Our Fathers and Mothers Come In
THE PEOPLE who now streamed in through the open door, who were they?
Mostly Eastern Canadians. But who were these Eastern Canadians? We must
look back a hundred years to find out.
When most of the English colonists to the south broke away from the
Empire, many thousands of them considered this violent action wrong;
and, without any doubt, if the object to be achieved was
self-government, it could and would have been won later on without
secession, as other colonists won it.
Thousands of “United Empire Loyalists,” sacrificing everything, flocked
over the border and made new homes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and
Ontario. This inrush from the lost colonies was followed by a
considerable immigration from the mother-country, and the human tide
flowed more strongly than ever after the end of the war with Napoleon.
The United Kingdom contained less than half her present population, yet
she was supposed to be overcrowded. Scotland and Ireland especially were
drained of their people, because the political economists could find
nothing for them to do at home.
It is believed that in the early years of the nineteenth century 25,000
Scottish peasants settled on Cape Breton Island alone, while great
numbers were taken to the southern parts of Nova Scotia, and various
counties in Upper and Lower Canada were peopled almost entirely from the
same source. The members of a clan, or the inhabitants of a district,
commonly emigrated together, and took up homes together in the New
World, under leaders chosen or accepted by themselves. In 1804, eight
hundred Highlanders, evicted by landlords who wanted the land for sheep
runs, came over and made a new Glengarry between the St. Lawrence and
Ottawa rivers, where the land would be their own. About the same time an
Irish officer, Thomas Talbot, threw himself with the “go” of a cavalry
charge into an emigration movement, and never rested till he had settled
twenty-eight townships north of Lake Erie.
One Highland chief, the Macnab, not only sent a large company of his own
clansmen to Canada at his own expense, but took up his abode among them
on the township allotted him by the Government. Later, in the early
thirties, we hear of 400 discharged Irish soldiers coming over in a
body, with their old officers at their head, and forming a military camp
in the Upper Canadian backwoods, till their united efforts had cut out
the roads and fields and built the houses of a civilized settlement. In
England, about the same time, Lord Egremont organized an expedition of
760 Sussex folk, who also made homes for themselves in Upper Canada, as
Ontario then was called. The emigrant ships were thick on the Atlantic,
and in four years 160,000 British emigrants landed on Canadian soil.
While the silence of the desert spread over Scottish hillsides, the
Canadian wilds awaked to vigorous life. From Lake Huron to the Atlantic,
Canada was ringing with the settler’s axe. The air was black with
smoke,—fire cleared the land faster than steel. The stones were
gathered into piles, and the plow, driven in and out among the blackened
stumps, prepared the virgin soil for its first crop of oats and
potatoes. The labor which forced the wilderness to blossom as the rose
was enormous; but the men who gave it had strong hearts, and wrestled
cheerfully with nature. Never thinking of ease, they won prosperity.
The children and grandchildren of those hardy eastern pioneers made just
the right pioneering stuff for the newly opened West. They were
reinforced by descendants of the folk their ancestors had left behind in
the Old Country, now coming out to Western Canada direct,—English,
Scottish, Irish, Welsh, even Manxmen and Channel Islanders,
Scandinavians, and others from Northern Europe. These were our nearest
relations on that continent, descendants of the men left behind long
centuries ago when their raiding kinsfolk settled in the British Isles;
and now they sent contingents straight to the British prairies in
Canada. Many of the same stock came in early, beginning long before the
railway opened, from the Norse colony in Iceland which had “discovered
America” five hundred years before Columbus. From the south came
“Americans,” practically all of the same stock as the Anglo-Saxons and
Scandinavians, or of the Celtic stock to which most of the Highland
Scots, Irish, Welsh and French belong. Many coming in from across the
line were natives of Eastern Canada who had heard “the call of the West”
while the only West ready to receive them was that of the States.
The newcomers spread over the prairie—spread so fast and so far, in
fact, that they had to endure long isolation before any railway could
reach them. “I had to haul my wheat 80 miles,” one old settler says,
“and then got forty cents a bushel for it.” But he was “a sticker,” and
is now one of the most prosperous farmers in the country. Not owing to
wheat, however; he was a stockman, long before live stock became
popular. Wheat became King of the Plains, and few there were who would
not bow down to him.
The reign of King Steer came first, however. Before the railway arrived,
with the mass of settlers, the chief industry of the plains was
ranching. The buffalo disappeared, but their place was partly filled by
great herds of cattle, driven in from the States and roaming at large
over the plains of our south-west and the foothills of the Rockies.
Their offspring were rounded up when the time came, year after year, and
driven across the line for sale. The rancher and his cowboys were almost
the only white inhabitants—with the Mounted Police, who had to protect
them from invading cattle and horse thieves, as they protected the
Indians from whiskey-smugglers.
I was going to say that the first western freight the Canadian Pacific
had to fetch out was cattle from the ranches. But, as an old railway man
says, “The first live stock carried was dead stock.” The first
substantial freight movement was that of buffalo skeletons. As soon as
the prairie section got running, Métis and Indians were employed to
gather up the millions of bones scattered over the plains where they had
been shot down by generations of hunters. Great stacks of these bones
were piled up like cord-wood beside the track—Regina’s first name was
Pile of Bones—and thousands of carloads were shipped down to Chicago
and other centres for use in sugar refining.