Click on the picture to see a larger version.
Above: The Connell & Burke stable in 1883, after McMicken sold it to Bill Squires. Below: In 1884 Bill Squires advertised that he was running his cab business from "McMicken's Old Stand".
Source:
Top: c[irca] 1883. Burke Livery just south of HB Co. store on Main St. Burke was an old Black Hills stage driver. Archives Manitoba, Stovell Advocate Collection 6 (Negative N20773). Bottom: Winnipeg Siftings, April 12, 1884, p. 4. The ad also appeared in the issue of March 29, 1884.
Winnipeg Cab History / 10
Connell & Burke (1)
McMicken's grand plan for a fleet of coupes with "coloured attendants" did not come to fruition. By 1882 he had sold off the North West Omnibus and Transfer company and joined his father Gilbert and other investors in the creation of a new freight handling business called the Manitoba Cartage Company.
He sold his stable to one of his employees, Bill Squires, who tried to keep the livery cab operation going in the McMicken style but without the McMicken finances or political connections. The collapse of the Winnipeg boom in 1884 and the economic depression that followed didn't help matters. About 1885 Squires sold the stable back to Connell & Burke.
Michael Connell seems to have dropped out of the partnership by the 1890s but Redmond Burke stayed in the cab and livery business until he retired in 1902.
In the photo at left, the tracks of Winnipeg's horse-drawn streetcar system can be faintly seen in the foreground threading their way through the ubiquitous mud.
A coupe drawn by two horses is parked illegally on the wooden sidewalk to keep it out of the mud. The cab closest to the camera looks like a clarence.
Barely distinguishable at the right edge of the photograph is an open landau with a top-hatted driver. An omnibus is parked on the other side of the landau.