Felix Plantes Buffalo Store was popular in its day Leith KnightPublished on January 14, 2011 It has been 130 years since Felix Plante first set foot in Moose Jaw to become one of the towns most popular merchants. Felix was a short, stout, jovial French Canadian born about 1860 on the island of Orlean in the St. Lawrence River a short distance down stream from Quebec City. In 1882, Felix, then about 22, arrived in western Canada to seek his fortune and settled in Winnipeg. A year later he was sent to Regina by his employer to wind up the affairs of a bankrupt business. When this was completed, he moved on to Moose Jaw. He liked the town and saw a good future for himself as a general merchant. He occupied several buildings for brief periods before moving to a shop on Main Street, now the site of the Elk Block, 18 Main St. N., which is home to the administration and ticket offices of the Tunnels of Moose Jaw. Above the door of his wood-frame building, Felix hung a large sign bearing the silhouette of a buffalo head, and the Buffalo Store was in business. (The mural on the east wall of the Times Herald building depicts the Buffalo Store and its surrounding neighbourhood.) The Buffalo Store was a hit from the beginning, and soon Felix was one of the most successful merchants in Moose Jaw. He stocked supplies for the settlers, and there were always big wooden barrels of mixed candies for the kids. One pioneer who had come to Moose Jaw as a child told how the kids liked to candy shop at the Buffalo Store because Felix gave them more candy for a nickel than any other merchant. He also remembered that when he and his friends failed to close the shop door properly, Felix would admonish them in his broken English: Close the door! Were you born in a barn? Felix did a brisk business with the French Canadian settlers of the Willow Bunch-Wood Mountain area. Jean Louis Legare was one of his customers who was so pleased to have a general merchant who spoke French. Felix was also a fur trader. According to a contemporary account, his chief business was trading in furs with the Natives and Metis. He was also one of several local buffalo bone dealers, buying bones gathered on the prairie by the settlers and Natives. In the autumn of 1886, Felix was reported receiving as many as 25 cartloads of buffalo bones daily. The bones were then stock-piled along the CPR tracks to await shipment east to be turned into fertilizer. Like every storekeeper Felix had his downs as well as his ups. In October 1886, someone broke into the Buffalo store and made off with the cash box containing $125, a considerable sum in those days. Boys found the empty box in a nearby water barrel. Then in December 1888, a spark from a chimney started a fire on the roof of the Buffalo Store. Fortunately it was noticed and extinguished before much damage was done, but it had been a close call for a town of wooden buildings, stables, hay stacks, manure piles and no running water or fire protection. A few doors up the street was the shop of another local merchant, James Chalmers, a soft-spoken Highland Scot. Late in 1889, James started to build the first solid stone building in Moose Jaw, and by mid-October 1888 he was ready to open his new general store. Felix watched the construction of the new store with great interest and probably went to see the dinosaur bone found embedded in one of the limestone building blocks. Sometime in 1889, Felix fell from his horse and became permanently disabled. His condition gradually deteriorated until he could no longer operate his store and the business failed. By 1891, time was running out for both Felix and his old Buffalo Store where he continued to live, cared for by his father. Soon after midnight on Dec. 12, a great fire which broke out in the Foley Block, two doors south of the Buffalo Store, laid waste to the entire first block of Main Street. Only James Chalmers stone store was left standing - it had effectively stopped the flames from spreading up Main Street. In later years, the same stone walls became the north section of Joyners Department Store. The demise of the Buffalo Store and Felix Plante well over a century ago, marked the beginning of the end of the frontier shack town that was the product of railway construction. One visitor described Moose Jaw as a hodgepodge of discarded wooden boxes. It was some time before the site of the Buffalo Store was built upon again. In 1906, Henry Kern and M.J. MacLeod erected the Elk Block. The surviving south portion of the block sits on the plot of land once occupied by the Buffalo Store.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 11:58:59 +0000
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