A Pioneer Golf Course

I found the following unpublished article by my grandfather, Walter Ernest Langton, about his early days in Edmonton, and his building of the first municipal golf course there starting in 1900. I hope the humor and pioneer spirit shine through. He is on the left as you view the photo. _______________________________

Had anyone told me upon my departure from England over 25 years ago that I was going to build one of the first golf courses of Western Canada, one destined to become the first municipal course in the Dominion, I unhesitatingly would have branded him as a gross prevaricator, but would have used much plainer language. In the first place I was going to Canada to become a farmer; next, I knew nothing about golf or where on it was played; finally, no one else would be interested in the game where I was going. But the fates, as usual, had their own way about the matter. I found that I was not constitutionally fitted to being a farmer, that one could learn about almost anything, even about golf courses, under the press of necessity, and that a few hardy golf enthusiasts in 1900 in Edmonton banded together for the purpose of establishing a golf club.

Outside of their desire to play the game, the prospective golfers had almost nothing upon which to base any hopes that their purpose would be fulfilled. Perhaps if they had known more about what they were going into, they would have disbanded immediately and this never would have been written. But these 25 men and 11 women had decided to have a golf course even though minus the aid of specialized tools or knowledge, and so with true British disregard for details such as these they went ahead with their project.

The first choice for a site was a tract of land overlooking the Saskatchewan river and adjacent to old Fort Edmonton, the nucleus from which the town had sprung. No doubt the fates had decreed that this particular spot should be used for the imposing parliament buildings and surrounding gardens of the future, for they set about discouraging all attempts to use it as a golf course, and inevitably were successful. The tract of land selected was rutted and furrowed by the animals and carts of farmers, traders, and hunters who had used this place since the town's earliest days as a sort of an Old Country common upon upon which they could camp and trade. The habits of a lifetime could not be curtailed by the introduction of a crazy sort of game that nobody but a bunch of mad Englishmen indulged in anyway. So after a very few years of very unsatisfactory and much jeered golf, the irate club members gave up the site as hopeless and in 1906 chose another on the river flats, which, though more remote and being virgin territory, was not as subject to the intrusions of volubly sarcastic country gentry. However for a time every year it was the camp grounds of several hundred Indians on their annual trip to Edmonton to renew their trade treaty with the Hudson Bay Co. and MacDougall and Secord. But no trouble was anticipated on this score.

The land chosen, the present site, was on the north bank of the river and was covered by a fertile alluvial soil enriched by decayed vegetation and flood silts which made it marvelously adapted to the growing of grass as I was to discover later to my consternation. The ground was a little too level for the ideal golf course site, but this was a godsend in the light of construction difficulties that had to be overcome. The 60 acres to be utilized were covered chiefly with wild roses and badger willows. Near the river was a dense growth of poplar trees too close together to permit the passage of a team of horses even if the tangled, thorny undergrowth would have allowed it. Nowadays a gang of a hundred men equipped with tractors, grading machinery, and trucks would find the task one to call forth their best efforts, but 25 years ago there was I equipped with $300 which was half the club's funds, one ancient Tansome mower with a cut of 18 inches, one file, one axe, two rakes, one spade, and nine hole cups equipped with solid iron poles. With nothing else but this was I to carve a golf course out of Alberta. The size of the task would have stopped an experienced golf architect from even starting, but I did not know enough to stop. Besides I needed an income to support my wife and me after the disastrous experiment at farming. So, nothing daunted because blissfully ignorant, our hero started to whittle himself a nebulous golf course out of the thorn brushes by following in general the extremely sketchy plan with which someone had provided me.

My working crew consisted of myself and the scion of a noble English family who had been sent to the colony to forget some of his bad habits. Although he was not lazy, he perennially regretted the necessity for hard work and his efforts usually were misdirected. Nevertheless he was a likable fellow and a highly acceptable companion. It sounds ridiculous now, but neither one of us was handy with any kind of tools, let alone the implements we had to use. But were were to learn a lot. Our total daily wage amounted to $2.75 of which I received 25 cents more than my companion. We were supposed to work from 6 AM to 6 PM but the little we usually accomplished during these hours frequently shamed us on to putting in a real day's work especially if we saw the end of a particular task. During midsummer when the light lasted a long time, we were able to put in especially long hours.

The first task was to clear away the heaviest of the growth to see what we had underneath, a task which we started early in the summer of 1906. One of the club members lent us a team of horses and with this hitched to a hired hay cutter we disposed of as much of the smaller growth as we could, which was not much when we compared it with the acres of poplar and willow remaining. A realization of the character of our task began to dawn when we attacked the larger growth with the axe. Incidentally, a lot of things will dawn on anyone who tries to chop willow brush with a dull instrument such as ours. The chiefest of these will be the knowledge that retribution in Nature can be extremely swift and painful upon occasion. Unless willow withers are cut through at a single blow their retaliation is swift, sure, and telling, registering itself upon the tenderest parts of one's anatomy. In the autumn we set fire to the whole tract, burning as much as we could. The coming of snow brought our activities to a halt for the remainder of the season.

There may have been nothing in it of course, but by All Fool's day of the next year we were back on the job again, and our first attention was given to the location of the greens. When one considers that the location and construction of modern greens are the result of careful calculations, painstaking effort, and the expenditure of thousands of dollars, the method we pursued might be of interest. In the vicinity of where the greens were supposed to be according to the chart, we selected a level piece of ground, drove a stake, and radiated our clearing from that point--simple, concise, and inexpensive. We grubbed out as many roots as we could with a spade and then secured a load of sand and filled in what seemed even to us the rough and abrupt undulations. According to our ideas, when this work had been done the construction work of the greens was completed. The next thing we set our combined muscle and intelligence to working upon was the construction of bunkers, the old-fashioned kind that stretched whole widths of the fairways with a sort of a breastwork thrown up on the side towards the green. The first year we tried we built five of them by plowing up strips of ground across the fairways with a sort of a breastwork thrown up on the side towards the green. The first year we tried we built five of them by plowing up strips of ground across the fairways and throwing the turf up on the requisite side. No sooner had we accomplished this not inconsiderable feat than a herd of cattle wandered one night on to their former pasture and caused bunkers to vanish as the snows of yesteryear. In those days it was the law that stock could go where it pleased; so, thereafter we jealously guarded our handiwork with fences.

Meanwhile, during all the activity of construction, grass, beautiful, lush grass, was beginning to grow without benefit of seeds, irrigation, or fertiliser. Nowhere else have I seen grass grow so enthusiastically. Nature takes care of bare spots in some places with weeds and of other with vines, but by the side of the Saskatchewan it was with grass. We were so busy with our other activities that we had not noticed the growth of this natural green carpet until it was several inches thick. Then was it brought to our attention by the several devoted apostles to golf who from the very beginning had been whacking golf balls around the prospective fairways, and who recently had been hampered in their pastime because of the grass. Consequently the club directory suspended all operation, fired my assistant, and told me to get busy for a change and start mowing. With grass already half a foot high and growing fast I did not have much time left to cut 45 acres of fairways after slashing away at greens and tees with my tiny antiquated mower. As the next best thing I cut a path six feet wide down the center of each fairway, more as a guide than a place to play upon, for only those where were marvelously accurate or extremely fortunate ever kept on it. The others, which included everybody most of the time, had to play their shots and hunt, and then go home when their supply of balls had been exhausted. To facilitate the location of played balls I placed posts here and there in the waving fields to act as landmarks so that players would be enabled to chart a fairly accurate course towards where their balls should be.

But even these conveniences were unsatisfactory, and something had to be done about the matter. Someone who should have known better suggested that sheep might be of assistance in keeping the grass at a manageable level, so a farmer with a flock of 2,000 was prevailed upon to pasture his herd on the golf course. This might have been a good idea had it been thought of earlier in the season, but by now the growth had gained too much headway to be affected by mere nibblings. Furthermore, no one had considered the fact that sheep prefer short dry vegetation, the kind that these particular sheep could get by straying off the golf course on to the nearby bluff. So the two boys engaged as shepherds, when they were on the job, had a merry time persuading the stubborn brutes to remain where they might do the cause of golf some good. As a result of the unfavorable diet and the athletic efforts of the herdsmen, the sheep rapidly lost weight, which caused the disgruntled owner to remove his flock, thus destroying a beautiful pastoral dream. And all the time I kept merrily on with that accursed machine trying to cut what looked to me like the whole of the Canadian West.

During one of the despondent days when I was trying hopelessly to keep my head above the plant growth, a friend of mine came along and asked my how I would like to go on a hunting trip with him. I hesitated between assaulting him or throwing him in the river, but I took one look at my verdant surroundings and decided to go with him. So, cacheing my mower in the bush I made ready and departed with him. When I returned after about ten days, the golf course was just a hayfield, the greens having vanished without a trace beneath two feet of grass. During my absence the club secretary had asked for me once or twice, wondering mildly where I was, but not feeling the urge to go out and search for me in the expanse of grass. He probably thought that I was down on my hands and knees working with pair of shears, which I might just as well have been doing for all the good I had been accomplishing with the machine.

Inasmuch as I would have made no appreciable impression on the hay crop had I stayed on the job working every minute of the day, I suffered not one twinge of conscience for allowing the secretary to continue with his erroneous belief. I even regretted the fact that I had not gone hunting earlier and stayed longer.

In view of the futility of trying to cut all of the grass, it was decided to let nature take its course, which included our golf course, until the fall of the year, at which time we harvested the grass with a hay mower and a hay rake. We gathered a truly magnificent crop which was used the next season to feed the team of horses which the club by then had acquired. But immediately following the harvest the whole layout was burned over, after which I secured a pair of hedge clippers and hand cut a circular area with a radius of four feet around every hole so that each player would get a chance to use his putter with some degree of accuracy for at least a club's length.

Having acquired at least the vestige of something to play golf upon, the club began to look up in the world and even progressed as far as having printed score cards. Some of the local rules enscribed thereon make interesting reading today. There was one especially, which stated that the player was allowed to run the back of his hand along the line of putt to ascertain the presence of any roots or other obstructions liable to divert the forward progress of the ball. If such were found they could be removed with the aid of a pocket knife provided that due care was exercised for the preservation of the green's surface. Horses, cows, sheep and other grazing animals were welcome guests and I was asked to encourage their presence so as to augment the dilapidated grass cutting equipment. Consequently the score cards contained the printed admonition to exercise due care in playing so as not to disturb grass eating animals, and stated further that balls might be dropped to the right or the left of such animals not nearer hole without penalty, if said beasts were directly in line of play.

After the burning of the grass during this particular fall a fairly playable surface remained, and so it was decided to hold the first championship of Alberta. Participants from Calgary and other towns were invited and about 100 enthusiasts, pioneers, or lunatics, depending upon one's viewpoint, started from the first tee. Since that time I have followed and participated in many tournaments, but this early one was the most enthusiastic and the most enjoyable that ever I have witnessed. Tournaments as I see them today with huge entry lists and expensive prizes have led me to suppose that never again will I see a group of men and women have such a good time as did those during that week in the autumn of 1907. I do not remember who won, but the winning of the match was the smallest consideration. Today, with practically perfect golf courses, the game has become more mechanical and seems to have lost considerable of its zest, but this merely may be a sign of approaching age on my part. Today there seems to be too much at stake and the players are to serious; they seem as if they are indulging in some grave religious ritual rather than a game. And all plaudits go to the low scorer rather than the high handicap sportsman.

But to continue: the tournament marked the first official gesture of the Edmonton Golf Club as such. The following spring a putting green machine and a horse drawn fairway mower with a 30-inch cut were purchased. This, of course, was a vast improvement over the year before, and by working fourteen hours a day, I and a helper could easily keep the grass down. Compared with today, however, that early cutting equipment was positively primitive. For cutting fairways , now there is provided tractor-drawn, seven-mower cutting units capable of mowing a swath 16 feet wide at a speed of 15 miles an hour. It was a good thing in 1907 that our horse was not a very speedy animal, for the machine would not stand a speed above a slow walk; even under this condition parts fell off on one trip to be entangled in the blades on the next. But it was no great task to keep all the blades sharpened with a file because the metal was very soft; consequently, one usually took too much metal off in one place and not enough in another so that it was a lucky coincidence if the reel came in contact with the bottom plate at all points. Gears were cast just as was the frame, and both kept fracturing at embarrassingly frequent intervals. The interlocking device or crude clutch on the horse-drawn mower, used to put the revolving blades in or out of gear with the driving wheels, did not always interlock. This we remedied by driving a pin through the interlocking device and putting it permanently in gear so that whenever the machine moved, the blades turned. The putting green mower was made of the same heavy material as the larger machine, but being smaller did not give us as much mechanical trouble as did difficulty to push it. An improvement on this machine came out a year or so later when it was provided with a rope attached to its bow so that one or two people could help by towing it.

On the course itself as time proceeded we found that nature was still a little adverse to having her domain trespassed by a golf course and she showed her displeasure in various ways. At night coyotes would come out of the woods and hold high revel on the greens. Their favorite pastime was a sort of a maypole dance during which they would leap up and tear the flags to pieces. One or two repetitions of this and I trudged around the golf course for many evenings thereafter.

One year the tribe of Indians in their annual encampment on the golf course some of them mistook the stock barricades around our greens for corrals and used one accordingly, to the eternal loss of the green. Nature's final gesture against the interloper was in 1915 when the Saskatchewan rose 60 feet in 24 hours, flooded the golf course, and deposited a layer of gluey mud over everything which had to be picked up before play could be resumed.