Hotel Allan: A Bear Story

Allan Hotel and Steak Pit, 2006. Joan Champ photo

Peter J. Loehndorf was growing restless. In 1920, despite his rather impressive accumulation of seven quarters of land, plus one hundred and fifty head of cattle on his homestead near Leofeld, Saskatchewan, he was ready for a change. Perhaps his restlessness was due to the fact that he and his wife Maria had ten children, including two sets of twins. Every birth had necessitated another addition to the family’s log home since he had filed for the homestead in 1903. Then, in 1917, Peter’s father, John Loehndorf arrived from Germany to make his home with them. The thought of owning a hotel with lots of bedrooms must have appealed to Peter. In the spring of 1920, he sold his farm, bought the Hotel Allan, and moved in with his large family. 

Hotel Allan had been built by Thomas Murphy in about 1910, and owned for several years thereafter by John Bitz and Tony Leier (who lost his life attempting to save a young child in the Elstow Hotel fire of 1919). In 1915, when the hotel business was no longer lucrative due to Prohibition, the Bitz family gave up the hotel and moved back to the farm. 

Hotel Allan, c 1940. From Times Past to Present (1981)

In 1936, changes in Saskatchewan’s liquor laws allowed Peter to open a beer parlour in Hotel Allan. It is quite likely that his wife, a deeply religious woman, did not approve. “Maria’s greatest comfort was the rocking chair and her faithful companion was the Rosary with which she prayed daily with sincere devotion,” the family’s history in Times Past to Present (Allan, 1981) explains. “Daily ritual required the family to recite meal prayers, morning and evening prayers.” Maria’s prayers may even have helped to save the Allan hotel from destruction by fire in 1935. “Fire ravaged building after building as it raced towards the hotel,” Allan’s history book records. “Women flocked to the church to pray. It was only through the tireless efforts of the fire brigade, and the prayers too, that the hotel came through with just one wall scorched.” 

Peter and Maria Loehndorf, n.d. From Times Past to Present (1981)

After the death of his father in 1923, Peter had been pursuing a new hobby – taxidermy. He had taught himself how to prepare, stuff and mount the skins of dead animals and birds – his sons’ hunting trophies – for display. People came from miles around to see his finished work which lined the walls of the beverage room in Hotel Allan. 

In 1941, Peter added a live animal to his menagerie. During one of his trips to northern Saskatchewan, he captured a bear cub. To the amazement of the children of Allan, Peter kept the bear in a pen beside the hotel. A year later, the bear had grown so large and strong that it was dangerous. Peter’s solution was simple. “Bear meat being a delicacy, [the bear] was butchered and his meat distributed to various families around town,” the family history recounts. “Peter made up some summer sausage … and sent some of it to his son, Paul, who was still in England serving with the Canadian Armed Forces.” There is no mention of Peter applying his taxidermist skills to the bear's hide. Peter and Maria Loehndorf, both in their mid-70s, sold the Allan Hotel in 1946. 

Allan Hotel and Steak Pit, 2006. Joan Champ photo

When I stopped by the Allan Hotel in 2006, the wooden exterior of the Allan Hotel had been covered over with stucco and two layers of insulation. Nothing remained of Loehndorf's stuffed menagerie in either the 121-seat beverage room or the 32-seat restaurant on the main floor. The Allan Hotel was "semi-modern," with ten guest rooms on the second floor - three with sinks in the room. All shared a bathroom and shower, accessible from the hallway. The owners' two-bedroom living quarters was also located on the second floor.

Architectural History Society of Saskatchewan 3D Model Saskatchewan

© Joan Champ, 2011

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Hotel Entrances: Walk Right In

My photos -- Some hotel entrances are inviting, others -- not so much!

Bladworth

Watrous

Kayville

Alvena

Blaine Lake

Pilger

Maymont

Rabbit Lake

Radisson

 © Joan Champ, 2011

Hotel Food: Home Cooking, Steak Pits and Wing Nights

Fine dining at the Maple Leaf Hotel, Maple Creek, 1914. Glenbow Archives, NA-3811-75

The hotel dining room was always a busy place in the early 1900s. Meals were served to boarders, traveling guests, local farmers and railway workers. For many years, trains stopped in small towns every day and meals were served to the crews. Annual Christmas dinners served in hotels were real banquets. Dining rooms were decorated with bunting, miniature flags and evergreens, and lighted with gas lamps and Chinese lanterns. The guests sat down to a lavish menu, the likes of which few had ever seen.  

Cecil Hotel dining room, Colgate, c. 1910. From Prairie Gold (1980)

Hotel cooks came from a variety of backgrounds. Chinese cooks were the mainstay of many hotel restaurants in the early days. The Silver Plate Hotel at Govan boasted of “an English chef who has few peers” in a 1908 edition of the Prairie News. The Hitt brothers, owners of the Griffin Hotel, brought their staff with them from the United States. “The Negro cook [Chloe] prepared the best food I have eaten anywhere,” one customer recalls in the Griffin local history book.  “[The owners] provided her with the ingredients for southern items such as beaten biscuits, yams and fried chicken.” Chloe married a “coloured” porter from Regina. When the Hitts sold the Griffin Hotel and returned to the States, she and her new husband went with them. 

Other hotel cooks were more “home grown.”  In 1923, Mrs. Mari Lewis was hired by the Vanstone family to operate the hotel dining room at Central Butte. Mrs. Lewis had spent three summers on cook cars preparing meals for threshing crews. She brought produce from the Lewis farm to help out with meals. “The turkeys came in very handy for the banquet we served to about 50 war veterans,” Mrs. Lewis’ daughter, Gertrude Lokier, recalled for the town history book. During the 1940s, on a typically busy morning at the Mont Nebo Hotel, Annette Taylor was up at 4 a.m.  She baked 25 pies – eight lemon, eight raisin and nine apple. After serving breakfast she headed for the town butcher shop, where for a dollar she bought a good sized beef roast. “By nine a.m. the roast was in the oven,” Donna Kolchuck writes in the Mont Nebo history. “At noon the aroma of roast beef, gravy and mashed potatoes was prevalent.” Mrs. Buhler, cook at the Fairlight Hotel, was a favorite with the commercial travelers who stayed at the hotel. They called her “Ma” for they knew “that regardless of what time they arrived, Ma would get them something to eat.” 

Steak pit, Whitewood Hotel, 2006.  Joan Champ photo

Today, small-town Saskatchewan hotels offer everything from bar food (chicken wings, nachos, dried ribs) to fully licensed family dining with great food. The steak pits that were added to many hotel dining rooms in the 1970s can still be found around the province today. At the Jansen Hotel & Steak Pit, for example, customers can cook their own steaks on the natural gas grill in the 22-seat steak pit area off the beverage room. 

One of the best kept secrets in Saskatchewan has to be the White Bear Hotel. People travel from miles around to the town of 13 for the extensive menu and unique décor. In the summer, visitors check out the flower gardens and fruit orchard where the White Bear Hotel grows its own pears and crabapples. In 2007, a visitor to the hotel wrote the following on his blog: “A big part of the reason we make the trip to the White Bear Hotel is the warm hospitality and good food at a reasonable cost. The couple [Wayne and Patricia Spence] who own and have run the hotel and restaurant for 29 years take pride in what they do and genuinely enjoy visiting with their patrons. What gets me is you would never expect to find good food like that in such an out of the way place. It seems to me this is why people travel to White Bear and patiently wait for 2 hours plus for their food. It is so charming and unexpected – one of those little surprises that make life interesting.”  At the time of writing this post, the White Bear Hotel was for sale.

White Bear Hotel, 2009. Photo courtesy of Ruth Bitner

© Joan Champ, 2011

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Hotel Signs

My photos, taken on road trips throughout the province over the years.

Wynyard

Gull Lake

Fox Valley

Weyburn

Guernsey

Alvena

© Joan Champ, 2011

Chinese Hotel Owners: "Friends to All"

Chinese immigrants in Canada, c. 1900. Image source

“George Brennan built the first hotel and managed it until Prohibition came. When he could no longer get a license for the bar, he sold it to some Chinamen.” This line from Pennant’s history book describes a typical scenario. When Saskatchewan’s hotels hit hard times, the province’s small Chinese community stepped in to pick up the pieces, keeping those hotels in business. Many Saskatchewan hotels were owned and operated by Chinese throughout the Prohibition years of the teens and 1920s, and into the Depression of the 1930s. In his address to the annual convention of the Hotel Association of Saskatchewan in 1952, George G. Grant stated that, back in the early1930s, “the condition of hotels was desperate, and half the hotels were operated by Orientals.” (Saskatoon StarPhoenix, May 20, 1952, p. 3)

The “Chinamen” who bought the Pennant Hotel from George Brennan in 1916 were “Yock Yee, Yee On, Yee Kong, and Young Yenchew, better known to all as George, Doo Lu, Louie and Charlie.” Like many Chinese enterprises in small-town Saskatchewan, the Pennant Hotel was not, strictly speaking, a family business. Rather, it was run by several men – relatives or friends – who worked as partners. This was necessary because, from 1885 until well into the 20^th century, restrictive immigration laws prevented Chinese from bringing their wives and children to Canada. As a result, the Chinese Canadian community became a “bachelor society.” 

Chinese immigrants began arriving in what is now Saskatchewan in the late 1880s after the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Fleeing from mob violence in British Columbia, they tended to disperse into the new railroad towns of the prairies. In his book, Sweet and Sour; Life in Chinese Family Restaurants (2010), John Jung explains that, upon arriving in a community, Chinese had to find or develop forms of self-employment as a means of economic survival. Other forms of work such as railway construction were denied to them. “Lacking English language skills, having little money, and little experience,” Jung writes, “one of the few opportunities was in domestic work, typically considered ‘women’s work’. Thus, they started their own small businesses such as laundries, grocery stores, and restaurants often in areas where there were few other Chinese.” Some became cooks in small-town hotels where they learned the business. 

Chow Chow on right, with Robin Chow, n.d.

                       From A Link to Our Heritage: Lacadena and District (1989)

Chow Chow came to Lacadena in 1925 and built a hotel with eight guest rooms upstairs, and a very good café on the main floor.  According to Lacadena’s local history book, Chow was a generous, good-hearted businessman. “At Christmas time he always had a gift of chocolates or Christmas cake for every family,” the book recounts. “He provided service twenty-four hours a day if food was needed.”  Other members of the hotel staff were Wing Chow and a nephew, Ernie Chow, who attended school in Lacadena for a year or two. In 1947, Chow Chow's life changed when the Canadian government repealed the Chinese Immigration Act. His wife, son and two daughters were finally able to come from China to join him. He left Lacadena and moved to Vancouver where his wife helped him in a confectionery-café until he passed away from leukemia in 1972. 

The Wong Gin family of Herbert, 1940. Image Source

Wong Gin was a lucky man.  He came to Canada from China in 1908, and by 1913, he was the owner of the Tuxedo Café in Herbert, Saskatchewan. Thirteen years later, in 1926, he was the owner of the Tuxedo Hotel and Café, advertised as “The Best Hotel in Town – Ice Cream and Confectionary – Meals at All Hours – Clean Rooms and Best of Service.”  Wong Gin was also fortunate because his wife and family were not thousands of miles away in China. In 1927, he married Mae Yea of Riverhurst, Saskatchewan, and they had six children. Wong Gin was in competition with the Herbert Hotel owned by Mrs. E.M. Stephenson – “A Home Away From Home – Home Cooking – We Employ White Help Only.”  He must have been a naturalized Canadian, because in 1935, the year the province allowed the sale of beer by the glass, he bought the Herbert Hotel from Mrs. Stephenson and he was able to obtain a license to open a beer parlour – something many Chinese hotel owners were not permitted to do. Chinese were excluded because the law required that the applicant for a liquor license had to be a person who was entitled to vote. The Chinese in Saskatchewan did not receive the provincial franchise until 1947. In 1939, N.B. Williams, chairman of the Saskatchewan Liquor Board, stated that some liquor licenses had been granted to naturalized Chinese "who had long operated hotels in communities and were respected there." It was not, however, the board's policy to grant a license to naturalized Chinese "who had bought hotels after the former white owners had failed," Mr. Williams said. (Regina Leader-Post, Aug. 22, 1939, p. 9)

The Herbert Hotel in 1908.Image source

In 1945, Wong Gin sold the Herbert Hotel. He died in January 1960. The Herbert history (1987) records the following tribute:  “Wong had more than fulfilled the requirements of any citizen. As a pioneer he took an active part in building Herbert, for the well-being of his children and his neighbour’s children. He had helped to build on every project that needed volunteer labour – the school, hospital, skating rinks, curling rinks, exhibition grounds and Bible School. … One winter he even won a trophy in a farmers’ bonspiel.” The Gin family has continued to be active and involved in the Herbert community ever since.  

Edam Cafe and Hotel, n.d Image source

Charlie Chan arrived from China in 1910.  In 1915, Chan and a partner built a hotel on Main Street in Edam that, according to the Canada’s Historic Places web site, “was considered to be one of the most elegant establishments of its kind in the region.”  Chan’s business consisted of hotel, café and ice cream parlour. He eventually bought out his partner’s share in the Edam Café, and his family operated it until 1986. The two-storey, wood frame building, designated as a Municipal Heritage Property, was moved in 2003 from Main Street to the site of the Edam museum. 

Back in Pennant, Young Yenchew (aka Charlie) and Yok Yee (aka George), owners of the Pennant Hotel for many years, were considered “friends to all,” especially the children. The hotel café was a great place to meet for a 25-cent banana split, or an orange drink called “belly wash” for five cents. Charlie loved the sport of curling, and attended many bonspiels throughout the region. “When they left Pennant,” the history book reports, “a large crowd gathered at the Memorial Hall to say thank you for all the years of service to the community.” 

Once economic conditions improved during the war years of the 1940s, the number of Chinese hotel owners in the province dropped substantially.

© Joan Champ, 2011