The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (25 page)

Bob Edwards, the irrepressible editor of the Calgary
Eye Opener
, took a sardonic pleasure in skewering the remittance men. For this purpose he invented a character, Albert Buzzard-Cholmondoley, whose letters home were a popular feature in Edwards’s weekly. Albert was seen each week contriving another ingenious trick to squeeze money out of his father in England:

“I am married to a half breed and have three ornery looking copper colored brats. We are all coming over to visit you at Christmas when you will be having the usual big house party at Shootingham Hall. I shall so like to see the dear old place again and my wife is most anxious to become acquainted with her darling husband’s people and obtain a glimpse of English society. The Hall will be quite a change for her from the log shacks and tepees she has been used to all her life.

“If I had only about a thousand pounds just now with which to start afresh, I would invest it all in cattle right away, settle down to business and forego the pleasure of a trip home and remain here. But I do not know where to lay my hands on that amount.…”

Edwards’s satire was not so farfetched. The West abounded in stories of how English ne’er-do-wells schemed to squeeze extra funds out of their families back home. For instance, there was the tale of Dickie Bright, grandson of the scientist for whom Bright’s disease was named, who squandered his entire remittance on riotous living in Calgary instead of investing in a ranch and livestock as his father supposed. Bright kept sending home florid stories of the profits his ranch was making until he received an alarming dispatch that his father was on his way to Canada to visit him. In desperation, it was said, he persuaded a neighbouring rancher to lend him a thousand head of cattle for a single night. When the elder Bright arrived, his son assured him that the visible stock was only a sample of the thousands he had roaming the range. Bright senior was so delighted he gave his son $10,000 to increase his business and boasted of how the boy had built up one of the biggest stock ranches in the Canadian West.

It is hard today to understand the antipathy and scorn reserved for
the English remittance man. It can be explained only by reference to the Western work ethic, the Western concept of a classless society, and the Western rejection of Imperial and colonial attitudes.

The Westerner was already beginning to think of himself as a new breed of Canadian, freed of Eastern prejudices and concepts, breathing the pure air of the prairies where every man was equal and success depended on hard work. The West was peopled by self-made men who had started from nothing and prospered. They had little time for those who, born to privilege, lived on a stipend, refused honest toil, and looked down on their fellows. As one English traveller discovered, “There is only one class on the plains, and that is the working class.”

Hard work was the criterion by which newcomers were judged in the West. Time and again, British writers advised their readers that they must be prepared for backbreaking toil during their early years in the new land. But the remittance man was not capable of work – or at least that was his image – and it was this that raised the hackles of editors like Bob Edwards:

“Were he good at even ONE thing he would be all right. His dilettante training precludes all idea of his getting a job in a store or in a bank – he does not know even enough for that. With machinery or mechanics he naturally is unfamiliar, only knows live stock from the saddle of an Irish hunter, couldn’t hold a job in a newspaper office longer than ten or fifteen minutes, has not had sufficient savvy to go breaking on the railroad, is too gentlemanly to canvass books and finally has to seek aid from the local English clergyman as a preliminary to going on to a farm to work for his board.

“What can you expect from young men brought up in a hunting and shooting atmosphere?”

These cultured but improvident Englishmen often lived in abject poverty. Frank G. Roe, who came to Alberta in 1904, worked on the railways, and eventually became a distinguished Western historian, visited two remittance men-one the son of a mayor of Crewe, the English railway town, the other of a distinguished officer of the Indian Army – who had “sunk to an unimaginable depth of squalor and filth, physical and moral.” They lived in a shack built of pieces of stolen scrap lumber, roofed with a jumble of shingles, pieces of tarpaper, and kerosene cans hammered flat. It looked, Roe said, like a great square packing case dumped on the prairie, “truly … a thing of shreds and patches,” unswept and filthy with coal dust.

Yet many hid their penury behind a masquerade of sartorial bravado.
Some kept wardrobes of formal clothes and dressed for dinner; others hired tailcoats for an evening and were photographed with their cronies, the pictures to be sent home to England as “a few friends I entertained at the ranch recently.” Roe remembered men who could not ride anything “but the most docile sheep of a horse” who ventured into town on a wagon, parked it on the outskirts, then donned Stetsons, chaps, and neckerchiefs “to camouflage the degrading contamination of wheels and harness.”

The calumny heaped upon the remittance men belongs to another era. These eccentric hangers-on formed a tiny minority in the great mass of British immigrants, but, like the Sons of Freedom, they were highly visible. As such they became convenient targets, the focus for much of the anti-British antipathy in Canada, their reputation blown up out of all proportion to their numbers. Many an innocent Englishman, genuinely seeking work, suffered from the stigma.

In retrospect it’s hard to view the remittance man without a certain affection as a colourful footnote to the saga of the opening of the West. For the remittance man, more than any other, refused to conform. In the great scramble to adapt to the Western style and the Western spirit, he stood apart. It is difficult not to admire the eccentricities, the ingenuity, and the panache of a man like Robert Dixon, who lived near Edmonton as Rattlesnake Pete, who did indeed carry a live rattlesnake, defanged, inside his shirt, who dressed the part sometimes in buckskin jacket, chaps, and moccasins, sometimes in derby hat, checked suit, and spats, whose cuffs were prominently and fashionably displayed two inches below the edges of his sleeves, and who, when prospecting in the bush, insisted on fashioning an instant set of them each morning out of toilet paper. He was nothing if not dramatic. When faced with a girl who refused his advances in a canoe, he knew just how to conduct himself. Without a moment’s hesitation, Rattlesnake Pete the remittance man flung himself into the chilly waters of Cocking Lake.

3
Lloydminster

All the qualities of the British in general and the English in particular – their amateurism, their clannishness, their endurance and stick-to-itiveness – can be seen in the microcosm of Lloydminster’s formative years. For Lloydminster was unique; it was the only colony in the West
that was 100 per cent British – its leadership entirely English, its outlook Imperial. Lloydminster and the Britannia Colony started out with every disadvantage: an incompetent and dilatory leadership; an utter lack of practical farming methods among its people; a refusal and an inability to learn from other immigrants. And yet, in the end, Lloydminster prospered. There were many reasons: the richness of the Saskatchewan Valley; the coming of the Canadian Northern Railway; the general growing prosperity of the Canadian West. But not the least of these reasons was the peculiarly English habit of being able to hang on and muddle through.

In exchanging the leadership of Isaac Barr for that of the Reverend Mr. George Exton Lloyd and his twelve-man committee, the colonists weren’t out of the woods. Lloyd was a likeable but hopelessly incompetent leader and businessman. George Langley, the land agent, called the Twelve Apostles “one of the most incapable bodies of men ever got together.” Donaghy described Lloyd as “the blind leading the blind.” Speers reported an absence of all business methods among Lloyd and his council. The hospital plan collapsed; the Stores Syndicate went out of business, paying its investors twenty-five cents on the dollar. Free enterprise replaced co-operative effort. Power went to Lloyd’s head, and like Barr, he became autocratic. The Mounted Police inspector at the settlement thought he would have made a Grand Inquisitor in an earlier age.

One problem was Lloyd’s jingoism. He and his committee insisted that nobody other than Englishmen be allowed to locate in the colony, a policy originally established by Barr, who had declared: “We hope to keep the colony free from any foreign admixture, even of American people.… I think it not wise to mix that people with this colony. I hope to keep it British in actuality as well as in sentiment.” As a result, the English tenderfeet had no practical farmers from Iowa or Nebraska as neighbours to help them by example and advice but only novices like themselves. The colony’s doctor, who had stayed behind when the hospital syndicate folded, found that his work was constant but pretty monotonous. His biggest daily chore was stitching up axe wounds. Scores of colonists had never before had an axe or hatchet in their hands.

This lack of experience and of knowledgeable neighbours held up the development of the colony for at least a year and caused untold hardships. Langley reported that the buildings being erected on the new homesteads were some of the poorest in the North West. Some
were almost useless, and many were so badly built there was danger of the roofs collapsing.

To comprehend the magnitude of the problem facing these green arrivals, let us go out onto the empty prairie with Ivan Crossley and see what he and his three friends were up against.

The land agent has brought them here, located the survey posts, and left them standing beside their wagon on their new homestead – 640 acres of unbroken prairie some twelve miles southeast of the colony
.

It is a lonely scene – not a sign of human habitation, nothing as far as the eye can see, save for the prairie, blackened by fire, and a few skeletal copses of charred cottonwoods
.

The scene is not unique. It has already been repeated thousands of times in the open country that lies between the Red River and the Rockies. It will be repeated thousands of times more before the plains are broken and fenced. And it will remain engraved on Ivan Crossley’s memory for all of his life, as well as on the memories of thousands of others – British, American, German, Scandinavian, Slav, and Dutch. None will ever forget these first despairing moments on the limitless ocean of the prairie. This is home. This is where we must live. This hard turf on which we stand, as tough as human gristle, will be our building material. Before we can prosper, before we plant a single grain, we must attack it, break it, turn it over, rip it apart, andfinally nurture the black soil beneath. This is the folk memory of the West, the glue of prairie nationalism
.

Crossley knows that some of their compatriots, faced with the magnitude of the challenge, have already packed up and fled. He and his partners are almost broke; but they are unencumbered by wives and children, and they have the enthusiasm and energy of youth. They pitch their tent, unload their walking plough, and go to work
.

They have a sketchy idea of how to build a sod house, thanks to the government’s farm instruction in Saskatoon. So they set to work ploughing long strips of various lengths and dragging them to the site on a stone boat built of fire-killed trees. They learn by trial and error. Their house is to be sixteen feet by twelve. They simply mark out a space, lay a row of sods around it, and continue to build until the walls are eight feet high
.

There will be no windows; glass is unobtainable. But they make a door out of split poles and cover it with blankets. They fashion a roof of sorts out of small poplar poles, laid close together and shaped to
shed the rain. They pile more sods on top of the poles and chink them with earth. That will have to do, even though it is not watertight; no sod house is. There is a saying in the West that if it rains three days outside, it rains for two weeks inside. They must get used to that
.

They install their stove, build bunks out of more poles, make mattresses of branches. It would, as Crossley says, take a lot of imagination to call this hovel a house. But it will be their only shelter in the winter to come, and before many weeks have crept by they will start to think of it as home
.

It was one thing to throw up a house of sorts, quite another to begin practical farming. Crossley and his friends tried to plant a garden in the bare spot where the sods had been stripped away, only to discover, too late, that they had also removed the best soil. The vegetables withered and died, and the men were forced to go to work for wages.

Scores left the colony to seek jobs. Scores more would have gone had Lloyd and his committee not persuaded them to stay, promising jobs in the town itself; alas, these never materialized. Others sat on their homesteads, attempting to break the land, with little success.

Matthew Snow, the government farm inspector, had great difficulty getting the colonists to move quickly to break the land and prepare it for the following year’s crops. The breaking season was quickly passing, yet 70 per cent had no chance of getting a crop in the following year, let alone in the summer of 1903. Teams stood idle, some animals straying away because their owners were so lackadaisical. They did not seem to realize that the prairie could be broken only in the summer. Many thought, in their ignorance, that they could work late into the fall, after their houses were finished.

In fact, these middle-class Englishmen from Leeds and Birmingham, London and Manchester had no comprehension of the harshness of the prairie climate. They had never experienced a Western winter, never faced a blizzard or a white-out, never felt their eyelids freeze together or their skin peel off when pressed against icy metal. The Slavs and Scandinavians, the Nebraskans and Iowans were used to such conditions. The English weren’t. By fall it was apparent that the average amount of farmland broken to the plough, let alone planted, was less than two acres a homestead.