The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Read Online Free Page A

three years. If he could stick it out, the land was his. But before anybody could be convinced to take up the land, some facts about this strange and unknown realm at the top of North America would have to be broadcast.
    The first and most important task was to dispel the image of the West as a snow-covered desert. Sifton had hardly taken hold before his own paper reported that the Nation , a respected Dublin journal, was warning people away from Canada, declaring that Manitoba was “a kind of Siberia.” One of Sifton’s first moves was to try to ban the daily publication of Manitoba temperatures, but since that might prove even more alarming, he dropped the idea. Nevertheless, snow was never mentioned in the blizzard of pamphlets his department issued. “Cold” was another taboo word. The accepted adjectives were “bracing” and “invigorating.” Why, it was so mild, one pamphlet declared, that “the soft maple” could grow five feet in a single season! And if prospective immigrants confused the Manitoba maple, a weed tree, with the Eastern hardwood – Canada’s symbol – too bad.
    In this anti-cold campaign, Sifton had the enthusiastic support of the CPR ’s ebullient chairman, William Van Horne, who never lost anopportunity to suggest that the prairies were close to being subtropical. In one public statement in Europe, Van Horne announced that the coldest weather he had ever known was in Rome and Florence. “I pine for Winnipeg to thaw me,” he declared, maintaining the same straight face that allowed him to bluff his way through innumerable all-night poker games. “The atmosphere in the far west intoxicates you, it is so very invigorating.”
    There were better lures than the weather. Canada was touted not only as a free country but also as an orderly one: no one needed to carry a gun in the Canadian West; the Mounted Police, who were establishing an international reputation in the Yukon, would see to that. And the land was free. More, you could usually pick up an adjoining quarter-section for a song. And there was money to be made in the West by anybody willing to work. The titles on the pamphlets trumpeted the story: The Wondrous West; Canada, Land of Opportunity; Prosperity Follows Settlement .
    In 1896, the Immigration Department sent out sixty-five thousand pamphlets. By 1900, the number had reached one million. The best-known and most successful appeared just after Sifton left office and was directed at immigrants from south of the border. In thirty-three pages of large type The Last and Best West (later simplified to The Last Best West ) cunningly played on the American agrarian myth beloved by the readers of Horatio Alger, extolling the farmer as the finest type of citizen and echoing the ingrained belief that the most successful men “have as a rule been those whose youth was spent on a farm.…”
    Sifton took personal direction of this propaganda. One highly successful pamphlet entitled A Few Facts about Canada consisted of a series of letters, carefully culled from thousands solicited by the department, from former British farmers praising the West. At Sifton’s suggestion, these letters were printed in the handwriting of the correspondents rather than in cold type “to impress the ordinary farmer with the idea of reality.” Sifton also insisted that the editors of the pamphlet avoid exaggeration and select “fair samples, not too favourable.”
    Nonetheless, other pamphleteers indulged in hyperbole. “The kindest thing to say about it is that the literature was a little on the optimistic side,” one British immigrant recalled. “Canada was said to have a healthy climate guaranteed to be free of malaria. One has to admit that this was true. It was said that while the prairie summers were hot, the heat was delightfully invigorating and while it got cold inthe winter the cold was dry and not unpleasant. I used to recall those glowing words as I pitched sheaves with the temperature at 95