The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (19 page)

Unable to reply to the flood of mail personally, Lloyd contrived a circular letter answering the forty-two questions most frequently asked and had it printed and mailed to correspondents. A few days later Barr knocked on his door, and the two joined forces. Lloyd and a secretary manned the small office that Barr had set up and began to take applications for the Britannia Colony. Barr himself left on September 30 for Canada.

2
Quite a hustler

No one could argue with C.F. Just’s description of Isaac Barr as “quite a hustler.” He had produced his first pamphlet in mid-August and rushed out his second in mid-September. By early October he was in Ottawa and by the end of that month he was one hundred miles west of Battleford selecting homesteads for his prospective colony. He was back in Ottawa in mid-November and after a fortnight’s discussions with Sifton’s staff returned to England in time to produce a third, more detailed, pamphlet before Christmas. It was his intention to bring out a shipload of settlers in early March – not much more than a year after his original arrival in Great Britain.

James Smart was impressed by Barr and agreed to hold the odd-numbered homesteads in eight townships until February or later if Barr sent him a list of prospective emigrants with fees for their homestead registrations. Barr had also persuaded the
CPR
to reserve additional even-numbered homesteads in the same area for sale to the British. Smart, after meeting Barr, felt that “he is most enthusiastic and is also very clever and I am inclined to think that he probably stands a good chance of making a success of his work.” Smart, the civil servant’s civil servant, never totally committed himself to anything. He was invariably “inclined” to an idea, and he sprinkled his correspondence with “probablys.”

Others were less enthusiastic. W.J. White, then Acting Superintendent of Immigration, didn’t think Barr would be successful. Barr’s “propaganda has assumed such a magnitude and the many schemes he has in connection with it are so great and multifarious, I am afraid very little will come of it.” Seymour Gourley, a Tory M.P., who encountered Barr at the Russell House in Ottawa, dismissed him as a “sharper.” T.G. Pearce, a successful colonization entrepreneur who had brought out three trainloads of immigrants to the North West in 1892, read about Barr’s scheme and thought him inexperienced. After some correspondence with Barr in which he tried to offer suggestions, he came to the conclusion that Barr was an impractical man who didn’t like criticism. In spite of Smart’s controlled enthusiasm, the government remained cautious. It would not employ Barr, give him any expenses, or set him up in an office. But the press on both sides of the Atlantic had been captured by Barr’s eloquence. The government was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Smart himself became nervous at the speed with which Barr was moving in London. The reverend gentleman was actually talking about bringing his people out early in March! Pearce, the colonizer, had pointed out that when he had brought people to Alberta in April the weather was so bad the women and children all came down with flu. March was a month of storms, the worst possible time to impress prospective settlers. Smart was dismayed. The vision of the Doukhobors’ disastrous wintertime arrival was still etched on his memory. He rushed a letter off to Preston, who was back in charge in London, urging him to delay the departure of the colonists to May or June. Preston tried to reason with Barr. The clergyman, who disliked anybody tampering with his plans, grudgingly agreed to postpone the sailing date, but only until the end of March.

Barr had moved so quickly that the government, even if it wanted to, couldn’t wash its hands of him. He had arrived in Canada at the height of the Doukhobor troubles, a propitious moment for him. With the Conservatives demanding more Anglo-Celtic immigrants and fewer Slavic paupers, his enthusiastic interviews with the press were exactly what the Liberals needed. To have cut him off would have invited a public outcry.

White, however, was right. Barr had let his fancy run away with him. In his new pamphlet, he proposed a variety of ancillary enterprises: a “Stores Syndicate,” which would operate retail outlets at the colony; a hospital syndicate, which would look after the community’s health; a transportation syndicate, which would convey the colonists and their effects comfortably from the railhead to the site.

Was Barr in it for the money? “I am not on the make,” he declared. Certainly profit was secondary to the Grand Scheme. On the other hand, he did not view the enterprise as philanthropic. He got $1.50 a colonist from the steamship company and commissions also from the
CPR
for the sale of railway lands, which the company agreed to withhold from the market until the scheme was under way. He also planned a five-dollar charge on homesteads for those prospective settlers who could not come out with the first group but who wanted land reserved for themselves. Under the Homestead Act, that was illegal.

In England, enthusiasm was building as a result of Barr’s newest and longest pamphlet, which described his journey to Canada, outlined the areas reserved for the Britannia Colony, and explained that “those who wish to join us must decide at once and deposit passage money.” Much of what Barr wrote was sensible and accurate. Some of it,
however, was misleading. He managed to give the impression that fruit trees – apple and plum – would grow easily in northern Saskatchewan; that the Canadian Northern Railway would reach the settlement “within a few months”; that timber was easily available because it could be rafted down river from Edmonton; that a good road existed between the railhead and the colony. These were wild exaggerations.

Barr fudged on distances, intimating that a factory for producing sugar from beets was close by when it was actually three hundred miles from the settlement. He agreed that it was “sometimes very cold” but made much of the “invigorating and enjoyable climate” (as, indeed, the government itself did) and the “dry and highly exhilarating atmosphere.” He did not say how long the winters were, nor did he give any details on the kind of sod, log, or frame houses the newcomers would have to build. He promised that “at Saskatoon there will be provided horses, waggons, harness and provisions for the journey, also coverings for the waggons, camp stools and other necessary things” and that for the women and children there would be a covered-wagon stage service all the way to Battleford, “where they would be suitably housed and cared for until the men could establish homesteads.”

These were paper promises, but they were believed. It was not possible, in England’s green and pleasant land, to conceive of a country where a road was nothing more than a rut, a village a huddle of shacks, and a homestead a vast expanse of unbroken turf stretching off to the horizon. Englishmen were knowledgeable enough about settled Canada: cities like Halifax and Saint John, Montreal and Toronto – even Vancouver – were not unfamiliar. These had streetcars, six-storey brick buildings, banks with marble pillars, theatres, even opera houses. Had not Jenny Lind sung in Toronto? Was not Madame Albani a Canadian?

Thousands of Britons knew of Canada from relatives or friends, or knew of somebody who had a relative or friend in Ontario, Quebec, or the Maritime Provinces. The
CPR
with its palace cars and its burgeoning string of château-style hotels was advertised throughout the country. And Winnipeg! Traveller after traveller wrote of its miraculous growth, of its electric railway, its brick buildings, its block pavement. Winnipeg was the West, wasn’t it? Few Britons realized that after Winnipeg, civilization came to a stop; that Canada was split in twain, one half sophisticated, the other as wild and empty as the veld. In a country where it was rarely possible to travel without seeing a cluster of homes, it was difficult to imagine a realm where one’s nearest
neighbour was a quarter of a mile away. Who in crowded England could conceive of the vast distances west of Winnipeg? No map could convey the emptiness, the loneliness, the desolation. To most of Barr’s prospects, the Britannia Colony was just around the corner from the nearest metropolis.

By the end of January, Barr’s scheme had, in his words, reached “immense proportions.” He could, he told Preston, bring out as many as six thousand settlers in March, but since he couldn’t handle that number he was closing off the movement. He would have some two thousand members for the colony; only the previous fall he had contemplated no more than a few hundred. But by this time Preston, too, was disillusioned with Barr; he no longer believed the clergyman had the qualifications to carry through an undertaking of such proportions. In Canada enthusiasm was snowballing to the point where Clifford Sifton realized he would have to step in and take hold to prevent a catastrophe.

Smart was in London in February, still inclined to believe the Barr plan was likely to be a huge success. The pragmatic Sifton was less easily impressed. Barr had sent advance agents from England to the West with instructions to scout out supplies but with no money or authority to buy anything. Several Englishmen, members of the so-called Stores Syndicate, arrived in Winnipeg with grandiose plans to start businesses in the new colony but with scant funds. None had experience, and the leader, in the assessment of Obed Smith, the Commissioner of Immigration at Winnipeg, didn’t appear “to be a practical man in any respect.” It was quite evident, Smith reported, “that this Stores Syndicate is
non est.”

That was March 10, two weeks before the Barr party was due to leave for Canada. Meanwhile, Charles May, Barr’s advance agent, who had been sent to Battleford ostensibly to buy supplies, turned up in Winnipeg and revealed that he had no money to purchase anything. Barr cancelled May’s authority and turned the responsibility over to W.S. Bromhead, who sailed from England, arriving in Winnipeg on March 18, to find that he, too, had had his authority cancelled. By March 19, he had been replaced by a third agent, John Robbins, another Church of England clergyman, who had, however, not yet reached Canada. As far as Smith could figure out, Barr up to this point hadn’t spent a dollar in Canada.

Sifton’s frustration with his deputy in London can be seen in the cables he fired off, day after day, to Smart:
March 14
: “…  see Barr and
bring him to his senses”;
two days later
: “Barr evidently misleading you.” Finally, on March 18, a desperate cable came from Smith in Winnipeg: “Those out here must act now regardless of him. Time too limited for further delay.” The sailing date was just one week away.

Sifton now did take personal charge. He wanted two top farm instructors on hand to teach the newcomers practical agriculture. None but “absolutely first class men” would do, and he was prepared to pay top wages of one hundred dollars a month. He wanted at least three land guides on hand to help the newcomers locate their homesteads. He had no faith in Barr’s arrangements. Wes Speers would go immediately to Saskatoon to see that marquees, firewood, and fodder were spaced at regular intervals along the trail that led from Saskatoon to Battleford and on to the colony.

Smart, meanwhile, had been vainly trying to push back the sailing date. Getting nowhere with Barr, he wrote to Sir Alfred Jones of the Elder-Dempster shipping company, owners of the Beaver Line, and urged a fortnight’s delay. Sir Alfred met him half way. “Slight repairs,” he revealed, would justify a delay until perhaps April 1. An angry Barr, who was bombarding his clients with circulars, sent out a special one explaining the delay was not of his making.

But, in spite of all these difficulties, Barr’s enthusiasm had not lessened. On March 21, in an interview with
The Times
, he managed to give the impression that all of his projects were thriving. Nor could he leave it at that: “Lumber yards, creameries, mills, grain elevators, schools, post office, a newspaper … will be established without delay.” It was enough for Barr to say something would be done to make it an accomplished fact in his own mind.

The truth, as reported by Obed Smith from Winnipeg, was bleaker. The Indians could not furnish lumber for the colony until mid-May, when it would be too late. The Battleford contractor charged with providing portable sawmills had refused to do so because Barr’s plans were so indefinite. Barr’s agent, Robbins, with his limited funds, was making purchases “which were altogether inexcusable from a business point of view.” There was no provision for hay or oats at the settlement. And finally – the last straw – Barr’s brother, Jack, who had gone to Calgary to buy two carloads of broncos for the so-called transport service, discovered that one carload had suffocated to death in transit.

Yet even as his house of cards was collapsing in Canada, Barr and two thousand British colonists were on the high seas heading for Saint
John. Somehow this idealistic if incompetent clergyman had managed to pull off a coup. He had slithered around the cautious Canadian bureaucrats, bedazzled two thousand generally unromantic Britishers with his wild vision, shocked the Canadian government into precipitate action, and bamboozled everybody into taking part in an adventure whose outcome was uncertain and, for some, would be horrific.

3
Stormy passage

A young Belfast Irishman stood at the deck rail of the
Lake Manitoba
with three newfound Irish friends, looking down at the waving crowd and, as the ship inched out into the harbour, thinking of the remarkable chain of events that had changed his life.

Ivan Crossley was one of “Barr’s lambs,” as the colonists would soon call themselves. He was just eighteen years old but not without experience, for he had spent the previous year working on a fruit farm in Florida. Back in Belfast in January he had been kicking up his heels, wondering what to do with himself, thirsting for adventure, planning to seek his fortune somewhere in the Empire – South Africa, perhaps, or Australia.

And then his mother had received a letter from a relative in England, and a pamphlet had dropped out of the envelope describing the wonders of the Canadian West. So Ivan Crossley had written to Isaac Barr and received an enthusiastic letter by return mail and sent in his ten dollars and got his receipt, and here he was with the ship’s horn blasting and the band playing “Auld Lang Syne” and the people on the dock waving goodbye with tears in their eyes. Just twenty-four hours before, he remembered with a pang, he had been part of a similar scene before boarding the channel steamer at Belfast, his mother praying and crying and singing “God Be with You Till We Meet Again.” But they would not meet again, though Ivan Crossley could not know that at the time. He had said goodbye to her forever.