How the Canadian west was won
The dream was simple enough. Canada wanted to see its prairie west become a gigantic breadbasket, tied to central Canada through railways. Wheat would flow east to feed the world and central Canada would fill the returning freight cars with manufactured goods. Surely, with the west’s expanding population and ever-increasing agricultural bounty, Canada would be able to overtake the USA’s economic prosperity. The 20th century would belong to Canada!
The dream would only become a reality, however, if Canada got the farmers it needed. ‘The men whom we want above all others,’ proclaimed Canada’s assistant superintendent of immigration in London in 1907, ‘are the men of ambition and healthy condition; the men of good muscle who are willing to hustle.’
Great lone land
For more than two centuries, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been filling the world’s imagination with images of the Canadian west as a snowbound, inhospitable, empty
wilderness. ‘The great lone land,’ as one adventurer called it. Such images served the company’s interest well by keeping the population to a minimum, allowing it to preserve its monopoly on the fur trade. But different images were needed now if the world’s deeply ingrained misconceptions of the region were to be overcome and the west transformed into an agricultural economy.
To counter earlier prejudices, the federal government began a huge advertising campaign, the likes of which the world had never seen. Clifford Sifton, the federal minister responsible for settling the west, figured immigration was like any other commodity. ‘Just as soon as you stop advertising,’ he warned Canada’s House of Commons in 1899, ‘the movement is going to stop.’ Expanding its advertising budget from a few thousand dollars to a staggering four million in 1905, the government blitzed the four corners of Britain with one simple message: ‘Canada needs farmers.’
The message was trumpeted through every medium that the early 20th century offered – from displays at agricultural shows and horse-drawn exhibition wagons to public lectures, films, colourful slide shows, billboards and newspaper advertisements. ‘Our agents are equipped as missionaries of Canada, carrying propaganda to the smallest town and the remotest hamlet,’ said Canada’s London-based superintendent of immigration, J Obed Smith, in 1922. The blitz prompted the British illustrated paper The Graphic to compliment Canada on carrying out an advertising campaign that was ‘better and more extensive’ than any of the other colonies.
Immediate hit
The largest portion of the government’s advertising budget was set aside for a small pamphlet-size atlas. Featuring a combination of good writing, attractive photography, useful maps and colourful covers, the 30- to 40-page annual was thought to offer British farmers the best opportunity for developing ‘a fair understanding of the geography, climate, and natural resources of Canada’, as Sifton’s director of publicity put it.
From its first appearance in 1897, the Canada West atlas was an immediate hit. ‘The people like readable facts and maps,’ commented Obed Smith, ‘and I can conceive of no better value for the expenditure of public funds than… by getting [maps and atlases] in the homes of school children.’ Alberta’s Edmonton Bulletin declared it ‘in appearance and in matter… attractive, readable and reliable. The book is worthy of a place in any library and will serve an excellent purpose.’ At a time when a Canadian book was considered a bestseller if it sold 5,000 copies, the government was printing as many as 675,000 copies of the atlas annually.
In order to use the atlas to its full potential, deputy interior minister James Smart suggested sponsoring a nationwide competition, in which British schoolchildren would be asked to write an essay on Canada. The best essay in each school would be awarded a specially minted bronze medallion. Although the atlases were handed out to students, Smart instinctively knew that their parents would also look at them. ‘In this way,’ he mused, ‘it is thought that the parents of the children will also become interested with a desire to know more of this country’ and perhaps think about emigrating.
The student response was overwhelming. ‘I am extremely pleased with your free atlas,’ wrote Edith Beckett to the superintendent of immigration in London. ‘It is very much better than I expected it to be. When my mother saw it, she said it was very kind of you for sending it free of charge… I have backed it to keep it clean and put it out of the reach of my younger sister.’ In the first year alone, immigration officials in London were inundated with some 90,000 essays to adjudicate. ‘It taught us a lesson,’ admitted a Canadian official to an Australian newspaper, ‘and we have never lost touch with the schools.’
The atlases’ popularity undoubtedly stemmed, at least in part, from the fact that they ignored some of the least attractive aspects of western Canada – the cold, the isolation and the dryness – or at least repackaged these negatives into something that was more respectable. References to the cold, for example, were replaced by such euphemisms as ‘bracing’, ‘invigorating’ and ‘healthy’, while actual temperatures and rainfall values were given as monthly, seasonal and yearly averages, which hid the daily extremes.
Without exception, the atlases touted the new and empty landscape not as it was, but as it was hoped it would become. Using words such as ‘unexcelled’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘inexhaustible’ throughout every edition, the atlases unabashedly promoted the productivity of the region, its growing season and its bountiful crops.
The colourful, eye-catching covers were especially boastful in this regard, promising not only a productive landscape but a picturesque one as well. In an era when
the use of colour in publications was at a premium – less than half of one per cent of the British media used colour at the time – the colourful covers must have made a strong first impression, suggesting that life in the west wasn’t the drab, lonely existence many potential immigrants may have been led to believe.
The covers always set the horizon high so as to diminish the immensity of the prairies, and everywhere there was lush vegetation. There isn’t a single mosquito or black fly in sight. Families may be toiling in the fields, but they are obviously happy. Their hard work is justly rewarded, since they are always in the company of bountiful harvests.
Pack of lies
Despite their slick appeal, the misleading nature of Canada’s promotional material didn’t go unnoticed. ‘I have before me the latest pamphlets on Manitoba and the North-West and all I can say is that the ones that are not a pack of lies are a pack of rubbish,’ wrote one unidentified victim of prairie boosterism on his return to England from Manitoba in 1891.
After he had been in the country for several years, George Shepherd, an immigrant from Kent, realised the advertisements were ‘a little on the optimistic side’. ‘It was said,’ recounts Shepherd in his autobiography, West of Yesterday, ‘that… while it got cold in winter, the cold was dry and not unpleasant. I used to recall these glowing words… as I ran behind the sleigh at 30° below zero to keep from freezing.’
Similar tales were all too common. Local histories are filled with stories of miserable prairie winters, the loneliness of homestead life, lightning storms that curled your hair and hail that flattened family dreams along with those ‘bumper’ crops. An estimated four in ten homesteads were never ‘proved up’ because of such adversity; the homesteaders simply gave up and moved out the country, mostly to the USA.
But as long as the campaign was in full swing, settlers made their way west every year by the tens of thousands. Where census takers counted only 55,176 farms on Canada’s prairies in 1901, two decades later, there were 288,079. Winnipeg had been the only prairie city in 1896, but by 1914, there were 12. Without any US-style shootouts with desperadoes or any Indian wars, but with lots of help from a colourful, eye-catching advertising campaign, the Canadian west was won within the span of a single generation.
May 2010
The dream would only become a reality, however, if Canada got the farmers it needed. ‘The men whom we want above all others,’ proclaimed Canada’s assistant superintendent of immigration in London in 1907, ‘are the men of ambition and healthy condition; the men of good muscle who are willing to hustle.’
Great lone land
For more than two centuries, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been filling the world’s imagination with images of the Canadian west as a snowbound, inhospitable, empty
wilderness. ‘The great lone land,’ as one adventurer called it. Such images served the company’s interest well by keeping the population to a minimum, allowing it to preserve its monopoly on the fur trade. But different images were needed now if the world’s deeply ingrained misconceptions of the region were to be overcome and the west transformed into an agricultural economy.
To counter earlier prejudices, the federal government began a huge advertising campaign, the likes of which the world had never seen. Clifford Sifton, the federal minister responsible for settling the west, figured immigration was like any other commodity. ‘Just as soon as you stop advertising,’ he warned Canada’s House of Commons in 1899, ‘the movement is going to stop.’ Expanding its advertising budget from a few thousand dollars to a staggering four million in 1905, the government blitzed the four corners of Britain with one simple message: ‘Canada needs farmers.’
The message was trumpeted through every medium that the early 20th century offered – from displays at agricultural shows and horse-drawn exhibition wagons to public lectures, films, colourful slide shows, billboards and newspaper advertisements. ‘Our agents are equipped as missionaries of Canada, carrying propaganda to the smallest town and the remotest hamlet,’ said Canada’s London-based superintendent of immigration, J Obed Smith, in 1922. The blitz prompted the British illustrated paper The Graphic to compliment Canada on carrying out an advertising campaign that was ‘better and more extensive’ than any of the other colonies.
Immediate hit
The largest portion of the government’s advertising budget was set aside for a small pamphlet-size atlas. Featuring a combination of good writing, attractive photography, useful maps and colourful covers, the 30- to 40-page annual was thought to offer British farmers the best opportunity for developing ‘a fair understanding of the geography, climate, and natural resources of Canada’, as Sifton’s director of publicity put it.
From its first appearance in 1897, the Canada West atlas was an immediate hit. ‘The people like readable facts and maps,’ commented Obed Smith, ‘and I can conceive of no better value for the expenditure of public funds than… by getting [maps and atlases] in the homes of school children.’ Alberta’s Edmonton Bulletin declared it ‘in appearance and in matter… attractive, readable and reliable. The book is worthy of a place in any library and will serve an excellent purpose.’ At a time when a Canadian book was considered a bestseller if it sold 5,000 copies, the government was printing as many as 675,000 copies of the atlas annually.
In order to use the atlas to its full potential, deputy interior minister James Smart suggested sponsoring a nationwide competition, in which British schoolchildren would be asked to write an essay on Canada. The best essay in each school would be awarded a specially minted bronze medallion. Although the atlases were handed out to students, Smart instinctively knew that their parents would also look at them. ‘In this way,’ he mused, ‘it is thought that the parents of the children will also become interested with a desire to know more of this country’ and perhaps think about emigrating.
The student response was overwhelming. ‘I am extremely pleased with your free atlas,’ wrote Edith Beckett to the superintendent of immigration in London. ‘It is very much better than I expected it to be. When my mother saw it, she said it was very kind of you for sending it free of charge… I have backed it to keep it clean and put it out of the reach of my younger sister.’ In the first year alone, immigration officials in London were inundated with some 90,000 essays to adjudicate. ‘It taught us a lesson,’ admitted a Canadian official to an Australian newspaper, ‘and we have never lost touch with the schools.’
The atlases’ popularity undoubtedly stemmed, at least in part, from the fact that they ignored some of the least attractive aspects of western Canada – the cold, the isolation and the dryness – or at least repackaged these negatives into something that was more respectable. References to the cold, for example, were replaced by such euphemisms as ‘bracing’, ‘invigorating’ and ‘healthy’, while actual temperatures and rainfall values were given as monthly, seasonal and yearly averages, which hid the daily extremes.
Without exception, the atlases touted the new and empty landscape not as it was, but as it was hoped it would become. Using words such as ‘unexcelled’, ‘prosperity’ and ‘inexhaustible’ throughout every edition, the atlases unabashedly promoted the productivity of the region, its growing season and its bountiful crops.
The colourful, eye-catching covers were especially boastful in this regard, promising not only a productive landscape but a picturesque one as well. In an era when
the use of colour in publications was at a premium – less than half of one per cent of the British media used colour at the time – the colourful covers must have made a strong first impression, suggesting that life in the west wasn’t the drab, lonely existence many potential immigrants may have been led to believe.
The covers always set the horizon high so as to diminish the immensity of the prairies, and everywhere there was lush vegetation. There isn’t a single mosquito or black fly in sight. Families may be toiling in the fields, but they are obviously happy. Their hard work is justly rewarded, since they are always in the company of bountiful harvests.
Pack of lies
Despite their slick appeal, the misleading nature of Canada’s promotional material didn’t go unnoticed. ‘I have before me the latest pamphlets on Manitoba and the North-West and all I can say is that the ones that are not a pack of lies are a pack of rubbish,’ wrote one unidentified victim of prairie boosterism on his return to England from Manitoba in 1891.
After he had been in the country for several years, George Shepherd, an immigrant from Kent, realised the advertisements were ‘a little on the optimistic side’. ‘It was said,’ recounts Shepherd in his autobiography, West of Yesterday, ‘that… while it got cold in winter, the cold was dry and not unpleasant. I used to recall these glowing words… as I ran behind the sleigh at 30° below zero to keep from freezing.’
Similar tales were all too common. Local histories are filled with stories of miserable prairie winters, the loneliness of homestead life, lightning storms that curled your hair and hail that flattened family dreams along with those ‘bumper’ crops. An estimated four in ten homesteads were never ‘proved up’ because of such adversity; the homesteaders simply gave up and moved out the country, mostly to the USA.
But as long as the campaign was in full swing, settlers made their way west every year by the tens of thousands. Where census takers counted only 55,176 farms on Canada’s prairies in 1901, two decades later, there were 288,079. Winnipeg had been the only prairie city in 1896, but by 1914, there were 12. Without any US-style shootouts with desperadoes or any Indian wars, but with lots of help from a colourful, eye-catching advertising campaign, the Canadian west was won within the span of a single generation.
May 2010
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