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

in the shade, and as I ran behind the sleigh at 30 below to keep from freezing.”
    To alter the international image of the Canadian prairies, Sifton curried favour with American newspapermen and farmers as well as with British politicians. Thousands were wined, dined, and shuttled across the prairies at government expense. Lloyd George, then an up-and-coming Member of Parliament, was one of those brought to Canada and persuaded that his Welsh countrymen who had emigrated to Patagonia should be advised to move north.
    As a newspaper publisher himself Sifton had a cynical attitude toward the press. Reporters, editors, and small-town publishers could be purchased with flattery and a few free whiskeys. Sifton went further. Entire trainloads of editors from south of the border were conducted in luxury across the plains, lubricated by strong drink. Those too lazy or too inebriated to write their own stories were fed specially composed articles, which often appeared without a comma changed.
    The venality of the newspapers played into Sifton’s hands. If a publisher wanted government advertising he had better not run any anti-Canadian material. On at least one occasion, the members of a journalistic junket assured the department that any negative articles would be censored and their authors banned from future trips across the West. One editor (of the Shelby, Kentucky, Sentinel ) actually apologized for not getting his story into type quickly enough, explaining that “when I arrived home I found my office in an uproar, with every member of the force drunk except my lady stenographer.”
    The Minister’s purpose was to saturate the world with propaganda about the Canadian West. Sifton, the one-time lay preacher, saw himself as a new kind of missionary for his country, proselytizing the unconverted and never letting up. “Just as soon as you stop advertising and missionary work,” he told the Commons, “the movement is going to stop.” In 1902 alone, 465 American farmers’ “delegations” crossed the prairies at government expense. These delegations were made up of civic leaders, municipal officials, and former legislators, elected by local farmers and encouraged to write and lecture about the wonders they had seen in Canada.
    The statistics suggest the extent of the Sifton campaigns: tens of thousands of pamphlets and exhibits at state fairs, 200,000 pamphletsdistributed at the St. Louis world exposition in 1904 alone; seven thousand newspaper advertisements for “Free Land Clubs” (the name told the story); one thousand lantern-slide lectures in England in a single year; one thousand inquiries a month at the High Commissioner’s office in London; and a thirty-five-thousand-dollar arch at the coronation of Edward VII, trumpeting the advantages of immigration.
    When Sifton took office in 1896, the department had six agents operating south of the border. By 1899 it had three hundred. The Minister liked to tell the story of one such agent who quit his job after six months “on the plea that no one thought of Canada.” Sifton brought him back to Ottawa, gave him a holiday, and persuaded him to go back. Six months later, the agent had finally managed to convince one family to emigrate. But between 1900 and 1903 he brought five thousand American settlers into the Canadian West.
    There were other, more exotic, ventures. In 1902, M.V. “Mac” MacInness, the department’s portly and jovial agent in Detroit, began to cultivate James Oliver Curwood, soon to become the best-known outdoor novelist in the United States. Eventually, as a result of this connection, the Canadian government hired Curwood for eight hundred dollars a year plus expenses to tour the Canadian North West in search of material for his novels. The gamble paid off. Curwood, in a series of best-selling books, coined the name “God’s Country,” a phrase that is still in use.
    In 1896, about 17,000 immigrants arrived in Canada. In 1899 the figure approached