The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (31 page)

As the Blacks waited apprehensively aboard their Great Northern
coaches in St. Paul’s Union Depot and their children scampered about making mud pies in the yard (the waiting room was too small to handle them all), the wires buzzed between Washington, Ottawa, and Winnipeg. The Canadian authorities had made it clear they weren’t wanted, but Henry Sneed had no intention of turning back. After he got in touch with the U.S. State Department, the situation began to take on some of the aspects of an international incident. The State Department wired to the American consul general in Ottawa, who had already heard from his colleague in Winnipeg. Could Canada exclude any class from entry on account of colour? No, came the answer, Canada couldn’t; nobody had wanted to spell out the specifics of racial discrimination in cold type. Any healthy applicant who had fifty dollars was admissible. Late in the afternoon of March 21, the train moved out of St. Paul toward Emerson, Manitoba, the Canadian border point.

But the Canadian authorities had let it be known that the party would be subjected to a rigorous medical examination and all who failed to pass would be turned back. If, by this warning, Canada had hoped to frighten off the Blacks, they reckoned without Henry Sneed. He had been careful to select only the healthiest and most prosperous families.

The Immigration Department rushed eleven members of its staff from Winnipeg to Emerson, including several doctors. What followed was in marked contrast to the usual cursory examination. Young John Blackburn, from Pennsylvania, who crossed into Canada at Emerson with his family that same month, recalled that “immigration officials at the international boundary were courteous and friendly. There was no examination of luggage, and entry into Canada seemed merely a matter of form.” But the Blacks were held up for two days while the doctors examined them from scalp to ankle and other officials questioned them about their finances.

By March 23 they could find no reason to hold them back any longer. Not only were these people in robust health, they were also well off. Most had cash or credit cheques ranging between one thousand and three thousand dollars. Sneed, who was held until the last (the others refusing to proceed without him), was worth $40,000 and was carrying $10,000 of it in cash on his person! Three of his party were turned back; the others went on to Edmonton to settle with the Edwardses in Amber Valley.

By now, however, the department was seriously concerned over
what some papers were calling “the invasion of Negroes.” Sneed had told the press that he was in the vanguard of five thousand Blacks seeking admission to Canada. Wesley Speers was dispatched post-haste to Oklahoma to warn Black leaders that there was danger north of the border for their people. The department even hired a clergyman – black, of course – to stump the state preaching against Black migration. It sent Will White on a fact-finding mission; he reported, predictably, that in the Black communities, “laziness is abundant and seems to have put its hall-mark everywhere,” a conclusion that did not seem to agree with his own observation that the Oklahoma “Negro-Indians” possessed “wealth much greater than that of the white settlers in the State.” White advised against any further Black emigration from Oklahoma: “There is so much of the Indian blood in the coloured man of Oklahoma, carrying with it all the evil traits of a life of rapine and murder, that it will not easily assimilate with agrarian life.”

In Canada, the objections were nationwide. The Toronto
Mail and Empire
, ignoring Canada’s boast that it was a country of law and order, called up the spectre of race riots if more Blacks were allowed into the country. But the protests were most violent in Edmonton, which, rumour whispered, was the main target of the Black invasion. The Board of Trade demanded that all Blacks be banned from Canada. The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire warned that the Blacks would prey on white women. The city council demanded the immediate segregation of all Negroes.

By May, 1911, the Immigration Department had an order-in-council ready for government approval banning all Black immigration for a year. But Wilfrid Laurier had a problem. An election was coming up, and there was a significant Black vote in Halifax and in southern Ontario. Most of it was Liberal; could the government afford to antagonize these people? The government could not; the order was dropped; Canada continued to pretend publicly that every race was welcome while privately tightening the screws on Black immigration. The
CPR
co-operated, excluding Negroes from Western tours and refusing them the reduced rates to which every white settler was entitled.

In its efforts to keep the West racially pure, the Department of Immigration was hugely successful. In 1901 there were ninety-eight Blacks on the prairies. In 1911, after the greatest immigration boom in the nation’s history, there were only 1,524.

4
Loosening Imperial ties

By mid-decade it was obvious that the American invasion was changing the West. The Americans moved confidently and speedily, with greater assurance than most Canadians, especially Eastern Canadians. Ella Sykes was to discover that in Canada life galloped along at a faster pace than it did in her more leisurely homeland. But Americans seemed to gallop faster than Canadians, seizing opportunities that others had missed, stealing a march on cautious Torontonians, pushing ahead as if life were a race with the prize to the swiftest.

One Saturday night in March, 1906, for example, J.H. Roberts, a South Dakota farmer, arrived in Calgary with his wife and family and a trainload of fellow Americans. Roberts and seven of his friends had decided to locate near Mannville on the Canadian Northern east of Edmonton. They were in such a hurry to reach the site that they couldn’t wait for the Canadian weekend to end. Leaving their families in the immigration hall (every hotel was full), they pushed on to Edmonton, found their way into the land office by the back door, and began rummaging about, looking for maps and information. Here the agent found them and tried to explain that in Canada everything closed up tight on the Lord’s Day. Roberts and his friends would have none of that.

“Hurry!” cried Roberts. “Hurry! If you could see them coming after us you would think there was hurry. We are going out to Mannville on tonight’s train and we want a map.” They got what they wanted.

The Americans brought a more aggressive style to the West. American entrepreneurs were prepared to take greater risks than Eastern Canadians. They poured into Winnipeg in the early days of the century, as strange in their own way as the Doukhobors, with their broad-brimmed felt hats, their fierce moustaches and goatees, their strange cuts of chin whiskers and their midwestern drawls – buyers, speculators, land company men, intent on buying up large blocks of the prairies to sell at a handsome profit to their fellow countrymen.

As a result, the American land companies made the largest profits. They were often prepared to buy marginal land that others would not take a chance on and, by high pressure methods, make it popular and saleable. Their willingness to spend large sums of speculative money, to organize every detail, and to advertise freely astonished the
more conservative real estate interests in Canada. “These companies work on different lines altogether from any of the real estate agents here with whom we have hitherto done business,” F.T. Griffin, the
CPR
’s land commissioner, wrote to a Canadian developer. “They go after their purchaser, pay railway fares, accompany them to the land, personally conduct them over it and stay with them, eat, sleep and drink with them if necessary until a sale is made or they fail in the attempt.”

The Americans were even more aggressive than this comment suggests. B.L. Grant, president of the Grant-Armstrong Land Company of St. Paul, described the technique in detail in 1903: “We do more than sell the lands; we colonize them. We organize excursions from different parts of Wisconsin and Illinois, giving a special rate of $18 for the trip. We bring the people to Winnipeg where we have our rooms and treat them as guests. We show them over your city, take them out to our lands where we have our carriages waiting to drive over the entire district, and we take them back, all for $18, which is refunded if they purchase the land. Why those people talk of … the wonders of the west continuously and that is the best advertisement we could want.”

The biggest and most controversial of the American land speculations was that of the Saskatchewan Valley Land Corporation, which in 1902 purchased a vast block of more than a million acres of railway and government land between Regina and Prince Albert. The larger portion of this block – some 839,000 acres – was part of the land grant awarded to the Qu’Appelle, Long Lake and Saskatchewan Railway and Steamship Company, as “fairly fit for settlement.” The railway, whose front man was E.B. Osler, M.P, a well-known Toronto banker, had rejected much of it, however, as sub-marginal, and the matter was being disputed in the courts when the newly organized Saskatchewan Valley company of Minnesota businessmen jumped in and offered to take it over. The land company, made up largely of former Canadians who had immigrated to the United States and had acquired broad experience in previous land speculations there, paid $1.53 an acre for the railway lands and $1.00 an acre for 250,000 adjoining acres of government land.

The deal was made in secret between Clifford Sifton and the principals of the company. Once the details were revealed they touched off a raging controversy in the House of Commons. The land company made a staggering profit because it sold the lands quickly for
prices ranging between six and ten dollars an acre. The presence, as directors and incorporators, of two prominent Liberals, D.H. McDonald of Qu’Appelle and A.J. Adamson of Rosthern, heightened the Conservatives’ suspicions. The latter was a candidate in the 1904 election and, more significant, a brother-in-law of J.G. Turriff, Sifton’s Chief Commissioner of Dominion Lands. The Americans were wise in the ways of politics: Adamson and McDonald were obviously in on the original deal to grease the political skids. Once the contract was approved the company was reorganized to include others, almost certainly including Turriff, who did not deny under oath that he was involved.

Nevertheless the Conservatives found it difficult to make political capital out of the enterprise. For one thing, the land had stood empty for years; even the railway didn’t want it. One man who did have faith in it was Wesley Speers, who visited St. Paul and convinced the Americans (including several executives and stockholders of the Quaker Oats Company) that the land was suitable for flax growing. Secondly, the government had driven a hard bargain; the new company had to place a minimum of twenty settlers per township on the adjacent public lands within a five-year period. And finally, the scheme was wildly successful: a vast strip of Saskatchewan country was rapidly filled with colonists, thanks to the Americans’ bold tactics. They at once set about building hotels, boarding houses, and livery facilities for the newcomers. They brought in a trainload of two hundred American businessmen, merchants, bankers, and reporters to look over the property and publicize it. They spent forty thousand dollars the first year in advertising. They set up twenty-two hundred sales agencies in twelve states. All this investment paid off handsomely; no other land company had, to this point, been so successful. Land that no Canadian wanted had been bought for a song – the Americans used discounted half-breed land scrip rather than cash, which meant that their original investment was as low as fifty thousand dollars – and sold for ten times its original cost. It was, as Cy Warman, a U.S. writer declared, “one of the first guns in the American invasion’ of Canada.”

The American invasion caused considerable soul searching on both sides of the Atlantic. What would be the result of all this influx? It was certainly changing the West; would it change Canada? Would the nation become “Americanized,” or, worse still, would it become part of the United States? Many Americans thought so. Would the American
presence mean a loosening of Imperial bonds? Many Britons believed it would. Or would the West become a separate nation, neither British nor American? The American frontier novelist James Oliver Curwood was convinced of that. “A new nation,” he declared, “will be born in the West, formed of the very flesh and blood of the United States.” As Curwood noted in Alberta, “every town is hustling with American spirit” and former Americans were entering politics, becoming reeves and councillors in Alberta communities.

The general attitude south of the border was that the West would soon be part of the United States. The
Saturday Evening Post
referred to Alberta as “the Yankee province.” Such Eastern papers as the Brooklyn
Eagle
, the New York
Post
, and the Detroit
Journal
were convinced that annexation was inevitable. Western American politicians echoed these sentiments. Senator Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota thought the union would come as the result of assimilation. Marsh Murdock, the powerful Republican congressman from Kansas, was for outright capture. The Governor of North Carolina predicted a struggle that would result in “one great republic under the government of what is now the United States.”

Such a possibility failed to raise the hackles of Canadians, giddy from the prosperity the Americans were bringing. John Dafoe said he saw no sign that Westerners viewed the invasion with any feeling of dread. Frederick Haultain, the Premier of the North West Territories, agreed that there was no political danger in the influx. The Toronto
Globe
was worried at first: five out of eight Alberta newspapers were edited by former Americans. It sent a reporter out west only to be told that the editorial ideas expressed were no different from those of other Canadian newspapers.

The Americans in the West, in fact, turned out to be among the most enthusiastic Canadians. “It is the Americans rather than the Canadians who show jealousy at the flocking in of people of other nationalities and raise the cry of ‘Canada for the Canadians,’” the national president of the British Brotherhood Movement discovered during a trip to Canada. Those Americans who were not European-born or ex-Canadians were, in the words of Dr. Peter Bryce, chief medical inspector for the Immigration Department, “accidental” rather than “essential” Americans. This type of American, Bryce explained, “came to the [American] West for bread, and not for liberty; he will come north into Canada for bread, regardless of national flag or tradition.”