The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (30 page)

The fever of which Charles Cherry spoke was partly Will White’s doing. Yet it’s probable that, propaganda or no propaganda, a good many Americans would have come to Canada anyway, enticed by the railways and the land companies or simply by the inexorable pull of westward expansion, which had been a fact of American life since the days of the first colonists. Frederick Jackson Turner’s epitaph on the closing of the American frontier, unveiled in 1893, was premature; the Canadian prairies were an extension of that frontier. The Americans flocked there for the same reasons they had flocked to their own West: because it was there, a vacuum waiting to be filled.

Consider the case of Daniel Webster Warner, who scouted the possibilities of the Canadian West in 1898. A forty-year-old dairy farmer with a very American name, a long, rugged face and a patriarchal beard, Warner had been born in Iowa, the son of a farmer and millwright. Neighbouring Nebraska achieved statehood when Warner was nine; two years later the family joined the flood of settlers moving west to the frontier and took up land in Dixon County on the Nebraska-Iowa border. But a decade or so later, as more land opened up and his father retired, Warner himself moved west again and proceeded to build a dairy farm of milking shorthorns. By 1898 he was ready to move once more.

He was no city amateur prepared to grab the first piece of land offered him, nor did he intend to queue up in the land office and put his mark on a quarter-section sight unseen. He set off for Winnipeg and took the
CPR
as far as Strathcona, near Edmonton, getting off periodically along the way and exploring the prairie country by team until he had logged some six hundred miles. Warner patiently prospected the countryside, then hopped on whatever train was available; one carrying poles for a new telegraph line stopped so often to unload that Warner was able to walk the track in front of the locomotive.

He found what he wanted – a section of land on the south bank of the North Saskatchewan, east of Fort Edmonton. He returned to
Nebraska, sold his farm for eight thousand dollars, and moved with his wife and family to Canada. Before he moved again in the face of advancing civilization, this time to Tofield, he had acquired eight hundred acres and was one of the wealthiest farmers in the district and a pillar of the community. He had also become a politicized Canadian – an executive of the local branch of the Grain Growers’ Association and later first vice-president of the powerful United Farmers of Alberta.

With men like Warner, the pull of profit overrode considerations of loyalty and patriotism. About one-third of the American immigrants were newcomers, anyway, from European countries; to them, the United States was no more than a way point on the road to their final destination. And many more were former Canadians. Besides, the American West was seething with agrarian discontent. The Canadians offered better farm legislation, so why stay south of the border when you could get anywhere from $60 to $200 an acre for your farm and pick up in Canada a free homestead for yourself and every son over the age of eighteen?

In the United States there was less and less opportunity for farmers’ sons or for farm labourers; land was just too expensive. “Why did I come here?” one Iowa farmer explained. “Because it seemed to be the only place to go. The old homestead was worth $100 an acre. It was too small to divide among the boys and the neighbouring farms were too high priced to buy.” He paid seven dollars an acre in Manitoba and by 1905 was making as much as he had in Iowa with the additional satisfaction of having settled his sons on nearby properties.

Every newcomer was eager to get rich quick. Stories flew about the country of the early birds who had paid a dollar an acre, done minimal work on the land, and by mid-decade were selling out at twenty times the price. They talked, for example, of William Wishard, the first American farmer in the Canadian West, who came overland from Missouri in 1875 and settled near Portage la Prairie. Wishard started out with three hundred dollars. By 1905 he had 480 acres of land worth about twenty thousand dollars, a fat bank account, and a completely equipped farm. But the astonishing coda to his success story was that he’d been able to present
each
of his eight children with 320 acres of rich black land. It was Wishard’s boast that he hadn’t made a dollar he hadn’t earned by hard work.

There were similar tales: Thomas Fuqua had sold his Nebraska farm for an average price of $62 an acre, then picked up a better farm
near High River, Alberta, for only $3.75 an acre. A.J. Cotton had been staked by his friends to make a new start at Swan River, Manitoba. By 1905 he had three thousand acres; his wheat yield was rarely less than twenty bushels an acre and often as high as twenty-five, a startling contrast with conditions back home where the average yield was only twelve.

There was another attraction: unlike the land companies and the railways, the government was not in the real estate business for profit; its only object was an orderly development of the West. This idea of order was planted in the department’s pamphlets; the subliminal message was that there was something more decent about life in the clean, unsullied air of Canada. Divorced from the rabble and the violence of the cities and the gunplay of the American frontier, a man could feel secure north of the border, where British justice prevailed.

One pamphlet, diplomatically avoiding the obvious corollary, declared that “respect for law and maintenance of order are very prominent features of life in Canada, as distinguished from other new countries.” As one American immigrant from Ohio told the
Century Magazine
: “You can’t monkey with the law here. You can’t grease a sheriff’s fist.”

F.B. Lynch of St. Paul said it all. Speaking to the second annual meeting of the Western Canada Immigration Association in Winnipeg in 1903, he declared: “We are essentially men of peace who have emigrated to your country to find homes and investments in a land that is famous for the home and its purity, for the law in its uprightness and for liberty in its truest sense.”

3
Keeping out the Blacks

There was one class of Americans that Canada didn’t want and took firm steps to discourage. It didn’t want Blacks.

In spite of the welcoming parties that had greeted the slaves smuggled into southern Ontario in the days of the Underground Railroad, the American stereotype of the Negro was deeply ingrained in the Canadian consciousness. Magazines such as
Grip
caricatured the Black as a shiftless and slightly comic figure who played the banjo, danced all night, and lived on watermelon. In the West, the Negro was feared as a potential rapist who could not control his sexual passions
and was a threat to Western womanhood. Even J.S. Woodsworth, in
Strangers within Our Gates
, was prepared to quote an American source describing Blacks as having “an aversion to silence and solitude” and a “love of rhythm, excitability and lack of reserve. All travellers speak of their impulsiveness, strong sexual passion and lack of willpower.” Woodsworth’s own comment was laconic: “Whether we agree … or not,” he wrote, “we may be thankful we have no ‘Negro problem’ in Canada.”

The general attitude was that the Blacks could not stand the rigours of the Canadian climate, the very thing that the Immigration Department in its propaganda was trying to play down. That argument was used again and again to discourage Black settlement – the only occasions on which Ottawa admitted that prairie conditions were anything but “bracing” and “invigorating.”

White’s well-oiled propaganda machine didn’t operate for Black Americans. No advertisements were placed in Black publications, no Black agents were hired, no promotional material was sent to Blacks, no settlers’ certificates were given them. Agents were told they must discourage inquiries from American Negroes.

When the Kansas City agent, James Crawford, reported that Blacks were visiting his office inquiring about forming a colony in the West, he received a blunt answer from Ottawa: “…  it is not desired that any Negro immigrants should arrive in Western Canada, under the auspices of our Department, or that such immigration should be promoted by our agents.”

Crawford tried to discourage such applicants with tales of terrible cold and racial prejudice. In spite of that, a few slipped through. As a result, the agent received a dressing-down from Sifton’s successor, Frank Oliver. Like his colleagues, Crawford was faced with a dilemma: how could he know whether or not a written inquiry came from a Black farmer? The department helped him out. If the request came from a small community where there was no agent, he was to write a letter to the local postmaster asking if the man was Black. The responses were unequivocal. “Black as hell,” one man replied. “Nigger!” wrote another.

American Blacks were baffled by the Canadian attitude. Great Britain’s early rejection of slavery and Canada’s reputation as a country of refuge for escaped slaves did not square with the current policy. To Barney McKay, director of the Afro-American Literary Society in Washington, Canada was “a land free from prejudice, caste and social
and political slavery.” In actuality it was as racist as the States, as McKay ruefully discovered when the government coldly rejected his suggestion that Canada welcome Black settlers. Letters from Blacks went unanswered, were “filed for future reference,” or were answered with the curt reply that Canada wasn’t encouraging Black immigration into the North West.

The policy was hypocritical in the extreme. The official line was that Canada welcomed everybody. As late as 1911, when the anti-Black hysteria was at its height in the West, Frank Oliver was telling the House of Commons that Negroes were treated the same as any other immigrant at the border while at the same time reassuring his aroused constituents in Edmonton,
sotto voce
, that, as the Boston
Post
reported, “officials are more strictly interpreting the provision of the act which forbids the admission of persons not likely to make desirable citizens.”

The act to which Oliver referred was passed in 1908. By instituting compulsory inspection at the point of entry it effectively ended Sifton’s policy of unrestricted immigration, to which Oliver had always been opposed. It was a useful tool to sift the “undesirables” from the desirables. The latter got the most cursory once-over; the former – especially the Blacks – were subjected to intensive medical examinations, which in some cases were fraudulent. In White Rock, B.C., for example, in April 1911, forty Blacks were rejected at the border because the medical officer insisted all were suffering from tuberculosis. In Winnipeg, the Commissioner of Immigration offered a fee to the medical inspector at the port of entry for every Negro he failed to pass.

The anti-Black feeling in the West began to grow in 1910, when it was realized that a number of Negroes from Oklahoma had settled in Canada and that more were preparing to join them. These were the so-called Creek Negroes, descendants of slaves kept by the Creek Indians, with whom many of them had intermarried following emancipation and who thought of themselves more as Indians than as Negroes. Subjected to racial prejudice by southern Blacks as well as by the whites of Oklahoma, denied the franchise by the literacy test, squeezed from the land by the tide of Western settlement, they coveted the free homesteads of the Western provinces. It was difficult to stop them at the border for they fulfilled all the qualifications: they were healthy, wealthy, and good farmers.

The first Blacks from Tulsa and Muskogee reached Saskatchewan in 1909 and settled north of Maidstone, between Battleford and
Lloydminster. They were a tough, determined group of eleven families led by Julius Caesar Lane, a fifty-nine-year-old farmer, and a slender little ex-slave, Mattie Hayes, aged sixty, soon to be known as “Mammy” Hayes, matriarch of the community. Mattie and her husband, Joseph, brought their entire extended family with them to Canada, including ten sons, three daughters, and a host of grandchildren. Mammy Hayes and many of her descendants were still in the same area when she died at the age of 103.

In 1910, Jefferson Davis Edwards, aged twenty-two, despairing of the growing Jim Crow atmosphere in Oklahoma, heard from a friend that there was no prejudice in Edmonton – an assessment that was monumentally untrue. He went up to see for himself, looked about, trudged farther north into the Athabasca country, and decided to homestead at Pine Creek, later to be renamed Amber Valley. Others followed, including his tiny fiancée, another Mattie, just turned eighteen. The grey soil, splotched by muskeg, was so heavily timbered when Edwards arrived that he couldn’t see more than a hundred yards, but he and his wife and some three hundred others persevered, cleared it, broke it, and lived in harmony.

It wasn’t an easy life. All the land had to be cleared by hand, by axe and grub hoe. It was gruelling work, for the spruce stumps were three feet in diameter. Then, before the land could be cultivated, all the timber had to be piled up and burned. Amber Valley was isolated, the only trails being blazed patches on the trees. It took at least two days to make the return trip to Athabasca, twenty-one miles distant, for groceries. Sometimes when the country was soggy it took Edwards four days, packing the load on his back. During one such absence, his wife bore one of their ten children. But the Edwards family prospered. One son became a doctor, another a Golden Gloves champion, and some of their descendants still live in Amber Valley.

Edwards, on his original trip to Alberta, had taken along a travelling companion, Henry Sneed, a Black Oklahoma preacher. Sneed liked what he saw and began to organize other Oklahoma Blacks to make the journey. In March, 1911, he and more than 160 followers from Weleetka, Oklahoma, arrived in St. Paul to find that the Canadian immigration authorities were making every effort to prevent them from crossing the border. The excuse given was a familiar one. As the St. Paul
Pioneer Press
reported, “the cold of the Northern prairies is said to be disastrous to the health of the negroes.”