Colourful Characters at Oxbow’s Alexandra Hotel

 

The Alexandra Hotel in Oxbow, c. 1910. Source

 

Oxbow's First Hotel - The Palace

The Palace Hotel. Source: Furrow to the Future (1984)

Oxbow's local history book, Furrow to the Future (1984), tells us that the Palace Hotel was built on the corner of Railway and Main by a Winnipeg firm in 1892. Peter Powell came from Ontario to Oxbow in 1897 to operate the hotel until he sold it to Harry Gleiser, also from Ontario.

In 1904, Harry Gleiser and his family took over the Palace Hotel. Gleiser enlarged the hotel’s dining room and built an addition at the back, giving the hotel 34 guest rooms. Gleiser’s son Percy opened a jewelry store in the hotel.

On August 14, 1907 a fire started at the rear of the Palace Hotel, sweeping through the business section of Oxbow, destroying many buildings including the hotel. The cost to Harry Gleiser was $25,000.

In 1908, with financial assistance from Oxbow businessmen, Gleiser replaced the Palace Hotel with a three-storey, 40-room, brick hotel called the Alexandra. It had a good-sized bar. Percy Gleiser opened a jewelry and watch repair store in the hotel. Two years later, Percy died of blood poisoning, and his sister Ruby took over his business. Several years later, Ruby took over the operation of the Alexandra Hotel.

Ruby Gleiser 

 

Ruby Gleiser. Source: The Indianapolis Star, Oct. 10, 1937

Ruby Gleiser was a force of nature. When her father Harry died in February of 1927, Ruby took over the operation of the Alexandra Hotel. By that time, she was living in Estevan. “Who shall say what made Ruby Elizabeth Gleiser great?” a Regina Leader-Post editorial asked shortly after her death in August 1953 at age 62. “She had courage and even high daring from the beginning.” As a girl in Oxbow, Ruby played hockey and baseball, rode horseback, and won medals for her shotgun marksmanship. She was an avid hunter and became known as one of the best shots in Saskatchewan, man or woman. Ruby was also an accomplished musician. "She played the clarinet and saxophone at a period, surely, when most young ladies were occupied with piano lessons," the Leader-Post noted. "As a member of the Oxbow town band, she toured to fairs in North Dakota, Regina and Brandon exhibitions. In 1913, when she moved to Estevan, she was saxophone soloist with a band that toured from Winnipeg to Vancouver." 

 Ruby developed a strong head for business. Not only did she take over her brother’s and father’s businesses in Oxbow, she also operated the Delight Theatre at Estevan; a taxi service; and the Estevan Dairy which she purchased in 1933. Gleiser was the first woman in Saskatchewan to hold a motion picture operator’s license and the first woman in the province to obtain a chauffer’s license. She owned her first car at age 16, and according to the Leader-Post, by 1936 she owned 17 cars. 

Leader-Post, Sept.24, 1936

A member of the local Rebekah Lodge, Ruby Gleiser's most notable achievement was when she became president of the international Association of Rebekah Assemblies in 1936, the highest office possible in that benevolent society. At the outbreak of the Second World War, Gleiser was named Saskatchewan director in charge of welcoming and placing children evacuated from England – the “Guest Children” as they became known. “[A] church so filled with flowers and friends that not an inch remained, with people standing outside and along the streets, must indicate that the day of Ruby Gleiser’s funeral was a sad day for all of Estevan,” the Leader-Post’s editorial concluded.

The Indridasons 

Brothers Sveinn and Thorstein (Stone Sr.) Indridason bought the Alexandra Hotel from Ruby Gleiser in 1936. Originally from Iceland, the brothers and their families first settled in Gimli, Manitoba, then moved to North Dakota. Two years after moving to Oxbow, Sveinn and his family moved to Wolseley where they leased a hotel for three years. Stone Sr. and Stone Jr. continued to operate the Alexandra Hotel until 1942 when they moved to Alameda to operate a hotel there.

Sveinn Indridason and family. Source: Furrow to the Future (1984)

In 1942, Sveinn and his wife Oliva regurned to Oxbow with their four children and bought the Alexandra Hotel. Their son Lorne continued to operate the hotel after he had spent a few years at university, from 1949 until at least 1984.

The Oxbow local history book contains the reminiscences of Margaret (Indridason) Grisdale about

Ab Salter, 1957. Source: Furrow to the Future

the years her family owned the Alexandra Hotel at Oxbow up to 1984, the year the book was published. “Since Oxbow did not have an old folks’ home it seemed a lot of bachelors came to the hotel to spend their last years,” Grisdale writes. One of them was Albert (Ab) Salter, who had come to Cannington Manor, Saskatchewan from England in the 1880s as a 17-year old stable boy. After a stint with American rum runners, Salter, “a likeable old guy,” moved into Oxbow’s Alexander Hotel where he did odd jobs.

According to Grisdale, the 1950s were good years for the Alexander Hotel. In addition to rooms filled with oil workers, the hotel had one of the first televisions in Oxbow which, thanks to the antenna on the roof, could pick up a TV station in Minot, North Dakota. Grisdale remembers that the hotel lobby would be jammed with kids who came to watch television after school.  

When the oil companies left and the Bow Manor Hotel was built in Oxbow, business declined at the old Alexandra Hotel. “Today there isn’t much business for the rooms, but the bar is still a regular ‘watering hole’ for many people,” Grisdale concluded in 1984.

A vacant lot now holds the space where the Alexandra Hotel once stood.

©Joan Champ, 2019

Gambling on Kindersley’s Seymour Hotel

Final stages of construction at the Seymour Hotel in Kindersley, 1910. Source

This is an update of an earlier post about the Seymour Hotel in Kindersley.

When town lots went up for sale in Kindersley on October 7, 1909, the Canadian Northern Railway realized sales of over $60,000 – the most expensive of which was a lot on the corner of Railway and Main – the lot for the Seymour Hotel. C. N. “Gusty” Vasser, began construction on the hotel that year, and by the spring of 1910 there was a fine looking, three-storey wooden structure standing on the street corner. The hotel had 44 rooms at $2.00 per day.

The hotel as it looked in 1912. Source

Charles C. Rogers, the former proprietor of the King Edward Hotel in Saskatoon, bought the Seymour Hotel in 1913 for $85,000 – an increase of $25,000 over the price paid for the hotel ten months earlier.

Ad in the Saskatoon Daily Star, July 7, 1915.

Rogers then hit a string of bad luck. On July 7, 1915, a week after Saskatchewan started Prohibition, an ad appeared in the Saskatoon Daily Star stating the furnishings of the Seymour Hotel would be auctioned off by the Town of Kindersley for taxes, including 60 “magnificent” bedroom suites, full dining room and kitchen contents, and three pool tables. In October 1918, Rogers’ son Eska died, possibly from the terrible Spanish Flu that raged through the world that year.

Saskatoon Daily Star, December 13, 1920.

Rogers’ slogan for the Seymour Hotel was “The hotel for your wife, mother and family.” Perhaps Rogers was trying to protect that slogan when, in his version of events, he attempted to stop a crap game in the hotel in 1920 and got charged for his troubles. According to the Daily Star, one of the disgruntled crap-shooters, owner of the Kindersley picture show, laid the charge against Rogers. The hotel owner was found guilty of permitting the use of his premises for a gambling game and sentenced to pay a fine of $500. Rogers health declined and he died in 1923.

Like all Saskatchewan businesses, Kindersley’s Seymour Hotel struggled through the Great Depression. Things looked hopeful when it was taken over in 1938 by Bill Moore, “whose genial personality and ambition to give a completely modern hotel service … makes it certain that the Seymour’s popularity is bound to continue on the upward grade.,” the Star-Phoenix wrote on August 6^th. The large hotel had 56 guest rooms; a large, attractive rotunda; and dining room “where menu, service and environment will meet the requirements of the most fastidious.” Mrs. Maud Stevenson was the proprietor of the Seymour in 1939.

Seymour Hotel on the right during the 1940s. Source

In 1944, William Dobni purchased the Seymour Hotel. Originally from Austria, Dobni operated the hotel along with his wife Anna and their six sons until his death in 1955. After his death, Anna and her sons continued to run the hotel until 1975 when they sold the business. James Dobni settled into operating the Seymour Hotel after marrying his wife Shirley in 1951. “He loved the opportunity to meet new people that were passing through,” his obituary read in January 2008. James served on the Kindersely town council for many years, including as mayor.

Marvin and Pearl Gilbertson then bought the hotel in Kindersley and gave it a new name - the Prairie Trail Hotel. The Gilbertsons moved to Swift Current in 1981 where they bought the Imperial Hotel.

The Prairie Trail Hotel - formerly the Seymour Hotel - in Kindersley, 2007. Joan Champ photo

By 2011, the old Seymour Hotel – known as the Prairie Trail Hotel – was Kindersley’s oldest building. That year, a public health recommendation led to its demolition. The building had been closed for a couple of years and no longer deemed safe.

Demolition of the old Seymour Hotel in March 2011. Source

©Joan Champ, 2019

“There’s a Fire in the House!” - Arson at the Sovereign Hotel

Sovereign, Sask. prior to the 1915 fire that destroyed the hotel (far right).Source

“Afraid of what?” Inspector A. W. Duffus, RNWMP, asked chambermaid Molly Kelly, a witness at the preliminary hearing of William Shinbane. The former owner of the Sovereign Hotel was charged with setting fire to his own property on March 29, 1915. “I thought there was going to be a fire,” was Molly’s answer, reported by the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix on November 11, 1915. “What made you think that?” queried the inspector. “Oh, it was common talk among the employees that there was going to be a fire at the hotel,” Molly testified. “Mrs Mitchell the cook said that she did not think Mr. Shinbane would set fire to the house until his wife went to Winnipeg where she was expected to make a visit in a few days.” (Mrs. Anna Shinbane was pregnant with her second son, Berel Shinbane, who was born in Winnipeg on June 2^nd, several months after the fire.)

Headline in the Saskatoon Daily Star, Nov. 10, 1915

The chambermaid had been so nervous that she went to bed fully clothed on the night that fire destroyed the Sovereign Hotel . She had only been working at the hotel for two weeks but the gossip among the other employees that the hotel was going to burn down made her nervous. Sure enough, in the early morning hours of March 29^th she woke up to the smell of smoke coming through the transom window of her third-floor room. She managed to rescue her trunk and escape from her room unharmed. The Shinbane’s 4-year-old son, Edward (Ted), was not so fortunate. The toddler was badly burned on his legs and posterior during the fire. 

The Shinbanes

Source: Sovereign: Mileposts to Memories, 1981

William Shinbane was born to Jacob and Leah Shinbane in Vilna, Russia in 1886. He came to Canada as an infant, settling in Winnipeg, Manitoba where his father ran a general store. He married Anna Schwartz on January 24, 1911 in Winnipeg. After their wedding, the couple planned to settle in Lemberg, Saskatchewan where William’s brother Morris lived. By 1915, they were the owners and operators of the three-story hotel at Sovereign, built in 1912 by Chris Hoeschen, brother of Ben Hoeschen, manager of the Saskatoon brewery. And, by November of the same year, William was charged in incendiarism (arson) for torching his own property. Sovereign is located 26 km southeast of Rosetown on Highway 15.

Insurance Companies Balk

Saskatoon Daily Star, March 23, 1915

On March 29, 1915, the Saskatoon Daily Star reported that there had been “a small epidemic” of hotel fires in Saskatchewan after Premier Walter Scott announced two weeks earlier that Prohibition was coming to the province starting on July 1^st. These fires on licensed premises were viewed with great concern by the fire insurance companies operating in the province. “Every insurance company has been dreading a general outbreak of fire among the hotels since Premier Scott made his announcement,” a company representative told the Daily Star. “We saw it coming and most of us believe that this is only the beginning. All we can do is to make the closest investigation possible in every case.”

 

Star-Phoenix, April 22, 1915

By April 22, six hotel fires in the province, including the one at Sovereign, were under investigation by Fire Commissioner R. J. McLean. Several fire insurance companies cancelled all their hotel policies in the province, while others scaled down their risks. “Some [companies] state that under no circumstances will they insure hotels for more than two-thirds of their estimated value,” one insurance company representative told the Star-Phoenix, “while others put the limit at 50 percent. Still others decline in future to carry any insurance of hotels whatever.”

Preliminary Hearing

On November 4, 1915, William Shinbane was arrested in Winnipeg and brought to Saskatoon for trial. His preliminary hearing began on November 10^th, and the testimony given at the three-day hearing, such as that from Molly Kelly, provides a revealing glimpse into the operations of a small-town Saskatchewan hotel prior to Prohibition. 

Star-Phoenix, Nov. 11, 1915

Sam Musik, the Sovereign Hotel’s porter and furnace man testified that on the night of the fire, he had made up the furnace fire and tended to two dogs that were kept in the cellar. At about 2:00 a.m., he awoke to sound of his employer calling, “Sam! Sam! Fire!” His room was thick with smoke so he only had time to grab his coat, hat and shoes before exiting the burning building via a rope through the window of his room. When he got to the ground, another hotel employee loaned him a pair of pants. After the fire had done its damage, Musik testified that Shinbane came to him and said, “Sam, you keep quiet, my father has lots of money and you won’t lose a cent.” Shinbane owed Musik over $300 in back pay. The porter also testified that he had presumed the two dogs in the hotel’s cellar had perished in the fire, but that two days later a man named Henry Mitchell told him that he had gone down to the cellar at about 11:30 p.m. and taken out the dogs. When Musik told his employer, Shinbane responded, “Sam, you keep quiet.” Shinbane gave Musik $30 for a train ticket to Winnipeg, but when he asked for the $335 still owed to him in back wages, Shinbane told him he could not pay him until he secured the money that was coming to him from the insurance companies.

Bohemian-American Cook Book., 1915. Source

Mrs. Mitchell, the hotel’s cook, barely escaped the hotel fire with her young daughter. She was awakened by Mr. Shinbane calling to her outside her room. “Mrs. Mitchell, for God’s sake get up, there’s a fire in the house.” The cook had no time to dress as her room was already filled with smoke. She lost all her belongings, including $200 in her trunk. She testified on November 11^th that when she got outside to the street, she heard Molly Kelly accuse Shinbane of setting fire to the place, but she didn’t hear his response. Questioned about how business conditions were at the Sovereign Hotel, Mrs. Mitchell stated that Mrs. Shinbane had frequently volunteered that business was “very bad.” She also testified that for about a week prior to the fire, the Shinbanes “had been busy packing up the hotel bed and table linen and the curtains and that these were stored in boxes on the landing” when she went to bed on the night before the fire. The smoke was so thick as she descended to the lower floor that she could not see whether the boxes were still there, but she did not run up against them during her escape.

Sylvester (Sid) Herrick, hotel boarder and handyman, testified that on the night of the fire he had been in Molly Kelly’s room until midnight. “Was there any talk of the possibility of a fire in the hotel while you were up in Miss Kelly’s room,” P. E. Mackenzie, the Crown prosecutor asked. “Yes,” was Herrick’s answer. He also stated that there was a small tank of gasoline at the back of the building which was used for gas-lighting purposes in the hotel. “We were all waiting for it to explode,” he said. All of the witnesses for the prosecution stated that they could smell gasoline as they exited the burning building.

Henry Thomas, representing the eleven insurance companies who held policies on the Sovereign Hotel and its contents, testified on November 11^th that the total insurance on the building, furnishings, liquor and cigars was $23,900. “He said that since the fire the accused had submitted schedules of the values of the loss which totaled $34,946.25,” the Daily Star reported. “That while the policies were made out to William Shinbane, the losses were payable to the Hoeschen-Wentzler Brewing Company, Saskatoon, and to Jacob Shinbane to the extent of $13,000 to the former and $10,900 to the father of the accused.”

Saskatoon Daily Star. Nov. 11, 1915

Despite defense lawyer Donald Maclean’s statement that there was not sufficient evidence to connect the accused with the fire, Inspector Duffus bound Shinbane for trial at the Supreme Court of Saskatchewan. Duffus said that while there was no overwhelming presumption of guilt, there was, in his opinion, enough evidence for the case to go to a jury. 

What Happened?

Star-Phoenix, Nov. 12, 1915

And this is where the case goes cold. So far, I have not been able to find any newspaper story or other reference which can tell us what happened as a result of Shinbane’s trial. (Prior to 1918, there was a Supreme Court of Saskatchewan, but 1915 legislation created a new Court of King’s [now Queen’s] Bench to take over the trial functions of the Supreme Court, which was abolished effective March 1, 1918. Thus, I need to do more digging if I am to discover the Shinbane case records.) Based on what I learned (see below), it looks like William Shinbane got off. Maybe his case didn't even go to trial. His brother, A. M. (Mark) Shinbane, fresh out of law school at the University of Manitoba, attended William's preliminary hearing. Mark went on to have an illustrious career as a lawyer in Winnipeg. Click here to learn more. Perhaps the Shinbane family found a way to maneuver through the court system and help William, Anna, Teddie and Berel get back on their feet again.

William's brother, A. M. Shinbane at U of M, 1915. The Manitoban.

Here’s what I do know. By 1916, according to the Canada census, William and Anna Shinbane and their two boys were living in Swan River, Manitoba, where he worked as a general merchant. In the early 1920s, the family moved to Los Angeles, California. The US census for 1930 shows Shinbanes still living in LA where William worked as a building contractor. Two of his brothers, Hyman and Morris, also lived in LA. William Shinbane died on June 29, 1931 and is buried in Los Angeles.

Record of Shinbane's border crossing, 1923. Source: familysearch.org

The hotel at Sovereign was not rebuilt after the 1915 fire.

©Joan Champ, 2019