As soon as the earliest settlers arrived in Western Canada, it didn’t take long for musical instruments to appear — particularly ones with keyboards.
The first piano was brought from Quebec to Red River Settlement (present day Winnipeg and area) by freighter canoe along inland waterways.
The piano belonged to Frances Simpson, the 18-year-old wife of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s vast territory known as Rupert’s Land.
It must have arrived in playable condition because the recorded highlights of the 1830 Christmas entertainments at Red River were Frances’s piano solos.
However, the Canadian climate proved to be disastrous for 19th-century pianos.
The cold dryness of winter followed by spring humidity caused the instruments to warp, shrink and become almost untunable, and soon good for little more than firewood.
It would take several more decades before piano makers realized that piano woods had to be kiln dried properly to withstand climate extremes.
Governor Simpson got better mileage out of the musical instrument he brought to Western Canada in 1826.
His requisition for fur trade supplies included “one Highland piper, the best available in Scotland.”
From that day on, Piper Colin Fraser “piped George Simpson up and down every navigable stream in Rupert’s Land, inspiring some listeners and frightening others half to death.”
Mary Lowman brought her piano along when she left England in 1833 to teach at Red River Settlement.
Granddaughter Harriet Sinclair, who eventually inherited the instrument, recalled: “Father Lafleche (a missionary after whom the village of Lafleche, Sask., is named) often visited us and play on our piano. He was a fine musician.”
When the Sinclairs travelled overland to their new home in Oregon in 1850, the piano was sent to St. Louis, Miss., to be completely restored before going on to Oregon by boat via Cape Horn.
Unfortunately, the ship was lost rounding the Cape and Red River’s second piano found its last resting place on the ocean’s floor.
When James Hargrave, a Hudson’s Bay Company official at remote York Factory, married Letitia Mactavish in 1840, he bought her “a first-rate square piano.”
Letitia was thrilled and wrote home: “The piano is a very fine one and the handsomest I ever saw. The wood is beautiful . . . there is not a scratch upon it nor a note out of tune.” Letitia lived for more than 10 years on the bleak shores of Hudson Bay; it is unlikely the piano lasted that long.
The first pipe organ brought to the west was installed in St. Boniface Cathedral on the Red River in 1875.
The six and one-half ton instrument was built at Montreal and sent by an American railroad to Fargo, Dakota Territory, and then by riverboat to Winnipeg where 50 people were required to unload it.
By 1887, the Presbyterians of Birtle, Man., had installed a “small but good pipe organ” and then bragged about having the “only pipe organ in the country west of Winnipeg.”
With the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886, pianos, reed organs and pipe organs of all kinds came by rail freight and inundated the West.
The first transcontinental train carried a Heintzman piano destined for the Klondike.
But there was no instrument more unique than Moose Jaw’s celebrated “buffalo bone” pipe organ built between 1901-1903 by a local settler Jacob Druschkowicz, a former organ builder in his homeland of Poland.
Jacob made the organ from odds and ends gathered on the prairie: lead bullet heads from a Mounted Police rifle range; horns and bones of buffalo and cattle and discarded packing boxes.
The finished organ had a five and one-half octave keyboard, five full sets of pipes — two of wood, three of lead — four stops — flute, hautboy, principal and bourdon — and cowhide hand-pumped bellows.
The organ casing was made from the packing boxes and finished in oak.
According to the Regina Leader, the black keys were carved from the horns of buffalo found on the prairie, and the white keys were made from ribs and shinbones of buffalo and cattle.
The organ was finished in time to supply the music for the dedication of the Catholics’ new church on Passion Sunday (second Sunday before Easter) in 1902.
The church, of Moose Jaw red brick, stood on the northwest corner of Manitoba Street and First Avenue Northeast.
The organ was the pride and joy of the congregation until 1904, when the Irish singer Rosa d’Erina arrived in Moose Jaw to give a concert. (d’Erina was also an accomplished organist and had actually given a recital on that first pipe organ in St. Boniface Cathedral.)
When she saw the buffalo bone organ, she made an offer of $2,000 (at today’s rate about $40,000) that some members of the congregation couldn’t refuse, and she lost no time in having it crated and shipped east.
