The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (26 page)

That winter, in the course of a snowshoe patrol, Sgt. D.J. McCarthy of the Mounted Police happened upon a curious spectacle some miles southeast of the community. Here was one of the Barr colonists,
crouching in his shack with the door partially open, sitting close to his stove, wearing all his outer clothing including his cap and mitts, and calmly reading Shakespeare. The door would not close because he had pushed a long tree from the outside into the door of his stove. When the fire died down he simply pushed the tree farther in. He seemed quite cheerful, invited the policeman in for “a spot of tea,” and revealed that he was the son of the former British ambassador to Turkey.

In sharp contrast was the example of those who
had
farming experience. These people prospered. By July 22, for instance, William Rendell, whose family had farmed in England for two centuries, managed to break and plant three acres of oats, an acre and a half of barley, another acre and a half of potatoes, and a quarter-acre of vegetables. His family bungalow, the largest in the settlement, was within two weeks of completion, even though Rendell had to haul the lumber thirty miles. But Rendell was one of the few who knew his business. He had refused the homestead Barr offered, chosen another one, and started to plough the day after he arrived. That winter his wife, Alice, wrote her friends in England an enthusiastic letter: “I would never advise anyone to come out here who is afraid of work. They are better off at home. There is room to breathe in this country and if the work is hard the freedom, which is the indispensable attribute of the life here, makes one far less susceptible to physical fatigue.… Here, one feels that each week’s work is a step forward, whilst in the old country oftentimes a year’s hard work brought nothing but disappointment.…”

The Rendells were in a minority. Less than 10 per cent of the community had farming experience. By October, Wes Speers was concerned at the prospect of serious hardship and destitution that winter. He called a meeting to try to discover who would require government aid but was hampered by the pride and reserve of the English. As one woman told him: “I will not become the object of charity.”

Speers was appalled at the conditions among some of the destitute families. The worst example was that of J.G. Bulmer, whose ailing wife was the mother of eighteen children, one no more than three weeks old. While Speers was visiting the family, she fainted dead away. Bulmer had a fine piece of land, but he hadn’t broken a foot of ground. Speers packed the entire family off to Battleford.

An equally pathetic case was that of Alexander Carlyle-Bell, who
had somehow dropped his wallet, stuffed with two hundred dollars in cash, on the prairie, and then lost an endorsed bank draft for five hundred dollars. The wretched Carlyle-Bell could do nothing right. He had managed to break seven acres on a quarter-section of land only to discover it was the
wrong
quarter-section. The last straw came when his wife fell off the wagon and broke her arm. “Unaccustomed to work,” Speers wrote against his name, and that was the last the colony saw of the Carlyle-Bells.

E.W. Thomson, a special correspondent for the Boston
Transcript
, visited the settlement in November and reported on it as he might a strange colony in the wilds of Africa. The inability of the colonists to prepare for the Canadian winter both dismayed and charmed him: “It is impossible not to like their curious, dauntless demeanour. Going about among them one is strongly affected by their spirit. He half believes all will come right in the end – that once again the English will ‘muddle through.’”

And so they did. Somehow they made it through the winter. Some of the men had taken jobs during the cold weather, not always successfully. One group, which took a contract to grade twenty-five miles of the Canadian Northern roadbed, had managed to complete no more than two miles by April.

Speers was frustrated at the evidence of the settlers’ ineptitude. Very little of their land was yet broken by June, 1904, three-quarters of their horses were dead of exposure, and the rest were spavined and mangy. He was by this time fed up with Lloyd and his town-bred committee, who thought in urban rather than rural terms. Speers was convinced that Lloyd and his council were wasting the colonists’ time at planting season with endless meetings, organizations, and subcommittees, all planning in the most optimistic fashion for a glorious future – discussing taxes, lot sizes, and all the petty details of municipal organization, “troubling about small things that should give them no concern … trying to build up a commerce without cultivating their good lands.…”

The rugged Speers – practical farmer, apostle of the West, committed Liberal – had his patience sorely tried that winter. Like all Canadians he had welcomed the idea of British immigration, a politically popular strengthening of the Protestant Anglo-Celtic mix that had, in his view, built Canada. But now these people, in their own way, were proving as maddening as the Doukhobors. What were these English doing organsizing musical societies, tennis clubs, theatrical enterprises, and literary
circles in the town when they ought to be out in the fields, building up their quarter-sections? In Speers’s view, pioneers could not afford such indulgence. What these people lacked, he thought, was not culture but common sense.

And yet they were beginning to prosper. The impossible cases had been weeded out; those left behind were learning slowly, by trial and error, to meet the demands of the Canadian prairie. In 1905, the colonists broke more land than they had during the two previous years combined, though many, in Speers’s opinion, were “sticking too closely to Lloydminster, listening to the dreams and prophetic forecasts of the leaders of the community.” But by November, with Lloyd out of the way – promoted to Archdeacon of Prince Albert – Speers was able to announce a decided improvement. It was spurred by the arrival in the area of Americans and Canadians with farming experience and in the fall of 1905 by the coming of the Canadian Northern Railway (two years later than Barr’s prediction).

By February 1907, W.R. “Billy” Ridington, the local immigration agent, was able to report that Lloydminster had surpassed all expectations. In 1908, the Lloydminster Board of Trade felt justified in putting out a pamphlet boosting the town as “The Banner District of the West.” By then all the heartache and controversy that had marked the settlement’s early days were forgotten. E.J. Ashton, late of Norfolk, a bank teller turned Boer War veteran, was to recall at the end of his life that “strangely enough, as the years rolled by, it was apparent that several among the most successful settlers were men who had no previous farming experience.”

This was true of William Hutchison, who by 1905 was able to write on “How to Become a Farmer” for his home town paper, the Sheffield
Weekly Telegraph
. Stanley Rackham did so well that he was able to make regular trips home to the Old Country. But he never left the site of the Barr colony and was still in Lloydminster in 1937 when, at the age of sixty, he died.

Like many others, Ivan Crossley alternately farmed his homestead and supplemented his income by taking temporary jobs. When he needed money he’d go to work ploughing another man’s acreage or taking a winter mail contract from Battleford or Saskatoon. In between he’d go back to his homestead, break ground, work on his shack, put up a barn, until he owned the land outright. In 1906 he ran into Robert Holtby, bringing a load of hay into town for sale. Robert Holtby’s pretty sister was sitting astride the load. Crossley took her to lunch and
soon became a regular visitor at the thriving Holtby homestead seven miles out of town. They were engaged that fall, married in Lloyd’s log church the following spring, and enjoyed forty-eight years of married life, the memories of those early struggles on the long trail from Saskatoon slowly fading as the years wore on and Lloydminster prospered and the grandchildren of that pioneer union began to arrive.

4
The odyssey of Ella Sykes

In the fall of 1910, Miss Ella Constance Sykes, a high-born Englishwoman of redoubtable energy and enterprise, was struck forcibly by a letter to
The Times
, which reminded her of the hard future faced by so many of the million surplus women in the United Kingdom. Too often, the writer suggested, educated women found themselves a drug on the labour market; indeed, it was almost impossible for any English working girl to support herself comfortably let alone put anything aside for her old age. The answer? Surely it lay in the Overseas Dominions.

Miss Sykes, in spite of a sheltered upbringing, was by middle age no delicate Edwardian flower. She was one of a small but distinguished company of adventurous ladies, so typical of the late Victorian era, who thought nothing of dashing off to the far corners of the Empire on voyages of adventure and inquiry. In 1899 she had been the first woman to ride from the Caspian Sea to India and the first to visit Persian Baluchistan, where her brother, a Sandhurst-trained officer in the Dragoon Guards, was British consul. It was an invigorating experience. In her book
Through Persia on a Side Saddle
she revelled in the “sense of freedom and expansion which quickened the blood and made the pulse beat high.”

Now Miss Sykes determined upon a second adventure: she would set off for the Canadian West to try to assess the prospects for an educated Englishwoman working as home help in the new world. She outlined the plan to a friend, who made a blunt suggestion: if she
really
wanted to find out how the English were treated in Canada, wouldn’t it be more effective if she disguised herself as a potential job-seeker?

Miss Sykes demurred; the idea was not only distasteful but also she, who had grown accustomed to the attention of twelve servants in Persia, had no experience of being a servant herself.

“Ah,” said her friend, “evidently you wish merely to dip your fingers in the water; you shirk at taking a plunge that might prove of real service to the women you say you want to help!”

That did it. Ella Sykes determined to take the plunge even though she saw herself, like so many others of her class, as “an incompetent amateur, trained to do nothing properly the country wanted.”

On shipboard, she met several English families returning to their Western Canadian farms after a winter spent in the Old Country. “We could never live in England now, after having been in Canada,” she was told over and over again, but when she talked to the women she began to understand the dimensions of the problems that even the wives of successful homesteaders faced. One woman told of her first experience when her fiancé wrote that he had a home at last and she went out to Winnipeg, loaded down with household goods, to marry him.

“I remember asking him what was the colour of our bedroom paper, as I wanted to get a toilet-set to match it. He didn’t say much then, but I shall never forget my feelings when I found our new home was just a one-roomed wooden shack, divided in two with a curtain, and not papered at all. It was an
awful
shock to me.…”

“But now that you are well off your life is much easier isn’t it?” Miss Sykes asked.

The reply astonished her: “I had less work when I began my married life as a poor woman than I have now.” It was, she said, the farmer’s passion to buy more and more land: “They will sacrifice everything to that and the house and its comforts have to come last. My husband buys every acre he can get and of course has to engage hired men to work his farms; and the more men there are, the more work it is for a woman.…”

Miss Sykes understood the problems, but she also realized that the life her shipboard companion described would be far harder on an Englishwoman fresh from a comfortable home than it would be on a Canadian or on a European peasant.

In Winnipeg Miss Sykes checked into the Home of Welcome. In this government-subsidized frame house as many as fifty single women could be packed. The first night’s lodging was free, courtesy of the Immigration Department. After that Miss Sykes paid five dollars a week for a single room. The matron who registered her and listened to her background looked at her sadly. “What a pity it is that Englishwomen are taught to do nothing properly,” she said. Miss Sykes agreed.

At the
YWCA
, where she went for information, she was advised to put a classified ad in the
Free Press
:

Educated Englishwoman, inexperienced, wishes to assist mistress of farm in housework.

Job offers came in immediately, but Miss Sykes was realistic enough to know that she couldn’t handle them. How could she wash, cook, and clean for the pregnant mother of four children for only fifteen dollars a month? Canada, in its own way, was as foreign as Baluchistan.

She trudged disconsolately through Winnipeg’s bustling streets, depressed at her inability to cope. She was accustomed to the leisurely pace of settled England. But here in this raw new country, everything seemed to be moving at the speed of those gigantic
CPR
locomotives, which roared headlong out of the prairie stations. Even the funeral processions dashed along at an unseemly trot, as if the mourners were in a hurry to fling the coffin into the grave and get back to work. At church, the choirs sang at such a brisk pace she could hardly keep up with the psalms and hymns. She had thought of trying to get a job as a waitress, but she heard again and again that English waitresses were too slow and were swiftly hustled out of their posts by alert Canadians, who seemed to her to do their work at lightning speed. This was a country for the young and the energetic; the streets seemed to be empty of old people. Am I a fool to have started on this absurd adventure? she asked herself.

Back at the Home of Welcome she caught herself starting to criticize the food and the women she shared it with, and felt ashamed. Others at the table were running down Canadians, whom they thought of as merciless taskmasters, even though their wages were at least double those they would have received in England. Miss Sykes understood the problem: in Britain servants were specialists; but they could not understand that in Canada they must be able to turn their hands to anything – to be cook, house-parlourmaid, washerwoman, even baker and dairymaid all rolled into one. It wasn’t entirely their fault. No one had bothered to tell them about Canadian conditions – and they hadn’t bothered to find out.