Grandview Hotel, North Portal, c. 1910 Source |
The border town of North
Portal was a wild and wooly place in the early 1900s, due in large measure to the
sale of alcohol to residents of North Dakota, a “dry” state from 1889 to
1932. Sales of liquor flourished in North
Portal from 1903 when it was founded, until 1915 when Saskatchewan implemented its
own prohibition laws. Things picked up again during the Roaring Twenties when American
rum runners used North Portal as a distribution centre for illegal liquor. The town boasted two hotels located only a few feet from the Canada-US border – the
Union Hotel and the Grandview Hotel. It also gained notoriety as a town with a high
crime rate for a community its size.
North Portal in the winter of 1911; Grandview Hotel on left. Source |
Located on the Soo Line
Railway, North Portal attracted many shady characters from south of the border.
In 1906, for example, Corporal Hogg of the Royal North West Mounted Police
(RNWMP) was called to one of the hotels in town to break up a disturbance. The
hotel was full of cowboys led by a gun-toting “notorious bad man” named
Monaghan, aka Cowboy Jack. Police records state that in the process of
arresting Monaghan, the following property was damaged: “door broken; screen
smashed up; chair broken; field jacket belonging to Corporal Hogg spoiled by
being covered with blood; and the wall plastered with blood.” Monaghan, or
Cowboy Jack, is reported to have remarked that if Hogg had not confiscated his
gun, another death would have been recorded in Canadian history. Source
It was into this fray that Louis Kill and his family arrived in 1906. Kill,
a German-born representative of the Standard Oil Company, had immigrated to
Canada via Minnesota and South Dakota with his wife, Anna, and their children.
By 1921, Louis Kill was reported to be “one of the most widely known citizens
in southern Saskatchewan.” Source
In 1907, after a year with the oil company, Kill decided to take over the Union Hotel in North Portal,
Union Hotel, c. 1910. Source |
Undeterred, Louis Kill bought the hotel at Alameda, Saskatchewan, about 50 kilometres north of North Portal. He and his family operated the hotel for about three years. The 1911 Canada census shows Kill, age 54, and his wife Anna, age 50, as the hotel proprietors in Alameda. Their 23-year-old son Edward worked as the hotel’s bartender. Annie (25), Vincent (15), and Sylvester (13) as well as four domestics also lived in the hotel.
Opportunity knocked once more for the Kill family due to yet another violent incident in North Portal. In 1914, William Hetherington, owner of the three-storey Grandview Hotel, was convicted of manslaughter in death of Pat Murphy, alias Kelley, alias Denver Blackie. The crime had been committed during a drunken brawl in the bar of the hotel at the end of August. Source Shortly after Hetherington’s sentence to two years’ imprisonment, Louis Kill returned to North Portal and bought the Grandview Hotel.
Baseball game in North Portal, 1914, with Grandview Hotel in background. Source |
By 1921, Louis Kill had
retired from the hotel business. In the
early years, he had made considerable money at the Grandview Hotel. With the
passing of bars in Saskatchewan due to Prohibition, however, hotels had become “white
elephants.” The Kill family moved to Sacramento, California where daughter
Frances and her husband Charles H. Hecht now lived.
Throughout the 1920s, the
Grandview Hotel became the centre for illegal liquor trading as well as gambling,
apparently attracting some notorious gangsters from Chicago, including Al
Capone – incognito. Legend has it that some of the big-winning gamblers never
left the Grandview. A sign beside the hotel once told of guests who disappeared
after cleaning up at the gambling table, leaving their belongings – and their
train tickets – untouched in their rooms. It is rumoured that they may have ended
up at the bottom of the hotel’s 60-metre-deep well. Source: Winnipeg Free Press, April 8, 1989
© Joan Champ 2014