The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (18 page)

Now the gangway is lowered. Two thousand souls rush towards it, eager to start for the land of promise. For a few minutes the crush around us is stifling. Then the band strikes up “Auld Lang Syne” and “Till We Meet Again.” Up goes the gangway, and the ship moves out into the harbour stern first. The dock becomes a sea of waving handkerchiefs. We rush with the others toward the prow of the vessel to shout our last goodbyes. With this movement forward, the
Lake Manitoba
lurches alarmingly. The captain roars out to the mate: “Get these people topside!” The long, irritating voyage has begun
.

We have all encountered men like the Reverend Isaac Montgomery Barr: dedicated enthusiasts with a missionary’s zeal – likeable, earnest, utterly believable. Their credentials seem impeccable, their dreams and visions bold, imaginative, convincing, their enthusiasms infectious. We warm to them, for these are selfless men, disinterested in personal gain, willing to give their all in the interests of the Great Plan. We defend them against their critics and place ourselves with total trust in their hands. Only later does it begin to dawn on us that they are not what they seem, that their dreams are gossamer, their plans impractical, their promises unfulfillable, their abilities wanting, their organization hollow, their dedication suspect. They are charlatans, though they do not know it and cannot admit it, confidence men who have conned themselves. They are the Kings of the Gullible. In the end, the scales fall from the eyes of their followers; but they never fall from their own. They continue on through life, leaping from project to project, convinced after each collapse that they have been sabotaged by sinister forces not of their making. But they themselves are the saboteurs; and the innocent and the naïve suffer for it.

Such a one was the Reverend Mr. Barr, who arrived in England from North America in January, 1902, after a career that can only be described as chequered. A son of the rectory, raised in Hornby, Ontario, he had in his early years served as a Church of England priest in a series of posts – but seldom for long. At both Woodstock and Exeter, Ontario, when he argued over the size of his salary, his parishioners made no real effort to seek his retention. His contract as minister to an Indian reserve at Brantford was terminated for the same reasons. In 1875, he accepted an appointment as missionary in Prince Albert but abandoned that charge after a few weeks on the excuse that his wife and son were both ailing-a defection that irritated the Bishop of
Rupert’s Land. Back in Ontario, at Teeswater he lost his job after denying the doctrine of the fall of man. He recanted, tried again to get a job in the North West Territories, but did not succeed. The next two decades were spent in the United States, where he held half a dozen posts, the last being in Whatcom County, Washington State. At this point he had been, by his own account, married and divorced three times, a fact that he apparently had been able to hide from the church.

Barr was fifty-three when he arrived in London. His son had died of enteric fever while serving in South Africa, and the senior Barr had “a strong desire to take up my abode again under the old flag which I love so well.” He had come to England to arrange for transportation of potential emigrants from Washington State who wanted to become farmers in South Africa after the Boer War ended. The Colonial Office was cool to that scheme, and Barr abandoned it. Instead he applied for a job as Canadian immigration agent in Washington, having “had some successful experience in locating people on land and have for years taken a deep interest in immigration and colonization.” These vague credentials did not commend him to William White, the inspector of emigration from the United States, who met Barr in London; nothing more came of it. Instead, Barr embarked on a scheme of his own: the establishment of an all-British colony of emigrants from the Old Country somewhere in the North West Territories of Canada.

Barr had all but abandoned the church, but he received a licence to preach during the summer at St. Saviour’s, London, and so was able to wear his clerical collar, a considerable asset, since it put the odour of sanctity on his project. He was a short, thickset man, with a broad moustache and plump, bland features. Although he was blessed with the voice of a bull he could, on first encounter, be soft spoken, courteous, and convincing. As one of his future colonists put it, “You could not help but trust him.” But there were serious flaws: a lack of any sense of humour, an inability to accept criticism, a quick Irish temper, an autocratic bent. He was not able to delegate authority, and he had a tendency to gloss over unpalatable truths. Yet he had an imaginative mind, and he certainly had a way with words.

Barr was intoxicated by words, and he knew how to use them to the best advantage. As far as he was concerned, once a plan took shape on paper it was half way to completion. As he scribbled away that spring and summer of 1902, churning out articles for no fewer than thirty-two publications, the grandiose scheme of an all-British colony in the Canadian West began to balloon in his mind. What a coup it would be!
To place hundreds, even
thousands
of stout British yeomen and tradespeople, the finest stock in the world, in a colony all their own! No foreigners – no Slavs or Germans or Swedes, and certainly no Americans – would be allowed to creep in. This would be an Imperial undertaking.

Barr had already built a town in his head, complete with shops, churches, schools, and post office grouped around a central park, with the homesteads of the settlers encircling it for miles. His enthusiasm was infectious. By August, having received two hundred written inquiries and one hundred personal calls, he was ready to produce a small pamphlet outlining his scheme. Building materials would be cheap because they could be purchased wholesale and in quantity. Horses, oxen, cows, implements, and seeds would all be arranged for in advance and available at the new colony for purchase. There might even be co-operative ownership of property and animals. And yes! There would be openings for tradesmen and teachers in the new settlement.

Barr’s hyperbole flowered like the daisies of summer. “Agriculture on the prairies is simple,” he wrote enthusiastically, “the work not very hard.…” He would welcome inquiries: prospective emigrants could write to him or even turn up on his London doorstep in person. He would be home Monday and Wednesday mornings and Saturday afternoons and evenings.

If he could get some kind of official sanction for his scheme the all-British colony would be well on its way. He shot off a draft of the pamphlet to the Canadian immigration office in London, asking for approval and also for a year’s contract “at a very moderate salary” as well as an office, expenses, and free transportation to Canada to choose a site for the proposed venture. Most of those who had called him, he claimed, were either practical farmers or the sons of farmers. That was scarcely true, as events were to prove; as for his statement “I know the North well having labored as a missionary at Prince Albert in the North Saskatchewan in 1874,” that was totally misleading.

C.F. Just, the deputy commissioner, could not give Barr what he wanted; that was up to his boss, W.T.R. Preston, who was that month in Canada. But Just thought there would be no difficulty getting free transportation from the Beaver Line and the
CPR
for Barr to visit Canada. In fact, Just was charmed and impressed by Barr. He wrote to Preston that he found him “a masterful kind of man”… “quite a ‘hustler’ ”… “evidently a very capable fellow.”

Barr didn’t waste a minute. In September, he produced a second, longer pamphlet, which suggested that he was a man with wide farming experience in the Canadian North West and that he had something resembling an official seal of approval from the Canadian Immigration Department:

“Modesty suggests that I should not say anything of myself, but it seems necessary that I should.… First, then, before taking action I conferred with the Canadian Emigration Commissioner here in England, and I keep in constant touch with the Emigration Office, although this is a perfectly independent movement. I was born on a large farm in Canada, and learned all branches of agriculture. With me, farming has always been an enthusiasm – I might also say a passion, and I have farmed both in Canada and the United States. I have been interested in Colonization for many years, have done some fairly good work as a colonizer, and am now anxious to build up my native Land, and keep it as much as possible in the hands of people of British birth.…”

Nobody in the government bothered to check into Barr’s background. No one took the trouble to find out how much time this particular clergyman had spent in the North West. No one bothered to investigate his background as a colonizer. No one looked over the list of applicants for the all-British colony to see how many were bona fide farmers. No one really
wanted
to know. The British took Barr at his face value; how could a cleric of the Established Church treat them dishonestly? As for Preston and Sifton’s deputy, James Smart, awaiting the promoter’s arrival in Ottawa with Just’s enthusiastic recommendations in their hands, Barr provided a heaven-sent opportunity for Clifford Sifton to get the Liberals out from under the blanket of criticism directed at them for bringing in the Galicians and the Doukhobors.

The opposition papers had been in full cry, demanding to know why impecunious Slavs were being imported instead of well-to-do British farmers. It did no good to explain that well-to-do British farmers were perfectly content where they were and that, for the most part, the British who did want to emigrate were artisans, office-workers, and slum dwellers, city people unfit for the rigours of the Canadian prairie. Now here was an imaginative man – a Canadian
and
a man of the cloth – prepared to bring in thousands of Britons, “very generally men of sufficient means,” as he put it, men who would not be a burden on the country and who would not water down Canada’s sacred Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Events began to take on a velocity of their own. Buoyed up by enthusiastic press comments and an equally enthusiastic response to his pamphlets, Barr was planning to leave for Canada on September 30 (both the Beaver Line and the
CPR
had come through, as Just predicted). Now, a few days before his departure, he was joined by another enthusiast – a man who could handle the details of his plan during his absence from Britain. This was the Reverend George Exton Lloyd, a tall, cadaverous Church of England cleric who knew a good deal more about the Canadian North West than Barr and who had just returned to England after an absence of two decades. One of the “muscular Christians” so typical of the late Victorian era, Lloyd rejoiced in a background romantic enough to entice the most phlegmatic Briton to the new country.

A born Londoner, Lloyd had gone out to Canada at the age of twenty, a zealous young missionary dazzled by the example of the great David Anderson, first Bishop of Rupert’s Land, whose son was vicar in Lloyd’s London parish. Lloyd spent his first years in a poverty-stricken backwoods Ontario community. In 1885, while a divinity student at Wycliffe College, Toronto, he rushed to the colours the instant the Saskatchewan rebellion broke out. At the Battle of Cut Knife Hill, with his last cartridge expended and a bullet piercing his side, Lloyd and a fellow Wycliffian
^*
were saved by a last-minute rescue from certain death at the hands of Poundmaker’s Crees.

This episode brought Lloyd the chaplaincy of the Queen’s Own Rifles and later a position as minister at St. George’s Anglican Church, Winnipeg. In 1891 he founded a boys’ school near Saint John, N.B. Now, at the age of forty-one, he was back in his native London as assistant secretary to the Colonial and Continental Church Society.

Like Isaac Barr, George Exton Lloyd was a dreamer with Imperialist stars in his eyes. He believed implicitly in the rightness of the Imperial cause, whatever that cause might be (even when it involved killing Boers, Métis, or Matabele), just as he believed in the evils of alcohol or the revealed truth of the Gospels. Upright, tenacious, relatively humourless but dedicated, he was a born leader, a good if dictatorial organizer, and, as it developed, an impractical businessman. He could and did inspire great affection, a quality Barr lacked; he could also drive people to paroxysms of frustration.

A confirmed jingoist, Lloyd had penned several letters to the press, decrying the mongrelization of the Canadian West. To
The Times
he wrote: “Might not the English newspapers do more than they are now doing to keep the magnificent area of wheat land in Western Canada thoroughly British by encouraging the emigration of English people to their own territories?…It grieved me to see what is now a fine British province being settled so largely by Americans and foreigners. I am not a capitalist, or I would take a few thousand of good British blood to settle upon these fine farming lands – I mean take some of those who are now treading on each other’s heels in the old country, scrambling for a living. But why do they not go on their own account? Are they afraid they would be going from civilization to barbarism in a wild unknown land?”

Lloyd had struck a nerve. When he offered to answer any questions that prospective emigrants might have, he was not prepared for the deluge of letters that swamped him. At this point Britain was overcrowded. With the end of the Boer War thousands of veterans had returned home, seeking new horizons. The Victorian Age had reached its zenith, and the urge to bring British ideals to the untamed corners of the globe was inherent in every Englishman. In London, jobs were scarce; firms were failing; vacancies had to be made for sons coming into family businesses; but fewer and fewer vacancies existed. And with trade decreasing, labour was cheap, wages low.

It was not the farmers who looked across the Atlantic but the huddled masses in Shelley’s “populous and smoky” cities, who yearned for a return to the pastoral life of pre-industrialized Britain. In the open spaces of Canada, surely, that dream could come true; or so they wanted to believe. Charles Tweedale, one of those who responded to Barr’s siren call, wrote that “most of us pictured our homesteads as picturesque parkland with grassy, gently-rolling slopes interspersed by clumps of trees, a sparkling stream or possibly a silvery lake thrown in, the whole estate alive with game of all kinds.” But the Canadian North West was not the Cotswolds.