by Merle Massie
Railways and Bridges
The Canadian Northern Railway brought its line to Prince Albert in January 1906, the year before the killing winter. The rail line doubled local export capacity.76 The lumber industry was quick to take advantage of it, ramping up production and building new milling facilities, reinforcing the importance of the northern wood basket to continued prosperity. The railway brought competition and somewhat lower freight rates, and it was expected to bring opportunities to all aspects of Prince Albert’s development, from industry to agriculture. With ongoing growth in the Shellbrook community, the lumber and freighting trade, and the push to open homesteads across the river, it became imperative to build a traffic bridge over the North Saskatchewan River. Local citizens fully expected and planned for further rail lines to penetrate the north, both to serve the recently surveyed homestead land and to exploit minerals, timber, fish, and other resources, including fuel for the prairie market. As it was, the north Prince Albert region was cut off during key times of the year, when the ice was too weak to use in the spring and when it was not sufficiently frozen in the fall. In the summer, the ferry could handle only small loads. The Prince Albert Times noted with disgust in 1907:
Traffic Conditions Are a Disgrace. River Crossing Facilities Woefully Inadequate. Shellbrook Farmers Delayed in City for Weeks. The need of a traffic bridge was amply demonstrated this week. For nearly a week it was impossible to cross the river and residents of Shellbrook were cut off from the market. All day Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday the river bank on both sides was crowded with teams waiting to cross. It would have taken half a dozen ferries to have accommodated this traffic. The unfortunate part of the inadequate crossing facilities was that many Shellbrook farmers lost two days of this fine seeding weather. Just now a day lost is a serious blow. Unfortunately when the ferry was being launched on Thursday she struck a stone and stove a hole in her bottom. Tuesday night City Engineer Moon and ten men worked nearly all night making repairs.77
Calling for a traffic bridge, the city was caught in a double bind: should the city build a bridge to service the settlers at Shellbrook and offer all-weather access to the region across the river, or should it wait for the Canadian Northern Railway to build a railway bridge and convince it to add a traffic bridge? With alarm, the local newspaper pointed out the heart of the problem: “The absence of [a railway bridge] has done untold injury to this city. People come to Prince Albert and go away again. They say that ‘the land across the river is not worth anything and nobody lives there because it has never been necessary to build a bridge and if the land was worth anything the bridge would have been built long ago.’”78
The call for a bridge over the North Saskatchewan River was part of a much larger push to build a railway to Hudson Bay. The Prince Albert mayor went to Ottawa in 1907 to procure support for Prince Albert as the logical starting point of the railway, and he relayed a positive message back to the city: “The Mayor says that since the Dominion Government has made its decision in regard to the Hudson Bay Railroad that Prince Albert is ‘IT’ and all eyes are turned this way. Prince Albert will be the great point in the new railroad.”79 The Hudson Bay Railway scheme played an important role in the boosterism of Prince Albert: as late as 1926, the city was calling itself “The Gateway to Hudson Bay.” Although optimism regarding the scheme continued to feed the new Prince Albert agricultural boom, hopes were continually delayed. The city continued to joust with the railway, putting off building its own bridge until 1909, when the Canadian Northern Railway completed a dual railway and traffic bridge. Rail and other traffic could finally move easily over the river. The Hudson Bay Railway—which did not go through Prince Albert—was finally finished in 1929.80
The “New Northwest”
On 24 January 1907, in the middle of the fuel shortage and brutal winter (and building on the momentum of enthusiasm generated by the second railway, the Prince Albert economy, the lumber interests, and the potential Hudson Bay Railway), Senator T.O. Davis of Prince Albert stood up in the Senate and issued a call for a special committee to investigate the land north of the North Saskatchewan River.81 The Prince Albert Times reported that it was time to “Unfold the Riches of the North.” Davis called for exploration parties to look into the region north of the Saskatchewan watershed to ascertain not only its agricultural potential but its other resources as well.82 His call set in motion a firestorm of popular interest that lasted well beyond that brutal winter. The Senate committee’s report, prepared on a meagre budget by interviewing and collecting statements from people who knew the region, was eventually published as Canada’s Fertile Northland: A Glimpse of the Enormous Resources of Part of the Unexplored Regions of the Dominion. Copies of the report were sent to major newspapers across the country, a savvy media blitz that resulted in extensive coverage. The Department of the Interior reeled from the avalanche of over 10,000 requests for the report.83
The next step was to fund a detailed physical investigation of the region, starting with the area north and west of Prince Albert. Civil engineer Frank Crean led two expeditions, one in 1908 to Green Lake and Île-à-la-Crosse, the other in 1909 to the Alberta region north of the North Saskatchewan River, near Cold Lake and Lac la Biche. Crean reported that, for the most part, the region would support mixed farming as opposed to wheat farming. He asserted that about one-quarter of the 22 million acres of land in his study region could be farmed. Crean deliberately emphasized what he believed was the region’s “potential” for mixed farming, a vague but hopeful term. The area’s most serious drawback was not climate or soil, he argued, but transportation and access. His reports were published as New Northwest Exploration, and the area became known as the New Northwest.84
Crean’s report reinforced the Prince Albert Board of Trade’s insistence on the fitness and potential of the area for mixed farming, though the board was more interested in the outlying regions for resource development, not farming. Farming required at least some good land, and those who had travelled the northern trails were sceptical of the grandiose assertions of good land as far north as Crean indicated. The Saskatchewan minister of education, for example, believed that, “after a line forty miles north of Prince Albert is reached, the land is unfit for any purpose whatever.” Prince Albert citizens disagreed. After all, there were lumber, fish, and possible mineral resources. Nonetheless, for farming purposes, many agreed that the limit of agricultural land north of Prince Albert likely did not exceed the forty-mile band.85 Regardless, Crean’s repeated correlation between the New Northwest and mixed farming was echoed by dominion surveyors. The wood basket that supported the lumber industry had become denuded within thirty miles of the city, and clearcut logging and fires opened up more of the country. Into this landscape, quickly being repopulated by a vigorous growth of aspen and willow, came surveyors. Their quarter section survey reports and maps for the north Prince Albert region consistently presented the land as suitable for mixed farming.
The whole of 1907 was devoted to opening up twenty townships north of the river. Surveying twenty townships, instead of the fifteen extravagantly demanded by the Board of Trade, reflected the impact of the killing winter and fuel shortage on the plains. Homesteads with their own fuel source were popular in the aftermath of the shortages of the extreme winter. Surveyors described each township in terms of its aspect, soil, topography, water sources, and potential for development. A township is six miles in length and six miles in width, with thirty-six sections and 144 quarter sections. Surveying twenty townships opened up almost 3,000 new homesteads. Within that space, there could be considerable variation in the quality and suitability of each quarter section. A typical description covered access trails, soil conditions, timber and fuel resources, hay land, and surface or well water potential. The surveyor’s reports also assessed potential mineral resources, such as coal outcrops or stone quarries. Local game was always described, particularly if any could be used for human consumption.86 The sur
vey report noted that “already the newly surveyed townships north of this city, where until quite recently it was generally supposed no land existed fit for settlement, 130 homestead entries have been made within a radius of twenty miles.”87
Map 9. Surveyor’s map showing plan of Twp 54 R25 W2, 1918. “Gently rolling country covered with spruce, poplar, Jack pine and tamarack, willow swamps and spruce and tamarack muskeg.” The trail shown in the centre by the long dotted line is the Montreal Lake Trail.
Source: Department of the Interior. Prince Albert Historical Society, Bill Smiley Archives. Photo by Merle Massie.
Climatic conditions were also noted, but they were generally descriptions of what the weather was like when the surveyor visited the area. The summer of 1907, following on the heels of the brutal winter, was particularly miserable. A note in the newspaper section known as “Satchel of the Satellite” quipped on 9 May 1907 that “the Indians tell us that once in every hundred years there is no summer. I can’t tell as I wasn’t here the last time, but I’m here now alright! The ice is still not out on the river!”88 The 1907 survey reports were littered with references to the cold and even freezing temperatures, giving the impression that these conditions were normal for the region. Since the dominion surveyors were men brought into the area from elsewhere in Canada, they might not have known typical local conditions. Their reports would plague development of the area for years to come. The dominion lands agent at Prince Albert, R.S. Cook, in an attempt to mitigate the effects of the survey reports, explained that “the year just closed has been the most unfavourable in the history of the country. The severe winter of 1906–1907 was followed by a late spring and a cold, wet summer.” Crops were damaged all across the west, but at Prince Albert, Cook was quick to note, a fair or even a poor crop was enough for local farmers. The region “is essentially a mixed farming country and the light wheat crop does not seriously affect the condition of the farmer. The banking institutions and implement men inform me that collections are good, and that there is no serious falling off of business.”89 The survey of 1907 ended at the 14th baseline, from Townships 49 to 52, and Ranges 23 to 28, north of the river. These boundaries opened up the land west of the Indian reserves at Wahpeton, Sturgeon Lake, and Little Red River.90
Marketing the Mixed-Farming Message
With homesteads available north of the river, and building on the recent fuel crisis, Prince Albert became a popular homestead destination. The Dominion Lands Agency at Prince Albert saw a rise of 500 homestead applications in 1908 over 1907.91 The biggest competition for new homesteaders in the north Prince Albert region was the newly opened land in the Palliser Triangle of southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta.
Originally closed to homestead settlement, the Palliser region had been reserved as Crown land for grazing purposes. The disastrous winter of 1906–07 crushed the ranching industry. Ranching historians have consistently pointed to the hand of nature in bringing about the end of the open plains ranching era. Writer Wallace Stegner, in his acclaimed classic Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier, noted the efforts of ranch hands to scrape snow from hillsides to help cows reach forage. These pitiful attempts were continually frustrated by the next blizzard. Cows, driven to bottom lands searching for shelter, ate willows and starved to death for lack of nutrition. Starving cattle also wandered into towns, searching desperately for food. Historian Joe Cherwinski noted cattle invading Lethbridge and Medicine Hat by the thousands. They had to be driven out by cowboys. Chinooks only made the situation worse, melting the top layer of snow, which then refroze and covered meagre forage supplies and froze cattle where they lay. Buried in ice and snow, their bodies served as burial platforms for other cattle, driven to seek shelter by the next storm and dying on top of the carcasses. By spring, dead animals lay three or four deep. Stegner called the spring of 1907 “carrion spring,” in which stinking, bloated carcasses floated downstream with the spring breakup or hung in trees as the drifts melted away.
The killing winter spelled the end of the big, open-range cattle companies, many of which liquidated what cattle survived and abandoned their holdings.92 Those who continued ranching began to practise a more forage/farming-oriented ranch style similar to mixed farming, in which some land was broken and seeded to provide sufficient fodder for the animals in winter. Following devastation of the cattle-ranching industry, the drylands were hastily surveyed and thrown open for settlement to the homesteaders who poured into the western interior.
The divergent push to develop land in two completely different biomes—the New Northwest and the Palliser Triangle—represented the difference between those who advocated mixed farming at forest edge landscapes and those who promoted dryland/wheat-farming techniques. Settlers in the dryland were allowed to file on both a homestead quarter and a purchased “pre-emption” homestead, thereby creating 320-acre or half-section farms. It was believed that, because the land was arid, it would be less productive. Twice as much land was necessary to operate a successful family farm. The opportunity to gain a half section of land proved irresistible: in 1908, this region drew over 18,000 entries; in 1909–10, a tremendous 26,000 homestead entries were filed, dwarfing interest in the northern forest edge.93 Historian Curt McManus called the movement into the Palliser Triangle “the Last Great Land Rush of modern times.”94 Scientific investigation of dryland-farming techniques such as summerfallowing and crop rotation bred enthusiasm that strategic farming would triumph over nature—as long as a farmer owned enough land to generate a living.95
Prince Albert boosters looked on the popularity of this southern region with envy and redoubled their efforts to promote mixed farming in the north as opposed to “wheat mining” in the south. The pre-emption, the dryland allowance for a second quarter, was remade as a detriment. Boosters contrasted the pre-emption region to the northern edge landscape: “So fertile is the land [in the Prince Albert area] and so favored by climatic conditions that the Dominion Government did not include it in the pre-emption area, knowing full well that 160 acres of this land was equal in production capacity to 320 acres in semi-arid … south western Saskatchewan and southern Alberta.”96 These boosters connected permanence, resilience, and long-term prosperity to the forest edge landscape. Promoters admitted that “it is not surprising that the immigrants preferred the bare prairie, which could be easily broken up, to the richer but more bushy soil of the Prince Albert district.” Such short-term gain, however, was not in a true farmer’s best interest. Economic return on mixed farms, they stated, “if slow … has been substantial and solid. The farmers not living on the prairie went in for the more sure occupation of mixed farming, and, never running risks of total loss from droughts, early frosts or hot winds, they have, almost without exception, built up a competence and in many cases much more than that.”97
From the brutal winter of 1906 to the beginning of the First World War, the Prince Albert Board of Trade sold the north Prince Albert region as a mecca for those interested in the business of mixed farming in a forested landscape. The pamphlets trumpeted “Prince Albert—the Centre of Extensive Mixed Farming District” and “Prince Albert, Saskatchewan—Where Crops Are Sure.” The pamphlets scorned the bleakness of the open plains and presented Prince Albert as a park-like paradise: “From a vantage on [Prince Albert’s] wooded slope it is possible to get a birdseye view of the north country, as it lies spread out like a map stretching away to the farthermost horizon, a variegated mass, in the sunlight, of shaded green; changing as the woods merge from poplar into spruce, and from spruce into pine. For sheer picturesqueness of location there is no city in Western Canada that can compare with Prince Albert.”98 Typically, such effusive descriptions contrasted the idyllic, green landscape with “the bare, bleak isolation of the prairie town; the scorching winds as from Sahara; the blinding, death-dealing blizzards, which come as a terror by day in the bitter chill of winter.”99 Mixed farming and the beauti
ful, forested landscape were bound together.
The major disadvantage of mixed farming was that it required heavy capital investment, particularly for stock, buildings, and feed. Prince Albert promoters flipped those drawbacks into another advertising hook. The local landscape contained all “the essentials for settlers possessed of meager capital: cheap fuel, good water, and natural pasture. These [are] in abundance, without money and without price.” A forest edge farm could also provide timber to construct barns and fences. As those who operated farms on the open plains knew, these resources “would cost a small income out of capital during the first years of development in a purely prairie country.”100 Prince Albert boosters promoted the region’s natural advantages of wood, water, and hay land/pasture to those with little capital. Marketing to the low-income settler became a key feature in promotional literature, which became more and more important as internal migration came to rival external migration.
Homesteading the North Prince Albert Region
Between 1906 and 1914, over 15,000 homesteads were filed at the Prince Albert Land Office.101 In the north Prince Albert region, homesteaders skipped over the scrub jack pine and sand in the Sand Hills (now Nisbet Forest Reserve) to move farther north in search of better land, settling the black and transition soils of the Shellbrook-Meath Park plain. Although the land was better, it meant travelling a greater distance over rather poor roads to the Prince Albert market. Profits and markets for northern homesteads were not necessarily tied to city markets or wheat exports. A jubilant article in the Prince Albert Times in the spring of 1907 declared that “these townships offer a splendid opportunity to settlers as they have a good market for all kinds of farm produce in close proximity and all winter they can have work in the lumber woods.” The markets in “close proximity” were lumber camps, expected to soak up any excess supplies of eggs, butter, milk, meat, oats, and hay that the new homesteaders might have for sale—in fact, almost all farm produce except wheat. In addition, those lumber camps would provide work for the homesteaders to raise money to build up their farms.