Read The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Online
Authors: Pierre Berton
The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (28 page)
They went to work as farmhands once again. At summer’s end William Shepherd opened a small butcher shop in Girvin. It didn’t look as if they could last long in Canada.
Suddenly, in September, an astonishing thing happened. The rest of the family turned up in Girvin – Mrs. Shepherd and George’s four brothers and his sister, Kit. What had caused this sudden decision? Nobody quite said it, but George was pretty sure his father had written home suggesting it might be better if they both went back. That did it. His mother had no intention of staying put.
Mrs. Shepherd had simply sold the business and loaded her family
aboard a ship sailing for Canada, taking with her everything she felt they would need in the wild Canadian West including a Boer War army rifle, two double-barrelled shotguns, another single-barrelled gun, a bowie knife, a naval cutlass, and a pole-axe, all presumably for standing off an attacking band of redskins until the Mounted Police dashed to the rescue.
She also had the presence of mind to bring a keg of five-inch railroad spikes for nailing logs together and a piano, which cost twenty-five dollars in freight charges but which all agreed was worth its weight in gold that winter.
The family worked hard. Mr. and Mrs. Shepherd ran the butcher shop, George toiled as a farmhand, three of his brothers, Will, Harry, and Geoff, laboured at hauling and shovelling grain. Charlie got a job as a well digger. Kit, aged fifteen, worked in the Girvin hotel waiting on tables.
By midwinter none of the Shepherds considered themselves green Englishmen; in fact, they tended to scoff at a fussy little Englishwoman who came in especially to warn Mrs. Shepherd of the blizzards. They had made good and were now trusted hired men. What would the next step be?
It’s clear that the family catalyst was Mrs. Shepherd. It was she who had first thought of emigrating, she who had summarily pulled up stakes and come out to Girvin. Now, as George put it, she was bitten by the free-homestead virus. Why wait? Why not act before spring came? Nothing would do but she and her husband must take the train to neighbouring Davidson to visit the land agency, pore through the township books, and return with a handbook of homestead regulations and a good idea of the free land available in the area.
Another family council followed. It was impossible to locate land while the snow was so deep, but it was agreed that everybody would make himself familiar with the Homestead Act and keep in touch with the land office in Davidson to learn what cancellations and changes were being recorded by the government agent there.
This vigilance paid off. At Long Lake, some twenty-odd miles east of Girvin, three quarter-sections suddenly came open, relinquished by a land company that had failed to live up to its agreement with the government. The Shepherds learned of it immediately through their contacts with the agent, who offered to hold on to it for a day.
Will, George, and Charlie went to Davidson at once and “filed blind,” that is, without inspecting the land. What was good enough for
a land company, they figured, was good enough for them. That done, they went down to the station to return home. The train was nine hours late. They couldn’t wait, and so off they trudged down the track – ten miles on foot in the bitter cold. When they reached Girvin it was dark and the thermometer had dropped to forty below. It didn’t matter. As they stumbled into the family shack behind the butcher shop and relaxed, they couldn’t hide their triumph. Out came the homestead receipts as the entire family gloated. They were land holders at last, with almost five hundred acres to their names, and they felt on top of the world.
They couldn’t help but remark on the fortuitous chain of events that had led them to this moment. If they hadn’t decided to send father and son to Canada … if those two hadn’t happened on the office of Read, the Land Man … if Mrs. Shepherd hadn’t insisted on keeping in touch with the land office in Davidson! It seemed as if some guardian angel was fluttering just above them, leading them through various trials and travails to this moment of jubilation.
That spring they moved their house and their butcher shop by sleigh to the new homestead. It took two days, perhaps the most trying of their lives, for the loads were so heavy they kept veering off the trail of packed snow. But it was a momentous anniversary, for they arrived on the site on March 20, 1909, exactly one year to the day after George and his father had left Liverpool.
They had four oxen, a little equipment, scarcely any cash, but considerable experience. They were healthy, ambitious, and not afraid of work. To hold the land they would have to follow the homestead regulations – put up buildings, break the sod, raise crops. But some of them could also work for others, and they were prepared for long hours, few holidays, and no vacations.
Will and George worked as labourers on a fifteen-thousand-acre farm in the district. Charlie stayed home that first summer and helped break ninety acres of virgin prairie. Mr. Shepherd managed to get a mail contract. When a Canadian Pacific branch line came, two of the boys laboured on the construction gang.
They worked as a family unit: all their wages and profits went into a central fund to improve the farm. There was a closeness here that others, lonely on the prairie, must have found enviable. In George Shepherd’s memoirs, written fifty years later, one gets a glimpse of it: Mrs. Shepherd seated at the piano, her bell-like voice joining the others grouped around her singing “Old Black Joe” and “My Old Kentucky Home.”
It was a remarkably successful transition. In Kent, the “Garden of England,” the family had led a sequestered urban existence. To adjust so swiftly to a raw and foreign rural environment was not easy, especially for the parents. Yet they did not complain. While Canadians were poking fun at “blooming green Englishmen,” this family and thousands of others like them were going sturdily about their business enriching the Dominion by the sweat of their brows. In England, the Shepherds could hardly make ends meet; in the Canadian West they thrived. Mrs. Shepherd was the most amazing of all. Within four years of her arrival she was writing articles for the
Grain Growers’ Guide
giving advice to farm women on how to raise chickens. She became such an authority on poultry that she took to public speaking. In Moose Jaw, when the Grain Growers held their annual convention, she was chosen as the leading woman speaker. Ramsgate, by that time, must have seemed as distant as the moon.
Chapter Six
The American Invasion
1
Will White thinks big
It was Clifford Sifton’s original belief that “the best settlers are those whose condition in the land from which they come is not too rosy, and who are content in coming here to get along in a humble way at first.” It was hopeless, he believed back in February 1896, to expect to fill the country with well-to-do farmers; this was his rationale for bringing in peasants from northern and eastern Europe.
Well before the turn of the century, however, the pragmatic minister had softened his policy. Public opinion was forcing him to restrict Galician immigration. British farmers didn’t seem to want to come. But south of the border were tens of thousands of well-to-do Americans who might jump at the chance of selling out at a high price and buying in at a low one. Sifton shifted his sights and concentrated his main thrust on these people. The results were wildly successful.
In the powerful and carefully orchestrated campaign that followed, every technique was used and honed to a fine point. Between 1898 and 1906, the department spent two million dollars – more than a quarter of its budget – to convince Americans that they should come to Canada. They didn’t come cheap. It cost an average of $3.22 to bring in an Englishman, but the government spent $5.35 for every American who crossed the border. Sifton obviously thought it was worth the money.
By 1902 he was able to warn an audience of British businessmen in Montreal that “Americans now own the Canadian Northwest.” Yet the real invasion had scarcely begun. There were at that time fewer than 40,000 American-born settlers on the prairies. In another ten years the number had jumped to 217,000. Only about 10,000 settled in Manitoba; the majority took up homesteads in Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Sifton turned his propaganda campaign in the United States over to W.J. “Will” White, his old crony from the Brandon
Sun
. White was the perfect choice – a “go-getter,” in the phrase of the day, assigned to a nation of go-getters. Back in 1881, chafing at the lack of opportunity in Exeter, Ontario, where he was editor of the weekly
Times
, he encountered a local boy, Tom Green way, just returned from Manitoba and bursting with enthusiasm for the West. White, the hustler, took Greenway’s advice and hustled off to Winnipeg by way of Michigan, Milwaukee, and St. Paul (for the
CPR
was not completed). So did Greenway, who was destined to become Premier of Manitoba.
In Winnipeg, White learned that there were plans afoot to start a
newspaper in the
CPR
’s new divisional point in the Brandon Hills. On he hustled, again as far as the steel would take him, a few miles west of Portage la Prairie. Then, in a driving rainstorm, he trudged the remaining thirty-five miles on foot to Brandon. Two days later he was walking the sawdust-strewn streets of the new community. Shortly afterwards he launched the weekly
Sun
.
It was a one-man operation. White set the type himself, cranked the press, peddled the paper on the streets for a nickel a copy, sold the advertising, wrote every word that appeared, and even swept the floors. As the
Sun
prospered and the West made news, White prospered with it. When Louis Riel touched off the Saskatchewan rebellion in 1885, White began to churn out extras, hiring gangs of boys to turn the press and upping the price to a quarter. Soon he acquired shareholders, Clifford Sifton and James Smart, among others; the
Sun
was always ruggedly Liberal.
White thought big. When Brandon was about to be incorporated as a town, he discovered it cost no more to call itself a city. Why not go for the bargain? Think big, he told the city fathers; vote yourselves a city! They took his advice.
Now, as Sifton’s propaganda chief for the United States, White was again required to go on the hustle. He was in his fifties now, at the height of his powers. And, as he set up his network of agents south of the border, he continued to think big.
He had as many as twenty-one immigration offices operating in the most productive U.S. centres, each manned by a salaried manager and a staff. In addition he had twenty-seven travelling agents moving about the country and, by 1901, 276 subagents – farmers and railroad employees, mainly – who received a bonus of three dollars for every man, two dollars for every woman, and a dollar for every child they secured for Canada.
The job of this army of salesmen was to tout Canada as a land of promise where the weather was bracing but never exhausting; where British law, order, and justice prevailed; where the land was rich, cheap, and available; and, above all, where everybody who got in on the ground floor and worked hard could become wealthy and successful.
The agents blanketed the American midwest with lantern-slide lectures and stereopticon views of the Canadian prairies. They devised a chain letter system to get the names of interested farmers and then deluged them with a rain of pamphlets and information. They placed
maps and atlases in the schools and persuaded teachers to give geography lessons on the Canadian West. They talked women’s clubs, which were eager to study almost anything, into studying the prairies. They buttonholed clergymen and suggested they extol the virtues of the Canadian moral climate. They held street meetings which, for their evangelical fervour, competed easily with the itinerant medicine shows and Saturday-night corner sermons. They squired leading farmers on free junkets to Canada and got them to write up their adventures for the local paper or the department’s pamphlets. They turned up at state and county fairs with displays of Canadian wheat.
They were everywhere, it seemed. When a land rush was touched off in Oklahoma by the opening of a Comanche Indian reservation in 1902, the Canadians were on hand in a tent to make sure that those land-hungry settlers who didn’t get a homestead would have an alternative. As a result, three hundred families pulled up stakes and left for Alberta.
But the immigration agent was more than a propagandist. He was the farmer’s friend, companion, land agent, and travel expert. White’s people handed out thousands of “settlers’ certificates,” each of which allowed the holder to travel on the
CPR
from the American border to his destination for the ridiculous price of one cent a mile. If many used these certificates for nothing more than a pleasure jaunt, White didn’t care. The country
wanted
visitors who would return with glowing reports of the golden land west of Winnipeg. The immigration agent stood ready to help out with advice, to suggest the best land, to arrange for train tickets, and if a farmer set off alone, to make the necessary arrangements for his family to follow.
As a practitioner of hype, Will White deserves to stand with the best of the modern hucksters. Newspapermen were even easier to buy in those days than they were in later decades. A free junket did the trick, especially if there was a prolonged stop at the spas of Banff or Lake Louise. Trainloads of compliant editors, lubricated by good whiskey and warmed by the best
CPR
cuisine, raced across the prairies at government expense, stopping at wheat fields and handsome farms (carefully selected) or for banquets at the major cities. The Minnesota editors came first, then the Wisconsin editors, and then the National Editorial Association, all six hundred of them, representing a thousand newspapers.