Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  While they were overseas, another fuel shortage due to extreme cold weather in the winter of 1916–17 led to a boom in cordwood production for homesteaders north of the city, who hauled the loads to town by sleigh while petitioning for a railway. Fuel shortages on the prairie led to increased business for, and interest in, northern homesteads.1 With interest surging, and anticipating the needs of returned soldiers, dominion agents identified the Paddockwood area as suitable for soldier settlement, and the region was reserved against new claims, except from soldiers. Returning from the theatre of war in 1919, Dunn and Stoddart brought home English war brides and a posse of fellow soldiers ready for new lives at Paddockwood. A grateful government offered each a quarter section Soldier Grant in addition to a homestead, doubling potential acreage, plus loans to purchase new livestock and machinery. The men set about finding a “quality of permanency” in their lives.2

  Early dominion immigration policies, such as those that filled the prairie with thousands of homesteaders, had an embedded “do or die” mentality. The homestead system under Clifford Sifton and Frank Oliver held out the carrot of 160 acres of cheap homestead land. For a ten-dollar filing fee, breaking, clearing, and building, a man (or a widowed, divorced, or deserted woman who was the head of a family3) could gain patent. Cheap land, a massive advertising campaign, and support from railways and steamships to move settlers drew immigrants to western Canada, but the homestead policies offered little else.4 Once on a homestead, the settler had to succeed on the farm or choose to abandon it and go elsewhere.5 Between the time that a homesteader registered his claim, through his application for homestead patent, dominion land agents had little to do. There were few or even no dominion programs in place that helped a homesteader to settle into farm life in western Canada, no matter where or what kind of farm it was. Other than a few drafty immigration sheds as temporary quarters for homesteaders en route to their land, or a bit of advice or help in locating their land, homesteaders “could expect minimal assistance.”6 Rugged individualism and a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality emanated from the dominion government, infecting the early homestead process.

  Homestead registrations across the western interior were astounding, particularly in the dryland region after it was thrown open for settlement. Although homestead entries indicate the wild success of federal immigration policies, they do not reveal the whole tale. Homesteaders and their families would cancel (abandon) the lands on which they had filed their claims and leave. Free homesteads taken between 1870 and 1927 and subsequently cancelled, as calculated by economist Chester Martin, averaged 40 percent. Martin called cancellations “the silent but deadly attrition,” “preventable wastage of human material,” and “the real cost of the western Canadian frontiers of settlement.”7 Yet there remains ample room for investigation of abandoned homesteads. Dunn and Stoddart strategically abandoned their original quarter sections but soon took and later patented homesteads in the immediate vicinity. Their experiences fit both the “failure” and the “success” calculations.

  Their choice of homesteads at the northern ecotone was equally strategic. Inadequate rainfall plagued farmers in the Palliser Triangle. A severe drought in 1914 marked the first serious warning that the decision to open the pre-emption region was fraught with difficulty. Farmers in the dry region had no crop. In desperate need of feed and fodder for stock, seed grain for the next planting season, and relief to tide families through until a successful crop should come, settlers appealed to the federal—not the fledgling provincial—government. Homesteading was a dominion-controlled process. At Saskatchewan’s creation, Canada refused to grant the province the right to its own Crown land, retaining it for the dominion. As owner, the dominion was on the hook for aid when drought stalked the land. Society demanded support for hapless homesteaders shepherded onto land that, some contended, nature never meant to be farmed. In contrast to the “hands off” immigration policy, aid was reluctantly delivered on a scale “hundreds of times greater than the total advanced in all the years since 1886.”8 Dryland disaster refugees also searched for water, moving northward. On a national scale, the declaration of war overshadowed emerging problems in the dryland area, but local newspapers and homestead records pointed to a steadily growing number of new homesteaders coming to the Prince Albert region from southern areas of the province.9

  The social outcry demanding government intervention and aid, based on the inadequacy of dominion homestead land policies, led during the Great War to a profound change. The federal government created new land policies that introduced intensive federal intervention, control, and support. The old “do or die” policy of minimal homestead assistance shattered. Assisted land settlement started first with Soldier Settlement Board policies, which later expanded to include other schemes. The Canadian National Railway (CNR) Colonization Department, as well as the dominion’s Land Settlement Board and 3,000 British Families scheme, brought settlers to the north Prince Albert region in the postwar period. The Prince Albert Daily Herald lauded the idea, arguing that federal land settlement assistance would

  supply the necessary quality of permanency which has hitherto been absent from our land settlement policies. That the west is no more settled than it is, is not due to the fact that people have not gone into the western provinces, but that too many have not stayed there. They have simply gone through it like a sieve. Large numbers have gone out of the country because they had nothing to sustain them over a few bad years. The returned men taking up land under the soldier settlement scheme will be sustained in a way so that he may come through lean years.10

  Soldier settlement policies moved distinctly toward promoting mixed farming as the most “sure” farming practice. As a result, the government recognized several important factors: the increased costs required to build a mixed farm; the amount of time required to set that farm on solid financial ground; farming experience as a major contributing factor in success; the importance of women in farming; and the need to build mixed farms in drought-resistant, ecologically mixed landscapes, such as the ecotone of the forest fringe.

  Building on years of promotion as “The Home of Mixed Farming,” the north Prince Albert region was ideally suited to the new experiment in sustained settlement and became a preferred destination.11 Ongoing environmental disaster and drought on the open plains—which intensified during the spring and summer of 1919 when soldiers were arriving home and searching for land—also directed soldier settlement north, away from drought regions.12 Prince Albert boosters found a receptive audience. Sustaining the new settlers, as opposed to merely registering them, became the new focus. In the postwar era, land settlement policies expanded to focus on building and sustaining farms, not just creating them.

  The Dryland Disaster

  With the ravages of the 1914 drought in the rearview mirror, an arid spectre stalked western Canada. The winter of 1918–19, famous for its Spanish influenza outbreak and soldier homecomings, was mild. By spring, what little snow there had been had melted, and it soon became hot. By May, Hades was loose in the northern boreal forest, and the massive spring conflagrations decimated the timber industry. As summer limped breathlessly on, the arid spectre returned with a vengeance: a severe drought took hold in the “drylands.” Although the heart of the drylands was the old Palliser Triangle of southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta (the pre-emption area that had been opened for homestead settlement only in 1908), aridity desiccated a much larger area. The Prince Albert Daily Herald outlined the extent: “The dry area may be defined as all that part of the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba lying roughly south and west from a line drawn from Wetaskiwin to Camrose, north to Chipman, east to Lloydminster, south to Chauvin, then to Elbow, Moose Jaw, Weyburn, Virden, Souris and south to the international boundary.”13 It was a huge region suffering.

  Despite early enthusiasm and extensive in-migration, out-migration from the pre-emption region was ast
ronomical. Year after year of dry conditions leading to poor grain and fodder crops, punctuated by a few spectacular crop years that did little more than extend the agony, initiated a disaster of epic proportions, appropriately termed the “Dryland Disaster.” Thousands of families who had settled the arid pre-emption area in anticipation of years of wheat profits were defeated by the land and its harsh climate. Historian Curt McManus noted extreme cancellation rates—over 80 percent of those who had filed—within three years of opening the drylands for settlement.14 Cancellations in the dryland region shattered the “normal” 40 percent and contributed to Saskatchewan’s dismal record: between 1911 and 1931, cancellations were 57 percent. Almost from the start, disaster hit many farms, but by 1919 and throughout the 1920s at least 10,000 people—and probably a much higher number—abandoned the Saskatchewan drybelt region; a further 16,000 abandoned their lands in Alberta.15 These numbers do not include the high rate of cancellations noted prior to 1917. The early cancellations were often dismissed as merely those of people who were not established or poor farmers in the first place.

  The large-scale abandonment touched off a massive internal migration, noted in stories published in major community and agricultural newspapers. Not all of the migrants went north. Historian David Jones called the exodus somewhat “directionless.” Those who had come to the drylands from the United States, for example, “slunk back into the States from whence they had come.”16 Others moved to cities, British Columbia, farms in the parkland, Washington State, or the forest edge. Chain migration, with several farmers from a region moving and relocating together, often applied. Clearly, though, those who stayed in the Canadian west deliberately moved either to irrigated farms or to ecologically mixed parkland and forest edge landscapes. These migrants typified the debate over wheat farming versus mixed farming. In the face of environmental disaster, many chose to abandon the prairie wheat monoculture to seek resilience and risk management through mixed farming at the ecotone.

  As the drought intensified, the north received more and more attention. Letters poured into the Dominion Lands Office at Prince Albert asking for haying and grazing permits on Crown land to alleviate a major feed shortage in the drylands.17 Interestingly, it was the drought that in fact helped to turn the north Prince Albert region into suitable haying and ranching country. The brutal and devastating fires in the north in the spring of 1919, which in effect decapitated the local lumber industry, recreated the landscape. The fires cleared the forest floor of years of accumulated slash and debris, leaving room for a lush growth of wild hay, pea vine, fireweed, and vetch. The dominion government stepped in to alleviate the feed shortage, either by supplying relief hay or subsidizing the movement of cattle north to graze and offering grazing permits in the forest reserves.18

  Each week in the spring of 1919, the editor of the Prince Albert Daily Herald commented on the extent of the dryland disaster. He declared that the dominion government bore much of the responsibility for opening up that arid land to homestead settlement in the first place. For the first time, and long before the 1930s, Prince Albert newspapers began to use the term “trek” to refer to the incoming railcars and wagons of settlers moving in from the south. The Daily Herald noted, with a sense of satisfaction, that “the north-bound trek of the southern farmers continues, and daily four or five carloads of settlers effects arrive. These are permanent settlers who are taking up farms ... intending to carry on mixed farming.”19 The editor claimed that the movement “is most rational. It is almost inexplainable that men should continue to attempt farming in areas that have proven year after year that they are unsuitable.”20 It was inexcusable, the editor charged, that the government had opened up the lands in question in the first place. Such lands “might have filled the bill for grazing and ranching but once the prairie sod was destroyed by frequent cultivation the country was converted into a potential desert.” These farmers were losing a battle against nature, insisted the editor, and it would be better for all if the government would “recognize this situation before further disaster is encountered and encourage the rapid removal of these people to the areas in the north where their sustenance is assured.”21 Prince Albert boosters viewed the coming of drought refugees with an attitude of “I told you so,” reiterating their long-held views on the advantages of mixed farming and self-sufficiency over “wheat mining” monoculture.

  Figure 11. Settlers from Vanguard trekking north, 1919.

  Source: SAB, R-A-2727.

  The Alberta government understood the nature of the disaster more clearly and instituted emergency measures to help settlers relocate to better land. Despite stark conditions, the Saskatchewan government remained reluctant to intervene. The dominion and Saskatchewan governments were embroiled in debate regarding who was responsible for the dryland disaster and who should bear the brunt of the cost involved in solving it. This debate was part of the ongoing fight between the province and the federal government over Crown land control. Provincial efforts concentrated instead on finding the proper crop rotation and farming techniques to farm the drylands successfully—a focus on farm practices rather than land assessment. Dryland was farmable, the government literature insisted, if done “properly.” Efforts to find the proper techniques included continuing the Dry Farming Congress work through the Better Farming Congress of 1920, in an attempt to scientifically support farming the land.22 Provincial reluctance to fully appreciate the extent of the dryland disaster meant that Saskatchewan experienced much higher migration and relief problems than did Alberta during the Great Depression.23

  Despite ongoing drought issues, some soldier settlers took dominion land in the dryland region.24 Many of these soldiers relocated to northern forested or parkland farms throughout the 1920s.25 Overall, though, returning soldiers were acutely aware of the extent of the dryland disaster in the spring and summer of 1919, and for this reason they sought farms in parkland and forest edge regions northeast of Regina, east and north of Saskatoon, near North Battleford, and around Prince Albert. Soldier settlements sprang up across the parkland and forest edge region, including the augmented settlement at Paddockwood.

  It is tempting to assess migration solely as an expression of vulnerability, degradation of resources, reactive response, and desperation. Such an appraisal is deficient. Migration as an adaptation strategy was also a proactive choice—assessing the situation, planning what to do, making it happen. The Prince Albert Daily Herald editors declared that internal migrants were seeking a more resilient and balanced mixed-farming lifestyle at the forest edge. To counteract the worst problems of wheat monoculture—the iconic picture of drought stalking the drylands—migrants would move to a landscape that could support a mixed farm. And, for the first time, the federal government changed its settlement policies to focus less on enticing homesteaders to choose Canada than on helping those who were here to succeed.

  “Glad to Be Amongst the Trees Once More”

  Another reason for moving north was a simple desire for better scenery: “Prairie Farmers Turning toward North Areas. They Want Sight of Tree Once in a While,” headlines declared. The dominion lands agent reported that letters were “being daily received” from farmers in the southern part of the province, asking about the prospect of obtaining grazing lands for their stock or homesteads north of the city. “Many of the letters express themselves as weary of the monotonous life of the prairie and say they would be glad to be amongst the trees once more.”26 There is a simplicity to this story, one that resonated in local history books and memoirs written by people long after the move north. “No one minded leaving the prairie, we loved the forest and the lakes,” one southern refugee remembered.27 Greenery, growth, and beauty became a cultural draw beyond economic considerations.

  Some of the settlers moving north, the newspapers suggested, had in fact been successful on the prairie. They were coming north deliberately with extensive capital to invest in a mixed-farming enterprise. “It is a n
oticeable fact,” the Daily Herald declared, “that many of the new settlers are men who have made a success of farming on the prairie, but seemingly are tired of the monotony of straight grain growing.” They sought the timber country, “with its wealth of fuel, plenty of wild hay and the availability of wild game at certain seasons of the year.” Such a landscape would “appeal strongly to many men who are desirous to engage in farming of a mixed variety and to stock raising.”28 The prairie, in this interpretation, was a convenient stop for a short period to shore up some capital, but real farmers looking to create long-term, resilient, ecologically sustainable mixed-farming enterprises were heading north. In some ways, David Dunn and James Stoddart were typical examples. They worked on grain farms and found other opportunities to gather the necessary capital to build a farm at the ecotone. South-to-north migrations, newspapers asserted, were deliberate expressions of capability and choice rather than reactive responses to environmental vulnerability.