The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 (4 page)

The Canadian policy was more pragmatic and certainly more cautious than that of the United States, which, in its idealism and self-confidence, had welcomed the masses of Europe to its shores, serene in the belief that once established in America they could not help but flourish. But Canada wanted only those who it believed would not become a burden on the public purse. The Americans saw their country as a haven for the downtrodden; at least that was the rhetoric, and the rhetoric was often as important as the reality. Canada didn’t really want the downtrodden unless they could contribute to the nation’s wealth. It could be argued that while most emigrants set off for the United States in
search
of something vaguely called the American Dream, the ones who came to Canada were
escaping
from something that might be called the European Nightmare. The Americans offered an ideal: liberty. The Canadians offered something more practical: free land.

Every immigrant who arrived in the North West was entitled to choose 160 acres of public land on the payment of a ten-dollar registration fee. He must be prepared to live on his land and do a stipulated amount of work on it for three years. If he could stick it out, the land was his. But before anybody could be convinced to take up the land, some facts about this strange and unknown realm at the top of North America would have to be broadcast.

The first and most important task was to dispel the image of the West as a snow-covered desert. Sifton had hardly taken hold before his own paper reported that the
Nation
, a respected Dublin journal, was warning people away from Canada, declaring that Manitoba was “a kind of Siberia.” One of Sifton’s first moves was to try to ban the daily publication of Manitoba temperatures, but since that might prove even more alarming, he dropped the idea. Nevertheless, snow was never mentioned in the blizzard of pamphlets his department issued. “Cold” was another taboo word. The accepted adjectives were “bracing” and “invigorating.” Why, it was so mild, one pamphlet declared, that “the soft maple” could grow five feet in a single season! And if prospective immigrants confused the Manitoba maple, a weed tree, with the Eastern hardwood – Canada’s symbol – too bad.

In this anti-cold campaign, Sifton had the enthusiastic support of the
CPR
’s ebullient chairman, William Van Horne, who never lost an
opportunity to suggest that the prairies were close to being subtropical. In one public statement in Europe, Van Horne announced that the coldest weather he had ever known was in Rome and Florence. “I pine for Winnipeg to thaw me,” he declared, maintaining the same straight face that allowed him to bluff his way through innumerable all-night poker games. “The atmosphere in the far west intoxicates you, it is so very invigorating.”

There were better lures than the weather. Canada was touted not only as a free country but also as an orderly one: no one needed to carry a gun in the Canadian West; the Mounted Police, who were establishing an international reputation in the Yukon, would see to that. And the land was free. More, you could usually pick up an adjoining quarter-section for a song. And there was money to be made in the West by anybody willing to work. The titles on the pamphlets trumpeted the story:
The Wondrous West; Canada, Land of Opportunity; Prosperity Follows Settlement
.

In 1896, the Immigration Department sent out sixty-five thousand pamphlets. By 1900, the number had reached one million. The best-known and most successful appeared just after Sifton left office and was directed at immigrants from south of the border. In thirty-three pages of large type
The Last and Best West
(later simplified to
The Last Best West
) cunningly played on the American agrarian myth beloved by the readers of Horatio Alger, extolling the farmer as the finest type of citizen and echoing the ingrained belief that the most successful men “have as a rule been those whose youth was spent on a farm.…”

Sifton took personal direction of this propaganda. One highly successful pamphlet entitled
A Few Facts about Canada
consisted of a series of letters, carefully culled from thousands solicited by the department, from former British farmers praising the West. At Sifton’s suggestion, these letters were printed in the handwriting of the correspondents rather than in cold type “to impress the ordinary farmer with the idea of reality.” Sifton also insisted that the editors of the pamphlet avoid exaggeration and select “fair samples, not too favourable.”

Nonetheless, other pamphleteers indulged in hyperbole. “The kindest thing to say about it is that the literature was a little on the optimistic side,” one British immigrant recalled. “Canada was said to have a healthy climate guaranteed to be free of malaria. One has to admit that this was true. It was said that while the prairie summers were hot, the heat was delightfully invigorating and while it got cold in
the winter the cold was dry and not unpleasant. I used to recall those glowing words as I pitched sheaves with the temperature at 95 in the shade, and as I ran behind the sleigh at 30 below to keep from freezing.”

To alter the international image of the Canadian prairies, Sifton curried favour with American newspapermen and farmers as well as with British politicians. Thousands were wined, dined, and shuttled across the prairies at government expense. Lloyd George, then an up-and-coming Member of Parliament, was one of those brought to Canada and persuaded that his Welsh countrymen who had emigrated to Patagonia should be advised to move north.

As a newspaper publisher himself Sifton had a cynical attitude toward the press. Reporters, editors, and small-town publishers could be purchased with flattery and a few free whiskeys. Sifton went further. Entire trainloads of editors from south of the border were conducted in luxury across the plains, lubricated by strong drink. Those too lazy or too inebriated to write their own stories were fed specially composed articles, which often appeared without a comma changed.

The venality of the newspapers played into Sifton’s hands. If a publisher wanted government advertising he had better not run any anti-Canadian material. On at least one occasion, the members of a journalistic junket assured the department that any negative articles would be censored and their authors banned from future trips across the West. One editor (of the Shelby, Kentucky,
Sentinel
) actually apologized for not getting his story into type quickly enough, explaining that “when I arrived home I found my office in an uproar, with every member of the force drunk except my lady stenographer.”

The Minister’s purpose was to saturate the world with propaganda about the Canadian West. Sifton, the one-time lay preacher, saw himself as a new kind of missionary for his country, proselytizing the unconverted and never letting up. “Just as soon as you stop advertising and missionary work,” he told the Commons, “the movement is going to stop.” In 1902 alone, 465 American farmers’ “delegations” crossed the prairies at government expense. These delegations were made up of civic leaders, municipal officials, and former legislators, elected by local farmers and encouraged to write and lecture about the wonders they had seen in Canada.

The statistics suggest the extent of the Sifton campaigns: tens of thousands of pamphlets and exhibits at state fairs, 200,000 pamphlets
distributed at the St. Louis world exposition in 1904 alone; seven thousand newspaper advertisements for “Free Land Clubs” (the name told the story); one thousand lantern-slide lectures in England in a single year; one thousand inquiries a month at the High Commissioner’s office in London; and a thirty-five-thousand-dollar arch at the coronation of Edward VII, trumpeting the advantages of immigration.

When Sifton took office in 1896, the department had six agents operating south of the border. By 1899 it had three hundred. The Minister liked to tell the story of one such agent who quit his job after six months “on the plea that no one thought of Canada.” Sifton brought him back to Ottawa, gave him a holiday, and persuaded him to go back. Six months later, the agent had finally managed to convince one family to emigrate. But between 1900 and 1903 he brought five thousand American settlers into the Canadian West.

There were other, more exotic, ventures. In 1902, M.V. “Mac” MacInness, the department’s portly and jovial agent in Detroit, began to cultivate James Oliver Curwood, soon to become the best-known outdoor novelist in the United States. Eventually, as a result of this connection, the Canadian government hired Curwood for eight hundred dollars a year plus expenses to tour the Canadian North West in search of material for his novels. The gamble paid off. Curwood, in a series of best-selling books, coined the name “God’s Country,” a phrase that is still in use.

In 1896, about 17,000 immigrants arrived in Canada. In 1899 the figure approached 45,000. Bill McCreary, the bulky, black-browed Irishman whom Sifton had made Commissioner of Immigration in Winnipeg, was overworked to the point of breakdown. The immigration hall could not accommodate the flow of newcomers, and the government was forced to pitch tents to handle new arrivals. Yet this was a comparative trickle. “I confess it makes my head swim trying to keep tab on the development that is going on,” John Dafoe of the
Free Press
wrote to Sifton in 1902. Long queues were forming at every land office. One weekend in 1903 at the Prince Albert office, men sat on camp stools from Friday night to Monday morning waiting to file on the homesteads they had selected. One such was a German-born farmer from Neustadt, Ontario, named William Thomas Diefenbaker, whose son, a future prime minister of Canada, kept him revived with innumerable pots of tea, rustled up between snatches of sleep caught under a billiard table in a nearby pool hall.

By 1905 when Sifton left office, the annual intake of immigrants was
pushing 150,000. Every board of trade in the West was copying the government propaganda, and the prairie country was in the throes of a boom. “It roars in… [one’s] ears like the race of machinery in a factory,” one travel writer exclaimed. “Maps, pamphlets, diagrams, reports, books, photographs swish around him like a tornado. They are handed to him on the railroad car; they are by his porridge bowl at breakfast in the morning. You go into a drugstore to buy a cigar, and the eye is fascinated by a brochure.… Being an ordinary hum drum individual … you read and you learn and are amazed at your own stupendous ignorance.… Every ten or twelve miles a town is springing up like a mushroom.… The chief product of many of these places is the pamphlet about their own virtues.…”

3
A political animal

Sifton took office with the reputation of being an iron man. In the words of an admirer, “he never gets tired, works like a horse, never worries, eats three square meals a day and at night could go to sleep on a nail keg.” During the Manitoba provincial campaign of 1896 he would climb off the train at Brandon at eleven at night, sit up until morning talking politics with friends, entertain at breakfast, and then take off in the winter’s cold by sleigh, speaking at Souris, say, in the afternoon, and Hartney at night before heading off to the railhead at Oak Lake to catch the train back home. “All he needed,” one of his companions recalled, “was to pull the buffalo robe around him to sleep in the rig.” In Ottawa he had the reputation of staying all night at his desk, leaving behind a pile of work for his clerks at 6 a.m. and returning at ten o’clock looking as fresh as ever. It was not that he had an iron constitution; his secret was an iron will power.

But as Sifton’s work load increased, his health began to suffer. His years in office were punctuated by periodic breakdowns. After only a few months, the long office hours began to take their toll on him. By the end of July, he had reached a point where he could “neither eat, rest nor sleep”; yet he could not consider a holiday until he had wound up the last remains of the backlog of business – his legacy from the Conservatives.

Plagued by high blood pressure and “insomnia, my old enemy,” he suffered a nervous collapse but bounced back after a one-month
seaside vacation. Two years later he was again in a state of near exhaustion. “I would as soon spend life in the treadmill as carrying the load of work I have to do now,” he wrote to a Winnipeg friend. In February 1902, his nerves were so badly upset that Laurier insisted he take a fortnight’s holiday. Yet the iron man reputation remained. Even today it is difficult to think of Sifton as a sickly, nervous insomniac. His image was always that of the man who could catnap on a nail keg.

The strain and overwork were exacerbated by Sifton’s chronic deafness, an afflication he suffered as the result of a fever contracted at fifteen. In 1900, he set off to Europe to see a Viennese specialist in an attempt to alleviate “the nightmare which has been hanging over me.” That
cri de coeur
in a letter to a close friend is one of the rare times that Sifton reveals himself as an ordinary mortal, subject to human frailty and tormented by it. Relief, alas, was only temporary. He used an ear trumpet, but that didn’t help. By 1905 Clifford Sifton was almost stone deaf. His deafness was not without advantages. It stimulated his lifelong habit of reading and probably helped develop his photographic memory – the uncanny ability to quote long passages verbatim from the books he so eagerly devoured. His responses to Opposition attacks could not be hasty or ill-considered because in his later years he could not hear his detractors. He was forced to pore over the Hansard reports and thus construct a more deliberate but often more effective reply.

His inability to hear properly and thus communicate has been given as one reason for his public reputation as a cold, aloof, even ruthless politician. Yet it is hard to imagine anyone being truly intimate with Clifford Sifton, deaf or not – not even his sons, perhaps not even his attractive and outgoing wife, Arma, the daughter of a socially prominent Ottawa family whom he married when he was twenty-three. She was, so tradition has it, a gifted clairvoyante, the direct antithesis of her unmystical, pragmatic husband.