by Royden Loewen
University of Manitoba
Manitoba History, Number 18, Autumn 1989
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Voisey, Paul. Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community. Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988, 25-341 pp., ill.
Dick, Lyle. Farmers “Making Good”: The Development of Abernethy District, Saskatchewan 1880-1920. Ottawa, Canadian Parks Service, 1989, 259 pp., ill.
Loveridge, Donald. “The Garden of Manitoba: The Settlement and Agricultural Development of the Rock Lake District and the Municipality of Louise, 1878-1902.” (PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1986).
Motherwell barn at Abernathy, circa 1945.
Source: Canadian Parks Service
In his 1946 article, “Clio in Canada,” W. L. Morton argued that Western Canada should establish its “own identity in terms of its own historical experience” separate from the Laurentian school of Eastern Canadian history. He suggested that the West had developed a “latent nationalism [that was] neither racial ... nor dominant ... but environmental and, because of the diversity of its people, composite.” The old Clio that Morton saw dominating prairie historiography is indeed being replaced by a new spirit of history that recognizes the distinct experience of settling on the prairies. This is clearly the theme in the three works under examination. They offer neither the teleology of national expansion from sea to sea (the Laurentian view), nor the machinations of Central Canadian economic interests (as argued by V. C. Fowke). Rather these works attempt to re-create the perspective of the actors themselves by means of “the new rural history,” a category of social history described by Robert Swierenga, the American historian.
Although the studies are based in three different provinces, deal with different time periods, and place differing levels of importance on the frontier, physiography and economic structures, they see Western Canada as a distinctive place that gave birth to distinctive settlements. Unlike other recent studies of rural history, such as those by Donald Akenson and Allen Greer in Canada and Jon Gjerde and Robert Ostergren in the American Midwest, these studies do not focus on cultural transplantation or economic modernization. The dialectic here is not between settlers and a host culture or industrial capitalism. The assumption is that the settlers were members of the host society and that they were capitalists upon entry into the west. Ironically, just as American rural historians have begun focusing on the resilience of pre-industrial cultures, Canadians have rediscovered the frontier. These three volumes treat the prairies as a cultural void; economic opportunity determines the nature of the new settlements. The dialectic described in these books, therefore, is between the settlers’ traditional values and the environmental and economic realities of their new home.
Paul Voisey sets out to chart the “influences that shaped Vulcan,” a 1000 square mile agricultural district located on the semi-arid plains between Calgary and Lethbridge in Alberta. He insists that “traditionalism, frontierism, environmentalism and metropolitanism interacted in extremely complex ways” to determine the settlement dynamics, patterns of agriculture and the social make-up of Vulcan.
In developing this thesis Voisey provides a rich social history of Vulcan. Through census records, local newspapers and oral history he determines that the settlers came from a diversity of places throughout the American midwest and Ontario. His analysis of social mobility, land speculation and boosterism allows him to conclude that rural communities were anything but “sleepy, stable places.” The detailed descriptions of how farmers adopted various dry land cultivation practises and technological innovations offers insights into their capitalistic value system. His argument that there was a high degree of wealth stratification without an accompanying class conflict may pit him against many of his contemporaries, but it puts him in the company of James Henretta and others, and does prove to be a convincing portrayal of rural mentality. The community’s social networks and interaction through curling bonspiels, literary clubs and local municipal politics are highly informative. And his description of Vulcan as inordinately secular puts to question previous assumptions about rural communities’ predisposition to religious radicalism or sectarianism.
Directing Voisey’s sketch of the Vulcan community is the interrelationship of the four themes of heritage, metropolitanism, physiography and frontier. Of these factors, however, Voisey is clearly most intent on arguing the influence of the “frontier” which he simply defines as an area with “low man-to-land ratio.” The frontier proves to be the main factor in every aspect of community building. The abundance of land instilled in the settlers a progressive mentality that governed attitudes to farming, town building and politics. That same abundance was the underpinning of Vulcan’s social mobility because the settlers’ main preoccupation was to “turn a fast profit [on land] and clear out.” If there were signs of cultural replication it was inextricably tied to land speculation and the townbuilders’ main aim was to “create settlements that would appeal to potential buyers.” Large acreages encouraged farmers to ignore pleas from the cities and governments for diversification of crops and livestock. Because the “frontier lacked restraints based on local tradition” Vulcan’s farmers readily accepted new technologies and farm practises. Social life was affected by the “low population density [that] led to the proliferation of formal organizations.” Great distances and an ignorance of heritage were key elements in low quality education and “crumbling denominationalism.” Social conflict was avoided in Vulcan because the availability of land created a single dominating class of “petite bourgeoisie” and because the “wheat frontier demanded so much cooperation.”
The “frontier” thesis is, thus, given much greater weight than Voisey himself seems to have anticipated, judging from the tone of the introduction. One is left with a sense that the material and social history within the book is stronger than its main interpretation. No one doubts that the frontier was an important factor in the development of the Vulcan district, but to dwell on it as Voisey has done raises the spectre of the reincarnation of Frederick Jackson Turner onto the Canadian prairies.
The environment of the prairies is a key variable also in Lyle Dick’s history of the Abernethy district near the Qu’Appelle Valley in southeastern Saskatchewan. He, too, sets out to examine the dialectic between tradition and the frontier. Dick’s study, which covers a span of forty years, treats Abernethy’s development in two stages—the early settlement period and the mature society phase. During the first twenty years the availability of land, sparse settlement, and economic opportunity resulted in a society similar to Vulcan. There was a high degree of egalitarianism, neighbourliness, informal social relationships and upward mobility.
Dick’s book, however, departs from Voisey’s in both the description of the settlement period and of the mature society. First, Dick argues that the frontier did not change the values of the settlers. Indeed, the frontier allowed them the opportunity to perpetuate their old Victorian and Calvinistic ideas that they were “makers of their own destiny” and that they could take any situation and “make it good.” But despite the obvious theme of Ontarian transplantation, the replication of these ideas was a distinctively Western phenomenon. As Dick argues “the Canadian West offered the last ‘safety valve’ for the continuation of nineteenth-century ideals of individual enterprise and unfettered exploitation of resources.”
A second major argument in Dick’s book is that the end of the frontier, after the first twenty years of settlement, gave rise to a rigidly structured and differentiated society. Despite the farmers’ Calvinistic world view which ascribed their success to “thrift, hard work, [and] intelligence,” the fact was that they were winners because they had arrived first, a fact which gave them the opportunity to choose the best land, and because they had come before 1887, the year a temporary liberal land policy of providing homesteaders with two quarter sections of land ended. Dick uses the neighbouring, but much poorer German settlement of Neudorf as a control group to underline this point. The Germans who settled later were restricted to poorer land and to homesteads of only one quarter section. Quantitative analysis of homestead entries indicates that this and not initial investments or the ability to meet “setting up” costs explains the gap between the Anglo-Canadian and Neudorf farmers.
The central factor of success in Abernethy, thus, was land. Indeed, as Dick argues, Anglo-Canadian farmers proved to be the most successful because of the “capital gain ... [they derived] from a rapid increase in land values after the turn of the century.” The gap between rich and poor farmers increased in time, for it was the former who had the means to withstand the cost/price squeeze of World War I and to acquire new technology. Dick notes that in the increasingly structured mature society, farmers in the top 15% of the economic ladder saw the value of their farms more than double between 1900 and 1920 while those in the lower one third saw their values actually decrease.
Farmers “Making Good” was published by Parks Canada to create the social and economic context for the restoration of the farm of W. R. Motherwell, the founder of the Territorial Grain Growers and the agricultural minister for Saskatchewan after 1905 and for the Dominion government during the 1920s. Thus the study focuses on the Motherwell type of settler. Typical of the Abernethy farmers, Motherwell erected a massive stone house and frame barn to serve as a “status symbol” and also recreated “stratified concepts of social intercourse.” Dick counters S. M. Upset’s view of Saskatchewan’s “classless society” by demonstrating that Motherwell’s self perception and his social relationships set him apart from transient farmhands, German or Indian female servants, and landless farmers. Hard work was seen as a virtue and Dick richly portrays those values by presenting the backbreaking, dangerous toil of wheat raising on the Motherwell farm. In Motherwell’s view hard work was justly rewarded with the “conspicuous consumption” so evident at his farm, Lanark Place. But the Victorian order of things extended beyond the farm. It was a view of society which was well exemplified in Motherwell’s second wife, Catherine Gillespie who, confident of being “an agent of Divine Will,” advanced the cause of sabbatarianism, eugenics, temperance and female suffrage. This same conservative spirit of reform characterized the TGGA which Motherwell founded. In contrast to E. A. Partridge’s organization in the same district, the TGGA was comprised of well-to-do farmers whose programs served to “reinforce differences in economic and political power,” between farmers.
The Motherwell dream died hard. “Many of the contradictory elements ... could no longer be reconciled as the old Victorian social order gave way to modern realities,” writes Dick. The rise of “large market oriented units” ended the myth of the “independent yeoman farmer.” Even Motherwell’s farm suffered and Dick concludes that it would only have survived with outside infusions of money—probably from Motherwell’s ministerial salary. Motherwell’s son, Talmage, became a new type. His “modest ambitions ... signified a fundamental shift in values” and his marriage to a woman of German descent signalled “that the anticipated Anglo-Canadian hegemony in Saskatchewan was already in decline.” The frontier that had engendered such a hope in farmers that they could chart their own course proved illusory. Instead of nurturing egalitarianism as Voisey might argue, the frontier in Dick’s view merely encouraged farmers “to avoid reconciling the contradiction between the ‘myth of the self made man’ and an increasingly dosed social framework.”
Donald Loveridge’s unpublished study of the Rock Lake district in the Southern Manitoba Municipality of Louise between 1879 and 1906 represents a third approach to the problem of man and the frontier or the dialectic between tradition and a new environment. Loveridge, too, argues that the frontier with its abundance of land was a crucial variable in the nature of settlement. Like Voisey, Loveridge argues that the frontier molded capitalistic values. Like Dick, he argues that vacant land allowed a replication of a homogeneous Ontarian settlement. But his primary concern is not with cultural replication on the frontier, but with how empty spaces and economic opportunity fashioned the strategies employed by the settlers themselves. He dismisses what he calls the “victim’s thesis” which argues that national policies discriminated against Western homesteaders. Instead he claims that “the settlers themselves played a dominant, dynamic role in shaping the course of events.” Despite the fact that Loveridge alludes to no theoretical framework or body of historical literature in making this assertion, he makes this the central theme in his narrative. In comparison to simple human agency, neither the unique opportunity of recreating a homogeneous Ontario community on land that contained no railway reserves nor the obstacles that self-serving railways set up are important.
Loveridge uses exhaustive detail to follow the strategies the settlers employed as they left their counties in Ontario and migrated to Rock Lake. He shows the process of chain and group migration, the operation of colonization companies and the rise of a cohesive, densely populated Ontarian settlement. Upon arriving in Manitoba the settlers exhibited “a competitive note which had hitherto been muted”; they sought to become commercial farmers as quickly as possible. This spirit of capitalism directed the initial land rush of 1878 and 79, led the settlers to adopt a “reckless, tunnel vision” in their quest for a railway, and influenced the intense, stormy history of town building. Everywhere there were signs of a “wheat-based railway-oriented strategy of development.” Loveridge shows how this spirit rose to “sublime self confidence” with the land boom, good wheat yields and the survey of the CPR in the early 1880s.
If it was the frontier that led to a situation in which “avarice triumphed over good sense” it was “the hard realities of the Western climate” as expressed in four straight crop failures that led farmers to reconsider their views of community building and instant wealth. Mixed farming became the “sane version of the wheat craze.” It is significant that Loveridge insists that this too was part of the Western experience. Here was no “cultural rebound” as argued by John Rice, no metropolitan influence as suggested by Voisey. Mixed farming was an adaptation to the exigencies of frontier agriculture.
What puts the works of Voisey, Dick and Loveridge in one historical school, then, is clearly their subject matter. Here are three detailed, thoroughly researched studies of the tensions between settlers and their environment that follow the lines of enquiry of the “new rural history.” Where the studies speak of settlers’ world views, community social structure, and human networks they have added richly to the growing body of rural social history. The fact that Voisey and Dick disagree on the social significance of wealth differentiation is less important than the fact that they have comprehensively portrayed those structures and provided exciting insights into the histories of these communities.
Where the studies fail to mention the crucial variables of household production, family networks, kinship labour pools, and women they reveal a continuing weakness in the historiography of the west. On this latter score Loveridge ignores women almost entirely, Voisey mentions them only in passing and Dick is primarily concerned with the public side of Abernethy’s socially prominent women. In the arena of economic strategies men and their organizations, and not the household which included women and children, are seen as the main players.
Where the studies argue the variables of frontier and environment they have added to an appreciation of the West’s separate identity. But where they ignore the wider social context they have added to a regional myopia. The assertions that clergy maintained ecclesiastical authority until they came west, that impartible inheritance systems ensured a degree of egalitarianism, that farmers were driven by capitalistic greed only after they saw the frontier, or that ethnic minorities were on the “periphery” of frontier society because they were poor and did not participate in public life are made without convincing evidence and, indeed, are contradicted by much recent historiography.
Where the studies differ in interpretation and focus, they have underscored W.L. Morton’s view of a “composite West.” Though Vulcan, Abernethy and Rock Lake were all dominated by Ontarians, differences in land policies, local soil and climate, ethnic mixes, railway service and local leadership ensured different communities. These differences ensured a fact which each of the authors asserts—a typical Western community may not have existed.
In the final analysis each of the works add to a Western sense of identity that is “environmental and composite.” The point has been well made that the West’s history is much more than the result of eastern machinations. Having separated Western Canadian historiography from Laurentianism it may be time to tie it to global themes. Historiographical maturity should not lead to regional myopia.
Catherine Motherwell in the sitting room of the Motherwell’s stone house, circa 1911.
Source: Saskatchewan Archives Board
Page revised: 13 July 2015
