In the last decades of the 19th century industrialization and urbanization was in the expansion phase of development in Europe and in eastern North America. The increased demand for food, especially wheat, first caused the expansion of the commercial agricultural frontier into the American West and subsequently into western Canada. It was made feasible by improvements in transportation and by the development of agricultural machinery.
Settlement of the Canadian Prairies [1] by Europeans was a unique phase in the occupation of the overall Canadian living space. It lasted only a few decades, from the end of the 19th Century to the beginning of the 20th , but was very intense in nature. Before this time the Prairies had been occupied for nearly 300 years by fur traders and Native Indian hunters and gatherers. Native Indians already had lived in the region for the last 10,000 years or more.
The first agricultural settlement attempts in the Prairies were made in 1812 by Lord Selkirk [2] in Manitoba. He helped about 100 settlers come over from Scotland and settle in Manitoba. In part, because of opposition to them by the Hudson's Bay Company [3] and its fur traders, the settlement met with limited success. By 1870, some 60 years later there were still only 12,000 people living in the Red River Settlement in Manitoba of which more than 80 percent were of Metis background [4] and most others were Natives with only a few full time agriculturalists. Agriculture in fact was by far the secondary occupation after hunting in the settlement. Its products were mainly consumed locally and to some extent sold to fur traders.(Kay, B., 1993)
The real agricultural settlement migration [5] took place after 1870. It started in Manitoba when the first of nearly 2000 Mennonite settlers [6] arrived from Russia in 1874. With the expansion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) westward from Winnipeg after 1877, immigrants just followed in streams. By 1885 the CPR [7] had reached British Columbia. Settlers followed right on the heals of its construction. In fact by 1890 the western settlement frontier had reached central Saskatchewan. Not only did the railroad provide means of getting goods in and out, it itself owned much land along the railroad tracks and consequently had a very active settlement recruiting policy itself in Europe. Besides the railroad, the invention of the steal plow, a few decades earlier, allowed for the plowing of the tough Prairie [8] turf and consequently the movement of commercial agriculture onto the plains.
Economic life was hard on the Prairies as the local history of Wawanesa [9], a small village in Western Manitoba shows. Just like their counterparts in the USA, the Canadian prairie settlers could not find good construction wood on the plains and frequently had to turn to local grass sod to construct their houses [10]. Only later could they afford to change to stone, brick or lumber building materials. Much of the hardship is now documented in numerous local histories and in frontier museums [11] right across the Prairies.
By 1891, the far West, including the Prairies and British Columbia, had about 300,000 people living in it or just over 6% of the Canadian total population (Measner, D. and Hampson, C., 1993) of 4.8 million. But it was filling in fast. Of these about 30% were Native Indians or Metis. In the next 40 years the inflow increased to such a level that in 1931 the Prairies alone had about 2.28 million people out of a total Canadian Population of 10.4 or 22%. It probably was its high point. Already in the 1920s out-migration took place from marginal lands like the Cypress Hills region of southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta. A second region of early out-migration, or one could say a retreat of the agricultural frontier, occurred from the poorer land on the interface of the Prairies and the Canadian Shield. By 2000 the population of the Prairies [12] was down to 16% of the Canadian total with the largest proportion, by far, now living in urban areas in the Prairies and not on the land. Except for the province of Alberta with its booming oil industry, the other provinces of the Prairies have been stagnant in population numbers basically since the 1930's.
From where did the Prairie immigrants come? If one looks at the peak immigration years, between 1891 and 1914, they came mainly from the British Isles, the United States and western and eastern Europe. In the latter case it was mainly Germans, Ukrainians, Jews and Russians. A number of people from eastern Canada also migrated west. It resulted in an ethnically very diversified culture [13]. And why did they come? It was mainly because of the free land. Homesteaders [14] were given 160 acres. The land they occupied stretched from Winnipeg, which acted as gateway to Canada's West [15] with its eastern railway head, west along the USA border and in a northwesterly direction along the Canadian Shield to just north of Edmonton and west unto the foothills of the Rockies (McKinnis, M., 1990). It was considered by many to be an agricultural marginal region because of its long cold winters and its subsequent short growing season and its dry but hot summers.
As alluded to earlier, the reason why people moved to the Prairies was to own land and produce commercial grain for the hungry world. In fact the image of the Prairie is still a landscape with many large golden coloured harvest ready wheat fields. The average farm size of nearly 1200 acres in Saskatchewan enhances this image [16]. The economic data for that time period supports this evolving wheat economy image. In 1891 the West contributed only 17% of total agricultural output by value. But by 1926 wheat contributed more than 50% of Canada's total of which 34% was wheat, most of it coming from the West (McKinnis, M., 1990). Even today the value of crop production [17] in Saskatchewan, most of it is wheat, still generates nearly 80% by value of total agricultural output. The physical landscape symbol of this economy was and still is the grain elevator [18]. It is found and usually is the reference point, in every village, town or city in the Prairies.
Today the Prairies are changing again. The agricultural economy, the reason for its initial large scale settlement, is decreasing in relative economic importance to other resource sectors like oil and gas, forestry products and mining. But even more important it is losing ground to the fast expansion of the service, manufacturing and construction sectors. Yet the rural agricultural economy, the reason for the settlement of the Prairies in the first place, continues to define visible landscapes today and probably will do so for centuries to come.
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