January 2017 - Manitoba Museum

Posted on: Tuesday January 31, 2017

After Manitoba entered Confederation in 1870 and the Canadian government negotiated Treaty No. 1 with First Nations leaders, Canada began to actively engage potential immigrants to settle and farm the prairies. The first two groups that arrived in large numbers were English speaking Ontarians and German speaking Mennonites from eastern Ukraine. This first large wave of immigration to Manitoba would begin the irrevocable transformation of the environment and the economy of the province forever. The success of the Mennonites in particular may have helped open the door to other immigrants who did not speak English and had different religious backgrounds compared to the English Protestants and French Catholics who dominated political life in Canada. Icelandic, Jewish, Ukrainian, and many immigrant groups from Eastern Europe began entering the province by the 1880s.

Our new exhibit “Legacies of Confederation” features a number of personalities, including William Hespeler (1830-1921) who played an incredibly important role in immigration from the 1870s to the 1890s. The exhibit features his Speaker’s Chair, used in the Manitoba Legislative Building between 1900 and 1903. In 1899 Hespeler entered provincial politics, winning the rural seat of Rosenfeld. In 1900 he was chosen as the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, which he held for three years before retiring. The carved wooden armchair was built for his position as Speaker and he retained it after he left politics. It has been handed down to generations of his descendants since he died in 1921. The chair was donated to the Manitoba Museum in 2016 by his great-great-grandson Michael Boultbee of Victoria, BC.

An ornate, brown leather claw-foot armchair with a wooden crest and crown embellishing the top of the seat back.

William Hespeler Speaker’s Chair, 1900, wood and leather. H9-38-512, copyright Manitoba Museum, photograph by Rob Barrow.

William Hespeler seated in the Speaker’s Chair, ca. 1903. Courtesy Jeremy Hespeler-Boultbee.

Detail of crest rail, including the seal of Manitoba (Bison and English Cross of St. George) surmounted by a large crown. This symbolizes the power of the Speaker as an authority in the Legislative Assembly and the role of Manitobans as subjects under the British crown. H9-38-512, copyright Manitoba Museum, photography by Rob Barrow.

Hespeler was born to a wealthy family in Baden, Germany and moved to Berlin, Canada West (that is, Kitchener, Ontario) in 1850. After business success in establishing mills and distilleries in Canada, he moved back to Baden with his sick wife Mary Keatchie in 1872.

In Baden, Hespeler was informed by the Canadian government that a large population of Mennonites had grown dissatisfied in their colonies in Ukraine. Many felt their religious freedoms were being threatened as a new schooling system and military service were enforced. Mennonites were looking to emigrate, and the Canadian government hoped they might migrate to farm the lands of southern Manitoba. Hespeler went to Ukraine and convinced Mennonite delegates to visit southeastern Manitoba in 1873, which led to the migration of 7000 Mennonites to Manitoba. Along with Anglo-Ontario settlers, this comprised the first wave of mass migration into the province. It would also set the stage for more waves of Mennonite migration to Canada in the 20^th Century. Not only did Mennonite settlement in Manitoba help prove the viability of farming on the open prairie, it also had long term effects for Mennonite populations around the world, as they realized Canada could be a safe homeland.

After this success William Hespeler was appointed as dominion immigration agent for Manitoba and the North-West Territories. As such he assisted with the immigration of Icelanders, Germans, and Jewish refugees. He planned the village of Niverville, establishing what might be Canada’s first grain elevator. He also managed the Manitoba Land Company, and acted as the German consul for Manitoba.

William Hespeler worked diligently to provide Manitoba with immigrant farmers after the province joined Confederation and Treaty No. 1 was signed in 1871. Since then Canada and Manitoba have had varying degrees of openness to immigrants and refugees, but certainly one of the legacies of Confederation for Manitoba is the creation of a society that largely welcomes and values the contributions of newcomers.

Dr. Roland Sawatzky

Curator of History

Roland Sawatzky joined The Manitoba Museum in 2011. He received his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Winnipeg, M.A. in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina, and Ph.D. in Archaeology…

Meet Dr. Roland Sawatzky

Museum Stories: History

History

Friday February 14, 2025

Posted on: Monday January 23, 2017

Tasting is something we do everyday but many of the things we think we know about taste are actually wrong. So let the debunking begin!

Myth #1: You taste food with your tongue.

Fact: Your sense of taste involves your tongue AND your nose. When you are sick with a cold, food doesn’t taste very good. This is not because your taste buds aren’t working – it is because your nose isn’t working. To test this, close your eyes, plug your nose and pop a flavoured candy in your mouth. Can you tell which flavour it is? Then unplug your nose and see if you know. What you are experiencing when you unplug is retronasal olfaction (or smelling the back of the nose). Many flavours in food are released as gases while you chew, which then waft into your nose through the back of your mouth. In fact 80% to 90% of what we “taste” is actually detected by your nose.

Myth #2: There are four basic tastes.

A round, white Puffball mushroom growing among mostly dry grass.

Fact: There are actually at least five tastes: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami (Japanese for “pleasant, savory taste”) is probably the term you are unfamiliar with. Umami is the rich, earthy taste you get from foods containing natural glutamate such as seaweed, fish sauce, meat, mushrooms, aged cheese, and even breast milk. Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a common additive used to add umami taste to food. Although umami was discovered by a Japanese chemist in 1908, it wasn’t accepted as a fifth taste (it was thought to be a flavour enhancer) until 2009 when glutamate receptors were discovered on the human tongue.

Image: Mushrooms like this puffball (Lycoperdon spp.) have a distinct umami taste. © Manitoba Museum

Myth #3: The front of your tongue is where you taste sweet things and the back is where you taste bitter things.

A plant growing in a red-orange pot. The plant's branches reach out in all directions with oblong green leaves growing from them.

Fact: All five tastes can be detected all over your tongue. You may have seen a taste map of the tongue in a text book or on the internet. But it is wrong. The taste map was created in 1901 by a German scientist who simply asked volunteers to indicate where certain tastes were strongest; not very scientific at all. Since then, detailed studies using modern equipment have found receptors for all five tastes all over the tongue. However, there are slightly more receptors for certain tastes in certain areas; bitter tends to be detected most strongly, but not exclusively, at the back of the tongue.

Image: Grapefruit (Citrus paradisi), such as this one at the Montreal Botanic Garden, can have a bitter flavour that some people don’t like. © Manitoba Museum

Myth #4: Artificial flavour doesn’t taste right because it has too many chemicals in it.

A watercolour painting of a wild strawberry plant, showing the various stages of the plant's growth from blossom to fruit.

Fact: Artificial flavour doesn’t taste right because it has too FEW chemicals in it. I got into an argument once with another scientist over artificial strawberry flavour. I insisted that it didn’t taste quite right and he insisted that since it contains the exact same flavour chemicals as a real strawberry, it should taste exactly the same. Turns out we were both right. While artificial strawberry flavour does contain some of the chemicals that give a real strawberry its flavour, it doesn’t have all of them. Artificial flavour contains about 5 to 30 flavour and scent molecules but a real strawberry has over 300! The reason artificial flavour doesn’t have all those chemicals is because it would be too expensive to produce. So if you’ve never eaten a fresh strawberry right off the plant, artificial strawberry flavour might taste just fine to you. But to someone who grows strawberries in their backyard (that would be me) it doesn’t quite cut it. Plus it always reminds me of the taste of those fluoride treatments you get at the dentist!

Image: Nothing tastes as good as a real wild strawberry (Fragaria spp.). Painting by Norman Criddle. H9-23-415 © Manitoba Museum

Myth #5: Fruits are sweet and vegetables are bitter.

Fact: While it is true that many fruits contain sugar, some fruits are not sweet at all. Botanically speaking, a fruit is a structure that contains, or is attached to, one to many seeds-it has nothing to do with what it tastes like. Many things that we call vegetables are actually fruits including avocados, cucumbers, tomatoes, and squash. The taste of a fruit is influenced by the kind of animal that normally disperses it. Since some animals like juicy, bitter, sour, or fatty tastes, not all fruits are sweet.

Vegetables (defined as roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, and leaves) may be bitter due to the presence of toxins that discourage animals from eating them. However, humans have bred modern vegetables to be less bitter (and therefore less toxic). For example, wild carrot root is bitterer than modern varieties. Unfortunately, breeding out the bitter compounds (which are often natural pesticides) and increasing the sweet ones make our crop plants more desirable to insect pests.

Myth #6: Food tastes the same to everyone.

A coffee plant growing in a botanical garden, tall and covered in green leaves.

Fact: Everyone has a different number of taste buds; the number that you have controls the volume of your food. People with lots of taste buds (super-tasters) tend to dislike really bitter and spicy foods (because they taste louder) while people with fewer taste buds (non-tasters) may find them pleasant or stimulating. Black coffee and dark chocolate are two foods that non-tasters usually like and super-tasters dislike. Bitter vegetables like kale may also be disliked by super-tasters. This may explain, at least partly, why some people are picky eaters, although cultural factors are also extremely important. So the saying “everyman to his taste” is most certainly true.

Image: Black coffee (Coffea spp.) is usually loved by non-tasters and disguised with cream and sugar by supertasters. Photo taken at the Montreal Botanical Garden. © Manitoba Museum

Dr. Diana Bizecki Robson

Curator of Botany

Dr. Bizecki Robson obtained a Master’s Degree in Plant Ecology at the University of Saskatchewan studying rare plants of the mixed grass prairies. After working as an environmental consultant and sessional lecturer…

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