by W. J. C. Cherwinski
Memorial University, Newfoundland
Manitoba History, Number 3, 1982
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When I had the occasion a dozen years ago to survey the historiography of the English Canadian Left what I saw was a virtually barren landscape with only some four score and ten works in print. Those directly dealing with labour matters made up only a fraction while those on prairie workers proportionately less. I did, however, indicate that despite the bleak picture there was hope. An examination of the 1969 Dissertations in Progress compiled by the Canadian Historical Association revealed that students, many no doubt from worker background, were beavering away at an impressive list of subjects which would contribute considerably to Canadian historiography when completed. [1]
Indeed much of the work in progress on prairie labour topics in the late 1960s saw the light of day in the next decade. A few of the dedicated writers involved went on to academic pursuits and they in turn begat graduate students who have ventured into still other unexplored areas armed with new methodologies to further expand our understanding of the prairie workers in the past. Their task was made simpler by others who infiltrated various archives in search of employment and whose predilection for labour matters led to concerted acquisition policies directed at workers and their related organizations. [2]
Money helped as well. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and earlier organizations, the University Research Committee of the Department of Labour, and the Department of the Secretary of State, concerned as they were with Canadian, regional and area studies, succumbed to appeals by young academics and researchers seeking new avenues for expression and new outlets for their work. Not only were existing publication programmes expanded but new journals appeared. Those with a regional focus include Acadiensis in Atlantic Canada and Prairie Forum in the West. Most notable of those with a subject focus is Labour/le travailleur. Edited at Dalhousie by Greg Kealey and purporting to be a mouthpiece of the class conflict oriented “second generation” of labour historians, few of whom are writing about prairie subjects, it still has given the west considerable space in the five years since its founding. [3]
Further discussion between scholars and funding agencies resulted in the establishment of important conferences like the Western Canadian Studies Conference which is dedicated to the serious study of the region. Labour history has received its fair share of attention at these meetings as well.
The new practitioners of labour history also expanded existing forums. Not only did their work breathe new life and importance into sleepy, previously antiquarian journals like Saskatchewan History and Alberta History but they also directed the Canadian Historical Association toward the creation of the Labour History Group and the Western History Group in recognition of new found strengths of interest. The bibliography of prairie labour history has expanded as a happy consequence of these many activities.
There is little doubt that there has been a naissance of a vigorous field of study centering on workers in the prairie region. This essay proposes both to survey and assess the most recent developments and to indicate the wider impact these developments have had on the society whose past they are interpreting. Since labour’s associations and activities are many and varied the choice of works mentioned and discussed is arbitrary; the writer therefore apologizes for any omissions.
To a considerable degree the recent historiography of Central Canada has been concerned with working class culture resulting from the growth of industrial capitalism in the major cities prior to the Great War. Notable in this regard have been Greg Kealey’s and Michael Piva’s recent books on Toronto and Bryan Palmer’s on Hamilton. [4] These writers, whom Viv Nelles in his recent article in Saturday Night designated as pivotal to the new social orientation of Canadian history, [5] have by and large dismissed western labour history as pre-industrial and its practitioners as conservative and out of touch with the “true meaning” of labour studies. Indicative of this attitude is the deceiving title of the book Essays in Canadian Working Class History edited by Kealey and Peter Warrian, [6] the subject matter of which ends at the Lakehead, and Palmer’s recent critique in the Queen’s Quarterly of western labour historians. At the same time, however, the treatment of prairie labour material in works that are national in scope have established two main emphases similar to those of writers in the region. One deals with the radicalism traditionally associated with the west’s extractive industries; while the second emphasis is on labour’s overt expression of frustration manifested in the One Big Union and the Winnipeg General Strike. Typical of these works is On Strike: Six Key Labour Struggles in Canada 1919-1949, edited by Irving Abella, which contains an article by David Bercuson on the Winnipeg General Strike and another by S. D. Hanson entitled “Estevan 1931” dealing with a major strike-riot in a traditional hotbed of miner radicalism. [7] Moreover, the volume of readings Abella edited with David Millar, The Canadian Worker in the Twentieth Century (1978), while balancing the account to some extent by showing the social side of the workers existence, persists in portraying the prairie dweller as primarily involved in resource-based industries. Similarly, Abella’s most important work, Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour [8] which charts the development of the Canadian Congress of Labour, pays scant attention to the prairie region, concentrating instead on Ontario and Quebec where most of the organizational activity took place.
Since labour is a national entity in a national economy it is surprising that a serious survey encompassing the whole country has not been attempted. Instead most scholars have been content to nibble away at specific aspects of labour’s past, and one’s curiosity is thus aroused for the anticipated appearance in 1981 of Eugene Forsey’s centennial project, a large-scale, highly detailed compendium of Canadian labour history, almost two decades in the making. With a termination date of 1902, however the west will probably receive scant attention again, and what there is one suspects will be more descriptive than interpretative. The recently published (1980) Working People, An Illustrated History of Canadian Labour [9] prepared by Desmond Morton with Terry Copp will have to stand alone as the sole recent textbook for some time. Here again, however, the emphasis is on conflict and confrontation and since the prairies contributed little here they have received only a slight treatment.
That national treatments of prairie labour themes stress frontier radicalism and post-World War I urban discontent is not surprising, for this echoes the basic approach of historians of the region. The writers established the pattern, and the reasons for this are quite simple to explain. Behaviour deemed to be deviant is noticed and recorded in sufficient quantity to assist later research. The desire of recent students to identify with the forces for change cannot be discounted either, in a period when commitment and relevance in scholarship have been accorded a high priority by students. Implicit also is a belief that the recent political past of the prairies with its consistent record of third party success derives from a radical tradition. What results, however, is the perpetuation of a myth of radicalism which often has little basis in fact. Yet myths are important, and for whatever reasons, the recent work on prairie radicals is of sterling quality.
Three authors head the pack. In terms of sheer volume David Bercuson is the triumvirate’s torch bearer. The evolution of the work of this native Montrealer is interesting. A thesis reinterpreting the Winnipeg General Strike led to the volume Confrontation at Winnipeg [10] bracketed by several articles and papers on the One Big Union, Western radicalism and the strike itself. [11] A textbook study, Winnipeg: 1919, [12] in conjunction with Kenneth McNaught followed. The capstone to Bercuson’s work in the area and a delightful discussion of pre-Depression prairie society, its reformist undercurrents and its legacy centering on the aborted career of the OBU, is Fools and Wise Man. This book is far and away the liveliest and most readable work on the subject yet. From these works Bercuson has struck out to examine regionalism within a wider framework and has become an interpreter of western Canada to Central Canadians most recently through the pages of the Globe and Mail and on the CBC AM network. [13]
To acquire insights into the theoretical and ideological bases for western radicalism the reader should consult Ross McCormack’s Reformers, Rebels and Revolutionaries: The Western Canadian Radical Movement, 1899-1919. (1977) His mastery of the intricacies of schism and union among the myriad of organizations which constituted the west’s left before the Winnipeg General Strike is truly impressive. In the process he combines them into three distinct groups—reform-minded labourites working within the capitalist system, industrial rebels seeking quick change through radical unions, and the Marxist revolutionaries who wished the destruction of the wage system in which they toiled. Along the way McCormack offers the reader perceptive views of the working and living conditions of men in an exploitive frontier. Like Bercuson, McCormack has elaborated on various aspects of his study in a variety of journal articles which appeared before and after the book’s release. [14]
Many of McCormack’s protagonists and their contributions to western history are also examined by Donald Avery in his volume for the McClelland and Stewart Social History Series, “Dangerous Foreigners” whose subtitle European Immigrant Workers and Labour Radicalism in Canada, 1896-1932 indicates the specific emphasis and scope. While he paints the continental activists with a somewhat wider brush than they deserve so that the pigment splashes on all and sundry by implication, one must admire the variety of material Avery has marshalled to present his case. For this reason the accusation levelled at the book by some ethnic historians as being an example of WASP condescension has little foundation. [15] “Dangerous Foreigners” too has been the culmination of almost a decade’s fragments in journal form. [16]
Three overviews of western prairie labour and the working class in article form must also be mentioned here since all three confirm the fixation of writers with the radical tradition. H. Clare Pentland, the guru of the new left historians, penned a piece which appeared after his death in the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory in 1979 entitled “The Western Canadian Labour Movement, 1897-1919.” In it he goes out on an obvious limb and concludes that the highly organized and militant western labour movement was quite similar to its American counterpart in that both were different from their respective Easts due to the rapid rise of “oppressive corporate capitalism” which they both often violently, resisted. Yet the western Canadian movement differed from the American because the lack of concentration of extractive industries spread worker radicalism over a larger area. In addition Canadian workers held different views about the role of government in improving the lot of the worker. While intriguing, these sweeping conclusions are supported by little concrete historical evidence. Pentland’s ideas were sufficiently attractive to spawn an admitted clone in Paul Phillips’ “The National Policy and the Development of the Western Canadian Labour Movement” which was first presented to the Western Canadian Studies Conference and later appeared in Prairie Perspectives 2. In it Phillips links the National Policy and its emphasis on hinterland exploitation with Western labour vibrancy and radicalism as a response to it. The least sweeping and yet historically the soundest of the three is Gerald Friesen’s “‘Yours in Revolt’ The Socialist Party of Canada and the Western Canadian Labour Movement” which appeared in the first issue of Labour/le travailleur in 1976.
There Friesen concludes that for the Socialist Party of Canada the Winnipeg General Strike happened at the wrong time and thus killed efforts directed towards the worker revolution some time in the future.
Not unexpectedly, considering the emphasis of national and regional studies, recent studies of Manitoba’s labouring classes continue to focus on Winnipeg, as the province’s predominant metropolitan centre. and more specifically on the immediate post-world War I industrial disruption. Bercuson’s work discussed above predominates and is supplemented in the popular arena by the document collection Winnipeg 1919: The Strikers’ Own History of the Winnipeg General Strike (1973) edited and introduced by the Marxist political scientist Norman Penner. In a similar vein is Mary V. Jordan’s Survival: Labours Trials and Tribulations in Canada (1975) which is in reality a tribute to her former employer, the strike leader and One Big Union mainstay R. B. Russell. Also noteworthy is a recent article by RCMP historian, Stan Horall who points out the role played by western radicals in 1918-19 in saving the RCMP from redundancy by giving the force a security function. [17] The reason perhaps that writers have ignored labour since the depression may be summed up by the title of Kathleen Wornsbecker’s M.A. thesis, “The Rise and Fall of the Labour Political Movement in Manitoba, 1919-1927” (1977). Folks soon lost interest in losers. Consequently, G. F. MacDowell’s The Brandon Packers Strike: A Tragedy of Errors (1971) remains the sole exception deserving mention. It is, however, less of a history than a detailed case study of a single dispute and the legal framework surrounding it.
With the fewest number of organized workers in the region the labour movement in the Wheat Province understandably has attracted the least attention. Traditionally weak and divided, the trade union movement has been less evident than its neighbouring counterparts or else a pale imitator of them. As elsewhere, however, primary industry radicalism has received the lion’s share of concern from writers, in this case that involving workers in the poor lignite mining area in the provinces southeast corner. While the unrest in the Estevan-Bienfait area has for a considerable time been the “highpoint” for the province’s movement, S. D. Hanson was the first to pay detailed scholarly attention to it in his M.A. thesis completed in 1972 (“The Estevan Strike and Riot, 1931”) which he later condensed for Irving Abella’s On Strike. More recently Glen Makahonuk has produced two papers for Saskatchewan History detailing the difficulties experienced by miners there in living, working and trying to establish and maintain a union. [18] Meanwhile, this writer attempted to tie much of the Saskatchewan trade union movement together in a thesis which surveyed the development of a craft union and evolution within an almost totally agricultural environment before 1945. [19] One lonely contribution which has come to this writer’s attention which only partly conforms to the general trends is an MA thesis completed by Donald Fairbairn for the University of Regina in 1975 entitled “The British-American Refinery Strike Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan 1965-1966.”
Alberta labour has contributed the most to the radical interpretation of prairie labour history by virtue of the province’s economy which has a high component of extractive industries. Historical writing on Alberta workers amply reflects this fact. As can be expected most of the work has been on various aspects of the coal mining industry which has been examined from a variety of perspectives. C. J. Macmillan’s thesis “Trade unionism in District 18, 1900-1925: A Case Study” ‘was one of the first (1968) followed by Frank Karas’ “Labour and Coal in the Crows Nest Pass, 1925-1935”(1972). Bercuson too has considered the parochial, with an article on the tragic Bellevue mine disaster of 1910 [20] followed by a skillful editing job on the minutes of evidence presented to the 1919 Alberta Coal Industry Commission. [21] The most recent authority on the roots of radicalism in the Alberta coal fields is probably Alan Seager who appears to be following an MA thesis on the Mine Workers’ Union of Canada with a dissertation comprising a detailed analysis of the industry’s society and work force. [22] Although in no way comparable, the folksy, under researched article by Keith Parker “Arthur Evans: Western Radical” in Alberta History deserves passing reference for it too follows the pattern. [23] However, the most prolific producer in the field has been the antiquarian Anne B. Woywitka who has chosen to chronicle prominent events and activities of a number of Ukrainian mine labour activists with a series of thumbnail sketches in Alberta History and its predecessor, the Alberta Historical Review. [24] W. R. Askin deviates from coal mine disasters and disputes in his 1973 thesis “Labour Unrest in Edmonton and District and its Coverage by the Edmonton Press, 1918-1919 [25] while E. Taraska charted the progress of unionism in Calgary in another thesis completed in 1975 called “The Calgary Craft Union Movement, 1900-1920.” [26] This work covers some of the same ground that Henry Klassen did in the thin little piece he did on the role of the labour newspaper, The Bond of Brotherhood in the formative years of the Calgary movement. [27] Significantly, however, Alberta’s labour movement is the only one on the prairies to enjoy the luxury of an official history to trumpet its accomplishments. Sadly, Warren Caragata’s Alberta Labour: A Heritage Untold is an example of money poorly spent. The illustrations are first rate but the text ignores large portions of the work force in an attempt to show that the Alberta movement arose from the need to confront rapacious, exploitative employers. [28]
The problem with Caragata’s book are symptomatic of the labour writing in the entire region. By concentrating on radicalism and confrontation, particularly in the primary sector of the economy, certain less evident worker activities have been all but ignored. Despite the importance of railway running trades, Hugh Tuck’s essay in Labour/le travailleur on the CPR Trainmen and Conductor’s strike in 1892 being an obvious exception. [29] Even less is available on the unionized workers in both the service sector and the public service which is strange considering the role that government has played in the economic life of the provinces as a regulator and stimulator. The same holds true for the lumber industry in the northern part of the region. In addition, one hopes that David Breen (UBC) will include in his examination of the petroleum industry an analysis of its impact on the creation of a unique free-wheeling subculture of transients which constitute a good portion of that industry’s work force.
Surprisingly, the interest in women’s studies which has been expressed over the past decade or so has not been reflected in an equivalent output on women in the prairie work force. Most work has been along the lines of A Harvest Yet to Reap: A History of Prairie Women which brings together photos and contemporary excerpts to illustrate women involved in a variety of activities. [30] Meanwhile University of Manitoba economist Paul Phillips presented a paper to the Western Canadian Studies Conference in 1976 entitled “Women in the Manitoba Labour Market: A Study of the Changing Economic Role.” Based on an examination of census returns it revealed that while more and more women were working. their roles and incomes relative to men had not changed appreciably. [31] The most recent conference, 1981, produced a more substantial paper by Ruth Roach Pierson on western women in the workplace during the Second World War. It too should appear in print in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, Carol Bacchi has discussed the politics of women and the vote in “Divided Allegiances: The Response of Farm and Labour Women to Suffrage to show that fundamental differences existed between urban “eastern” suffragists and western women involved in farm and labour organizations. [32]
Considering the predominant role agriculture has played in the prairie economy another surprising omission from prairie labour historiography until very recently has been the absence of any study of farm labour. Part of the reason has been the extreme difficulty of acquiring sources for a workforce which has traditionally been seasonal and transient. Be that as it may, considerable ground has been broken in the past half-dozen years. The Prairie Regional Office of Parks Canada in Winnipeg has done some interesting work in its background papers for the Motherwell Farm restoration, as did E. B. Ingles in his excellent MA thesis “Some Aspects of Dry-Land Agriculture in the Canadian Prairies to 1925” completed for the University of Calgary in 1973. While neither is directly concerned with labour per se they do describe the pre-Depression farm practices and principles which confronted the worker. Some recent ethnic collections like Harry Piniuta’s Land of Pair: Land of Promise, describe the experiences of Ukrainian farm workers trying to get established in the New World. [33]
For formal scholarship on farm labour one must consult Ross McCormack’s Reformers, Rebels and Revolutionaries, to see the attempts made by the IWW to organize harvest workers and Don Avery’s “Dangerous Foreigners” to examine the part that prairie agriculture played in creating a large unskilled labour pool to be tapped at will by various needy sectors of the economy. Of related interest is D. McGinnis’ “Farm Labour in Transition: Occupational Structure and Economic Dependency in Alberta, 1921-1951.” [34] This seminal study has stripped away the mythology surrounding the farm hand and shows him simply as a commodity contributing to the cost of agricultural production. When the price of wheat dropped the labourer had to seek urban alternatives, resulting in a decline in the quality of rural life, which in turn contributed to a further exodus of young people from the farm. Meanwhile, John Thompson’s study of the region during the Great War, The Harvests of War, gives serious consideration to the labour “problem” experienced by farmers during the conflict and the technological changes that became part of the solution. This theme he pursued further in an article written in conjunction with R. E. Ankli and H. D. Helsberg, “The Adoption of the Gasoline Tractor in Western Canada” which appears in the second volume of Canadian Papers in Rural History. [35] Thompson has also skillfully placed one aspect of farm labour supply, the annual harvest excursion, within its rightful national context in an article in the CHR entitled “Bringing in the Sheaves: The Harvest Excursionists, 1890-1929.” [36] Shortly thereafter, this writer examined one particularly eventful excursion, that of 1908, to show the role that myths about the prairie west, together with speculation and publicity, played in creating unfulfilled dreams among those hoping for wealth and excitement in the annual harvest. [37] I have also pursued the same theme within an imperial context to examine the basis for various training schemes designed to prepare British farm workers for the prairies in an article entitled “Wooden Horses and Rubber Cows: Training British Agricultural Labour for the Canadian Prairies, 1890-1930.” [38] Hopefully McCormack’s most recent interest, sponsored British immigration to Canada, will provide concrete information on such matters as the recruitment of labour by various organizations.
While it seems that agricultural labour studies appear to be “taking off’ the most recent issue of Post-Graduate Dissertations in Progress [39] reveals a considerably diminished interest in labour matters in general. Perhaps this is an indication that students forced into a conservative stance by a sick economy are less altruistic and therefore more inclined towards “safe” subjects like business history and ethnic studies. Yet the legacy of their predecessor’s concern for militants, activists and the working class is far reaching and permanent. For example, any modern general treatment of any aspect of prairie society can no more ignore the contribution of workers to that society than it can ignore the contribution of women. One need only look at such recent books as John H. Archer’s Saskatchewan: A History and Regina Before Yesterday: A Visual History 1882-1945, [40] edited by William Brennan to see concrete examples of the changed emphasis.
The impact has been felt at other levels as well. School texts for example are now often supplemented by the impressive Canada’s Visual History Series produced by Museums Canada in conjunction with the National Film Board which features a number of slide sets and commentaries prepared by informed authors on a variety of topics. Included among them are David Bercuson’s “1919: A Year of Strikes,” Ross McCormack’s “The Blanketstiffs: Itinerant Railway Construction Workers, 1896-1914” and Don Avery’s “Immigration to Western Canada 1896-1914” all related to the subject of prairie labour. In a similar vein provincial government departments in co-operation with provincial archives have occasionally hired summer students to conduct interviews with pioneers, among them individuals from the labour movement. [41] The sponsorship by the Alberta Federation of Labour of Warren Caragata’s book Alberta Labour: A Heritage Untold is another measure of the growing awareness of and interest in historical matters not only for their own sake but also as a means of promoting solidarity among contemporary workers.
Provincial museums too are getting into the act. Alberta’s museum in Edmonton has long exhibited static displays of Albertans at work while the various Western Development Museums of Saskatchewan have attempted to supplement the physical past of the workplace with demonstrations of now all but forgotten work practices such as wheelwrighting, in an effort to perpetuate and preserve them. [42] The worker and his society have received recognition unheard of even a decade ago and the groundwork for all this was laid by young scholars venturing into what in the 1960s were considered new fields of endeavour. That academic interest appears to have waned is unfortunate. However, over the next decade an absorption process should take place, and time will allow for a certain detachment from the frenzied 1970s. Previously untouched areas should gain currency, not so much for their relevance, as for their basic historical importance. Perhaps someone might even step forward to place the prairie worker in comparative perspective with a much-needed overview. Prairie society by virtue of its newness and continued transiency is unique and the workers who have contributed to it deserve such special treatment.
1. See W. J. C. Cherwinski, “The Left in Canadian History, 1911-1969,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 4(4) Nov. 1969, 51-60.
2. Nancy Stunden; “Labour Records and Archives: The Struggle for a Heritage” Archivaria, 4. Summer 1977. 73-91; George Brandak, “Labour Sources in the UBC Library’s Special Collection Division,” Archivaria, 4, Summer 1977, 166-171.
3. See Bryan D. Palmer, “Working-Class Canada: Recent Historical Writing,” Queen’s Quarterly, 86 No. 4. Winter 1979-80, 594-616 for a detailed discussion of the debate between the “new generation” and the “elder statesmen,” some almost a decade older.
4. Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867-1892, (Toronto: 1980), The Condition of the Working Class in Toronto, 1900-1921 (Ottawa: 1979), and A Culture in Conflict-Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario (1960-1914), (Montreal, 1979) respectively.
5. 96(2), Feb. 1981, 11, 12, 14, 16.
6. Toronto: 1976.
7. Toronto: 1974.
8. Toronto: 1973.
9. Ottawa: 1989.
10. Montreal: 1974.
11. “Western Labour Radicalism and the One Big Union: Myths and Realities” in S. M. Trofimenkoff. ed., The Twenties in Western Canada (Ottawa: 1972). pp. 32-49; “Labour Radicalism and the Western Industrial Frontier, 1897-1919,” C.H.R. 58(1977), pp. 154-175; “The Winnipeg General Strike, Collective Bargaining and the One Big Union Issue,” C.H.R. 51 (1970), pp. 164-176.
12. Toronto: 1974.
13. Canada and the Burden of Unity (Toronto: 1977). Globe and Mail, 14-21 Feb. 1981
14. “Arthur Puttee and the Liberal Party, 1899-1904.” CHR. 51(2), 1970. 141-163; “Radical Politics in Winnipeg 1899-1915” Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba Transactions, Series III, 29 (1972-3), 81-98. “The Emergence of the Socialist Movement in British Columbia,” B.C. Studies, 21, Spring 1974 3-27; “The Industrial Workers of the World in Western Canada,” CHA Historical Papers, 1975. 167-90; “British Working Class Immigrants and Canadian Radicalism: The Case of Arthur Puttee, Canadian Ethnic Studies, X(2), 1978, 22-37
15. Edward W. Laine, “The Strait-Jacketing of Multiculturalism in Canada” and Donald Avery, “Of Book Reviews and Polemics A Rejoinder to Edward W. Laine,” Archivaria, No. 10 (Summer 1980), 225-248.
16. “Canadian Immigration Policy and the Foreign Navvy.” CHA Historical Papers, 1972, 135-156: “Continental European Immigrant Workers in Canada, 1896-1919: from ‘Stalwart Peasants’ to Radical Proletariat” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 12(1), 1975 53-64. “The Radical Alien and the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919,” in Carl Berger and Ramsay Cook, eds., The West and the Nation, (Toronto, 1976). 209-231 “British Born ‘Radicals’ in North America, 1900-1941: The Case of Sam Scarlett,” Canadian Ethnic Studies, X(2), 1978, 65-85.
17. “The Royal North-West Mounted Police and Labour Unrest in Western Canada;” CHR, 61(2). June 1980, 169-190.
18. “Trade Unions in the Saskatchewan Coal Industry, 1907-1945; Saskatchewan History, 31(2), Spring 1978 50-68; “The Working and Living Conditions of the Saskatchewan Deep Sea Coal Miners 1930-1939.” Saskatchewan History, 33(2), Spring 1980, 41-55.
19. “Organized Labour in Saskatchewan, the TLC Years, 1905-1945.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Alberta, 1972.
20. Tragedy at Bellevue: Anatomy of a Mine Disaster,” Labour/le travailleur, 3, 1978. 221-31.
21. Alberta’s Coal Industry 1919, (Calgary: 1978).
22. Dissertations in Progress lists Seager’s thesis as “Aspects of the Social. Industrial and Political History of the Alberta Coalfields” but his paper presented to the CHA meetings in 1979, “Class Consciousness. Class Anarchy: Three Alberta Coal Towns during the Great Depression” possibly defines the topic more precisely.
23. 26(2), Spring 1978, 21-29.
24. “Strike at Waterways.” AHR, 20 (Autumn 1972), “Drumheller Strike at 1919,” AHR, 21 (Winter 1973), 1-7: “Recollections of a Union Man.” AH, 23 (Autumn 1975). 6-20; “A Pioneer Woman in the Labour Movement,” AH, 26 (Winter 1978), 10-16; “Labouring on the Railroad,” AH, 27 (Winter 1979. 25-33).
25. University of Alberta.
26. MA, University of Alberta.
27. “The Bond of Brotherhood and Calgary Workingmen,” in A. W. Rasporich and Henry Klassen (eds.), Frontier Calgary (Calgary: 1975), 267-72.
28. Toronto: 1979.
29. “W. C. Van Horne and the ‘Foreign Emissaries’: The CPR Trainmen’s and Conductors’ strike of 1892.” Labour/le travailleur 6, Autumn 1980, 73-88.
30. Rasmussen, Rasmussen, Savage and Wheeler (eds.) Toronto: 1976.
31. In Henry C. Klassen, ed., The Canadian West: Social Change and Economic Development. (Calgary: 1977), 77-92.
32. In Linda Kealey (ed.) A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada 1880s-1920s, (Toronto: 1979), 89-107.
33. Saskatoon: 1978.
34. In H. Palmer (ed.), The Settlement of the West, (Calgary: 1977), 174-86.
35. Donald H. Akenson (ed.), Gananoque, Ont. 1980.
36. CHR, 59(4), Dec. 1978, 467-489.
37. W. J. C. Cherwinski, “The Incredible Harvest Excursion of 1908” Labour/ 1e travailleur, 5 Spring 1980, 133-154.
38. CHA Historical Papers, 1980, 133-154.
39. 1980, 34-37.
40. Saskatoon: 1980 and Regina: 1978 respectively.
41. See for example Towards a New Past Vol. III: Toil and Trouble An Oral History of Industrial Unrest in the Estevan-Bienfait Coalfields, (Regina: 1975).
42. See Sparks off the Anvil, 5(2), Feb. 1981.
Page revised: 23 April 2010
