Middle Saskatchewan and the Englishmen
The charms of Manitoba are great, but without any depreciation of her buxom maturity I turned my face to the west in search of her younger sisters. To the north-west…
From: 1907 C.E. To: 1907 C.E.
Location: Saskatchewan, Canada
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From New Canada and the New Canadians by Howard Angus Kennedy, 1907.
The charms of Manitoba are great, but without any depreciation of her buxom maturity I turned my face to the west in search of her younger sisters. To the north-west I should say, at first, for on this occasion I took the new route opened up by the Canadian Northern Railway Company.
For the first 250 miles the railway is still in the "Premier Prairie Province," with Lake Manitoba, Lake Dauphin and Lake Winnipegosis far away on the right, and the slopes of Riding Mountain on the left. The land is practically all good, but a large part of it is covered with scrubby poplar, and as long as there is plenty of open prairie to be had the new settler naturally lets the scrub land severely alone—unless, that is, he is a Galician.
The Galician may be a poor farmer when he first comes to the country, but the country owes him no little gratitude for the contented way in which he makes his home on the scrub-land that better farmers despise. Nor is the better farmer at all. uncommon in this region, and the prosperity the ten-year-old town of Dauphin only reflects the prosperity of the country around.
Here the railway forks. If you take the right hand line, to the north-west, you reach the very corner of Manitoba before turning west into Saskatchewan. This line goes on to Prince Albert, close to the rebel headquarters of 1885, and about 540 miles from Winnipeg. This Prince Albert branch has opened up a vast amount of fine country in the Carrot River Valley and elsewhere, and the old-timers who have been waiting fifteen years for a railway, raising cattle till it was worth their while to raise crops, now see their solitude invaded by thousands of homesteading neighbours.
It is on this line, at Tisdale, about 100 miles west of Manitoba, that the Canadian Order of Foresters own a tract of land which they have asked the Salvation Army to people with carefully selected families, to whom farms are being sold at from $7 to $10 (29s. 2d. to 41s. 8d.), an acre. By organizing their forces in co-operative gangs, and jointly hiring a steam plough, the Salvation Army settlers have made as much progress at the end of their first year as many of their neighbours have at the end of their third. Instead of spending several years in rough log shacks, they find themselves installed in four or five-roomed cottages before beginning their first winter in the country.
Prince Albert, the western terminus of this line, about 30 miles west of where the North and South Saskatchewan rivers join, is one of the very few towns or villages off the line of the Canadian Pacific that already had something more than a fur-trading history when I went through the country in 1885. White men had already been farming in that district for a dozen years, and though they were more than 200 miles north of the latitude of Winnipeg one of them assured me that his grain had never been touched by autumn frost. After a long period of slow growth the district is going ahead fast. Agriculture is not the only industry here, though it is the chief, and a very prosperous one. The forests lying north of the rivers give employment in winter to a large number of "lumber-jacks," who come down into the settlements for farm-work in summer.
The main line of the Canadian Northern, however, strikes west from Dauphin. The last station before we leave Manitoba is called Makaroff, and the first station in Saskatchewan is Togo, by which the future historian may fix the dates of their foundation without much trouble. The railway godfather who gave them those names had no malevolent intention. The maiden triumphs of Saskatchewan are not being won at the expense of matronly Manitoba.
There is no change in the landscape to impress you with the fact that you have left one Province for another. By degrees, to be sure, you notice that the cultivated land is a smaller proportion of the whole than it was a few hours ago, but the wheat and the oats that you see are as good as anything you have seen. At Canora, about 50 miles over the border, there has been so large an immigration of "well-heeled" American farmers, that the acreage under crop doubled in the single year 1905-6.
"Fifty car-loads of effects," the immigration officer says, "accompanied 800 settlers arriving at this point during the year, and most of them were able to commence farming operations without being obliged to hire out beforehand."
The next railway divisional point, called Humboldt, is in the heart of a district largely settled by German-Americans, who in their second or third year have each from 80 to 100 acres under crop. South of Humboldt there is a settlement of Mennonites, who may be described as German-Quakers from Russia; and some of these people at the end of two years' work have 100 to 150 acres under crop.
Nearly 500 miles from Winnipeg the train comes to a great river, the south branch of the Saskatchewan. Instead of the wooden trestle which the earlier railway builders threw across the streams that came in their path, the Canadian Northern crosses the valley on a magnificent steel bridge.
The first town beyond the river, Warman, was but an infant of three months when I stepped into its hotel; but already the owner found that the business had outgrown his accommodation, and a new wing was going up with prairie speed. The tables in the big dining-room were embellished with flowers—a delicate hint that Warman was within the limits of civilization,—and the charge for board and lodging, $1.50 (6s. 3d.) a day, could hardly be called a pioneer price. Meat, ducks, and geese I found were plentiful, and eggs only cost 10 or 15 cents a dozen. As for supplies that were not produced on the spot, their prices had come down with a run when the first train arrived. Salt, for instance, which in the spring had cost $7.50 (31s. 3d.) a barrel, had promptly fallen to $3.93 (12s. 3d.).
Another great steel bridge crosses the north branch of the Saskatchewan, A burly American who boarded the train at the next stopping place assured me that the country south of this point was the best he had seen. He, by the way, is a commerical traveller, taking orders for school books—a fact which "speaks volumes," considering that hereabouts you see, or did see then, few adults and no children.
At the 573rd mile, I found myself at North Battleford, The "Lucknow of Canada" is three or four miles away on the left, across the river, and rather grudges the importance conferred on its upstart neighbour; for North Battleford is a divisional centre with railway work-shops, and will presently no doubt be calling itself a city. At the age of three months, though most of the houses were still of unpainted yellow plank, and some of the inhabitants were living in tents, real estate was changing hands at an enormous advance. One gentleman who had bought a town site for $600 (£120), turned up his nose at an offer of $1200 for the same. I am not particular about the figures; if I have made a mistake I have put the profit too low.
A few miles further on the railway got back to the south side of the river, and presently I became aware, having a map in my hand—I certainly should not have known it otherwise—that the train was crossing the Indian Reserves of Moosomin and Thunderchild; Moosomin, whose possession of $600 in the bank kept him prudently loyal when his neighbour Poundmaker went on the war-path. It was almost impossible to realize that I was rolling along in a comfortable railway car through "the enemy's country,"
The impossibility was intensified when the train pulled up at Lloydminster, the chief town of the all-British colony associated with the name of Barr. With the unadulterated English accent of the townsfolk in my ears, with a bank manager telling me of the hundred thousand dollars he had on deposit, and the residence of an archdeacon before my eyes, I had to make a great effort to realize that just over the prairie was the deserted site of Fort Pitt, and but a step further north the scene of the Frog Lake massacre.
More has been heard of Lloydminster in this country, for obvious reasons, than of any other place of its size in the West. I hope it is unnecessary now to say that the all-British colony is prosperous. It is really very prosperous indeed. To be sure, it is no longer all-British. Whatever Mr Barr's mistakes may have been, the choice of a site for his colony was certainly not one of them. Americans, Scandinavians, and Canadians, are flocking in—and not empty-handed, A single party of Norwegians from the State of Minnesota, for instance, arrived in the summer of 1906 with six big railway car-loads of effects, with which they struck out to the south and formed a little colony of their own about 30 miles from the town.
The arrival of American and Canadian neighbours has been in most respects an advantage to the first-comers, most of whom began with a rather hazy idea of the ways of the country.
Happily, the disadvantage of inexperience was so impressed upon the Englishmen by their early trials that they were willing to learn; which cannot always be said for our countrymen in Canada.
The great difficulty that checked the progress of the colony for the first two or three years was its distance from the source of supply, and also therefore from the market. Saskatoon, on the Regina and Prince Albert Railway, was the nearest railway station, and freighting by carts over 200 miles of trail is terribly expensive.
When I visited the town, however, it had had a railway station for three weeks, and the colonists already felt that the old era was far behind them. "You can't buy a bit of land round my homestead," said an old-timer of 1903, "for less than $10 an acre. Yes, we did have a hard time at first, but, after all, we didn't come out here for beer and skittles. We were misled in one thing. If a man had £5, they told us, that would be enough to start with; but the man who only had £5 had to go off and get work somewhere else to keep himself, and to raise what was really necessary for implements and so on, so his homestead had to be neglected. However, that's all over now, and before long we shan't have any fear of comparison with any American or Canadian in the country."
Several of the colonists carry on little shops in the town as well as their homesteads in the country—such as the man from Birkenhead who has started a butcher's shop on the strength of an acquaintance with Canadian cattle formed in the lairages.
As for the severity of the climate, the English men laugh at it. They have certainly felt the worst it can do. The winter of 1906-07 was exceptionally hard all over the West. The cold was intense, and what upset the new-comers most of all was the extraordinary fall of snow. Any man living out on a treeless part of the plains, without even a poplar bluff or a wooded valley at hand, who had not had the foresight to lay in a proper supply of wood, was bound to suffer for lack of fuel. But on the whole there is no doubt that a hard winter in England causes much more suffering than a hard winter in the West, where scarcely any one lacks the necessary clothing and fuel and shelter on account of poverty, and where a dry zero is more tolerable by far than a damp English freezing-point. A Lloydminster man assured me that he had never worn an overcoat, even at 40 below zero; and though in that detail he was a little eccentric, the fact is very significant. Another Englishman, who, however, does not despise a jacket lined with sheepskin, declares that 40 below zero is not so cold as 10 degrees of frost in England.
The Englishmen have not merely learnt such western ways as were better than their own. They have refused to unlearn certain English ways that are better than the ways of the West. Life at first was reduced to its primitive elements; but since the pioneer strain has been relieved the little refinements of an older world are beginning to bloom again. A western observer speaks more strongly on this point than I should have dared to. " There are very few corners of this western land that I have not penetrated," he says, "and there is none where kindliness, good-breeding, and honourable instincts prevail to a greater degree in Canada. Many of the men who have most to say, and say it loudest, by way of criticism of these people would be vastly profited by a sojourn among them. Lloydminster might well lay claim to the honour of being the most aesthetic town in Western Canada. It is the home of good taste, and a conservatory of the fine arts."
There is one English institution, by the way, which does not seem to flourish at Lloydminster, in spite of the efforts of enthusiasts, and that is cricket. It takes too long. Football is more reasonable in its demands on a busy Westerner's time.
The Englishman in Canada, it has often been remarked, is neither so popular nor so successful as the Scot. So far as popularity is concerned, it is partly due to the greater reticence of the Scot. He is on the whole more cosmopolitan than the Englishman; and even when he feels just as strongly that his ways are better than Canadian ways, he more often keeps that opinion to himself—till he changes it. As for success, the average Scot is better educated, more accustomed to discipline, and fonder of work.
We have unhappily sent out to Canada a great many Englishmen, and even some Scotsmen, of the wrong sort. By an emigrant of the right sort I do not mean simply a man who is used to work on the land. Experience in agriculture and the care of live stock gives an emigrant a start of his inexperienced companion; but experience can soon be gained—by "emigrants of the right sort."
The man who emigrates need not be either brilliant in mind or over the average in bodily strength; though, of course, Canada would like the pick of our home population in both respects. Canadian air, and especially the air of the West, with food and work in plenty, has a marvellous effect in toning up the health of those who do not counteract it by the wretched drinking habit and other avoidable influences; and the effect of the energetic life on sluggish intellects is sometimes equally marked. The essential quality, the first of the essential qualities, in an emigrant is moral courage; the spirit that will resolutely learn the ways and perseveringly do the work of his new home, undaunted either by strangeness or by hardship.
The new country makes a large draft on a man's store of character; but, if he meets her demand, she repays him generously, with independence and prosperity and the promise of still greater bounty for his children. We must all be sorry for the man who fails, or "just manages to scrape along," owing to local and exceptional circumstances that might beat the bravest; but long experience has convinced me that nearly all the failures are due to the emigrant's own defects; his indisposition to learn, his helplessness when called on to do for himself what others always did for him in England, his incapacity or unwillingness to work hard and steadily for long at a time, and his craving for the mental stimulants of noise and glitter, if not for the physical stimulant of alcohol.
Many weak ones have been crushed simply by the disappointment of finding the country below the level of their quite unreasonable expectations. Now, however. Englishmen know a vast deal more about Canada than they did even a couple of years ago, and you meet in Canadian cities comparatively few of the people who (I quote from the Montreal Daily Witness. but I know the species very well myself) "seem to expect to be met at the landing wharf by a carriage and pair and to be driven around till they have picked out the job that suits them, at their own price."
There are two classes of Englishmen in Canada, the same writer says, "which are very sharply defined. The one is sterling, adaptable, modest, able, sober, enterprising; the other—well, the other is an infliction." In view of the bad name these "inflictions" give to Canada when they get back to England, and the equally bad impression of England that they give while in Canada, it is good to know that their number is being greatly reduced. It is actually stated that the Englishmen who arrived in the West for the last harvest were considered equal, if not superior, to the men who came up from Eastern Canada.
Whatever part of the kingdom he comes from, the emigrant of to-day is a more industrious, a better educated and a more sober man, than the emigrant of yesterday. This is partly due no doubt to the greater strictness of the Canadian Government in shutting out undesirables, who are accordingly refused assistance by the emigration organizations at home. But, whatever the cause, the percentage of failures now is extraordinarily small.
Kennedy, Howard Angus. New Canada and the New Canadians. The Musson Book Co., 1907.
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