In 1928, the Bank of Montreal opened this bank in Mayo, Yukon Territory— an inland mining town 250 miles from Whitehorse at the confluence of the Mayo and Stewart Rivers.
a free-trade agreement with the United States. Nothing personal, just business.
Not surprisingly, BMO was involved in the financing of the Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, just 16 years after the transcontinental railroad was completed in the US. But that was not BMO’ s first rail venture. The bank helped finance the first railway in Canada, the Champlain & St. Lawrence, which ran 16 miles from La Prairie, on the opposite bank of the St. Lawrence River, to St. Johns, Quebec, at the head of navigation on the Richelieu River.
A modest run to be sure, but when it began service in 1836 it completed the connection from Montreal to New York by way of steamers on Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. It also put Canada on the cutting edge of transportation and technology. The world’ s first railway, the Stockton & Darlington in England, had begun operations just 11 years earlier. And the first US railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, started service just six years before the Canadian road.
As the nation grew, so did BMO. As negotiations for confederation advanced, the accounts for the Province of Canada were transferred to BMO late in 1863. Just three years after confederation, BMO opened a permanent office in the City of London. The bank had long had offices in New York.
Communication with Europe became a practical reality when Cyrus Field laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable between Newfoundland and Ireland in 1858. US President James Buchanan was able to exchange greetings with Queen Victoria, but the cable parted after only a few weeks. The end of the American Civil War not only prompted confederation in Canada, but also allowed renewed cable laying. Regular and reliable service was established by 1867. Today BMO operates in 22 countries on five continents.
Canada created an official central bank
in 1935, long after most other industrialized nations. That was in part because decisions made by the US Federal Reserve and by the Bank of England had powerful effects on Canadian international business, and also because BMO was prudent and effective as the government’ s banker. In a bank note footnote,“ The right of chartered banks to issue or reissue their own notes expired on 1 January 1945,” according to A Vision Greater than Themselves.
Postwar prosperity boomed in Canada as in the United States. It was steady on for four decades. Then, over the course of a few years, BMO jumped into a much higher orbit with the acquisition of Chicago’ s august Harris Bank in 1984. In 1987 BMO added Nesbitt Thomson, one of the largest brokerages in Canada.
The Bank Finds a Forgery
For many years this painting, Place d’ Armes, Montreal( 1848, oil on canvas), in the BMO Art Collection was thought to be by Cornelius David Krieghoff( 1815 – 1872). However, the bank’ s curators, working with the expert on Krieghoff, Dennis Reid, former chief curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, confirmed that the BMO painting is a fake.
“ There are apparently a number of these copies dating from the artist’ s own time to the late 19th century, when it didn’ t seem unusual or wrong to copy a work by a‘ famous’ artist right down to their signature,” said Dawn Cain, curator of the BMO collection.“ The [ unknown ] copyist in question may have been working from a series of prints based on popular works by Krieghoff that were published in the late 1840s, one of which shows the same scene rendered in the painting.”
Even though the work is only in the style of Krieghoff, it reflects both the period and the bank: European roots and strong cross-border North American scope. Krieghoff was born in 1815 in Amsterdam, worked and studied in France and Germany, and then came to New York in 1836. He moved to Montreal in 1846, where he both partook in salon society and also lived for a while with the Mohawk First Nation. He lived and worked in Canada, the United States and Germany through his life.
His work is actively collected today and is contemporaneous with Currier & Ives and also the Hudson River School, which are more familiar to many Americans.
Any brokers of any age would do well to match brokers in 1917 who recommended buying the stock of the bank on its centennial. A single share of BMO when issued at the height of the Great War effort that year was worth c $ 222, or c $ 3,600 in 2016 dollars, as calculated in A Vision Greater than Themselves. Through appreciation, four splits and reinvesting dividends, that single share would now be 52,000 shares worth c $ 4.4 million.
Somewhere, the Montreal Nine are smiling all the way to the bank.
Gregory DL Morris is an independent business journalist, principal of Enterprise & Industry Historic Research( www. enterpriseandindustry. com) and an active member of the Museum’ s editorial board.
Bank of Montreal www. MoAF. org | Winter 2017 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 31