Pioneer Lee Duck
People inside Lee Duck Cleaners located at 330 13 Street North. Lee Duck is pictured on the far right. No date.
Galt Museum & Archives, 199110003480
When Ron Lee was 17, his mother told him to go talk with his dying grandfather Lee Duck one last time. From his bed, Lee Duck opened up to his grandson about his life in China at the turn of the century. Born in a village near Taishan in 1888, he left home at ten years old to seek his fortune in Canton (Guangzhou), first working as a thief, then as a card shark. At 15, he walked into the back of a kitchen and convinced the cook to hire him. While living and working in Canton, he caught the bubonic plague but fortunately recovered and decided to become a tailor.
A traveller returning from Canada convinced Lee Duck to emigrate from China in 1905. Lee travelled across the Pacific Ocean on a steamer named Empress of India. He stayed in the steamer's belly shovelling coal to avoid confrontations with the white passengers aboard the ship. Once he arrived in Canada, Lee secured a job as a car oiler, or "grease monkey" with the Canadian Pacific Railway. He travelled on trains on their round-trips between Vancouver and Calgary, greasing the undercarriages of locomotives at each stop by crawling under them on his back, and "polishing the engine exterior, from the controls to the bell, the body and even the cowcatcher." (Ron Lee interview) Lee became increasingly interested in moving to Alberta on these round trips.
Eventually, he moved to Lethbridge and started Lee Duck Cleaners on 13 Street North. Lee married Der Soon Yet, "who was part of Chinese Nationalist leader Dr. Sun Yat-Sen's entourage during a visit to Canada 'to raise money for the revolution.'" (Ron Lee interview) They had six children in Lethbridge and sent the five oldest to China to be educated there and return to Canada as teenagers. Lee Duck ran a successful business in Lethbridge and travelled back and forth to China multiple times, where he built a magnificent house.
Display of medals and documents belonging to Lee Duck, March 28, 1931.
Galt Museum & Archives, 19911000513
300 block of 13 Street North, with the Lee Duck Cleaners storefront visible at the far right.
Galt Museum & Archives, 20001076241
Portrait of Lee Duck, no date.
Galt Museum & Archives, 199110003478
Lee Duck family standing in a garden, no date.
Galt Museum & Archives, 199110003481
What makes Lee's story more remarkable is that he achieved all this against the backdrop of Canada's anti-Chinese immigration policies, which included a $500 head tax for each entry to Canada, followed by a near-total ban on Chinese immigration after 1923.
At Lee Duck's funeral, Ron recalled that his grandfather issued instructions that his funeral service be conducted bilingually in both Chinese and English so that everyone could understand and no one would feel left out or out of place.
You can learn more about the history of Chinese Canadian businesses in Lethbridge and southern Alberta by exploring the documents, materials and photographs in the Galt's online database at collections.galtmuseum.com.
William Baliko demonstrates how blacksmiths like William Gladstone would have made a knife at the fort in the late 1800s.