Ad McPherson, Oldtimer of ’69
By W.M. Bleasdell Cameron, Meadow Lake, Sask.

‘On a hot July day in 1881 I dropped into a wooden restaurant in the wooden town of Winnipeg and sat down at a wooden table with a magenta cover. Opposite me sat a compactly-built, red-faced man of medium height who somehow reminded me of a racehorse. A short bristling crop of red hair covered his bullet head over a pair of snapping, humorous blue eyes and a nose to which nature had given a comically pugnacious tilt. We both ordered steaks.

When the orders were brought I thought for a moment the pepper box had been emptied. I glanced across at the stranger and he looked back at me with an amusing frown on his fiery features and said in a soft southern draw: “Do you reckon there’s anything under ‘em?”

“If there is, I wouldn’t offer it to a dog,” I replied, and we both pushed back our plates. They were black with flies.

That was my introduction to Addison McPherson, one of the squarest shooters and most lovable characters I ever knew, and the beginning of a friendship that lasted from that day until he passed on more than forty years later in the city he had seen rise from the grass roots that is now Calgary.’

• More ‘History’ on the Canadian Cattlemen: Were chuckwagon races first introduced at Calgary rodeos?

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