Some emigrants who lacked the means to purchase cleared land straight away preferred to work for wages until they could afford an improved farm. Ten years elapsed between James Thompson’s emigration from Aboyne and his purchase of a farm in Edwardsburgh, Upper Canada, in 1854:
Since writing to you last I have purchased a farm, within mile of this village. The farm contains one hundred and fifty acres, fronting on the River St Lawrence. There is a pretty good house and barn on it. I will give you a more lengthy description of it some other time. I have got the deed, but as I am busy with the Railroad, I do not intend to live on the farm this summer, nor do much with it farther than having a few acres ploughed and put under crop. I pay for the farm at the rate of five pounds fifteen shillings per acre in all £862, 10/ of which I have paid £500 and the balance in three equal yearly instalments. 14
Although Michie and Mary Ewing, emigrants from the Castle Fraser estate in Aberdeenshire, aspired to rent rather than purchase a farm, they were still some way from achieving that goal when they wrote home from Upper Canada in 1857 to ask for an extension on the money loaned them by their former employer. But despite their indebtedness and some reservations about the ‘sick soil of Canada’, they too were content, not least that they had remained healthy in an environment where debilitating illnesses like malaria and epidemics of cholera or typhus were a constant concern:
It is now nearly two years since we left; it will soon be two years since we arrived in the land of our adoption; And God in his mercy hath blessed us with remarkable good health, both on our journey and since our abode in a foreign clime. And although I have not (in one point of view) been altogether so successful as I expected, yet I like the country, I like the climate, and am fully convinced that many a poor man would be much better here than in Scotland. Yet there are many come here, who would be much better at home than here. Wages are high, but much more work is expected, and unless a man be a good workman, few will employ him, at the same time people, manners, climate, work and all strange, A good many get disheartened, return home, go to drinking, or even lose their health and die. And although we have not had the same comfort as yet, that we had at Castle Fraser, being most of the time away from home, my only cause for complaint is having to pay from 10sh to 12sh Stg per week for Board. Being either with Farmers (who always board their hands) or so far off that I could not walk home. Yet I have great cause to be thankful, in having all the time got plenty of work, and sometimes two or three persons wanting me at the one time. Last winter I got several good offers of farms to rent. In summer I was paid with from 6d to 8d more a day, than other workmen, part of the time being intrusted with the charge of from 16 to 20 men and 3 or 4 span of horses, at the making of a gravel road, I felt as if on trial, did my best, both contractor and engineer were pleased, and I was just about to engage to go on to the branch of railway from St Mary’s to London, to take charge of a squad of men, when all was brought to a stand still. 15
Surviving accounts of the experiences of Lowland farmers in pre-Confederation Canada tend to be optimistic, perhaps because the decision to emigrate had usually been based on positive foundations. Conversely, removal to Canada apparently did nothing to alleviate the sufferings of cleared Highlanders, at least in the early stages of settlement. In autumn 1849 the anti-landlord Inverness Journal was repeatedly preoccupied with the plight of thousands of famine-stricken Highlanders who had been sent out in the midst of a cholera epidemic, to fall victim to ‘pauperism and beggary … amid the horrors of a Canadian winter’. 16 According to one correspondent, a Tain man living in Hamilton who raised a subscription to assist a contingent of emigrants from Mull and Tiree, and persuaded the city authorities to forward them to Fergus:
They were landed at Quebec at a time when cholera raged in all our towns and cities. They were forwarded by the Government from port to port until they arrived here at the head of the Navigation, when, without any provision being made for them, they were thrown on our wharfs, weary, diseased, and destitute. Their numbers had been considerably thinning by the prevailing plague, many having died in Montreal, Kingston, and Toronto, another thinning was still in reserve for them here. The emigrant sheds being already filled to overflowing with the destitute sons of Erin, the poor Highlanders had to weather, as the best way they could, under the canopy of heaven, huddled together on the wharf, and on the commons that lie between the city and the bay; the greater part of them lay for the space of eight days, with nothing to screen them from the scorching rays of an almost tropical sun, or the cold damp dews of our Canadian night — what the sad consequences were may easily be conjectured. The first night after their arrival, thirteen were seized with cholera; on the second night, eight; in all, while they remained here, forty-eight; they were sent to the hospital, but as yet none of them have left it alive. 17
Unlike the Lowland farmers who had found Fergus and the surrounding townships a profitable field for investment and labour, for the Highlanders it was a bleak, temporary halt en route to their final destination of Owen Sound, where — despite having ‘nothing necessary for a life in the bush’ — they were to take up free grants of uncleared land.
But the Highland emigrants’ experiences varied widely. Further east, in Cape Breton, the first wave of settlers, many of whom had some capital in reserve, secured Crown land freehold on generous terms, and were able to establish reasonably productive commercial frontland farms, on which they enjoyed a far higher standard of living than in Scotland. By contrast, the impoverished emigrants of the 1830s and 1840s found not only that most of the good terrain was already taken but that stricter regulations made it virtually impossible for them to acquire land legally. Often squatting without title on inferior backlands, they eked out a precarious existence on a meagre agricultural base, supplementing their incomes by part-time wage labour in mining and fishing. Following a lifestyle very similar to what they had left behind in Scotland, they were even dogged by the same potato blight they had sought to escape. Having obtained a substantial grant by virtue of his army service, Captain Donald McNeil of Mira River had been confident of securing his family’s future until the economic crisis of the 1840s. Writing to his brother in North Uist — from whom he had just heard after a twenty-year period of unanswered letters — he was now pessimistic about his prospects in Cape Breton:
It is melancholy to what extent the failure of crop has effected [sic] the inhabitants of this Island, potatoes have almost altogether disappeared, and other crops, tho’ not to the same extent, have been very backwards. I need not say that I feel the pressure of these times in Common with others. My Farm and Half Pay are the only means I have of supporting my Family and when the one fails, the other is by far too limited to be an equivalency for every demand. I have laid out a very large crop this season and Providence may become favourable, if otherwise I know not what be the result. I have a Grant of Five hundred acres & could I get for it as much money as would bring us up to Canada and purchase a small Farm there, I would not hesitate to try the change, but under present circumstances that is entirely out of the question. I have had to contend with greater difficulties and Kind Providence carried me through and his word directs me to trust him still and not dispair [sic].
I have Nine of a Family, four Sons & five Daughters (enough you say in hard times). My oldest Son Ewen I suppose will follow the Farming if better does not cast up to suit his inclination, but the second, Rory, of a different turn of mind, gives me great concern not having it in my power to procure a situation for him … Before the change of times I had every prospect before me, that my undertaking would be ultimately crowned with success and I did not in the least envy even your larger possession at home, as my property was improving apace, all my own, and to pass to my heirs & successors for ever. Such was my Consolation, with a living in comfort, tho’ not in luxury. The wheel may turn. 18
McNeil’s ambition to move west was not unique, for many Highland settlers saw Cape Breton as a staging post on the way
to Upper Canada, the American Midwest or, later, the prairies. However, the remigration that became inevitable for many backland settlers in the wake of the 1840s and 1870s depressions was often to urban-industrial centres, notably Boston. It was a pattern that was replicated in another area of concentrated Hebridean settlement, the Eastern Townships of Quebec. There, as in Cape Breton, the emigrants were characterized by widespread squatting, subsistence agriculture, a reluctance to cultivate large parts of their holdings and eventual remigration to New England and the prairies, while in both locations the abandoned marginal farms that had been wrested from the bush reverted inexorably to their original state.
Highland settlers on the prairies came directly from Scotland, as well as from eastern Canada. Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart’s sponsored settlement of ten Benbecula families at Wapella in 1883 was followed in 1888 and 1889 by the colonization of Killarney and Saltcoats by 100 families from Lewis, Harris and North Uist with the aid of a £10,000 grant from the British government. Neither venture was particularly successful, although William Gibson, who farmed only fifty miles away from the Benbecula crofters, thought they were ‘all doing fairly well, and have no cause to regret coming to the North-West’. 19 One Saltcoats settler with twelve cattle and almost twenty acres under crop after two years claimed in 1891, ‘I would not leave this country unless I am dragged from it by ropes’, 20 and the two pioneers who subsequently recalled their experiences for the Saskatchewan Archives Board’s survey in the 1950s were also fairly uncritical. In 1952 Norman McDonald (seventy-nine) was still living on the same homestead in Wapella that his father had taken up when the family had emigrated from Benbecula in 1883. Their early experiences, he remembered, were a mixture of triumphs and tribulations:
In 1883 we built a sod shack and it was burned down and we lost the most of our clothes. We built a log house before winter set in. It was on 7th June that we planted potatoes on land newly broken and had a very good crop. We also put in a few acres of barley and oats. The barley crop was good but oats were frozen. We were out here a year before we got our first cow. 21
Six years after McDonald arrived in Wapella, Archibald Docherty emigrated from North Uist to Saltcoats in a party of forty-nine families, under the government’s prairie settlement scheme. Both the Saltcoats settlement and its sister colony at Killarney had been hastily conceived and poorly implemented. Applicants had been given only a week between acceptance and embarkation to settle their affairs, and the Scottish Office, in its haste to set the scheme on foot, failed to reach a specific agreement with the Canadian government about the latter’s responsibilities in terms of land allocation and the retrieval of loans. The crofters were dispatched on the strength of incomplete negotiations with various land companies and a vague assurance from the Canadian government that it would ‘render every assistance ’ to the emigrants. Not surprisingly, both settlements, but particularly Saltcoats, were beset by practical, financial and administrative difficulties. Many of the settlers, brought up with the sound of the sea in their ears, were unwilling or unable to adapt to life on a land-locked prairie homestead, and often preferred to work as seasonal harvest labourers or railway navvies, sometimes in order to work their way to British Columbia. Their tardiness in paying Canadian taxes and in repaying their loans of £120 per head to the British government discouraged any extension of the scheme, which became ‘the forgotten episode in the history of the Scots in Canada’. 22
None of these problems was reflected in the reminiscences of Archibald Docherty. Like Norman McDonald at Wapella, he had farmed in the same location all his life and was also the first person in the community to buy a car, a Model T Ford, in 1914. Recalling, at the age of seventy-eight, how ‘agents came to the Islands to induce the people to emigrate to Western Canada’, he went on to describe various incidents from the family’s emigration and settlement:
The Saltcoats district was the end of steel, and was then being opened up…Some of my relations were also coming to Canada with the same party, but mostly they thought we were crazy to go so far. People came fromall over the island, and with tears in their eyes tried to dissuade us … We came by small steamer from the Islands to Glasgow, and from there to Halifax in the Allan Line Scandinavian. Then to Saltcoats by train. The chief thing I remember was that I was very seasick, as were most of the other children and most of the women. There was quite a large building in Saltcoats known as the Immigrant Shed. This was insufficient so a number of boxcars were used. Two families were housed in each boxcar … My chief impression of the early years was the great loneliness of prairie life, after living in the Islands where people were crowded together.We went to Saltcoats about once a week, a day’s journey by oxen. After the first church was built in the district in 1896,we went to church every Sunday. All travel was by ox wagon or on foot, as none of the settlers had horses in the early years. 23
John Laidlaw, who emigrated from Ross-shire with his parents in 1882, travelled west from Brandon in a prairie schooner and lived for a time in a tent, confirmed that ox wagon was the customary form of transport for the pioneers. His father, having been attracted out by ‘far from truthful’ propaganda spread by the Canadian Pacific Railway, hoped to make enough money to retire back to Scotland, but it was not to be, and the family remained in Grenfell, where they first settled, for seventy years. 24
Of the 285 responses to the questionnaire, sixty-two came from Scottish settlers, only a small minority of whom were Highlanders. Peter Fraser, who came from Kilsyth to Kamsack in 1891, and had a varied career as a homesteader, farm worker, cook at an Indian mission school and storekeeper, remembered the hazards of fording flooded rivers, the impact of Doukhobor settlement and the tragic death of one of his employees, a Barnardo boy who had accidentally shot himself. William Harkness, who emigrated from Johnstone in Dumfries-shire in 1892, recalled that during his first two summers he was ‘nearly eaten by mosquitoes’, while James Tulloch from Shetland had intended to go to Australia until an encounter with the mayor of Winnipeg in Dumfries changed his mind. Arriving in Winnipeg penniless in 1897, he worked for wages for three years until he was able to secure a homestead, and later paid the fares of several other emigrants from Shetland. George Bruce, who had already spent a harvesting season in western Canada before returning to the University of Aberdeen to continue his BSc course, emigrated permanently in 1904, having been unable to finance the completion of his studies. He was joined almost immediately by his parents and sisters, and both father and son took up homesteads. 25
Many respondents had vivid memories of fires and frosts that threatened their livelihoods and sometimes their very lives. Although on one occasion Aberdonian Andrew Veitch’s family lost their barn, granary, hay and an entire season’s crop after threshing, he remembered not only the fear of being burned in his bed but also ‘the beauty of watching fields of jumping flame in the various formations on hill tops, valleys and bluffs against a pitch black night’. 26 At the other extreme, Dundonians Robert and Jim Wood were given up for dead when, searching for missing cattle in winter 1899, Jim became lost forty-five miles from home in a blizzard and temperatures that plunged to sixty-four degrees below zero. Fifty-five years later, Robert recalled the adventure:
12. Group of immigrants arrive at CPR Station, Winnipeg 1927. Winnipeg remained the major hub for the settlement of the West.
The weather had been getting steadily colder since we left home and on the morning of the fifth day we decided we had gone as far as we could with the team. However we decided we would make one last cast with the riding horse and in the grey of that morning Jim left on Nipper, going north east, while I stayed in camp and chopped down dry poplar most of the day, cutting it into twelve foot lengths … It was intensely cold and when darkness came that night and Jim hadn’t got back I became very anxious. We had a shotgun with us and about a dozen shells. An hour or so after dark I fired a shot and thereafter every half hour or thereabouts I would fire another. In that time I went through all the emot
ions of the condemned man who was to be executed the next morning — for I had made up my mind that Jim was frozen and I had no intention of going back without him. But about nine o’clock that night Jim rode into camp.
He had a very remarkable tale to tell over the camp fire that night. Travelling north east in the morning for quite a few miles he had stumbled on an Indian Camp … The Indians, some of whom apparently knew a few words of English, told him that the cattle were safe and were only a few miles from their camp. The absence of snow had helped them and they were coming through alright. Jim did not go any further but late that afternoon took to the bed of the Carrot River, heading south west towards our camp. After travelling slowly for hours and for long after dark he had no idea whether he had passed the camp or was still approaching it. He had his heavy fur coat on and the collar up over his ears and could not hear anything. But suddenly he saw Nipper prick up his ears and knew he must have heard something. Scrambling up the steep bank at the first feasible place he gave Nipper his head and the horse walked back about a mile and some distance from the river and finally walked into the camp. He had heard one of my shots in the first place no doubt and had then located the camp by the smell of the camp fire …
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 33