Here's another clue to the White Bear Yacht Club mystery, though a frustrating one. This passage is taken from a history of St. Paul's Town and Country Golf Club, written in 1930 by William F. Peet, an original member of that club. T&C has been playing at the same location continuously since 1893, and Pete was describing club members' efforts to spread the game of golf to other locations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area:
"In 1911, L.P. Ordway started golf in connection with the White Bear Yacht Club. With his usual vision, he had bought forty acres North of the railroad track to protect the rear of Dellwood and probably in the back of his mind to provide a playground of some sort for the Yacht Club. It was the God awfulest forty you ever saw, full of hills, valleys, stumps and underbrush, with absolutely no promise of a golf links, but it served as a starter. We bought the Arkell seventy acres adjoining on the East and subsequently eighty more North of the Stillwater road and all of us lived at the lake went to work to raise the very substantial sum needed to make this wild and unpromising land a real golf links. Billy Mitchell, excuse me, Attorney General Mitchell, contributed a lot of his time and a very large amount of his money, subsequently recovered, to this enterprise, and the old Yacht Club sweat blood for years to finance and maintain it. We are all familiar with the results, the sportiest and one of the best links in the Northwest, worked over, prayed over and put to bed every night for the past seventeen years by good, old Tom Vardon."
Elsewhere in the T&C club history, Peet describes the efforts of some of the club members to establish what would have been St. Paul's first municipal golf course at Como Park. Peet writes that they "got Watson, the great links expert, to lay it our and blue print it." The St. Paul city council turned down the proposal, but it does establish a connection between those who started golf at WBYC and William Watson, who had already designed Interlachen and Minikahda. The account also seems to give a lot of credit to Tom Vardon for the course as it existed in 1930, but it doesn't specifically say who designed WBYC.