A traveler on Manitoba’s highways will often notice signs identifying the side roads. They are numbered sequentially south to north, beginning with Road 1N a mile north of the CA-US border, and east to west beginning with Rd 1W a mile west of the Principal Meridian just west of Winnipeg. This really helps an unfamiliar traveler. In addition to the numbering, many roads are named - usually after a school or village. That might prompt the more curious person to venture down that road, just to see what’s up.
Going north from Boissevain on Highway 10, Road 21N is identified as Orthez Road. If you were to turn down that road you would be hard pressed to find a clue as to what prompted that name.
We’ll get to that.
The rail lines that used to connect communities were an amazing convenience. My favourite illustration of this convenience happens to be fictional, but accurate just the same.
Nellie McClung knew all about rural Manitoba pioneer life. She lived it. Her novel, “Purple Springs,” set in a fictional town in rural Manitoba in the early 1900s, is based upon her home community of Millford, near Wawanesa. It includes an incident where a young man wants to impress the young lady he is courting and the sooner the better. He phones Brandon that morning and is able to have flowers sent out by train later in the day. Can Canada Post, Purolator or Fed-Ex match that service today? The train service also allowed for very efficient mail delivery - even to the point of having someone on the train actually sorting mail en route so as to efficiently drop off mail to each community as they passed through.
Local history books relate many accounts of the benefits of reliable, inexpensive train service in those days before everyone had cars. Sports teams traveled to games, salesmen made their rounds, fraternal organizations visited their neighbouring lodges, ladies made shopping trips to the city…
But my favourite train trip story tells me even more about the times:
In 1912 the CPR built a branch line that ran north out of Boissevain for about 10 km, then turned west towards Lauder. It provided service to some territory previously unserviced and was much appreciated by farmers who previously were some distance from an elevator. The new line created the small hamlets of Croll, Regent and Dand, as well as a siding straight north of Boissevain named Orthez (Orthes on some maps). It was pronounced OR-THEESE.
In addition to facilitating easier grain delivery, and bringing supplies for the stores in the new villages, the passenger service was also convenient.
When Jack Vandusen was a young lad growing up on the farm near Hartney, the service made it much easier for him to visit his grandparents at Orthez. Orthez consisted of an elevator, a freight shed and two homes; one housing his grandfather who was a railway section man, and the other for the elevator agent.
Sometimes his parents would take him to the station at Lauder and he would make the trip on his own. Those were simpler times indeed. The thought of an eight year old traveling alone would seem quite irresponsible today. Even so, his parents and the train staff did take precautions. To make sure there was no mix-up and that the young passenger was not misplaced, they would take one of the tags that were normally used on cream cans, write his destination on it, and pin it on his jacket.
Telling that story many decades later, Jack’s final comment was, “It was kind of demeaning.”
He recently related another memory about his first solo journey. Those were the days of steam engines - and a trick they used after a stop, to facilitate getting them rolling again, was to back them up slightly to take up a small bit of slack in the rail car connections, before starting forward again. This was new to Jack, of course, and his initial thought was something along the lines of, “Hey…we’re going the wrong way.”
He always reached his destination safe, secure, and mostly on time.
Orthez was served by the Lauder Subdivision of the CPR, which came to be known as the Blue Flea. The Blue Flea line was unique among railway lines in that it offered passengers the opportunity to jump from one branch line to another (much like a flea, thus one hypothesis behind its name). Thus, the service from Boissevain to Waskada and Lyleton was also called the Blue Flea
Sources: Interviews with Hartney Historian Jack Vandusen McClung, Nellie, Purple Springs, U of T Press, 1921
