Canada's Rural Majority: Households, Environments, and Economies, 1870-1940 9781487510589

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CANADA’S RURAL MAJORITY: HOUSEHOLDS, ENVIRONMENTS, AND ECONOMIES, 1870–1940

Before the Second World War, Canada was a rural country. Unlike most industrializing countries, Canada’s rural population grew throughout the century after 1870 – even if it declined as a proportion of the total population. Rural Canadians also differed in their lives from rural populations elsewhere. In a country dominated by a harsh northern climate, a short growing season, isolated households and communities, and poor land, they typically relied on three ever-shifting pillars of support: the sale of cash crops, subsistence from the local environment, and wage work off the farm. Canada’s Rural Majority is an engaging and accessible history of this distinctive experience, including not only Canada’s farmers, but also the hunters, gardeners, fishers, miners, loggers, and cannery workers who lived and worked in rural Canada. Focusing on the household, the environment, and the community, Canada’s Rural Majority is a compelling classroom resource and an invaluable overview of this understudied aspect of Canadian history. (Themes in Canadian History) r.w. sandwell is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.

THEMES IN CANADIAN HISTORY Editor: Colin Coates

R.W. SANDWELL

Canada’s Rural Majority: Households, Environments, and Economies, 1870–1940

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-8846-8 (cloth)  ISBN 978-0-8020-8616-7 (paper)

♾ Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sandwell, R. W. (Ruth Wells), 1955–, author Canada’s rural majority : households, environments, and economies, 1870–1940 / R.W. Sandwell. (Themes in Canadian history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8020-8846-8 (bound)   isbn 978-0-8020-8616-7 (paperback) 1. Agriculture – Canada – History – 19th century.  2. Agriculture – Canada – History – 20th century.  3. Land use, Rural – Canada – History – 19th century.  4. Land use, Rural – Canada – History – 20th century.  5. Community life – Canada – History – 19th century.  6. Community life – Canada – History – 20th century.  7. Sociology, Rural – Canada.  8. Canada – Rural conditions.  I. Title.  II. Series: Themes in Canadian history HN103.S25 2016  307.72097109'034  C2015-906404-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

For Colin, with thanks

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Contents

1 Introduction: Rediscovering Canada’s Rural Majority, 1870–1940  3 2  The Canadian Shield  29 3 The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes Region  67 4  The Canadian Central Plain  105 5  The Mountains  141 6  The Coast  175 7 Conclusion  217

notes  223 references and further reading  231 index  247

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CANADA’S RURAL MAJORITY: HOUSEHOLDS, ENVIRONMENTS, AND ECONOMIES, 1870–1940

All maps by Gerald Romme, University of Toronto Map and Data Library

1 Introduction: Rediscovering Canada’s Rural Majority, 1870–1940

For most of its history, Canada has been a rural country, and Canadians have been a rural people. Throughout the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth, the majority of Canadians were born, went to school, worked, married, had their children, and died in rural areas, or in tiny communities. Demonstrating a pattern very different from some of the modernizing countries of Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canada contained twice as many farm households in 1941 as it had seventy years earlier, and the number of acres being farmed in Canada had increased sixfold. The rural population grew continuously in the century after 1871, from 3 million to more than 5 million in 1941, and again to about 7.5 million in 1971. In 1931, more Canadians were still employed in agriculture – almost a third of all employed adult men – than in any other single occupation. In 1941, the number of people working in the rural, resource occupations of agriculture, logging, trapping, and fishing reached their highest levels, outnumbering those employed in all other industries and manufacturing combined. It would not be until 1951 that for the first time more people in Canada would be employed in manufacturing than in agriculture. And from the first sawmills to the canneries and hydroelectric dams, much of Canada’s industrial work took place in rural areas. Impressive as these rural labour statistics are,

4  Canada’s Rural Majority they generally do not include the work of millions of rural women who, according to the custom of the time, were not considered to be “working” when they did not receive pay for their considerable work on and around the rural house and farm. Although the trend towards urbanization in Canada was obvious from the late nineteenth century, and while the proportion of Canadians living in towns and cities increased slowly but steadily between 1870 and 1940, it was only in 1976 that the rural population of Canada fell (for the first time ever). Well into the twentieth century, rural and village life characterized Canadian society, economies, and cultures. But if most Canadians were rural in important ways until the post–Second World War period, they were not always rural in the same way that people in other countries were, or even in the ways that rural peoples in Canada had been before 1870. Only 6 per cent of the landmass can, in fact, support agriculture (in 2007, about 67,502,446 hectares or 166,802,197 acres of land were being farmed). In a country dominated by a harsh, northern climate, short growing seasons, and long winters, where the largest land form is granite covered with thin, soggy, and often frozen soil, ice, and snow, and where most rural people lived in households largely isolated from others by poor or seasonal transportation links, rural households supplemented, and in some cases entirely replaced, the raising and tending of farm produce for sale with a range of other economic practices. Canada’s rural history is complicated and enriched by the fact that not all farmers relied exclusively on selling farm produce to make a living. Most farms in this period, like their profits from agricultural sales, were small; indeed, many rural dwellers were not really farmers at all. Whether or not they called themselves farmers when the census enumerator came to call, most rural people supported themselves with different kinds of economic activities between the cradle and the grave. These varied from raising or finding food and fuel on their own or nearby lands and

Introduction  5 waterways, both for their own consumption and use (known as self-provisioning) and for sale (as commercial suppliers), to getting wages for their labour, and that of their draft animals. Waged labour took many forms, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, seasonal work in the resource industries (mining, logging, and fishing) helped many cash-strapped rural households, just as rural boys and men provided a skilled and knowledgeable workforce for the often remote and small-scale resource industries springing up across the country at this time. The exact amount of economic support provided to the rural household by any of the three economic pillars of support – self-provisioning, waged work, and the sale of commodities – would vary with the season, the life course of the family (parents with infants, parents with children able to work, elderly parents living with their adult children), the size and location of their operation, the weather, and the particular skills and abilities of family members, as well as with cycles of local and international trade. Characterized by this economic mix, rural households fit awkwardly into definitions of “traditional” or “modern”; they were not fully capitalist (though they often hired labour and owned land and machinery), nor proletarian (though they often worked for wages), nor peasants (though they might provide much of their own means of subsistence, independent of landlords and employers). But in 1940 the rural populations of Canada were still a recognizable part of the Canadian social, political, and economic fabric, and their experience differed in significant ways from those in the urban and industrial milieux growing up across the country. How these rural people lived and worked is the subject of this book. Characterizing Rural Life Immigrants were not the only rural residents of Canada in the years between 1870 and 1940. A variety of First Nations peoples had lived for millennia in what became Canada,

6  Canada’s Rural Majority and remained an important presence throughout this entire period. Some immigrant families had lived in Canada for so many generations by 1870 that they felt that they had been there forever. Recently arrived or not, immigrants comprised a substantial proportion of the rural population in many parts of the country, particularly after Canada’s immigration boom of the 1890s. There are several ways of answering the question, “Why did settlers come from Europe to live in rural Canadian lands?” In global terms, the would-be-farmers surging into Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the last stragglers of a global transformation that historian John Weaver has called “the Great Land Rush.”1 It had begun in the sixteenth century, and was just about to end in the early twentieth. This worldwide movement brought tens of millions of immigrants, mostly European, to the rural areas of the “new world” in South Africa, the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, where they laboured to bring hundreds of millions of acres into agricultural production. Their success gave a tremendous boost to world supplies of food (particularly wheat and beef) and, as a result, to the human population of the planet. These changes transformed the natural environment and created havoc with Indigenous, primarily hunting and gathering, societies around the world, who had to deal with the disease, declining natural resources, and reduced access to them that followed in the wake of the massive relocations. From the vantage point of the settlers, for the first time in human history millions of relatively poor people were given access to cheap farm land. Like others involved in the Great Land Rush, most immigrants came to Canada seeking the kind of economic independence Europeans associated with agricultural land ownership, where (it was hoped) the family farm would provide a living free from both landlords and employers. Individual chapters in this book will explore the ways in which this worldwide phenomenon worked itself out in the particular circumstances of rural Canadian regions.

Introduction  7 Rural life in Canada between 1870 and 1940 varied dramatically from one place to another. A fisherman in Sointula, a Finnish community on the West Coast, would have lived a life with different seasonal rhythms, different neighbours, different relationships to the local environment, and different distances to the nearest urban area than would a wheat farmer from Scotland living in Peel County, Ontario. And both would differ from a French-Canadian/Cree family living in the bush in the Abitibi region of northern Quebec. In this period, rural Canada, particularly in the West and North, was far more ethnically diverse than the Frenchand British-dominated cities, reflecting the fact that the Canadian government reached to Eastern Europe and Scandinavia for rural peoples who had the knowledge and expertise to cope with the country’s northern environment. Canadian rural peoples differed in their ethnic origins, in their religions, in their customs, and in their communities. Not only differences but also dramatic changes marked rural Canadians’ individual journeys from childhood to old age between 1870 and 1940. These were not merely personal or standard life course changes (infancy, youth, marriage, parenthood, old age): the years 1870 through 1940 in Canada witnessed what were arguably some of the biggest changes in human society since the introduction of agriculture. If someone born in 1870 lived to be seventy years old, he or she would have witnessed changes in the kinds of foods they ate (new canned foods, refrigerated and even frozen foods, as well as newly imported goods like oranges and bananas) and the fuel used to cook them (from wood to propane, electricity, even natural gas). Lighting that had been for so long produced by beef tallow candles or whale oil (and in urban areas by manufactured gas) was, in 1870, just beginning to be provided by kerosene lamps, then by various kinds of gas, and finally by electricity. A person born in 1870 would have seen transportation developing and becoming much easier over this time period, beginning with the trans-Canada railroad in the 1880s.

8  Canada’s Rural Majority Communication improved with the telegraph and then the telephone and the radio. The numerous small, familyowned businesses and industries that characterized rural and urban societies in the later nineteenth century were, by 1940, experiencing the stresses of increasing competition that followed hard on the heels of rapidly increasing production with new machines, technologies, and the growth of international trade. Many of the changes affecting daily life, particularly those (like electricity and oil) dependent on the installation of modern grids or networks, were slower to reach the rural populations. Rural people were often separated by great distances from one another and because of economies of scale from many modern infrastructures (e.g., many rural areas could not provide the minimum number of households needed to make electrical hook up economically viable). By 1940, air travel, new highways, and diesel ships had transformed some rural communities and the way that much rural work was done on land and sea. But many rural communities along the coasts, on the Prairies, and in the Shield were still without year-round roads, railroads, or telephone service; most rural homes across the country lacked both electricity and running water at that date. As the twentieth century progressed, there was much worried talk about the growing divide between urban and rural living that access to such modern amenities seemed to address. We will probe the issue of relative rural deprivation a little further in the coming pages. It will suffice to note here that rural people were, somewhat paradoxically, largely responsible for installing the grids, building the transportation routes, and extracting the natural resources (including food), often using new methods and technologies to do so, that ushered in modern Canada. Rural people played a key role in fuelling the growth and increasing the wealth of Canada’s twentieth century. That does not mean that rural people worked and lived as other Canadians did in the time period under study.

Introduction  9 Although remarkable change characterized many aspects of Canadian rural life in the 1870–1940 period, and considerable variations existed among and within rural communities, this book will argue that there were strong commonalities and continuities that marked rural people across the country, sharply and increasingly distinguishing them from those in the towns and cities. Before turning to these characteristics, however, it is worth pausing to consider what the term “rural” actually means. There is considerable debate today about whether rural is a geographical classification, relating to population size, density, and distance from urban centres, or whether it is a cultural classification, relating to a particular culture or way of life that differs significantly from the urban. The Dominion Bureau of Statistics (now Statistics Canada) opted for neither kind of definition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the census years 1871 to 1941, the Bureau’s distinction between rural and urban had nothing to do with people’s occupations, the size of a community, or even population density, and (before 1951) it had nothing to do with cultural classifications either. Instead, and rather improbably, until 1951 census distinctions between rural and urban hinged on the kind of local government that people lived under: urban people were defined as those living in incorporated cities, towns, and even villages, regardless of their size, and the rural population was comprised of everyone else. This definition has created some statistical anomalies. Canada was officially more urban than rural in 1921, yet the census also documents that it was not until 1941 that, for the first time, a slight majority of Canadians (51 per cent) were living in communities larger than 1,000 people (a population size that played a role in determining later census definitions of urban). It was not until 1961 that, for the first time, a slight majority of Canadians (again, 51 per cent) were living in communities larger than 5,000 people. Some historians have argued that a more sensible definition of rural would be a community smaller than 30,000 people, arguing that

10  Canada’s Rural Majority only beyond that size would a community have the range of consumer choices that we now identify with urban communities. If we were to accept this community-size definition of rural, in 1951 (when 57 per cent of Canadians were officially listed on the census as being “urban”), Canada would have to be defined as 70 per cent rural. Census definitions of rural and urban, particularly before 1951, were actually overstating the extent of urbanization in Canada. I will be using the 1941 and earlier definition of “rural” when I am presenting statistical census data for those years throughout this book. I will as well, from time to time, branch out to discuss those people living in communities of fewer than 5,000 people. I will also be exploring other ways of understanding just what “being rural” meant in Canada between 1870 and 1940. One of the purposes of this book, indeed, is to provide a fuller description and analysis of the people, places, and communities outside of towns and cities so as to refine definitions of rural. But whatever exact definition is used, Canada was a rural country, and Canadians were a rural people, until at least the Second World War. Using Rural Experience to Define Rural Life Notwithstanding the countless variations among individual lives, let alone the variations over time within one life, the task of any historian is to make some meaningful generalizations about how society, or parts of it, changed and how it stayed the same. Accepting that the most important generalization about rural life in the 1870–1940 period is probably its sheer variety, I will begin here by exploring some of the ways in which the experience of daily, rural life in general in these years differed, and differed dramatically, from the lives of urban (and rural) Canadians today. I will use these differences to explore some of the meaningful generalizations that we can make about the coherence and identity of rural society, economy, and culture in the years under study, even in the face of difference and change.

Introduction  11 It is difficult to estimate just which aspects of everyday life would seem most foreign to modern urban dwellers in Canada, if we were to be transported back to, say, the fruit belt of the Niagara Peninsula, or the mining frontier of northern Manitoba, or a fishing village on Nova Scotia’s South Shore in 1900. It is even harder to make general statements about the similarities among the vast varieties of experience that constituted daily life across rural areas of the country over a seventy-year period, because they were so very diverse. I am going to venture here, however, the bold claim that three elements of daily rural life – three key elements of rural experience – would stand out for urban people today, wherever they time travelled in rural Canada, to whatever ethnic community or household, and almost whatever the level of wealth inside the households they visited in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are the dominance of life lived out-of-doors, the enormous amount of hard labour, and the pervasive presence of the household as the defining social and economic structure. These three aspects of everyday experiences, I will argue, not only identify for us what it meant to be rural then but also gave coherence and identity to rural Canadi­­­­­ans themselves, bonding with one another and at the same time distinguishing them from those living and working in urban areas. As we will see throughout this volume, this does not imply a single political identity: one of the cornerstones of rural Canadian history, indeed, is the fact that rural people seldom organized consistently around a politicized rural cause. Neither does the existence of a coherent rural identity imply any shortage of distinctions or disagreements among rural people – of gender, age, ethnicity, wealth, or region. Nevertheless, their experiences comprised a coherent rurality that shaped and defined them in the period under study here. Life Outdoors The first feature of rural life that would immediately strike a twenty-first century urbanite time traveller would probably

12  Canada’s Rural Majority be the number of waking hours that rural people spent outdoors. Whether putting in or harvesting crops, transporting livestock, “picking” stones from field and garden and throwing them at blue jays eating seeds in the fields, working in the woods in the winter, feeding chickens, planting and tending the vegetable garden, milking cows, going to market, cutting fire wood, fishing, or hunting, much of the daily round of life happened out of doors or in unheated “outbuildings.” While the gendered routines of rural life meant that women typically spent more time indoors than men and boys, even women spent much more time outside dealing with the elements than most Canadians today. This was in part because the commodities that people tended, produced, and sold – wheat, beef, pork, maple syrup, fish, fruit, berries, milk, eggs – were created, harvested, and transported out of doors. But people’s relation to the outdoors was not limited to the production of commodities for sale: unlike urban dwellers today, rural people were usually reliant on their immediate outdoor environment for at least some of their own food, and before 1940, for much of the fuel with which they heated their houses and cooked their food. Most people purchased staples like tea, flour, kerosene (often called coal oil), and molasses from the local store or ordered them with other household commodities from the Eaton’s or Woodward’s catalogue. They purchased a wide range of non-essential and luxury goods as well, but purchases were a much smaller part of daily life, and the opportunities for obtaining goods otherwise were much greater than they are today. Most rural households also hunted, fished, and gathered what they could from their own and from uninhabited public lands and waters to supplement their own families’ daily needs for fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables. Much of Canada is well-supplied with trees, which provided not only fuel but also materials for building and fencing. Some rural people had formalized legal rights to find or harvest food (for animals and people), fuel, building materials, and other

Introduction  13 useful things from government-owned lands (called Crown lands). This was the case with First Nations people who had negotiated treaty rights to fish and hunt, and fishing families in Newfoundland who had the right to use forests up to three miles inland from the coast to supplement their livelihood. Many rural people took advantage of the fact that few police, game wardens, or even neighbours were around in remote rural areas to hunt, fish, and harvest wild plants without formal legal rights. The ability to make free use of such lands (known in other countries as “the commons”) has long been an important part of rural and village life around the world, and Canada was no exception. As well, most rural people planted and grew at least some of their food in their own kitchen gardens, preserving much of it for consumption later. At the same time that rural people were generally much more reliant on locally provided food, fuel, and building materials than urban and rural dwellers are today, they were also more directly reliant on their own labour, or that of their animals, to provide the basics of life. This was not a moral or ethical matter but one contingent on isolation and erratic transportation, on the larger range of creative skills, and on the smaller role of ready cash that generally characterized life for many rural people in the 1870–1940 period. If food was to be cooked, or the house heated, a tree had to be cut from the farm woodlot and taken to a yard close to the house or barn. Even the rural families who purchased wood for their own use usually had to cut it into smaller pieces that would fit into the fireplace or stove, stack it, and then haul it in from the outside in small quantities to a place near the stove. “Wood warms twice,” the old saying goes – once in the cutting, once in the burning. Even when food was purchased from a general store, the labour involved could be extensive. Most rural areas did not have year-round roads before the Second World War. Many rural people owned cars and trucks by the end of this period, but roads were not routinely ploughed of snow

14  Canada’s Rural Majority and gasoline equipment was susceptible to freezing before the invention of anti-freeze additives. Where automobile travel was not available, rural people would have to first make sure the horse had been adequately fed and watered, then harness it up to a wagon or sleigh, before riding a considerable distance into the nearest town or village. The health and well-being of the human travellers were not the only concerns during the journey; particular care would have to be taken not to underfeed or overfeed the horse or to give it too much or too little water. The driver would have to ensure that the horse was not exhausted as a result of the distance or the pace of travel, or endangered as a result of bad surfaces, darkness, or bad weather. Although they required considerable attention, it must be said, animals had the advantage over automobiles in that they helpfully memorized regular routes. Children as well as adults had to deal with the outdoors: the trip to school and back often took more than an hour to walk, and many children rode horses – or even travelled by dogcart – to ease the journey. Many children had to spend an hour or more on chores, often outdoors, before and after school as well, particularly weeding, bringing the cows in, or chopping wood. Rural people, in other words, were subjected to the vicissitudes of Canadian weather, climate, and environment in a way that most of us – short of “emergency” weather situations like a flood or freak snowstorm – find difficult to imagine today. There was no central power grid for supplying rural people’s energy needs at the flick of a switch, just as there were few reliable, all-season transportation routes – roads or railroads – to easily convey food, clothing, or other consumer goods to people in rural areas, even if they had the money and chose to purchase them. Instead, rural people had to respond on an hourly, daily, and seasonal basis to the climate and to their immediate environment directly, in ways that we do not. And because of this they were often physically uncomfortable, and sometimes actually in danger from a variety of natural phenomena, like extremes of

Introduction  15 cold, or storms both on land and sea, or the constant threat of fire, or even wild animals. Accident reports, gathered through newly minted regulations relating to workers’ compensation in the early twentieth century, provide detailed accounts of the dangers associated with some elements of rural work, including farm, mine, and logging machinery. Heavily reliant on the outdoors for their livelihood, rural people needed to adapt to their immediate environment in a multitude of ways, wherever they worked. Labouring Lives A second feature of rural life that would certainly strike a twenty-first century urbanite time traveller as very different from our own has already been mentioned but needs more elaboration here: work, in all its forms. Almost all firsthand accounts of rural life in the time period studied here emphasize, first and foremost, the sheer volume of physical labour that most rural people (and, indeed, most urban people before the twentieth century) engaged in. It occurred throughout most of each day; it wore people down, and it wore them out, from the time they were children through to their old age, even as many took pride in their own (and sometimes envied others’) strength and endurance. Few people, least of all perhaps women, participated in leisure activities as we know them; instead of golfing, skiing, going shopping, or taking a holiday, people attended church on Sundays and religious holidays, and occasionally attended a seasonal fair or a local picnic. These provided some of the only regular interruptions in dawn-to-dusk labour, and even on those days children had to be cared for, meals cooked, and (in fall, winter, and spring) the house heated. Much socializing was built around communal work bees which, even if sometimes notoriously lubricated by heavy drinking, provided a common form of relative relaxation. The large family size that characterized most rural areas until the first years of the twentieth century hints at other popular but more private forms of recreation.

16  Canada’s Rural Majority Work differed not only in quantity but in quality from much of what urbanites in the twenty-first century tend to associate with the term. Today, “work” generally means a specific set of actions and behaviours sharply segregated from “leisure” not only by geography (most people do not now work where they live) but also by the nature of the tasks we perform. Work now means performing a fairly specific or specialized task or set of tasks we sell to someone (or some corporation or institution), or that we perform ourselves and sell as services or commodities as part of our business or profession. Whether operating heavy machinery, performing the accounting work necessary to run a business or industry, sitting at a computer, or teaching university students, almost all of our work is specialized, and most of it is done indoors. In turn, we use the money we are paid for these specialized activities to buy commodities or services that other people, in our country and beyond, have been paid to create or provide. Modern urban people in Canada are deeply, intricately, and impersonally linked to vast networks of people around the world through such divisions of labour and the buying and selling of commodities. These are the defining characteristics of our economy, our society, and indeed our lives. In rural societies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most people performed a much wider variety of work within any given day than is common now – sewing, gathering and selling eggs, and milking a cow, or repairing a barbed-wire fence, harrowing a field with a team of horses, and digging a new outhouse. Much rural work, to be sure, was specialized, dependent on special skills often attached to labour remunerated by money: producing butter, for example, or working as high-lead logger in a seasonal work camp, or making clothes. And rural people purchased commodities and even services with wages or through the sale of other commodities. Indeed, a point that will be made repeatedly throughout this book is that the sale of labour – of farmers as well as farm women,

Introduction  17 children, and even their animals – commonly called “offfarm work” was a key component of Canadian rural life in the 1870–1940 period. While many rural women, most often when they were young, earned wages in town, in the small industrial enterprises such as canneries and jam factories that characterized the countryside, or on other farms, probably the most common kinds of off-farm work across this country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were done by men (again, most of them young) working in the woods, and building infrastructure projects. Railroads, roads, and later the power networks of electricity, oil, and gas linked towns and cities to each other, and to the rural natural resources that were, by the early twentieth century, beginning to generate considerable wealth in Canada. Tens of thousands of farmers adapted economically to the harsh winter conditions that created short growing seasons or to other economic downturns by working for wages in various industries during the winters, often using their own farm horses. The importance of oats as a farm crop throughout much of Canada attests to the hard work of horses, who needed oats to fuel their most strenuous labour in winter, when fresh grass was not available. Historians are still debating whether work in the woods contributed to a decline in rural standards of living, by forcing down wages in rural industries such as logging (arguing that employers did not have to pay a “living wage” as farmers could grow some of their own food), while at the same time making farms less productive as “farmers” were working too often away from home. Other historians point out that off-farm work played a key role during the settlement period in many communities, because logging provided extra wages and a key market for farm produce in newly opened areas of settlement, providing the cash needed to get pioneer farms up and running. There is no doubt, however, that the wages earned from agri-forestry, other rural resource industries, and infrastructure projects played a significant role in keeping people on the land,

18  Canada’s Rural Majority working. Rural families across the country had to live for weeks or even months without adult males in the house, but this was a hardship that they were apparently willing to endure in spite of the burdens of loneliness and extra work imposed on those who remained at home. As the example of logging illustrates, physical engagement with their local environment linked rural Canadians, as both consumers and producers, to one another as well as to national and global economies. But this was not the only way, and probably not the most common way, that rural work was performed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Not all work was about producing commodities or processing goods for sale. Rural people in the past shared with contemporary urban Canadians a propensity to perform specialized work for pay, but they differed in having a wider variety of specialties. Because so much rural work took place at home, the lines between working and living were more blurred. Rural people were much more likely to possess the knowledge, skills, and the time to carry out complex tasks, and to follow labour through the entire process from the creation, planting, or harvesting of some raw material to a finished product. For example, rather than buying a pound of butter, a rural woman might raise a calf, milk the cow, and work to turn the milk into butter. She was likely to consume at least some of what she produced, and produced much of what she consumed. If she had the specialized skill of making butter, and many did, she was usually also an “expert” at preserving food, which often included raising and sometimes slaughtering the pigs, chickens, and cows, parts of which she preserved or cooked. She would have tended the vegetable garden and picked wild fruits, cooking or preserving these as well. She may have known how to hunt wild animals by fishing, trapping, or shooting, and would certainly have known how to “clean” and cook the final product. She knew how to launder and repair clothing and likely knew how to sew, knit, and perhaps even weave. She would also have had

Introduction  19 some knowledge of medicines and of the basics of nursing. She would certainly have known how to transport large volumes of water from the well or stream to her house in the most effective way. Men’s work too, and the skills involved, went far beyond the tasks that they performed raising, tending, and selling agricultural produce (though these were many and complex), and went beyond the tasks they were paid for when “at work.” Wood, with its remarkable diversity of functions, exemplifies the complex way rural people worked within their immediate environment to participate in a wide variety of economies, from the “private” household to the corporate global world of trade, from growing their own food to selling their labour to buy commodities. Wood has long been one of Canada’s leading commodities traded within the global and national economies, and farmers and corporations were among those who benefited financially from its harvesting and sale. For rural households, however, wood was more than a commodity to be harvested and sold for money. It was also typically used by farm and rural households as a material found in the immediate local environment that was directly responsible for their support. To put this another way, rural people had many different ways of using wood, and each of those uses was accompanied by a series of skills and kinds of knowledge. Outside the treeless prairies, alpine areas, and the treeless North, wood from “the farm” provided much of the building materials used to shelter rural dwellers and their animals. It often provided the raw materials out of which rural dwellers fashioned their first furniture and some of their tools. It also provided the most important source of fuel by which Canadian families cooked their food and heated their homes. Rural dwellers without a good source of wood were significantly disadvantaged in terms of daily life compared to those who had a ready supply. In the Arctic, marine mammals, which supplied food, fuel and clothing, played an analogous role.

20  Canada’s Rural Majority To put it starkly, rural people were directly reliant on the relationship between their bodies and their environment to find, tend, and fabricate much of what they needed to live. Their work comprised a complex and multifaceted set of tasks and strategies, of which selling their labour and raising crops and livestock for sale were only two. Work supported a family and its livestock in places where many commodities and services simply were not consistently available for purchase or rent. As a result, while few rural households were fully self-supporting on a year-round basis, they were much more self-supporting and self-reliant than urban ones are today. Work within the rural household had to address a complex of activities, and each relied for success on an understanding of complex and fluid ecosystems: what kind of wheat would grow best in a low rainfall area? Which chickens would be most likely to make it through the harsh winter? What kind of wood was easiest to cut or created the most heat? What was the cheapest fencing material that would keep the cows out of the wheat field? The work of running a rural household was complex and multifaceted because a rural household met many of the needs that, in larger areas like neighbouring cities, were provided by specialized shared infrastructures such as water mains and the electric grid. Kathryn Morse explained the difference between modern industrial workplaces and distinctive older forms of labouring outside in this way: “In losing that direct connection to and knowledge of nature and production within nature … [contemporary labourers] lost an older, preindustrial intimacy with the ecosystems that sustained them.”2 The Household But if rural people had to rely, in part, on the relationship they were able to forge between themselves and their immediate environment, they also relied heavily and directly on their relationships with other people in making a living. The kinds of relationships that fostered and supported

Introduction  21 rural populations constitute the third significant difference between urban now and rural then: most rural people lived on a daily basis with a very small group of people, and many of those they interacted with the most were related, or at least personally known, to them. As we have seen, urbanites live and work today mostly inside buildings, protected from the exigencies of the environment, where they support themselves with wages or salaries paid by someone they might not know, using the regular sums in turn to purchase goods created for them by others they also do not know. Almost all able-bodied adults are now employees, or are selfemployed, owning their own businesses or enterprises. This scenario differs profoundly from that of most rural Canadians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who received a substantial part of their livelihood by doing work that was not remunerated by wages, did not take place “at work,” and was not limited to repeating the same narrow set of specialized tasks. Instead, much of it took place within, and was recompensed by, the household. Rural society was dominated by family matters in ways that contemporary urban life typically is not, and this aspect of rural life had significant consequences for how people lived as well as for the rural economy. Rural women’s social life in particular took place within a society of family members, but while children often went to school for some months of the year (if there was one close enough) and while men often travelled to markets to sell their produce or to work for wages on a daily, weekly, or seasonal basis, it was still the society of the family and household – not anonymous strangers or unrelated co-workers – that framed most people’s work and life throughout most of their lives. This is not to suggest that life was therefore sweet and harmonious. The fact that most labour was organized according to kinship (and one could not be fired), and most sociability centred on the household, certainly put some pressures on family dynamics. As pointed out in Neil Sutherland’s delightful oral history of childhood in the latter part of the period under study here, Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada

22  Canada’s Rural Majority from the Great War to the Age of Television, some rural children (and indeed adults) felt oppressed and constrained by the moral and emotional strategies that parents and older siblings resorted to in ensuring correct behaviours, including the right quantity and quality of work from all. Others felt appreciated and validated for the vital role they were playing in a joint family venture. The decision of when to hand over the farm to the next generation, and to whom, could also create problems. But as a range of rural community studies have argued, whether happy or sad, generous or exploitative, families provided the main economic and social support within the rural community. As Canada’s first national census in 1871 demonstrated and later ones confirmed, most rural households were centred on nuclear families (two parents and their young children), as were urban households. But rural households, however, were generally or often more complex, meaning that they included a higher incidence of stem families (parents living with their married children), family co-residence (more than one nuclear family in a household), and more distantly related and non-related people living in the household as lodgers, visitors, or hired help. Households would expand and contract, balancing the families’ needs for labour (in the fields and inside the home) with the number of mouths they could feed. Community-based studies from the period note that if most rural Canadian households were nuclear in structure, extended family, including cousins, nephews, aunts and grandparents, often lived near enough to play a major economic and social role within the household. This is not to say that family and household were sealed off from the wider community. Neighbours also provided an important part of the economic and social support networks of rural society, not only through the hiring and selling of one another’s labour but also, as we saw above, through the exchanges of labour in various kinds of reciprocal work bees, such as barn raising or quilt making. As one rural dweller described it, the “neighbourhood

Introduction  23 system was a bank in which all made their deposits, and from which in due course all were entitled to make their withdrawls [sic] and make small loans.”3 But the family lay at the heart of rural society. One final aspect of rural households in the 1870–1940 period that would strike a modern-day urban time traveller warrants discussion: the relative absence of material possessions that we now associate with poverty. The explosion of purchasing power for what came to be called consumer goods had to wait in most rural areas until after the 1970s, after the rural population had declined and the size of farms and their productive power had increased substantially. Before that, however, the relative absence of both cash and material goods, from electric gadgets to closets full of clothes, did not necessarily signal poverty to rural households at the time – even if rural populations were beginning to be disparaged by some outsiders for their so-called backwardness in terms of possessions, cultural habits, and spending power. Rural memoirs from the time frequently mention that while they had few possessions, families did not consider themselves poor. Their point of comparison was with family and neighbours, not the urban households where material wealth and modern amenities were becoming more common. Repeated rural testimony suggests that, with enough to eat, shoes and clothing to wear, and a roof over their heads, they simply did not feel poor. Canadian historians have questioned these assertions. Noting the relative paucity of cash and possessions of rural people in this period, they have asked whether rural people were simply unable to increase their wealth because of the economic structures of rural life, or whether they instead lived inside a culture and economy in which a “modest sufficiency” was enough. More research is needed to provide definitive answers to this question. These chapters attempt to describe the activities of rural people on their own terms, as if they were living life as they believed it should be lived. These chapters also seek to recognize and describe some

24  Canada’s Rural Majority of the larger structural factors that constrained and shaped rural people. Some of these larger constraining structural factors certainly shaped rural access to material wealth. Farmers frequently complained about the low prices they were able to obtain for their produce. But the difficulty that rural families experienced in accessing modern amenities often had little to do with how much cash or credit they possessed; it was the labour and expense of extending rural transportation, fuel, and power grids to more remote and sparsely populated areas and not the wealth of the individual rural households that influenced whether or not they received service. In the attempt to evaluate the role of money, it has been noted already that cash had a very different role in the rural households under study here, providing only one of three types of economic activity used to provide economic support, as opposed to providing almost the only means of support in urban areas. It is difficult to quantify its importance as a result. Finally, even when rural people might be considered by themselves and their neighbours as well off, they did not always use their wealth in ways that urbanites then or now would. Most rural people’s wealth was tied up in their land and improvements to it. Because most rural families owned and operated a home and lands that also provided their means of support, they frequently made different choices about what was worth spending money on or investing in. Rural people tended to spend on what would best support the household, including land and machinery, and not necessarily on what others might consider luxuries or even important amenities. By the 1960s, absolute and not just relative rural poverty had become a subject of considerable social and political concern in Canada, but that was after structural changes affected the complex economies that defined rural society in the 1870–1940 period. Throughout our time period here, rural households were supported by a varied and changing range of economic strategies, focused on the

Introduction  25 land and sea, whose exact value is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. But of course history is not simply the accumulation of personal experiences, including the three distinct characteristics of rural life outlined here: the dominance of the outdoors, the enormous amount of physical labour, and the centrality of the household. Questions like, “To what extent did off-farm wages degrade the earning potential of the family farm?” or “What was the influence of gender relations in Canada on the international price of wheat?” cannot be answered simply by looking at people’s day-today experience. Instead, history is about analysing a variety of evidence and explaining what changed and what stayed the same, in terms of concepts that resonate as significant inside the world of historians and within our contemporary world. This book is no exception. My particular aim here, however, is to write a general history that depicts the experience of rural life, while exploring its larger historical significance and meaning, both for those who were, and those who are not, rural. The Structure of This Book This book is organized around the premise that understanding place (and kinds of place) is key to understanding rural society. What rural people experienced when they stepped out their back door mattered in important ways. The encounter between people and land (and water) played a key role in household life, subsuming a variety of purposes and relationships. In order to explore these, the book is organized according to five vast, generalized, and somewhat overlapping zones in Canada: the Canadian Shield, the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region, the Central Plain, the Mountains, and Canada’s long threeocean coast. While neither geography nor “the environment” is destiny in Canada, the focus here will be on the local environment or kinds of environments within which

26  Canada’s Rural Majority people lived and worked. The five chapters vary somewhat in their organizational structure, but approximately the first half of each chapter will describe distinguishing features of the environment and explore key themes and issues in that kind of rural place, providing a “history from above.” The second half will “zoom in” to explore various aspects of daily life, at work and at home, providing a “history from below.” While each chapter acknowledges the environment and the occupationally plural, three-pillared support that generally characterized rural households and society, I provide detailed studies of various particular aspects, or elements, or spaces of rural life, distributed over the book. I generally allocate these to the chapters where it seems particularly appropriate, limiting relevant discussion in other chapters to a more cursory treatment in order to minimize repetition. The agri-forestry farm, hunting and gathering households, and the bunkhouse camp are, therefore, examined in the Canadian Shield chapter, while women’s work in the farm household, and men’s work on the mixed-farm and in the barn are given the most detailed examination in the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes chapter. The implications of the bison, the grasslands, and wheat farming are explored in the Central Plain chapter, while mining, orcharding, woodlands ranching, and market gardening are explored in the Mountains chapter. Finally, fishing and logging are explored in considerable detail in the Coast chapter. The temporal frame of this study is set by the date of Canada’s first census in 1871, which provides the first set of somewhat comparable national-level data, and 1941, the census year which marks the apogee in the number of farms and rural workers in Canada. The latter date also marks the clear emergence of important structural changes that would eventually erode the kind of rural life described in this book as characteristic of the previous seventy years. After 1940, wartime labour shortages disrupted many patterns, and then fossil fuels dramatically expanded transportation,

Introduction  27 agricultural production, and new forms of resource extraction even while competition within the globalized economy made redundant the small-scale farmers and small rural businesses. But that is another story. The focus here is on the distinctive rural way of life that had sustained the country for generations, between Confederation and the Second World War. There are many aspects of rural life and society that are not addressed in this short introduction to rural life in Canada. Ethnic differences within the non-Native, predominantly Western European and Scandinavian population in these years are generally ignored, not because they did not matter but because the focus of the book is on the coherence and commonalities among rural peoples rather than their differences. There are few discussions of the distinctive rural customs and practices that people brought to Canada from elsewhere or the ways that these were worked out at the level of community, though this was often an important aspect of rural culture and society. The politics of rural peoples is also seldom mentioned, even though it too was highly significant: conflict between agricultural and other interests, indeed, dominated politics across the country for much of the 1870–1940 period. But while farmers’ interests sometimes coalesced around particular issues – cheap land, low tariffs on the machinery that they needed to produce their crops, and cooperative control over the transportation and marketing of their produce – a single rural cause seldom galvanized political action, and never for long. But there was no shortage of people trying to organize rural reforms and rural people in these years. Some began to urge the creation of a new, better, and truly Christian/egalitarian society out of functioning rural communities, with nodes of sociability such as community centres and active farm and Women’s Institutes. Some spoke of a new and modern rural society that would draw on the efficiencies, amenities, conveniences, and inventions that were already improving urban life – but without the anonymity, greed,

28  Canada’s Rural Majority violence, individualism, and corporatism so often associated (by rural people in particular) with the city. To usher in the new rural society, reformers lobbied for a wide variety of social reforms, from safe milk for babies to community development, year-round roads, a national council for child welfare, and women’s rights. The 1930s Depression put an end to visionary thinking for most rural people. We will here see only glimpses of the rural reformers, and some rural responses, to a range of political issues that touched rural people’s lives, even if rural people – disparagingly referred to by at least one observer from the time as a “motley crew” of people with divergent interests and abilities – would not mobilize into a single coherent political interest group. Important as political movements, ethnic differences, and cultural diversity were to rural people, this short book will argue that rural Canadians shared some common and distinctive patterns of life and experiences that clearly distinguished the country’s dominant rural populations from the urban in the 1870–1940 period (and from us today). Spending large amounts of time outdoors in every season, expending copious amounts of physical energy working mainly within and for the household (even when that involved working away from home), negotiating complex and ever-changing relationships among household members, local environments, and markets, Canada’s rural majority comprised a vital – and I repeat, distinctive – element of the country’s history. For this period of time, their concerns defined the potential of the nation. This book introduces their story.

2 The Canadian Shield

The Canadian Shield is the country’s largest landform. It is almost unimaginably huge. Its 4.6 million square kilo­ metres include most of Newfoundland, Labrador,­ Nunavut, northern Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba, much of northern Saskatchewan, and the northeastern corner of Alberta. It is the world’s largest and oldest outcropping of bedrock (granite). While some of it is exposed, the majority of it is covered with the water of hundreds of thousands of lakes, rivers, and ponds, as well as swampy muskeg and dense boreal forests atop a thin layer of acidic, waterlogged soil. It is covered with snow and ice in the winter, and, farther north in the tundra, layered with permafrost throughout the year. The Shield is most visible and accessible today to those “on the outside” as a wilderness destination, one not usually called rural. Following a tradition of wilderness tourism first established in the late nineteenth century, today tens of thousands of people from cities such as Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal own cottages or join visitors from all over the world at summer and winter resorts and fishing camps in the recreational lands on the southern fringes of the Shield, including the Manitoba-Ontario Interprovincial Wilderness Area, Muskoka, the Haliburton Highlands, and the Thousand Islands in Ontario, and the Laurentides and the Charlevoix in Quebec. Some venture north to remote wilderness parks to camp, canoe, and kayak in, for example,

The Canadian Shield  31 Wood Bison National Park, Alberta, or Auyuittuq National Park, Nunavut. Some (including many Americans) hire guides and hunt and fish in private camps. A recreational space for many, for others the Shield has been a place to work, not play. It was, indeed, the resources extracted from the Shield by rural workers that transformed Canada from a resource-poor to resource-rich nation in the early twentieth century. Today, if you travel beyond the most popular tourist regions on the fringes of the Shield, you will find a vast zone of heavy industry and megaprojects, huge vistas of clear-cut logging, hidden valleys flooded by massive hydroelectric dams, dotted with the mines, smelters, sawmills, pulp and paper mills, and other processing plants that they power. “The North” (as subarctic Shield country is often known) is a land of semi-permanent company towns and resource extraction sites, where heavy-powered machinery operated by highly paid short-term workers wrests out massive volumes of natural resources for export elsewhere. But in the 1870–1940 period, as the population of the Shield increased almost twenty-fold from sixty thousand to just under a million, hundreds of thousands of people called it home, the majority living in rural enclaves. This chapter begins by exploring what kind of place the Shield is, and then provides an overview of the complex rural societies and economies that existed, and changed, in this vast region in our seventy-year period. The second half of the chapter depicts in some detail daily life on the Canadian Shield, focusing on three different typical sets of activities that related people to their environment and to each other: the life of hunters/fishers/gatherers, of the farm/forest household, and of workers in bush camps (loggers in particular). The Canadian Shield as Rural Place The Shield is a landscape, a geography, and an environment that dominates Canada. This Precambrian rock, one of the globe’s most distinctive visible geological formations,

32  Canada’s Rural Majority is the biggest physical feature of North America. The subvarieties of Shield landscapes have been classified into five distinct physiographic “provinces” or subzones, but it is generally granite covered with a thin layer of water or soil (the hard rock so close to the surface making for poor drainage). It is unmistakably easy to see from an airplane that most of the rocky land is covered by standing water, from the deepest of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior, to shallow bogs. This remarkable hard oblong includes over 300,000 square kilometres of arctic islands and lies under Hudson Bay. Its extreme southern tip reaches Lake Ontario at Kingston, crisscrossed by the St. Lawrence at the Thousand Islands, and extends about 260,000 square kilometers into the United States, including the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, and the rocky lands south and west of Lake Superior, into Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The landscape we see was shaped during the last ice age. At its most intense, when the ice was more than 3 kilometres thick, it exerted about 9 billion tonnes of pressure per square mile on the land underneath it, scraping metres of the organic material, soil, and other kinds of rocks from the surface as it moved southward. Hudson Bay, where the ice was heaviest, can be imagined as the water-filled bottom of a big bowl that is the Canadian Shield. Most rivers in Canada are on the Shield and flow north, many into the Bay, away from both the warmer, more fertile lands of the south and the eastward-flowing Great Lakes–St. Lawrence transportation conduit. The Shield’s rivers thus had a profound effect on its rural populations, and indeed on the entire Canadian economy and society. During the days of the fur trade, through the eras of logging, railroad building, and attempts at farm settlement, the glory days of the pulp and paper industry, and the ongoing activities in silver, gold, and uranium mining and hydroelectric development, the northerly flow of the rivers has meant that transportation from the north to the south was expensive and often physically impossible. Ice blocked almost all outlets in the north.

The Canadian Shield  33 Some pulverized rock and organic matter remained after the last retreat of the ice, creating relative fertility in the Lac St. Jean and Saguenay regions of Quebec, the so-called Clay Belts in Ontario and Quebec, and an area west of Thunder Bay. Forests of pine, spruce, and balsam with their shallow roots in the thin soil are a distinctive characteristic of the Shield, but farther north, ice, permafrost, and tundra dominate the land. Numerous small mammals are well adapted to the region, including beaver, lynx, squirrels, hares, and foxes. Many kinds of waterfowl migrate to produce young in the relative safety of the sparsely occupied Shield, attracted by the intense prolonged light of its short summer. A wide variety of fish live in the fresh water of the abundant lakes and rivers. A few large mammals thrive throughout the Shield, including bear, wolves, deer, moose, and caribou, and farther north, muskoxen and polar bears. All these life forms have been vital to the survival of the low-density human societies of the Shield for several millennia. Soil has been gradually building up since the last ice age, but the intensely continental climate (far from the moderating effects of warmer oceans) has slowed this region’s recovery from that total devastation. In the early twenty-first century, rapid climate change has already begun melting glaciers and areas of permafrost, with unknown consequences for the region. In the rock (under the thin to non-existent soil and snow) there is and was a wealth of minerals, and on it, a wealth of trees and water. In the twentieth century, these “natural resources” transformed Canada into a leading world exporter of gold (for jewellery, currency, and industrial applications), potash (for fertilizers), zinc and nickel (to make stainless steel, primarily for weapons), salt (for food and roads), iron ore (for steel, again primarily for weapons), copper (for wire and pipes, and again, weapons), standing timber (for house construction and renovation, previously naval ships), “pulp” trees (paper mainly for newspaper and magazines), and fish. Today, the Shield remains a

34  Canada’s Rural Majority significant source of copper as well as uranium (for nuclear weapons, nuclear power stations, and, in small amounts, medical diagnostics), lead (now mainly for car batteries and weapons, but previously for paint and gasoline), asbestos or chrysotile (for insulation, pipes, and brake linings), as well as much of the world’s cobalt (for magnet steels, weapons, pigments, stainless steel, and medical diagnostics), silver (for jewellery, electrical contacts, batteries, and photography), and molybdenum (for steel and as a solid lubricant in industry). The Canadian Shield, with its abundant water, is a major supplier of power in the form of hydroelectricity, a most valuable form of energy that, in coal- and oil-deficient central Canada, has fuelled the industries of the Shield. The extraction, processing, and transportation of these resources in the twentieth century constituted a significant part of the work, the society, the politics, and the culture of the rural populations on the Shield, laying the foundations of much of Canada’s wealth. Overview: The History of the Shield Across much of Canada, the visible start of the Shield is seen as the farthest reach of commercially viable agriculture and, by correlation, successful settlement. Farming was all but impossible on the Shield itself and, until the mid-nineteenth century, the vast Shield lands (known then as Rupert’s Land or the North West) were seen by the Euro-American agrarian eyes of would-be settlers, policymakers, and “developers” as a vast, formidable, cold, impenetrable, and basically useless physical barrier between two bodies of lands that could be farmed: on the east side, the rich farmlands of the St. Lawrence Plain linked upstream to the shores of Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron, and on the west side the prairie grasslands. Euro-Canadians first maintained that only Native hunting and gathering populations could survive in the intervening environment. Because of the extreme difficulty Euro-Americans had in travelling through and living

The Canadian Shield  35 on the rocky, insect-infested, water-logged, often frozen land, it was only with the building of the transcontinental railway in the 1880s that it became possible for large numbers of would-be-farmers, industrialists, and business people to even move across this “barrier.” Although the Shield became part of Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905, and of the new northern extensions of Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba in 1912, as late as 1965 historian W.L. Morton argued that the Canadian Shield was so different from the rest of Canada that it “ought to have been made and kept a federal empire … controlled from Ottawa with its own department of government.”1 Historically, then, the Shield has played a largely negative role in what historians have designated as the main story of Canadian rural history: the progress of Euro-American agricultural settlement. First Nations and Inuit originally inhabited the Shield, living in small numbers and supporting themselves mainly by hunting, fishing, gathering, and trading furs and fish. Shield lands are now, again, deemed generally unsuitable for commercial farming. But that was not the perception when Canadian federal and provincial governments spent considerable sums in the early decades of the twentieth century to entice tens of thousands of would-be-farmers to settle on Shield lands. Their efforts helped to boost the population to almost a million by 1941. Shield towns grew up around mines, such as those near Sudbury (nickel and copper, 1883), Cobalt (silver, 1906), and South Porcupine and Timmins (gold, 1911–12) in Ontario; Rouyn-Noranda (copper, 1917), TroisRivières (iron, and later pulp and paper), and Capelton (copper and sulphur, 1863) in Quebec; Flin Flon in Manitoba (copper and zinc, 1927); and Yellowknife (gold, 1935), and around Port Radium (silver, copper, lead, zinc, iron, pitchblende, radium, uranium, 1920s) in the Northwest Territories. Others grew up around pulp and paper mills, such as Kenora, Ontario, and Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Towns such as The Pas, Manitoba, or North Bay, Ontario, were located at the confluence of transportation routes, and acted

36  Canada’s Rural Majority as regional centres for rural peoples and resource industries. Before the late 1950s, however, the majority of those living on the Shield lived outside of urban areas. But most rural people were not farmers. As we will see below, the agricultural experiment at settling people on Shield lands did not, in the end, create a thriving agricultural region. The climate was too extreme, the growing season too short, and topsoil too scarce. Until the 1940s, however, many First Nations and Inuit communities continued to support themselves primarily through hunting and fishing. A few homesteaders here and there succeeded in establishing the kinds of productive farms imagined by governments eager for agricultural expansion. But most of the half million people living in the rural Shield country in 1941 were still, like their predecessors, supported by the three pillars of the complex household economy, composed of a shifting mix of wages from seasonal work (of both draft animals and people) in the burgeoning forest, mining, and fishing industries; direct self-provisioning from land and water through hunting, fishing, gardening, and gathering; and finally, the sale or barter of commodities (often processed by the household) that were grown (potatoes and other vegetables), reared and tended (chickens and pigs), or otherwise extracted (maple sugar, trees for fuel wood, mining props, and fencing). Some people worked as guides for wealthy tourists wanting to hunt and fish in the north. A few early prospectors succeeded in extracting silver and gold from the mineral-rich lands before large corporate operations moved in, living and working outside of resource towns. The Shield’s varied and flexible economy supported thousands of rural families on the land, albeit often at levels that would be defined as “below the poverty line” by the standards of urban Canadians in the postwar period. As well, it fostered resource industries needing the labour of thousands of men and draught animals on seasonal, part-time, and intermittent bases for low pay in remote areas.

The Canadian Shield  37 For a brief but highly significant period in Canadian history – beginning just before 1900 and ending with the widespread use of gasoline-powered engines by the mid-twentieth century – rural households on the Shield coexisted with growing industrialization: they were vitally intertwined in a fragile but adaptable pattern that was the modern, industrial development of the region’s and the country’s wealth. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a pattern known as “agri-forestry,” resource industries, particularly forestry but also mining and fishing, provided parttime and intermittent work for wages that helped support tens of thousands of would-be farm families moving onto the northern Shield regions of the Prairie provinces and in northern Ontario and Quebec (known as New Ontario and Quebec). For a few decades, the food and fuel grown, hunted, or harvested by rural householders directly from their Shield lands, and used in the rural homes (or sold), provided a key pillar of household support on the numerous occasions when wages or sales of special cash crops failed, whether because of an early frost, the breakdown of transportation systems, or one of the many downturns in international markets for Shield resources. But if rural families depended on a wide variety of activities for their support, industries were, for a time, also reliant on rural households. The symbiotic relationship between farming and logging on the Shield was at the heart of both the development of industry and agricultural settlement. Changes in that relationship would eventually herald the decline of farming and the triumph of corporate (usually foreign-owned) industry on the Shield. But before the turn of the century, as good quality timber in the form of pine was almost exhausted (the polite term for over-harvested) in the southern reaches of the Shield, some loggers moved farther north to find big pine trees. Others started harvesting small pine as well as spruce and balsam, at first for processing as lumber in hundreds of small sawmills and, by the early decades of the century, as pulp in paper mills.

38  Canada’s Rural Majority By the 1920s, an estimated 90,000 men worked in all this tree-­cutting of various kinds. Another hundred thousand worked building first the railroads, then roads and airports in the Shield, to facilitate the movement of people and goods. The wages paid in these occupations, and the agricultural products consumed, were vital components of support for those families living in rural areas of the Shield. Dramatic changes were underway in the interwar period. By the 1940s, the three pillars of support on which rural households relied were beginning to crumble. New industrial production of pulp and paper, and the expansion of transportation routes across the Shield, provided employment opportunities for rural dwellers but worked against the long-term symbiosis of the agri-forestry economy. While the hand-cutting of “pulp trees” hauled by teams of horses continued to be an important rural Shield industry, the pulp and paper industry of the twentieth century introduced an element of competition, rather than symbiosis, between settlers and loggers. Early logging operations had often been a prelude to settlement, clearing the land of large trees for farmers and then providing a supplement to farmers’ incomes. Pulp and paper, by contrast, came to rely on harvesting small trees repeatedly on a particular piece of land. Farmers were increasingly identified as interlopers on lands that industrialists argued were best reserved as forest lands for the new pulp and paper mills, to be efficiently harvested over and over. The modern pulp and paper mills established on the Shield in the early twentieth century required much more capital expenditure and were more technologically sophisticated than the sawmills they replaced: “In 1924, for instance, Ontario’s 720 sawmills employed 8,828 people, while the province’s 26 pulp and paper mills provided jobs for 9,874.”2 Citing its heavy and sustainable investment in the region’s economy, the industry lobbied for, and won, the right to expand the typical oneyear logging lease to twenty years or more. Environmental

The Canadian Shield  39 conditions made it possible, and financial incentives made it profitable, for companies to reforest vast areas, and the spindly forest reserves of the Shield were turned into renewable resources. With their new more permanent interest in the land, forest interests became increasingly interested in expelling rural people, whether Indigenous or not, from lands they argued provided only a marginal agricultural living at best. Not only had farmers taken up land that pulp and paper interests wanted for their own massive woodlots, industrialists complained, but they had also contributed to the destruction of vast regions of timber by fire. Whether fires resulted from the deliberate practices of farmers wanting to clear their land quickly or from stray sparks from a household fire or a blacksmith’s shop (or, as farmers counterclaimed, from the careless habits and fuel-consuming steam engines of industrial operations), they constituted a fact of life that destroyed, according to some estimates, as much land as was harvested by loggers: hundreds of thousands of hectares of boreal forest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While forest fires were a part of the region’s natural ecology, foresters had little understanding of this, and settlers and foresters alike feared wildfires. Under pressure from industry, governments developed new policies to take the lands suitable for tree-cutting, mining, and hydroelectricity out of the hands of farmers and others gaining a living directly from the land and put them into new, non-agricultural designations to support industry and the electricity that powered it. Governments changed laws to allow for long-term licensing of the forests and created provincial parks, beginning with Algonquin Park in 1893, in which they prohibited settlement while doling out long-term logging licenses. Pulp and paper mills, mining, and hydroelectric dams and lines destroyed or compromised the habitat of the animals on whom Indigenous people and large numbers of settlers alike relied, cutting away at the third pillar of rural life: direct reliance on the local environment for food and fuel.

40  Canada’s Rural Majority As rural, land-based families competed with companies over forested lands, outside interests increasingly identified householders’ reliance on subsistence hunting, gathering, and fishing activities as interfering with the interests of both commercial fishing operations on the Shield and the lucrative sports fishing and hunting camps. Urban (often foreign) owners lobbied governments to restrict the access of rural people to Crown lands, areas from which rural people traditionally drew berries, fish, deer, wildfowl, and wood for fuel and shelter. Governments responded by implementing ever-more rigorous hunting and fishing regulations on non-commercial populations, often positing “poor conservation ethics” to argue that both Indigenous people and rural populations generally were irresponsible in the ways they hunted and fished. Interestingly, historians now argue that not rural households but the massive extraction of fish and game by commercial interests and habitat destruction by industry were mainly responsible for the precipitous declines in the numbers and variety of fish and animal species on the Shield in those years. At about the same time that marginalized farmlands came into competition with industrial and commercial uses on the Shield, particularly with the pulp and paper industry, the nascent industries of the Shield became less reliant on the part-time and temporary workforce of rural dwellers, and ever less dependent on their farm produce. As gasoline-powered machines replaced power derived from horses, oxen, and humans, logging operations no longer had to rely on relatively expensive local supplies of food and labour. By the 1930s, coal-powered railways began to bring cheaper and often more reliable sources of both from the south. After the Second World War, legislation relating to work conditions in more highly capitalized, stable, and permanent industrial activities translated into higher wages and more secure jobs, in the medium term, at least. Better transportation, particularly refrigerated rolling stock (i.e.,

The Canadian Shield  41 trains), brought cheaper and more abundant food from the south to northern communities. The fragile symbiosis that had existed between the farm and the forest snapped, the farm population fled, and the rural population diminished. The remaining rural households welcomed the increasing incomes, safety, and comfort of the new, much leaner industrial enterprises and the dependence on a full-time wage, particularly as their options – their three pillars of support – had changed so dramatically. Few lamented the often brutal working conditions and financial insecurities of the seasonal work camps of the northern bush. Many, however, missed the independence of owning their own farms, and most acutely when the mill, mine, or factory went out of production, leaving them wageless inside an increasingly wage-based economy. By the early twentieth century, the Shield had become, in an important sense, Canada’s massive outdoor “working space” or “economic resource extraction area,” the place where massive quantities and varieties of natural resources were extracted, processed, and then transported elsewhere for the benefit of non-local populations. The costs for the Shield environment and its peoples have been high and the returns relatively low. Many species of fish and fur bearing animals were on the brink of extinction even by the early twentieth century because of overexploitation and habitat destruction. Many others have followed. Since the late nineteenth century, the Shield has been not only a vast space of resource exploitation but also a de facto dumping ground for the by-products and waste from the extractive and industrial processes that funnel natural resources, and the wealth they generate, out of the Shield and into urban populations elsewhere. The Great Lakes that frame the arc of the Shield – Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior to the south, as well as Lake Winnipeg, Lake Athabasca, Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake to the west – have been particularly hard hit by industrial pollution, overfishing, and habitat destruction. It is time to look in more detail at

42  Canada’s Rural Majority the continuities and changes experienced by those, Native and non-Native alike, who called the Shield their home in the 1870–1940 period. Hunters, Fishers, Gatherers, and Traders For the 10,000 years since the retreat of the ice, the vast area of the Shield was thinly populated by the ancestors of Cree, Assiniboine, Ojibwa, Inuit, and Dene. Some arrived before the pyramids were built in Egypt, before the dawn of agriculture in Mesopotamia, crossing from what is now western Alaska to northeastern Canada. The Arctic Inuit are more recent arrivals, crossing from Greenland only 4,000 years ago, not too long after agriculture was established in Britain. Indigenous peoples of the Shield varied in languages, culture, and social practices, and in ways that changed, sometimes due to encounters with other peoples. But all made their living primarily from hunting, fishing, and gathering rather than relying exclusively on agriculture or the sale of commodities. Trade had made up a part of their economy, and this part expanded with the arrival of Europeans in search of the rich Shield furs. Indigenous cultures were well adapted to the environmental conditions – forests, lakes, rivers, muskeg, snow, and ice – that proved almost impossible for Europeans. Birch bark canoes, snowshoes, toboggans, and dogsleds, for example, allowed seasonal variable travel over land that was impenetrable on foot because of extensive muskeg and numerous shallow lakes. Living always in low population densities, usually for most of the year in small groups of two or three families, and moving across a wide territory throughout the year to pursue food and fuel, Indigenous peoples had a relatively light touch on the complex Shield ecosystems that supported them. Fishing played a central role in their economy and society. Although cultural conventions differed across this vast region, women were often primary fishers, fishing for sturgeon, whitefish, lake trout, jackfish, and several species

The Canadian Shield  43 of suckers. They used a variety of gear, including hook and line, spears, nets, and brush and stone weirs. Once Cree and Ojibwa were drawn into the fur trade, they used European metal fish hooks, net lines, and twine as well as seine nets. The fish were preserved by freezing, drying, and smoking. Fish, caribou meat and pemmican (a high protein mix of buffalo meat, fat, and sometimes berries) traded at fur trade posts supported the Hudson Bay traders as well as First Nations families. Much of the Canadian Shield, and indeed most of north and western Canada, though occupied almost exclusively by Indigenous people throughout the nineteenth century, had been in the formal possession of the Hudson’s Bay Company since 1670, when the King of England granted an exclusive charter to the Company to trade for furs in the area. The Shield provided the conditions of extreme cold that gave the beaver and the other fur-bearing animals – mink, ermine, fox – the particularly thick coats that made them so valuable to the Indigenous peoples, and then around the world. Local rural populations harvested the furs, particularly the beaver whose pelt was used to make the top hats fashionable in Europe, and provided one of Canada’s first rural exports. It was a rural resource that, along with fish, played an important role in bringing Europeans to what became Canada, first simply to trade and then later to settle in the agricultural areas immediately to the south of the Shield, in the St. Lawrence Plain. Europeans were not (for the first two centuries after arriving on the Shield) interested in displacing or transforming the Shield’s Indigenous communities or environments by settling agricultural populations or by installing industrial infrastructure in the region. By 1870, this was beginning to change. Even prior to the earliest days of the fur trade, contact had brought devastation into Indigenous communities across the continent. Diseases from the Eurasian landmass to which the long-isolated peoples of the Americas

44  Canada’s Rural Majority had no immunity had caused serious epidemics. Some disease organisms made their way north and westward from Central America and travelled along the fur trade routes. Much detail remains unknown, but overall, the Indigenous population decline due to European epidemic diseases in Canada has been estimated at between 25 and 50 per cent overall. Some individual villages were wiped out, some cultures disappeared, some coalesced, and others regrew in numbers only slowly. By the 1870s, even before the massive tide of Euro-Americans flooded into the Canadian south and west competing for land, many Cree, Ojibwa, and Chipewayan populations of the north, from present-day Quebec to Alberta, were beginning to need outside help fending off starvation. The “numbered treaties” that Canada negotiated across the Canadian Shield throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries initially gave First Nations legal rights to hunt and fish for their own use on the small pieces of land reserved for them. The depletion of animals from overhunting (a result of the fur trade) made this a slim reed for survival in many areas of the Shield, and conditions worsened as railways brought non-Native hunters and trappers into northlands previously inaccessible to outsiders. Agricultural settlement began encroaching on the southern fringes of Indigenous Shield lands, interfering with their access to fish in streams and rivers from the late nineteenth century onwards. As competition over land use intensified, federal and provincial governments began to rescind non-commercial hunting and fishing rights previously granted under treaties to First Nations. Fish, game, and wildlife conservation efforts in the early twentieth century increasingly controlled “wildlife” for the benefit of vacationing urban hunters and fishermen, reducing the ability of all rural populations, but most acutely Indigenous, to rely on free access to the Shield’s natural bounty for their support. Private fish and game clubs successfully lobbied governments to limit or remove their access. Major commercial fishing operations

The Canadian Shield  45 used large and powerful equipment, eventually eliminating stocks of sturgeon, white fish, and later lake trout. In 1888, an unidentified Aboriginal man reported that the overfishing by American corporate interests of just one variety of fish, the sturgeon (whose roe were used for valuable caviar), was devastating his Manitoba Shield community: We have waited too long for our guardians to do something for us. They must know surely that our food is being carried away to the [United] States. The fish are becoming fewer and fewer and more and more difficult to catch … Our little canoes and handful of nets toiling along the shore in shallow water are but a drop in the lake compared with these companies with their steamers and enormous nets enclosing fish of all kinds … these men catch all the fish, and we get nothing.3

Farming, sports fishing, and commercial fish harvesting all encroached on First Nations’ ability to access the resources on which they had traditionally relied. Massive levels of timber and mineral extraction brought Euro-Americans and Indigenous peoples, the majority of the population in most remote northern Shield areas, into direct competition as well. In the early twentieth century, hydroelectric dams were built to power the mills, mines, and processing plants of the Shield. Mining operations and power lines further disrupted the animal and plant populations on which First Nations relied for subsistence and trade. Thousands of hectares of Native lands were flooded or otherwise denuded of the environmental attributes on which the hunting, fishing, and gathering populations relied. While Aboriginal peoples found some waged work in the developing resource industries, they were disproportionately affected by policies and practices that limited their access to three of the main supports of rural life on the Shield in the first half of the twentieth century. First, their access to well-paying waged work in the resource sector was limited by racist hiring priorities. Second, their access to rural agricultural lands, however marginal in quality, was

46  Canada’s Rural Majority compromised by racist homestead policies and practices; Aboriginal people were prohibited from homesteading. Third, their ability to participate in a hunting and gathering economy was reduced by environmental destruction from resource extraction and the related industrial development on the one hand, and, on the other, land use policies that favoured the “preservation” of land for wilderness recreation, industrial uses, and agriculture. Increasingly excluded from “traditional” means of support, from the benefits of new agricultural ways of life, and industrial occupations, Aboriginal peoples were also culturally devastated as children when they were removed from their homes and their cultures to be placed in the “total institutions” of residential schools. In spite of all these obstacles, some First Nations and Inuit, particularly in the northern parts of the Shield, were able to thrive in an economy and society still based on hunting and fishing. It would not be until the later twentieth century, however, that their sustained protests finally resulted in legal recognition and removal of at least some of the economic and social injustices of the 1870–1940 period. If the complex fishing/hunting/gathering/trading economy that had sustained rural households on the Shield for millennia was seriously disrupted by the new industrial activities of the early twentieth century, how did the newly settled agricultural populations fare in these years? Agri-Foresters at Home on the Shield As Arthur Lower, one of Canada’s first historians of the Shield observed in 1936, “From the first there have been two quite different types of motivation in the occupation of Canada, one the purely exploitative urge to gain and plunder the natural resources of a new country, the other the equally human desire to possess the land and on it to build new societies.”4 Recent interpretations of rural life on the Shield do not support such a stark contrast between resource extraction

The Canadian Shield  47 and settlement; as in so much of rural Canada in the 1870– 1940 period, the commercial value of Shield resources and the use-value of local environments for local households were intertwined. The individuals and families moving onto the Canadian Shield in the early twentieth century for the first time, or those who had been living there from time immemorial, did not work simply to generate wealth for entrepreneurs, or to satisfy the expansionist ideals of their province or country. Although many worked at some point in the logging, mining, and pulp and paper industries, the evidence is overwhelming that Euro-Canadian families were drawn to the Shield in the early twentieth century, whether through group settlement schemes or as individuals, because they believed that it was their last chance to create an agricultural family enterprise that would provide reliable support, relatively free from the stranglehold of landlords and employers. Many factors encouraged Shield settlement: the improbable success that settlement on the Prairies had brought; scientific theories of the day championing the agricultural promise of the Shield; generous terms of land acquisition and other foundational government support; and the promise of “off-farm” work in the forests and mines to help with unavoidable cash expenses.  Tens of thousands of settlers arrived with high hopes of establishing farms there. Roy MacGregor, son of a bush farmer and logger, explained what brought his father to the Algonquin Park region: It was “work that took him there, not vacation, not adventure, not design, not romance.” Those coming to the Canadian bush, “as opposed to the American frontier, woods, or even wilderness – came almost exclusively because they had no other choice … almost invariably so busy with survival that they had little or no time to intellectualize the experience.”5 Logging was foundational for thousands of families. While waged work in the forests provided an important support for rural life on the Shield, for many people, cheap farmland was the backbone: a very powerful draw

48  Canada’s Rural Majority for immigrants and southern Canadians alike. Early settlement on the southern reaches of the Canadian Shield, particularly in the valleys of the south-flowing Ottawa and Trent Rivers, had grown up with the logging industries of the nineteenth century. When Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta obtained their northern Shield regions, political parties urged that the cheap lands of the “new” northern pioneer agricultural frontier would solve a variety of problems associated with urbanization. And tens of thousands of would-be-farm families seeking their own economic stability in the Shield lands agreed. Up until 1932, Ontario and Quebec promoted northern colonization to the same level; the numbers of farms, total farm revenues, and government spending was about the same in each province. Their responses diverged after the Great Depression first brought renewed interest in settling the unemployed on northern lands, quickly followed by many spectacular failures: by 1940, there were twice as many farms in Abitibi, Quebec, as in Cochrane, Ontario. Northern agricultural settlement was significant. Be­tween 1911 and 1941 the number of farms on the Shield in Ontario and Quebec increased from 30,000 to 40,000, growing in those years from about 8 per cent of all farms in both provinces to about 12 per cent. Shield farms were about 150 acres (60 hectares) on average throughout this whole period, with about a third of that cleared and cultivated or in pasture per farm, much less than in their respective provincial souths at that time. Farmers grew oats and barley (but little wheat once Western wheat became available) to supply cash, or more commonly, credit from the general store. A number of communities had small cheese factories that turned surpluses of milk from the family cows into cash, and which also supplied pigs with whey, a by product from the cheese factories. The people flooding into the Shield country of Quebec and Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mostly Canadian-born, with Ontario having more

The Canadian Shield  49 immigrants than Quebec from Britain, the United States, and Finland (which became an independent state in 1917), Poland, Italy, and Yugoslavia (formed in 1918) in descending order. The Shield lands of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta had a higher proportion of European-born settlers, many from the Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, but even there about half were Canadian-born. Many, indeed, were farmers from southern Ontario or Quebec seeking less expensive land farther north. Others, particularly in the 1930s, were fleeing their failed farm experiments in the drought lands of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. In Ontario and Quebec in 1941, only 60 per cent of rural populations in areas other than the Canadian Shield were living on farms (defined in 1941 as an area of land larger than one acre and generating agricultural products valued at $50 or more, or having land under crops or used for pasture). On the Shield itself, only 45 per cent of rural populations were living on farms defined in this way. Shield farm populations fell as a proportion of the total population from just under a third (30 per cent) in 1931 to a quarter in 1941, and the urban population held steady at 45 per cent of the total. When the census enumerators asked farmers what kind of farms they were running in 1941, over two-thirds of Quebec Shield farmers and over half of Ontario Shield farmers reported that they were either subsistence or part-time farmers. These were never commercially successful farms. As we will see below, work camps were filled almost exclusively with men without families. But outside of towns and camps, families predominated. Almost no farms depended on full time hired labour; the farm families did the overwhelming bulk of the work, with all members vital to even the most fragile success. While some settlers were certainly misled, underprepared, and tragically misinformed about farm life on the Shield, for others, the region represented a wide variety of strategies that could be pursued, particularly for those more interested in “getting by” than “getting

50  Canada’s Rural Majority rich.” This was most dramatically the case for those fleeing the Dust Bowl of the southern prairies during the Depression. The story of individual settlers and local communities are full of references to the advantages of Shield life, as this one excerpt from the area north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, shows: The 1930s were boom times for Paddockwood. The drought on the prairies forced many farmers to move North. At this time Paddockwood had five general stores, a butcher shop, a drugstore, two harness repair shops, a lumber yard, hardware store, two blacksmith shops, one pool room, two hotels, three restaurants, a bakery, a second hand store, a barber shop, and twice weekly the ladies of the community could visit a beauty parlor operated in the hotel … A resident MD set bones and performed minor surgery (without anesthetic) … There were men who filed saws, repaired radios, practiced veterinary medicine, tanned robes, made illegal spirits, and told fortunes.6

It was not only Dust Bowl refugees who benefited from the mixed ecology of the Shield; throughout the early twentieth century, thousands of settlers preferred the forested northern “parkland” of the Prairie Shield region. While the Prairies could, in good years, provide abundant income from the sale of wheat as a cash crop, the Shield was a more reliable provider of the basics upon which rural life depended: wood and water. But conditions were tough. A study of settlement of the Clay Belt, the largest organized agricultural settlement region in northern Ontario and Quebec, published by the Canadian government in 1944, noted that “ninety-eight percent of the settlers visited had to haul their water supply for the house and barn … Electricity, telephone or radio were not reported by any settlers.” Settlers complained that the most difficult thing about their lives, however, was financing the farm as it was getting started; most had spent all their money and more on the house, barn, and livestock,

The Canadian Shield  51 and were unable to obtain the credit needed to purchase supplies and equipment because of existing debt. They also complained about the shortage of feed for horses in winter, many of whom died from starvation or from harsh winter conditions. The shortness of the frost-free season made it difficult to grow produce, and the poor, often impassable roads, made it difficult to transport it to markets.7 For rural settler families, whether or not their land qualified as a “farm,” life fell into a fairly predictable seasonal round. While families would purchase items such as tea, flour, molasses, and kerosene (for lighting) for the winter months, most households had a garden, planted in early summer after the risk of frost had passed, in which they grew potatoes, other root vegetables, and cabbages. From late spring through to late summer, berry gathering was an important and generally very pleasant aspect of rural life (except for the biting insects). If the family required extra cash in the summer, older sons or the father might leave to work on a road or rail-building crew nearby, though some travelled farther for this type of work, and for months at a time. Families sold vegetables, oats, and beef or pigs to nearby logging and other work camps, or took them to the railhead for shipping to markets. Some families sold surplus eggs, chickens, and, in the summer, vegetables from the garden to people in the neighbourhood, or, in some areas, to summer tourists. In the fall, all available vegetables and fruit would be preserved by canning, and meat and fish would be canned, smoked, or salted. In the late fall, as work on the farm decreased, the elder sons and perhaps the father would head off for weeks or months at a time to work in the logging camps, leaving the women and younger children to look after the household and farm. Rural houses were almost always made from the abundant supplies of wood that characterized the Canadian Shield. As households and communities moved out of the pioneer phase, cut timber construction replaced logs. Generally small, dark, and draughty, these homes provided the

52  Canada’s Rural Majority standard accommodation for the large families that typified rural society of the time. Here is one description of a Shield country home (this one north of the village of Saint-JeanPort-Joli, Quebec) of the 1930s: “There were 8 rooms, only downstairs. In winter, you had to close some of them off. The girls would sleep together in one bedroom, the boys in another. You had to keep in the heat because there was only one stove to heat all that. The house measured 50 feet long, 30 wide, so it was difficult to heat.”8 As Stanley Anderson of Chisholm Township, near North Bay, Ontario, recollected, life for adults and children alike was dominated by work that was interminable, year in and year out. Wood cut with cross-cut saws ready for wood bees. Ice cut by hand and stored in sawdust, manure loaded by hand, hay handled loose with forks, stoking and forking of sheaves to wagons, to the mow, and then to the thresher. Potatoes and turnips were largely handled by hand. Hay was forked off into stacks when the barns were full. Chores were still done by lantern light.9

The kitchen stove was the heart of the house, in large part because, as noted above, it was the warmest place and sometimes the only source of heat. On the Canadian Shield, as through much of rural Canada, deer and pheasants, fresh and frozen, provided an important part of the fall and winter diet, while fish provided an important source of protein year round. In winter, perishable foods like meat and fish could be kept in the seasonally unused summer kitchen if the home had one, or in an outdoor shed if it did not, acting as a freezer. Items that could not take the frost, such as root vegetables, cabbages, and apples were often preserved in root cellars, cold rooms, or, in some cases, simply buried outside till the spring. Fresh meat did not keep in warm summer temperatures, so what could not be eaten had to be preserved, either by salting, smoking, or canning, though a few people built their own ice houses to store fish and meat during the summer.

The Canadian Shield  53 Common dinners would be pork or chicken with potatoes, or in Quebec, “chiard” (minced meat and potatoes) with “grillades de lards salés” (grilled salt bacon). Potatoes would be roasted on the stove top. Fish and deer were important components of rural diets, Native and non-Native. Desserts were homemade apple pies or freshly picked blueberries, wild strawberries picked in the fields, or raspberries, served with white sugar. Breakfast might include homemade baked beans, made with molasses, crêpes, and potatoes. But, in a pattern seen across rural Canada, if food was often abundant, cash was in short supply, as this Quebec Shield resident reported: Very often, the farmers didn’t have cash to pay for the doctor or the notary, or for other services. The solution then was to provide firewood, cut from the farm’s woodlands, or to offer food, chickens, eggs, a side of beef or lamb, or vegetables from the garden, or maple syrup in spring, or honey from their bees in fall or apples from their orchard. In this way, they survived despite being a family of eight children and ten with their parents.10

Conveniences were few. Toilet facilities were located in the outhouse, presenting a challenge when temperatures plunged to the minus-forty degree range; at that point “chamber pots” (which no one in the household enjoyed emptying) were relied on. Like most rural and farm homes before the 1950s, few rural homes on the Shield had electricity, unless they were located close enough to a mill, mine, or town to make the extension of an electrical line cost-effective. Houses were lit by kerosene lamps. Few people had cars, and when they did, their use was limited by seasonal conditions and generally very poor roads. Often impassable after heavy rains in the summer, the roads were generally not ploughed in the winter. For those fortunate enough to own them, cars were typically put up on blocks for the duration of the winter. Neither car engines nor gasoline additives had yet been invented that could deal with the frigid winter temperatures that characterized the Shield;

54  Canada’s Rural Majority the block heaters used today across the Shield to warm engines require electricity. Transportation by horse and sleigh made travel relatively easy over packed snow. In the 1930s, a few people across northern Ontario and Quebec (often the doctor or lawyer) purchased the new Bombardier passenger predecessor of the snowmobile made in Valcourt, Quebec, the “autoneige” or “snowcar.” It was a closed vehicle with porthole windows, with front ski-like runners, bulldozer-type back “wheels,” and a grooming machine, making motorized winter travel possible throughout the Shield for the first time. The sheer difficulty of travelling through the landscape, exacerbated by the isolation of so many households, ensured that throughout much of the Shield, in these years, “family was clearly the centre of social life.” It would not be until the 1950s or even the 1960s that “electrification, school buses, and improved roads arrived and began to reshape the countryside.”11 An important, albeit tiny, source of cash was cutting ice for urban use. Most rural families also had woodlots from which could be sold poles, posts, rails, and firewood. Wood also provided the main form of fuel for heating and cooking. The wood would be cut in the fall and piled along a trail. It was gathered up and brought to rural homes once the snow allowed transporting the logs with horses and sleigh, typically in February or March, often done as a communal bee. As one Shield dweller remembered, the wood “was cut in 30 inch logs, the width of the sleighs … Everyone would go up at the same time. They had time to chat, smoke a pipe, exchange tobacco. They were men; that wasn’t women’s work at that time.”12 Ontario shut down its northern colonization schemes on the Clay Belt after 1934, largely because of the disastrous consequences for many of those who had taken up land under Depression-era schemes. The Windsor Star published a “scoop” when it reported that families who had moved to the Clay Belt were actually starving to death, cementing

The Canadian Shield  55 public opinion that northern agricultural settlement could not succeed. The Quebec government continued to contribute subsidies and bonuses for agriculture to the region after the Second World War. But poor yields, highly variable growing seasons, high transportation costs, and a shortage of the part-time and seasonal work in nearby logging industries needed to support farms in these marginal areas were all cited as factors constraining agricultural settlement. Estimates of farm failures on the Ontario Shield suggested that two out of every three farms established between 1912 and 1937 failed. The Quebec total is almost as dismal: between 1910 and 1940, 51 per cent of the 80,175 farms on the Shield were abandoned. By the early 1940s, high rates of farm abandonment characterized the Clay Belt in both communities and in the northern Prairies. For the first time in the twentieth century, the rural population of the Canadian Shield fell. Families, though in declining numbers, continued to live and work across the Canadian Shield. Those remaining combined seasonal, part-time, and occasional labour with the sale of agricultural or more commonly forestry products. But even as the kind of life that had characterized a half-century of rural life on the Shield declined, a 1944 report concluded: In spite of all the difficulties mentioned above, the great majority of settlers who had been able to remain for several years stated that they liked their new mode of life and as long as they could manage to finance their undertakings they would stay on the farm even if they have to be satisfied with a lower standard of living than they were accustomed to previously.13

As late as 1944, in other words, some people still felt that the advantages of owning a homestead that could support a variety of economic activities for a rural family, though making only a meagre subsistence, still outweighed the benefits of abandoning “the farm” for the city.

56  Canada’s Rural Majority Logging and the Bunkhouse Life Culturally central to life on the Canadian Shield, if only on a seasonal basis or at a certain point in a young man’s life, was the bunkhouse experience. An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 men worked in these “frontier” zones of the Canadian Shield in the pre–Second World War period, building roads, airports, railways, hydroelectric dams, and transmission lines, first for the telegraph, and later telephones, electricity, oil, and gas, and providing the labour power needed for extracting lumber and minerals. These men (and a few women who mainly worked in the kitchens) were responsible for building the communication, transportation, and power infrastructures that continues to support modern Canada and the extraction and transportation of its resource wealth. It was hard work. Such bushwork accounted for a significant portion of rural life and of the northern experience, but it is difficult to know exactly who the bushworkers of Canada were. Few records were kept documenting who was doing what in the camps. A. Fitzpatrick, author of the University in Overalls: A Plea for Adult Education (which summarizes the life of immigrant bushworkers on the Shield and argues for an education that meets their needs) estimated in 1920 that there were 3,700 work camps in Canada, about 2,000 of which lasted in one location for more than a year. A rare 1941 study of 25,000 loggers in Ontario concluded that about half of them were residents of the province, and of these, 85 per cent worked in the district where they lived. Ten thousand came to Ontario from other provinces, with about half from Quebec, and a quarter each from Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In terms of listed “occupations,” farmers or farm workers made up half of the total labour force. Thirty per cent counted as woods specialists and 20 per cent were classed otherwise.

The Canadian Shield  57 Work in the rural Shield continued to rely on patterns of work established in the logging camps of the early nineteenth century. Until the 1940s, even the biggest pulp and paper enterprises, which had a modern, permanent indoor workforce of technicians, scientists, office and mill workers, continued to hire thousands of seasonal workers to cut trees in a subcontracted camp system. Sawmills and pulp and paper mills, like the road and railroad construction industries, relied on the work of men who, divided up into groups of 50 to 125, were sent off into camps in the bush. As historian Ian Radforth describes it, as late as 1945, “lumber companies and pulp and paper firms clung to time-honoured methods that depended heavily on learning by doing, the strength of men and horses, and natural factors, such as the friction reducing qualities of snow, and the flushing power of the annual spring run-off.” In every winter before the Depression, there would be 20,000 to 30,000 men working in Ontario logging camps alone.14 And the Shield was perfectly suited to the lumber industry. As Arthur Lower summarizes, the Canadian Shield lends itself admirably to the industry of lumbering. There is a good snowfall, and dependably low winter temperatures, so that no climatic difficulties present themselves to the task of getting the logs out of “the bush.” There are innumerable rivers, which because of the geological nature of the country, never lack for water for the “drive.” Hard granite ridges running across their courses form natural dams for impounding the spring freshets, and thus regularize the flow. The countless lakes, combined with the irregular surface of the country, ensure that nearly all trees cut down need be drawn only a short distance to water and that on a down grade.15

Life in the work camps of the Shield, like in homes, had clear seasonal patterns that drew on environmental advantages to accomplish the tough tasks. Resource extraction, like the building of railroads and roads, took advantage of nature. Some workers moved seasonally through the

58  Canada’s Rural Majority camps, working in logging camps in the fall and winter when ice and snow made it possible to haul logs through the bush, then moving on to road and railway camps once enough of the frost left the ground to make digging and grading possible. Logging camps, which moved every year or so as loggers cut down the available trees within walking distance of the camp, actually began their seasonal set up in the spring. Logging companies would send “cruisers” to establish locations profitable for exploitation, ensuring that camps were located close to the creeks or rivers needed to transport the logs to market the following spring. Giving a sense of the remoteness of Shield logging camps, one (obviously non-Aboriginal) cruiser noted, “Even in the 1920s and 30s there was surprisingly little known about the geography up there. Cruising in the Temagami area of Ontario in 1929, we were not only naming the lakes, we were finding the lakes.”16 When the location was decided, a preliminary team would move into the area in the summer, including the foreman, the clerk, about a dozen men, and some horses. Their task was to cut the trail into the camp, the “tote road,” using a doublesided ax and small cross-cut saws for smaller trees, and the bigger, two person cross-cut saws for larger trees. This rough trail would act as the main route bringing men, horses, and supplies into the camp over the coming months. It could be as long as fifty kilometers. With the road completed, workers turned to building the camp that would house and feed men and horses over the coming months, living in tents during the process. After the camp was built in the fall, teamsters (who would often be local farmers with their teams of hoofed beasts) would begin bringing in the food and supplies to support the workers through the winter. These included pork, smoked meats, flour, canned goods of all descriptions, dried fruits, raisins, prunes, apricots, and beans for the cookery; hay in bales and oats for the stables; dynamite for the powder

The Canadian Shield  59 cellar; mackinaws, boots rubbers, socks, shirts, shoepacks, stationery, painkillers, mosquito-oil, snuff, tobacco … The blacksmith shop would be rigged with an anvil, sledges, big link chains, steel rods for drills, dump carts in parts, and spares of many kinds.17

One historian has estimated that over the course of a season, a small logging camp of thirty men consumed approximately 36 barrels of pork, 10 barrels of beef, 34 barrels of flour, and 76 bushels of potatoes, while the horses consumed 20 tonnes of hay and 400 bags of oats. Another late summer or early fall task was to begin the process of making the creeks and rivers better conduits for the thousands of logs they would be transporting once the ice was gone. This would include working to remove rocks and jagged creek and river edges as well as larger projects of constructing “splash dams” that would increase the level of water to facilitate the easier movement of the logs. By the 1880s, the camps were fairly uniform across Ontario, Quebec, and the Prairie provinces. The single-building bush shanties had given way to a more formal camp arrangement with office, cookery, bunkhouse, warehouse, stables, and blacksmith’s shop. The buildings were usually built of logs before 1916, but after new government regulations started improving conditions in the camps, sawn lumber was used more often. The bunkhouse itself was generally about thirty feet by fifty-two feet. When full, it accommodated from eighty to over a hundred men. The roof was made of poles covered with tarpaper. One or two small windows would provide all the natural light. Coal-oil (kerosene) lamps provided light in the evening till “lights out” at 9 p.m. Large barrels of water, replenished daily, provided drinking water, and several basins for washing were provided. Heat and hot water were provided by a central woodstove. In the bunkhouse, the men slept in bunk beds typically made of roughly hewn logs; the bunks were about four feet wide by six feet long, and they lined the walls of the bunkhouse. Two slept in each bunk, in their clothes. Bunks were originally bedded with fir

60  Canada’s Rural Majority tree branches, but these were later replaced with hay. Each bunk was supplied with three blankets, one for underneath, and one for each man. As Edmund Bradwin, author of The Bunkhouse Man published in 1922, describes it: The blankets may be clean for a few weeks when first put in, but … it would be a wonder if the bunkhouse blankets remained clean for any length of time. Vermin are rampant … the blankets themselves smell heavy and musty, and, even though one changes underwear every week, it is impossible to keep clean for lice and nits are in the bedding.18

When the men came back into camp, after their day’s work, their outer clothes were hung above the stove, on all sorts of improvised clotheslines. As A. Fitzpatrick, who worked tirelessly in the camps in the early twentieth century as an adult educator and to improve the conditions for camp workers, explained in 1921: With the wet, or snow, and perspiration of the men, these garments are soon steaming above the heated stoves, and long before midnight the oft-breathed air has a rancid smell. Even toward morning when the fires have died down the air of the crowded sleep camp is thick and heavy ... It is the crowded conditions of bunkhouses which are their weakness. There is no privacy in the bunkhouse, and the occupant longs in vain for a chance to get a good bath.19

While bunkhouse men were cheered by the warm water to wash their hands and faces, warm stoves to heat the bunkhouse, and generally good and abundant food, the pests, poor pay, and often unfair foremen made life difficult for them until the middle of the twentieth century. Logging was also one of the most dangerous lines of work; as a pulp and paper company official pointed out in 1933, “The northern woodsman is more likely to be injured in his occupation than is the [airplane] navigator, railroad man, or the fellow engaged in loading artillery shells.”20

The Canadian Shield  61 The autumn brought the addition of more men and horses into the logging camp to begin cutting the timber. Gangs of two or three men each would begin cutting areas lying off one of the rough roads extending into the bush. It is hard to quantify the labour in equivalent units but a camp might aim at cutting 100,000 cords per season, with one cord being comprised of a pile of wood four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long. It was skilled work. Logger William Savard of Chicoutimi, Quebec, observed, “It is only with practice that a man becomes a good lumberjack … A lumberjack never cuts the same tree twice, that is to say, uses the same techniques on each tree, for every tree is different. Engineers have written books on ways of cutting a tree but you can only learn the techniques with practice.”21 They would cut down the trees, cut them into four- or eightfoot lengths, placing them in giant piles on or near the main road, waiting for the freeze-up. At that point, the rough logging roads would be turned by packed snow and ice into smooth thoroughfares along which newly arrived horses and drivers would transport (“skid”) the logs from where they had been initially cut and piled, moving them to the shores of creeks and rivers, or onto the ice itself, to await the water’s (liquid) transformation at spring breakup. Reflecting on the skill of both the animals and those who worked them, Jim MacDonald of Thessalon, Ontario, noted, “Some of those old skidding horses were as wise as the men who drove them. Once over a skidding trail they could take a log out with little or no direction.” MacDonald goes on to describe his first winter working as a “young lad of 13 or so,” where he made numerous mistakes working with the horse and the logs, finally fouling the chain that was attached to a fallen log around a standing tree. As MacDonald put it, at that point the horse “turned his big bay face around to me and the look in his eyes unmistakedly [sic] conveyed the thought, ‘Well, you are a green one, aren’t you?’”22 The gangs would load fifteen to twenty huge logs onto a sleigh, and in procession, the sleighs would move easily over

62  Canada’s Rural Majority the snow roads, iced every night with poured water to ensure the smooth movement of logs. In the summer, spring, and fall, mud would envelope cart wheels, ensuring that “not five hundred pounds can be toted under such conditions, even with a four-horse team.” In the winter, by contrast, “with sleigh and team, a two-ton load may be taken fifteen miles in a day … What wonder that sharp frosts, with plenty of snow and ice, are welcomed?”23 Like loggers, teamsters had to be highly skilled to work with the horses in the bush. Horses carrying huge loads of logs behind them often had to be kept at “full gallop to keep ahead of a sleigh load of pulpwood running down a small hill. The loads were too heavy for a team of horses to hold back, and the skill of the teamster lay in keeping the horses moving fast enough and yet steering the sleigh. On steep hills horses were sometimes crushed to death when the sleighs got out of control.”24 And so were teamsters. As spring approached, horses and teamsters would gradually leave the camp. A few skilled men would stay, waiting until the creeks and rivers broke up and the river drive could begin. At the “breakup,” when the ice melted, thousands of logs would be dumped into the water to be herded towards the sawmills or pulp and paper plants by the power of the rivers, aided by men working on the shore, or even on the moving logs themselves. A log driver spent most of the day “prodding the logs with his peavey, a six-foot long pole with a metal point and hook at the tip.” Some of the men worked from long narrow boats known as pointers; “others waded into the water. When large sawlogs were being driven, the more experienced men rode the logs. To be able to dash out along the rolling, bobbing logs, men needed agility and steady nerves, although a pair of sturdy caulked boots helped as well.”25 While most of those working in logging, mining, road, and rail camps were men, a few women and children did live and occasionally work in them. It was not uncommon for engineers and office staff, who might have superior housing

The Canadian Shield  63 with electricity and even running water in more permanent camps, to bring their families to live for part of the year or longer in the camps. Some families living in towns and rural areas of the Shield included a seasonal trip to a logging or mining camp as part of their seasonal round of household support. A child of Finnish immigrants in Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay, Ontario), where her mother worked as a housekeeper and her father as a labourer throughout the 1930s, remembers being taken out of school in town in April each year for three to six months to accompany her parents and her sister to a bush camp. Her father worked in the woods, and her mother was a cook in the bunkhouse. There were only a few other children to play with, but like so many rural children, they enjoyed the break from the routine of school that this sojourn represented. While bunkhouse reformers such as A. Fitzpatrick maintained that the presence of more women and children would vastly improve the quality of life for bunkhouse workers, and while bunkhouse living improved considerably after 1940, it was the creation of semi-permanent company towns that drew women and children to resource-based industries, and few women and families lived for any length of time in the camps. Conclusion Environmental historians have a grim accounting of human depredations on Shield lands and waterways by the end of the period under study here, a story that does not improve as the twentieth century “progressed.” White pine was almost extinct through overharvesting. Much of the boreal forest had been cut, and human infiltration of the forests had made significant changes to the forest ecology. Nancy Langston summarizes the history of the Shield region of Lake Superior in this passage: Log drives scraped streambeds clean, spring dams destroyed riparian habitat, and dams for logging blocked passage of fish

64  Canada’s Rural Majority upstream for spawning. Sawmills dumped vast quantities of sawdust and wood scrap into nearshore estuaries and rivers. The sawdust floated on the surface, then became waterlogged and sank; clogging harbors, covering spawning and feeding grounds for fish, and filling in the critical nearshore estuarine habitat.26

Mining operations had not only removed tonnes of minerals from the earth but the extraction, processing, and transportation of these materials had in many cases polluted land and watersheds, with profound consequences for local and regional ecosystems. The development of hydroelectric power had made massive changes to the land, flooding some areas and changing the course of rivers and streams. The impact was devastating on all rural peoples and on Aboriginal peoples in particular, as historians have argued. It is difficult to dispute their evidence. Life was definitely changing for human residents of the Shield as a result of these and other related factors. By the late 1940s, the three pillars that had supported rural communities on the Shield in the 1870–1940 period were crumbling: commercial farms could not survive the changes in markets and the increase in competition brought by better transportation; part-time and seasonal waged work dried up; and rural dwellers’ direct access to the fruits of the land – animal, vegetable, and mineral – became ever more difficult throughout much of the Shield. At the same time, however, increased wages, better working conditions, and improved sanitation were drawing families into the resource towns of the Shield and into the rapidly growing urban areas of the south. Government regulations and increasing standards of living meant that individuals and families did not have to deal as often with the danger, poor pay, overcrowded housing, and irregular employment that had hitherto defined so much urban work. In the postwar period, governments were finally instituting a social “safety net” outside of the family and its resources, to deal with illness or accident; to a considerable extent, various forms of government support were replacing the flexible

The Canadian Shield  65 and varied resources previously available to the rural, landbased household. But during the 1890–1940 period, rural households both depended on and subsidized the industrial development of the vast Shield region that helped to transform Canada from a resource-poor to a resource-rich nation. In the early years, a range of rural resource industries would have had a difficult time either finding a large enough labour force in remote northern areas or paying that workforce full-time wages within industries that were profoundly seasonal and cyclical in nature. The men and women surging onto the Shield to set up farmsteads and communities could not have survived without wages from the resource industries and income from the sale of commodities (particularly wood products from their farms, but also produce) to the camps engaged in logging, building roads and railroads, and mining. While this threefold living strategy of mixing subsistence, waged labour, and the sale of agricultural and forestry commodities lasted for only a couple of generations, the complex political economies of rural families had played a vital role not only in supporting a Shield variation on the archetypal Canadian ideal of the family farm but also in balancing the needs of a new locally focused agricultural community with a new globally focused industrial society undergoing rapid development.

3 The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes Region

This chapter explores what many Canadian historians – and indeed most Canadians – consider the country’s heartland. Judging by the (relatively) huge amount of both urban and agricultural history written of this region, you would be forgiven for thinking this is where “real” Canadian history lives. There are some good reasons for this. Arguably Canada’s most agriculturally rich region, it encompasses the valley of the St. Lawrence River and the land beside the three lowest and southerly of the Great Lakes, and stretches (as European sailors saw it) through southern Quebec from the St. Lawrence River near the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the most southwesterly portion of Ontario at Windsor, where Lake Erie meets Lake Huron at Lake St. Clair. Called for short in this book the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region, it provides a study in contrasts with areas lying to the east, west, and, particularly, north: the vast, non-agricultural Canadian Shield characterized by very low population densities and frigid temperatures. In 1871, the relatively small southerly fraction of Ontario and Quebec that we focus on here included most of the useful agricultural land in the country and its most benign climate, possessing 80 per cent of all the farms in Canada. It would not be until 1921 that the rapid growth of farms in Western Canada meant that there were more farms outside than inside southern Ontario and Quebec.

68  Canada’s Rural Majority By 1870, this region was already exceptional in Canada for having a “mature” rural economy, culture, and society, as Canada’s first census indicates. Its farms were more numerous, and if only a small proportion of farms in the region were substantial commercial operations, many were producing the kinds of small surpluses necessary to develop more complex local economic activities. Farmers had long produced a variety of agricultural products for self-provisioning (home use) as well as market sale. By 1871, many of the farmers of the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region had already moved away from an earlier focus on growing and exporting wheat to overseas markets. They were beginning to adopt more diversified farming in response to growing local markets in towns and cities of southern Ontario and Quebec for hay, barley, hogs and poultry, and dairy. As another sign of a mature rural economy, agricultural lands were becoming more expensive, and old farm families were beginning (along with new immigrants to Canada) to look for farms farther west or for non-farm employment alternatives for their children in cities and towns. But in the late nineteenth century, and in part because of the stimulus of urban growth nearby, more people were still moving into farming than into any other occupation; agriculture remained a growing concern. Urban markets inspired not only diversification but also some specialist agricultural production, from the fruit trees of Niagara and the barley of Prince Edward County to the tobacco farms of Essex County. When Canada’s total population was over 3.5 million in 1871, the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region’s most distinctive characteristic was already evident: it was home to two of the largest provincial populations in the country. Its rural population was four times the total in the rest of rural Canada combined; its urban population was fivefold larger. In addition to being endowed with soils that were richer and with a climate that is better for farming, the part now known as the “Windsor to Quebec City Corridor” had another

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  69 advantage over the rest of the country: it possessed a mighty water transportation conduit, the St. Lawrence River, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the largest freshwater lakes on the planet, the Great Lakes. This corridor facilitated the rapid growth of trade and industry, moving people and goods into, through, and out of the region. By the 1870s, a network of railways and canals throughout southern Ontario and Quebec was already augmenting the trade and commerce facilitated by the St. Lawrence system and extending its reach. By the late 1880s, railways linked the entire country to its centre and to markets in the United States and overseas. This same corridor would eventually undermine local production and trade by bringing in cheaper imports. But in the 1870–1940 period, with an increase in farmland and farmers to feed a hungry population, improving systems for moving people and goods, a growing supply of landless labourers to work in towns and cities, and an alliance of business and government eager to facilitate trade and industry, the region quickly became Canada’s centre of urban and industrial growth. The rural population continued to grow, and the rural hinterland close by supported urban growth with food, fuel, building materials, and other goods. The transition to an urban and industrial society was noted, but not always in favourable terms. As early as 1849, members of the community were seeing significant “modernizing” trends, including the replacement of rural, home-made goods by manufactured imports. The sheriff of Cobourg found these changes worthy of comment in a speech that year at the Provincial Exhibition in Kingston: The old-fashioned home-made cloth has given way to the fine broadcloth coat; the linsey-woolsey dresses of females have disappeared, and English and French silks [have been] substituted; the nice clean-scoured floors of the farmers have been covered with Brussels carpets; the spinning wheel and the loom have been

70  Canada’s Rural Majority superseded by the piano; and, in short, a complete revolution in all our domestic habits and manners has taken place.1

In the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region we find the earliest example of the “transition to modernity” that the entire country would, to varying degrees, come to experience by the end of the twentieth century, when most individuals and families would be living in massive urban areas, drawing on the power of oil, gasoline, natural gas, and electricity to make a living by selling their labour to business, government, and industry, and using that money to purchase almost all of the commodities and many of the services needed and wanted for daily life. As members of modern society, people would consume little of what they produced, and produce little of what they consumed. Modernizing trends of urbanization, commercialization, and industrialization manifested themselves particularly early, strongly, and coherently in this region. But from the vantage point of 1940, a parallel story emerges, one that provides a number of contradictions, paradoxes, and anomalies in the story of progress from pioneer to commercial farm, and from agriculture to industry. This chapter is going to tease out two significant puzzles that rural history provides within this “main story” of change in the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region in the 1870–1940 period: the continued persistence and significance of rural populations in these years of rapid urban and industrial growth, and the continuation of distinct, complex rural economies and cultures in the face of increasingly centralized and urban development. For notwithstanding some significant changes, rural life in the region continued to resemble, well into the twentieth century, the rural past more than its urban or rural future. Weathering an economic depression of the 1870s, the economic downturns of the pre– and post–First World War periods, and even the Great Depression of 1929–39, neither rural nor urban people, even in 1940, could foresee the rapidly approaching end

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  71 of the agricultural society that the region had known for generations. Urban society, economies, and culture eventually dominated and (some would argue) overwhelmed the coherent rural society and culture of the 1870–1940 period, but the inevitability of this eventual rural decline was still not clear to many in 1940. This chapter will begin by briefly describing the environment of the region, and will go on to document the continued importance (in numeric and other terms) of the rural populations of the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region and the parallel fears and concerns about rural decline in the early years of the twentieth century. It will go on to focus on four “sites” of rural life – the farmhouse, the barn, the farmlands, and places of off-farm work – to explore continuity and change within the distinct rural society and culture of the region. Rural people in this region can, at one level, be defined by the variations that distinguished one household from another (even individuals within a household), especially over time: differences of gender, ethnicity, religion, language, place of origin, neighbourliness, age, local environment, weather, season, family life-course, personality, disease, local customs, crops, wealth, machines, scientific innovations, and the demands and opportunities of local, regional, and international markets. Differences within rural society and between the English-speaking Protestants and French-Canadian Catholics are significant in this period. This chapter, however, focuses on the coherent rural society, economy, and culture that characterized the region, suggesting that the most significant difference of the period rather might have been that between the rural and the rapidly growing urban populations. Land and Water Canada’s eastward flowing drainage starts in Shield land by Lake Superior, but the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region extends from Windsor in the extreme southwest of Ontario,

72  Canada’s Rural Majority eastward on a kind of peninsula between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, past Niagara, along Lake Ontario, and down the St. Lawrence River valley for almost 1,200 kilometres through southern Quebec towards the Atlantic. Ancient oceans and more recent glacial action created the Great Lakes and rearranged both the rich soils and other waterways that define the region, explaining why it contains most of Canada’s best farmland. Serious winters are compensated by long, hot, lightful summers, generally watered well by spring melt and summer rains, and normally capped by a long dry patch ideal for ripening fruit (even grapes and peaches) and also harvesting grains. Mostly flat, much of the land was deemed to require, and so received, the attention of drainage experts, but generally throughout the region it was easy to stow abundant hay, shoot ducks, process ample cordwood, and tap the almost ubiquitous fast-growing maple trees. The farthest west part of the region is by far the most southerly portion of the entire country, two degrees of latitude farther south than the tip of Nova Scotia. The region’s latitude ranges from lying well south of the 42nd parallel on Pelee Island to the 49th (which runs through Gaspésie and on to Newfoundland). This explains why its climates are some of the most benign in all Canada. Such ecological conditions had encouraged dense forests over the region, but by the start of the period covered in this book these had been massively cut back. The combination of good land and climate worked to concentrate Canada’s rural population in this region. The Rural Populations of the St. Lawrence/ Great Lakes Region As Mark Twain once quipped, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” His statement works as an apt introduction to the rural history of the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  73 Region. Notwithstanding rumours to the contrary, the rural population of Quebec grew steadily, from just under a million in 1871 to 1.3 million in 1941. Ontario experienced a slight drop in its rural population between 1891 and 1911, but the rural population increased again after that, going overall from 1.3 million in 1871 to just under 1.5 million in 1941. As we saw in the previous chapter, about 10 per cent of the rural population in both provinces lived outside of the southern valley region, in the Shield areas. Urban populations in the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region grew even faster than rural ones, and the proportion of the population living in rural areas fell significantly in both provinces from over 75 per cent in 1871 to about 50 per cent in 1911. Keeping in mind the problematic census definition of rural noted in the introduction, the statistical record nevertheless makes it possible to compare over time the relative proportions of urban and rural populations and documents some surprising continuities: between 1921 and 1951, the proportionate size of the rural population remained remarkably stable at about 40 per cent of the total population in both provinces. Other indicators challenge the idea that Canada’s most populous region made a rapid transition from rural and agricultural to urban and industrial. Between 1900 and 1940, and as the rural population increased, the number of farms fell only slightly from just above, to just below, 200,000 in Ontario, and rose slightly in Quebec, from 140,000 to 154,000. The number of “improved acres” on farms in the region (the acreage actually being farmed) reached its maximum in 1891, and levelled off between 1901 and 1941 at just over 20 million acres, about 13 million in Ontario, and 9 million in Quebec (a total of 8 million hectares). In both provinces, although the rural population remained relatively stable, the farm population began to decline quite rapidly at the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and was not revived by the Second World War.

74  Canada’s Rural Majority In sum, unlike Britain, which was experiencing rural depopulation from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, rural Ontario and Quebec continued to grow between 1871 and 1940, as people farmed more land, and more productively. A variety of socio-economic factors drew people to the rural areas and particularly to family farming in this period, and kept them there. These included a series of devastating economic recessions (which limited the appeal of giving up the security of the family-owned farm or even non-farm rural lands in order to deal with employers and landlords); a continuing, if declining, supply of good rural land (that provided a range of alternatives to working for wages in an urban setting); continuing economic and social problems in the city (the absence of health and social services that could provide a “safety net” of non-family support in the cities during the intermittent periods of high unemployment and low wages); and the dependence of Ontario’s and Quebec’s rapidly growing urban populations on locally grown and raised food (systems of long-distance food distribution, even during peacetime, were not well-established until the middle of the twentieth century). As we will see below, these factors gave many people a strong and compelling rationale for preferring rural culture and society in both provinces throughout this period. Well into the twentieth century, farming and rural life were recognized as key elements in the economy, culture, and society of southern Ontario and Quebec in a way that changed rapidly and dramatically only after the Second World War. In early-twentieth-century Ontario, “municipal coats of arms sprouted scythes and sheaves as did the ornamental sculpture on public buildings … [and] cartoonists represented Old Man Ontario sometimes as a hayseed, sometimes as a nobly-muscled son of the soil, always as a farmer.”2 While farmers and their politics were often notoriously difficult to categorize and pin down exactly, political parties in Ontario and Quebec continued to be heavily influenced by their perceptions of farmers’ interests. Farmers

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  75 and farmers’ organizations argued long and hard a general defence of the “sons of the soil” in a world in which farming mattered: The pre-eminence of agriculture enhanced the rural dwellers’ self-esteem. They had cleared the land and made the fields. They knew that they were engaged in the prime activity of the province and that they produced the bulk of its wealth. What is more, as Protestants and in the main, evangelical, they knew they were the guardians of the country’s moral tone.3

In Quebec, rural and agricultural society was widely believed to represent the Catholic, French-Canadian nation’s “love of work, simple pleasures, and a quiet life echoing the rhythms of nature,” and comprised “the ideal of a stable, rural society, summoned by shared history and crises to the only pursuit really left to it – agriculture – faithful to its traditions, guided by its civil and religious elites.4 Many rural people were keen to stay on the land, and even urbanites recognized farming as a legitimate occupation, the backbone of the nation. At the heart of this conviction was the fact that local and regional farmers provided much of the food and fuel (wood) on which everyone relied and which was difficult for urban people to obtain elsewhere. Farmers took seriously the task of producing food for the growing urban populations of southern Ontario and Quebec. Before refrigeration became common in the early twentieth century, local producers had daily to ship perishable goods such as fresh milk and dairy products, eggs, meat, and a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables. By the late nineteenth century, the farmers of southern Ontario and Quebec, and most particularly those living close to rapidly growing cities such as Toronto, Hamilton, Montreal, and Quebec, were changing the way they farmed to accommodate the new and expanding urban market nearby. While specialization was growing, mixed farming for local markets came to dominate the region, where farm families worked

76  Canada’s Rural Majority to produce more vegetables, milk, cream, butter, meat, and cheese for the urban markets. Fresh produce was not as commonly imported from other regions and other countries before the Second World War, with the exception of some easily transportable and storable foods such as apples, onions, and potatoes. “Fresh frozen” foods were not consumed in large quantities until Canadians, rural and urban, began to purchase electric freezers in the postwar period. Urbanites who did not grow and preserve their own fruit and vegetables (though many did) obtained off-season and out-of-region foods in cans, much of it processed in the thriving seasonal canning factories fed by the farms of southern Ontario and Quebec. With increased urban demand, food processing indeed became an increasingly important industry throughout the urbanizing St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region, with small canning and juice factories constituting an important rural industry, as the 1871 census of manufacturing attests. While the systems of food delivery to the rapidly growing populations of southern Ontario and Quebec were necessarily expanding before the Second World War, the quality of many commercially canned foods was a source of constant complaint. We can speculate that the most vociferous complaints came from the majority of urban dwellers who had grown up in rural areas knowing not only fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats but also home canning, which most considered as superior to commercial processing. Local and regional farming and food processing, therefore, continued to be visibly important to urban people well into the twentieth century. Horses continued to be important on the new mixed farms, providing the main source of power, with the possible exception of that provided by men, women, and children. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, a technological revolution had occurred in horse-powered machinery, which dramatically improved productivity with such innovative machines as reapers, binders, hay rakes, seed drills,

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  77 and new, larger, tougher ploughs. These innovations, while excellent at providing draft power, did little to address the need for stationary work, which comprised about a third of farm-power needs. The invention of the “horsepower” was, therefore, heralded as revolutionary: it was a circular stationary device attaching a horse to a pole and the pole to gears and the gears to a shaft that was connected to a variety of machines used for threshing, grinding feed, chopping turnips, pumping water, and sawing cordwood, all powered by the horse pulling the pole as it walked slowly round and round. The horsepower greatly improved productivity inside the barn itself. A horse walking in a stationary, slightly sloping treadmill attached to a system of gears created the same effect. Less common was a smaller “dogpower” that could be attached to a cream separator or butter churn. (It is a sign of the changing times that one of my students, seeing a photograph of a dogpower for the first time, asked me if it was an exercise machine for dogs!) Many of these stationary machines were eventually adapted to gas-powered internal combustion engines, or less commonly electrical motors, but not typically before the Second World War. Tractors came late to the farms of the region. In 1931, only 1.7 per cent of farms in Quebec and 9.5 per cent in Ontario had tractors, percentages that increased to only 3.7 per cent and 19 per cent, respectively, by 1941. Automobiles were much more common on farms in both provinces, with more than two-thirds of Ontario farms and about onefifth of Quebec farms owning one. An unspecified number of farmers were also relying on their automobiles for stationary power as well as transportation. Farmers would raise the back (powered) wheels off the ground, set up belts and gears, and use the car engine to transfer the power by means of belts and pulleys to a washing machine or cream separator. Farmers also invested in stationary (though portable) gasoline engines for the same purpose; almost one-quarter

78  Canada’s Rural Majority of Quebec farms and 16 per cent of Ontario ones used gasoline engines in 1941. These statistics speak to the advantages of the internal combustion engine over steam: steam power, used in agricultural operations from the mid-nineteenth century, was used for certain phases of agricultural work, proving particularly useful for powering threshing machines, for example, whose work involved long hours and abundant energy. Steam engines were less useful for smaller jobs, as they were very heavy, difficult to move across the farm terrain, and needed a considerable amount of time – and fuel – to build up the head of steam needed before use. They required the constant attention of a skilled operator to run them and many “hands” to keep them supplied with fuel and water. They were also dangerous; boilers could explode with devastating consequences, and they gave off sparks that were hazardous, particularly in the barn. American estimates suggest that even at the height of their popularity, only about one in five American farms in the 1908–15 period relied on them. Farmers began adopting gasoline tractors only around the time of the Second World War, when labour shortages threatened agricultural production, and, at the same time, technical innovations had improved their reliability and functioning. Particularly important was the addition of a “power take off” that transferred power from the drive train to the mechanical operation of previously horse-drawn machines. At that point, gasoline-powered engines began to significantly transform farm life and farm economies of scale. Horses remained key sources of power on the farm then, however; the production of fodder for animals, particularly hay and oats, was still exceeding the production of food for people up until the First World War throughout the region. While the rural population continued to take up and work the land in the region into the 1940s, a number of factors had shifted the balance away from farming towards other

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  79 ways of life, drawing a portion of the southern Ontario and Quebec population into towns and cities in Canada and the United States, even before the 1870s. Quebec first experienced serious population pressure on the carrying capacity of the best lands flanking the St. Lawrence. As early as the 1830s agricultural settlement schemes were established in the Eastern Townships and later New Quebec in response. In spite of these efforts, over the nineteenth century, more than 900,000 French Canadians left the province, moving to work in factories in the emerging urban and industrial areas of New England. Similarly in Ontario, tens of thousands of rural people left to make a living south of the border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The movement out of Quebec, and particularly the move into Protestant areas, was a cause of concern for the Catholic elites who feared for the future of the traditional, rural French-Canadian, Catholic nation. Ontario did not share Quebec’s concerns about the loss of a Catholic, French culture, but, like Quebec, it confronted the increase in urbanization, industrialization, and the loss of its rural economic base with considerable fear and suspicion. By the mid1850s, Ontario elites had seen a solution in the settlement of the “great northwest” – the Prairie region – and, by the end of the century, farmers from Ontario and some from Quebec were moving west. Governments in both provinces actively (as we saw in the previous chapter) promoted the southern portions of these northern lands as a solution to land shortages in Canada’s south. In both provinces, the decline in rural industries that had traditionally provided important pillars of support for the farming community exacerbated the population movement out of rural areas. In 1881, for example, Ontario alone had 144 small farm-implement factories. By the end of the century, they had almost all been bought up by Massey-Harris, which by 1891 was the largest agricultural equipment maker in the British Empire, operating huge factories in the growing industrial cities of Brantford and Toronto.

80  Canada’s Rural Majority Many people experienced the rapid transition of society towards urban industrialism with considerable alarm; many regarded the growth of cities (crime, filth, and poverty seemed to define them in the late nineteenth century) as a negative trend, but one that more settlement on rural lands could correct. In practice, at the same time that some rural people were viewing urbanization and industrialization with fear, others embraced the new technologies and the opportunities to travel and trade, and to purchase new goods. Ruling elites in each province, however, had serious reservations about the social destabilization accompanying urbanization and industrialization, and used the rhetoric of a stable and knowable past to assuage their fears. Later generations would agree with British economist John Maynard Keynes that the solution to poverty in modern society lay in increasing the living wage and thus the spending power of the “masses,” leading to increased trade and manufacturing for the overall good of the urban-centred economy. Historians such as E.A. Wrigley and Christopher Jones have recently argued that all of these transformations can ultimately be traced to the unprecedented wealth generated by the remarkable density and efficiency of the country’s new forms of energy: fossil fuels and electricity. Neither explanation was obvious to Canadians at the time; many were still convinced that “the solution” to Canadian urban problems lay in reaffirming the values and activities of an earlier rural society and encouraging more people to go “back to the land.” Vigorously championing rural virtues and the rural way of life, rural reformers were not, however, usually arguing that rural life should be exactly the same as it had always been (or seemed). Many advocated that the rural culture, society, and economy of Ontario and Quebec needed to be modernized and improved in many of the same ways that applied to urban and industrial areas. A well-worn theme was to ceaselessly exhort rural people in general, but farmers in particular, to greater efficiency, greater productivity,

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  81 and better organization so that they could participate in creating a more progressive kind of rural society, one where (rural) family and community values could temper the (urban) extremes of possessive individualism and rampant consumerism. The stable and complacent rural population that reformers so often (to the annoyance of many rural dwellers) associated with the traditional family farm could, they argued, if imbued with a new regard for efficiency and productivity, restore the fundamental stability and wealth of society at large. As the social and rural reformer J.S. Woodsworth argued in “The Rural Home: Yesterday and Tomorrow”: In the farm-home family life has perhaps reached its highest development. The common task, the united family circle, sturdy manhood, sweet wholesome womanliness, open hospitality, life-long friendships, democratic relationships, genuine neighborliness, high moral standards, simple healthful pleasures, deep personal religion, and religious community consciousness … these are all the issue of the country home.5

In 1920, when asked to reflect on the relative virtues of the city and the country, a well-known Ontario-born judge opined that country living would soon be compulsory, due to its generally curative nature in dealing with the evils of urban society: “By and by, we shall probably come to see that certain classes should not be allowed to live in the city at all, and that all children should be reared in the country – that the garden and field are better places for boys and girls than garret and gutter .... on the whole, life is saner and safer in the country.”6 The desire to improve the efficiency and productivity of rural farm families lay behind the development of government-assisted agricultural colleges and a variety of farm organizations (particularly the Women’s Institutes and Farmers’ Institutes) that could educate farmers about scientifically informed ways of farming, and educate farm

82  Canada’s Rural Majority women about modern domestic life. In 1859, Canada’s first agricultural college was established in Kamouraska as the École d’agriculture de Sainte-Anne, to promote the modernization of agriculture quite generally, but particularly also the draining of tidal marshes for intensive, commercially successful agriculture. In 1874, the Ontario Agricultural College was opened in Guelph, and in 1886 the Central Experimental Farm was established as part of the Department of Agriculture in Ottawa. Macdonald College (also for agriculture) was opened near Montreal in 1905. In 1913, the federal government passed the Agricultural Instruction Act, which provided $10 million in funding over ten years to the provinces for agricultural education. Over the next forty years faculty and staff worked to educate farmers and prospective farmers about the best methods for turning farming into a profitable business. The response from farmers was mixed. Some enthusiastically took advantage of educational programs to learn how to apply science to crops and livestock production. Scientifically informed breeders and growers’ associations flourished, as did marketing boards and cooperatives. Many rural people saw education in general, and scientific farming in particular, as a way to gain control over their environments and used market opportunities to reshape their families’ futures. Others remained deeply suspicious of “book learning” as a way of understanding the complexity of farming and of negotiating its relation to the larger world. Others could not afford to spend the time or the money required to learn and implement new ways of farming. As one staunch critic of agricultural college education for farmers warned her brother, an equally staunch advocate, he would be widely considered a “crank” by other farmers if he came to be known as a “schoolmasterish kind of fellow.”7 On another front, a wide range of organizations banded together to attack what was identified as a key aspect of the “rural problem”: the drudgery of women’s lives on the farm. For in spite of the glowing terms in which reformers and

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  83 “back to the land” advocates argued the advantages of rural life, they could not avoid the reality that life on the farm was difficult and often unpleasant. The transformations in daily life promised by electricity and fossil fuels in the context of an overall increased standard of living, making things easier for women in cities, were simply not making it to the country. As late as 1941, even after significant gains during the Depression era, only a quarter of farm homes in Quebec had electricity or running water. In Ontario, over a third had electricity, but only 14 per cent had running water. Home Economics Departments and Women’s Institutes championing rural life and women’s active role in transforming it for the better, as well as a wide range of newspapers, journals, appliance companies, agricultural schools and social reformers, all took on the problem posed by the lack of “modern conveniences,” a problem that was widely held responsible for the dissatisfaction of women and therefore for the rural exodus. The solution to the decline of rural society and culture, they contended, was simple: bring modern conveniences to the countryside. “What kind of house does the country mother require to keep her contented, so that she shall become the learning apostle of country life?” asked the Reverend Simpson in the religiously informed journal Social Welfare in 1920. He itemized four “prime utilities” needed in the farm home: “a good water supply, a complete sewage disposal plant and effective lighting and heating systems.” As he went on to proclaim, “Electricity on the farm is not a luxury – it is a necessity and it pays … This is what Ontario mothers need to make them leaders in the ‘back to the farm movement,’ for too many of them have their back to the farm and their face towards the town or city.”8 While rural people did not oppose in principle making their lives more efficient, profitable, beautiful, and comfortable, they had various different takes on why modern amenities were not making it onto the farm. From the time of the First World War farmers in Ontario and Quebec, like

84  Canada’s Rural Majority those across the country, were providing many, and highly varied, analyses of the problems facing them. “Farmers” was a term that applied to a vast range of people, from the specialized and wealthy fruit-farmers of Niagara to the “dirt farmers” of the Ottawa Valley, whose farms were characterized by their very low sales of produce. These differences made it very difficult to get political agreement on what, exactly, was causing problems for farmers as a group, let alone how to solve them. While they had very different ideas about causation, farmers were more in agreement in defining what their problems looked like. Summarizing a widespread belief among farm families, J.S. Woodsworth contended in his 1916 book, Studies in Rural Citizenship, that the difficulty surrounding rural life and the maintaining of a prosperous and contented rural population is fundamentally economic: that the bad farming, undesirable social conditions and improper housing on our farms are primarily due to the fact that the farmers cannot get enough for the commodities required to make the home comfortable and improve the farm in exchange for the crop grown. A farmer may increase his production by better farming methods, he may introduce better business methods; but it is not the amount that he produces but what he gets in exchange for what he produces that enables him to better his condition and that of his family.9

But even if farmers were increasingly aware of the widening gap between rural and urban standards of living by the 1920s, they were not always eager in this period to leave the family-owned farm for the city. As we have seen, most cities still had few social services, poor housing with little or no sanitary disposal of human waste or garbage, high crime rates and intermittent, frequently dangerous employment. They were often the last resort of those who, by the twentieth century, could make a living on the land. Furthermore, farmers highly valued their independence from employers, and their ability to control the processes and products of their own labour. When the Canadian Farm Radio Forum asked Canadian farmers

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  85 across the country in 1946 to discuss the question “Would you take a job in the City at $32.50 a week if you got the chance?” (this was the average wage of non-agricultural workers, higher than that in agriculture), 81 per cent of respondents declared that they would not move to the city. “Farming offers much more independence, fresh food, and beauties of nature” was the consensus, and with “a large investment on their farms,” most farmers did not want to leave.10 Rural people were, at times, able to work together to champion their own interests against what many saw as individualistic, greedy and exploitative city middlemen and industrialists. Farmers demanded free trade in farm machinery but protected markets for selling farm products, and extolled cooperative business methods. Various farm organizations, including the United Farmers of Ontario and l’Union catholique des cultivateurs in Quebec, briefly attained power in the early 1920s, and were able to turn the tide of government policies and international competition that disadvantaged farmers. By the late 1920s, farmers’ movements across the country had, however, been shattered by a decline in coherent political agitation, a split between the urban working class and the land-owning farmers, and a general lack of organization. The devastation of the 1930s led to further dissolution and discouragement, and the final decline of a farmers’ political lobby. It was recognized that no simple solution had a chance of effecting a “cure” and nothing short of a fundamental shakeup and reorganization of the economy could afford any significant or permanent remedy. Despite the many challenges facing rural dwellers in this region, the large rural population persisted, and continued to define the provincial societies. What, exactly, were rural people doing, and how were they living in the 1870–1940 period? Daily Rural Life in the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region There is no doubt that over the entire period we are examining, market-oriented activity provided an important

86  Canada’s Rural Majority portion of the rural family’s support. While the region as a whole was one where farming, specifically commercial farming, dominated rural life as it did in few places in the country during the 1870–1940 period, the rural economy of the region nevertheless remained more complex and multifaceted than this commercial focus suggests. Rural people, including farm people and also that growing population of the provinces designated after 1921 as “rural non-farm” in the census, continued to draw on two other pillars of support: provisioning and off-farm waged work. Families continued to gain a living – part of their food, shelter and fuel – directly from the land through gardening, felling and tapping trees, fishing, hunting and gathering. Notwithstanding the growing availability of consumer goods and the expansion of local, increasingly urban markets for farm produce, the farm household continued to consume a significant amount of what it produced, and to produce a variable proportion of what it consumed, also using proceeds from “off-farm” labour to pay for what they could not produce. Let us take a closer look at what daily life involved. The Farmhouse and Garden In the period we are examining, farmhouses in both Ontario and Quebec were typically one or two storey and made of wood (though in many areas stone and brick were common). If there were two stories, the bedrooms would typically be located upstairs. An upstairs room with a bathtub and toilet was extremely rare in rural areas before the Second World War: in Quebec farmhouses in 1931, only eight out of a hundred had running water in a bathroom, while only six out of a hundred farmhouses in Ontario were so equipped. By 1941 the situation was not much better. Over 90 per cent of the farms still relied on the outhouse. Carrying water from an outside pump or stream into the house took a significant part of women and children’s time.

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  87 Buckets were commonly used for transportation, but sometimes with refinements. One woman from Saint-Paul de Montigny, Quebec, remembers her mother carrying “water with ‘joutes’ – a piece of wood across the neck with ropes and a bucket on each end – it was faster that way, she could load more than one bucket at a time – I saw her using it. She went to fetch water from the well, not far from home.”11 In the large families that characterized farm life until the early years of the twentieth century, children would typically share not only a room but also a bed with one or more same-sex siblings. Beds were made of straw in the early days, and later were made of horse hair, and keeping them free from bugs and lice was one of the more unpopular, but necessary, duties of the farm housewife (and, in the years before vacuum cleaners became widely used, of the urban housewife too). Here is J.S. Woodsworth’s description, from his 1916 Studies in Rural Citizenship, albeit sanitized and sentimentalized, of the main floor of a typical two-storey frame farmhouse: The downstairs is divided into two compartments. The first we enter is the kitchen or living room. A large stove, a table, a cupboard and several chairs are the chief articles of furniture. A washdish [sic] and water pail stand on a bench in the corner. Nearby, two rows of pegs are filled with caps and coats, above which is suspended a rifle or shotgun … We pass through the kitchen to the parlor or “the room” … Along one side runs the old horse-hair sofa, with its crazy-work cushions. The rocker, the seat of honor, fills the corner, while uncomfortable chairs stand stiffly along the walls. But the crowning glory – the envy of the less fortunate neighbors – is the small American organ.12

In some houses the dining room and/or parlour and/or an additional main floor room might serve as an additional bedroom, a sick room, or a birthing room. Towards the end of our period, one function of the parlour was taken off-farm by the similarly named “funeral parlour,” and the

88  Canada’s Rural Majority room could take on more the role of a family room. And by that date, better roads and more automobiles meant that hospitals were becoming more accessible to rural families, reducing the need for a sick or birthing room common in earlier days. At the heart of the farmhouses of southern Ontario and Quebec, and indeed throughout rural Canada, was the large kitchen, which might, as noted above, be combined with a “living” or dining room. And at the heart of the kitchen was the large cast iron stove, most commonly using wood as a fuel. Coal, if it was available, was a fuel that was typically purchased for use on the coldest nights of the year, as it could be banked at night and would keep burning till the morning. By the 1870s, wood and coal iron stoves had largely replaced the open fireplaces of the pioneer era. They had some important advantages over the open hearths they replaced. The cook stove, or range, often doubled as the main source of heat for the kitchen and the main floor of the house. It made more efficient and manageable use of fuel, and had the added advantage of providing both a cooking surface and a baking oven. In addition, stoves kept food – and small children – away from the smoke, flame, and ashes that the open fire generated, also providing a more controllable and even heat. For these reasons, it is credited as being “the most drastic of all steps taken to reduce the housewife’s drudgery” in the nineteenth-century rural home. Its influence reached far into the twentieth century: as late as 1941, over 80 per cent of farms in Ontario and Quebec were still using a wood stove for cooking, usually supplemented by a second smaller stove exclusively for heating.13 From the 1880s onward, hot water tanks or “reservoirs” were often attached to the cookstove, providing hot water that farmwives could ladle out and use to wash dishes; the large volume of hot water for washing clothes and for the weekly bath continued to be heated in a large copper pot on the top of the stove. Farmwives did not often wash clothes

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  89 or sheets, but when they did so, they boiled them to sterilize them and to kill lice or other bugs. By the end of the nineteenth century, stoves often included a shelf above the cooking surface for warming plates and keeping food hot. Men and boys of the family traditionally did the time consuming work of cutting, stacking, and bringing in the wood. Historians estimate that about one-fifth of farmers’ waking hours were spent finding, chopping, and stacking the wood required to cook in and heat a typical early-twentieth century farmhouse. The wood, carefully cut into “stove lengths” over the winter, stacked outside to dry, and then brought into the house, was put in through one of the removable iron elements on the top. Ashes were removed from a pan below the fire box, which was next to the stove box. As well as providing heating and cooking, it also helped dry clothes when outdoor drying was not possible and warm the “sad irons” used for ironing clothes. Farm people were not fanatical about unwrinkled clothing, but ironing, like boiling, provided another way of killing bugs that could infest clothes, bedding, and table linens. The multiple roles that the kitchen range played – heater, water heater, cooker, and ironer – was certainly an important factor in its continued use well into the twentieth century. Many farms had “summer kitchens” where farm women would move the cooking (and with it the family life revolving around the kitchen) outdoors or to a shed attached to the main house. Some used an old wood stove reserved for summer use, others actually moved the regular stove from the “winter kitchen” on a seasonal basis. If they lacked a summer kitchen, some women did their summer cooking on a kerosene or gasoline powered stove, which generated much less heat inside the house. Kerosene (coal oil) provided lighting throughout most of this period; kerosene had been available in Ontario and Quebec since the late 1850s, and occasionally gasoline lamps performed the same function. The glass “chimneys”

90  Canada’s Rural Majority for these had to be cleaned daily, and their wicks trimmed, usually by the women and girls of the family. In 1931, only 14 per cent of Quebec farms and 17 per cent of Ontario farms had electric light, figures that rose in 1941 to 24 per cent and 38 per cent, respectively. Screen doors, patented first in the 1880s, provided welcome relief from houseflies, always a nuisance and carriers of disease around a farm, as well as biting flies like mosquitoes and blackflies that were common throughout the region. Notwithstanding the important contribution of men and boys to fuelling the stove, most of the spaces within the farm home and garden were gendered female. And, as the following paragraphs suggest, the work of the farm wife and daughters in the home and garden was extensive. A 1912 article in the Farmer’s Advocate, “Is Marriage a Failure?” drove home a popular theme of farm women’s overwork in an age when many commentators believed that expectations of women’s work in urban Canada had significantly improved: Up in the morning early, breakfast over, hurry to milking, separating milk, washing dishes (minding babies in intervals), tidy house, get dinner [lunch], wash dishes, do mending, sewing, gardening, berry picking, helping in the field if necessary, washing, ironing, baking, with the thousand and one interruptions, which come through the day; get supper, put sleepy babies to bed, milk, wash dishes, sew, or mend again until bed time.14

Women and girls were almost exclusively responsible for the care of young children, and the preparation and preservation of foods, typically three or four meals a day during the growing and harvesting season, and in many households the women were solely responsible for the clean-up as well. Most rural women were adept at growing both fruit and vegetables in the home garden and orchard. Planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting the farm garden was an important source of support and labour for the farm household.

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  91 It was primarily done by women and children. Most farm women had their own “food processing plants”: their home canning operations. Vegetables and fruit were preserved mainly by canning in the summer and fall. Oral history evidence confirms that both the quantity and quality of women’s home preserves were a source of considerable pride, while census data from 1941 confirm that home production of foods remained an important component of household “income” for more than 90 per cent of farms in the St. Lawrence Valley/Great Lakes Region. Few rural houses had refrigeration of any kind: Only about a quarter of farms in both provinces even had iceboxes for refrigeration by 1941. Those close to urban areas might have had their icebox supplied by the urban delivery carts. Some rural people had access to a community ice house, where ice cut in the winter could be stored in hay or sawdust, ideally underground, well into the heat of summer. Meat slaughtered or fish caught in the winter could, of course, be frozen simply by leaving it outside, protected from dogs, rats, or other fauna, until the change of seasons. Many houses had root cellars for less perishable goods. While farm women willingly purchased a variety of consumer goods, from fabrics to needles to tea and sugar when they could afford to, buying food for daily consumption did not develop into a habit until well after the Second World War. It is impossible to chart the exact extent of provisioning activities in rural areas, in this or any region in any given year. The census of Canada did not include the farm garden in its official estimates of farm products, even though anecdotal evidence and the received wisdom of the time suggested that it provided a substantial portion of the farm family’s food. A few official estimates are available, however, for farms, if not for rural non-farm areas. The 1941 average estimated value that farmers placed on those products “consumed on the farm” was about 10 per cent of their total revenue in Ontario and about 20 per cent in Quebec – a substantial portion of farm revenue, in other words. In that

92  Canada’s Rural Majority year, a surprising 46 per cent of farms in the St. Lawrence Valley of Quebec designated their farm type as “mainly subsistence” or part time, while almost one out of five in southern Ontario did. A report from 1926 in Ontario estimated that as much as 50 per cent of the Ontario diet was produced on the farm. If women’s age-old attention to taking care of and providing the necessities of everyday life continued into the twentieth century, their age-old tradition of earning money by selling agricultural commodities also continued, but underwent some changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the production of woven cloth, soap, and candles diminished markedly in the late nineteenth century, many farm families continued to sell not only the produce grown or raised explicitly for the market but also the surplus butter, eggs, pigs, poultry, and maple syrup that were left over from household production. The sale of these products produced a small but significant source of cash for most farm women. The importance of these small sums should not be underestimated. In his reflections about growing up in Glengarry County, Royce MacGillivray, notes that an aunt of his, who died in 1921, was “said to have held that she needed only five dollars in cash per year for use in the maintenance of her family. The figure seems small, but so heavily was the local economy still that of subsistence farming that no one familiar with the history of the place and the times can have any confidence in denying it.”15 Eggs and butter typically provided farm women with cash or enabled barter for what they needed at the store. Indeed, until 1920, Ontario farm women produced the majority of butter consumed in the province; it was only after that date that factory production exceeded it. Quebec farm women continued to produce millions of pounds of butter until the 1930s. By that date, less than 1 per cent of Quebec farms and only 2 per cent of Ontario farms had machines for milking cattle. Men, women, and children would

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  93 participate in milking, a time-consuming activity when the average Ontario farm in the first decades of the twentieth century had twelve to fourteen cows and farms in Quebec had nine to twelve. While men were generally involved in milking, women and children were mainly responsible for “processing” the milk into butter. First the cream had to be separated from the milk, a process made easier on the twothirds of Ontario and Quebec farms which, by 1931, owned mechanical hand-powered cream separators that used centrifugal force to separate the lighter milk from the cream. “The whine of the whirling mechanism, and the change in pitch as the separation began, were familiar sounds in the farm kitchen.”16 The cream then had to be churned into butter each day – “a relentless chore that had to be fitted in with laundry and housework.”17 This involved agitating the cream vigorously until it congealed, usually by beating it in a dasher churn. Any remaining buttermilk left over had to be squeezed out of the butter with paddles, and then the bulk would be placed in the 30-pound (13.6-kilo) box that had been supplied for the purpose by the general merchant, who would then exchange the filled boxes for cash or store-bought commodities and a new box. In many parts of Ontario and Quebec, dairying remained a part of the family or household economy in this way until the 1940s. In some farms before that time, and in most farms after, dairy farming became more of a specialty, supported by more machinery and larger herds. Both the work and the profits were taken over by the men of the family, depriving women of a familiar and welcome source of cash. A similar transition occurred with poultry; in the postwar period, poultry production increased and became more specialized, moving from being one of many sources of work for women and children on the farm used to supplement other kinds of support, to a full-time, profit-oriented business run by men. While home butter production increased (cheaper than the commercial alternatives of either factory butter or margarine until the 1920s) household production of cheese

94  Canada’s Rural Majority declined from 1860. The number of cheese factories in southern Ontario rose, however, from just over 300 in 1870 to over a thousand by the end of the century. Almost all produced cheddar cheese, which was in high demand in Britain; almost all of the cheese produced in Ontario was exported. Most factories were very small operations with two or three employees, and it was the small mixed farms of southern Ontario and Quebec that provided the milk for all the cheese operations. The commercialization of cheese had a number of advantages for farm families. They could sell the milk that they did not require for butter for home use from their small herds on a regular basis, and receive in return not only cash (it was a rural commonplace that “the cheese factory paid the mortgage”) but also the important (and stinky) by-product of cheese making, whey, an excellent food for pigs. Pigs and cheese making, therefore, went together in southern Ontario and Quebec, and both cheese and bacon – easily transported without refrigeration – became important agricultural exports, to Great Britain in particular, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So, overall the trend from varied household production by women, to more specialized factory-type production overseen by farm men, was gradual. The Barn The barn was known as the “powerhouse of the farm” – at least according to the men in the farm household. Barns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were very large, typically larger than in Europe, and generally made of wood. They were often built with the labour of neighbouring farm men and boys at barn raising bees, often under the direction of a skilled carpenter. The word “barn” comes from a phrase meaning “a place for barley,” for the original function of a barn was simply to provide an enclosed (dry) place large enough for threshing (breaking the grain seeds out of their husks) with a flail, and then separating the desired

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  95 seeds from the chaff by a messy winnowing processes (using a fan or taking advantage of wind blowing through the barn), and then storing the grain. Barns varied significantly across southern Ontario and Quebec. The Connected Barn, common in New England and Quebec, comprised a row of mows (upper hay lofts, rhyming with “cows”), plus drive floors, stables, byres, piggeries, and storage bays, with posts and planks or logs dividing each bay. Early roofs were of thatch (straw), later shingles, eventually sheet metal, which provided better protection against fire. Quebec famously had many circular or polygonal barns. Small English barns, originating in a place where livestock needed no sustained protection from the cold, existed throughout Central Canada, but were ill-adapted to the changing agriculture of central Canada, from a concentration on wheat to mixed farming, with its increased emphasis on livestock. In the late 1880s a new form of barn began to become common in southern Ontario and Quebec. Originating in the Swiss Alps and Bavaria, the Pennsylvania or Bank Barn was particularly well adapted to both the extremely cold and snowy environment of the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region and to the new importance of livestock. As we have seen, growing fodder for animals, was, by the early twentieth century, taking up more land in southern Ontario and Quebec than growing food for people, and the animals’ food supply had to be sheltered. And so did the animals. By the late nineteenth century, farmers had realized that cows could be milked for up to nine months of the year, and their milk production kept much higher if they were kept warm and well fed. The new style of barn was typically built into a south-facing hill, with the stable portion of the barn dug back north into the hill to avoid the arctic winds so the surrounding earth could provide insulation. This lower part of the barn typically had several compartments or “stables” and was more likely to have a concrete floor as the twentieth century progressed. Another great innovation in this type of barn was using gravity to feed the animals. Hay

96  Canada’s Rural Majority and straw stored on the upper floor was simply dropped as needed through hay chutes and chop chutes. W.H. Graham explains in his history of an Ontario farm region, Greenbank: In the Country of the Past, that “the new bank barn was essential to the changeover to mixed farming from wheat.” Not only were animals better sheltered and more easily fed, but concentration was another benefit. In one building were the threshing floor, granary, feed mill, hay and storage with, below, stalls for horses and milking cows, pens for young stock and fat stock, storage for harness and equipment, feed bins and root cellars as well. A last, inestimable benefit was the concentration of manure when animals were stabled, making fertilizer available in larger (and more convenient) quantities. Such revolutionary innovation would not recur until the introduction of electricity.18

The barn also housed the one, two, or three horses that provided most of the power on the farm. A pig pen would often be attached to the barn, and a separate shed might include space for sheep, chickens, ducks, and geese. Farmers loved their barns. As one farmer put it, “Few farmers lived in beautiful houses, but most had beautiful barns.”19 The tendency of farmers to spend considerable time on and in the barn, and considerable money improving the amenities within it, created tension in many early-twentieth-century farm households. The provision of electricity for lighting (kerosene lamps were a significant fire hazard in barns filled with straw and grain) and for pumping water (dairy cattle consumed massive amounts) in barns was a sore point in farmhouses lacking both conveniences. As farm journalist Ethel Chapman wrote in the Farmers’ Magazine in 1918: Machinery for women has not kept pace with labor-saving equipment so rapidly coming to farms. We have a lot of bank barns with warm, comfortable stables ... yet a furnace that would keep every room in the house at a livable temperature is rare luxury in many

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  97 neighborhoods … More and more we find running water in the barn for cattle, while the water for house is still pumped and carried from the well.20

Fields, Pastures, Woodlots, and Sugar Bushes If the barn was the powerhouse of the farm, much of the work was done outside, by the draught animals and the farmer, away in the fields, pastures, woodlots, and sugar bushes, often some distance from the house. In the long summer days, cows grazed in open pastures, and it was generally the children’s job to go and fetch the cattle home to the barn if they did not come back of their own accord. Fields planted with barley (for alcohol), oats and hay (for horses), buckwheat (for some people), and a range of vegetables, including turnips (for animals mainly), and field crops (potatoes, beans) followed a seasonal round. Other crops included tobacco, sugar beets, mangolds (for animal feed), peas, and “rapeseed” (now “canola”) for vegetable oil. The issue of women working in fields was a contentious topic; some felt that women had enough hard work to do in the farm house and garden, and field work was an unfair, even exploitative, additional burden. Others felt that women “helping out” in the fields simply reflected the sharing of the farm work burden. Children would work in the fields from an early age “picking stones” from the fields, scaring off birds, and later, working with the teams of horses ploughing and harvesting the crops. Work in the fields followed a pattern that varied with the weather, the particular kind of farm, and international prices. W.H. Graham perused a number of farm diaries to pull together a “typical round” of seasonal activities, paraphrased here. In April the land was prepared for grain planting. Two teams of horses could plough sixty acres (twenty-four hectares) in a month (about one and a half acres a day), most farms having between forty and a hundred acres (or sixteen to forty hectares) under crop (more in pasture for cows,

98  Canada’s Rural Majority horses, and sheep). Harrowing, or the smoothing of the soil, generally went more quickly. Spring wheat, oats, barley, and peas were sown by the end of May. Hay fields, seeded the year before, were ready to cut by mid-July, taking two weeks on a ten-acre field with the family helping with the cutting, turning, drying, raking, cocking, drawing in, and mowing down. A week in August was needed to cut and bind and stook and draw the barley crop to the mow (the loft in the barn). September demanded the most intense work, typically three steady weeks of cutting and getting in the peas, wheat, and oats with a horse-drawn mower. In October the farmer could usually get all the grain threshed and stored in the granary and the straw stacked before the end of the month, albeit with the help of a threshing machine powered by a horsepower, and of neighbours and their horses working alongside the farmer, his horses and his sons. When the crops were off the fields, fall ploughing began. Harvesters stored peas, vines and all, in a stack and in the course of the winter and through to March they threshed them as needed for the family and to fatten the swine. Farmers threshed some of the Timothy hay for seed in the fall, and through the winter fanned all the grains. The process was finished by March, and it all began again in April. Other tasks occupied the farmer: from April to June, he cleared manure from the barn and cattle yard to put on the fields; in July, he dug stumps, carted stones from the turnip land and planted turnips, and until August had to hoe vegetable crops to keep weeds down. In October and November the potatoes were ready, and although they typically occupied only one acre, digging them was spread over four weeks. In those same months thousands of turnips were drawn to the root cellar to be chopped later as needed for feed. Fences had to be mended, the potato pit in the barn cellar had to be drained and cleaned. The chaff house had to be put into shape to receive new chaff in the fall, kept as winter feed for animals. The granary had to be cleaned out. There was daily

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  99 work caring for livestock, and men and women alike tended to the birthing and butchering of horses and cattle. Horses had to be shod and the cows had to be milked through most of the year. Graham explains that soon after the wheat or rye was cut, “the family spent a day with special knives splitting the straw and braiding it into lengths that would later be made into floor and table mats and hats.”21 Most farms had a woodlot. This rural resource played an important part in both production-for-home and production-for-sale in rural areas. Much of the time from November and December and into March was taken up with logging and in hauling timbers to the mill for lumber, and in the endless cutting and splitting of cordwood for the stoves, and the cutting and spitting of cedar rails to repair and extend the fences. Trees remained a vital part of the farm economy, but farmers were the source of much of the cordwood that continued to fuel urban stoves and furnaces. So wood was a significant component in the cash economy, as well as valuable for building and burning on the farm. Indeed, in the 1870s, entrepreneurs floated the idea of a special, narrow gauge railway whose sole purpose would be to take cordwood from Ontario farms to Toronto and cities to the south and west. The sugar bush was another important source of treerelated cash and also used for home consumption in the region. While most important in Quebec, particularly in areas where Shield outcrops or limestone made crops difficult to grow, many of the farmers lucky enough to have maple trees on their property had “sugar shacks” in the woods. As the sap began to run in March, spouts in the trees drained the sap into buckets. Transferred to huge pots it was boiled for hours, and then bottled. The syrup was used as a sweetener at home, and was also an important cash crop. Whether in their barn, field, or their woodlot, farmers in the region spent much of their time working outside their house.

100  Canada’s Rural Majority Off-Farm Work Farm populations were of great concern to reformers and bureaucrats alike. Governments, reform groups, businesses, and industries tracked farm households closely in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing historians with a wealth of data with which to understand many aspects of farm life. A range of evidence suggests that offfarm work remained an important aspect of life for farmers throughout this period. Because so much of this work was irregular, untaxed, and outside of formal economic channels, however, details about its exact nature and extent (like household provisioning work) are hard to find in “routinely generated sources” such as the census or employment records. There are a few statistics, however. In 1940 the census of Canada asked farmers if they had participated in “off-farm work” for wages, and to estimate the proportion of the farm’s total revenue that this work produced. An analysis of detailed census district data reveals that 30 per cent of farmers in southern Ontario and 39 per cent of farmers in southern rural Quebec reported off-farm income in 1941, and they estimated that it equaled 8 per cent of the household revenue in Ontario and 11 per cent in Quebec. Evidence from diaries, memoirs, and oral histories confirms that even in the case of farms that were commercially successful, the men, women, and children also worked for wages off the farm, and some family members participated in reciprocal work bees throughout the year. The rural non-farm population is more difficult to figure out. This group did not appear as an identifiable group in the official record until the 1931 census, when the Dominion Bureau of Statistics was particularly concerned about what was happening to farming in the Great Depression. The rural non-farm class was found to be growing from 12 per cent of the region’s population in 1931 to 14 per cent in 1941, with rates much higher at 26 per cent to 30 per cent in the Shield regions of Ontario and Quebec. But

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  101 the kind of life that “non-farm rural” people lived in the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region is not entirely clear, nor is it exactly known what they did for a living. A few households could have formed a kind of proto-suburban population, living an essentially urban life: each consuming little of what it produced, producing little of what it consumed, and using wages to purchase the commodities needed to live. While the phenomenon of suburbanization did not really occur in Canada until the post–Second World War period, there were people who were living in essentially urban areas that were not yet incorporated as cities. The most dramatic example of this was the district of York just north of Toronto, which in 1941 had over 100,000 people but was still designated a “rural” municipality. There are some indications that some of the large rural non-farm populations in this region in the 1870–1940 period included farm households that did not meet the minimum requirements of acreage farmed or income generated to be designated as “farmers” even though they were making some living from the land. Most were, like their neighbour farmers, making a living from a complex range of economic activities, including provisioning in the form of gardening, hunting, and gathering (a rural tradition extending into the twenty-first century for many Canadians in this region), working at a variety of waged jobs in nearby towns, mills, or rural industries, providing room and board, or renting out a cottage or campground for summer visitors, and/or selling whatever extra fuel or livestock that could be easily raised or tended on rural property. The category of course must also have existed before 1931. Before the consolidation and centralization of industry underway from the early twentieth century, some rural non-farmers might have worked in the same rural mines, mills, and factories that provided part-time waged labour for their farming neighbours and their children. The history of this important group, and of the declining rural industries on which they could rely in the first half of the century, still,

102  Canada’s Rural Majority however, needs to be written, and their voices more clearly heard in the history of rural Canada. Farmers and the growing “non-farm rural” population performed work that varied as widely as the countryside itself. Working in the woods continued to employ farmers and other rural dwellers, even though the glory days of the timber industry in most of this southerly region had ended by the 1870s. “Faire les chantiers,” the phrase for men going up north (usually) to work in the forest for a company, remained a part of rural life for many, particularly those living near the Canadian Shield. Rural and farm populations also found work seasonally, or on a part-time or intermittent basis, in nearby towns or cities, where employment was increasingly available. While the decline in rural industries would have an increasingly negative effect on the rural economy, throughout this period, farm men and a growing number of women continued to find employment in the mills, the small factories and food processing plants, and in a wide variety of rural occupations from seasonal labour on someone else’s farm to working as a fire ranger, a postmistress, a rural shop assistant, or in a farm implement factory. Many rural women worked as domestic servants for town and city families. In areas flanking the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, fishing (even whaling far down river) provided part of the family subsistence, as well as some parttime waged work in commercial operations. To be sure, some of these rural areas were more properly characterized as based around fishing villages rather than farming. Many farmers and other rural dwellers worked on other people’s farms, some doubtless trying to save to buy their own land, some just to supplement their own incomes. Labour exchanges – work bees for threshing, barn raising, harvesting, and quilt making – continued throughout this period, though they were in decline by the 1940s. There was a particular shortage in off-farm work for women in rural areas, a decline that one historian uses to explain the fall in the birth rate on farms from the 1870s onward. Marvin McInnis argues that, with shrinking opportunities for off-farm work

The St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes  103 and thus lower cash incomes, from the later nineteenth century, many couples made the decision to keep family size small to make up the difference. In Quebec, where large families were legendary, the majority of rural families began limiting births by the early decades of the twentieth century, even though extremely high numbers of children in a few families rendered this trend less visible.22 Conclusion Rural households in the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes Region occupied some of the best land, and experienced some of the best climatic conditions of any Canadian population. These factors, combined with the excellent transportation of goods in and out of the region that was afforded by the St. Lawrence River and Great Lakes, help to explain why this relatively small region held the largest rural population in the country. Many rural people in the region lived in close proximity to the rapidly growing urban populations who supplied a key market for the food and fuel they provided. Rural people responded to increased urbanization and industrialization by continuing to draw on the labour of all household members in the collective (though not egalitarian) task of ensuring their persistence on the land. And they quickly responded to increased urban demand for agricultural products by diversifying their production away from selling a single crop (previously wheat) in an international market, to include dairy products, livestock, and animal by-products. The transition to urban industrialism that characterized much of southern Ontario and Quebec between 1870 and 1940, therefore, had a varied, sometimes muted and indirect effect on a significant population of rural dwellers. Rural life changed in some significant ways, and it continued to be characterized by its variability from one place and even one household to another. But the biggest differences were increasingly manifest not among farm families, but between the rural world and the new urban industrial world growing up inside it.

4 The Canadian Central Plain

The Prairie’s agricultural landscape of flat grassland is the southerly portion of Canada’s share of North America’s great Central Plain. At 1.9 million square kilometers (190 million hectares), or about a fifth of the Canadian land mass, it is a relatively flat, but tilted, region that lies between the Canadian Shield in the east and the Rocky Mountains in the west. A massive tectonic plate sliding under the Pacific coast of North America continues to raise up the entire western half of the continent, and so the Central Plain meets the Rockies at an elevation of about a thousand metres. It then slopes to a low point where it meets the Canadian Shield in the east, which in turn slopes to sea level at Hudson Bay. The Central Plain also tilts in the other direction, from a high point just south of the U.S. border into Mexico, narrowing as it slopes down to the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north. The rivers of this great Plain, like most of Canada’s rivers, flow north into James Bay, Hudson Bay, and the Arctic Ocean. When, in 1670, the English king granted to Hudson’s Bay Company exclusive rights to trade furs on all lands within the drainage basin of the Hudson Bay, the company was in fact given trading rights to most of northern North America. Between the 1890s and 1940s, farmers ploughed up and planted with wheat a substantial portion of Canada’s naturally grass-growing Prairies. The harvests were transported

106  Canada’s Rural Majority by railways and ships great distances around the world for human consumption. Most people are (and for the last 5,000 years have been) basically seed-eaters, and well into the twentieth century, bread (made from wheat seeds ground up and then baked) was the main food besides rice on which much of the human population relied. Participation in the global wheat trade thrust Canada onto the world stage as one of the largest producers of that valuable commodity. The growth statistics are astonishing: the rural population of the Prairie provinces increased from about 300,000 in 1901 (when the first provincial population statistics were gathered) to almost 2.5 million in 1941. The number of farms grew fivefold in the first twenty years of resettlement, between 1881 and 1901, from 10,000 to just over 55,000; by 1931, they had increased a further five times to 288,000. “Improved land” on the Prairies – ploughed and planted land – increased from just over 9 million hectares in 1911 to just over 18 million in 1921, to just over 26 million hectares in 1941. Wheat was the most important single crop, and Canada exported the great majority of it. Prairie wheat production grew from one million bushels in 1880 to 63 million bushels in 1901, reaching levels of between 300 and just over 500 million bushels per year in the 1920s. (A bushel is about 72 litres of wheat by volume, about 27 kilograms by weight.) By 1929, Canada’s wheat exports constituted a staggering 40 per cent of the entire world export market for the grain. In 1930, before the devastation brought about by the drought of the Great Depression, there were more than a million hectares of wheat planted in Manitoba, almost 3 million hectares in Alberta, and 5.7 million hectares in Saskatchewan (which grew half of all the wheat in the country in that year). Almost all of these were family farms. Oats (mainly for the horses that powered most of the machines before 1940) and barley (for beer to power the people) were also grown in large quantities, though in Manitoba and Saskatchewan they did not rival wheat. Cattle ranches

The Canadian Central Plain  107 grew up in areas with less water and poorer soils that were unsuitable for cropping. Coal was mined throughout southern Alberta. Oil and gas were extracted and processed in the Prairies before 1940, but it would not be until the great Leduc oil strike of 1947 that petroleum would become a major industry in the Prairie West. While many of the farm families moving into the region in the 1900–40 period had remarkable success in planting and harvesting their crops and raising animals, tens of thousands of less fortunate settlers occupied lands which, notwithstanding encouragement from government scientists, could support neither crops nor animals. Their suffering, like that of Aboriginal peoples facing the loss of both the buffalo and the lands that supported them all, is legendary. The “opening up” of the western Prairies is a passage in Canadian history (paralleling an earlier trend south of the border) that is firmly embedded in national narratives of development and in ideas about “typical” rural life on the family farm. Less familiar is the nature of the social, economic, and environmental transformation of this region in the years between 1870 and 1940, when a massive and ethnically diverse agricultural population arriving from eastern Canada, the United States, and Europe suddenly overwhelmed the sparse hunting and gathering populations that had inhabited the region for 10,000 years. Life for the Aboriginal and Metis inhabitants, as for most of those newly moving into the region from other parts of the world, changed dramatically as commercial agriculture, and to a lesser extent ranching, quickly became the most visible mediator between people and the rural lands of the Prairies. What caused the abrupt transformation from the hunting and gathering societies to an agricultural one between 1870 and 1940? The short answer is that the Canadian Prairies became one of the biggest, one of the last, and, like the settlements on the Shield, one of the most northerly sites of the global transformation that brought Europeans to

108  Canada’s Rural Majority New France and British North America: the unprecedented phenomenon of massive land redistribution from Europe to the “new worlds” between 1650 and 1900. But if the land rush on the Canadian Prairies was a late component of a global phenomenon, with global causes and global consequences, it also developed within the specific historical and environmental contexts of the Canadian Prairies. People experienced and understood it within the contexts of their immediate relations to their places of origin, to their families, to their neighbours, and to the particular environment they encountered as they stepped outside their back door. In order to explore the relationships between the global, the local, and the personal that constituted the history of the Central Plain, with a particular focus on the centre of population change in the 1870–1940 period in the southern Canadian Prairies, I am going to train three different historical lenses on the region: first, this chapter will situate this particular historical period within the huge swathes of time that created the physical environment that profoundly affected the human history of the region in the era under study here. Second, I am going to focus on the ways in which the history of the 1870–1940 period comprised various human struggles over land use in the Prairie environment, struggles involving Aboriginal buffalo peoples, Metis hunters/farmers, wheat farmers, and ranchers. Finally, I am going to focus a lens on daily life on a Prairie wheat farm, asking not only what rural Prairie wheat farmers did all day, but how these practices linked families, their households and their local environment to the new, global economy emerging in this period. Geological Time: Shaping the Prairie Environment Water, ice, and wind formed the Central Plain. This relatively flat formation was, for about 30 million years during the Cretaceous period, a warm inland seaway lying between the two halves of what is today the North American

The Canadian Central Plain  109 continent, as is proven by the fossilized marine life that remains. Fossil fuels provide another less visually exciting but far more ancient (and currently more valuable) vestige of living matter decaying in (then tropically located) lands and seas hundreds of millions of years ago. The coal found on the slopes of the Rockies provided an important source of heat and fuel not only for the transcontinental railroad’s energy-hungry steam locomotives but also for the settlers pouring into the (largely treeless) region in the late years of the nineteenth century who needed a source of energy to heat and cook in their homes. Pin-head-sized organisms called diatoms were plentiful in the ancient tropical seas. As they decayed, they were compressed into oil and gas. Canada’s Central Plain, indeed, contains what may be the largest supply of petroleum in the world. The oil sands of northern Alberta alone may have more than Iraq and more than Saudi Arabia, with 1.75–2.5 trillion barrels of oil, 200 billion of which are recoverable with current technology. Explorations further north had their origins in Norman Wells in the late nineteenth century, but exploitation of oil began in earnest with the First World War, expanded to the Mackenzie Valley with the Second World War, and continues to this day. After the water, ice shaped the vast plain over millions of years. As the kilometre-thick ice sheet covering most of Canada during the last ice age (it began 60–100,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago) moved from east to west, it scraped the soil off the Canadian Shield, leaving that region defined by a massive block of mostly naked bedrock. Much of this soil was redistributed over the great plain to the west. And as the glaciers began to melt, they left behind vast bodies of water that persisted until about 8,000 years ago. These massive lakes have been mostly absorbed into the porous soils of the Central Plains, but their remains can still be seen in the (still-shrinking) great lakes that border the Canadian Shield. The prime grass-growing prairies resulted from the soil that remained. They begin near Winnipeg in

110  Canada’s Rural Majority the east, arch up to Edmonton in the north, take a western arm into the Peace River Country (the only part of British Columbia lying east of the Rockies), and then head south, easting past the Rockies to the 49th parallel. Going from east to west across the Central Plain, rainfall declines in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Indeed, in the extreme southwest of Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta lies an area of true desert and “badlands” (defined as a type of dry terrain where sedimentary rocks and clay-rich soils have been extensively eroded by wind and water) called the Palliser Triangle. First Nations people spent little time in this barren region, whose infertile soils and lack of water limited its ability to support life of any sort. The northern and western portions of this land had enough precipitation, soil, and short grass cover, to support herds of buffalo and, after their extermination, beef cattle. North of the prairie grasslands lies parkland, about 160 kilometres wide, of aspen groves and prairie meadow. It typically provided a good livelihood to vegetable, insect, bird, and mammal populations, including the human hunting and gathering populations of the pre-settlement era, the Metis (a society of mixed-race hunters, farmers, and traders that developed during the fur trade era), and the Euro-American populations that welcomed the water and trees that were in short supply on the prairie grasslands, except in river bottomlands. Prairie and parkland are dwarfed by a second great ecosystem of the Central Plain lying to the north: a vast expanse of boreal forest, much of it spilling over from the rock of the Canadian Shield to the north and east, and over onto the northern Rocky Mountain region to the west. Across these land formations lies the largest intact boreal forest on the planet – 566 million hectares – containing mainly pine, spruce, and tamarack, and occupied by a variety of animal species, including bears, wolves, and lynx, as well as thousands of species of plants and insects. Ecologists now recognize that this forest, larger than the Amazon jungle, plays a vital role in the health of the earth’s atmosphere, as

The Canadian Central Plain  111 a habitat for living organisms, an absorber of greenhouse gasses, and a filter for water. The boreal forests of the Central Plain alone occupies about 20 million hectares of land. This forested land of the Central Plain has been home to First Nations fishing, hunting, and gathering peoples for millennia, and, more recently also to those other more recent great migratory populations of Canada: loggers and oil workers. To the north of the boreal forest, into the Northwest Territories north of the 60th parallel, the Plain narrows between the Shield to the east and the Rockies to the west; the trees gradually become smaller and more sparse, and tundra and permafrost finally replace the more southerly ecosystems. Life-forms in the western Arctic are more numerous and varied than on the Shield country of the eastern Arctic (present-day Nunavut), and the numbers and varieties of animals and plants are greater in coastal or more southerly areas. If the Canadian Prairies are remarkable for the tropical climate of a hundred million years ago that gave us both dinosaur bones and vast oil and gas reserves, they are also known for the climate extremes of the last 10,000 years. There is no moderating effect of oceans, except in the southwest corner, where Chinook winds bring warm Pacific air through the mountain passes. The extremes of climate and weather have been called capricious and cruel; of all the inhabited places of the world, only central Russia has such an extreme climate. Long cold winters, which, even in the south are often frozen by wind from the Arctic, quickly swing into short hot summers, fanned by the hot winds from the desert plains of the American west. Even worse than the extremes of climatic conditions are their variability and unpredictability. Aboriginal populations had lived in the vast region for millennia, sustaining their society and culture by means of their rich ecological knowledge, culture of resource sharing, and patterns of highly selective seasonal migrations. For the first

112  Canada’s Rural Majority generation of settlers entering the region from generally more climatically benign parts of the world, the particular combination of extreme and variable conditions created serious, often fatal, problems; incoming agriculturalists had no local knowledge to rely on and a very thin layer of time over which to evaluate or adapt to such extreme norms and trends. Extreme conditions of drought, heavy rainfall, and unseasonable temperatures (including late and early frosts) occur about one year out of four. Blizzards, hail, almost constantly howling winds, torrential rain, searing heat, tornadoes, and frequent droughts, particularly through the semi-arid region, are common. Agrarian production is not easy, particularly for newcomers, and in many areas it is impossible, as tens of thousands of rural Canadians discovered in the early decades of the twentieth century. Hunting and Gathering Populations A variety of First Nations on the Prairies and the Plain to the north continued to rely on fishing, hunting, and gathering into the fur trade era, where they traded what they took from the land and lakes such as beaver, marten, and muskrat, whitefish, and sturgeon for iron, guns, and other European goods. Some also cultivated the land. On the Prairies, the First Nations known to settlers as the Assiniboine, Saulteaux (Ojibway), and Plains Cree were allied, as were the Blackfoot, Peigan, and Blood of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Avoiding the dry and barren lands of the Palliser Triangle, these rural populations relied heavily on the largest mammal of the Northwest, the buffalo (more commonly known as bison rather than buffalo), to provide most of their food, shelter, and clothing. Prairie First Nations lived in large encampments near the buffalo herds during the summer, and typically broke into smaller units to follow dispersed herds to the wooded uplands for the winter, where firewood, water, fish, game, and shelter were also more readily available.

The Canadian Central Plain  113 Though trade with the Europeans brought some material advantages, by 1870, the First Nations’ alliances and trade relations had already been altered as their relations with Europeans and their trade goods, including horses, guns, and whisky, altered the balance of power in the west. Diseases transmitted from Europe resulted in frequent epidemics. Large numbers of so-called Woodlands Indians moving south and westward in the nineteenth century signalled not only changing relations of power but also the depletion of animals that provided food, shelter, and trade goods for Aboriginal peoples. Demonstrating a distinctive variation on the occupational pluralism that characterized rural populations across Canada for centuries, the Metis also lived and worked within a hybrid of capitalist relations in the fur trade and self-provisioning, household-based foraging and farming on ­riverfront lots. Their French, English, and Plains Creespeaking ancestors had worked and lived for generations with Hudson Bay servants and labourers. The buffalo hunt was key to the inter-related economies and cultures of both First Nations and Metis. For centuries, a sustainable presence on the North American Great Plains of massive buffalo herds, estimated at a density of nine or ten animals per square mile (258 hectares), must have ranged between 28 and 30 million (a total only slightly less than Canada’s human population today). As late as 1872, an observer of a buffalo herd wrote: “The number of animals is beyond all estimation. Looking at the front of the herd from an elevation of 1,800 feet above the plain, I was unable to see the end in either direction.”1 The commercial trade in buffalo meat was as old as the trade in furs in the Northwest: Metis had prepared and sold the mixture of buffalo fat and berries made into pemmican, the high energy, low-weight food that sustained the men as they transported furs through the vast distances of the Northwest to Montreal and Quebec City. By the early nineteenth century, historian George Colpitts has argued,

114  Canada’s Rural Majority the use of this energy-rich food fuelled the expansion of the fur trade throughout the Northwest. Before that time, voyageurs simply were not able to carry enough food energy (mostly from lower-energy beef) in their canoes to support their high-energy paddling across the continent. Only with pemmican were they able to avoid the starvation that faced many voyageurs by the time they reached Winnipeg. The routes where furs were traded became, therefore, pemmican supply routes. The effect on buffalo populations was devastating. Between the 1860s and the late 1880s, the Red River Colony alone was estimated to have consumed between 3.5 and 7 million kilograms of buffalo meat per year. Buffalo populations plunged. From the 1820s, commerce in buffalo robes, used as sleigh throws in Canada and the northern United States, also put pressure on existing herds. An estimated 50,000 to 100,000 robes were traded each year from the 1840s to the 1870s, most of it for whisky through the United States. After mid-century, First Nations and Metis on the ­Prairies were both pressured by the decline in other furs and enticed by the commercial (and alcohol) opportunities offered by the booming new trade, and they began slaughtering buffalo for commerce in numbers that were simply not sustainable. First Nations and Metis were not alone in this: as the railway south of the border made transportation to and from the buffalo herds easier, the activities of Euro-American sports hunters took an increasing toll. After 1870, new tanning processes made it possible to process the now easily transportable, cheap, and abundant buffalo hides to markets, where they made a good substitute for cow hides. The slaughter increased. The last great hunt was in 1873, when an astonishing 3 million were killed. By 1879, the buffalo populations were in serious decline even on the Canadian side. By 1900, only an estimated 300 remained on the western Prairies. But overhunting was not the only cause of the near-extinction of the buffalo. Early settlers and Aboriginal peoples living

The Canadian Central Plain  115 south of the 49th parallel, like their governments, had long realized that hunting and gathering were activities that fit poorly at best with both ranching and agriculture. Each depended on very different and usually contradictory relationships with the immediate environment. Even though hunting and gathering societies were almost always of a very low density, the animals and plants that they relied on typically occupied a very large area. Hunting and gathering societies, even those engaging in small amounts of agriculture, depended most significantly on the free access of both hunted and hunters to a lot of land. Native hunters and the hunted fit poorly, therefore, with the invasion of new species – like cattle – which, on the early ranches, competed with buffalo for grasses, water, and even shelter from winter storms. The Plains hunting and gathering societies, like the ranchers, competed even more directly with grain-growing farmers. Fences around fields blocked the buffalo’s natural migrations and incommoded cattle. The land-related activities of settlers – the building of fenced ranches, farms, and towns – and mining had destroyed buffalo habitat in the American southeast by the 1830s. As Americans settlers had drifted west, they set about deliberately to interfere with the sustainability of the herds that threatened settlement. Prairie grasses had taken millennia to adapt to periodic annihilation by the huge herds of massive beasts, trampling their excretions with their hooves. Neither the fields of delicate new crops nor the newly established towns and villages of the plains could cope or adapt. So decades before agricultural settlement of the Canadian west, settlers south of the border had begun killing off the buffalo whose migratory rounds included Canada’s Plain. The massive kill-off of buffalo had a variety of causes but a single massive effect: the destruction of a way of life and a livelihood for First Nations and Metis peoples of the southern Prairies. Had the massive buffalo herds that provided food, clothing, and shelter for the First Nations not been

116  Canada’s Rural Majority mostly destroyed before the 1880s, agricultural settlement of the Canadian Prairies could not have easily taken place. The first Euro-American settlers moving into this region arrived just in time to witness the last great buffalo harvest: huge piles of bones left from the massive slaughters were gathered up, often by settlers themselves, to sell to bone traders. Ironically, this last vestige of an old economy played a role in the newly developing industries of the North American west. Dried and charred, the bones created a substance called “bone black,” which was put to a number of industrial uses. When coarsely crushed, it could filter impurities out of sugarcane juice, leaving a clear liquid that evaporated to produce pure white sugar, a product emblematic of the new industrial foods and modern tastes of the twentieth century. Bone black was also used as a pigment in paints, dyes, and cosmetics, and as a dry lubricant for iron and steel forgings. Fresh bones could be boiled to extract gelatin for food, glues, and photographic emulsions. Rich in phosphorus, buffalo bones provided one of the first industrial fertilizers that would, by the 1940s, be synthesized and made available in the massive quantities needed to transform agricultural production on Prairie farms. By the late 1870s, some years before the massive tide of immigrants flooded into the southwest of the Canadian Plain competing for land, many Cree, Ojibwa, Chipewyan, and Blackfoot populations of the Northwest were facing starvation. These peoples did not die out, as some EuroAmericans predicted, but their lives were increasingly circumscribed. Even in northerly areas, where government surveillance was weaker, and where agricultural settlement occurred later and with smaller populations, Aboriginal peoples suffered from the same industrial land use that interfered with hunting and gathering economies on the Shield: mining, commercial fishing, and eventually pulp and paper mills and the vast hydroelectric system of dams, reservoirs, and transmission lines. All these took away fish and animal habitat by polluting and/or transforming lands

The Canadian Central Plain  117 and waters. Reduced resources created hardship, and government policies, particularly animal and fish conservation laws, restricted Aboriginal free access to land, water, and air, even when treaties had guaranteed them. Living according to a new agricultural way of life was also difficult. Many Aboriginal peoples indicated their (albeit desperate) willingness to adapt to the loss of the buffalo by expanding their traditional small-scale agricultural practices towards commercial agriculture. After some preliminary encouragement from the federal government, however, government officials precluded Aboriginal peoples from homesteading opportunities and forced them to take up residence on reserves with poor agricultural lands, thereby discouraging them from farming. Where the land was farmable, immigrant farmers complained that Aboriginal peoples were competing unfairly in producing agricultural goods for the same markets with the government’s help. The federal government responded by reneging on promises to provide Aboriginal peoples with the agricultural tools, seeds, and knowledge that would put them into direct agricultural competition. The suppression of First Nations and Metis economic opportunities, like the removal of the buffalo upon which their political economy depended, paved the way for Euro-Canadian resettlement of the Prairies. Rural Canada Looks West European trade and overhunting had, therefore, already created serious economic and social problems for many Aboriginal populations on the Plain, as on the Canadian Shield, by the 1870s. The first years of the Canadian confederation marked the political transformation that accompanied the new pressures on the hunting and gathering economy: the takeover of the Northwest by the new Dominion of Canada for the purposes of installing a Euro-American farm population on Aboriginal lands. Before 1850, few

118  Canada’s Rural Majority outside of the region had thought of the Northwest as anything but a hostile, barren wilderness unsuitable for agriculture, a view that would change dramatically over the next decade. In 1868, a number of business leaders, politicians, and other prominent citizens in the Canadas, loosely organized into the Canada First Movement, called into question the commonly held belief that the entire Northwest of the continent was a frigid wasteland, suitable only for “savages” and wild animals. They began to challenge the suitability of allowing a sole trading company to control, and reap the profits from, such a vast and valuable region. And this was a time when the Hudson’s Bay Company’s profits from the fur trade were falling. Central Canadians were already fretting that they were suffering from a shortage of lands suitable for supporting their agricultural society; it remained for the Canada First Movement to solve the perceived problem by demonstrating the suitability of at least some of the great Northwest for farming. Canadian proponents of the idea of a “usable” (i.e., agricultural) rural West turned to the new sciences of the age: geology and meteorology. The Palliser and Hind scientific expeditions of the late 1850s confirmed the agricultural potential of much of the western region. The Hudson’s Bay Company gave up rights to the 8 million square kilometres of Rupert’s Land (about one-quarter of the North American continent and 40 per cent of modern Canada, including most of the Central Plain, Nunavut, northern Ontario, and northern Quebec) to the Dominion of Canada in 1869 for compensation of sterling £300,000 ($1.5 million in Canadian funds). Shortly after, the first survey crew moved west from Ontario to build a road from the Metis settlement at Red River to Lake of the Woods. To their surprise, the road crews were confronted with a group of Metis led by Louis Riel, blocking their entry to the Northwest and insisting that their nation – la nation métisse – would not be turned over without their consultation and approval. Today we would say that in this incident, known

The Canadian Central Plain  119 as the Red River Rebellion or the First Riel Rebellion, they were asserting their right to self-determination. This protest resulted in the formation of a new province, Manitoba, which was “postage stamp” in size as it encompassed only about 12,000 hectares around present-day Winnipeg. In 1870, the Ottawa government guaranteed rights regarding religion, language, hunting, and fishing, and granted (for Metis) access to “traditional” waterfront lots. By 1885, although many Metis had moved north and west to take up lands allotted to them there, their condition had worsened. After the creation of a Metis provisional government again under Louis Riel in 1885, Metis and First Nations lost the fight for the Northwest to the incoming Canadians. Aboriginal peoples, already weakened by disease, starvation, and the transfer of their lands to the Canadian government, and confronted with the military strength of the new Dominion of Canada, capitulated. By 1885, the interests of the ranchers and agriculturalists had largely (though not entirely) won out over the first rural populations of the Prairies, the Aboriginal and Metis. After losing fierce battles to protect their very different relationship to the land, Aboriginal peoples of the Prairie south were relegated to a small fraction of their former territories by the Numbered Treaties negotiated with the Canadian government; Metis dispersed and moved further west. And so the agricultural economy began. It was not, therefore, simply the idea of the Northwest that had changed by 1885. By that point, the stage had been set for the ranchers and agriculturalists who comprised the Great Land Rush in three key ways: the severe weakening of the dominant hunting and gathering population; the building of the railway to provide a workable transportation route; and the instituting of a carefully planned and wellsupported system of laws and regulations that facilitated the growth of a particular (new) kind of agricultural society. The transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railroad – promised as a way of linking the Western resources to Eastern Canadian markets and beyond, and Eastern manufactured goods

120  Canada’s Rural Majority to Western markets – transformed the country’s economy and society. In return for “opening up” the West, the new government of Canada gave the CPR almost half the Prairie lands (about 10 million hectares) to sell to settlers to help finance the line. This scheme strengthened economic and social ties across Canada, linked Canada to the rest of the world, and allayed fears of the United States annexing such a sparsely occupied region, as they were doing elsewhere in the Americas. After settlers arrived in the West, the railway linked people, goods, and money through regional national and international networks of trade. While the survival of Prairie households, Native and non-Native, continued to depend on a variety of relationships between families and the land (self-provisioning, sales of rural commodities, sales of labour), increased access to transportation decreased householders’ reliance on their immediate rural environments as it increased their ability to exploit rural “products,” selling them for profit in distant markets from which they imported more and more in turn. These trends did not bode well for an ecologically sustainable rural Prairie society. By the late 1880s, with the buffalo gone and the railway in place, a third element anticipated the arrival of a new rural society. In stark contrast to the mid-century processes in the United States, settlement in the Canadian West was preceded by carefully planned systems ensuring Euro-American agricultural settlement. The settlers who eventually flooded in to Prairie lands in the last years of the nineteenth century came for reasons of their own, most drawn by the promise of cheap land and a farming life independent of landlords and bosses. Nevertheless, the settlement of the Prairie west (unlike the more chaotic settlement south of the border) was a project explicitly and meticulously designed for particular state purposes, well in advance of mass settlement. The railway, which made travel across the country possible for large numbers of people and goods, was of key importance, but the establishment of a government-regulated

The Canadian Central Plain  121 land allocation system and a set of regularized processes ensuring an orderly and relatively dependable application of laws provided more evidence of the government’s careful planning. Created specifically to bring agricultural settlers to the Prairies, the Dominion Land Act of 1872 followed in some particulars the United States Homestead Act passed in 1862 to regularize the West as the Union went to war. The Canadian law provided for dividing the land into a “Cartesian grid” of townships of six square miles, each divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile (equal to 640 acres or about 260 hectares), each divided into so-called quarter sections of 160 acres (about 65 hectares). Fifteen of these sections per township (42.3 per cent) were opened as free homesteading lands, obtainable by paying a ten-dollar registration fee and the costs of surveying. The CPR was given sixteen sections (44 per cent) per township, while the Hudson’s Bay Company was given two (4.8 per cent). Another two sections were allocated for schools and other government functions. This laid out the foundation of rural Prairie society as settlers took up remote areas dotted about the grid. Only Mennonites and Doukhobors set up village communities. The federal government soon suppressed Doukhobor attempts to farm communally. When granted the standard quarter section, a male “head of family” agreed to build a permanent dwelling within three years, to live on it, and to cultivate at least thirty acres (12 hectares). Settlers could take up an additional quarter section for another low fee. Finally, in an early experiment in establishing a rural police force, the North West Mounted Police arrived well in advance of settlement in 1874 and were responsible for supervising the orderly transformation from using the land for hunting and gathering to using it for ranching and farming. Agricultural settlement of the region did not really “boom” until the 1896–1914 period, when over a million newcomers arrived on the Prairies. Some historians argue that the appeal of the region north of the 49th parallel was

122  Canada’s Rural Majority limited until the warmer, more accessible American West had “filled up” with settlers in the 1890s. Others argue that would-be-farmers only felt confident about more northerly regions after new strains of wheat had been bred, particularly Marquis wheat, which was the first variety developed specifically to ripen 7 to10 days earlier than other varieties and was, furthermore, more resistant to the harmful “rust” (a fungus) that killed wheat crops. Yet others cite the first worldwide “great depression,” which lasted from the 1870s into the early 1890s. Still others argue that it wasn’t until it happened to rain a bit more than usual in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan that settlers overcame their suspicion of dry-land farming and started to take up land. But if the Canadian land rush lagged behind the American one, when it did occur, it was as remarkable and dramatic as any in the nineteenth century. The land rush involved significantly different conditions and consequences for the two very different, and competing, kinds of new land users coming into the region: ranchers and farmers. Ranchers in the Great Land Rush From the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, from China to Las Pampas in South America, and from the Caucasus to Vancouver Island, the Great Land Rush was marked by the massive expansion of arable lands, much (though by no means all) of it by Europeans. It exponentially increased global food supplies and, with it, human population. On the Canadian Prairies, landholders did not take up vast quantities of land to be worked either by slaves, as in the plantations of the American South and Brazil, or by employees, as in the share-cropping farms of the midwest and the vast cattle ranches of South America. Instead, influenced by (and in direct competition with) the United States’ Western policy of attracting immigrants through the promise of farms for owner-occupiers, Canada’s Dominion Land Act drew people to newly settled areas by allowing

The Canadian Central Plain  123 easy and cheap access to land (at least for non-Aboriginal men). The family farm was to be the basis of economic, social, and political life in rural Canada, including the Prairies. But it was not clear from the beginning of Euro-American expansion into the Canadian Prairie west that agriculture on the family farm would triumph over ranching. Because they involved competing uses of land – ranching relied on vast expanses of land for cattle to roam across and farming required land protected from animals – both could not thrive in the same area at the same time. Furthermore, establishing a ranch typically required substantial personal wealth not only to purchase the large numbers of cattle (and horses for managing them) needed for a profitable operation but also normally to acquire and maintain the vast amount of land immediately needed to accommodate the herds. And the rancher needed to hire the workforce, a very particular kind of workforce, to manage the herds. Because of the vast size of most cattle ranges, employees needed to live where they worked. Typically, they were single men, without families. Low wages and large social and economic divisions made it unlikely (though not entirely impossible) that waged cowboys would become land-owning ranchers. As historian Carl Solberg famously argued in his comparison of ranching in Canada and Argentina, The Prairies and the Pampas, because of these factors societies rooted in ranching tend to be characterized by great inequalities of wealth, supported by political systems inconsistent with democracy. In the 1870s, a few small ranching outfits moved into the Prairie region as the buffalo moved out. Some were owned and run by Metis, who imported cattle from Montana to supply meat to the North West Mounted Police establishments, who in turn provided meat to First Nations suffering from starvation. Later, a few large cattle interests moved in, importing large herds again mainly from Montana, where the western American cattle industry had

124  Canada’s Rural Majority flourished from the 1860s. Pressured primarily by wealthy British ranching interests, in 1881 the Canadian government first issued twenty-one-year grazing leases in the dryer portions of southwestern Saskatchewan and Alberta. Ranchers could rent lands for one cent per acre per year and import cattle duty free. Massive profits, regularly 20 to 30 per cent, enticed those would-be ranchers with access to the large amounts of capital needed for the start-up costs. Profits were so high in the early years because the grazing leases from the Canadian government provided ranchers with access to the unfenced natural grasslands that in turn provided food and habitat for their cattle almost free of charge. By the 1880s, Canadian Prairie grass was not only supporting Canadian cattle, but also proving very appealing to ranchers south of the border whose massive herds had already compromised their native grasslands. The North West Mounted Police worked hard, though with limited success, throughout the 1890s to ensure that invading American cattle would not free-load on the vast Prairie ranchlands north of the border. Demand for Canadian beef grew in the rapidly expanding eastern Canadian cities and in Britain during the 1880s. An outbreak of disease in Britain in the 1860s had reduced its herds, increasing prices and demand for Canadian-raised cattle. Pleuropneumonia discovered in American herds in 1878 made Canadian beef a preferred item in British markets. Even after pneumonia was found in Canadian-raised cattle beef in 1892, demand remained high. Developments in transportation linked supply and demand. Refrigerated ships came into transatlantic use in 1879. The CPR linked Saskatchewan to British and American markets in 1883. Between 1882 and 1887, the number of Canadian cattle increased from 9,000 to 100,000; in 1887, the high point of Canadian ranching, grazing leases encompassed 4 million hectares. Ranchers on the Prairies, like those moving into South America and Africa, made massive fortunes from the natural abundance of prairie lands.

The Canadian Central Plain  125 The highly profitable free-range cattle industry had been brought into being by a combination of specific government policies, including support of a railway that linked rural products to international markets with favourable tariffs; by technological developments, including refrigerated trains and steamships; and by some environmental factors, including diseased American cows that the British did not want to buy. The industry was, however, still hampered by a simple problem: unlike horses, buffalo, deer, and caribou, cattle were unable to use their hooves to paw through snow and feed on the grass below. The snowy winters of 1886–7, 1903–4, and 1906–7 were devastating to Prairie cattle and to ranching interests. Eventually the lost profits, as well as the spectacle and stench of thousands of rotting cattle carcasses thawed at the end of those winters, made it clear that cattle could not be left outside for months on end through the winter. Canadian cattle needed to be fed and often sheltered from the intermittently harsh conditions of the Prairies. The cost of hay, of shelter for the animals, and later the costs of installing and repairing barbed-wire fencing, increased labour and capital costs considerably, cutting deeply into ranching profits. Another factor brought an end to the huge profits from free-range cattle raising. In areas suitable (or, more to the point, believed to be suitable) for crops, the herds of ranch cattle, like the herds of buffalo that had roamed the same lands a decade earlier, were in competition with farmers for the land. Farmers could no more grow crops on lands being grazed by herds of cattle than they could allow cattle to freely graze in their fenced-in fields. Not only would cattle eat the crops, but both farmers and cattle needed water, a scarce and essential resource in the southwestern Prairies. Large herds of cattle also polluted the water that farmers relied on for their families, livestock, and crops. Even when farmers did not settle downstream from or right on watercourses, their fences blocked herds from accessing this key resource. As the best wheat growing lands of the Prairies filled up with fields of grain in the first years of the twentieth century,

126  Canada’s Rural Majority farmers, mortgage companies, and government immigration agents pressured the Canadian government to open up the ranching lands in the dry southwest lands for more intensive farm settlement. Palliser and Hind, who had travelled to the Northwest in the 1850s to assess its agricultural settlement potential, had warned against settlement in the vast area in southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta. Agriculturalists in the first years of the twentieth century ignored these warnings, and the government opened the land up for farm settlement in the Palliser Triangle in 1908, at a time when unusually high rainfall made grain production possible – for a few years at least. The farmer-friendly Liberal government cancelled grazing leases and forced ranchers to fence their much-decreased range lands to keep cattle off the lands now designated as suitable for farming. Once barbed wire made it possible, and frequent cold weather made it necessary, to confine and thus find and feed ranch cattle throughout the winter, losses due to death fell, but the costs involved in ranching had grown, and so profits shrank. By 1908, some of the issues of importing a new species in large numbers to a new land created ecologically related problems that proved expensive to solve. Mange spread easily through the large herds and took years of close surveillance and treatment to eradicate. Cattle overfed on the native grasses, destroying the soil’s ability to regenerate grasses, let alone support more cattle. Ranching did not end in 1908, but the glory days of vast profits had come to an end. But before leaving Prairie ranching, it is worth taking a quick look at the ranching life, one which attracted considerable attention throughout North and South America, as well as in Britain and Europe. Much of this attention was highly romanticized throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the (still) very popular art forms of “the western” film, fiction, and painting attest. In Canada as in the United States and Mexico (where much

The Canadian Central Plain  127 of the cowboy culture originated), cowboys were figures of iconic masculinity and wilderness romance. Ranchers on the Canadian Prairies, though relatively small in number, enjoyed a reputation for wealth and leisure denied to most of the farmers of the region. Grazing cattle did not require the long periods of relentless work that dairy cattle and field cultivation did, being a highly “extensive” rather than intensive land-related activity. Cattle could be left on the range for months to feed off native grasses without being tended, at least in the “free-range” years before fencing of range lands was introduced in 1908, and in summer months thereafter. The daily round of work was often comparably light, and much of it was done by a small number of paid cowboys (some of whom were Aboriginal). The ranchers themselves were often imposing figures in Prairie society. Operations were large, even when the glory days of free-range cattle were over. Although successful cattle ranching required and generated a lot of cash, ranching reflected the pattern we have seen throughout rural Canada. While ranchers worked outside for much of the year, the entire household carried out a myriad of tasks that went into deriving directly from the land a considerable portion of its own support. As one Alberta rancher remembered, “Except for a few items ordered twice a year from the Eaton’s catalogue,” each family was often “self-sufficient, producing its own vegetables, fresh beef, and milk and butter. In addition, pike from Willow Creek and a plentiful supply of ducks, prairie chickens and partridge added variety to their diet.”2 Ranching women in particular enjoyed relative freedom from the constant drudgery that beset farm women on the Prairies, finding time for hobbies and leisure activities. It is not a coincidence that the first Prairie woman in active federal politics, Irene Parlby, was a rancher. If the ranchers considered themselves to be at a higher echelon of society on the Plains, the working cowboys also partook of a distinctive culture, though of a very different sort. Cowboys were

128  Canada’s Rural Majority typically single and American, highly skilled at their work with horses and cattle, attuned to their environment, and acculturated to isolation. The land rush in Canada did not, in the end, result in land ownership by small numbers of very wealthy ranchers, but was instead one of the last population movements in which millions of (relatively) poor people were able to acquire modest quantities of cheap land, land that could, with only the labour of household members, provide a decent living for a family farm. In spite of the great (for that time in history) variability in ethnic and national origins as well as religious practices among the European majority who flooded onto the Prairies, whether as individuals or as parts of “bloc settlement,” almost all these newcomers shared a form of social and economic organization rooted in the family and household. We will now take a close and careful look at life on a Prairie farm in the 1900–40 period. Life on the Prairie Farm Before dawn on the morning of 3 November 1927, Andy Blair hitched up his team of horses to his box wagon piled high with 60 bushels of wheat to be hauled to the nearest grain elevator in Estevan. Even though the track was so rough and icy that twice he thought he would lose the load, he made it in about six hours. He was used to it, going at least once a week through the fall and early winter, in order to get his 1,200-bushel (32.7-tonne) harvest to the railhead to be sold. The weather was good, and mostly “with nothing to do except smoke a pipe and think philosophical thoughts,” he found the journey a pleasant one overall.3 As he arrived at the elevator, conveniently located at the railway siding, his load was graded for its quality and weighed before he tipped it into the receiving pit. From there, it was carried up into the building by a conveyor belt (the “elevator”) and poured into the appropriate bin to be stored. When the price was high enough for the wheat to be sold into the international market, the elevator manager, working on behalf of the

The Canadian Central Plain  129 cooperatively owned Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, arranged for the wheat to be poured into a rail car to be transported across the country, and then poured into a ship for transport to its final destination, a flour mill in Britain. Once ground into flour, the mill would package and sell some to retail grocery stores, while the majority would be sold to commercial bakeries to be made into bread, cakes, and biscuits. At the exact moment when the elevator operator weighed, graded, deposited and paid for the load, the labour and capital of Andy Blair’s farm household successfully entered the international market in wheat, a market that linked this Saskatchewan farm family to industries and people thousands of kilometres away. The grain elevator not only facilitated an economic transaction but also changed the nature of the wheat itself: once dumped into the pit in the elevator floor, it was transformed into a virtual liquid that could be moved quickly, easily, and with little labour through world markets. This transaction and transformation, multiplied so many thousands of times across the Prairies in the early twentieth century, also brings his work into the view of the historian and the economist measuring the growth of Canadian wealth extracted from rural Prairie Canada. The sale of his grain might have brought Andy Blair into historical view, but it does little to reveal the days, weeks, and years of labour behind this transaction. While the government insisted that the commercial sale of grains be kept track of for reasons relating to taxation and tariffs, they had less concern about the day-to-day work that went into creating each bushel of wheat or other grain. Here is a rare written account of work by one rural labourer, Noel Copping, who worked as a hired hand on a Prairie grain farm near Earl Grey, Saskatchewan, in April, 1909: At present our daily routine of work is 5 A.M to 5.30 P.M. Rise, milk cows, feed and clean down horses … About 6 A.M. have a wash and breakfast. After breakfast I saw wood for the kitchen stove and get water from the well … Then at about 7 A.M. we commence work on the land … This morning I have been ploughing … at 12

130  Canada’s Rural Majority noon we come in to dinner (lunch), first unharnessing the horses and putting them in the pasture. After dinner I clean out the stable then bring up the horses, feed and harness them. Then work goes on again till 6 P.M. At this hour we come in from the fields, unharness the horses and give them oats. Tea is the next item on the programme and afterwards the horses are turned out and the cows brought up to the stable and milked. This I usually do in the evenings. Then any odd jobs are done and the day’s work is over. I usually end up with a wash and am ready for bed.4

The farmer hiring Noel in 1909 was fortunate: many farm families on the Canadian Prairies in the 1885–1940 period were simply unable to find the money to hire farm labourers for the entire year. And, before the First World War, there was a significant shortage of the kinds and the numbers of labourers that farmers needed to harvest their crops. The harvest was a time-sensitive activity, and particularly at the northern edge of the wheat-growing region. Thousands of men were hired across the Prairies and beyond to make sure that the vast acreages of wheat and other grains were harvested in the window between ripening and the first frost, one often measured in days. Hail, or too much rain, or an early frost could, and frequently did, wipe out an entire crop. Harvests provided work for men (and less frequently, women) from nearby farms and cities, and harvest excursions were an important source of seasonal work for men across Canada and the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. The number of harvest excursionists is an index of the vast volume of grain being harvested: numbers rose from 3,000 in 1891 to 36,000 in 1911, to a high of 53,000 in 1928. These men did a variety of tasks and came from a variety of backgrounds. Some were seasonal labourers who made their way across Canada working at a variety of jobs in the resource industries, sometimes sending a portion of their wages back home. A good number were those we have seen in other parts of Canada, young men starting up, or wanting to start up, their own

The Canadian Central Plain  131 farms, working where they could to raise much-needed cash and, particularly in the early years, wanting to get experience working on the land. Many of these excursionists travelled to the Prairies by taking advantage of the cheap “excursionist” fares that the railway companies provided to ease Western labour shortages. Once on the farms, they began the back-breaking and skilled work of piling the sheaves of grain that had been “processed” by one of the key pieces of technology that made possible the harvest of huge farms: the horse-drawn self-binding reaper. This machine replaced the manpowered scythes that early Canadian farmers used, for these horse-powered cutting machines increased substantially the number of acres that could be cut per day. The horsepowered machine not only cut the stalks of wheat but also loosely tied them into bundles, or sheaves, which the men walking behind the machine carefully arranged into larger bundles, or stooks, for drying in the wind. Less time-sensitive was the work of the specialized threshers, who, working some days later in teams of usually twelve to twenty men, forked these stooks into wagons, and then fed them into the other key piece of technology that made massive harvest possible: the steam-powered thresher, which separated the wheat (seeds) from the chaff (stalks). Two men usually tended the steam engine that powered the thresher, making sure it had sufficient water and fuel to run the belt, while others fed the threshing machine itself. There, the threshing action separated the wheat from the chaff, and fans blew the wheat into wagons or sacks where it could be taken to market. The hired hands taken on at harvest time played a key and time-sensitive role in grain production on the Prairies, but in the period following the First World War, farmers looked for ways to reduce their dependence on waged labourers, and the increasing wages they were demanding in the period. Mechanization, which had previously been used mainly to increase productivity, began to be seen as a

132  Canada’s Rural Majority way of lowering labour costs. The steam-powered threshers, crucial to speeding up and therefore increasing production, typically required eighteen to twenty men to work them; by the 1920s, farmers were looking for a way to make the farm self-sufficient in labour. As historian Cecilia Danysk has argued in Hired Hands: Labour and the Development of Prairie Agriculture, by the 1920s, farmers looked to three new technological innovations – the gasoline-powered tractor, the small portable thresher, and the combination harvesterthresher – to reduce their labour costs. It was not until after 1926 that the numbers of machines began to rise and the number of horses began to fall on the Prairies. This trend was interrupted by the drastic fall in farm incomes during the Depression. Nevertheless, the transformation of farming by gasoline-fuelled mechanization, as well as by the rapidly increasing use of fertilizers, had begun. Even when steam-powered machinery maximized hired labour after the First World War, hired hands were responsible for less than a third of the work needed to bring the wheat to market. The rest was typically the unpaid work of family members, including women and children. As Alberta farmwife Esme Tuck described it, feeding the crews who harvested the grain was a significant job in itself: The most eagerly awaited and yet in some respects the most dreaded time of year was that spent while waiting for the threshers to come and go … What a bustle! The jugs of hot coffee, buns and sandwiches in prodigious quantities had to be taken out for lunches. Dinner to be ready not when the housewife had planned it, but when the threshers decided they would like it … And, oh, the washing up and washing up and washing up …5

Long before harvesting the crops, the farm family had planted the seed, and before this they had to work the land to receive it. On the Canadian Prairies, farmers broke up the land first by a steel plough. By the 1880s, good quality steel and iron ploughs had replaced inferior metal and wooden

The Canadian Central Plain  133 ploughs of earlier years, and teams of horses replaced slower moving oxen. Hitching several plough bottoms (typically two or three of these) together into a “gang plough” behind a larger team of horses, the farmer literally increased the “horse power” and sped up the process even more. After ploughing the initial furrow, the farmer then turned to discing, where a series of sharp discs, also pulled behind a team of horses and guided by the farmer, sliced the soil. The team then harrowed the soil, pulling a long coarse rake-like tool over the land to smooth it out. Ready at this point to begin seeding, the farmer or his “hands,” working with the team of horses, would pull the seed drill over the land, making sure that the seeds were planted at the proper depth. Finally, the team pulled the harrow over the seeded land again to cover the seeds with soil. Notwithstanding the fact that Prairie farmers relied heavily on selling their produce for cash in international markets, they shared with other rural peoples across Canada the habit of producing a great deal of what they consumed on a daily basis. Remembering growing up on a Prairie farm in the 1920s, one man recalled that, as a boy, “if you wanted to fish you got a willow stick with a hook on it, then come back and take a .22 and hunt partridge and have a big feed on them. No reason for anybody to starve; there was lots of food.”6 Another pioneer provided this brief description of farm life in the early twentieth century: Every household was completely independent, doing all its own work; we baked our own bread, made our own butter, washed and ironed, made our own clothes, in addition to all the ordinary work of an average household; and in winter all these things were rendered doubly hard by the cold. If the dough was chilled then the bread was heavy; if the cream was touched ever so lightly by frost, the butter refused to come. The washing was the greatest difficulty of all, for nothing could be dried out of doors. Incredible as it may sound, I have seen the sleeve of a shirt broken off by a horse nosing against it as it hung stiffly frozen on a clothes line.7

134  Canada’s Rural Majority As in other parts of Canada, women had to haul cleaning and cooking water, as well as drinking water for the human and animal occupants of many farms. But this was a particularly time-consuming task in the drier Prairie regions, where river water could be scarce and wells far from home. Barrels collected precious rain water from the roof of houses and barns. In a pattern seen throughout rural Canada before the year-round roads of the 1940s, women sewed the family’s clothing, raised chickens, often milked the cows and managed the dairy work, and tended the home garden. All of these contributed to the family’s sustenance, and could also be a source of cash, particularly valuable when the wheat or other grain crops failed. Many women, men, and children supplemented their diet by fishing, gathering berries and other native plants, as well as hunting. A survey of Manitoba farm women’s lives in1922 showed that, while many families purchased some items such as tea and sugar, for many Prairie families, the pioneer conditions continued well into the twentieth century.8 Housing took many forms on the Prairies. Wooden frame houses slowly replaced houses made of logs, or sods cut from the grassland, as the lumber industry in British Columbia and the CPR quickly saw the potential of wood sales on the Prairies. Like food, agricultural practices and community customs, forms of housing drew on the customs that people brought with them from other countries and cultures that were adapted to suit the conditions on the Plain. Between 1891 and 1941, 170,000 immigrants came to Canada from Ukraine, mostly to the Prairies, and, like the English and Scots, made important contributions to these rapidly growing provinces. The houses occupied by the British tended to be of two storeys. On the ground floor was a kitchen with its back door opening into the “yard,” and a front door and parlour that were seldom used. The bedrooms were upstairs. As one observer noted, after arriving in Manitoba in the 1890s, Ukrainian immigrants “built their houses by driving

The Canadian Central Plain  135 stakes into the ground and then weaving a huge basket-like structure with the red willows. This was then mudded up … inside they built a stove of the clay, drew the smoke across near the floor with a horizontal chimney at the other end of the house. On the warm platform thus made they slept.”9 The Prairie provinces shared with Prince Edward Island the distinction of having the lowest proportion of homes with electric lighting in the country. In 1941, fewer than 10 per cent of rural homes had electricity. Combustible fuels were more difficult to obtain from the Prairie environment than from other regions of Canada. Wood was often difficult to obtain on the treeless Prairie, and expensive when it was available. Coal, much of it from Alberta and British Columbia, provided the main form of heating fuel. The euphemistically named “buffalo chips” (made of buffalo manure) provided another source of fuel for the first settlers moving into the region, though one that generated less heat per volume than wood. As one pioneer Alberta farmer recounted, there being no trees near home, we used to hire a stoneboat and go out and pick buffalo chips ... when they were dry you picked them up ... there was no smell. My uncle had a lean-to with a sliding door into the kitchen, and we stored them all in there. You pulled out two or three, set them up in the stove, lit a match to them, and they started just like nothing. A really hot fire, good for baking.10

Despite the dominance of large commercial wheat farms, not all those living and working on the land engaged in commercial farming enterprises. Many of the settlers pouring into the Prairies, like some who had been there for many generations, were willing to forego the wealth promised by the sale of wheat or other agricultural products into international markets. As was the case across rural Canada, many were seeking instead the more modest goal of obtaining for the household a sufficiency on the land, supplemented by

136  Canada’s Rural Majority seasonal labour in northern bush camps and the sale of surplus agricultural goods. In 1941, the number of farms on the Prairies peaked at just under 300,000. That year also saw the rural population of the Prairie provinces peak at about 1.5 million, both of which suggest that 1941 marked a kind of apogee of farm society on the Prairies. In that year, however, Metis and Aboriginal peoples as well as immigrants from Ukraine, other European, countries, Britain, and central Canada were among the 60,000 farm families who described their farming operations as “subsistence” (i.e., with sales so low that the farm was not considered a commercial operation) or “part time.” If one of five Prairie farm families identified themselves as non-commercial in that year, this compared well, from the vantage point of commerce, to the majority on the Shield in Ontario and Quebec who so classed themselves. But, as in Ontario and Quebec, farm dwellers in 1941 constituted just over half the rural population in the Prairie region. A variety of evidence supports the supposition that if the Prairie provinces shared southern Ontario and Quebec’s reputation for “modern” commercial farming, the situation at the level of rural households was considerably more complex in the period before the Second World War. Rural families, farm and non-farm, were relying on a variety of strategies across the economic spectrum to support their households from waged labour to commodity sales to self-provisioning. It was a difficult life for many, particularly in the early days. Competitive hardship stories were a staple of the first years of Euro-American settlement in the Prairies, and it was no wonder. As one farmwoman summed up: To homestead is to be drenched with rain, caked with mud, choked with dust, chilled with cold, warmed by the sun, to rise early and go to bed late, to wonder whether roads and railway will ever come one’s way, whether one has come to the right place or not, what the future holds in store for oneself and one’s children, to be tired, to work, to laugh, to help the other fellow and always to hope ...11

The Canadian Central Plain  137 As David C. Jones confirms in grim but realistic detail in Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry Belt, settlers in the southern drylands in particular had to deal throughout the year with a variety of intense climatic conditions, including drought, floods, hail storms, and blizzards. In addition, the rapid installation of human agricultural populations brought its own environmental problems. The dryland farming techniques encouraged by agricultural scientists destabilized prairie soils, with the net effect that the precious topsoil blew away in the frequent years of low rainfall. Settlers, and the railroads that transported people and goods, could create wildfires able to rage through a homestead in minutes, destroying everything in their path. Farmers moving into the region wanting to protect their livestock and their families from predators launched an attack on wolves, whose declining numbers resulted in dramatic increases in their prey, particularly gophers and rabbits. Gophers became so numerous, and so destructive to farmers’ crops, that many municipalities offered a bounty of five cents a tail. One spring, the municipality of Excelsior, near Medicine Hat, Alberta, held a gopher-killing contest for school children, and received 15,000 tails. Rabbits also flourished; one farmer counted 400 rabbits on his trip from the house to the well one day in the spring of 1926. Municipalities organized “bunny round-ups”; even “students playing hooky often participated in the hunts, collecting and selling the skins for hide leather and selling the carcasses for fox feed.”12 Grasshoppers increased in numbers exponentially as humans provided them with new and abundant food sources (wheat, oats, and rye); swarms of grasshoppers would often turn the sky black before descending to eat a farm’s entire crop within hours. Blights, rusts, other plant diseases, and other insect infestations also thrived under the mono-cropping conditions of Prairie wheat farms. Weeds, originating from the seeds carried to the Western farms on the clothing and goods of the early settlers, flourished in the newly ploughed lands,

138  Canada’s Rural Majority choking out both any remaining original prairie grasses and threatening wheat production. As well, many species of birds, animals, and plants were threatened or even destroyed, victims of habitat destruction, overhunting, and pesticides, including arsenic, used to check insect infestations. As the new farming population flooded into the Prairie region, and in spite of the drastic transformations in its environments, newspapers and community halls of the day talked about the new and better society that was being created. Part of that discussion focused on the desirability and inevitability of the process by which agriculture replaced semi-nomadic hunting and gathering, creating the beneficent civilizing effects that would inevitably accrue (so the newcomers believed) to the region with Euro-American farm families and agricultural communities. Some emphasized the social transformation that would occur as poor immigrants acquired access to land of their own, land they could turn into an independent living for their families without having to either work for someone else for poor wages or pay exorbitant rent to a landlord. Some talked and wrote about the emerging promise of equality between the sexes as women worked along with their husbands and children in a renewed family partnership. And still others talked about the emerging new modern rural Canada, where the vital work of Prairie agriculturalists would be recognized, not only for their role in feeding the world’s population but also for the progressive social vision that many believed was the natural outcome of independence on the land. Prairie farmers were a highly politicized group, even if they did not always agree; from the early twentieth century they argued long and hard about whether they needed cheap land, low tariffs on the machinery to produce their crops, or instead cooperative ownership and control to ensure cheap transportation and good market prices for their produce. Farm movements, and the political organizations that championed their causes, often went well beyond the promotion of simple economic arguments to claim that twentieth-century Prairie farm families

The Canadian Central Plain  139 and communities represented a new kind of society, one that differed in significant ways from the urban and industrial societies gaining in strength across the country. Like the farmers’ protests in Ontario and Quebec, they had considerable success in the 1918–24 period. By 1940 things were beginning to change. A coherent farm protest movement collapsed, just as it had in Ontario and southern Quebec, in the late 1920s, and for a variety of reasons, including the growing number of factions among farmers. The economic and environmental disaster of the Depression had further discouraged and displaced many farmers, and economies of scale in an increasingly competitive global environment privileged the interests of big business, big industry, and big farming. As the number of farms and farmers fell after 1941, the number of acres under cultivation would continue to rise, highlighting the trend to ever-larger farms. The image of the Canadian Prairies occupied by tens of thousands of family wheat farms and hundreds of tiny rural communities reflects a historical reality that lasted only for a generation or two. Conclusion Prairie society was more complex than its dominant historic association with a commercial wheat economy suggests. The region shared other characteristics – such as off-farm work and self-provisioning – that defined rural life across the country. Another factor linked twentieth-century Prairie farms to ancient patterns of rural life. Even though prairie wheat ushered Canada onto the international stage as the self-described “Breadbasket of the World” in these years, the international grain trade was premised on an ancient economic system of labour organized according to kinship – the family farm – rather than being exclusively dependent on relationships of waged labour that were defining the changing economy. Freed from the necessity of paying wages to employees for most of the year, or from turning a profit for shareholders, the family farm had considerable

140  Canada’s Rural Majority resilience in dealing with the years of ignorance and misfortune – characterized by frequent drought, disease, fires, frosts, the ongoing animal, insect, and weed infestations, and international financial collapse – confronting these new settlers in an unknown land. This system of labour based on kinship was also responsible for pushing down the international price of grain and allowing North American family farms to out-compete corporate European farms that were obliged to pay wages to their workers. Whether falling back on subsistence activities, or by selling a variety of household-created commodities such as eggs, butter, and milk, or by relying on the wages from off-farm work, or by adopting new technologies that reduced the household’s dependence on non-family waged labour, those remaining on the Prairies were usually able to do so only because their families proved adept at mediating between the environment and the newly emerging capitalist world order.

5 The Mountains

The tall jagged new mountains that make up the Western Cordillera, including most of British Columbia and the Yukon, present a formidable barrier to the movement of plants, insects, weather, and most animals, including human beings. The same extremes of steepness, elevation, rocky terrain, and climate that have made the mountain region difficult to live in or move through have also made it a place of refuge: deep valleys and high plateaux exist between the mountains, adding to the remarkable diversity of ecologies and landscapes, and providing havens for subspecies of plants and animals that appear nowhere else. The mountain barrier has supplied sanctuary for a variety of human communities as well: Aboriginal peoples of the Cordillera experienced Euro-Canadian settlement much later, and in the 1870–1940 period, sometimes in a less invasive way, than did those unprotected by terrain so unsuited for travel, let alone farming. In the early twentieth century, pacifist, Russian-speaking Doukhobors sought refuge in the Kootenay Valley from militaristic governments as they built their visionary agrarian, communal society, while, only a mountain range or two away, genteel English emigrants could exchange visiting cards and play polo when the work in their apple orchards allowed. Excluded from their social circle were both the Native and non-Native cowboys on the neighbouring cattle ranches.

The Mountains  143 If the mountains acted as a barrier to movement, the rivers and valleys in between were corridors that linked rural people and their labours to each other, to regional centres, and to the world. The many mountain ranges of the region, and the river and lake valleys in between, slant up from the southeast to the northwest, and most of the transportation corridors followed the low-lying passes between the mountains. Even before the colony of British Columbia joined Confederation in 1871, settler concerns about the relative ease of transportation down to the United States – and the consequent diversion of “Canadian” resource wealth to the south – had made building a rail link between east and west a priority. The railway (which, unable to climb steeply, used tunnels and bridges) was not the first route across the mountains: since ancient times, the passes provided the routes on which the Athapaskan Dene and the Tsimshian, and the Interior Salish and the Kootenay, travelled, typically over vast areas of land, often seasonally, as they followed the ecological rhythms of their food and their established trade routes. While Aboriginal peoples of the Interior were much better adapted to the environment than the new settlers arriving in the mountainous region, frequent fires, landslides, avalanches, sudden extreme weather, and semi-periodic low animal population cycles endangered all the human populations of the Cordillera. The climate in the northern regions kept populations small, as the carrying capacity of the land was low. In southern valleys, larger populations had traditionally flourished. First Nations generally had access through trade to the rich and plentiful diet of salmon in the west-flowing rivers from the coast, or through trade. Along well-established trade routes the Aboriginal peoples on the mountainous coast had been trading seashells and eulachon – a fish highly valuable for its rich oil – for furs, obsidian, and foodstuffs with people throughout the mountains and as far away as the foothills of the Rockies, along Grease Trails, named for the oily eulachon. They adapted

144  Canada’s Rural Majority these routes to move yet more furs as trade with Europeans from the east expanded into the Northwest of the continent in the late eighteenth century. These routes also provided the paths along which the germs of diseases so deadly to First Nations – particularly smallpox, but also measles and other diseases – travelled from the south, often accompanying trade goods generally well in advance of Euro-American settlement. From the time of the Fraser River gold rush in 1858 until the railroad arrived in the 1880s, valleys and rivers provided the paths along which thousands of prospectors, many of them the new mining men from the United States, came looking for minerals, from the gold in the Cariboo region to silver, copper, lead, and zinc in the Kootenay Mountains. From the late nineteenth century onward, the railway allowed fairly dependable passage through the mountain barrier, bringing people to places of refuge in or beyond the mountains. Tourists flocked first by rail and much later by road to national parks that were among the world’s first, located in the spectacular mountain scenery near Banff and Jasper. They contributed to the region’s economy whether visiting to enjoy the view or to participate in the newly popular sport of mountaineering. The Canadian Pacific Railway established a second, more southerly route using the Crow’s Nest Pass to accommodate the transportation of smelted ores out of, and supplies, workers and their families into, the region by the end of the nineteenth century. Steamships ran north and south on the long Interior lakes, providing links between the rail routes and the mines as well as providing vital transportation routes for the thousands of farmers, orchardists, and ranchers living in the Interior valleys. They relied on water and rail routes to transport both what they had produced along with the farm machinery, tools, animals, and consumer goods they relied on for work (and leisure), and for moving themselves from place to place. The railway also brought a rapidly growing number of people to the urban enclaves located on the coast; for whereas

The Mountains  145 the southern Prairies, like southern Ontario and Quebec, was characterized by a more or less even distribution of people across rural areas, British Columbia was unusual in the extreme concentration of its population in a tiny southwestern portion of the province: between 1911 and 1941, 70 per cent of the population lived in or near Vancouver at the mouth of the Fraser River or on coastal Vancouver Island, not in the mountainous Interior. The railway also funnelled out a series of resources vital to the province’s economy, particularly lumber, fish, coal, and ore, and funnelled in commodities such as foodstuffs, a wide variety of consumer goods, and machinery for logging, milling, and mining manufactured in eastern Canada, Britain, and the United States. Much of the wealth created by the extraction and exchange passed through the urban Lower Mainland, and from there out of the province and out of the country. From the vantage point of its rural population, however, the mountains looked a little different; the mountains that dominated the region, and the valleys in between them, provided the contexts and the environments in which to live and work on a daily basis. In the 1870–1940 period, the Western Cordillera became the source of the massive wealth of “natural resources” that rural people worked by drilling, blasting, processing, felling, bucking, yarding, fishing, trapping, picking, harvesting, slaughtering, hunting, or otherwise removing from the land and waters the goods for export as well as for their own consumption. And while census data show us that single men working in the resource industries dominated the rural British Columbia population by the late nineteenth century, they were not the only ones living and working in rural British Columbia. By the early twentieth century, as Aboriginal populations persisted but dwindled in numbers due to disease, the valleys and plateaux of the province were, like the coastal regions, home to an increasing number of farm households, most of them smallscale family operations in ranching, orcharding, and mixed farming. Although the rural proportion of the provincial

146  Canada’s Rural Majority population remained fairly stable at about 50 per cent in the first half of the twentieth century, the absolute number of rural dwellers was increasing at a remarkable rate, almost sixfold between the census years of 1901 and 1951 (as compared to just under sevenfold for the urban population). By the 1920s, more adult men in British Columbia were working in agriculture than in any other single occupation, rural or urban; by 1931, more men were working in agriculture than in fishing, forestry, and mining combined. The work of women and children was vital to a rural economy that was, in turn, vital to the wealth of the growing economy of this mountainous region and to the coastal cities alike. In a pattern we have seen throughout Canada, family-owned households and lands provided a foundation of support that rested on three pillars: waged work on a seasonal, part-time, or intermittent basis, particularly in British Columbia’s rural resource extraction areas; provisioning activities carried out by all members of the family (gardening, hunting, and fishing in particular); and the sale of surplus agricultural and other produce from the land. Aboriginal people, though their relationship to land and water was curtailed in some ethnically-specific ways, also supplemented self-provisioning activities with the sale of commodities (fish and furs) and waged work in the logging, canning, and fishing industries. This rural pattern worked throughout this period to balance the requirements of the growing resource-based economy of the province with the needs of diverse rural households. We leave to the next chapter of this book what the rural majority living and working right on the coast were up to, and turn now to focus on the mountainous Interior. This chapter will provide a brief description of the mountain environment, then a close-up of two sites of engagement between rural mountain dwellers and their environments: mining and agriculture, the latter including ranching and orcharding. Forestry was another massive rural workspace in the Western Cordillera; because

The Mountains  147 most forest work took place close to the coast before the Interior pulp and paper industry took off in the post–­ Second World War period, this important industry is mentioned only briefly here, but discussed fully in the final chapter, “The Coast.” The Land High, stark mountains rise up suddenly from the Interior Plain of Alberta and the Northwest Territories in the east, covering about 800 kilometres before meeting the Pacific Ocean to the west. To the north, the mountains almost reach 2,500 kilometres from the Arctic Ocean in Alaska, and stretch south through the Yukon, the Mackenzie River in the western NWT to reach the border with the United States. From here, they continue south for more than 14,000 kilometres to the tip of South America. From the air, land, or water, the mountain region may look like a single, massive range, but it is actually made up of a number of mountain ranges. Moving beyond the Alberta Foothills, are first the Rocky Mountains, and moving westward along the 49th parallel, are the Purcells, Columbias, Selkirks, Cariboos, Monashees, the Chilcotin, and the Cascades. To the north there are the Hazeltons, Skeenas, Ominecas, Cassiars, Selwynns, Ogilvies, Richardsons, and British Mountains. The mountains are separated from each other by narrow and steep valleys, or by broad, grass-covered and desert-like plateaux. Like the Interior Plains, parts of the region were submerged under a shallow sea hundreds of millions of years ago, as the fossils of shells and other marine life, lodged into vertical rock faces hundreds of metres above current sea levels, attest. In stark contrast to the Interior Plains, however, the western part of the continent was pushed up in extreme folding and faulting of the sedimentary rock as a massive tectonic plate slowly forced the land up as it slid under the west coast. Today, the mountains of the Cordillera

148  Canada’s Rural Majority are still going up even as parts are coming down; gravity and water continue to erode the steep and rocky slopes. Snow and ice also work in the short term to break up and bring down rocks and stone: avalanches and landslides continue to wreak havoc for animal and vegetable life in mountain environments. Ice has played another, larger role in bringing down the mountains. During the last ice age, the Cordilleran ice sheet was about two-kilometers thick and covered many of the mountain ranges in the west, grinding down mountain tops and creating glacial valleys and moraines, and causing more erosion as the melting began some 18,000 years ago. The ice has not yet retreated from some of the mountains, though climate change has dramatically increased the rate of glacial melting in the last decade. Even where ice retreats seasonally, extremely steep terrain and rocky soil make it difficult for most species of plants and animals to survive. The dramatic changes in elevation also affect the weather and the climate: as the warm damp air moves from the Pacific, it rises to cross the mountains, cools, and drops large amounts of rain on the west side of the ranges, with the most being dropped in the “rain forests” of the coast. The east sides of the ranges are in a rain shadow, and neardesert conditions prevail through some of the Interior, particularly the high Central Plateau and the Okanagan Valley. The mountainous terrain, and the climate it has generated, has meant that only 3 per cent of British Columbia is arable land. The mountains have played a significant role well beyond the local or regional: the mountain barrier prevents the warm air from the Pacific being diffused more generally across the continent, and is therefore largely responsible for the Subarctic climate that dominates most of Western Canada. The mountain ranges, in other words, are the determining geographical feature in far Western Canada, and, as such, have profoundly influenced the range of human uses of the land.

The Mountains  149 Mining, Mountains, and Rural Life in the Western Cordillera The most notable feature of the mountains that dominate the Western Cordillera, aside from their sheer size, is their literal nature as rock that provided the foundation of the new society, economy, and culture of the rural, mainly Euro-American and Canadian populations flooding into the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1901, mining employed more men than any other economic activity in the province. The increasing use of energy-rich fossil fuels began to replace human and animal labour in the decades that followed. The proportion of the workforce employed in the mines decreased from 18 per cent in 1901 to 4 per cent in 1941. The gross value of products mined in British Columbia had increased more than ten times between 1870 and 1901, but increased an additional seven times by 1940. Mining continued, and continues, to bring considerable wealth to British Columbia and the Yukon. Its role in the history of rural British Columbia extends far beyond the riches it directly produced for wealthy, mostly foreign mine owners. The gold rush of 1858 first brought large numbers of non-Natives, typically single men, to the province, to Victoria, New Westminster, and Yale. Later, they were drawn north in the Cariboo gold rush in 1862, the mining boom in the Kootenays in the 1890s, and the Yukon gold rush in 1898. Women, some of them Aboriginal, worked in road houses, ranches, cookhouses, and houses of prostitution, and a few began raising families with miners inclined to stay in the area. By 1900, Kamloops, Kelowna, Nelson, Revelstoke, and Dawson City were beginning the transformation to regional centres of trade, which in turn attracted more agricultural settlers into the region. Governments, furthermore, were interested in making serious infrastructure investments in order to exploit mineral resources, and the same systems of transportation,

150  Canada’s Rural Majority communication, and power generation that benefited large mining companies like the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada (Cominco) created in 1906, also brought benefits for people wanting to stay or move there, or to trade agricultural or other products to and from rural parts of the province. One of the most significant long-term effects of rushes in particular, and mining in general, therefore, was bringing new non-mining settlers to expand the economy in these areas providing a market for the agricultural and other produce that these settlers were producing. In addition to its role in promoting and facilitating a wide range of rural activities, mining can in itself be seen as a rural, or semi-rural activity, of the Western Cordillera. The most obvious way in which miners in British Columbia were rural, rather than urban industrial workers, is that many did not actually live in towns, let alone cities. The first mining in British Columbia and the Yukon was placer mining, and this early mining was a rural, fairly unmechanized, process. As a 1907 mining pamphlet noted, The placer is the “poor man’s mine”; he needs little or no capital to work it; its product is cash to all intents and purposes, and he is his own master – all attractions too great for the sturdy independence of the prospector to allow him to think of searching for lode mines which, when found, require so much capital to work them as to leave but very small interest in the property to the original owner.1

The placer mining that had characterized the Fraser Gold Rush of 1858 and some of the Cariboo Rush of the 1860s had largely been replaced by the “lode mines” in the southern parts of the Western Cordillera by the 1890s. In the Kootenays, “hard rock” mining (as opposed to “soft rock” or coal mining) quickly moved from one- or two-man operations to corporate-sized ventures, requiring huge, upfront amounts of capital. Large investments were needed to

The Mountains  151 provide the machines for digging the mines, for supporting the tunnels (usually with wooden beams or trees), creating systems for transporting the men into and the heavy ores out of the mine, and, particularly in the case of copper and zinc and some gold, building and operating the huge furnaces and chemical systems for separating out the valuable ores from the worthless. Such mining also required huge expenditures for transporting machinery, food, animals, and people over difficult terrain to the mines, and for transporting the massively heavy materials out of the region to market. But for the first outsiders who made their way to the Klondike gold fields via Skagway in 1898, it was still possible, for the first couple of years at least, to engage in small operations with low overhead costs. The experience of Michael MacGowan gives us some insight into the rural nature of placer mining. MacGowan left his impoverished home and family in Gloghaneely, Ireland, to make his fortune in “America” in the mid-1890s. After years of travel, he finally arrived in Dawson City – on foot – via San Francisco and Skagway, in December, one of the approximately 50,000 goldseekers to actually arrive at that destination in the late nineteenth century. Within a week, he started the sixty-three-kilometer trek from Dawson City to his claim on Klondike Creek, a claim left to him by a fellow-villager from Gloghaneely. Here is how he described his first view of the gold fields: There were huge piles of gravel and earth stretching as far as the eye could see, men appearing now and again out of the ground like rabbits, smoke coming from some of the holes and a pall of smuts overhanging the whole area. The claims reached from the river up to the hills and everyone’s strip was marked with stakes of wood at each corner ...2

MacGowan quickly learned from his fellow miners the mining techniques developed in the California gold rush of 1849, and adapted by his fellow goldminers to deal with the

152  Canada’s Rural Majority fact that in the Yukon, “the ground was frozen so hard that you couldn’t lift a spadeful even if you were chipping away with a pick-axe the live-long day.” As MacGowan explained, “What you had to do was to light a large bonfire, chip away the area so softened with your pick and your shovel and then light another fire in the same place. When that fire was finished, you’d have to repeat the work and keep on like that until you managed to get down a good bit below the surface.”3 The work was difficult, tedious, and dangerous; the holes filled up with melted water released by the fires, and the men were constantly worried about cave-ins. After digging eight metres or so below the surface, MacGowan struck bedrock and with it, gold. He and his partner spent the rest of the winter digging out the “paydirt” and sending it up by bucket to the surface. The gold-filled dirt was piled up, accompanying hundreds of other such piles in the vicinity, until the spring breakup would provide the water they needed for the arduous process of applying diverted stream water to sluice out the gold from the quantities of ore they had mined. Then MacGowan roasted the gold to remove any impurities, and then finally put it into sacks to be transported into town for assaying – the process of officially valuing its purity. Placer mining can only be described as a rural occupation; the miners mostly worked outside, in ways dictated by seasonal rhythms. Many drew on the local environment to provide at least some of their fuel, building materials, and food. Such direct sourcing was not always possible in the bigger and more northerly mining operations, particularly in the more permanent mining towns that were growing up with the more highly capitalized industrial growth of the industry. In many mining areas, miners and their families had come from other places, bringing with them a culture that was not attuned to provisioning, while in others, the mountainous climate and soil made self-provisioning difficult or impossible. Industrial waste often presented other problems to those trying to gain a living from

The Mountains  153 environments close to the mines. In Trail in southern BC, sulphur dioxide wafting from the smelter, little more than ten kilometres north of the U.S. border, instigated the first international court case about cross-border pollution as American cattle began dying from the fumes. Pollution from a copper mine in Anyox, far to the north, made the air and soil of the local environment too toxic to provide any local food. But many of the thousands of miners living alone in shacks on the edges of cliffs, or living with their families among others in tiny villages, even some of those living in larger communities on five-acre lots, were able to supplement their often inadequate wages (or takings) with selfprovisioning activities in the semi-rural settings in which they lived. Some families grew produce and kept livestock, including poultry, pigs, and goats. Much could be raised on the large five-acre lots that miners occupied in the town of Nanaimo, for example. As a newspaper report commented, attached to each of the small cottages “with their neat gardens in the rear,” one could find “cow-houses and piggeries etc. and nearly every man can boast of having a cow.”4 And in most mining areas, the natural bounty of nature was not far away: deer, fish, and wildfowl also made up part of the miners’ diet, and wood for fuel and building was often free for the taking. In addition to having direct access to food through gardening, hunting, or gathering, many miners (like the placer miners in the province) also had indirect access. One historian sums it up this way: “Aboriginal men made a good income supplying meat to Yukoners in the period before the Second World War,” specifying that “in Dawson alone, wild protein accounted for a third of all meat consumption.”5 Whether or not classed as rural, these early miners and mine families certainly kept some of the characteristics of rural life by gaining some of their support quite directly from the land. But there is another way in which miners can be seen as rural workers. Mining was seldom a full-time occupation, and often functioned as one of many strategies for households

154  Canada’s Rural Majority rooted in other land-based or agricultural activity elsewhere, in rural British Columbia and beyond. Estimates suggest that only about half of the underground workers in many mines were the skilled hewers, while the rest were apprentices and the unskilled. It was typically these unskilled and apprentice workers who made up a highly mobile workforce, picking up and dropping mine work as they needed it. The 1914 Report of the Royal Commission on coal mining described the surprising variety of workers in the province’s coal mines in 1914, which included “firemen, shotlighters, bratticemen, timbermen, timbermens’ helpers, tracklayers, roadmen, driver-boss tracklayers, roadmen, driver-bosses, drivers single, drivers double, pushers, winch-drivers, rope-riders, doorboys, stablemen, pumpmen, linemen, machine-runners, drillers, muckers, cogmen, pipemen, loaders, motormen, cagemen and other labourers.” The workforce above ground was also diverse and extensive. It included “blacksmiths, blacksmith helpers, machinists, machinists’ helpers, carpenters, carpenters’ helpers, engineers on the slope or shaft, engineers on compressors, firemen, teamsters, tipplemen, and other labourers.”6 For many, mining was a stage of life that was short-lived or represented part-time or seasonal work. This was certainly the case in the 1880s and earlier for a significant number of First Nations men and women who provided a key workforce in the first commercial coal mining on Vancouver Island in the 1850s, incorporating it into their seasonal rounds. And it was the case for the large numbers of itinerant and unskilled workers, Native and non-Native, streaming in and out of mining camps and towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even those skilled miners seeking full-time work were often unable to secure it. Mining camps and communities in British Columbia in the Yukon could be ephemeral enterprises; they appeared and disappeared with astonishing rapidity. Mine work could be suspended altogether due to downturns in international markets or corporate bankruptcies, or interrupted by explosions and other workplace

The Mountains  155 tragedies. And, unlike agriculture, hunting, logging, or fishing, it was fundamentally unsustainable even under the best management: “Mining is the only industry in a country which from the very nature of the case cannot be permanent,” observed the federal Commission of Conservation in 1915: “It is like money buried in the ground; once removed, the ore can never be replaced.” Furthermore, as the author went on to explain, “In recent times, with the introduction of high explosives and modern machinery, the exhaustion of any mineral deposit is much more speedily attained than with the cruder appliances of former times.”7 Evidence of this existed throughout British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century. As Cole Harris has shown, “In 1890, the [Slocan] Valley was virtually unknown. Five years later it was served by spurlines of two transcontinental railways, and by 1910 … it was already a quiet backwater in the wake of the mining boom.”8 In the twenty years between boom and bust, some 800 metric tonnes of silver and 90,000 metric tonnes of lead had been shipped out by mule, steamer, and rail, with the sales making a substantial contribution to the wealth of the province. There is another way in which mining is a rural occupation. Like many of the resource workers who lived as “bachelors in the backwoods,” miners’ lives in the mountains involved a strange negotiation of abstract international economic “modern” trends with intensely personal physical interaction with the immediate (rural) environment usually associated with pre-industrial labour. This juxtaposition of traditional and modern patterns of work can be seen in the sojourn of our placer miner, MacGowan. He had travelled the last 160 kilometers or so of his journey to the Klondike by foot, but he had taken a modern steamer from San Francisco and then from Skagway until the annual freeze-up intervened. A year after he arrived, American merchants had established in Dawson City “a huge store in which you could get almost anything in the world you needed.” In his three years in the goldfields, MacGowan visited that store on three occasions,

156  Canada’s Rural Majority each time to buy a year’s supply of “coffee, canned foods including meat, flour, peas and a barrel of whiskey.”9 Like the mining families living in the newly established mining communities of Rossland or Anyox in houses complete with electricity and running water, MacGowan’s world, though lacking electricity, included sophisticated modern systems of transportation and mass production, including canned goods produced far away by unknown farmers and processed in modern factories. He sold his gold eventually in international markets and, with his newly found wealth in hand, he travelled again across the continent and back to his home town in Ireland in the luxury of first-class train and steamship transportation. He married a local girl and lived a long life, dining out on tales of the Klondike and with all the luxuries that the twentieth century had to offer. But if part of MacGowan’s working life, like that of other mine workers, was defined by modern and industrial practices, it was physically, viscerally connected to the material world in which he was living and working, much as rural labour always had been. He worked his mine with a pick axe and a shovel, using only his muscle power to wrest the gold from the rock. He hunted, trapped, and fished when he could, trading with local First Nations people for food and clothing. As for so many living and working in the vast region in the period, MacGowan forged a relationship between the rural environment in which he laboured and his past and future family for whose well-being he toiled, all this brokered by an international economy that facilitated the trade in commodities harvested far, far away from where they were sold and used. Clearly, though, McGowan was not in the same relationship to the environment in which he lived as the modern urban consumer who, in historian Kathryn Morse’s words, “in losing that direct connection to and knowledge of nature and production within nature … lost an older, preindustrial intimacy with the ecosystems that sustained them.”10 Similar paradoxes juxtaposing rural and industrial are visible in the work of underground miners throughout

The Mountains  157 this time period. Even as mining increasingly relied on highly sophisticated systems of mechanized and industrial processes for lighting, blasting, drilling, powering the pumps used to remove water from the mines, refining, and transportation, much of the work of extraction itself continued to be done by the sheer muscle power of horses and men working in dangerous conditions underground. Large, if declining, workforces were still needed for all stages of work, from digging out the mine and extracting the resource to loading it onto railway cars for transport around the world. As historian John Hinde points out, the job of “winning the coal from the face” as it was termed, and loading it into cars was done by hand at most coal mines until the 1930s. Most miners worked in the mines in small teams, “usually consisting of one or two experienced colliers and their helpers, who worked by the light of an open-flame lamp at the face of their assigned stall.” As he explains, “Miners often had strong attachments to their stall. They knew how the roof worked, the contours and peculiarities of the seam, and devised the best means of winning the coal. Sometimes stalls were even named for miners.”11 Workers began using blasting powder in the Vancouver Island mines in the 1860s. The miner would work with a helper to drill a long hole, one man holding the “drill” and rotating it manually a quarter turn between mallet hits delivered by the other. The men would then insert the cartridge of blasting powder, and put in a fuse. “After he lit the fuse, the miner left the stall as quickly as possible; if the shot was fired correctly, the subsequent explosion would bring down the coal.”12 The miner then worked with his helpers to load the coal into cars that had been brought to his stall for that purpose, and pit ponies or mules, or sometimes people, would push or pull the cars to the bottom of the shaft, where they would wait to be loaded to the surface by a coal- or electric-powered elevator. Conditions inside the mines did not, in the Vancouver Island coal mines, allow for much mechanization of

158  Canada’s Rural Majority drilling; the coal lumps were easily pulverized into useless (indeed, worse than useless because explosive) coal dust by the mechanical drills in use before the 1930s. Steam engines and electricity from the 1890s onward had reduced danger, by improving ventilation and by obviating the need for open-flame miner’s lights (particularly hazardous in the explosive air of the coal mine). The hauling of ore once it had been “won” from the face was also considerably mechanized. Yet in the hardrock mines of the Kootenays, as late as 1910, many mines lacked electrification or mechanically ventilated shafts, and hand drilling with irons and sledges was still fairly common. Pneumatic drills dramatically increased the rate of drilling in hard rock mines, increasing at the same time the volume of dust put into the air and inhaled by the miners, but not until the 1920s and 1930s. The lives of underground miners differed from the lives of other industrial workers and most rural workers in important respects. They “laboured hundreds of feet underground in conditions that were always dark, dirty, damp, hot and cramped. Devoid of natural light, fresh air and physical space, it was an unnatural and unhealthy environment.”13 But by the same token, mines were not “unnatural” places; they were places “understood as complex environmental fluid systems, and in which miners engaged with nature – once mining engineering had created habitable human environments.”14 This special engagement in, knowledge of, and intimate relationship with the physical world that miners experienced sharply distinguished their rural industrial from urban industrial work. It was outdoors work, effectively. In sum, mining shared with other kinds of rural work a vital engagement with the natural world, albeit in conditions mediated by the human activities and technologies that made working underground possible (fans to move air, lighting, and elevators and iron tramways to move people and heavy ores). Like other kinds of rural work, mining could be one part of a household strategy, perhaps seasonal or occurring at a particular phase of life, that also included

The Mountains  159 the work of all household members in self-provisioning (hunting, gardening, fishing) and even small-scale farming. Often, however, the environmental conditions that accompanied mining (rocky landscape and toxic activities associated with smelting and refining) prohibited other kinds of land- and water-based rural activities that could help support mining wages with direct provisioning from the environment. And mining was also distinguished from other rural occupations (except ploughing) by the very strict gender divisions that kept mining overwhelmingly a male preserve. In its strict gendered nature, and in its tendency to occur outside of and away from the homestead in single-sex working units, mining most closely resembled another rural mountain occupation: forestry. Forestry For many of the mountain Aboriginal populations, forests had long provided materials for shelter, cooking, storage, and transportation. The Aboriginal peoples also actively managed the forests, primarily by using selective burning to encourage the growth of certain plants and animals, to improve visibility, and to make transportation easier. The commercial logging industry developed rapidly in the late nineteenth century, spreading north and east from the first coastal operations, and disrupting local Aboriginal patterns of use. While Aboriginal peoples provided a sizable proportion of those labouring in logging camps and sawmills, typically inserting waged work in forests and mills into their round of geographically dispersed seasonal activities, the commercial devastation of the province’s forests had early and particularly serious consequences for First Nations, who relied on complex, multiple uses of land. As the next chapter of this volume will explain, the logging industry arrived shortly after the first Europeans, and was concentrated on the coast. Indeed, on the mountains of Vancouver Island, the usable timber that was close enough

160  Canada’s Rural Majority to the water to be transported, had been cut and hauled out by the late 1860s, ushering in a local lumber shortage. Lumbering stagnated after the 1870s, as both external and internal demand was low. Railways in the 1880s were the first huge market, needing wood for fuel as well as for ties, trestle bridges, bunkhouses, and stations. And after the transcontinental railway connected the province to the rest of Canada in 1886, settlement began in earnest across the Prairie West, opening up new markets for lumber, and creating demand for new products, such as prefabricated homes and even entire prefabricated farms for the settlers moving onto the treeless prairies. Facilitated by the new steamships, lumber from British Columbia was shipped to Asia, South America, and Europe, providing much of the wood for their rapidly developing railway systems. A building boom in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and across the Prairies provided an expanding domestic market for timber. Mining, also booming in late-nineteenth-century British Columbia, demanded huge amounts of lumber, for underground supports and for the buildings required by the burgeoning mining communities and industries. Wood and sawdust from the mills continued to provide the main source of cooking and heating fuel for most British Columbians until the mid-twentieth century. If logging was primarily a coastal rather than an inland mountain activity in the 1870–1940 period, logging nevertheless adversely effected the sustainability of rural populations throughout British Columbia and the Yukon. While providing in the short term the kind of part-time or seasonal waged work that helped to support rural land-based families, the industry often blocked and destroyed the other kinds of resources and land use on which Canadian rural families had come to depend. As the logging industry became increasingly efficient at clear-cutting vast areas of timber, rural mountain people lost an important economic foundation: the trees that provided fuel, fences, and shelter were gone. Along with them went many of the animals on

The Mountains  161 which they had relied for food, and also income from trapping and hunting. Logging roads and the huge trucks that, from the post–Second World War period onward, removed huge volumes of lumber, did further damage to the fragile mountain ecosystems, increasing landslides, flooding, and erosion. As wood became a saleable commodity, Aboriginal access to that resource was further limited by timber leases. Game regulations encroached more and more on rural dwellers, most particularly on Aboriginal users of the land. Even as the logging industry launched massive attempts to prevent the destruction of forest fires, the first steam-powered engines introduced in the late nineteenth century, and those powered by diesel oil and gasoline later in the twentieth, facilitated further massive destruction of the forests. The attempt to reduce rural places to the extraction of one primary commodity for private sale was successful in the case of forestry and, like mining, after had a devastating impact on neighbouring rural communities. Again like mining, forestry was a rural occupation whose off-farm and single-sexed nature sharply distinguished it from the household-based rural economies based around agriculture. Agriculture In British Columbia (and to a much smaller extent in the Yukon), the complex economy of the Western Cordillera was facilitated by a dramatic increase in the number and the proportion of land-based, Euro-Canadian rural families in the 1900–40 period. Farming was booming in this mountainous region, mostly areas close to the coast. By 1913, would-be farmers had taken out over 37,000 pre-emption land claims for homesteading. Between 1901 and 1941, the number of farms increased more than fourfold in British Columbia, from about 6,500 to 26,400, and the amount of improved agricultural land increased from just over 190,000 hectares to over 360,000. The number of adult men listing their occupation as “agricultural” also increased fourfold,

162  Canada’s Rural Majority from about 10,000 in 1901 to over 40,000 in 1941, even as the proportion of men in logging and mining combined fell from about 20 per cent to below 10 per cent of the work force. Agriculture was the largest part of the rural workforce in the province after 1901, and it was the largest part of the entire workforce in the census years of 1921 and 1931. Even more surprising in such a mountainous province, agriculture continued to be identified by politicians, policymakers, and community “boosters” trying to attract immigrants, as the heart of British Columbia’s economy and society well into the twentieth century. They encouraged agricultural land settlement for a number of reasons, not the least of which was to impose a new culture – cultivation – on former “wildlands” occupied by people whose reliance on hunting and gathering was perceived as a sign of inferiority by the incoming settlers. The British Columbia government’s disdain for First Nations people can be seen in its refusal to negotiate treaties with those whose lands were expropriated, whether for grazing, settlement, or timber leases, even though Canadian law clearly required this. Government policies sought to establish instead an agricultural society based on the family farm, one that would provide the foundation of European civilization and (somewhat paradoxically) would do so by providing a corrective to the kinds of economic activities that reflected the new, but potentially disruptive, competitive, industrial, individualistic ethic. For in the later nineteenth century, community developers in British Columbia as elsewhere in Canada were seriously worried about the social and moral decay that seemed to define the new urban industrial societies in Britain and, increasingly, in North America. Encouraging family-based farms seemed to offer the kind of social reassurance and insurance that would provide the solid, stable, well-ordered “family values” that society needed to thrive, but in a way that also would not interfere with the competitive, industrial, and individualist ethic needed to expand wealth maximally through

The Mountains  163 exploiting resource industries. The settlers pouring into the province to take advantage of relatively cheap agricultural lands had their own motives; while not impervious to the cultural and political ideas that lay behind land policies, the “farmers” of British Columbia, like those across the country in this period, were generally taking up lands to provide a broad foundation of support for their families rather than to either get rich or to “cure” society. The first cultivation of the soil for agricultural purposes occurred around the coastal fur trade posts of Victoria and Fort Langley, spreading with gold miners up the fertile valleys of southern Vancouver Island and the Fraser Valley, then northwards with the Cariboo gold rush. Alexander Graham, for example, headed out to the goldfields of northern BC from Ireland and then Vancouver in 1886, and on his return a few months later took up cattle ranching with a partner in the Chilcotin Mountains. From here he sent for his fiancée, Annie, from county Antrim in Ireland. She joined him in 1888, and over the next few years they worked to support their growing family by means of their cattle ranch near Clinton, where Annie also worked as the postmistress and ran a “stopping house” for travellers. She learned to speak Chinook so that she could talk with the First Nations women associated with ranchers and ranching in the Chilcotin area. Relations weren’t all friendly, however; Aboriginal peoples throughout the Interior, like those on the Prairies, had complained bitterly – but to little avail – since the 1870s that ranchers were acquiring and then fencing off almost all of the lands, and thus much of the water, that they relied on for raising their own stock. Policymakers in the colony adopted the first Canadian homesteading system in the West to encourage the growth of small-scale, family-based agriculture at that time. The cattle industry of British Columbia was one of the first commercially successful agricultural enterprises. Initially, as with mining and forestry, ranching was usually a relatively small-scale enterprise. As on the Prairies, in the

164  Canada’s Rural Majority early days cattle could graze for free, and later for very little money, on the rich grasses originally (and thanks to Interior Natives’ long and continuing practice of selective burning) covering much of the land in the high plateau of the central Interior. And, as on the Prairies, ranchers quickly learned that winter conditions required feeding and sheltering their herds. Providing hay and other feed for cattle was a huge expense and meant the difference between profit and loss for many ranchers. Most ranchers became farmers as well as ranchers, to provide feed for the cattle and for the horses needed to tend them. Many also grew crops and vegetables to feed the family and the working crews. As we saw on the Prairies, ranchers had to provide food for cattle and had to cover the expense of labour. Cattle, even those living all summer on the open range, needed to be checked, kept track of, fenced in, and rounded up to be branded, castrated, tended, or brought to market. The round-up alone could involve 125 men, and each man needed eight to ten cow ponies during the process. Before the railway went through the region, selling cattle meant long cattle drives to the coast. Unlike the work of farmers, many aspects of which were being transformed by efficient, horse-powered machines, this was not the case with most of the work of ranchers. Nevertheless, when compared to most farmers, the work of ranchers was relatively less onerous on a year-round basis. Economies of scale applied strongly, and so a few ranches in the Cariboo and Chilcotin region developed into huge, highly profitable operations. Perhaps most famous is the Douglas Lake Cattle Company in the Nicola Valley, started by a syndicate in 1882 to provide beef for the CPR construction gangs moving through the region. By the time the railway was completed in 1886, 12,000 cattle grazed on over 9,000 hectares. By 1891, almost 24,000 cows and calves were slaughtered annually in the province, and by 1910, the Douglas Lake Cattle Company had expanded to over

The Mountains  165 40,000 hectares. Ranching also became important to the horse export industry and then for the Canadian market. Because ranching demands more capital than farming – for leases, for animal feed, for barbed wire, for cowboy wages – a number of wealthy British ranching enthusiasts took up lands, giving a distinct British flavour to a number of ranching communities in the Interior. British influence was also felt in the effort by Canadian ranchers looking to export to British markets, to improve the American longhorn cattle with superior quality European cattle. However, many British families failed dismally in their efforts. As one would-be rancher concluded, “We have a large proportion of public school men coming from the British Isles to this part of Canada, and many do not seem to get along very well owing to their lack of knowledge of what is required to make a success in the new country.”15 In big operations and in small, whether British-owned or not, ranch life in the first half of the twentieth century depended on American equipment and training. Initially, cattle were driven from the United States, up the broad valleys to the Cariboo, but each year involved at least two major round-ups, as well as intermittent supervision of the cattle over huge distances. Riders had to be excellent horsemen, and as cowboy historian W.M. Elofson emphasizes “thoroughly versed in the nature and temperament of cattle”: When cattle are subjected to new surroundings on the open range they become insecure and deeply suspicious of any sudden movement or noise. If surprised, or if pushed too anxiously by drovers, they often are transformed instantly from tranquil, contented animals into totally irrational, panic-stricken creatures. During the early drives, the Canadians witnessed the American handlers carefully coaxing rather than forcing the cattle across streams, up the sides of steep hills and past obstacles like timber wolves and coyotes (which the bovine mind finds extremely disconcerting) ...16

166  Canada’s Rural Majority The lariat, or lasso, was essential because “it was the only means by which livestock could be given individual attention on the open range where corrals and chutes were lacking.” It was not an easy tool to master. As Elofson notes, “It takes hours of practice to learn to twirl the rope and throw it with any kind of directional control whatsoever. To do so from the back of an animal which is galloping at break-neck speed on the heels of a deliriously frightened bovine, however, is another matter altogether.”17 Americans taught the cowboys how to manage herds in the conditions of Western Canada and they also were the source of the equipment the cowboys needed: the wide western saddle, more comfortable than the English saddle, and necessary for cowboys who were often in them all day, for days at a time; the use of leather chaps to protect the riders’ legs from thorns, bushes, or frightened cattle; rifles and shotguns that they could fire while riding; wide-brimmed cowboy hats to protect the eyes and face from the hot western sun; spurs, saddlebags, and slickers; cheap barbed-wire fence that made it financially possible to fence large grazing areas; all of these were adaptations to the environmental conditions of the west initiated by Americans and Mexicans. Many of the small ranches that had managed to supply coastal markets by driving cattle hundreds of kilometers through the mountains did not survive the competition from Alberta via rail. A few survived, remaining small operations at between 200 and 300 head of cattle operated as family businesses with a few hired men. By the early years of the twentieth century, ranching in the Interior was in decline for most small operators, for a variety of reasons, including growing problems with predators (which grew in numbers with the sudden infusion of a tasty new species not flight-adapted like deer), cattle rustlers (likewise), isolation, and the harsh winters that constantly threatened a rancher’s profits (and even life). Cattle diseases, including pink eye, hoof- and-mouth disease, blackleg, and most particularly mange, became much more common as herds were

The Mountains  167 brought together in large numbers, and mixed with other herds. Fires, increasing in number and intensity as the railway, other machines and more people cutting and burning wood as a major source of heat and cooking fuel and often leaving slash around to dry, also wiped out large herds. Finally, under pressure from rising costs and from settlers wanting to use land for agricultural purposes, ranchers also overgrazed much of the land, causing permanent damage to the once-abundant grasslands. As in other rural cases, many ranchers existed on the margins of economic survival, especially during economic downturns, including the Depression of the 1930s. But rural lands continued to provide broad support to rural families, as they did on Prairie ranches. As Harry Marriott put it in his memoir of ranching in the Cariboo in the early twentieth century: Everyone, Indians and settlers alike, would go down to the river and catch salmon with a net pole … The folks up on Big Bar Creek were a resourceful bunch. They had little or no cash, but the men had jobs in the summer, either on ranches or on government road crews … the work all being done by shovels and teams of horses.18

Like forestry and mining, ranching was able to provide at least one part of the foundation of economic support for rural households, and sometimes waged labour for others. Two other forms of agriculture dominated the formal accounting of farming in the mountains of British Columbia: fruit farming (sometimes called “fruit ranching”) and mixed farming. Mixed farming dominated in terms of the number of farms declaring it as their “specialty,” and it could occur anywhere in the province where there was arable or indeed semi-arable land and a warm enough climate. It tended to dominate in the fertile lands of the Fraser Valley and the island valleys lying close to the good transportation routes of Georgia Strait, where water transportation made

168  Canada’s Rural Majority it easy to get produce and livestock to the large urban markets of the southwestern coast. As in southern Ontario and Quebec, these farms also stimulated transportation routes; by the 1920s electric trains extended from Vancouver many miles up the Fraser Valley, and from Victoria up the Saanich peninsula, transporting goods as well as agricultural workers. These farms provide good examples of the kind of commercially successful family farms that the British Columbia provincial authorities had in mind when they actively encouraged agriculture in the province. The farms fed the cities, and the cities produced or at least traded other commodities on which farms increasingly relied, creating prosperous, relatively stable rural communities. Electricity first reached rural homes on the farms of the Fraser Valley and southern Vancouver Island in the early years of the twentieth century, though only a few Interior mountain communities received household power in off-peak hours from mines or sawmills. The British Columbia government in the first half of the twentieth century experimented and invested heavily in creating a variety of agricultural communities as it sought to create a new modern rural province. A major engineering project was set in motion with the draining of Sumas Lake in the Fraser Valley, designed to draw agricultural settlers. As on the Canadian Shield, governments invested money in settling First World War soldiers on lands that they could farm with their families at Merville, near Comox on Vancouver Island. Governments also invested in huge irrigation projects to stimulate farming in the dry, desert-like regions of the southern Interior, at Camp Lister in West Kootenay region, and in the southern Okanagan. Only in the last case were the hopes of the instigators realized. As historian James Murton has shown in Creating a Modern Countryside,19 planners underestimated whole ranges of environmental problems in establishing such new settlements in British Columbia, with devastating consequences for people and environments.

The Mountains  169 Orcharding had better success. The first orchards were planted by some of the first farmers arriving in the Gulf Islands and the Fraser Valley, and the first orchardists in the Interior of the province were the same farmers and ranchers who followed the miners up into the Cariboo and later the Kootenays and the Okanagan. There was very little commercial activity outside of the coast, however, until the railway was in place, ensuring quick transportation of perishable fruits. Farmers might plant fruit trees for their own use and sell the surplus, but the development of large orchards not only required easy access to markets on the coast and in the Prairies but also substantial investments of both time and money. While the Okanagan Valley, and some areas of the Kootenay Valley, had adequate soil, sunshine, temperature ranges, and water (available in the rivers and lakes of the valley bottoms), very low levels of rainfall meant that expensive irrigation works needed to be in place to pump water uphill to the arable benchlands above these rivers before orchards could be planted. Fruit trees took longer to establish than either cattle or crops: most took about six years between planting and first harvest. Orchard ranches shared with cattle ranches the high labour costs and the need to hire workers on a seasonal or intermittent basis. As a result, while some irrigation projects began in the early 1890s in the Okanagan in particular, it was not until 1905 or so that there was a land boom in orchard lands. In 1901, there were just over 3,000 hectares of fruit in British Columbia, most of it outside the mountains near the coast. By 1905, the planting of over 1,000,000 trees in the Okanagan had almost quadrupled the provincial acreage to over 11,000 hectares. Land companies throughout the Okanagan moved in, bought up cattle ranchers’ lands where they could, subdivided the land into five- or ten-acre lots, and then installed irrigation systems and wrote contracts to guarantee new settlers access to them. Most of the early buyers were from Manitoba, but later English settlers moved into the district.

170  Canada’s Rural Majority Many of these were younger sons of wealthy English families, who, as the grandson of one of these settlers put it, “hoped to establish themselves as country gentlemen on the British model, complete with polo and tennis matches, high tea and private schools. They lacked the capital to do this at ‘Home,’ but expected to be able to live thus in Canada.” That author notes that his grandfather who was one of these “remittance men” (so-called because they relied on regular cheques – remittances – from their families to survive) had to work as a ditchwalker while waiting for his orchard to come into bearing, “but a heraldic encyclopedia published in England at the time listed him as ‘Oliver Dendy, gentleman, resident in Canada.’”20 This was not the only instance of exaggeration regarding orcharding in British Columbia at this time: land was sold for highly inflated prices, and some companies went bankrupt before they had installed the necessary irrigation or because they had simply failed to do so. As a result, real estate operators gained a very bad reputation for “misrepresenting essential conditions such as soil, climate, irrigation, land clearing and earning-capacity affecting the value of land.”21 By 1911, when the first fruit crops were coming into production, other problems emerged. The most potent of these in the early days was competition from American orchards in Washington State, whose fruit ripened days or weeks earlier than the fruit grown at a much higher elevation in the more northerly Interior of British Columbia. Orchardists had difficulty finding a market for their crops at prices that actually allowed them to cover their expenses. The financial recession of 1913 forced many of the land companies into bankruptcy, and hundreds of Englishmen returned “home” a few months later to fight in the First World War. Some orcharding communities were entirely abandoned, the irrigation equipment left to decay. While the orchard industry of the Okanagan produced most of the province’s 9 million kilograms of fruit in 1913, land prices in the region did not recover until well after the war.

The Mountains  171 Until the Second World War, the industry was plagued by serious problems of oversupply (which lowered prices), of getting fruits to appropriate markets, of standardizing the product to ensure better shipping practices and quality control. Diseases and pests were non-existent in British Columbia until brought into the region in fruit boxes that had been infected by fruits from Ontario and elsewhere and then sustained by the mono-cropping practices that provided an environmental paradise for aphids, codling moths, mites, and microbial diseases. Orchardists relied increasingly on highly toxic lead arsenates and other poisons to try to control their spread. As one immigrant orchard worker in Salmon Arm wrote in 1914 to his mother in England: Yesterday was Victoria Day, public holiday, but we worked. I was busy spraying the orchard to kill insects. The spray is made up of arsenate of lead, lime and sulphur and stuff called black leaf, all of which makes a lovely concoction. Since Saturday the colour of my face and hands and clothes is greenish yellow and I smell strongly of sulphur. It’s an awful stain to get off … If there’s a wind it’s a terror, as the spray stings quite a bit, especially if it gets into your eyes …22

Finding, housing, paying, and overseeing temporary workers engaged in handling delicate produce when all orchards needed them at the same time also presented serious problems to what was otherwise a family business. Quite simply, it was very difficult for most orchardists to make a living until the price controls, more organized marketing, and refrigeration that appeared during the Second World War and in the postwar period ensured a better balance between supply and demand. In a familiar pattern, however, part of the prevention of oversupply and the resulting control of prices involved pushing out smaller, often part-time producers who worked within somewhat different economic parameters. Much of the orcharding in the Kootenay region fell victim to this: as one small orchardist

172  Canada’s Rural Majority in Procter, a part of that more isolated, less environmentally suitable region, noted during the Depression: We grew fruit on our farm and specialized in cherries, shipping to our private customers on the Prairies. If you had a good product, word got around … We also sold jam in the factory in Nelson. However, once my father went through the Associated [Fruit Growers] he had to buy their [shipping] boxes and ship their way – we were no longer allowed to ship to our private customers. There was never any money left as profit. That [Natural] Products Marketing Act finished our little family industry.23

Whether agriculture took the form of orcharding, farming, or ranching, this important rural way of life generally expanded dramatically in the time period under study here, sustaining a significant number of rural households and communities. Conclusion According to the “total value of production,” statistics collected by the Economic Council of Canada in 1935, agriculture and mining in British Columbia took turns at second-place ranking behind forestry between 1915 and 1930. But in some important respects – particularly the increase in the numbers listing “agriculture” as their occupation – the biggest economic growth story in British Columbia in the first half of the twentieth century was the boom in agriculture. For increases in production and profits in mining and forestry (and, as we will see in the next chapter, fishing) were the result of new efficiencies of extraction and processing created by new fuels and machines; more product was generated, but this did not, for the most part, represent an increase in the numbers of employed workers. As profits increased, they were funnelled into the coffers of a decreasing number of large, typically foreign-owned companies – whose head offices, if they were in Canada at all, were in

The Mountains  173 the Lower Mainland, Toronto, or Montreal – which were expanding rapidly as a direct result of the natural resources leaving rural British Columbia. If the number of farms and farmers was increasing, this probably did not reflect the triumph of the nineteenthcentury policymakers’ agrarian vision for the province. Evidence suggests that many farms were part-time and not commercially viable; according to the 1941 census data, four out of every ten of these “farms” were not full-time or commercially successful operations, and it is reasonable to infer that a much larger proportion – particularly those in the more remote and mountainous regions outside of the Fraser Valley and on southern Vancouver Island – were only intermittently profitable agrarian ventures. The resourcebased economies of British Columbia and the Yukon drove the development of the province in some important ways; as historian Martin Robin phrased it, “Rough jobs require tough men. The primary industries of the company province [that is, British Columbia] had little room for the sheepish and servile clerk. Jobs were physically difficult and unpleasant, often seasonal and hazardous, and attracted strong men of independent and adventurous temperament.”24 While men outnumbered women by ten to one in the 1880s, the early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a more equitable balance. Many of the single men so visible in the resource industries of the province returned seasonally to their families living in other rural areas. The land-based household increasingly provided a relatively secure land base from which household members could launch a wide range of strategies to support their families, just as the land-based, cash-strapped rural homestead supported the resource industries by providing a steady stream of men available to work in difficult and dangerous rural jobs. Farmers were likely to work as fire wardens, prospectors, loggers, teamsters, and other transportation and communication workers. Rural people sold commodities grown or raised on their land, provided some of their own food

174  Canada’s Rural Majority and fuel, and worked for wages; many played several roles, sequentially, seasonally, or at the same time, perhaps as cattle ranchers, postmistresses, vegetable growers, and hunters. Complex, varied, and changing relationships to the specific conditions presented by local environments, the exact stage of family life, and global markets continued to define life in rural British Columbia and the Yukon in this period, for men, women, and children alike, just as in rural areas across the country.

6 The Coast

Canada, the country with the greatest percentage of surface covered in fresh water, is also the country with the longest ocean coastline in the world. This coast along the Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific Oceans has been of pivotal importance to Canada’s human history. The Pacific most likely provided the transportation link that first brought humans to the continent as the glaciers of the last ice age receded about 12,000 years ago. More recently, ports (some upstream on the many-thousand-kilometre-long internal “coast” along the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River) provided the point of entry for almost all the 6.4 million immigrants arriving in Canada in the 1870–1940 period. Some who arrived on the ocean coast stayed there, or nearby, as water brought many advantages to urban and rural people alike. Ocean water moderates the extremes of climate found throughout much of inland Canada, making it easier for rural people to make a living outdoors. And coastal waters provide rich, if dangerous, ecosystems of support. Oceans are the medium in which a huge variety of interdependent life forms feed and move, from the microscopic plant-like phytoplankton (the foundation of the marine food web), to fish and giant whales. First Nations peoples on Canada’s coasts were adept at taking for use or trade various birds, fish, marine mammals, and plants that thrived in coastal wetlands or just offshore.

The Coast  177 Many of these provided food or could be fashioned into tools (including fishing nets), weapons, means of transportation, or fuels for heating, cooking, and lighting, as well as clothing and shelter. The non-Native fishermen, hunters, traders, settlers, and sojourners who arrived on the coast between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries drew on the experience of First Nations people and adapted their own marine and maritime practices to their new environments. By the late nineteenth century, many long-established traditions existed among rural people for extracting the bounty of coastal waters and lands for not only local use but also worldwide export on a huge scale: Canadian coastal fish, furs, trees, and oils from both seals and whales entered international trade routes extending to the United States, Europe, the West Indies, and China. The key to this worldwide trade was the relative cheapness of ocean transportation. Before the advent of fossilfuel-powered machines for travel over land and through the air, Canada’s ice-free (and even some frozen) coastal, or coastally accessible, waters provided the best, and often the only, corridors for transporting people and goods within Canada and North America and between them and the rest of the world. Before 1940, most of the people in what are now Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut lived within walking distance of the ocean or one of the waterways – Great Lakes/Ottawa/ St. Lawrence, Fraser, Skeena, Mackenzie – that connected to it. Our focus here will be on the rural populations on or near the tidal waters of the ocean coasts. This chapter will begin with a brief overview of the highly varied ecosystems along the vast Canadian coast – east, north, and west. We will move on to explore how the presence of ocean waters nurtured, directed, and sometimes devastated rural life and livelihoods in the 1870–1940 period, emphasizing the larger structural changes to society, environment, and economy in those years. The second half

178  Canada’s Rural Majority of the chapter zooms in to look at daily life for rural coastal people, set in the kind of complex rural economy and society with features shared in so many ways by rural people across the country: occupational pluralism, the ubiquity of outdoor work, and the centrality of household. “Home,” which included house and garden and often the foreshore, provided the main workspace and living space for women and children and the base from which, seasonally, men and older boys went far away to work on fishing boats, in the merchant marine, or at logging camps. Using the three foci of farm and foreshore, fisheries, and forests, we will explore some of the particular, diverse ways in which rural coastal households negotiated with each other, and with their land and sea environments, to bring locally harvested goods to their homes and to exchange others in local, regional, and international markets. Canada’s Ocean Coast All of the continents of the world are (relatively) lightweight rock sticking up out of what is really a single ocean. The continents sit on much heavier rock plates under the ocean and move slowly over boiling magma. At least twice in the history of the planet, almost all of the continents were clustered together. Vast geological forces gave North America its current shape and approximate location on the globe; a number of ice ages have come and gone, the most recent one giving the ocean shoreline its current arrangements of visible rock and soil. The massive movement of ice over Nunavut, Newfoundland, and Labrador scraped their soil off and pushed some of it into the Atlantic, leaving much exposed Canadian Shield but also shallows rich in life offshore, most notably the Grand Banks. The rich agricultural lands of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island attest to a further benefit from the Shield’s loss. Even if you were allowed to bypass Alaska, it would take you many years to walk (and swim) the 243,000 kilometres

The Coast  179 to travel north up the Canadian Pacific coast from its most southwesterly point near Victoria, up across the northern Arctic shores, and then south again down the Labrador coast to Cape Sable Island in the extreme southeast of the country. But even if you walked only the tiniest fraction of that coastline, you would be impressed by the variations in the soil, plants, rocks, animals, and birds along the ocean’s shore. The geology, climate, and ecology of the three ocean coasts vary dramatically. The Pacific coast’s temperate climate, wet winters, and ocean currents nurture a rich and varied marine and land environment that has supported a large human population for many thousand years. The west coast shore is characterized by deep and narrow fjords, where high mountains, glacier-covered at higher elevations and blanketed with stands of huge cedar, fir, and pine trees nearer sea level, rise steeply from deep in the ocean. To the north, the Beaufort Sea, the Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay, and Davis Strait have been known as the most stark and forbidding of ocean shores, and among the most hostile to human beings. The shoreline is scoured by ice, making it impossible for most intertidal forms of life, so rich on the southern Atlantic and Pacific coasts, to survive. This movement causes massive shoreline erosion. Ice changes the Arctic and Subarctic coasts, but it also erases it. The sea ice of the Arctic Archipelago is almost land-like between October and June; the coast appears and disappears as water turns from liquid to solid. Seasonal, shifting pack ice gives humans and other predators easier and much-needed access to the fish and marine mammals along the coasts of the Northwest Territories and the more inhospitable Shield country to the east: Nunavut, northern Quebec, and Labrador. The ecological variety of this vast area is much more limited than on the southern Pacific or Atlantic coasts, and people would not have been able to survive without fish and a few large mammals. Most animal species (including humans) needed to migrate large distances in search of

180  Canada’s Rural Majority food and fuel, often scarce in the coldest and darkest times of the year. The Greenland glaciers send icebergs along the Labrador Current to the Grand Banks and Newfoundland, posing serious dangers to ships in the entire region and often completely blocking entrances to coves and ports. The Arctic does in fact receive as much life-giving daylight as other parts of the world do, but most of it is compacted into the very short period in high summer when the sun never sets. It is this intense period of high-energy daylight that draws so many species of birds and marine life to the region. But with the entire ice-free, sunlit growing season of the Arctic shore reduced to several weeks, any slight variation in weather can have devastating effects on the ecosystem and its ability to support life throughout the food chain. A late winter storm at just the wrong moment can kill off hundreds of thousands of hatching birds; an unseasonal thaw can interfere with large land mammals such as polar bears feeding on underwater seals and fish. The coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland are defined by the shallow, rocky, rolling, and water-logged geology of the northern Canadian Shield and by its characteristic black spruce and balsam. The North Atlantic waters are some of the roughest in the world. Huge quantities of water and ice come off the Shield to the waters off Labrador and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Warm currents flow north from Florida and the West Indies to form the Gulf Stream at about the latitude of Nova Scotia, but a channel of southerly flowing cold water keeps it 400 to 800 kilometres off the coast. To the southwest of Newfoundland, off the Grand Banks, the Gulf Stream meets the southward flowing polar water of the Labrador Current. As a result, waters there are more turbulent than in the South Atlantic, with more unpredictable winds and very strong currents. These conditions can be hazardous for people (and certainly were, particularly in the days before steam- and diesel-powered engines), but they are good for marine life. The inland fisheries of Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton, and peninsular Nova Scotia;

The Coast  181 the coastal waters of Quebec and New Brunswick; the Grand Banks of Newfoundland; and the waters of northern Labrador, the Arctic Ocean, and the entire British Columbia coast were some of the richest in the world, an immense source of seals, whales, lobster, scallops, as well as a wide variety of fish. Coastal waters, therefore, supplied support for human populations as well as a means of relatively cheap transportation for goods and people. Rural coastal people had access to a tremendous number and variety of resources for home consumption and for trade, but these came with the high price of negotiating the often deadly vicissitudes of living by and on the restless, formidable oceans. The History of Rural Coastal Canada, 1870–1940: An Overview In the later nineteenth century, particularly in the southern regions of the country, Canadians were well aware of the transportation benefits of extensive coastal waters. This advantage was key to the country’s rapidly growing commercial and increasingly international economy. Even as railroads (1860–90s), trucks and automobiles (1910–30s), and airplanes (1920–40s) began to supplement (and often extend) water transportation in many parts of Canada, most raw materials, natural resources, manufactured goods, people, and even animals (dead and alive) were at some point moved within Canada, or between Canada and the rest of the world, through ocean waters. In many small coastal communities, water provided the only transportation well into the twentieth century and, in some cases, the twenty-first. Air travel eventually cut into that de facto monopoly but was (and is) expensive and even more weather restricted by comparison. The Ocean Ports and Their Hinterlands Economic “staples,” the natural resources removed from rural lands in large quantities and shipped elsewhere, had been

182  Canada’s Rural Majority an important part of the Canadian economy ever since Europeans had first begun fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in the fifteenth century. Since the sixteenth century, Europeans had traded rich furs trapped by First Nations peoples throughout the Canadian northlands. In the early nineteenth century, when the Napoleonic Wars blocked British access to European sources of the timber needed for military shipbuilding, timber was extracted from the forests along the St. Lawrence and its connected waterways and exported in huge quantities. By the early twentieth century, however, improved rail and water transportation were making it possible to bring the vast agricultural, mineral, and timber wealth of Canada’s interior to coastal waters, boosting exports of natural resources to levels unimaginable in earlier decades. Most of these goods left the country via ocean ports. Halifax, St. John’s (Newfoundland), Montreal, Toronto, St. John (New Brunswick), and Sydney (Nova Scotia) – and later Victoria, Vancouver, and Prince Rupert – provided key transportation links to national and international markets. These cities, and the Canadian economy, grew up around these ports. In the later nineteenth century, the cheap transportation provided by water encouraged the establishment of vast factory areas for processing goods brought by water from other countries: sugarcane (for sugar) and cotton (for clothing) were processed in coastal Canadian mills and factories and then shipped back overseas or elsewhere inside Canada. Stimulated by the new Canadian government’s National Policy, which protected manufacturing and improved railway transportation, local merchants in East Coast communities had established cotton textile factories in Halifax, Windsor, and Yarmouth in Nova Scotia, and in Milltown, Marysville, and Moncton in New Brunswick, all on the coast or on waterways linked to the coast. Imported technology, raw materials, and often skilled workers were also brought by ship to create a manufacturing industry in boots and shoes, cigarettes and cigars, carriages and carts,

The Coast  183 tools, pianos, stoves, confections, clothes, books, and beverages. As well as importing materials for expanding their manufacturing base, East Coast ports imported a huge range of goods manufactured elsewhere, from special new agricultural implements to patent medicines. Atlantic Canada had been the site of a significant shipbuilding industry since the early nineteenth century, when the locally grown timber provided the raw materials and a growing national and international shipping trade provided the markets. Local men (and a few women) provided the workforce that loaded and unloaded cargo and sailed (and later shovelled coal) for the great merchant marine fleets. Ships moved goods and people about locally, bringing to hundreds of tiny outport communities along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts flour, tea, coal, and molasses, and the mail, and taking away their fish, agricultural produce, timber, and other commodities for sale. Coastal industries provided not only employment and a growth in consumer spending in the cities and towns of eastern Canada but also waged work, most of it seasonal, for rural populations. Before 1940, many small mills, workshops, and factories were located in rural areas or villages close to the places where natural resources were harvested, or in towns that rural people would migrate to seasonally. Ocean ports, large and small, were a vital ingredient of Canadian economic and social life, providing points of entry and exit for goods (many of them extracted from or manufactured near coastal lands) and for people, both of which in turn supported rural and urban populations in Canada and abroad. Rural Resources: Extraction, Transport, Processing, and Export in Coastal Canada While coastal ports provided the “launching pad” for exporting a wide range of Canadian resources, coastal lands and waters were themselves a source of rich natural resources. In the early twentieth century, agriculture, fishing, logging,

184  Canada’s Rural Majority mining, and shipping were still fuelled mostly by the muscle power of rural coastal people and their draught animals. Their intimate knowledge of planting, gathering, digging, hunting, fishing, harvesting, chopping, bucking, sawing, processing, and trading made both self-provisioning and commerce possible. Rural people worked in a variety of places and with a variety of goods that they either used themselves or sold. Many rural people worked seasonally (usually at the times when they could not farm or fish), extracting coal from Sydney and Nanaimo for Canada’s industrializing economy, for export, and for domestic heating and cooking. Agriculture remained a major and growing sector of the economy on both coasts. Coastal farms near urban areas of British Columbia and the Maritimes grew and raised a variety of produce: apples, chickens, pigs and cattle, eggs and dairy products, and berries. Even though British Columbia is so strongly associated with its mountain forests and mines, the areas of the south coast around Vancouver and Victoria experienced a significant agricultural boom in the 1890–1940 period, boosting agriculture to second or third place in terms of value of exports, always after forestry, but comparable to mining. Residents of La Pocatière, Quebec, hunted Beluga whales and rendered their oil for use in lighting and for lubricating machinery. Prince Edward Islanders harvested lobsters and oysters, mainly for human consumption, while in British Columbia, dogfish provided a valuable lighting fuel and fertilizer compound. Sea otters, also from the Pacific coast, were hunted briefly and almost to extinction in the mid-nineteenth century for their valuable furs, as were Arctic foxes in the early twentieth, the latter along the coasts of the Northwest Territories. Trappers and sealers, mainly Indigenous people from across Nunavut, Labrador, and northern Quebec who knew how to negotiate the environments in which valuable species thrived, caught mink, ermine, seal, and beaver, again in quantities that threatened the species’ survival. In the mid-nineteenth century, hunters on the Labrador and Newfoundland coast

The Coast  185 caught seals in massive quantities (which, like so many others, dwindled in the twentieth century), both for fashionable furs and valuable lighting oil rendered from the fat of newborn pups. Local, mainly Indigenous populations across the Arctic Coast used whales for food and leather and as a fuel. Non-locals on the new steam-powered whaling boats sailing from the United States, southern Canada, and beyond often valued the Indigenous people’s hunting prowess. Crews on ships originating in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Russia increasingly hunted grey, humpback, sperm, bowhead, and finback whales in northern coastal waters in the late nineteenth century when they were on the brink of extinction elsewhere, and until they were threatened with extinction even in the Arctic by the first decade of the twentieth century. In the pre-petroleum days in the nineteenth century, whale oil had greased the machinery of the Industrial Revolution and fuelled the powerful lighthouses of coastal waters, revolutionizing coastal shipping in the process. Even into the twentieth century, whale oil was still used for lighting and for lubricating delicate machinery such as watches. In the pre-plastics age, whales also provided bones and baleen (cartilage) for a very wide range of consumer goods from parasols to fishing rods and buggy whips to divining rods. Coastal waters brought other advantages. Salt-marsh hay from New Brunswick’s Acadian coast provided food for cattle and horses, and did not necessitate the clearing, ploughing, and planting of land, at least until the new agricultural schemes of the late nineteenth century advocated marshland drainage for increased yields. Particularly valuable was the harvest of trees, whose wood was used for cooking and heating fuels both for home use and for sale; for shipbuilding, fence-building, making houses, factories and other buildings; for mine pit-props, railway ties, and paper; and, up until the late 1940s, airplanes. Between 1910 and 1940, loggers removed an average of almost 9 million cubic metres of

186  Canada’s Rural Majority lumber per year, most of it coming from the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts and about half of it exported. As well as providing work for many rural people and fortunes for corporations, logging provided a significant component of provincial and federal revenues through the fees and licences associated with it. Finally, fish provided yet another huge harvest: on average, 450 million kilograms of fish per year were removed from Canada’s ocean coasts in these decades, mostly from the Atlantic, and mostly for human consumption, though it was also used in fertilizers, as animal food, and for lighting oil. About 60 per cent of the catch was exported (like wood), mainly to the United States and Britain. Some of these items were harvested from the coast, then processed in rural coastal mills, canneries, refineries, smelters, and households. Local processing was particularly important in the case of fish, which would spoil within days or even hours; salting and canning had to be done immediately after the catch was hauled up. Newfoundland outport families had been salting and drying cod on the foreshore for centuries. Since the 1870s, new industrial canning operations had come into being on both coasts, but most were tiny; in 1900, for example, 703 canneries operated in the Maritime provinces (not including Newfoundland). Over the next half century, canneries, like boats, would decline in numbers but expand dramatically in productive capacity. A number of coastal towns grew as they began processing other goods as well: whaling stations and fish rendering plants were established on the East and West Coasts. Sawmills had long been located on the coasts, or on rivers just upstream from them, so that trees, and the men who worked with them, could be transported to and from the mills cheaply. On the coastal Shield areas, by the late nineteenth century, scientists had developed techniques for turning spruce and balsam trees (instead of rags) into paper, and new mills grew up across the lands where these trees were abundant. Coastal sites had been preferred for all kinds of mills because of advantages in transporting

The Coast  187 trees and lumber, but many also came to offer hydroelectric power generation. By 1911, 468 such stations produced power in Nova Scotia alone. Industry thrived on the coast. Canadian rivers, rushing to ocean, provided the large amounts of fresh water and the vast amounts of electrical power needed to grind coastal trees into pulp and paper, and governments granted longterm logging leases to large companies in the expectation that trees could be harvested and men employed on a sustainable basis. Huge mills were built at Grand Falls (1909) and Corner Brook (1923) in Newfoundland; Ocean Falls (1903) and Powell River (1910) in British Columbia; and Dalhousie (1929) in New Brunswick. The ocean locations provided a convenient sewer for toxic and other waste disposal. The combination of cheap transportation and cheap hydroelectrical power boosted the growth of coastal mining operations as well. Between 1910 and 1936, Anyox, British Columbia, supplied copper to make wire for the rapidly increasing electrification of homes, businesses, and industries in North America, as well as for bullets. Iron ore from Bell Island, Newfoundland, equipped the giant steelproducing plants of Sydney, which in turn took advantage of the proximity of Cape Breton coal for fuel. In the late nineteenth century, East Coast shipping, excluding fishing, was also a big employer, giving work in mid-summer to almost as many men as the forest product industries of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia combined. Coastal places were key sites for the extraction, transport, processing, and export of goods that were found, or could be brought, within reach of the cheap transportation offered by ocean shipping. Coasts as Home Important as Canadian coastal waters were for extracting and processing commodities and transporting them and people for the benefit of corporations and rapidly growing urban and industrial populations in Canada and abroad,

188  Canada’s Rural Majority they also supported rural people indirectly as sources for wages and money from the sale of commodities, and directly in the form of consumable resources. As elsewhere, rural men, women, and children hunted, fished, gathered, gardened, herded, cut, mined, processed, and consumed a variety of foods, fuels, and materials for their own households, some of which they would sell and some of which they were paid to catch, cut, or grow for local, regional, and international markets. With rights granted by custom and by law, many rural coastal people used the natural resources from the land and sea around them as a common area of land and water to which they could claim free access. Rural coastal homes and home life varied considerably, from the comfortable coastal farmhouses just outside of Victoria, British Columbia, or Truro, Nova Scotia, endowed with the modern conveniences of running water and electric lighting by the 1930s, to the houses in the outport villages of Newfoundland that had neither. Even less endowed were the seasonal, often temporary, logging or fishing camps. Most households, however, were characterized by a high level of work and a low level of “purchasing power” that many today would consider unendurable. Nevertheless, in the time period under study here, many rural coastal people were staying put. What historian Mike Corbett has called the “migration imperative” – the insistence that rural coastal people should leave for bigger and better places – did not really triumph until the post–Second World War period. Memoirs and interviews contain some indications why coastal rural people stayed, even in the face of a decreasing standard of living (particularly in the Depression of the 1930s) and declining local resources. East Coast families in particular, who lived for generations in the same communities, spoke lovingly of the hard-working rhythm of their varied livelihoods, their communities, their rugged independence from employment and employers, and of their intimate relationship with local environments. Elizabeth Goudie was born in 1902 in Labrador, into a family of Inuit, Scottish,

The Coast  189 English, French, and Cree ancestry. First her father and later her husband were trappers. In her memoir, Woman of Labrador, Goudie describes her life before her world was transformed by the building of the Goose Bay military air base in Labrador. Here she sums up the attachment to place so characteristic of rural people in general, and long-settled (if seasonally migratory) peoples in particular: The name Labrador holds something hard to explain but … a deep peace within that helps to make all its hard work easier to take … The wife of a trapper played a great part because she had to live as a man five months of the year. She had to use her gun and she had to know how to set nets to catch fish and also how to judge the right distance from the shore to cut her fish holes … Indoors if you were a mother you had to know how to look after your children, you had to cook, make clothes for the family, sealskin boots and often you had to act as a doctor or nurse … I will go anywhere and be proud to talk about it.1

If rural coastal households relied for some of their support on wages and commodity sales (often paid in advance of the work as “credit” from the fishing bosses), rural coastal employers on the Atlantic and Pacific were, in turn, highly dependent on the flexible rural coastal workforce for their profits and survival. The coastal households’ varied economy, with its mix of paid and unpaid, commercial and household-oriented labour on the land and sea, worked well to support both the household economy and the growing commercial and industrial presence on the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts. From the vantage point of merchants and industrialists, coastal families provided the cheap seasonal, intermittent, and highly skilled workforce that commercial and industrial operations had to rely on if they were going to profit from the removal, transportation, processing, and sale of the rich bounty of the coasts. A flexible, skilled workforce, and one that relied on forms of support other than fishing, was crucially important to the seasonal and

190  Canada’s Rural Majority fluctuating resource extraction industries at this time. Like farmers and loggers, fishers and their families absorbed a lot of the risk and much of the cost that merchants and industrialists would otherwise have had to pay to support a permanent, full-time workforce. But many fishing families clearly felt that the independent life in rural areas, where they had control of so many aspects of daily life, was preferable to working for higher wages and with less risk in town or in a factory. Outdoor work had distinguishing characteristics that resonated not only with those performing the labour but also with those seeking to profit from it. These are worth looking at in a little more detail, so central are they to understanding rural life in the years under study here – and not only on the coasts. Indoor manufacturing, where people and machines could be regulated and controlled so as to maximize profits in a stable fashion, twenty-four hours a day, year round, was a much more predictable kind of industrial work than rural outdoor work. Those trying to take profits from resource extraction had to deal with a seemingly endless and often bewildering range of problems deriving from the fact that the work had to be done outdoors, under conditions they could not control, and in some cases could not even understand. The ocean was a particularly fickle worksite. Even when the fish were biting, fishing boats sank, fishers lost their catches, and weather often shut down a fishing operation with little advance warning. As we have seen, other kinds of resource extraction also created problems for capitalists, merchants, and workers alike: inclement weather or disease could – and did – attack plants, fish, and animals at any time. Unseasonal frosts, or too much rain, wiped out entire crops. Forest fires destroyed hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest. Added to this were the massive and unpredictable swings in international prices for export commodities. The varied, mixed, and flexible household-based economy of rural coastal places provided the foundational support

The Coast  191 for rural families, rural communities, and rural industries. Before large and fossil-fuel-powered boats, trains, planes, and trucks made travel to fishing and logging camps easier and less affected by the weather and the seasons, it was often only rural (or rurally raised) people who were able, available, and willing to perform the extraction of resources, in the woods and on the seas, that would have otherwise been impossible on a commercial scale. Rural skills, knowledge, and expertise provided the best hedge against the insecurities inherent in outdoors work with nature. Regional merchants and industrialists, for their part, were well positioned to pay the minimal wages – in the fisheries usually in the form of credit in advance of the catch – that rural people generally accepted and to market what rural producers had to sell. Merchants and local capitalists were familiar with negotiating complex markets that were typically thousands of miles away from the coastal households and work camps where the resources were harvested. On the East Coast in particular, it was worth their while to extend credit to support rural families even in years of poor fishing, for this was the workforce that they would need to rely on in the next season. This is not to say, however, that all coastal people were making what historians have termed a “modest sufficiency.” While many households had a comfortable, if basic, living, poverty could be widespread. Rural coastal families were sometimes stalked by hunger and malnutrition, particularly in the month of March, when cash was short or non-existent, provisions from the previous year were low, and the new growing and fishing season had yet to begin. Conditions for rural people on the East Coast not only varied seasonally, but deteriorated rapidly in the first decades of twentieth century and for all rural people during the Depression of the 1930s. Newfoundland in particular suffered from extremes of poverty, illiteracy, and an absence of even basic health care, even before the Dominion’s bankruptcy in the 1930s. Does the fisherman receive his own?

192  Canada’s Rural Majority asked William Coaker, founder of the Fishermen’s Protective Union (FPU), in 1912: “[When] he boards a coastal or bay steamer ... and has to sleep like a dog, eat like a pig and be treated like a serf? At the seal fishery where he has to live like a brute, work like a dog and be paid like a [slave]?”2 Between 1900 and 1940, attempts to ameliorate conditions were made by labour unions such as the FPU and International Workers of the World (IWW) in British Columbia, by political parties such as the United Farmers Party in Nova Scotia, and by a variety of social reform and grassroots movements. As we have seen in other regions of Canada, while outsiders and rural people alike usually agreed that “the problem” with rural life was the low wages and prices within the resource industries of fishing, agriculture, and logging, there was seldom agreement as to the solution, and if there was an agreement, it did not last for long. If the Antigonish Movement succeeded for a while in mobilizing many to creating a number of worker-owned cooperative organizations, others saw economic downturns as inevitable features of life, which, like a bad harvest or a storm, simply had to be weathered. For in spite of difficult conditions, particularly during the Great Depression, it was nevertheless possible for many rural households to “get by” and for some to thrive in the years under study here. Changing Coastal Economies The symbiosis between coastal commercial operations and tiny coastal communities, between the formal and informal economies, came under pressure towards the end of the period under study here. Coastal households at first adapted to the increasing commercialization of coastal resources that occurred in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, supplying more rural goods and labour for a largely international market, while still provisioning themselves directly from the land and the sea. But the rapid

The Coast  193 increase in commerce in the 1870–1940 period, hastened by the use of fossil fuels, put pressure on traditional forms of household support and local resources alike. By the 1940s, three interrelated factors were undermining rural coastal economies and communities: improved transportation, the consolidation of resource wealth into fewer hands, and resource depletion. There are some ironies in the story of the acutely destructive effect of improved transportation on rural coastal people. Fuel-powered ocean and rail transportation initially stimulated resource extraction and the diversification of the Eastern, Western, and Northern Coastal economies. The timing varied, but along the entire coast, and in a pattern we have seen across the country, the trains and new ships ended up facilitating the movement of resources and goods, capital, and, finally, labour out of rural places altogether. The issue was not only more powerful, labour-efficient, and weather-indifferent forms of transportation but also the changing economic systems that grew up with them in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Improved transportation led directly to the concentration of capital in fewer – and less local – hands. In the first stage, larger central Canadian and foreign operators merely bought up local coastal companies. Branch plants increased from just over 250 in 1891 to 1,000 in 1921. By 1891, the Dominion Cotton Mills Co. out of Montreal, for example, had already taken over most of the small cotton mills of Eastern Canada (most of which were on the coast or on waterways directly connected to the coast), mills that simply could no longer compete internationally as small independents. The process repeated with factories processing sugar, cordage, and glass. With centralized ownership, profits moved farther out of the region to central Canada or the United States. In the second stage of the transformation, factories themselves followed profits out of the region. Companies such as the Dominion Cotton Mills Co. of Montreal, like the

194  Canada’s Rural Majority corporate owners of glass and cordage industries throughout the Maritimes, realized that they could increase profits by cheaply transporting rural raw materials to urban centres for processing. Large corporations began to shut down their eastern branches and moved operations to central Canada, while small West Coast companies were absorbed into large corporations as well. The rural people who worked, often intermittently or seasonally, in these industries suffered, as did their somewhat richer and more urban local counterparts from this loss of industry. In some industries, such as mining and pulp and paper production, the promise of increased profits and the need for a stable workforce encouraged corporations to establish “company towns” in formerly rural places, to which workers and their families moved to find full-time work, generally with better pay and working conditions than before. Large corporations asked for and received highly favourable terms for establishing plants from provincial and federal governments that were eager to make revenue from leases, royalties and fees from these large corporate enterprises, and to “modernize” their provincial economies by increasing the role of waged work in resource extraction and processing. A pulp and paper mill in Corner Brook, a mine on Bell Island, or a large canning operation in Vancouver seemed to solve the problems of increasingly impoverished rural households and uncompetitive local industries, though sometimes only by getting rid of small rural communities altogether. But the steady work and increased standard of living offered by the town was seen as a very good thing by many, and at least in the short-to-medium term. A longer-term pattern established itself, however: as resources dwindled, companies closed down their factories and mills with depressing regularity, and corporations sought even more profitable resources to exploit, or businesses to invest in, elsewhere. This proved particularly devastating for small, single-resource towns. The concentration of capital itself increased the impact on coastal resources. As early as the 1850s, the increased

The Coast  195 commercialization of fishing had clearly reduced fish stocks off the East Coast. In response to increasing poverty due to the decreased catch, fishermen demonstrated the kind of resilience and adaptability so characteristic of rural peoples by moving from the single hook and baited line that was used in small boats to the more efficient double hook, then to cod traps and then, for those who could afford them, larger boats that increased their catch with even larger nets. This key response to rapidly depleting stocks (and the resulting decrease in credit or cash for rural fishermen and in profits for merchants and industrialists) on both the East and West Coasts has been called “gearing up.” This catch-all term refers to the process by which fishing gear with a low environmental impact and a low catch rate (such as a baited line with a single hook in a small rowboat) was replaced by higher-impact gear that provided a much larger catch (such as a diesel-powered ship with a winch-operated bottomtrawling net) in the attempt to remain competitive by catching more fish more quickly with less labour. International competition put increasing pressure on Canadian fishermen. They worked in ever-larger boats, which were more likely to be owned by ever-larger international canning corporations. Fishermen were able to travel greater distances to fish, were able to haul in more fish with the new power winches, and, as a result, dramatically increased the amount of “resource” that they caught. New seiners and trawlers no longer relied on fishermen’s knowledge of where the fish were or how best to get them to bite; they simply travelled to where the fish were located, and scooped them out of the ocean. Fish species declined and began to die out – setting the stage for yet another round of “gearing up” in international waters. Capital concentration and fossil fuels transformed logging as well. Men still had to go into the woods to take down the trees and haul them out, but in the logging industry on the West Coast, power boats and then trucks allowed men to travel to the woods for shorter periods of time, while

196  Canada’s Rural Majority ever-more powerful machines for cutting and moving trees allowed workers to move through an area more quickly. Clear-cut logging practices, which provided the greatest profits, began by the late 1930s, but proved devastating to coastal environments and to those who relied on them for part of their livelihood. On the East Coast in the 1870–1940 period, logging operations largely reflected conditions on the Shield: slow to mechanize but quick to exploit as many trees as possible using the extensive labour of rural men and their draught animals. Along the Arctic Coast, intense industrial exploitation of resources did not begin until the 1940s, when fossil fuels, specialized transportation equipment, and the influx of military personnel and infrastructure made it possible for those from outside the region to exploit resources on a large scale in the frigid environment of the Northwest Territories, the Far North, and Labrador. In the 1870–1940 period, the populations of the northern regions were largely concentrated along the ocean coast. They were small, and the majority were Indigenous peoples. Farther south, in Northern British Columbia, Aboriginal communities might be forced out of a coastal area by fishing or logging operations, only to return when the industrial work (much of which might have been done by local Aboriginal people) moved on. But as early as the 1870s, more permanent changes were taking place: key marine animals on which Northern Coastal peoples relied – whales, seals, muskox, caribou, foxes, walrus – had already been hunted to near extinction for markets far away, making it difficult for the local people to survive. The West Coast changed particularly quickly and dramatically in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as the rural population surged from 20,000 in 1881 to about 400,000 in 1941, with most of this rural population living on the southern coast near Vancouver and Victoria. First Nations communities were a significant coastal population in the late nineteenth century, though disease had drastically

The Coast  197 reduced their potential numbers. The incoming rural immigrants were mostly from Britain and the United States, but some of the rural population had immigrated from Scandinavia and other parts of Europe, Japan, China, and India. Many lived on farms or in tiny fishing villages with their families, following age-old patterns of seasonal occupation similar to those on the East Coast – and indeed the rest of rural Canada. By the early twentieth century, however, the British Columbia coast had a highly significant rural population – in terms of numbers and culture – that was single, male, and working seasonally in a variety of places up and down the coast, fishing and logging. Their homes and families were elsewhere, often in other regions, provinces, or countries. In some ways, this itinerant population behaved just as rural populations on both coasts had done for centuries – fishing, hunting, working in the woods, and migrating seasonally to do so. Some of the male resource workers were still part of a coastal household economy, working away from home for a few weeks or months as the needs of the household dictated. Farms throughout rural British Columbia, and most particularly in heavily populated rural coastal areas, sent their sons and fathers (and occasionally their mothers and daughters) to work seasonally in the woods and in the fisheries, just as Canadian rural families had always done. What was particularly notable on the West Coast was that a significant portion of the population was, for the first time on this scale, completely detached from the coastal ecology where their families lived: working seasonally in boats and with fishing gear owned by large corporate canning companies, or in corporately owned logging camps, and sleeping and eating in company work camps, they had no access to the free bounty of land or sea, and so no direct access to the varied kinds of support that typically maintained rural households. In the case of workers of Japanese, Chinese, and East Indian origins, increasingly racist laws prevented their owning land. For Aboriginal peoples, laws prevented them from fishing commercially even while large non–First

198  Canada’s Rural Majority Nations operations were taking large quantities of fish to feed people elsewhere. A new rural proletariat was emerging: for the most part male and single, free to move, and thus able to change jobs as opportunity arose. Independent as workers, they were cut off from provisioning themselves directly from land and sea – almost totally dependent, therefore, on wages from their employers. Devastating to both the informal economy of households and the sustainability of commercial interests alike was a third and related factor: resource failure. One cause was the intensified commercialization that increased the scale of logging, fishing, sealing, and whaling in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and put increasing, often unsustainable pressure on remaining stocks. Habitat destruction was another cause: cheap and easy transportation made it easy to reach coastal resources and export them, and coastal waterways also provided a convenient dumping ground – more accurately a sewer – for the massive volumes of unwanted by-products created by the harvesting, extraction, and industrial processing so newly and heavily concentrated along these water routes. Toxic tailings from mines, chemical pollution from pulp and paper mills, and sawdust from sawmills poisoned fish and other marine life, and those who ate them (including people). The flooding caused by hydroelectric dams released the soil’s mercury into the rivers, threatening the survival of phytoplankton that provided the foundation for all marine life and those that relied on it – including people. Airborne pollutants from coal mines and copper smelters destroyed trees and plants for miles around. Landscapes, including beaches and coastlines, were transformed by extensive mining and logging practices that caused massive erosion and yet more disruption of marine species in adjacent waters. A “flush and forget” ethos prevailed as many people, including scientists and many rural dwellers, believed that “dilution is the solution to pollution.” Perhaps they did not care, but it seems clear they simply could not believe that the rivers, let

The Coast  199 alone the vast oceans connected to them, could be seriously damaged by industrial activities. The sheer scale of the industrialized resource extraction enterprises located on coastal waters often overwhelmed the local ecosystems on which coastal people relied and would potentially threaten the survival of the oceans themselves as basic supports for marine life webs. Furthermore, those remaining in the rural areas of the Coast, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, East, North, and West, had ever-decreasing access to the ever-decreasing bounty of the Coast, a bounty that had provided a key pillar of support for rural households. Government regulations favoured the interests of large corporate operations, the overwhelming majority of which were owned by people living outside the region. As the twentieth century progressed, governments on both coasts were ever more inclined, on the one hand, to grant licences almost exclusively to large logging, mining, pulp and paper, and canning and fishing operations, and, on the other hand, to implement restrictive fishing and game laws directed at rural local people, particularly First Nations peoples. The incompatibility of intensive and extensive resource extraction activities with the land- and sea-based economies of rural peoples, and sometimes even among resource industries (e.g., fishing versus sawmills) was becoming apparent. Pollution and habitat destruction put pressure on animal, tree, and fish stocks already weakened by overfishing and harmful logging practices. Wealth, in the form of natural resources, was being removed from coastal areas, leaving behind dwindling rural communities with fewer viable economic strategies for survival, as their three pillars of support – commodity sales, waged work, and provisioning activities – were rendered more and more difficult. By the 1890s, the rural populations on the coast were already beginning to decline absolutely in the eastern Maritime provinces. After 1901, however, rural populations remained stable at over 50 per cent of the population in

200  Canada’s Rural Majority the Eastern Coastal provinces, and just under 50 per cent in the West Coast census districts until 1941. Rural people continued to adapt to what was often a rapidly changing menu of possibilities, as they had always done. The trajectory to rural depopulation was far from clear, even as signs of declining stocks and polluted habitats emerged in some areas. On farm and foreshore, fishing and logging continued to play significant roles in shaping and supporting rural households, and rural industries, in these years. Daily Life in Rural Coastal Places Farm and Foreshore Farming held a dominant place in coastal economies along the East and West Coasts. In all of the Atlantic provinces (except Newfoundland), farming was the largest single occupational category, and although it declined from the nineteenth century on, the 1941 census tells us that almost a quarter of the men in Nova Scotia, a third of those in New Brunswick, and almost two-thirds in Prince Edward Island worked in agriculture. In British Columbia, agriculture was sometimes the second- or third-largest occupational category in the 1911–41 period. The number of East Coast (Maritime) farms remained fairly stable until the 1930s, except in Nova Scotia, where there was a noticeable decline, while their average productivity increased with more improved hectares per farm. Farming provided the second-biggest gross value of production in the Maritimes between 1880 and 1940, second only to manufacturing. In British Columbia, agriculture grew most significantly in coastal areas, including the Fraser Valley (linked to the Pacific), the Lower Mainland, and Vancouver Island. While agricultural revenues increased significantly in the early twentieth century, particularly from the apple orchards of the Annapolis Valley and from farms like those in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia that provided milk, meat, eggs, butter, and cheese to some rapidly growing

The Coast  201 coastal cities, these too would decline in the post–Second World War period as refrigerated rail transportation made it cheaper for towns and cities to import more and more food from the United States or central Canada. Agriculture was not disappearing from coastal areas in the early twentieth century, but small-scale commercial agriculture was under stress, as it was in the rest of the country. By 1941, the first time the census included the categorization, the majority of farms in the East and West Coast provinces were designated “mainly subsistence” or “part-time” rather than commercially successful operations. Families were large on coastal farms, and the modern amenities that were beginning to appear on prosperous farms in central Canada by the early decades of the twentieth century did not appear in many coastal regions until much later. Most farms on the East Coast did not conform to the comfortable Prince Edward Island ideal depicted in Anne of Green Gables. By 1941, when 90 per cent of urban Canadian homes had indoor running water, only 12 per cent of Canadian farms did (9 per cent of farms in Prince Edward Island, 14 per cent in Nova Scotia, and 13 per cent in New Brunswick). While 20 per cent of farms across Canada had electricity by 1941, most of these were in southern Ontario. Throughout the Maritime provinces in 1941, over 80 per cent of homes were still being lit by kerosene lamps, and on both coasts wood provided over 90 per cent of farm homes with their cooking and heating fuel. While cash was often in short supply and modern amenities scarce relative to urban places, we should not be quick to assume that rural people anywhere in Canada understood themselves as living in poverty. Rural people may have had more limited choices about where they could obtain such amenities as light and power, but they had a broader base of activities, skills, and resources on which they could rely for support than many urban families with more cash. And as we have seen, they also made different choices about what to spend their money and their labour on. When the

202  Canada’s Rural Majority household provided economic support and not just rest and recreation, decisions about what to spend, and what to invest in, could be very different than those in other areas. Coastal farms and coastal homesteads differed from those in other kinds of rural places, existing not only along a continuum from provisioning to sales of commodities to waged labour, but as well along a spectrum of land-based to waterbased activities. For those families living close to the ocean shore, the water provided a dramatic addition to the range of activities and resources available to them. It also provided considerable dangers and uncertainties, including those of long voyages with no communication with those back home for months or years. As the old saying went in coastal communities, “There are three kinds of people in the world: the living, the dead, and those at sea.” Some rural coastal households certainly existed at one extreme or the other of the continuum from land to sea; whereas Inuit and some other northern First Nations got the bulk of their livelihood from the sea, some Prince Edward Island potato farmers did not fish at all. But most coastal households both fished and farmed, though in many differing ways in different seasons, in patterns that defined their rural lives. The foreshore, where the land met the sea, provided the point of contact between the two. The foreshore was the place where men and boys launched fishing boats, painted and cared for them, and unloaded fish. Farmers’ teams of horses were sometimes used to pull out boats, or to haul marine mammals, such as the beluga whales of the St. Lawrence, onto shore. The foreshore was the place where fishing nets were knitted, by local women on the East Coast and local Aboriginal women on the West. Here as well, men would mend the huge nets of cod traps and gill nets and care for them. Nets not only had to be washed regularly to keep their colour, but before the advent of synthetics, they also had to be dyed in huge vats with tree bark so that they would be invisible to fish, and then tarred for strength. On the foreshores of the East Coast, women, men, and children did the work of drying and salting the fish, using the wooden

The Coast  203 flakes and stages that the menfolk made from wood gathered during the winter for this purpose. On both coasts, women were a significant portion of the canning workforce, just under half of the 10,000 or so cannery workers on the East Coast and a third of the 7,000 or so on the West in the 1910–40 period. Aboriginal people and people of Japanese and Chinese origin worked in significant numbers on the West Coast only. Here is Rudyard Kipling’s evocative description of one of the small canneries in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1880s: A [cannery worker] jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and cast it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a rapid. Another [worker] pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can … [another] jammed the stuff into the cans … Each can was hastily tested for flaws, and then sunk, with a hundred companions, into a vat of boiling water, there to be half cooked for a few minutes … Except for the label, the “Finest Columbia Salmon” was ready for the market.3

Kipling went on to emphasize the striking juxtaposition of a highly industrialized workplace and the isolated, wilderness surroundings. In the Pacific Northwest, as across rural Canada, industrialization was a rural – not exclusively urban – phenomenon. The foreshore was also a place where people made the transition from land to water. Safe harbours were often difficult to find in poor weather, and predictably hard of access at particular times of day and tide. Where piers and wharves existed, a well-timed transfer from ocean to land could be smooth and uneventful; but for many rural people, boats always had to be hauled up over rocky shorelines, often under difficult and dangerous conditions. The lighthouse keeper on Candlebox Island off the coast of Nova Scotia recalled the difficulties of getting on and off the island with

204  Canada’s Rural Majority no dock: “The 18 ft. government boat can only be launched from the slip during the period from full tide to half tide; then again when the tide is half way in until full again.”4 Evelyn Richardson, who with her husband “kept the light” on Bon Portage Island, Nova Scotia, also recalled the difficulties of timing arrivals and departures to the tide, as well as clambering over seaweed-covered rocks in a cold rain, unloading supplies obtained only twice yearly from the mainland.5 Mr. Dawley, who had a small store in Ahousat on the west coast of Vancouver Island, relied on sealing schooners and steamships to transport what he had purchased from local First Nations peoples, including fish, seal skins, sacks of coal and barrels of fish oil, as well as imported goods such as flour, molasses, and tea (staples in coastal diets), and kerosene and gasoline. Everything had to be loaded and unloaded from a dugout canoe paddled out to the anchored ships, a trying process, as this letter hints: “arrived here at dark to night and blowing gale and raining = could not land goods to night but will do so in the morning.”6 The land on which a coastal homestead was located may not have been a commercially viable farm, but it would have had advantages, as historian Rosemary Ommer explains: “What to you and me is scrub and barrens on a bald landscape to the people of the cove is a pasture, a place to harvest blueberries, partridge berries, and bakeapples, or to set trap lines ... and a favourite place to hunt moose.”7 In the fishing communities, women performed myriad tasks, running the farms, helping with fish, and performing household chores. When men were away, sometimes for weeks at a time at their summer fishing or at a camp in the woods in winter, women were responsible for everything on the farm and homestead, including ploughing and cutting hay. As one urban visitor to a coastal Nova Scotia rural community in 1913 noted, with some disdain: The work in field and home was done almost entirely by the women. Early in the morning the men went fishing or visited their

The Coast  205 lobster pots; this duty done they usually slept for the remainder of the day, or walked about, hands in pockets, while their wives milked the cows, chopped the wood, or “broke it” as they said, planted potatoes and other vegetables, sheared the sheep and in the house wove cloth for blankets and clothing and prepared the meals. Needless to say, no man ever helped in washing up.8

Even in Newfoundland, where the soil was typically rocky and the season too short to grow most crops and vegetables, many households had a garden planted with the most trusty and hardy varieties of potatoes, cabbage, and carrots, as well as a small pasture for sheep, goats, and perhaps a cow. Some rural households lived in extreme isolation, others in tiny and remote outport villages. Lois Frost, for example, was cared for by her seven-year-old sister after their mother died when Lois was four, living in their draughty island home on the Tusket Islands, off Nova Scotia. Her father worked as a cook on a lobster boat and was away for long weeks at a time. She remembers suffering acutely from loneliness and sometimes hunger.9 Like a number of rural children, she did not attend school. Elizabeth Goudie described life as “pretty rugged for a girl in Labrador. In my day there was not much around except lots of hard work. We didn’t get much time for play.”10 Frank Nickerson of Nova Scotia remembers that he started fishing with his father when he was about eight years old, in the 1930s. He pursued many activities to help the household economy: “mossing” (for Irish moss), gathering kelp to dry for sale, picking cranberries, taking lobster to the cannery, catching herring, and hunting ducks and deer.11 While children played vital roles in households, their formal education remained a problem for those wanting to modernize rural coastal Canada in these years. Echoing the complaints of many administrators about rural households, coastal and otherwise, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, F.W. Rowe, minister of education in Newfoundland in the late 1950s and 1960s, summarized the problem this way:

206  Canada’s Rural Majority Traditionally we always had to ram education down the throats of large numbers of Newfoundland people. They were concerned with the fish, with the firewood, they were concerned with berry picking, with killing seals, with the extractive industries. As soon as a boy became big enough to get out on the flake or to get down on the stage, or to help his father in this way or that way with the vegetables, with anything else, he would be gone.12

It would not be until the collapse of rural coastal industries that education beyond the primary grades became significant, when for the first time it promised families an alternative to the old rural life by preparing them for urban jobs. Fishing Before gasoline-powered boats, fishing was a seasonal occupation in coastal Canada. Fisherman Harry Ennis of Newfoundland described the seasonal round of his life in the 1920s and 1930s. In the winter, he would prepare for the fishing season, selecting the different kinds of wood needed to build or repair the fishing stages and flakes and for use at the fishing camp throughout the spring and summer. “We’d also do a bit of hunting for rabbits and partridge to help out our meat stocks,” he recalled.13 As he put it, by the time March came round, the supplies of “rough food, like flour, sugar, molasses, salt beef, peas, beans, rolled oats, rice and tea” would be almost used up, making March “the Hungry Month.” At that point, “sealers were a welcome sight. When they arrived, we’d go to work, cleaning up the ships and curing the skins for two or three weeks to get some money to help in the house. It sure came in handy that time of year as there was little or none left from the last year’s fish supply.”14 Ennis, like many coastal fishermen, would travel to his summer fishing camp in early June, set his traps in the places where he knew fish could be caught, and fish throughout the summer months. The fisherman and his family dried the fish on the flakes (covered with branches

The Coast  207 to keep off the flies), then salted them to put in barrels. Many would fill out their year with winter work in the logging camps. Ryuichi Yoshida fished on the Pacific Coast from 1911 to 1919, slightly earlier than Ennis on the East Coast. Every May, Yoshida would travel by steamer with hundreds of other fishermen from Vancouver up to the Skeena River to work as an employee of a large cannery, fishing in the ocean for spring salmon, then in the river from June to August for sockeye. From the Skeena, smaller cannery steamboats would tow a collection of about twenty small gill-net craft (two fishermen to every boat: twenty-eight feet long and about six feet wide, open with no cabin) to where the fishermen wanted to set their nets. Boats and nets were owned by the cannery. As Yoshida explained, “You have to find where to go and when to put in your net; for high tide and low tide, when the wind is blowing and when it is calm … If you just put the net in without thinking you won’t catch many fish. Fishing is quite complicated … It all depends on tide-time.” One man, the boat puller, would work the oars, while the other would set the nets. As Yoshida describes it, they would stay out on the boat for six days at a time, spending Sundays back at the fishing camp: “We divided the boat in half. From the centre to the bow was for rowing, and for us to live and cook in.” They ate rice, bean paste, soya sauce, vegetables, and of course fish, and had a tank of fresh water to drink from and a tent to keep them dry when they were sleeping. From the centre of the boat to the stern was the area “for fish and for working the net, the gillnet [sic].” Until gasoline-powered winches took over the heavy work of lifting the heavy nets in later decades, taking in the net by hand was “very hard work unless you were young and strong.” A collector from the cannery would come and pick up their catch each day. At the end of the fishing season, Yoshida would take the money owing to him – always hoping, like Ennis, that the fish he had caught paid for more than the supplies that the company had “fronted” him. He

208  Canada’s Rural Majority travelled back to Vancouver or Steveston, where he would drink away most of his wages with his fellow Japanese fishermen before heading out to work as a logger for the rest of the year.15 The number and value of fish caught increased steadily between 1915 and the 1940s, but the number of fishermen remained fairly constant at around 54,000 to 69,000 on both coasts, with an additional 12,000 to 25,000 working in fish processing – highly significant, therefore, in terms of both the number of workers and value of goods. Men caught, and men and women processed, a wide range of fish on the East Coast, including Atlantic salmon, capelin, mackerel, scallop, sardines, flounder, turbot, hake, redfish, haddock, pollock, herring, plaice, and the supposedly inexhaustible staple, cod. Lobster and crab were caught and processed in canneries in large numbers on the East Coast from the late nineteenth century on. On the Pacific Coast, salmon, herring, halibut, and for a brief, highly profitable period, pilchard, were taken. The first big changes to the fisheries in the early twentieth century seemed positive: the advent of refrigeration, first on shore and then on ships, made it possible to increase the amount of fresh (then frozen) fish brought to market and for export, reducing the demand for salt cod. The first steam trawlers appeared on both coasts in 1908. By 1915, there were gasoline engines on 2,304 boats, making for “the latest and most successful mode of capturing large quantities of fish ever put into operation.” For the first time, it was possible for fishermen to get fish to shore and to market quickly “in spite of head winds or calms.”16 Fishermen’s fears about declining stocks resulted in government limitations on the number of huge steam trawlers in Canadian East Coast waters. This did not, however, stem the massive numbers of fish taken each year. While catches fluctuated considerably over these years, on average between 360 and 450 million kilograms of fish was smoke-cured, salted, pickled, or reduced (for oil and fertilizer) every year, about 60 per cent for export.

The Coast  209 The Coastal Forests Logging provided an important export commodity along both the East and West Coasts and a key form of waged employment for coastal households. The forests of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia had been heavily exploited by foreign commercial interests from the early nineteenth century. Coastal logging in British Columbia had been important to local interests from the 1860s. By 1899, Canada’s forest products amounted to more than a fifth of its entire export trade. But by the twentieth century many of the trees logged in the East Coast region were smaller trees, for use in the pulp and paper industry. The biggest logging operations on the Canadian coast in the 1870–1940 period were in coastal British Columbia. As logger and logging historian Ken Drushka summed up the process, “The essence of logging involves two basic tasks: knocking-’em-down and dragging-’em-out.”17 Forest workers in the 1870s and 1880s worked with limited tools and considerable skills and almost exclusively on the parts of the forests closest to the only transportation sites available in those days: riverbanks and ocean shores. Much like mining prospectors in the nineteenth century, many loggers on the West Coast (the Arctic has no harvestable trees, and logging had moved away from the East Coast by the 1880s) worked in small operations of two to three men, living for days and weeks in small shacks in the woods up and down the coast, with only axes and a couple of saws, and some food. Until 1888 there were no licences or leases for handlogging in British Columbia: “No one really cared who owned the timber the handloggers were taking. There was lots more out there, and if anyone objected, the itinerant handlogger moved on to another stand.”18 Many possessed a small boat to “cruise” for good timber stands that they would apply to the provincial government for licences to cut. They would cut timber with their double-bitted [two sided] axes on their own account, and build skidways and chutes on

210  Canada’s Rural Majority the hillsides to slip the big logs down to the water … The trees cut would be only those which ran 50 or 60 feet clear without a branch … The handloggers would make up their own booms and wait for a tug to go along up the coast after it. The logs would be scaled after they reached the mills on the Inlet and it was the quality of these logs which made the name of British Columbia famous in the lumber markets of the world.19

Sawmills financed many of these tiny operations, supplying the logger with food, boom chains, and other essential equipment, as well as arranging to tow the log booms.20 By the 1880s, the cross-cut saw was beginning to replace the axe, though some loggers continued to prefer the older, slower tool. The method of bringing down the trees changed dramatically only when fossil-fuel-powered chain saws came into common use in the 1940s. On the West Coast, the huge size of the trees presented serious obstacles to fallers and buckers alike. Loggers working with the huge trees began by cutting a deep notch in the direction that they wanted the tree to fall, sometimes clearing smaller trees out of the way. Working typically in pairs, the men then cut notches in the tree above the broadest part of the trunk, and put in springboards that they could use to stand on while making their cut back and forth across the trunk (the average length of saw used on the coast had to be around ten feet). If all went well, two to three hours later they would make the “falling cut” that would bring it down. But things often did not go well at this point. An upper branch might tear off, drop onto the fallers below, a common cause of death or serious injury. On impact a tree might bounce unpredictably and hit someone; “Smart fallers – the only kind to stay alive for long – learned to clear escape routes and locate a safe spot to hide when the tree came down.”21 With the tree on the ground, much work still remained. In larger, more specialized operations a separate “bucker” would measure out the size of logs wanted, typically between twenty-four and sixty feet in length. Following after him would be the “knotter and the sniper,” responsible

The Coast  211 for cutting any branches, removing the bark, and preparing the tree for the skids. The log was now ready for the second stage of the work: “the dragging ’em-out phase.” Handlogging on the coast marked the first phase of industrial logging in British Columbia. As logging moved farther from the slopes immediately above rivers or the ocean, new methods of transporting the logs had to be developed. As operations moved away from the water, oxen, and later horses, were the main source of power used to “yard” the logs to the skid road for hauling out of the forest. A teamster or “bull puncher” would work teams of oxen or horses, often as many as eight yoked in pairs together, to haul the log from where it had fallen to where the load of logs was waiting to be skidded on a steep chute to the beach, or to the beginning of the skid road. These were the roads built by the lumbermen, along which oxen or horses pulled the logs, preferably along downward-sloping land to the sawmill. By the 1880s, horses were being used along with the first “steam donkeys” – steam-powered, woodfuelled engines to power winches that would yard the log from the stump, at first with chains. Thus began the transformation of the logging industry with steam power. By the 1890s, manufacturers began producing steel cable that was both affordable and able to withstand the power of the new steam machinery and the abuse that it received working in the rock-infested mountain conditions. As logging operations moved farther and farther into the woods, all the new equipment and techniques became increasingly necessary. Along with the first steam donkeys came a series of changes, not so much in cutting the trees but in the different stages of bucking. Essentially, moving the logs was mechanized: the dragging from stump to the road (increasingly a railroad) with a “yarding machine”; then the loading with specialized machinery for hauling on the railway; and then the dumping of the logs at mill or beach. Around the time of the First World War, logging companies changed to incorporate high-lead and aerial yarding systems, which

212  Canada’s Rural Majority involved coordinating a complex, increasingly mechanized procedure for hauling out by means of overhead cables and pulleys. A specialized “high rigger” had the job of identifying an appropriate “spar tree,” and would then climb it to the height of thirty to forty-five metres, using only a rope encircling himself and the tree and spurs on his shoes. As one old logger described it, the spar tree was “rigged up with heavy yarding blocks placed at a high level, guyed for the heavy strain. In this way, the nose of the log was lifted clear and would ride over all obstructions without being held up en route, which so often happened with ground yarding through logged over areas.”22 High rigging was a dangerous and flamboyant job: “High riggers specialized in performing tricks while 120 feet up. Some were fond of handstands, some performed little dances, and some were given to urinating on the skidder crew below.”23 This form of logging revolutionized the industry by dramatically increasing (or maintaining) the volume of large high-quality logs that could be hauled out in any given week. Such massive logs barely exist anywhere anymore. The new techniques, powered by new and powerful fuels, accelerated the pace of work, making it not only more profitable but also much more dangerous. Opponents to the new process argued, furthermore, that this form of logging (a precursor to clear-cutting) was much more wasteful and more destructive to forest ecosystems than earlier, more selective practices: “The destruction of the remaining forest, combined with the large tops and limbs left in the slash, created an enormous fire hazard. Sparks thrown by the various steam boilers caused numerous fires that spread from slash to surrounding forests, consuming more timber than was logged in many years.”24 Nevertheless, for about half a century from the 1920s on, this form of elaborate yarding of logs dominated coastal logging. Further changes came indirectly because wartime accelerated technological change in automobile production, making

The Coast  213 the automobile more reliable and more inexpensive. Internal combustion engines were less likely than steam engines to create fires and so were quickly adopted by the logging industry, particularly as other gasoline-powered machines, particularly bulldozers, were making it easier to create roads through the heavily forested mountains. By the 1930s, improvements in rubber tires and truck-braking systems and the decreasing cost of trucks relative to railway engines had led to the decline of the railway phase of logging, and trucks began their (still-continuing) dominance in the transportation of logs. As logging and milling became more complex and began to rely on expensive machines and larger workforces, they became bigger businesses. They also stimulated business. Logging railways, for example, created demand for lumber to build them with. Unlike American states that sold lands to logging companies, Canadian provinces made the decision to only lease publicly owned lands (“Crown lands”) to logging interests, thereby ensuring a steady stream of revenue from renting it. Almost all logging in British Columbia was done on Crown lands – after 1905, on twenty-one year leases. In Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland, considerable tracts of land (and a larger proportion of their respective provinces) were also granted to private companies for years at a time, in return for licence and various other fees. Of course, such developments in the industry changed the conditions of work for loggers. In the early days of logging, the work was often done by a series of part-time and seasonal, if highly skilled workers. As in mining and fishing, many loggers relied on a series of other jobs, and in many cases a rural homestead somewhere else to return to, either at the end of the season or when growing family responsibilities required work closer to home. In his semiautobiographical novel Woodsmen of the West, Martin Grainger describes the scene in Vancouver in the early 1900s as the steamers arrived to transport loggers to and from “up the

214  Canada’s Rural Majority coast.” He notes that even for those closely tied to logging, other occupations could intervene: If logging is but the chief among your twenty trades and professions – if you are just the ordinary western logger – still the north-going Cassiar has great interest for you. Even your friend Tennessee, who would hesitate whether to say telegraph operator or carpenter if you asked him his business suddenly – even he may want to keep watch over the way things are going in the logging world.25

Over the first half of the twentieth century, the improvements in yarding and skidding made it possible to work yearround rather than seasonally in Western forests, creating the demand for a more stable, full-time, and well-coordinated workforce. With a more regular labour force came some better wages and working conditions: better accommodations began to prevail in work camps, with bedding and electric light provided, replacing the primitive conditions of pre–First World War logging operations. Bachelor traditions of heavy drinking, gambling, and irregular work habits that had defined logging culture became less acceptable. Some logging camps began to encourage families (and the stable workforce they would encourage) to live in permanent or semi-permanent homes, and sometimes in moveable camps. Floating houseboat camps, and as in northern Ontario some railway camps, were established in the 1920s and 1930s to accommodate families, and itinerant teachers provided schooling. Truck logging, growing slowly between the wars and booming thereafter, was related to the development of roads, which began to connect the remote logging areas, at first only accessible to the rest of the province by boat. Easier transportation made it possible for a growing number of loggers to work away from home for shorter periods. Yearly statistical data gathered by the dominion government indicate that in the years between 1908 and 1940,

The Coast  215 between 15,000 and 30,000 rural people listed themselves as lumbermen in the coastal provinces, with over 10,000 in British Columbia alone. A great many more worked seasonally or part-time in these years to produce an average of almost 9 million cubic metres of lumber per year, most of it coming from the Pacific Coast and about half of it exported. The lumber industry provided wages for men and their families, profits for international corporations, and fees and licences to augment provincial and federal revenues. While some declared that logging was “an orgy of waste. They’re skimming the cream of the forest, spilling half of it,”26 few spoke out against the devastation in the forests. As early as 1910, the Minister of Lands declared, “An epoch, sir, is drawing to a close – the epoch of reckless devastation of the natural resources with which we, the people of this fair young Province, have been endowed by Providence.”27 Anti-logging protesters of a much later era would not have agreed that the epoch ended in 1910, but many loggers and owners in the post–First World War period maintained that conditions were changing, and for the better. Conclusion Changes in the coastal environments and coastal economies of the 1870–1940 period brought challenges and opportunities for rural people. Rural households demonstrated the resilience and adaptability shown in other areas of rural Canada as they revised, tweaked, and sometimes reconsidered the three pillars of support on which they relied. Rural people provided the bulk of the labour needed for a variety of resource industries along three coasts, sometimes moving to the more secure labour opportunities in resource towns to do so. Many continued to rely on the time-tested three pillars of support, taking wages (cash or credit) from commercial fishing or logging operations, selling some commodities they found, grew or made in or near their homes and land, and relying at the same time on locally harvested

216  Canada’s Rural Majority food and fuel for their support. While environmental and economic changes were beginning that would, eventually, change the balance of rural life away from the old economy and society, in this time period, the resilience and adaptability of rural coastal households was usually equal to the task of supporting households, industries, and communities through the mixed and variable economic livelihoods on Canada’s long ocean coast.

7 Conclusion

Between 1870 and 1940, Canada had a thriving, expanding rural economy, culture, and society. In many ways, this era was rural Canada’s heyday: the number of farms grew to its peak in 1940, and the rural population continued to increase, even though the other story – the growth of urban industrialization – caused a lot of comment then, and has received much attention from Canadian historians since. Variety and change characterized the lives and the work of the rural majority. This was, in part, because rural people lived and worked intimately (and often dangerously) with and within their local environments, with the land, water, and weather that provided their livelihood and established their daily and seasonal rhythms. As the regional organization of this book has highlighted, the material world that rural people encountered when they stepped out of their back doors – whether on the Shield, or in the populous St. Lawrence Valley/Great Lakes region, or in the Prairies, or on the Coasts, or in the Mountains – mattered profoundly to what they did and how they did it. Variety and change came not only from the very different local environmental

218  Canada’s Rural Majority conditions across the country, however, but also from the complex demands and opportunities of the market, including local, regional, national, and international ones. The goods that rural people raised, harvested, gathered, processed, consumed, and transported varied and changed as well, as did their methods of selling, buying, and exchanging them. Rural skills, knowledge, and expertise often provided the best hedge against the insecurities inherent in working with nature outdoors, a fact that employers and merchants in a variety of trades and resource industries recognized full well and turned to good advantage. Rural people were not isolated from the great technological, social, and economic changes of the 1870–1940 period; indeed, their labour and their products were integral to the growth and development of Canadian urban and industrial society. Throughout these years, the rural household had a structure flexible and robust enough to accommodate and adapt in ways that were vital to the growth of the Canadian economy and its society. Although rural people, like urban people, responded to changing and varied local and international conditions, this book has argued that rural Canadians nevertheless had a coherent and distinct culture, or way of life, that distinguished them as a group from the urban society growing up with them, even during this time of change. For like the ethnic, class, gender, and regional lenses that can illuminate elements of social and economic experience, meaningful generalizations can be made about differences between rural and urban people as two separate, clearly differentiated groups. Notwithstanding the variations that defined their lives over time and in different places – and notwithstanding the impossibility throughout most of this era to unite these similarities into a single coherent political rural cause or interest group – rural people shared a range of experience and different kinds of experience in the course of their everyday lives that marked and defined them. Key components of their experience included the tendency of rural people

Conclusion  219 to spend a lot more time outdoors, engaging physically and directly with their environment, and for a variety of purposes. It was not only the amount of time rural people spent outside that helped to define their experience but also the range of skills and the kinds of local knowledge they drew upon in the process that increasingly distinguished them from their urban counterparts as the twentieth century progressed. A second defining element of rural experience in the years under study here lay in the foundational structure of rural economic life: the economic activities of rural Canadians remained rooted in land-based (or water-based) households. Most rural people owned, or had inexpensive, secure access to their own land (and the bounty of the land and sea nearby) on which they lived and worked. The experience of work that sustained the rural household was generally much more varied, complex, and diverse than that of urban people, and relied much more heavily on the unwaged, gender-segregated, and hierarchical society of the entire family. As noted throughout, the rural household is best imagined as relying on three very different pillars of economic support: waged labour (typically part-time, seasonal, outdoors, and varied), a wide variety of self-provisioning activities from the local environment (such as hunting, fishing, gardening, wood cutting, fence building, and butter making), and on the sale of a range of commodities, also generally from the local environments of land and sea (such as timber, berries, wheat, maple syrup, fish, whale oil, and caviar). These differences may not have united rural people as a coherent political or social group, but they did create a sense of recognition, familiarity, and even coherence that rural people drew upon to contrast their lives to those in the rapidly growing urban economy, society, and culture. This commonality of experience created coherence even as rural people continued to be divided by ethnic divisions, family quarrels, and gender hierarchies within their households, and by political difference, economic inequalities, and regional rivalries among them.

220  Canada’s Rural Majority The end of the Depression – when farm cash incomes and commodity prices in some areas had plunged to almost zero before recovering somewhat before the end of the 1930s – marks the end of the period under study here. The “crisis in the countryside,” real and imagined, has long been identified with the pull that the higher wages of city work exerted, and by the late 1940s, urban life had become more stable and less dangerous as government regulations and a general increase in the standard of living improved the health and safety of both workplace and home. The Second World War was of course a great catalyst of change in economics and also social politics. Perhaps most significantly, by the 1950s a coherent series of social welfare policies was, for the first time, providing the kind of economic security for individual workers and households that in earlier years had been offered only by rural land ownership and the family structure. As cities changed, so did rural life. Economies of scale initiated by global trade, increased competition, and powerful new means of improving productivity in rural workplaces became more available, disrupting earlier, smaller-scale, and often more informal strategies and practices. For some farm and fishing families, this meant becoming competitive in the new global economy, expanding their operations, and purchasing labour-saving appliances and machinery that decreased the amount of physical labour while increasing productivity and incomes. For most, the changing scale of modern farming was ultimately unpalatable or unaffordable; some rural families struggled to get by on the land and sea as they had done before, even as their traditional pillars of support – self-provisioning, part-time waged work, and the sale of now-uncompetitive products – were eroded by diverse factors, from suburbanization, the decline of rural industries, and the increase in full-time employment to pollution, resource depletion, and stricter game regulations. By the 1960s, absolute and not just relative rural poverty

Conclusion  221 had become a subject of considerable social and political concern in Canada. The changing nature of rural life, and the new opportunities of the urban, tipped the balance for many people, eventually convincing a majority to move off the land and into towns and cities where they could begin a new way of life. This book has explored just how different that world is from the world they had known before. It was a way of life that had characterized the country, reached its apogee from 1870 to 1940, and then drew to a close in the aftermath of the Second World War.

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Notes

Chapter One 1 John Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 2 Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 11. 3 Royce MacGillivray, The Slopes of the Andes: Four Essays on the Rural Myth in Ontario (Belleville, ON: Mika Publishing, 1990), 45.

Chapter Two 1 W.L. Morton, “The Geographical Circumstances of Confederation,” Canadian Geographic Journal 70, no. 3 (1965): 74–87. 2 Ian Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 20. 3 Quoted in Frank Tough, “Depletion by the Market: Commercialization and Resource Management of Manitoba’s Lake Sturgeon (Acipenser Fulvescens), 1885–1935,” in Diane Newell and Rosemary Ommer, eds., Fishing Places, Fishing People, Traditions and Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fishing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 115.

224  Notes to pages 46–60 4 A.R.M. Lower, Settlement and the Forest Frontier in Eastern Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1936), 28. 5 Roy MacGregor, A Life in the Bush: Lessons from My Father (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1999), 81. 6 Quoted from “Paddockwood Pow-Wow, 1965” (no author) in Merle Massie, “When You’re Not from the Prairie: Place History in the Forest Fringe of Saskatchewan,” Journal of Canadian Studies 44, no. 2 (2010): 179. 7 A. Gosselin and G.P. Boucher, Settlement Problems in Northwestern Quebec and Northeastern Ontario, Economics Division Publication no. 758, Technical Bulletin no. 49. Ottawa. Issued February 1944, 50. 8 Interview from Musée de la mémoire vivante (MMV); Mr. Donat Bourgault, Interview by: Mélodie Lachance / AnneMarie Bourgault; Date: 2010–03–22; Interview number: 2010-0012. 9 Quoted in Françoise Noël, Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario: The Interwar Years (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 58–9. 10 Interview from Musée de la mémoire vivante (MMV), Mrs. Jeanne Lévesque; Date: 2009–06–29; Interview number: 2009-0087. 11 Noël, Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario, 64. 12 Interview from Musée de la mémoire vivante (MMV); Mr. Donat Bourgault, Interview by: Mélodie Lachance / Anne-Marie Bourgault; Date: 2010–03–22; Interview number: 2010-0012. 13 Gosselin and Boucher, Settlement Problems in Northwestern Quebec and Northeastern Ontario, 50–1. 14 Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses, 25, 27. 15 A.R.M Lower, The North American Assault on the Canadian Forest: A History of the Lumber Trade Between Canada and the United States (Toronto: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1938), 5. 16 Donald McKay, The Lumberjacks (Toronto: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1978), 57. 17 Edmund Bradwin, The Bunkhouse Man (1922; reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 49–50. 18 Ibid., 77. 19 A. Fitzpatrick, The University in Overalls: A Plea for Part-Time Study (Toronto: Hunter-Rose Co., 1920), 5. 20 Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses, 66.

Notes to pages 61–82  225 1 McKay, The Lumberjacks, 85. 2 22 Ibid., 91. 23 Bradwin, Bunkhouse Man, 49. 24 McKay, The Lumberjacks, 107. 25 Radforth, Bushworkers and Bosses, 65. 26 Nancy Langston, “‘What Happened to the Lake Trout?’ Land Use, Pollution, Sea Lampreys and Climate Change in Lake Superior” (paper presented at the “Border Flows: A BiNational Symposium and Workshop on Water Relations along the Canada–U.S. Border,” Kingston, ON, 17–19 August 2012).

Chapter Three 1 Sheriff Ruttan of Cobourg, in a speech at the Provincial Exhibition in Kingston in 1849, Journal and Transactions of the Board of Agriculture for Upper Canada for 1855-6: 97, quoted in Robert Leslie Jones, The History of Agriculture in Ontario, 1613–1880 (1946; reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 214. 2 W.H. Graham, Greenbank: In the Country of the Past (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1988), 2. 3 Ibid. 4 Serge Courville, Quebec: A Historical Geography (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 166. 5 J.S. Woodsworth, “The Rural Home: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” in Studies in Rural Citizenship Designed for the use of Grain Growers’ Associations, Women’s Institutes, Community Clubs, Young Peoples Societies and similar organizations and groups desirous of obtaining an intelligent view of rural life in Canada with its various needs and possibilities (Winnipeg: n.p., n.d. [1916?], 36. 6 Judge Emily Murphy, “The Dual Problem of Modern Social Organization: The City – the Problem of Congestion; the Country – The Problem of Isolation” Social Welfare, III: 2 November 1920, 38. 7 Beth Good Latzer, “Myrtleville: A Canadian Farm and Family, 1837–1967 (Canadian Edition, 1980), 236–7, cited in Charles M. Johnston, “‘A Motley Crowd’: Diversity in the Ontario Countryside in the Early Twentieth Century,” Canadian Papers in Rural History 7 (1990): 237–56.

226  Notes to pages 83–113 8 Reverend Simpson, “The Shack on the Hill,” Social Welfare 3 (2 November 1920): 55–6. 9 Woodsworth, Studies in Rural Citizenship, 31. 10 National Farm Radio Forum Fonds, M28 I68 vol 24 D5, Library and Archives Canada. 11 Interview #13, Marieve Isabel Collection, R.W. Sandwell, “Heat, Light and Work in Canadian Homes Oral History Collection,” June 24, 2010. 12 Woodsworth, Studies in Rural Citizenship, 36. 13 Loris S. Russell, Handy Things to Have Around the House: Oldtime Domestic Appliances of Canada and the United States (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979), 29. 14 Farmer’s Advocate 47, 14 November 1912; cited in Monda Halpern, And On That Farm He Had a Wife: Ontario Farm Women and Feminism, 1900–1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 28. 15 Royce MacGillivray, The Slopes of the Andes: Four Essays on the Rural Myth in Ontario (Belleville, ON: Mika Publishing, 1990), 36. 16 Russell, Handy Things, 81. 17 W.H. Greenbank: In the Country of the Past (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1988), 250. 18 Ibid., 289–90. 19 MacGillivray, The Slopes of the Andes, 29. 20 Ethel Chapman, “Machinery for Women: Why It Pays,” Farmers’ Magazine, 1 December 1918, 54, quoted in Halpern, And On That Farm He Had a Wife, 33. 21 Paraphrased from Graham, Greenbank, 248–9. 22 Marvin McInnis, “Women, Work and Childbearing: Ontario in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Histoire sociale/ Social History 24, no. 48 (1991): 237–62.

Chapter Four 1 Archibald Campbell and Captain W. J. Twining, Reports Upon the Survey of the Boundary between the Territory of the United States and the Possessions of Great Britain from the Lake of the Woods to the Summit of the Rocky Mountains (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1878), 63, cited in Barry Potyondi, In Palliser’s Triangle:

Notes to pages 127–51  227  Living in the Grasslands, 1850–1930 (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing, 1995), 21–2. 2 Joy Oetelaar, “George Lane: From Cowboy to Cowboy King,” in Simon Evans, Sarah Carter, and Bill Yeo, eds., Cowboys, Ranchers and the Cattle Business: Cross-Border Perspectives on Ranching History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2000), 49. 3 Cecilia Danysk, Hired Hands: Labour and the Development of Prairie Agriculture, 1880–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 96n44. 4 Quoted in Danysk, Hired Hands, 90. 5 Nanci Langford, “First Generation and Lasting Impressions: The Gendered Identities of Prairie Homestead Women” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 1994), 52. 6 Elaine Leslau Silverman, The Last Best West: Women on the Alberta Frontier, 1880-1930 (1984; reprint, Calgary: Fifth House, 1998), 123. 7 Langford, “First Generation and Lasting Impressions,” 56. 8 Sara Sundberg, “Farm Women on the Canadian Frontier: The Helpmate Image,” in C.M. Wallace, R.M. Bray, and A.D. Gilbert, Reappraisals in Canadian History: Post Confederation (Toronto: Pearson Canada, 1998), 58. 9 Roman Paul Fodchuk, Zhorna: Material Culture of the Ukrainian Pioneers (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006), xiv. 10 Silverman, The Last Best West, 30. 11 Langford, “First Generation and Lasting Impressions,” 82, 86. 12 David C. Jones, Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry Belt (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1987), 111.

Chapter Five 1 British Columbia: British Columbia, the Mineral Province of Canada, being a Short History of Mining in the Province, a Synopsis of the Mining Laws in force, Statistics of Mineral Production to Date and a Brief Summary of the Progress of Mining During 1906 (Victoria: Bureau of Mines 1907), 7, cited in Jeremy Mouat, Roaring Days: Rossland’s Mines and the History of British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1995), 8n15. 2 Michael MacGowan, Hard Road to Klondike (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 113, translated from the Irish by Valentin Iromonger.

228  Notes to pages 152–70 3 Ibid., 114. 4 Victoria Daily Colonist, 8 June 1869, 3, cited in John Belshaw, Colonization and Community: The Vancouver Island Coalfield and the Making of the British Columbian Working Class (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002), 109–10. 5 Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 47. 6 Report of the Royal Commission re: Coal in British Columbia (Victoria: Queen’s Printer, 1914), 72, cited in John R. Hinde, When Coal Was King: Ladysmith and the Coal Mining Industry on Vancouver Island (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003), 12. 7 Report of the Royal Commission, 12, 27. 8 R. Cole Harris, “Industry and the Good Life around Idaho Peak,” in Patricia Roy, ed., A History of British Columbia: Selected Readings (Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman, 1989), 300–1. 9 MacGowan, Hard Road to the Klondike, 119. 10 Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 11. 11 Hinde, When Coal Was King, 71. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 77. 14 Liza Piper, “Subterranean Bodies: Mining the Large Lakes of North-west Canada, 1921–1960,” Environment and History 13, no. 2 (2007): 157. 15 W.M. Elofson, “Adapting to the Frontier Environment: The Ranching Industry in Western Canada, 1881–1914,” in Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. 8 (1992): 311n33; Cross papers, file 468, A.E. Cross to W.M. Bell Macdonald, 16 November 1906. 16 Ibid., 312–13. 17 Ibid., 313. 18 Harry Marriott, Cariboo Cowboy (Sidney, BC: Gray’s Publishing, 1966), 46. 19 Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007). 20 David Dendy and Kathleen M. Kyle, A Fruitful Century: The British Columbia Fruit Growers’ Association, 1889–1989 (Kelowna: British Columbia Fruit Growers’ Association, 1990), 30.

Notes to pages 170–205  229 21 W.H. Hayward et al., Full Report of the Royal Commission on Agriculture (Victoria: King’s Printer, 1914), 15, cited in Dendy, A Fruitful Century, 31. 22 Percy Mason, cited in Dendy, A Fruitful Century, 31. 23 Hilda Ogden, Procter, BC, fruit grower, cited in Joan Lang, Lost Orchards: Vanishing Fruit Farms of the West Kootenay (Nelson, BC: Ward Creek Press, 2003), 98–9. 24 Martin Robin, The Rush for Spoils: The Company Province, 1871– 1933 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 27–8.

Chapter Six 1 Elizabeth Goudie, Woman of Labrador (Toronto: Peter Martin Press, 1973), 163. 2 Cited in James Hiller, “Newfoundland Confronts Canada, 1867–1949,” in E.R. Forbes and D.A. Muise, The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, and Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1993), 363. 3 Rudyard Kipling, American Notes, “Punjab ed.” (London: Standard, 1930), 84–5. 4 Caroline B. Norwood, Life on the Tusket Islands: Stories and Photos Showing Life on the Tusket Islands Then and Now (Westport, NS: Norwood Publishing, 1994), 19. 5 Evelyn M. Richardson, We Keep a Light (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 1954). 6 Margaret Horsfield, Voices from the Sound: Chronicles of Clayoquot Sound and Tofino, 1899–1929 (Nanaimo: Salal Books, 2008), 12. 7 Rosemary Ommer, “Rosie’s Cove: Settlement Morphology, History, Economy and Culture in a Newfoundland Outport,” in Diane Newell and Rosemary Ommer, eds., Fishing Places, Fishing People: Traditions and Issues in Canadian Small-Scale Fishing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 20. 8 Phosa Kinley’s account of Kennington Cove village, first published in 1943 but written in 1913; a typical Cape Breton fishing village as described in Phosa Kinley, “Kennington Cove, Cape Breton,” The Maritime Advocate and Busy East (May 1943), 25–6, 31; cited in Brian Tennyson, Impressions of Cape Breton (Cape Breton: Cape Breton University Press, 1986), 243.

230  Notes to pages 205–15 9 Norwood, Life on the Tusket Islands, 55–6. 10 Goudie, Woman of Labrador, 14. 11 Norwood, Life on the Tusket Islands, 62–3. 12 Cited in Mike Corbett, “A Protracted Struggle: Rural Resistance and Normalization in Canadian Educational History,” Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 13, no. 1 (2001): 37. 13 Harry Ennis, St. John’s testimony in Frances Ennis, Sheila McMurrich Koop, Susan Shiner, and Carol Wherry, A Way of Life: Traditional Skills of Newfoundland and Labrador (St. John’s, NL: Jesperson Press, 1986), 75. 14 Ibid., 77. 15 The preceding paragraph is paraphrased and quoted from Rolf Knight and Maya Koizumi, A Man of Our Times: The Life History of a Japanese Canadian Fisherman (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1976), 20–5. 16 Frank D. Adams, The National Domain in Canada and Its Proper Conservation (Ottawa: Commission of Conservation Canada, 1915), 29, 30. 17 Ken Drushka, Working in the Woods: A History of Logging on the West Coast (Vancouver: Harbour Publishing, 1992), 32. 18 Ibid., 43. 19 Tom MacInnis, Vancouver resident and journalist, cited in Drushka, Working in the Woods, 31. 20 Eustace Smith, cited in Drushka, Working in the Woods, 48. 21 Drushka, Working in the Woods, 35. 22 Eustace Smith, cited in Richard Mackie, Island Timber: A Social History of the Comox Logging Company, Vancouver Island (Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 2000), 64. 23 Mackie, Island Timber, 68. 24 Drushka, Working in the Woods, 108. 25 M. Allerdale Grainger, Woodsmen of the West (Toronto: New Canadian Library, 1964), 15. 26 Bertrand Sinclair, Inverted Pyramid (Toronto: Frederick Goodchild, 1924), 97, cited in Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 330. 27 British Columbia Lumberman, 12, March 1928, 20, cited in Barman, The West Beyond the West, 330.

References and Further Reading

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Index

Aboriginal peoples. See Indigenous peoples agricultural colleges, 81–2, 83 agricultural equipment industry, 79 agricultural settlement: in British Columbia, 161–72; on the Canadian Shield, 46–55; in coastal areas, 200–1; in the St. Lawrence Valley and Southern Great Lakes region, 67–104; on the Prairies, 120–8, 128–39. See also agriculture agriculture: changing nature of, 68; conflicts with hunting/gathering and ranching, 112–25; daily/ seasonal round of farm work, 51–2, 89–91, 97–8, 129–30, 165–7; rural nonfarm population, 100–2, 148, 161–2, 172. See also agricultural settlement; agriculture and population

statistics; commodities; farming; ranching; rural; wheat agriculture and population statistics: 3–4, 9–10; in British Columbia, 146, 148, 161–2, 169, 173, 184; on the Canadian Shield, 34–6, 48–50; in coastal communities, 200–6; in Ontario and Quebec, 67–8, 73–4; on the Prairies, 106–7, 136 agri-forestry, 17; in British Columbia Interior, 159–61; on the Canadian Shield, 31, 32, 33, 36–41, 46–51, 55; in coastal Canada, 188, 190, 194–6, 209–15; in southern Ontario and Quebec, 102 automobiles, 13, 53; factors limiting the use of, 54. See also tractors; transportation autoneige, 54

248 Index barbed wire, 126, 165, 166 barns, 94–7, 98 barter, 53, 92. See also labour, reciprocal exchanges bees. See labour, reciprocal exchanges bison: buffalo robes, 114; hunting and conflicts with farming and ranching, 112–17 Bradwin, Edmond (The Bunkhouse Man, 1922), 60 buffalo. See bison bunkhouse life: on the Canadian Shield, 56–63 bushworkers, 56–63. See also labour butter. See dairy cash: and gender, 92–4; role in rural life, 13, 23–5, 50–1, 53–4, 91–2, 167, 201, 215. See also staples: as purchased by the household cattle. See ranching cheese. See dairy children, 14, 61, 63, 97, 134, 137, 202; and schooling, 14, 21, 205–6, 214 class: difficulties of establishing class position of rural Canadians, 5, 56, 85, 218. See also cash; politics, rural; rural: reform; standards of living clay belt: agricultural settlement on, 46–55

Colpitts, George (Pemmican Empire, 2015), 113–14 commodities: bison products, 112–16; on the Canadian Shield, 48–9; in coastal areas, 206–15; gendered roles of, 92–4; the Prairie wheat farm, 128–39; production and sale of, 4–5, 12, 18–19; purchase of and rural life, 23–4; ranching, 122–8; in southern Ontario and Quebec, 74–6 communication, 7–8 conservation, 40, 44–5, 117; Commission of Conservation, 155 cooking, 52–3, 88–9. See also food; fuel credit, 48, 51, 189–91, 195 Crown lands. See land dairy: butter production, 92–4; changing gendered roles in, 92–4; cheese production, 93–4; mechanization of, 92–3; role in household, 92 Danysk, Cecilia (Hired Hands, 1995), 132 disease: blights, rusts, and insect infestations on Canadian Prairies, 137–8, 140; in British Columbia, 171; and cattle, 124–5, 126, 166–7; and Indigenous populations 6, 43–4, 113,

Index  249 119, 144–5, 196. See also pests; weeds distance, 7–8; and modernity, 156–7 Dominion Bureau of Statistics: definition of rural, 9 Dominion Land Act, 121–2 ecological knowledge, local: nature and importance of, 20, 111–12, 219 electricity: absence of rural supply, 50, 53, 90; in coastal areas/ industries, 187, 201; ecological impact of, 39–40; generation of on the Canadian Shield, 34, 39; in the mines, 158; in Prairie provinces, 135; and women’s work, 82–3 energy: on the Canadian Prairies, 135–6; and gender conflicts, 96–7; and growth of the modern world, 80; human and animal: – in the logging industry, 58–9, 61; – in coastal industries, 184; modern networks of, 8, 24; and the modern woman, 82–3; and rural life, 27. See also electricity; fuel; heat; lighting; wood environment: importance to daily life, 14; and organization of this book,

26; particular regions: – Canadian Central Plain, 108–12; – Canadian Shield, 31–4, 42–6, 51, 57–9; – Coast, 178–81; – Great Lakes/St. Lawrence region, 71–2, 103; – Mountains, 141–3, 166–7; 147–9, 166–7 environmental damage: to BC agricultural lands, 171–2; to coastal ecosystems, 187, 195, 198; costs of Canadian Shield industries, 39, 41–2, 44–6, 63–4; forestry industry damage, 160–1, 187, 195, 198, 215; to Prairie ecosystems, 125–6, 137–9. See also habitat destruction; land ethnicity, 27 experimental farms, 82 families: in British Columbia, 173; on the Canadian Shield, 49, 62–3; in coastal areas, 200–6, 214; life course, importance of, 7, 54; nature and composition of rural, 20–4; as risk absorbers in rural capitalist economies, 37–8, 140, 190. See also children; household; labour; women farming, 83–4; conflicts with hunting and gathering, ranching, 115–17, 125–6;

250 Index conflicts with Indigenous peoples, 115–17, 125–6; conflict with pulp and paper industries; 37–9; daily/seasonal round of farm work, 51–2, 89–91, 97–8, 129–30; dryland farming, 126; economic problems of farming, 50–1, 54–5, 79–85, 137–9, 171–2, 190; farm abandonment, 49, 55; and political action, 85, 118–20, 138–9, 191–2. See also agricultural settlement; agriculture and population statistics fertilizers, 33, 116, 132 fieldwork: on mixed farms, 97–9; on the Prairie wheat farm, 128–39 fire, 39, 137, 161, 167, 212; barn fire protection, 96 First Nations. See Indigenous peoples fishing: coastal, 180–1, 186, 199, 202–3, 206–8; commercial fishing, 39–40, 44–5; environmental consequences of overfishing, 44–6, 195, 196, 199, 208; Indigenous fishing, 42–3, 45–6, 197, 199; processing industries, 186, 202–3, 207, 208; rights, 13, 40, 188, 197; sports fishing, 39–40, 44–5, 199; women fishers, 42–3

Fitzpatrick, A. (University in Overalls: A Plea for Part-Time Study, 1920), 56, 60, 63 food: canned food, 51, 76, 186, 203; canning and other food processing, 52, 186, 202–3, 207; global food supplies and the Great Land Rush, 5–6, 7, 106–7; Indigenous suppliers of, 153; local rights to, 12–13; production of (see food production); and resource industries on the Canadian Shield, 36–8, 40, 58–9, 153; women’s work in, 52–3, 88–92, 132–2. See also cooking; refrigeration; selfprovisioning; starvation food production: consumption, sales, purchase, and rural life, 12–14, 42–3, 51–3, 132; on the Canadian Shield, 51–3, 64, in southern Ontario and Quebec, 74–6, 90–1 forests and forestry: boreal forest, 110–11; in British Columbia, 159–61; on the Canadian Shield, 36–9, 46– 55, 56–63; on the coasts, 186, 209–15; conflict with Indigenous land use, 45–6, 159, 162–3; labour of rural men and animals in, 17, 215; pollution and environmental damage

Index  251 from, 37, 63–4, 160–1, 195–6, 198, 212, 215. See also bunkhouse life; labour fuel, 7, 12, 19; buffalo chips, 135; changing use and rural life, 27, 40, 193; for heating and cooking, 12, 13, 19, 52, 160; rural people’s free access to, 40, 54; wood production in Prairie provinces, 107, 109. See also gasoline; sawmills; wood fur trade: on the Canadian Central Plain, 106, 110, 112–17; on the Canadian Shield, 32, 35, 42–6; in the Coastal region, 177, 182, 184, 185; decline of, 43–5, 116–18; in the Mountains, 143, 144, 146, 163; and pemmican, 113–14 gasoline: advantages over steam, 78, 213; bulldozers, 213; chain saws, 210; engines, 14, 34, 37, 40, 53, 70, 77–8, 177; environmental impact, 161, 195; in fishing, 195, 206, 207, 208, 213; impact on local economies, 37, 40, 193; lighting, 89; in logging, 161, 213; replacing horses, 78, 132; transportation of, 204. See also automobiles;

mechanization; tractors; transportation Gaudie, Elizabaeth (Woman of Labrador, 1973), 189 grazing leases: in British Columbia, 164; in the Prairies, 124–6. See also ranching Great Land Rush, 6–7, 107–8 habitat destruction: in British Columbia 161, 166–7; on the Canadian Shield, 39–42, 44–7, 63–4; on the Central Plain, 115–17, 125–6, 137–8; in Coastal Canada, 187, 196–9, 215 harvest excursions, 130–2 heating: car heating, 54; home heating, 52; 88; water heating, 88–9; sawdust for heating and cooking fuel, 160. See also fuel; wood homesteading: on the Coast, 202–4; Indigenous exclusion from, 46, 117; on the Prairies, 121–3, 126, 136–8; on the Shield, 36, 46–55; in the Mountains, 161–3 horses, 14; in the export industry, 165; labour of, 17, 76–8, 106; in the logging industry, 58–9, 61, 211; in Prairie wheat farms, 131–3; in the ranching industry, 165–6. See also transportation

252 Index horsepower as stationary power source, 76–7 household: in British Columbia resource economy, 173–4; centrality in rural life, 11, 20–4, 37–8, 54, 202; changes with the pulp and paper industry, 36–9; role in coastal resource industries, 189–90. See also families; household, labour household, labour: on the Canadian Shield, 49, 63; in mining communities, 152–5; on the Prairie wheat farm, 139–40; in southern Ontario and Quebec, 86–94 housing: on Canadian Prairies, 134–5; on the Canadian Shield, 51–4; coastal homes, 204–5; in resource work camps, 59–60; in southern Ontario and Quebec, 86–9 Hudson’s Bay Company, 43, 105, 118, 121; Canada’s purchase of lands from, 118 hunting: on the Canadian Shield, 42–6; in Coastal communities, 184, 199; conflicts with agriculture, ranching, 112–18, 119–20; and extinctions, 41, 44, 113–17, 138, 184–5, 196; Prairie bison hunting,

112–15; rights, 112–13; sports fishing and hunting, 39–40, 44–5; trapping, 188–9 hydroelectricity. See electricity ice: in British Columbia’s mountains, 148; and the Canadian Shield, 32–3, 58; in creation of the Central Plain, 109–10; ice boxes, 91; ice cutting, 52, 54; ice houses, 91; the northern coast, 179; permafrost, 32–3; role on logging roads, 61–2 immigration/immigrants, 6–7; to Canadian Prairies, 121–2, 134; on the Canadian Shield, 49; to Coastal British Columbia, 197; to mining areas of British Columbia, 149–50; point of entry, 175, 183. See also migration Indigenous peoples, 5–6; and the Canadian Shield, 35, 39–40, 42–6; on the Central Plain, 112–19; in the Mountains, 143–5, 159, 161; on the coast, 176–7, 196, 202; as labour force, 45–6, 154, 159; racist policies against, 45–6, 162–3, 197–8; starvation, 44–5, 115–17, 123, 197; treaty rights, 44–51, 18–19, 162. See also disease; fishing; hunting; land; Metis

Index  253 industry and industrialization. See farming; fishing; forests and forestry; mechanization; mining; ranching; resource industries Inuit. See Indigenous peoples Jones, David C. (Empire of Dust, 1987), 137–8 labour: child labour, 14, 61, 63, 97, 134, 137, 202, 205–6; dangers of, 60, 212; as defining characteristic of rural life, 11, 13, 15–20, 158–9; gendered divisions of, 86–94, 202–6, 189 (see also women, labour); outdoor labour, 11–15, 158, 190–1; problems of, 137–8, 171, 190–2; racist hiring practices of, 45–6; seasonal (see labour, seasonal) shortages, 130–2; work bees (see labour, reciprocal exchanges); waged Indigenous labour, 159, 196, 197–8. See also agriculture; agri-forestry; children; forests and forestry; harvest excursions; horses; Indigenous peoples; labour, by region/type; mechanization; mining; ranching; women, labour labour, by region/type: in British Columbia, 165–6, 167–72; on the Canadian

Shield, 29–66, 50, 52; on the Coasts, 183, 202–15; in the mines, 153–5, 157–9; in the mountains, 146–7; on the oceans, 190–1; off-farm work in Canadian Shield, 17–18, 51, 56–63, 153–9; on the Prairie ranch, 126–8; on the Prairie wheat farm, 128–39; in southern Ontario and Quebec, 88–94, 94–9 labour, reciprocal exchanges (work bees), 15, 22–3, 54, 94, 98, 100, 102 labour, seasonal: in British Columbia, 164, 171; on Canadian Prairies, 129–32; on the coasts, 198, 214; off-farm work, 17–18; in southern Ontario and Quebec, 100–2 land: Canadian, typical, 4; conflicts over land use, 115–17; Crown Lands, 13, 40, 213; Indigenous exclusions from, 46, 117, 197; Indigenous rights to, 44–6, 116–19, 162–3; land rights, homesteading, 121–3, 161, 163, 188, 197; ownership of agricultural lands, 4–6; western Canadian grazing leases, 124. See also agriculture; Dominion Land Act; farming; forests and forestry; mining; ranching landlords, freedom from, 6

254 Index lighting, 7, 53, 135, 201; in barns, 96; whale oil, 185; in work camps, 59, 89–90 livestock: care of, 94–9, 125; cattle ranching, 122–8, 163–5; statistics on cattle populations, 124–5 log driver, 62 logging. See forests and forestry; labour Louis Riel, 119. See also Metis Lower, Arthur, 46, 57 lumberjacks, 61. See forests and forestry; labour maple products: harvesting, processing, and selling, 99 mechanization: of dairy industry, 92–3; of farm work, 76–8, 96, 131–2; of forestry labour, 57, 196, 211–15; in mining, 150–1, 157–8; as rural labour reduction strategy, 131–2 medicine: and women’s work, 18–19 Metis, 110, 111–17; Red River Rebellion, 118–19 migration: “migratory imperative,” 188; out of Ontario and Quebec, 78–9; to Prairie provinces, 79; for seasonal work on the Prairie provinces, 130–2. See also immigration mining: in British Columbia, 144, 149–59; on the

Canadian Shield, 32–4, 35, 37–8; conflict with Indigenous land use, 45; environmental consequences of, 64, 153, 159, 198; placer mining, 150–3; as rural occupation, 152–9; and self-provisioning, 153 modernization: definition, 70 natural resources. See agriculture; farming; fishing; forests and forestry; mining neighbours, 22–3, 98 New Ontario: settlement schemes for, 46–56 New Quebec: settlement schemes for, 46–56 North West Mounted Police, 121, 123, 112 nursing: and women’s work, 18–19 occupational pluralism, 3–5, 15–20, 34–9, 46–55, 113, 178, 188–9, 204–5, 214 off-farm work. See occupational pluralism; labour outdoor life: as characteristics of rural life, 11–13, 190 parks, 144; on the Canadian Shield, 29–31, 39; and conflicts with rural settlement, 39

Index  255 peasants, 5. See also class pemmican. See food permafrost. See ice pests, 51, 59, 60, 87, 89, 90, 171. See also disease; environment; weeds politics, rural, 27–8, 74, 84–5, 118–20, 138–9, 189, 191–2 pollution. See environment; forests and forestry; mining; ranching; resource industries; sawmills ports, 181–3 poultry production, 92–4; gendered roles in, 93 poverty. See class; standards of living pulp and paper industry: in British Columbia interior, 147; on the Canadian Shield, 31–5, 40, 47, 57, 60, 62, 116; and changes to rural households, 37–9, 194; in Coastal Canada, 187, 194, 199, 209; pollution from, 198 Radforth, Ian (Bushworkers and Bosses, 1987), 57 railways: and the Canadian Shield, 35; construction of CPR as market for ranchers, 164–5; impact on the local economy, 40–1, 166; logging, 211, 213; as market for fuelwood, 160; role in settlement of

western Canada, 119–21, 144–5, 160 ranching: in British Columbia, 163–8; conflicts with agriculture, 125–6; conflicts with hunting and gathering, 115–17, 163; fruit ranching/orchards, 167–72; in the Prairies, 122–8; and relationship to democratic society, 122–3. See also grazing leases Red River Rebellion. See Metis reform. See rural: reform refrigeration: ice boxes and houses, 91; ice cutting, 52; refrigerated transportation for meat, ships, 40–1, 94, 124; role in transporting dairy and produce, 75–6, 200–1; role in transporting fish, 208 religion, 7, 71, 81, 119 resource depletion: in British Columbia, 144–7; on the Canadian Shield, 44–5; in Coastal Canada, 193, 198–9 resource industries: on the Canadian Shield, 33–6, 41, 56–63; change and decline of, 192–4; coastal dependence on rural resource workers, 189–91; and the household economy, 36–9, 65, 188–9; labour in, 56–63, 173–4; racist hiring practices of,

256 Index 45. See also environmental damage; resource depletion roads: logging roads, damage from, 161; poor winter roads, 13–14, 53; role of better roads in changing rural life, 40, 88. See also automobiles; transportation rural: definitions of, 9–25; isolation of, 13, 54, 128, 166, 205; politics, 27, 74, 85, 118–20, 138–9, 189, 191–2; population statistics (see rural population statistics); reform, 26–8, 80–5, 138–9; rural/urban divide, 8, 27–8; as solution to urban problems, 48, 79–80. See also labour; occupational pluralism; self-provisioning rural population statistics, 9–10; for British Columbia coast, 196–7; for British Columbia interior, 146; for Canadian Shield, 48–9; for east and west coasts, 199– 200; non-farm population, 48–9, 74, 100–2, 136; occupational statistics, 3; for Prairies, 106–7, 136; for southern Ontario and Quebec, 73 sawdust as fuel. See wood sawmills, 57; changing role on the Canadian Shield, 38–9; coastal sawmills, 186, 210;

fuel for British Columbia heating and cooking, 160; hydroelectricity, 186–7; pollution from, 64,198 schools, 14, 21, 54, 63, 121, 170, 205–6, 214; residential schools, 46 seasonal labour. See agriforestry; forests and forestry; labour; mining; occupational pluralism self-provisioning, 4–5, 18–20; in British Columbia, 146, 167, 173; on the Canadian Shield, 39–40, 49–53; in Coastal areas, 188–9, 204–5; difficulty of estimating, 91–2; limits to, 197–8, 199; in mining communities, 152–3; on the Prairie cattle ranch, 127; on the Prairie wheat farm, 132–4, 135–6; in Southern Ontario and Quebec, 86, 89–94 shipping industry, 187 sports fishing and hunting, 40, 45, 114 St. Lawrence River. See transportation standards of living, 23–5, 36, 54–5, 84–5, 188–90, 191–2, 201, 220–1; problems defining, 23–5. See also cash; class; self-provisioning staples: and the Canadian economy, 182; as purchased by the household, 12, 51, 204, 206

Index  257 starvation: and fur traders, 114; and Indigenous peoples, 44–5, 116–17, 119, 123; and settlers, 51, 54 steam engines, 39, 78; in logging, 211; on Prairie farms, 132; on whaling and fishing boats, 45, 185, 208 subsistence. See selfprovisioning

urban: definition by Dominion Bureau of Statistics, 9–10; fears of urbanization, 8, 80, 81, 162; labour, 16, 21; pull of urbanization, 78–80; rural as solution to urban problems, 48, 55; rural labour in creating urban Canada, 8, 17; urban food demand, 76 vermin. See pests

toilet facilities, 53, 86 tourists and tourism, 29, 31, 36, 144, 51 tractors, 77–8, 132 transportation, 7–8; autoneige, 54; and the Canadian Shield, 34–5, 40–1, 42, 53–4; difficulties in British Columbia, 143–5; and family life, 54; of grains to market, 128–9; of heavy metals, 150, 151; horse and buggy, 54; impact of improved transportation on local economies, 40–1, 64, 193; impact on the staples economy and international trade, 182, 193; in the logging industry, 210–12; in mines, 157; in ocean, 177, 181, 187, 203–4; on St. Lawrence River, 69; in winter, 14, 54. See also horses; railways; trucks trucks, 14, 77; truck logging, 214

waged labour. See labour water: absence of running water in rural homes, 50, 86–7, 97, 134, 201; competition from livestock for scarce resource, 125; pollution by livestock, 125; in work camps, 59 weather. See environment Weaver, John, 6–7 weeds, 98, 138 wheat, 6, 48, 50; farms and farming, 128–40; Marquis wheat, 122; on Prairie, 105–6; in southern Ontario and Quebec, 68, 75–6, 94–6, 98–9; statistics on production and export, 106; transportation of, 128–9 wildlife: on the Arctic Coast, 179; on the Canadian Shield, 33; extinctions, 41–2; predators, 137 women: 12, 189; and birth control/family limitation,

258

Index

102–3; conflicts over competing energy demands, 96–7; and interior spaces, 88–90; and leisure, 15; as part of household economy, 21 (see also women, labour); and rural reform 81–3; and ranching, 127–8 women, labour, 16–20, 88–91; in coastal households, 205; and commodity sales, 92; and dairying, 92–4; as domestics, 102; as field workers, 97; as fishers, 42–3, 189; on Prairie wheat farm, 132–4, 137–8

Women’s Institutes, 27, 82–3 wood: as building material, 13, 160; on the Canadian Shield, 51–2, 56–62; as fuel, 12–13, 54, 99, 160; labour demands of, 89; substitutes on Canadian Prairies, 135–6; various uses of, 19, 99, 185–6; woodlot care, 99 Woodsworth, J.S., 81, 84 World War II: changes labour conditions, 40–1, 64–5, 220; electrification, 77; and food, 40–1, 91. See also transportation

Themes in Canadian History Editors: Colin Coates 2003– Craig Heron 1997–2010 Franca Iacovetta 1997–1999

  1 Paul Axelrod, The Promise of Schooling: Education in Canada, 1800–1914   2 Carolyn Strange and Tina Loo, Making Good: Law and Moral Regulation in Canada, 1867–1939   3 Allan Greer, The People of New France   4  Cynthia R. Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850–1940   5 Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900   6 Colin D. Howell, Blood, Sweat, and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada   7 Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900–1960   8 Ruth A. Frager and Carmela Patrias, Discounted Labour: Women Workers in Canada, 1870–1939   9 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, Christian Churches and Their Peoples,1840–1965: A Social History of Religion in Canada 10 Neil S. Forkey, Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century 11 E.A. Heaman, A Short History of the State in Canada 12 Andrew Iarocci and Jeffrey A. Keshen, A Nation in Conflict: Canada and the Two World Wars 13 R.W. Sandwell, Canada’s Rural Majority: Households, Environments, and Economies, 1870–1940