Bienfait Hotel: Mute Witness to Troubled Times

Bienfait Hotel, June 2006.  Joan Champ photo

Bienfait, a coal-mining town in southeastern Saskatchewan, has seen more than its share of trouble and the Bienfait hotel stood in mute witness to it all. 

1915 map of Bienfait showing location of the hotel. Image source

In 1904, the Canadian Pacific Railway opened Bienfait Mines Ltd. ten miles north of the US border near Estevan. Soon, other coal mines were opened in the area. Miner’s cottages, stores and other buildings were built near the mines, and the CPR built its Bienfait railway station in 1905. The King Edward Hotel was built on the corner of Railway and Main in 1907 by Fitzsimmons & Sons. By 1911, Albert Rogers was the hotel keeper, followed by Gordon White.  Because he owned it for so many years, the two-storey wood frame building with its lovely white verandah became unofficially known as White’s Hotel. 

White advertised the King Edward Hotel as “the best equipped village hotel in Saskatchewan.”  The hotel featured Simmons beds, Slumber King springs throughout, hot soft-water baths at all times, four  first-class billiard tables, three bowling alleys, a first-class two-chair barber-shop, and electrical refrigeration. According to Stephen L. Endicott, historian of the Bienfait miner’s struggles, by the 1930s the village elite – including mine managers, office staff, and pit bosses – “gathered at the bar for smoking, relaxation, and socializing and took their privileged standing for granted.” (Stephen L. Endicott, Bienfait; The SK Miner’s Struggle of ’31, 2002, p. 12)

Madoff Murder

In 1915 when the province went dry, bootlegging became Bienfait’s main industry. Harry Bronfman and his brothers set up a boozorium in the town called the Bienfait Export Liquor Company. By 1920, the boozorium, which looked from the outside like a drug store, stocked hundreds of cases of expensive Canadian and imported liquors – rye, gin, rum and scotch – all of which was sold to American buyers from across the border. “All we handled was $100 or $1,000 bills,” said Harry Zellickson, a farmer from Hirsch who managed the Bienfait boozorium. “We made about $10,000 to $20,000 a day.” (As quoted in Heather Robertson, Grass Roots, 1973, p. 249) The boozorium later became Alex Ronyk’s pool hall.

Dutch Shultz

There are stories about Al Capone and other gangsters from Chicago spending time in Bienfait.  Dutch Shultz (real name– Arthur S. Flegenheimer) apparently spent a week in White's King Edward Hotel in early August, 1922. It is said that he was sent by Capone to meet with Paul Matoff, brother-in-law of Sam and Harry Bronfman regarding liquor trade connections between the Bronfmans and Capone. There is even a story that Capone came to Bienfait and met the Bronfmans at White's Hotel. Source

Paul Matoff was shot and killed on October 4, 1922 in the telegrapher’s office of the CPR station – directly across the street from White’s hotel. While his men were loading bottles into the back of a rum runner’s truck, Matoff was inside counting the money.  Suddenly, the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun smashed through the station window, firing point-blank into Matoff’s back. $6,000 and Matoff’s diamond tiepin or ring were stolen. Source

Miner's Labour Struggles

In the summer of 1920, P. M. Christopher, organizer for the One Big Union, came to Bienfait to address a mass meeting of miners from various mines in the district.  On June 30^th, a vigilante group representing the coal mine operators broke into Christopher’s room at the King Edward Hotel in the middle of the night and kidnapped him. They drove him across the US border and told him that if he ever returned he’d be tarred and feathered. Click here for full story in the Regina Morning Leader.

A decade later, the Depression hit, knocking the bottom out of Bienfait’s economy. The price of coal fell, wages were cut, and many miners were laid off. The pressures of unemployment and the resulting poverty led to the coal miners’ strike in and around Bienfait in the fall of 1931. On September 29^th, miners and their families travelled in trucks to Estevan for a parade demonstration against the mining companies. Three miners, Julian Gryshko, Peter Markunas, and Nick Nargan, were shot and killed by the RCMP when they attacked a miners' parade in the streets of Estevan that day. Many more were wounded despite the fact that it was a peaceful demonstration that included women and children. 

RCMP during the miner's demonstration at Estevan, 1931. Source

The tragic melee was over in an hour. The miners and their families fled back to Bienfait in their trucks, where, in the Bienfait Café, Wing Wong performed first aid on the injured. Immediately afterwards, 90 fully armed RCMP descended on Bienfait where they patrolled the town night and day for two weeks in an attempt to break the strike and destroy the union. (For a full account of this event, see Endicott's book, Bienfait: The Saskatchewan Miner's Strike of '31 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.)

Postcard showing the King Edward Hotel in the early 1950s. Image source

Shenanigans in the Seventies

Wilf Gardiner (centre) with his father, son and wife, c. 1955. Image source

In 1971, J. W. (Wilf) Gardiner, son of former premier of Saskatchewan James G. (Jimmy) Gardiner, bought the Coalfields Hotel (the former King George Hotel) in Bienfait from Mrs. Ann Sichello.  “I bought the hotel because I love Saskatchewan’s small towns,” Gardiner said, “and because this part of the country has always been in my heart. My father Jimmy Gardiner taught school at Frobisher, just east of Bienfait, when he first came to western Canada. Besides that I am told the Coalfields Hotel … is one of the best small-town hotels in the province.”Click here for full story in Regina Leader-Post, p. 2.  Gardiner changed the hotel’s name to the Plainsman, and remodelled a section of the hotel as living quarters for his family, wife Marg and their son and daughters.

Gardiner spent seven years – three consecutive terms – as a Liberal MLA for Melville. He was defeated in the 1967 election. In 1970, Premier Ross Thatcher appointed Gardiner as the chairman of the Saskatchewan Homecoming ’71 celebrations. In March of 1971, Thatcher fired Gardiner because of a dispute over Homecoming funding policy. Gardiner fought back, calling for Thatcher’s resignation, saying that the premier was “unfit to govern.”  Thatcher proved too powerful and Gardiner’s political career was over. Click here to read full story in Star-Phoenix, p. 3.  

In 1972, Heather Robertson interviewed Wilf Gardiner for her book, Grass Roots. At that time the Plainsman Hotel was painted robin’s-egg blue. There was a big wooden cut-out of Davy Crockett over the hotel’s main entrance and an Indian’s head with feathers over the bar which was called the Eagle’s Nest.  When Robertson met with him, Gardiner was presiding over the bar,” a dark, cavernous place with cheap arborite tables and chrome chairs.” He explained to the author that Bienfait was his last resort after his battle with Thatcher. “Usually a man who’s been in government can get a big job with business,” Gardiner said. “Thatcher had enough power to freeze me out of a job.” Gardiner and his family ran the hotel themselves. He was the bartender, his wife did the cooking and cleaning, and his kids mopped up the pub on Sundays.

According to Robertson, Gardiner was “a wheeler-dealer, a promoter with a dozen schemes up his sleeve and all the angles figured.”

He’s out to promote Bienfait, to turn the town on its ear. Already he’s organized a shuffleboard tournament and an Indian pow-wow in the beer parlor. “I’m an honorary chief of the Crees,” he booms. “I have the complete outfit, white buckskin jacket, feather headdress; my wife has a wig with long braids. We’re gonna dress in the outfits all summer for the tourist business. I’ve been working seven years to get tourists into this province. The people say the only reason I’m doing it is because I’m gonna benefit, being in the hotel business. Most of them don’t recognize it as history. They’re not old enough.” … Gardiner has detected that [the mayor of Bienfait] Metro Katrusik is not too enthusiastic about advertising Bienfait’s illicit past. His eyes twinkle wickedly and a slow smile spreads across his face from ear to ear. “The mayor was one of the biggest bootleggers in the area! He admits it.” … Gardiner’s sly laugh booms through the pub. (Robertson, pp. 278-9)

 In 2010, the bar at the Bienfait Hotel was called the Coal Dust Saloon.

Coal Dust Saloon, Bienfait, June 2006.  Joan Champ photo

Courtesy of Google Street View

© Joan Champ 2011

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Hot Times in Ceylon: The North West Hotel

North West Hotel in Ceylon, 1912. Source

For a couple of years during the Roaring Twenties, a decade before Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, gangs of bank robbers terrorized small towns along the Saskatchewan-Montana border. The son of the owner of the North West Hotel in Ceylon, Saskatchewan, is reputed to have been a member of one of these gangs. 

Billy Coffron, aka "Little Billy." Salt Lake Telegram, Dec. 6, 1923

On September 26, 1922, Billy Coffron, son of William J. Coffron and his wife Catherine (Cassie), was very likely one of the gang of bandits that blew open the vault of the Bank of Montreal in Ceylon, making off with $7,000 in cash, securities and bonds. According to Ceylon’s local history book, Builders of a Great Land (1980), the bank robbers had hopped into a get-away car, fired a rifle into the air “as a parting shot of glee and triumph,” and sped south through the Big Muddy and down into the United States. 

Illustration by Don Anderson from James Gray, "Cops and Robbers in the Roaring Twenties," Windsor Star, May 10, 1975.

After building and operating a couple of hotels in Minnesota, the Coffrons moved to Ceylon district of Saskatchewan in 1907 and filed on a homestead which was operated by 19-year-old Billy. Located 110 km due south of Regina,  Ceylon had its beginnings – like most prairie towns – with the construction of the railway through the district in 1910. Seeing an opportunity, the Coffrons moved to Ceylon in 1911 and built the North West Hotel on the corner of Main Street and 1^st Avenue, across the street from the Bank of Montreal. The $25,000 hotel opened on the evening of December 25, 1911; the following day, it burned to the ground.

Fire at the North West Hotel, December 26, 1911. From Builders of a Great Land (1980)

The fire started in a small building next door to the hotel and spread quickly. There was no firefighting equipment in Ceylon, so little could be done to battle the blaze. “People do strange things in times of excitement and this was evident the day of the fire,” Ceylon’s history book, Builders of a Great Land, states, “Townspeople and hotel occupants carried bedding and mattresses down the stairs and threw china basins and pitchers out of the windows to the frozen ground below.” Mildred Stephenson, the first baby born in the newly incorporated village, was born in the hotel the night of the fire. The Stephenson family lived in the hotel, where Mr. Stephenson worked. Mrs. Stephenson went into labour just as the hotel was being consumed by flames. She was moved into a little shack behind the hotel which was sprayed with water to keep it from burning while Mildred was being born.

Coffron rebuilt the North West Hotel in 1912 on the same foundation. It had 47 rooms. He and Cassie ran and excellent dining room and the bar was always busy. A story is told about a certain Irishman who had a few too many drinks at the hotel bar and was creating a disturbance. “Mr. Coffron got him upstairs and handcuffed him to the bedstead,” the history book recounts. “Before long, he was coming down the stairs carrying the bedstead with him.”

William Coffron (far right) at the bar of the first North West Hotel, 1911. From Builders of a Great Land (1980)

Lobby of the North West Hotel, 1912.  From Builders of a Great Land (1980)

Bill and Cassie Coffron, n.d.

In an attempt to curtail incidents such as this, the government of Saskatchewan introduced Prohibition in 1915. The bar of the North West Hotel in Ceylon was closed, and in its place the Coffrons set up the town’s first movie theatre. There was no money to be made without the bar, however, so, according to the town’s history book, the hotel was temporarily sold to “the Bromptons” who used the hotel as a cover for bootlegging during Prohibition. This was, in fact, the infamous Bronfman family which built its huge fortune from the liquor business during Prohibition. 

The Bronfmans had a string of “boozoriums” or liquor supply depots in communities along the Saskatchewan-North Dakota border from which American customers could purchase liquor. Because Ceylon was located 50 km north of the border, a boozorium was operated in the town – quite likely out of the North West Hotel. Whiskey from the Bronfman family’s distillery in Yorkton was shipped to safe storage in Ceylon and other border towns. Under cover of night, well-armed men in big cars arrived to haul the booze south along well-worn trails to U.S. customers. 

Booze begat violence. On September 27, 1922, the residents of Ceylon were awakened by the explosion that opened the Bank of Montreal's vault to the gang of thieves. One theory was that the thieves knew the bank’s vault would contain the proceeds of the boozorium. Billy Coffron, who often hung out at his parents’ hotel across the street from the bank, may have had some inside information. According to James Gray’s book, The Roar of the Twenties (1975), “The Ceylon robbery was especially noteworthy because the robbers not only took off with all the cash on hand, they took a large folder filled with promissory notes, mortgages, and sundry other securities for debt. It was the greatest single debt adjustment act in Saskatchewan history for it reduced the indebtedness of the entire community to zero.”

On November 28, 1923 at Havre, Montana, detectives employed by several bankers' associations arrested Billy Coffron, Roy Hauger, and "Doc" Walkup, all from Ceylon. The three Canadians were charged with robbing the Bank of Montreal in Ceylong and the Union Bank at Moosomin in 1922; a bank at Dollard, Saskatchewan in 1923; and several banks in the States. According to the Regina Leader-Post, Billy's mother travelled to Havre in early December and secured counsel for her son's trial. She must have found sharp defense lawyers, for on July 15, 1924, the Leader-Post reported that Billy had been freed on all charges and was returning home to Ceylon. He claimed that he had been railroaded by the police.

The 1926 Canada census shows Billy Coffron residing on the family homestead near Ceylon. His parents were still operating the North West Hotel in town. They sold the hotel, which still stands today on the corner of Main and 1^st, in 1927.

The Ceylon Hotel today.From www.saskschools.ca/~pangman/communit/rmtown/ceylon/

© Joan Champ 2011

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