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The Plains Farmer and the Prairie Province Frontier, 1897–1914*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Karel Denis Bicha
Affiliation:
The University of Manitoba

Extract

It is curious that students of the American frontier and population movements have paid so little attention to the role of American farmers in the settlement and development of the last plains frontier—the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Perhaps the twentieth century has provided scholars with too many alternative “frontiers” to scrutinize, or perhaps the famous pronouncement of the Superintendent of the Census in 1890 has been accepted too casually. The movement has not been subjected to careful analysis, and the published material on the topic is peripheral or fraught with error, especially in its quantitative aspects.

Type
Note
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1965

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References

1 See Hansen, Marcus L. and Brebner, John Bartlett, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 219–43Google Scholar; Sharp, Paul F., The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada: A Survey Showing American Parallels (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), pp. 120Google Scholar, and When Our West Moved North,” American Historical Review, LV (Jan. 1950), 286300Google Scholar.

2 U.S. Congress, Senate, Immigration Commission, The Immigration Situation in Canada, Senate Document 469, 61st Cong., 2d Sess., 1910, p. 31.

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4 Mackintosh, W. A., Prairie Settlement: The Geographical Setting (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1934), pp. 2223Google Scholar.

5 The relationship between long-run price increases in staple commodities and movement into frontier areas was first demonstrated in North, Douglass C., “International Capital Flows and the Development of the American West,” Journal of Economic History, XVI (Dec. 1956), 493505CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13 An interesting case study of this trend, the firm of Rockwell Sayre, was presented by Allan G. Bogue in his presidential address to the Agricultural History Society, April 30, 1964, in Cleveland, Ohio.

14 U.S., Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910. Agriculture, V, 69, 75.

15 E. A. Goldenweiser and Leon E. Truesdell, Farm Tenancy in the United States, U. S. Bureau of the Census, Monograph No. 4, p. 236.

16 Ibid., pp. 26, 222, 224, 236, 245.

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20 Seward T. St. John, “Pioneer Recollections,” unpublished ms., Saskatchewan Archives (Saskatoon), n.d., pp. 98–103.

21 Except for a three-year residence requirement, the Canadian Homestead Act of 1872 was similar to the United States law.

22 A bona fide immigrant was one who satisfied an official at the border that he intended to reside in Canada “permanently.” Immigrants declared a province of destination at the time of entry.

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28 These figures are derived from Table 1.

30 Fifth Census of Canada, 1911, II, 376–77, 422–25.

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33 Canada, Parliament, Sessional Papers, 1900–1917, Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior, Report of the Deputy Minister of the Interior. See Merle Curti et al, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 69–70; Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 26; James C. Malin, “The Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, IV (Feb. 1935), 365–69. In their study of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, Curti et al. found “persistence” of 30 per cent or less during the pioneer decades 1860–1870 and 1870–1880. Bogue, sampling turnover in Bureau County, Illinois, and four townships of Wapello County, Iowa, found that “persistence” varied from 26 per cent to 56 per cent among new settlers in each of the decades 1850–1860, 1860–1870, and 1870–1880. Malin's data on the decades between 1860 and 1900 for five areas in Kansas indicated that “persistence” varied between 24 per cent and 46 per cent. Settlers in Kansas, Illinois, and Iowa exhibited greater “persistence” than American farmers in western Canada, while settlers in Trempealeau County exhibited slightly less. The Trempealeau settlers were apparently attracted to the prairie land of southern Minnesota.

34 Unpublished census conducted by the Northwest Mounted Police, 1895. Cited in Thomas, Lewis H., “Responsible Government in the Northwest Territories, 1870–1897” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1953), p. 383Google Scholar.

35 In addition to spur lines, two new transcontinental roads were completed during the period.

36 Morton, W. L., “The Significance of Site in the Settlement of the Canadian and American Wests,” Agricultural History, XXV (July 1951), 101Google Scholar.

37 Grain Growers Guide (Winnipeg), VII (July 8, 1914), 6.

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40 Dafoe, John W., “Western Canada: Its Resources and Possibilities,” Review of Reviews, XXXV (June 1907), 702Google Scholar.