Most of the French-speaking people who moved into Western Canada after 1870 turned to agriculture. There existed, however, a busy rural and urban commercial class which sought to service the francophone community. One finds hotels, general stores, liquor stores, and shoe stores in almost all the small French-speaking communities, and also brickmakers, entrepreneurs, and some financiers in the larger centers like Winnipeg-St. Boniface and Edmonton.
Businessmen like the butcher Rochon in St. Boniface could afford to advertise only in French, while a grocer like Couture who had a shop in St. Boniface and another in Winnipeg, advertised in English. This photograph (c. 1905) also shows the Banque d'Hochelaga, a local branch of a Montreal-based bank.
Interestingly enough, while many French-speaking businessmen in the West carried on their trade in both French and English, large department and hardware stores often advertised in the French newspapers that they had a clerk who could speak French.
