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Water and City
Water is everywhere in Winnipeg. The city’s name is famously derived from the Cree name Win-nipi, or murky water. Winnipeg has often been associated with water, with the meeting of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, with the swell and flood of riverbanks in the spring, and ice in the long winter. In an Indigenous and fur-trade world where waterways were conduits rather than barriers, the two rivers provided remarkable opportunities for travel and communication. The wetlands were a rich environment for birds, waterfowl, and manoomin, or wild rice. But neither wetlands nor rivers were an easy or reliable source of clean drinking water, especially on the scale that early twentieth-century urban population growth produced.
In Red River and early Winnipeg, people got drinking water in a number of ways. Rainwater was collected in barrels and basement reservoirs.1 Private wells were common. People also drew their own river water, especially from the Assiniboine. Those with sufficient resources could buy water from “watermen” who drew water from wells or from the Red River at the foot of Lombard Street. Watermen transported their product in tanks carried on carts in the summer and on sleighs in the winter. Until its name was changed in 2009, Winnipeg’s Water Street was named for some of these businesses.2
The infectious and deadly disease of typhoid had long been associated with the drinking of unprocessed river water and was colloquially called Red River fever. In the early Canadian period, old Red River people could be distinguished from newcomers because the former carried “pannikins” of boiled water to drink from “wherever they went.” This Indigenous knowledge did not transfer consistently to the newcomers. Winnipeg’s first director of public health explained that “The new arrivals had not yet acquired this habit and suffered accordingly.”3 Time-honoured ways of mitigating the problems associated with the most accessible local water supply broke down in the face of large-scale migration.
One of nineteenth-century Winnipeg’s watermen with an adapted Red River cart, 1871. City of Winnipeg Archives, A569 1-16.
Securing a water supply that could meet the needs of households and businesses, present and future, was a problem that preoccupied Winnipeg’s civic government for the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century. As historian Esyllt Jones points out, the first sustained effort tried to solve the problem of supplying the city with water by presuming that private enterprise could meet social needs.4 Winnipeg’s early civic government aimed to address social needs and save money by turning to a private, profit-seeking enterprise, not unlike how the British state empowered the Hudson’s Bay Company and current governments encourage private-public partnerships. In 1880 the Winnipeg Water Works was given an exclusive, twenty-year license to supply the city with water. They began doing so in 1882, drawing water from the Assiniboine River and filtering it.5 The stone intake of the Winnipeg Water Works Company is still visible near the Maryland Bridge.
Private enterprise failed to produce the water supply that Winnipeg needed. In 1897 the city did what it would do repeatedly in the next few years: hire an American expert, Rudolph Herring. Experts like Herring were armed with the particular social power that came with scientific and professional knowledge in an era that assigned new value and authority to both. They were men with letters before and after their names, scientists and experts, and also Americans; by associating their city with them, Winnipeg’s civic government located itself within a continental, settler world and in doing so reframed the city’s ongoing location within the British Empire.
Herring arrived in Winnipeg in July 1897 to evaluate its existing and possible water supplies. Completing his report in New York City, Herring explained that the Winnipeg Water Works’ five filters did not work well, and the water wasn’t softened.6 In 1899 the city essentially bought out the Winnipeg Water Works Company, paying the considerable sum of $237,650 for its plant and distribution system. A year later the city turned to artesian wells, a kind of deep well where water moves to the surface more or less naturally. The water drawn from the seven artesian wells was “hard,” or had a high mineral content. Laundry was a significant component of the domestic labour required to keep twentieth-century households. Hard water required large quantities of soap and was hard on clothes. Business owners had their own problems with hard water. It damaged boilers—especially locomotive boilers, plumbing, and heating equipment—the very capital equipment used by the new industry that the city, and the elite who they were tightly connected with and most concerned about, hoped to attract.7
The well water was putatively safe, but Winnipeg continued to be plagued by public health crises that were, in one way or another, linked to poor water supply. Most notable was typhoid, which visited the city annually, but with particular effect in 1904 and 1905. In 1904 the city had 1,276 cases out of an estimated population of 67,300, and its death rate from typhoid was “in marked excess as compared with that in the majority of other American and European cities.”8 The typhoid outbreaks of 1904 and 1905 broke outside of the disease’s usual class geographies. A.J. Douglas and R.M. Simpson, two of the men who would later lead the fight against typhoid, explained that typhoid most often affected the working class neighbourhood north of Notre Dame Avenue, where sewer connections were few and a particular kind of outhouse known as the “box closet” was the norm. But in 1904 and 1905 the disease spread to “one of the best” neighborhoods and occasioned a new kind of alarm.9 The persistence and levels of typhoid became a point of civic shame. Typhoid outbreaks situated early twentieth-century Winnipeg outside of the company it aspired to keep. The escalation of this kind of disease worried city residents and undermined progressive ideas of the inevitability of human progress.
The city of Winnipeg tackled the enduring problem of water-borne illness in the same manner they addressed many problems, by looking to American professionals for advice about how to grapple with what they cautiously described as “the somewhat frequent occurrence of Typhoid Fever.”10 Edwin Jordan, a professor of Bacteriology at the University of Chicago, found that Winnipeg’s typhoid rates exceeded those of comparable American and European cities. He blamed this on a number of things: transmission of disease within households, inadequate sewer connections and preponderance of outside privies or outhouses, infected milk, and lastly, poor water supply. Jordan explained that the artesian well water that the city principally depended on had been repeatedly tested and found free of typhoid. The problem was the fact that, in October and December 1904, “raw Assiniboine water was turned into the city mains to eke out the inadequate supply and meet the emergency caused by large fire.” When river water entered the city’s mains, typhoid followed.11
Jordan’s report compared Winnipeg to substantial American and European cities, but the document he appended—“Regulation for Combating Typhoid Fever by the German Imperial Board of Health”—revealed the wider, more clearly imperial history within which Winnipeg’s experience of disease and its possible amelioration occurred. Jordan recommended creating a public health officer with some clout, requiring houses to be linked to sewers, controlling the transfer of milk from households with typhoid, stopping the use of private wells and the drinking of river water, and putting “a man who has had experience in the management of epidemics” in charge of these substantial changes.12
This analysis pushed Winnipeg’s civic government to think seriously about both sewers and water supply. Another American expert, New-York-based professor Allen Hazen, doubled down on these findings. In his 1905 report on the Winnipeg sewer system and water supply, Hazen was not convinced that river water was to blame for the persistence and escalation of epidemic disease. Still, Hazen urged the city to address its ongoing water problems, explaining that “nothing is more essential to the welfare of your city than plenty of good water.”13
The city of Winnipeg began the complicated work of building a sewer system and connecting households to it. In 1904 the city passed a bylaw demanding that new dwellings be connected to municipal sewer and water and, within a few months, that all existing buildings be connected to sewer and water where connections were available.14 The city also commenced a vigorous campaign against overwhelmingly poor residents who continued to use outhouses, especially the famous box closet. If people were too poor to replace their box closets, the city would perform the work and tax the property over a seven-year period. Two public health officials would later describe this as a “crusade” and a “metamorphosis,” one that required enforcement by the powers of the state against poor households in Winnipeg. There were over 2,000 prosecutions of those who refused to comply with the city’s new expectations of sanitation.15
The ambitious crusade against the box closet was no doubt difficult for the poor people it targeted, but it was more or less effective. In January 1905 there were over 6,000 box closets; the last was gone in 1909. Winnipeg’s typhoid rates began to drop, and by 1909 tuberculosis was a bigger killer. But the city’s water supply continued to cause concern. The well water was routinely tested and described as safe, but there wasn’t enough of it, and it was vulnerable to contagion when it needed to be supplemented with river water in times of fire.16
For many civic officials and citizens who argued for a new water supply, public health was not the only problem or necessarily the most pressing problem associated with Winnipeg’s water supply in the first decade or so of the twentieth century. A limited and, in particular, hard water supply hindered plans for rapid economic growth. In 1912 one engineer explained that the city’s water was “destructive of wealth” and a “handicap to and a serious drawback to the proper operation of many industries, and a hindrance to the introduction of new industries.”17 Hard water was especially costly for the city’s cherished rail economy. In 1916 one journalist explained that hard well water was “so desperate an enemy of locomotive boilers that the C.P.R. made a present of $200,000 to the Greater Winnipeg Aqueduct Association if they would guarantee them good soft water for the boilers that tank up so lavishly at that junction of great railways.”18
Drinking water was about health and also about big business. Plans to build an aqueduct from Shoal Lake to Winnipeg were motivated by concerns for the well-being of Winnipeggers, including poor ones who lived in neighbourhoods with limited access to sewer and water services. Efforts to address Winnipeg’s enduring water problems were also motivated by the ambitions of men who wanted to make money, and for whom the city’s limited and particular water supply was a hurdle to capitalist profit and urban growth.