( Above ) The building at 770 North Water Street acts as BMO Harris ’ s Milwaukee headquarters . Marshall & Ilsley ( M & I ) Bank was expanding its operations and activities in the late 1960s and opened this building in 1968 .
( Right ) “ April 9 — a Bank !” That ’ s how the Whitehorse Star reported the arrival of the Bank of Montreal in the small community in southeastern Yukon Territory named for Frank Watson , an American trapper and prospector . The branch was closed in 1978 , with the Whitehorse branch of the bank taking over its activities .
upper and lower , fought with the British to stay part of the empire . The war ended late in 1814 , and the Napoleonic Wars ( of which it was just a part ) ended the following year . With peace , Canada and the rest of the empire got back to business . To take its place in that prosperity Canada needed a bank . BMO opened for business on November 3 , 1817 . Assets were c $ 150,000 .
By its centennial in 1917 BMO assets had reached c $ 404 million . In April of that year Canadian troops had won a historic victory at Vimy Ridge , and the United States had just entered the war . By 2016 assets had grown to $ 681.5 billion .
Such figures would have been incredible to the Montréal Nine , as they would also be to the Lords of the Treasury in Whitehall and the Colonial Office who issued the charter in 1822 . According to A Vision Greater than Themselves , there were 20 articles in the charter , four of which were “ devoted to banking crimes : embezzlement , theft , counterfeiting and forgery . The first three were punishable by death ‘ without benefit of clergy .’”
Printing bank notes not only preceded the charter , it preceded the opening by two months . The trans-border tone for the bank was set from the start , with the bank note order going to Abner Reid , an engraver in Hartford , Connecticut . Currency and capital in hand , BMO survived its first economic downturn in 1825 – 26 . Another institution across town , the Bank of Canada , was not so fortunate . It never recovered from the recession , and by 1831 BMO had taken over its business .
In time BMO would become a highlyacquisitive bank , but early transactions came slowly . An 1823 regulation prohibited the bank from operating in Upper Canada . That colony wanted to develop its own financial resources , an argument that echoed in many western states of the US as they fought branch banking by the big East Coast establishments .
Such regionalism was not as long lived in Canada as it was in the United States . Upper and Lower Canada were joined into the United Province of Canada in 1841 . That same year , BMO purchased the assets of Upper Canada ’ s Bank of the People , based in Toronto . Through this period Canadians also got sorted on the question of whether the nation would use dollars in common with the United States or pounds in common with the mother country and her empire . The decision in 1857 was for dollars — a risky move at that time considering the sectional violence already rising in the US as it cascaded into civil war .
The next expansion for Canada was into the Maritimes . The triumph of the Union in the American Civil War and the expansive concept of manifest destiny in the United States made Canadians both east and west profoundly uneasy . The response was confederation in 1867 , creating the Dominion of Canada with the addition of the Maritime colonies of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia . The conference for confederation was held in Charlottetown , Prince Edward Island , but that tiny colony did not join because it already had
30 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Winter 2017 | www . MoAF . org