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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
It is curious that students of the American frontier and population movements have paid so little attention to the role of American farmers in the settlement and development of the last plains frontier—the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Perhaps the twentieth century has provided scholars with too many alternative “frontiers” to scrutinize, or perhaps the famous pronouncement of the Superintendent of the Census in 1890 has been accepted too casually. The movement has not been subjected to careful analysis, and the published material on the topic is peripheral or fraught with error, especially in its quantitative aspects.
1 See Hansen, Marcus L. and Brebner, John Bartlett, The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 219–43Google Scholar; Sharp, Paul F., The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada: A Survey Showing American Parallels (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), pp. 1–20Google Scholar, and “When Our West Moved North,” American Historical Review, LV (Jan. 1950), 286–300Google Scholar.
2 U.S. Congress, Senate, Immigration Commission, The Immigration Situation in Canada, Senate Document 469, 61st Cong., 2d Sess., 1910, p. 31.
3 “The Western Middle West, 1900–1914,” Agricultural History, XX (Apr. 1946), 65.Google Scholar
4 Mackintosh, W. A., Prairie Settlement: The Geographical Setting (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1934), pp. 22–23Google Scholar.
5 The relationship between long-run price increases in staple commodities and movement into frontier areas was first demonstrated in North, Douglass C., “International Capital Flows and the Development of the American West,” Journal of Economic History, XVI (Dec. 1956), 493–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Buckley, Kenneth C., Capital Formation in Canada, 1896–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955), p. 5Google Scholar.
7 Toronto Globe, June 11, 1909.
8 Manitoba Free Press, April 8, 1905; May 15, 1907.
9 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Yearbook, 1910 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), p. 10Google Scholar.
10 Strauss, Frederick and Bean, Louis H., Gross Farm Income and Indices of Farm Production and Prices in the United States, 1869–1937, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Technical Bulletin No. 703 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1940), p. 36.Google Scholar
11 Hicks, Agricultural History, XX, 73.
12 Morman, James B., Farm Credits in the United States and Canada (New York: Macmillan, 1924), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.
13 An interesting case study of this trend, the firm of Rockwell Sayre, was presented by Allan G. Bogue in his presidential address to the Agricultural History Society, April 30, 1964, in Cleveland, Ohio.
14 U.S., Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States: 1910. Agriculture, V, 69, 75.
15 E. A. Goldenweiser and Leon E. Truesdell, Farm Tenancy in the United States, U. S. Bureau of the Census, Monograph No. 4, p. 236.
16 Ibid., pp. 26, 222, 224, 236, 245.
17 Peffer, E. Louise, The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies, 1900–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1951), p. 134Google Scholar.
18 Helgeson, Arlan, Farms in the Cutover (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1962), pp. 70–71Google Scholar.
19 Sharp, Agrarian Revolt, pp. 10–13; “When Our West Moved North,” 288–89.
20 Seward T. St. John, “Pioneer Recollections,” unpublished ms., Saskatchewan Archives (Saskatoon), n.d., pp. 98–103.
21 Except for a three-year residence requirement, the Canadian Homestead Act of 1872 was similar to the United States law.
22 A bona fide immigrant was one who satisfied an official at the border that he intended to reside in Canada “permanently.” Immigrants declared a province of destination at the time of entry.
23 Laut, Agnes C., “The Last Trek to the Last Frontier,” Century Magazine, LXXVIII (May 1909), 103Google Scholar.
24 Viner, Jacob, Canada's Balance of International Indebtedness, 1900–1913 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924), p. 41Google Scholar.
25 Morton, W. L., “Marginal,” Manitoba Arts Review, V (Spring 1946), 26–28Google Scholar.
26 W. C. Pollard, Pioneering in the Prairie West (London: n.p., n.d.), p. 49.
27 Fourth Census of Canada, 1901 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1903), I, 481Google Scholar; Fifth Census of Canada, 1911 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1913), II, 370–71, 376–77, 422–25Google Scholar; Census of the Prairie Provinces: Population and Agriculture, 1916 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1918), pp. 154–57, 216–17Google Scholar.
28 These figures are derived from Table 1.
29 Ibid.
30 Fifth Census of Canada, 1911, II, 376–77, 422–25.
31 Cape, Wilson, “Population Changes in the West North Central States, 1900–1930,” North Dakota Historical Quarterly Collections, VI (July 1932), 279Google Scholar.
32 Immigration Facts and Figures, 1912 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1912), pp. 3, 26Google Scholar; Coats, Robert H. and Maclean, Murdoch, The American-Born in Canada: A Statistical Appraisal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), p. 56Google Scholar.
33 Canada, Parliament, Sessional Papers, 1900–1917, Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior, Report of the Deputy Minister of the Interior. See Merle Curti et al, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 69–70; Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 26; James C. Malin, “The Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Quarterly, IV (Feb. 1935), 365–69. In their study of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, Curti et al. found “persistence” of 30 per cent or less during the pioneer decades 1860–1870 and 1870–1880. Bogue, sampling turnover in Bureau County, Illinois, and four townships of Wapello County, Iowa, found that “persistence” varied from 26 per cent to 56 per cent among new settlers in each of the decades 1850–1860, 1860–1870, and 1870–1880. Malin's data on the decades between 1860 and 1900 for five areas in Kansas indicated that “persistence” varied between 24 per cent and 46 per cent. Settlers in Kansas, Illinois, and Iowa exhibited greater “persistence” than American farmers in western Canada, while settlers in Trempealeau County exhibited slightly less. The Trempealeau settlers were apparently attracted to the prairie land of southern Minnesota.
34 Unpublished census conducted by the Northwest Mounted Police, 1895. Cited in Thomas, Lewis H., “Responsible Government in the Northwest Territories, 1870–1897” (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1953), p. 383Google Scholar.
35 In addition to spur lines, two new transcontinental roads were completed during the period.
36 Morton, W. L., “The Significance of Site in the Settlement of the Canadian and American Wests,” Agricultural History, XXV (July 1951), 101Google Scholar.
37 Grain Growers Guide (Winnipeg), VII (July 8, 1914), 6.
38 Weaver, S. Roy, “The Financing of Farms in Saskatchewan,” Journal of Political Economy, XXII (Apr. 1914), 384–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Strauss and Bean, p. 36; Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1912 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), pp. 115–16Google Scholar; Ibid., 1915, pp. 93–94.
40 Dafoe, John W., “Western Canada: Its Resources and Possibilities,” Review of Reviews, XXXV (June 1907), 702Google Scholar.