Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  Assisted Land Settlement Expansion

  Soldier land abandonment created a new set of problems for the Soldier Settlement Board. Farms reverted to the SSB, which found itself the owner of empty, unproductive farms. The SSB had a support structure suitable for facilitating extensive agricultural settlement, including its successful Home Branch, loan system, purchasing system, land base, and inspectors. As early as 1922, various groups were calling for the SSB to expand its services to look after the needs of civilian settlers. The Globe pointed out the wisdom of accessing SSB experience for general land settlement: “The placing of thousands of returned soldiers on the land involved the consideration of many difficulties that [also] confront the civilian settler. The solution in both cases must be the same.” Since the methods of soldier settlement have “proven successful,” the Globe went on, “there is every reason to suppose that they would be equally effective in continuing the work of settlement hereafter for the benefit of civilians.” The paper urged the government to make the SSB service available in a broader mandate.120 In conjunction, there was pressure to open dominion land previously held exclusively for soldiers to civilian settlement. In response, the SSB was transferred to the auspices of the Department of Immigration and Colonization. It was reformed to encourage civilian settlement, becoming the Land Settlement Branch.121

  One program developed to take over forfeited SSB land was the 3,000 British Families scheme.122 To alleviate continued shortages in Britain in the postwar era, British families were encouraged to emigrate to Canada to take up farming. The British government advanced loans of $1,500, and the Canadian government supplied land and support through the Land Settlement Branch using the old SSB infrastructure.123 The railways also pushed for a return to prewar immigration. They petitioned the government to give the railways a more active role in recruiting immigrants. The federal Railways Agreement, signed in 1925, allowed the CNR to create its Department of Colonization and Agriculture. This move to promote agricultural immigration complemented the CPR’s land settlement branch. The CNR, however, supported primarily northern development areas where its main and branch lines were located. The head of the CN Department of Colonization and Development, Dr. W.J. Black, was a Manitoba chairman of the Soldier Settlement Board. The CNR colonization platform declared that it would “encourage in every way possible the development of mixed farming and better farming methods.”124 The CNR owned the railway north from Prince Albert to Paddockwood and brought in settlers along that line.125

  Figure 15. M. Brodacki family, 1929. Settled at Paddockwood through the CNR land settlement scheme. Source: SAB, R-A32659.

  The majority of CNR settlers took over homesteads that had been proved up and then put up for sale. Real estate agent E.T. Bagshaw of Prince Albert claimed that “often where a small shack had been built, and a few acres cleared and broke round about the buildings the abandonment of the farm meant the buildings were falling to pieces, and what small piece of land had been cultivated in the past reverted to seeds and sod, and desolation reigned.”126 Real estate agencies had many quarter sections for sale in the north Prince Albert region, proved up for title and hastily put up for sale. Once a quarter was proved up and patented, it was open to taxation. To pay taxes, a farmer in situ often traded work with the municipality or local improvement district, doing jobs such as building roads and bridges.127 Landowners who left to pursue other opportunities had to pay taxes out of their own pockets, so often they were anxious to sell. Some land changed hands for little more than taxes owing.128 To their credit, though, titled farms near developed communities usually offered better farmland and prospects than the new homesteads farther north that edged swamps, muskegs, and rocks into Township 54.

  The two colonization schemes epitomized a major divide within Canadian postwar colonization. The first, the 3,000 British Families scheme, favoured British settlement and built on the infrastructure of the SSB (used by both Canadian and British soldiers). The railways, in contrast, pushed for immigration from wherever it would come, including continental and eastern Europe.129 CNR colonization agents were particularly accepting of the ethnic “group settlement” strategy. As a result, the north Prince Albert region, with its existing network of Ruthenian (Polish and Ukrainian) settlement along the Garden River, was targeted for more settlers from these countries. Henribourg and the east Paddockwood district drew extensive eastern European immigration.130

  Both colonization schemes also encouraged internal migration and recolonization within Canada, particularly within Saskatchewan. Settlers from southern regions could apply to either the dominion Land Settlement Board or the CNR and access land and loans, facilitating an easier transition to the ecologically mixed landscape of the northern regions.

  The ongoing work of the SSB as the Land Settlement Board, the colonization work of the CNR along the Paddockwood branch line, and continuing south-to-north migration from the arid regions throughout the 1920s swelled settlement in the north Prince Albert region. Between 1925 and 1927, the Department of the Interior noted a steadily rising demand for new homesteads in Saskatchewan, rising from 2,363 in 1925 to 2,961 in 1927, the majority of them taken along the parkland and forest edge. New homesteads were fuelled by a combination of natural growth, northern drift of southern migrants, and immigration from outside Canada.

  The steadily rising homestead numbers throughout the 1920s were swamped by a rapid increase in 1928, when a whopping 5,808 homesteads were taken, and a further 6,089 in 1929.131 The increase came when the Department of the Interior opened Crown land to permit second homesteads to the general population. Farmers who had successfully completed all the requirements for their first homesteads by 1 January 1925 could apply for second homestead grants. The majority of these second homesteads were taken in northern regions.132

  The northern movement in the latter half of the 1920s was not built on either economic crisis or environmental disaster. For a brief period, prosperity, rather than paucity, led the movement. Agricultural returns on the prairie had improved, as had prices and markets. Saskatchewan farms were diversifying at a fantastic rate, expanding the crop base beyond wheat to include more oats, barley, and other grains and increasing animal production. Although the diversification movement could be found across the province, it was a noticeable aspect of the northern surge. Owing in part to concurrent growth in urban areas, the number of milk cows in Saskatchewan rose dramatically from 225,000 in 1918 to almost 500,000 in 1925.133 Oats and barley, crops that grew well in northern conditions, also increased. Wheat remained the major cash crop on all farms, prairie and northern. After 1925, when wheat prices recovered from their postwar slump, wheat contributed significantly to the overall wealth of the province’s farmers.

  One outlet for that wealth was mechanization, and historian Bill Waiser claimed that mechanization in the 1920s “began a revolution in Saskatchewan farming whose repercussions are still being experienced today.”134 Larger acreages could be planted and harvested far more quickly, adding to farm wealth and security. With adoption of the gasoline tractor and development of brush-breaking equipment, the prospect of clearing and breaking a northern bush homestead was less daunting.135 Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan actively engaged in developing and testing brush-cutting machines, finding a mechanical solution to clearing acreage for agricultural purposes on northern land. Evan Hardy, a professor of agricultural engineering, wrote to Deputy Minister of Agriculture F.H. Auld in 1928, noting that “ten acres was all that one man could cut by hand in a year, and that [one farmer] was almost able to cut 10 acres a day with his John Deere tractor and brush cutter.”136 Brush cutting was necessary on land where the trees were too small to be valuable for timber or cordwood but too large to permit agricultural development. Land with recent burns, willows, and young poplars could be cleared efficiently with the technology. The move to northern farms in the latter half of the 1920s was facilitated by the opportunity to acquire a sec
ond homestead, contemporary agricultural affluence, and mechanization.

  Conclusion

  The sometimes tragic consequences of unsupported homestead settlement leading up to the Great War led the dominion government to radically change its settlement policies. Instead of a laissez-faire, sink or swim, attitude, the federal government initiated significant investment in the settlement process beyond simply enticing people onto the land. Soldier Settlement Board policies put both the land and the settler under closer scrutiny, emphasizing their fit. Loans, targeted purchasing power, sweeping land power, and investment in training became hallmarks. Women and their needs moved to centre stage along with health and welfare. Soldier settlement marked a significant new direction in dominion land settlement policies and should be viewed along this continuum. It laid the foundation for later settlement strategies, including the Land Settlement Branch, the 3,000 British Families scheme, the colonization departments of the railways, and the opening of second homesteads. All of these schemes were important in opening up new agricultural and potential resource lands along the forest edge and in changing the face of agricultural development and support in Canada.

  Flipped on its back, the question becomes: did the forest edge have a significant impact on the direction and prosecution of soldier settlement and, by extension, later land settlement or resettlement schemes? The answer, clearly, is yes. Although dominion loan policies were agile enough to help soldiers across a range of personal situations and ecological opportunities across the country, the SSB directed its attention to a particular kind of farming. The push to promote mixed-farming practices directed soldier settlers, if and when possible, onto ecologically mixed land that contained forest, meadow, and water. Soldier settlement became the poster child of a distinct move away from wheat mining and toward ecologically and economically mixed farming.

  Soldier settlement also had a significant impact on the agricultural growth and development of this edge place. The push for mixed farming meshed well with the promotional activity provided by the Prince Albert Board of Trade for the region north of the city. Moreover, the devastating fires of 1919 helped to purge the old timber berths. Renewed green growth enticed mixed farmers and ranchers to the northern regions, encouraged by both the landscape and the economic opportunities of the new stockyards and meat-packing plant at Prince Albert. The ongoing drought in the southwest corner of the province, the old Palliser Triangle, also redirected settlement efforts to the forested, mixed-farming region.

  Beyond all of these changes, though, lies an important point: mixed farmers at the forest edge engaged in much more than farming. They moved north to engage in a mixed lifestyle that combined mixed farming and opportunities and products of the forest edge landscape.

  Chapter Six

  Poor Man’s Paradise

  In 1919, land settlement adviser A. McOwan, writing in the Prince Albert Daily Herald, claimed that the north was “a Poor Man’s Paradise.” “There may be no bonanza,” he wrote, “but from the first day of entering it the adaptable man with initiative is assured of sustenance through all seasons and the reward of industry and thrift is the certainty of a margin and ultimate independence.” It was determined advertising, repositioning the region as a mecca for those with little capital. The promise of small but incremental gains, providing self-sufficiency and leading to independence, was a hallmark of mixed-farming rhetoric. McOwan went on to claim grandly that “the north country is no country for the slacker or the faint-hearted. ... I often think that the man who has least to lose progresses most rapidly.” The north region, he believed, would reward brave men who worked hard—a positive way of positioning the backbreaking work of making a living on a forest homestead. Economic success would be found by marketing the following list of products: “grain, potatoes, small fruit, vegetables, Seneca root, hay, cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, fish, venison, eggs, butter, furs, lumber, cordwood, fence posts, and such a seasonable necessity as Christmas trees.”1 McOwan advocated a mixed-farming base that combined not only products typical of a mixed farm (eggs, butter, cattle, hogs, sheep, and poultry) but also products particular to the forest edge environment: venison, furs, lumber, cordwood, fence posts, Seneca root, and Christmas trees.

  To the weary drylander wrung out by crop failures and drought, McOwan’s list of northern products seemed a cornucopia of simple but basic delights. Promoters worked hard to connect the forest edge with cheap living, recreating the north Prince Albert region as a destination for poor but ambitious and hard-working immigrants. Unfortunately, the variety of products blithely listed did not tell the whole story. A settler needed at least some money to invest. A good milk cow cost $40 to $50, a yoke of oxen $100, and a team of horses $350. Stock diversification was expensive.2 The natural products of the land were supposed to make the difference for incoming settlers as ways to generate, or save, capital. The fact that permits and licences, guns, ammunition, traps, knives, saws, axes, and grubhoes were needed—and cost money—was glossed over.

  Prince Albert took pride in and actively created its “northern” identity, taking as its motto “Gateway to the North.” A northern identity, though, had a few drawbacks. Local historian R. Mayson suggested that “twelve persons could be asked about Prince Albert and ten would answer that it is the door to the Arctic Circle and one step across the threshold of the frozen north would send its icy blasts to the marrow. Even so well-informed a person as Lady Macdonald said in one of her published letters that “‘Prince Albert is the most northerly city in the world.’”3 Nonetheless, the city thrived on its northern gateway identity. It became the pivot point of the two solitudes of resource boreal north and settled agricultural south in the western interior—an edge place where the two “personalities” of the province combined.

  The dual role of agriculture and off-farm resources suggested the growing connection between mixed farming and the forest landscape. Mixed farming was a traditional agricultural practice and at the ecotone took the idea several steps further. It became a place-based idea that encouraged combining on-farm products and off-farm forest resources. It was a good place in which to live and from which to draw other products or sources of income—an excellent interpretation that reflected older, First Nations models. Considering the deep-time history of human use that deliberately drew from a mixed resource base, it was painfully ironic that the First Nations families at Little Red River and Sturgeon Lake Reserves, well versed in using local resources, were denigrated for doing so. Despite diversified landscape use, which would eloquently satisfy McOwan’s list of forest and farm resources, these First Nations continued to fend off attacks from those who wanted their land. At the same time, non-Native homesteaders were encouraged and applauded for tenacity and inventiveness in pulling a living from off-farm opportunities in the local landscape.

  Off-farm industrial opportunities in the north Prince Albert region were varied. Timber was an important industry until 1919, when devastating fires swept through the landscape. Nonetheless, trees remained, including a new rank growth of poplar. Timber was largely replaced by a full cordwood and railway tie industry, particularly after branch railway lines snaked through the region in the postwar era. The large lakes supported commercial fisheries. Prince Albert remained a major centre of the fur industry and kept its important north-south links to the communities of the Churchill River system. A growing interest in mines and minerals contributed to a northward surge. Underpinning the growth of industry, though, was transportation. The old east-west water-based “highways” of the Churchill and the Saskatchewan were replaced by a north-south overland link that crossed the ecotone. Moving away from the rivers meant flipping the region from river to landscape-based knowledge—good tree stands, potential mineral sites, large lakes—that signalled new knowledge, control, and use of Saskatchewan’s northern reach. Land transportation links connected the communities in new ways and for different reasons. Soon overland freighters moved goods in b
oth directions, serving the new industrial businesses. All of these off-farm opportunities were dominant “pull” factors that encouraged migration. The ability to draw a living from several possibilities—“occupational pluralism”4—and an extensive barter economy took the community beyond a basic mixed-farming practice to develop a cultural, social, and economic lifestyle rooted in the landscape.

  Overland Freighting

  Nothing changed the face of transportation across western Canada like the railway.5 For northern regions, railways started the long decline of northern supply and shipping posts, including hardship for Aboriginal people who derived important income from the water transportation empire as York boat and canoe builders, paddlers, freight haulers, lumbermen, and suppliers. For many, canoe and York boat freighting provided a means of summer employment and wage labour, often used to supplement winter trapping and hunting returns.6 Yet northern communities still required goods and services, and in truth the fur-trade empire “remained strong and vibrant and expanded in the north until after the Second World War.”7 Trading companies and the federal government were both anxious to find efficient transportation links.