The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (42 page)

His paper was nothing if not theatrical. Its editor in 1904 was the colourful Garnett Clay Porter, a Kentucky colonel who boasted that he had once been forced to flee across the Mexican border as the result of a hill feud that had seen one man hanged. Porter, who had also taken part in the Klondike gold rush, was news editor of the
World
in Toronto when Young hired him. A hard-drinking poker-playing journalist, he fitted the Calgary image and caught the foothill spirit from some of the other tenants of the Hull Building in which the paper was published. These included Bob Edwards of the
Eye Opener
, P. J. “Paddy” Nolan, the most eloquent criminal lawyer in the province (who had on occasion written editorials for the paper), and J.E. Brownlee, a future premier of Alberta.

No modern journalist can pore over the
Herald’s
yellowing pages without mixed feelings: unease at the virulence of its regionalism and racism, dismay at the bullying extremism of its opinions, but admiration for its trenchant style, which makes present day editorial writing seem pallid.

Here is the
Herald
in 1902, roaring away in one of a score of editorials demanding provincial autonomy for the Territories: “We are not dogs nor serfs to be placated with a niggardly dole barely sufficient to sustain life. We are freeborn Canadian citizens who stand for our unalienable heritage, and shame on the traitor who will abate one jot or tittle of our just demands.”

The
Herald
had guts; it was quite prepared to put its money where its editorial mouth was. In 1901 it had pointed out that there was no excuse for Calgarians to send orders back east since most Eastern concerns were “cheap john places of business,” and Calgary products were just as good. Four years later when Alberta achieved autonomy
the paper responded by refusing all advertising from Eastern department stores.

Ottawa’s centralist treatment of the new province that year – “the country’s shame” as the
Herald
called it – drove the paper to a series of apoplectic editorials. “Can Albertans be forced to eat dirt and say they like it?” the paper cried. Alberta was “a political Cinderella … robbed of freedom … deprived of the sacred right of home rule.” Alberta, screamed the
Herald
headline, “has been cut up to suit the purposes of the Ottawa conspirators.”

In these machinations the
Herald
thought it saw a sinister Roman Catholic plot. Catholic Edmonton, which the paper called the “centre of French-Galician power,” had been named the capital in spite of its much smaller population because of the political influence of Frank Oliver. The paper went so far as to suggest that Laurier, guided by the Pope’s representative in Ottawa, was planning to establish a French-Canadian province in the North West.

In refusing full autonomy, the paper declared, the government was fastening upon the new provinces “a system marked by the worst form of coercion and intrigue.” From that day on the
Herald
rarely mentioned the word “Liberal.” It referred instead to the “coercionists” or the “coercion machine.” When the Liberals won Alberta’s first provincial election in November, 1905, its news columns reported that “by the worst exhibition of Ottawa interference ever displayed at a provincial election, the coercion plot has been forced upon the electors of Alberta.”

The
Herald
saw the West as a distinctive entity, its very newness an asset, unshackling the people from the hidebound East. More than any daily paper of its day – more than Frank Oliver’s
Bulletin
or Dafoe’s
Free Press –
it managed, in its ebullient, free-swinging fashion, to capture the spirit of the West. That was, in fact, the title it placed on one of its more memorable editorials, written on May 16, 1905, at the end of the Sifton era, when the long fight for provincial autonomy had been realized:

“Undoubtedly there is something about the West and western life that gives it distinctiveness and creates a certain peculiar temperament; and for lack of a definite term they call that something ‘the spirit of the west.’ The western spirit is a composite quality. National conditions of geography and climate are at the bottom of it and beget, in the first place, enthusiasm; energy and optimism are the outcome of enthusiasm; and these three are balanced with a healthy sincerity.… The West
is strong and free, it has no vain traditions; it is rich in possibilities and even richer in hopefulness. The ozone of the wide expanses has got into the ways and methods of business, and pioneer courage has developed courageous enterprise. Therein consists, as nearly as one can express it, the spirit of the West, which brings even the unenterprising under its sway and promises to change the whole complex of our modern conditions.”

In a later editorial, the
Herald
returned to this theme and defined its own concept of the Westerner as a man who had cut his ties permanently with the East: “…  he must be true to the West before the West will be good to him. It will not do, for instance, to have his body in Vancouver while his heart is rooted in Toronto. The jealous West soon smells that out and gives him the cold shoulder.… He throws in his lot altogether or the West throws him out.”

Those words were written in 1910. It would surprise few Westerners if they appeared in the Calgary
Herald
of 1984.

2
The common experience

Westerners, of course,
were
different, no matter where they came from. Most shared some form of common experience, the very stuff of nationalism. They were bound together because, in so many instances, they had come through the fire and survived; and they were proud of it. The settlement period was for the three Western provinces what the Voortrek had been for the Boers or the Long March would be for the Chinese. The
Herald
could look down on the “vain tradition” of the East; but in the act of settlement and survival, the West was developing a tradition of its own.

Thousands remembered, and not without a pang, the goodbyes on the docks of Liverpool or at the railway depots of Austria-Hungary: the sudden realization that they were saying farewell to these grandmothers, cousins, and close friends as surely as if death had claimed them (“Inexpressible grief seized my young heart.… The parting and the mournful keening were heartbreaking. Old and Young wept as they bade us farewell, perhaps forever …”). Thousands remembered the cursory medical examinations as they boarded the immigrant ships (“What’s your name? Are you well? Hold out your tongue …”); the dreadful storms on the Atlantic (“We all felt trapped. Some of us
thought we were doomed.… We lost all count of time …”); the first unprepossessing view of Canada (“It smelled offish, of wood, of pine trees. It was unkempt and ragged and slapdash …”); the slatted seats on the colonist cars, imprinted forever, some would claim, on parts of the body; the hasty meals snatched at divisional points (“All you can eat for a quarter”); and the homesickness, the shock of anticlimax in the pit of the stomach at the first view of the stubbled prairie, the long wait at the land office, the bone-rattling ride across the open plains to the new homestead, the despair, the toil, the loneliness. These experiences, remembered, exchanged, sometimes exaggerated, contributed to the folk memory of the prairie people.

It is the spring of 1905, and we have arrived at last at the Dominion Land Office in Saskatoon, housed above an agricultural implement shop and reached by a rough wooden ladder. We grip the handrail, climb the breakneck stairway, and find ourselves in an office crowded with applicants for homesteads and presided over by a single youth
.

We struggle for a place at the counter, but it is some while before we reach it. Here we are referred to a large wall map, marked out in townships, sections, and quarter-sections. This is the grid that has been imposed upon the West from the Red to the Rockies, disdainful of natural borders and barriers, criss-crossing coulée and river, lake and marsh – a surveyor’s dream, a homesteader’s nightmare
.

Some of the sections are already marked off with pencilled crosses, chosen by early arrivals. We note with dismay that all the little crosses radiate out from Saskatoon for thirty miles before any vacant land is available. Have we come too late? Where should we locate? The youth in charge cannot advise us; that is not his responsibility. We must put a cross on our chosen homestead on the map, find our own way to the land, look it over, and if we like what we see, make our weary way back to Saskatoon, wait in line again, and file our homestead entry, hoping that no one else has beaten us to it
.

We ask for a map of the Saskatchewan Valley, but there are none; the rush has been so great that all the maps have been snapped up, and the new ones have not yet arrived. The best thing we can do is to hire a rig at eight dollars a day, drive out across the open prairie, and find a man who can “locate” us – that is, show us what land is still available
.

The next day we head out along Saskatoon’s main street, clinging to the high cliff above the bend in the river. Soon the river is behind us and we are out on the lonely prairie. The trail takes us past a tiny
settlement: a few farmhouses and a school on one side of the road, a few new gravestones on the other, but neither church nor post office as yet. We travel another twenty-five miles before we reach the next school, another wooden shack with a single teacher, stark on the prairie
.

Our objective is the Eagle Hills, but we cannot reach them in one day. At last we find lodging – a kind of half-way house consisting of a one-room shack with a sod stable run by a bespectacled Englishman from Surrey, who puts us up on a mattress on the floor while he and his wife retire behind a curtained partition. The following day at noon we come in sight of the Eagle Hills, a long, low range rising sharply from the plain. Here in a big two-storey farmhouse a goateed farmer from Oregon offers to locate us for ten dollars a head and five dollars a day for driving the team
.

Off we go for three hours across the wild prairie seamed by old buffalo tracks and pockmarked by gopher holes, following the wisp of a trail until we reached the area marked on the land office map. Back and forth we rattle, searching for good land, rejecting section after section. The land here is too rolling; there the soil is too light. It is too high; it is too low; there are too many sloughs; there are not enough sloughs. At last, after much zig-zagging, we make our decision, scribbling down the section numbers on the iron corner stakes, looking for the holes in the ground that mark the quarter-sections, and selecting alternative homesteads in case our first choices have already been reserved
.

By the time we return to the farmhouse, just before dusk, the saffron sun of late evening is gilding the feathery grass, the tones changing as the sky reddens. Here and there we can see the green shoots of spring poking through the dead stubble. We have travelled close to sixty miles this day and our task is not yet ended
.

We rise early in order to make the long trek back to Saskatoon in a single day. The hotels are full when we arrive late at night, but we find a spot to sleep on the floor of a Chinese restaurant. The next morning in the land office, we swear an oath on a greasy Bible that the land we have located is unoccupied and unimproved, pay our ten dollars, pocket our receipt. Now we own a piece of the West – or we will own it someday. For we are gambling with the Canadian government, betting our ten dollars that we can hang on to our 160 acres for three years and make a go of it in the promised land
.

The darker themes interwoven into the symphony of prairie settlement
were universal. Whether he came from the Caucasus or the Black Hills, from Petworth in Sussex or Coboconk in Ontario, almost every settler experienced in some form the drudgery, the monotony, the loneliness, and the terror of homestead life. They never forgot it. In later years, when life was sweeter, when the frame farmhouse had replaced the log shack that had replaced the sod hovel, they looked back on it all with wonder, pride, and not a little affection. The dreadful food, the fearful prairie fires, the terrifying white-outs became part of a prairie tradition. People talked nostalgically of fat bacon, soggy flapjacks, rabbit stew, and tea as soldiers talk of bully beef and Spam. Who did not remember the day when a ring of flames surrounded the farm buildings and men dropped exhausted from beating out the embers with wet sacks? They were members of an élite, these prairie pioneers; they had come through experiences that no other Canadians would ever understand.

John Diefenbaker, for instance, would never forget the night when, as a boy, he was lost in a Saskatchewan blizzard, unable to see ten feet before him, forced to cower all night in a snowbank, his home only two and a half miles away, kept alive by an uncle who wouldn’t allow him to go to sleep.
March 11, 1908:
that date was engraved on his memory; it was something he couldn’t forget, and it became something to boast about. It set the Prime Minister apart from the effete Easterners who had no conception of pioneer prairie life. It made him one with his constituents in Prince Albert, veterans all, who knew from their own experience what he, the quintessential Western maverick, had gone through.

And who but a real Westerner could know or comprehend the haunting loneliness of the prairie? Maria Adamowska knew. When her husband was forced to go away to work and she was left alone on the farm, “my heart broke with loneliness. I almost died of boredom. I wept, my children wept, and my despair almost drove me crazy.” Evan Davies, the Welsh immigrant, encountered one settler whose wife had actually gone insane from loneliness.

The checkerboard pattern of the prairies accentuated the solitary life. People couldn’t hive together. As one woman, Mrs. Carl Tellenius, remembered, “you couldn’t even see the light of a neighbour’s house.” But the pattern of settlement, awkward as it was, put a special stamp on the West, giving this one Canadian region a geographical individuality shared by no other. The West was one vast checkerboard of townships, sections, and quarter-sections. Each six-mile-square township contained thirty-six sections of land; each section was divided into quarter-sections, each one 160 acres in size. Two sections were set aside for the Hudson’s Bay Company and two more for schools. The odd-numbered sections belonged to the Crown or to the railways as part of the original land grants given to encourage development. The even-numbered sections were available to homesteaders. Every homesteader was required to build a habitable house, prepare twenty-five acres for seeding, and live on his land for at least three years. At the end of that time it was his. And if he prospered and if the odd-numbered section next door was still available, he could buy that, too – as much as he could afford. Unlike the older regions, the West was developed in a single, disciplined fashion. And that, too, was part of the common experience.