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McINTYRE, DUNCAN,
businessman; b. 23 Dec. 1834 in Callander, Scotland; m. 6 June 1861 Jane
Allan Cassils in Montreal, and they had two sons; d. there 13 June 1894.
Duncan McIntyre
came to Upper Canada with his family in 1849. He apprenticed in his
father’s country shop in Renfrew and then joined his uncle Robert McIntyre
in the Montreal firm of Stuart, McIntyre and Company, dry-goods merchants
and wholesale importers. Stuart, McIntyre and Company was one of the best
business houses in Montreal, and young Duncan prospered as a clerk and
bookkeeper, and then as junior partner. During the depression of the mid
1850s, he learned the toughness, stubbornness, and practicality that
typified the Montreal Scots merchant of the day. He succeeded his uncle as
president in 1864, and the firm was known successively as McIntyre, Denoon,
and Henderson, McIntyre, Denoon, and French, and McIntyre, French and
Company before finally becoming McIntyre, Son and Company in 1884. Two
years earlier it had moved into the new McIntyre Block on Victoria Square.
The McIntyre firm
had extended its reach up the St Lawrence and Ottawa valleys and into the
Eastern Townships. In the early 1860s McIntyre began to invest in two
railways which supplied many of his best customers, the Brockville and
Ottawa Railway and the Canada Central Railway. This move brought him into
contact with the chief contractor for the roads, Asa Belknap Foster*, a
Vermont-born railwayman from the Eastern Townships who wanted to forge
links between Boston railway interests and the Ottawa valley. The Canada
Central, chartered in 1861 by promoters of the Ottawa valley to be part of
a railway from Quebec to Lake Huron, operated one engine from its main
depot at Carleton Place, Upper Canada, where it joined the Brockville and
Ottawa. Because of its pivotal geographical position and its steady
business supplying settlers and drawing lumber out of the rich Ottawa
valley, the Canada Central was seen as a linchpin in a future
transcontinental railway. By 1870 Hugh Allan* had invested heavily in it,
hoping to amalgamate it with the Montreal Northern Colonization Railway,
which ran along the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. In 1871–72 Allan
pulled together a syndicate and obtained the contract to build a
transcontinental line from the Conservative government of Sir John
A. Macdonald. Allan’s work was undone, however, by the Pacific Scandal,
provoked in part by revelations made by Foster.
As the scandal
unfolded, McIntyre lay low and worked on increasing his wholesale business
in the Ottawa valley. After the defeat of the Macdonald government,
however, he supported Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberals. The scandal led to
the election of a Mackenzie government, but McIntyre’s candidate in
Renfrew South, Ont., was defeated after an investigation. A friend of the
new prime minister and a major investor in the Canada Central, McIntyre
was invited in 1874 to join its board of directors. He helped Foster to
oust Allan and Allan’s lawyer, John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, and was soon
elected president of the line. The moment was inauspicious. The effects of
an American stock market crash were soon felt in Canada, and the railway’s
business fell off sharply as depression set in. Soon the line was over
$2,000,000 in debt. Enthusiasm for a transcontinental railway waned with
the economic decline. The Mackenzie government decided to build the line
by stages. It gave McIntyre and Foster a contract to extend the Canada
Central from Douglas to the terminus of the railway’s Georgian Bay branch
and granted them a subsidy of $12,000 a mile, which covered one-half to
two-thirds of the cost.
McIntyre knew how
to survive a depression and had the capital to ride out the storm, but
Foster became overextended. In 1877 he went bankrupt, and he died after a
short stint for bad debts in a Vermont prison. McIntyre, with subsidies
from Ontario, finished the line. In late 1877 he took control of the
Canada Central, astutely acquiring it from the English creditors for
$1,000,000, or 50 cents on the dollar. By 1878 business was reviving. The
Canada Central and the Brockville and Ottawa were prospering just as
Macdonald returned to power, determined to push ahead with his project of
a transcontinental railway. McIntyre stood directly in his path, holding
the key to the west. Macdonald and Sir Charles Tupper* induced McIntyre’s
former adversary Abbott to act as a catalyst in resolving the problem. By
June 1880 a syndicate had been formed that included McIntyre and a group
of investors from the Bank of Montreal and the Hudson’s Bay Company led by
cousins George Stephen* and Donald Alexander Smith*. McIntyre made
arrangements with his British backers and contracted to sell the Canada
Central to the syndicate for $3,000,000. As president of the Canada
Central, he officially initiated the syndicate’s negotiations with the
government, proposing to build a transcontinental line in return for a
land grant of 35,000,000 acres and a subsidy of $26,500,000. In July 1880
Macdonald and two ministers sailed for England to seek other offers.
McIntyre went on the same ship. When no other group persisted in showing
interest, Macdonald and McIntyre met for two weeks with the financier and
former Canadian cabinet minister Sir John Rose*. On 4 September, after
obtaining agreement from Stephen in Montreal, they settled on a government
subsidy of 25,000,000 acres and $25,000,000. On 21 October, after
Macdonald and McIntyre had returned to Canada, a contract was signed,
creating the Canadian Pacific Railway syndicate. McIntyre and Stephen
deposited a bond of $1,000,000 with the minister of finance, Sir Samuel
Leonard Tilley, on 16 Feb. 1881.
The following day –
the first day of business for the CPR – McIntyre assumed the duties of
vice-president. His job was to extend the Canada Central to Sault Ste
Marie, Ont., and put steamers on Lake Superior to Thunder Bay; by autumn
1882 he had built as far as North Bay. More and more, however, he was
spending his time in New York and London dealing with the CPR’s
increasingly shaky finances. In May 1884, wearied by the work and by
Stephen’s personality, and tired of pledging his personal fortune and the
firm of McIntyre, Son and Company to back Stephen’s desperate financing,
he sold his 20,000 shares to Stephen and Smith. His place as
vice-president was taken by a professional railwayman, William Cornelius
Van Horne*. Stephen was happy to see McIntyre go. He later wrote to
Macdonald that McIntyre had been “coarsely selfish and cowardly all
through these 5 years, [and] ruthless in regarding the interests of others
whenever he could advance his own.” “When McIntyre deserted the Company,”
Stephen added, “he made up his mind that it would ‘burst’ and that Smith
and I would lose every dollar we had, in the collapse.” Indeed, a few
months after retiring, McIntyre turned the screws on Stephen, threatening
a lawsuit unless the CPR paid its overdue accounts to McIntyre, Son and
Company. Stephen paid and thereafter refused to have anything to do with
McIntyre, telling everybody who would listen that he could not stand to be
in the same room with the man. For his part, McIntyre had, in the words of
a contemporary, “the placid contempt that all good business men have for
schemes of visionary-minded men.” He believed in “system,” and Stephen’s
financing no doubt lacked it in his estimation.
McIntyre lived for
a time in a house on Rue Dorchester (Boulevard René-Lévesque). He then
sold it to his neighbour Smith and moved into a romantic French-Scotch
Gothic mansion farther up Mount Royal. In 1891 he began to purchase large
blocks of Grand Trunk stock in London in an effort to gain control of the
railway and move its head office from there to Montreal. He was elected a
director that year, but failed to transfer the board to Canada. He did,
however, help to prevent a war over rates and running rights between the
Grand Trunk and the CPR; the action annoyed the public but improved the
credit of both lines with the British bondholders.
Over the course of
his career McIntyre had invested time and money in spheres of business
other than railways. He was among the founders of the Royal Canadian
Insurance Company (1873) and the Bell Telephone Company of Canada (1880),
and he invested in the Canada North-West Land Company, Allis Chalmers, the
Dominion Bridge Company Limited [see Job Abbott], Amalgamated Asbestos,
the Canadian Light and Power Company, and the Windsor Hotel, of which he
was president until his death in 1894. His sons, William Cassils and John
Malcolm, succeeded him at the head of McIntyre, Son and Company.
McIntyre had been
one of the great Scots barons of Montreal. He was a founder of the
Caledonian Society in 1857 and competed in its games. Twice president of
the St Andrew’s Society, he took pride in wearing the kilt at the
society’s ball. According to one writer, he had “much of the Carlyle
brusqueness in his manner” and divided people into two categories: those
“who were ready to admire him” and were his personal friends and those who
“bucked” him and whom “he counted as his enemies to be fought to the
death.” Shrewd and secretive, his talents tempered by economic depression,
McIntyre always had a good store of capital and was always in the right
place at the right time. He was nicknamed the “Canadian Napoleon of
finance”; a year before his death his fortune was estimated at between
$2,000,000 and $5,000,000, which according to a contemporary evaluation
made him one of the five richest men in Canada. |
