McGuire" meant stormy weather. So it does--for Calgary. Dinny arrived in Edmonton on Monday morning and yesterday and today the weather has been ideal. If it rains in Calgary tomorrow it will mean that the elements are weeping for Calgary and are trying to put off the evil day.
i mean apart from annoying the hell out of each other?
I think Calvin is the best at the interpersonal stuff, making people feel comfortable and welcome. He's the guy introducing everyone to everyone at an event and making sure you don't get lost and that you've had your drink topped up and making everything fun and enjoyable.
Ed is good at that balance of things that are both an art and a science, like baking. He's got enough sense to be able to relax and wing things once he's perfected the technical aspects, but he's also pretty determined and unphased by the "boring" and repetitive work, which is what makes him pretty formidable when it comes to things like making laminated pastry.
FIDLER'S PIPE DREAM.
The Calgary paper said Alf. Fidler had gone back on his own town and was now as tick [sic] as thieves with Dinny McGuire and others of the gentry class at the Capital ought to go way back and sit down. Fidler is just as much a Calgary man as ever but his residence in Edmonton has broadened his outlook in life. He realizes that the Cowtown is all right but there are others that can make it go a few.
The Old Hoss has doped out a pipe dream as to Calgary's baseball future which sounds good and may come true about the year 2009. Just to show that Edmonton papers and Edmonton sports are not knocking Calgary, and to give the baseball fans in the west a chance to consider the proposition Fidler's dope is published below:
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“For all of that, the notion that Alberta’s politics stifles all dissent, or made queer life impossible was not historically accurate. This research illustrates how the largely middle-class activists and organizers strove to make it safe... to be queer in Edmonton. And it makes plain how much further they had to go than their peers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.” “It is suggestive of the challenges of being queer in Edmonton that so much energy and resources went into counselling individuals struggling with their sexual orientation and negotiating the commensurate identities issues.”
this is very hard hitting to me because waking up today in this reality was an ordeal. but it makes me think a lot.
i don’t want to glamourize or valourize the difficulty of being queer in the “tough” city too much because i don’t want to fall into the trap of queer life in edmonton = suffering only but. at the same time it makes me reflect a lot on how i’ve perceived and chosen to personify and characterize my city (is it mine yet? has it always been?) in art over the years and so rambles about that follow
i designed Ed in sub-rural high school a few years after returning to Canada from post 9/11 midwestern America when i was filled with this dissatisfaction of being "home” only to discover that my life was matching next to none of the imagined past i had growing up in Edmonton, and trying to reconcile the gap between this mythical multicultural utopia in the Big City just out of my reach that existed only in my memory and this growing awareness of the rest of Canada looking down on us as a province and as a city- as I discovered firsthand in a rural k-9 school (which even this past year was subject to a horrific hate crime), this was not an entirely undeserved reputation.
of course during this time i was dealing with several battles that didn’t occur to me until later as having any real impact on who i was: all my classmates assuming upon barely interacting with me that i was a lesbian on the grounds of not admitting to liking anyone Ever; being referred to as “that” because my gender expression was considered deviant by my peers; grappling with the sexual deviance associated with hobbies at the time that were far far far from the mainstream at this point (anime and online social networks! gasp); protesting bill 44 without a second thought as to how people would perceive me after; coming out as asexual to relative strangers in a time where there were still only 2.5 orientations and identities barely spoken aloud; and graduating (finally!) into Big City University where I was struggling to reconcile things like being a notorious atheist completely against religious fundamentalism with my Not a Sexuality TM with my Yaoi is for Perverts Which I Am Not with my Feminism is Too Political For Me and so on and so forth.
(so you can see why when i was stepping between ultra religious conservative alberta and weird lefty university life i made these characters somewhat ironically with all the yaoi tropes and demanded that they not be shipped together. lmao. what was i thinking honestly. was it a challenge for others or for me? was it the start of a dialogue or the end of one?)
and sequestered as i was in my little southside university life a certain born and raised Edmontonian from an inner city north side school background, as desperate to escape the city as i was to be repatriated to it, decided this was insufficient and thrust me into directly confronting the fears and anxieties i had picked up through osmosis of Scary Downtown Edmonton. It’s not really a coincidence that the two major changes in Ed’s design (his queerness and his Indigeneity) happened at northside transit stops, both at night, in the company of the incorrigible quatschmachen). I remember us joking about Ed as “the gay cousin” after a particular journey to a discount theatre with a distinct sketchy reputation just a hop skip and a jump from the industrial, uh, charm of the meat packing plants and Belvedere LRT station and, naturally, it stuck. The myth in my head was beginning to grasp onto the realities that I had once been disenchanted by and was desperate to cover up. And it stuck.
And it stuck and I spent a long time “justifying” it in my head, because you have to remember up until this point that personifying a place with any “difference” (in ethnicity, ability, etc) or acknowledging the real struggles of being queer in a place outside of the sacrilegiously gay-and-silly and yes subversive heta-verse... it wasn’t acceptable in fandom. It was rarely done and when it was it was often met with extremely virulent hostility, hostility in similar-but-different ways to the hostility i faced for accidentally expressing “difference” that I didn’t realize I was expressing in rural backwater Alberta.
And it stuck and suddenly it became a gateway into this secret untold history of the city.
And maybe I will write more about that as my research progresses. but there you go, a little insight into why I designed Ed the way I did and why I’ve upheld that particular characterization for all these years. And now a decade after designing him exist the citations to back up my choices, on one hand, and the resolve to keep fighting, to keep writing that history in spite of these odds that look insurmountable from the outside.
it’s tough being the tough city but the battles are worth fighting. and that’s why i do what i do.
