The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (23 page)
Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
Now they entered wilder, emptier country, the haunt of Indians and animals. Forty miles out of Battleford lay the farm of Peter Paynter, an ex-Mounted Policeman. From that point west there was no white settlement (save for the new colony) for three hundred miles – only undulating hills, little lakes, scrub willow, prairie grass, and pea vine.
Barr reached Battleford on May 2, the day a large contingent of colonists took off for Britannia, one hundred miles to the west. He spent four days in Battleford, harried constantly by indignant colonists, many of whom flew into a violent rage at the mere mention of his name. Barr was now perceived as a dictator who wanted the absolute right to assign each man a homestead and compel him to accept it. Few now believed his shipboard assurance that all the land was of equal fertility. That was clearly fantasy. Some was flat, some rolling; some was wooded, some bald; some was fertile, some stony. Barr had insisted that all settlers wait until he personally reached Britannia to dole out homesteads. But R.F. Chisholm, the Dominion Lands Agent, told them to ignore Barr, move on to the settlement, contact George Langley, his sub-agent there, and choose their own land. Barr was furious. “If there is bloodshed and destruction of the colony as a result I throw the whole blame on you,” he shouted. Chisholm told Barr he had no authority to tell anybody where to settle.
On May 6 the embattled clergyman, accompanied by Lloyd and travelling light, left for Britannia, and reached it on May 9. But Lloyd, dismayed by the number of his charges returning to Battleford in disgust, began working back along the trail to encourage the trekkers and trying to dissuade them from quitting the project and going home to England.
These people were bitterly disappointed. They had reached the colony ahead of Barr and found nothing except three large marquees, two of them government tents, the other occupied by Barr’s Stores Syndicate. There were no buildings and not a stick of lumber to be had. Contrary to his promises, Barr had made no arrangements to
supply doors and sashes and float them down the Saskatchewan. There was no post office; the mail had been dumped on the floor of the Stores tent. And the prices Barr’s advance party was charging were so prohibitive that many packed up and left. They had bought oats from Peter Paynter at a quarter of the Barr price.
For the hundreds of outfits strung out along the dreadful trail between Battleford and Britannia, the Paynter farm, which employed a dozen hands, was an oasis. Here were herds of horses and cattle, flocks of turkeys, grunts of pigs. The Holtby family stayed at Paynter’s for two days to give an exhausted horse time to rest. Mrs. Paynter, whose kitchen was full of women and children warming themselves, let Mrs. Holtby use her oven to bake bread while the men put up the tents.
Ahead lay devastation. Fires had charred the land, leaving a wilderness of ruin, a monotony of blackness. No sliver of green could be seen through the ashen world that greeted those travellers who had the good fortune to escape the flames. Some lost everything – tents, wagons, horses, supplies – everything but their lives.
We have stopped with the Tweedale party beside a shallow slough several days out of Battleford. It is the second week of May. Hot weather and strong winds have turned the prairie grass to tinder. A heavy pall of smoke has blotted out the sun and is driving toward us; it has been growing in intensity all day, and now we find ourselves choking and gasping in the fumes
.
There is no time to be lost. We drive the team and wagon into a foot of water, unhitch the oxen, tie them securely to the wheels, cover their heads with wet sacks, soak the wagon’s canvas covering, and then build a backfire to create a guard, beating it out at the edges with a spade
.
Dusk falls before we finish our task. Now the horizon ahead is rimmed with flame – a great flickering line moving towards us. The air is thick with smoke and sparks; birds go shrieking past; gophers, rabbits, even antelopes dash by in panic. Now the fire is almost upon us. We wade into the slough, covering our heads with wet sacks as it reaches us, roaring and crackling. The heat is so intense we can scarcely breathe. Our oxen bellow and tear at the ropes. In minutes the fire has raced past us and on to the far horizon, but we must wait until the blackened grass has cooled and the smoke died down before we can remove our covering and crawl out of the slough
.
In the eerie light of the retreating flames we can view the havoc the
fire has caused – mile upon mile of charred, smouldering prairie. Next day we travel through an ocean of ash. There is scarcely any feed left for the oxen, only a few patches of dead grass left behind in the fire’s mad haste. Emaciated horses lie dead on the trail as we pass, starved for lack of fodder. And all because a carefree settler – one of Barr’s lambs – did not have the sense to extinguish his campfire
.
In this glum terrain, the sloughs and bogs were the worst the colonists had yet encountered in spite of the hot weather. The Hutchison brothers, who had managed to avoid every swamp on the trail from Saskatoon, were stuck fast on three occasions. With their wagon mired to the axles and tilted on its side in the muddy bank of a small torrent, they were struck by a blizzard that blocked their passage for four days. In all that time the brothers were never dry, their clothing, greatcoats, and blankets drenched and encrusted with mud. From Saturday night to the following Thursday they lived on starvation rations: a plate of boiled rice and one pancake made from flour, water, and snow per meal. When they were able at last to push forward at a leaden pace, very little else was moving. They passed scores of tents pitched in the snow beside the trail, their occupants depressed and sick, many of them trying to sell their ploughs and equipment to earn enough to pay their passage home.
At the settlement, Barr was the focus of every complaint. Ivan Crossley watched while one group demanded to know what had happened to all the fresh meat he’d promised. Barr seized an axe and knocked down one of his own oxen. “There’s fresh meat for you all now!” he cried. “Help yourselves.” And they did.
Barr left the colony on May 13, taking with him the three nurses brought out for the abortive hospital syndicate. On May 15 he was back in Battleford, where he encountered more angry demonstrations. Two Boer War veterans lit into him over their purchase from him of
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land in the colony. The railway’s Battleford agent had no record of the transaction; the homesteads in question had already been sold. Barr blustered, but when threatened with violence he gave them their money back.
It was obvious to all that he
had
been on the make. He had not only tried to sell supplies at exorbitant prices and collect money for
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land without authorization, he had also charged absentee Englishmen five dollars apiece to reserve their homesteads; he had extracted ten dollars from single girls in England, promising to settle them later; he
had tried to collect a premium of five dollars or more from every settler; and he had taken another five dollars from each member of a hospital syndicate that he knew was collapsing.
It was the end for Isaac Barr. On May 16 in Battleford, a mass meeting took away any control he had left and appointed Lloyd in his place as head of a twelve-man committee, quickly dubbed the Twelve Apostles. Barr, in a final moment of bluster, shouted that they were all ruffians and brandished a revolver. Then he meekly gave in, surrendered his accounts, resigned all claims to a homestead for himself, and turned over everything of value to the community which, all agreed, would be named Lloydminster.
Barr returned to the settlement, where he spent most of his time returning money to those indignant colonists who felt they’d been cheated. He left forever in mid-June, narrowly escaped being pelted by eggs by some of his former charges in Regina, and tried in Ottawa to get the bonus the government paid to all colonizers. The department turned him down on the grounds that he had not only caused it more expense than the total payments would allow but had also tried to squeeze money illegally from the British settlers.
That was the end, in Canada, of Isaac Barr. He married his secretary (his fourth wife, thirty-five years his junior), became an American citizen, and for the rest of his life dreamed unfulfilled dreams of settling people in the far corners of the Empire. He died in Australia in his ninetieth year, still scribbling away in the endpapers of a book he was reading, building more paper communities in non-existent promised lands.
*
Lloyd’s companion, Edward Campion Acheson, later became Bishop of Connecticut and fathered Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s Secretary of State.
Chapter Five
The Problem of the English
1
No Englishmen need apply
When the Liberals took office in 1896, it was generally agreed in the West that the ideal immigrant was a white Anglo-Celt with farming experience, preferably English or Scottish. Outside of Quebec, the people of Central and Eastern Canada thought of themselves as British first and Canadian second. Few took issue with the common cant that Britain was not only the greatest nation on earth but also the greatest nation that had ever
been
on earth. The British were colonizers and civilizers. They were “just like us.” With the British there could be no future problem of assimilation; how could there be, in a British colony? Only the presence of large numbers of English farmers would prevent the destruction of the national fabric. As Dr. George Landerkin declared in the Senate in 1903: “Take the Englishman and place him where you will, he is equal to the immigrant from the United States and superior to the immigrant from any other nation in the world.”
No wonder then that Sifton’s department strained every effort to attract English and Scottish farmers. By 1897 immigration agents in the United Kingdom were delivering a thousand lectures a year in small farming communities in England and Scotland. One agent reported that he had held meetings in one hundred small towns, attended fifteen summer fairs, visited farmers, blacksmiths, and cartwrights in seventy-three communities, and turned up at twenty-one hiring fairs, distributing pamphlets, guidebooks, and reports and giving lantern-slide lectures.
Posters proclaiming the wonders of Canada were on the walls of every English post office. The
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and other steamship companies advertised Canada in the newspapers and with posters and pamphlets. English reporters were invited to visit Canada. And those English farmers who had emigrated earlier were induced to send back testimonials and newspaper articles to convince others to come over.
Yet few came over. In its campaign to pull Englishmen off their farms, the department found itself up against a stone wall. There was no mystery about the English farmers’ refusal to emigrate; they had no need to. They were well off in the Old Country and becoming better off every year. Because they were a diminishing class, their profits were constantly increasing. By April 1899, Sifton had despaired of attracting British or Scottish farm labourers to Canada and was quietly turning his attention to the American midwest.
For it was farmers Sifton wanted: not the clerks, the shopkeepers, or even the artisans who were emigrating to the United States in quantity. The country, however, was up in arms. Why was the government bringing in Galicians and Doukhobors instead of British farmers? A note of panic crept into the press reports when the United States was mentioned: with its polyglot immigrant masses, it was seen as a mongrel nation. Why on earth would any Englishman want to go there in preference to a British colony? Was Canada purposely rejecting the English in favour of a less desirable immigrant mix, to become (in the words of the
Canadian
magazine) “as rude, as uncultured, as fickle, as heterogeneous, as careless of law and order and good citizenship as the United States?”
This attitude, fostered by the Conservative press, explains the genuine enthusiasm with which Barr’s immigration scheme was greeted and also the letdown that followed when it was realized that few of his charges were farmers. Nor did the extreme newspaper examples of the colonists’ foolishness and stubbornness help the stereotype of the typical Englishman as a comic figure and a snob that was beginning to form in Western minds. After 1903, the year of the Barr onslaught, demands for increased emigration from the United Kingdom began to abate, and Canadians adopted a curious kind of doublethink where the English were concerned: at a distance they were admired, even venerated, but on a personal level they came to be cordially disliked.
Basil Stewart, an Englishman who worked in railway construction camps and later as an assistant engineer on the Grand Trunk Pacific, wrote how shocked his countrymen were “to be told that, in a country which flies the same flag, the Englishman is held of less account than the lowest type of immigrant from Europe.” Even the despised Galicians, Stewart found, were preferred on the land to his fellow countrymen. In Winnipeg, a man applying for a job with the Associated Charities was kicked right out of the office when it was learned he was English.
The words “No Englishmen Need Apply” attached to newspaper advertisements became a kind of slogan in the West. One advertiser, Stewart reported, explained that he excluded the English “because those who were capable were too good for the work and would soon throw it up and go elsewhere to better themselves; the others would too soon give in.” Stewart thought the explanation “a little ‘thin’ ” but recognized that it was a symptom of Canadian disgust with the English that couldn’t be ignored.
If the English were blind to Canadian conditions, Canadians were equally myopic about England – Shakespeare’s jewel-like nation supposedly populated by the finest stock in the world – and about the English. It was not easy to separate the myth from the reality because the myth was part of the cultural baggage of most native-born Canadians. They were beguiled by the image of the gallant Englishman – upstanding, courageous, adaptable – planting the standard of justice and freedom in the soil of less cultivated nations, civilizing the world from Mombasa to Hong Kong, harvesting coffee in Kenya, tea in Ceylon, sugar in Jamaica, coconuts in Fiji, cocoa on the Gold Coast. Then why not wheat in the Canadian West? (But it was not English farmers who planted the rice or tapped the rubber trees; they left that to the natives.)