Between the Red and the Rockies 9781487576271

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Between the Red and the Rockus

BETWEEN THE RED AND THE ROCKIES

By GRANT MAcEWAN UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS : 1952

Copyright, Canada, 1952, by University of Toronto Press Reprinted, 1953, 1956 Reprinted in the United States of America, 1963 Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 978-1-4875-7710-0 (paper)

To Heather who was shaking the table much of the time when her daddy was writing this story

Preface

AGRICULTURE, life-blood of all nations, was born in the Old World before the dawn of history and cradled with the earliest civilizations. In the New World, more especially in the western section of the North American continent, the record of agriculture is brief. But though brief, it is none the less dramatic; the transformation of the Great Plains, so recently a limitless buffalo-pasture lorded over by a semi-savage race, to organized farms and ranches, in an astonishingly short space of time, must be included among the notable chapters in world history. Canadian agriculture began in the East and moved westward at an irregular pace. In contrast to the western aborigines, who were a non-agricultural race, the eastern tribes of Indians cultivated a little land and grew several species of crops for the purpose of supplementing the wild meat in their diets. Similarly the first white agricultural settlements were on the Atlantic coast, and for three centuries the West was left to the fur traders. But once started, the western wheat fields extended at a rate which had no parallel in world history. All Canadian life was affected. In a very real sense, wheat built a nation. The agriculture of Western Canada has thus a personality vii

that is rich and colourful. The story of its romantic rise should reveal entertaining, academic, and cultural values and is one that should be told in school and college classrooms. In the years which followed Confederation, events west of Red River were of the greatest political significance to Canada. One has but to recount the uprisings of 1870 and 1885, the establishment of law and order by the mounted police, the formulation of Indian policies, the ambitious rail construction, the feverish expansion when immigration was at its peak, the wealth produced in the western grain fields, and the hardships and losses during the drought years. Mistakes were made, many of them, but some new records in human achievement were made also. The conversion of half a nation from wilderness to an enterprising agricultural community in a single generation is without parallel. Indeed the record, imperfect as it may be, has much of practical value to offer. The best plans for agriculture's future in this land will not be drawn without an understanding of its brief but romantic past, the mistakes and the triumphs. A review of western agriculture, with its ups and downs, should help farming people and others to strike a happier balance between the buoyant optimism of 1909 and the deathlike pessimism of 1937. The next fifty years may not witness such dramatic changes as the past half-century produced, but it is to be hoped that the changes will be along sound lines, with broader interest in diversification, a determination to conserve soil, and a new emphasis upon homes. Western agriculture has traditions which are attractive and useful. The author acknowledges with thanks the permission extended by authors and publishers to reprint extracts from The Unknown Country by Bruce Hutchison (Longmans, Green & Company), Economic Geography of Canada by A. W. Currie ( The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited), and Army Without Banners by John Beames. G.McE. viii

Contents

l The Fur Traders' Empire 2 The Agricultural Explorers 3 Retreating Frontiers 4 A Trail of Steel 5 The Tide of Settlement 6

King Wheat

7

The Cattle Kingdom Klondike Beef Chuck-Wagon Romance Dress Parade Education and Experiment The Agricultural Revolution Changing Ways Union for Strength A One-Crop Country? Depression and Recovery Today and Tomorrow Index

8

D

10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17

8 26 44 68 79 108 116 185

149 171 190

208 220 282 247 268 277 297 ix

Maps

The Selkirk Land Grant of 1811 Main Route of Palliser Expedition

16 33

Main Railway Lines in Western Canada Today, al-so Military Routes in Northwest Rebellion, 1885

77

Ranching Zones of Western Canada 125 Cattle Routes to the Klondike 141 Main Types of Farming in Western Canada 251

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Between the Red and the Rockies

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The Fur Traders' Empire

the Red River and the Rocky Mountains, and north from the forty-ninth parallel to the Arctic, lies a region of relatively short, hot summers and uncertain rainfall. For centuries this was a region apparently unsuited to agriculture. The story of its conquest by one of the greatest wheat economies the world has yet known is an epic chapter in the history of civilization. The determinist sees this as the result of changing world conditions; the apostle of free will as the triumph of man over his environment. From either point of view the story should be of absorbing interest to students of the Canadian scene. In the lee of the Rocky Mountains and extending all the way up the continent, from the Rio Grande in the south to the Coppermine River in the north, lies an area of plains and plateaus in which the average annual rainfall does not exceed twenty inches. In places it is ten inches or less. This area includes the barren lands of the north and the southern deserts and "dry belts." The whole region must be considered subject to the risk of periodic drought. In the far northern reaches of this semi-arid region, the shortness of the growing season and the scarcity of agricultural soil are major handicaps BETWEEN

s

to cultivation and cereal production. In the extreme south the growing season is longer but the precipitation hovers often around the danger mark. Thus throughout the Canadian West the growing season is comparatively short, and frost adds its menace to that of drought. No force impelled primitive man to till these lands. Early agricultural communities grew up in fertile river valleys where there was little to do but fence and harvest. As overcrowding or ambition drove men to expand their holdings they would appear to have done so by trial and error. If fairly good crops could be raised on new lands without too much effort, the frontier of agriculture advanced. If there were failures it remained static or retreated. The aboriginal peoples of Canada were no exceptions to this rule. The sixty-five degree July isotherms in the regions of thirty- to forty-inch rainfall bear a close relation to the habitat of agricultural tribes in pre-European days. Beyond these limits the Indian, whether by instinct or as the result of unfortunate experience, did not attempt to crop the land. He maintained or reverted to the life of a nomadic hunter, and as such he effected, in his own way, the first conquest of the lands between the Red and the Rockies. The ranching country of southern Alberta was occupied before the coming of the white man by the Blackfoot nation, the strongest and most warlike on the Canadian prairies. The nation was composed of the Blackfoot, Blood, and Piegan tribes, and its territory extended from the Missouri River to the North Saskatchewan and from the Rocky Mountains to western Saskatchewan. The name may have arisen from the traditional habit of painting the moccasins a dark colour or the discolouration of the moccasins by prairie fire. These, the fiercest warriors on the plains, were traditionally at war with their neighbours, mainly the Assiniboines, occupying what is now the farming country of southern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba, and the Crees, 4

occupying central Saskatchewan and Manitoba as far north as the Churchill River. The Sarcee tribe, living to the northwest of the Blackfoot nation, was of little importance in point of war strength and had the good sense to maintain some semblance of peace with its neighbours; but the Gros-Ventre or Big Belly tribe, until it retreated south from the Canadian scene, about the latter part of the eighteenth century, fought the Blackfoot from the latter's southeastern flank. When they weren't fighting on their eastern and northern fronts, the Blackfoot were skirmishing with the Sioux from the south or with the Kootenay from across the mountains westward. Although the Sioux Indians belonged south of the present international boundary, they were to constitute an important factor in the affairs of British North America after 1876 when Sitting Bull and his braves fled northward across the boundary after annihilating an American force under General Custer at Little Big Hom. Such apparently was the more or less balanced Indian picture before the white man arrived to disrupt everything. This Indian society, which the whites managed to uproot in so short a space of time, was a natural order. It was not a peaceful society and it was not particularly progressive; but in many ways it was logical and in all respects it was simple. Political and parking problems were non-existent; there were no taxes to pay, and no budgets to balance, and the women did the work. Some will question if the white man improved things much. During their survival on this continent, the Indians accommodated themselves to their local surroundings, and the prairie tribes adopted a mode of life as distinct from that of the eastern tribes as present prairie farming methods are from those of Ontario. They depended on the buffalo as their white successors were for generations to depend on wheat. The buffalo provided food, clothing, shelter, and fuel, and when the buffalo failed, as later when the wheat crop failed, starvation was imminent. 5

The vastness of the prairies sometimes seems to encourage extravagant thinking. At any rate the prairie red man was not a thoughtful provider; it was a case of feast or famine with him. When game was plentiful, he killed extravagantly and ate the choicest parts only. In such seasons of abundance, the tongues and perhaps the unborn calves, both considered delicacies, were the sole parts recovered from the buffalo carcasses. The Indians of the plains were almost entirely carnivorous, and their capacity for food was very great. Eight pounds of meat per person per day was not thought extravagant rationing for a Hudson's Bay post, and in times of plenty an Indian could probably consume considerably more. The culinary art was not highly developed and a cookbook, a clean table cloth, and the inventive genius of a master chef were not considered essential to adequate eating. About the only alternative to fresh meat was pemmican, which provided for preservation in the absence of tin cans, glass sealers, and refrigerators. It was made by mixing dried and pounded buffalo meat with fat and sometimes saskatoon berries. The mixture could be packed in rawhide sacks for curing and storage and although no salt was used, it would keep for a year or more. It was as much a staple as bread in a modem diet and it was adopted and used widely by explorers, fur-traders, and early settlers as well as Indians. The remarkable skill with which the prairie tribes adapted themselves to their environment was in a real sense a conquest of the plains, even though it was very different from that of the later prairie farmer, and the first white men who came to the plains paid tribute to the Indians' skill by copying their ways of life. In their search for furs they adapted themselves readily to the wild free life of this hunter's paradise, and could see no other possible future for the country. The penetration of the West even by the fur-trader was, however, a slow and difficult process. The first attempts at exploration came by what seemed to be nature's gateway, 6

Hudson Bay. Henry Hudson, in search of a northwest passage to the Orient, sailed the good ship Discovery into the great bay in 1610. He was carrying credentials from the English sovereign, James I, to whatever oriental king or ruler he might chance to meet. Good Englishman that he was, he would not be caught away from home without a letter of introduction to somebody. But it was a fateful voyage. The crew mutinied and Hudson and eight loyal followers were cast adrift on the icy waters of the Bay, never to be heard from again. Thomas Button, with the double purpose of finding Hudson and finding a short route to the far east, reached the mouth of the Nelson River in 1612. Jens Munck, sailing under the Danish flag and with the same twofold purpose, entered the Bay in 1619 and wintered at the mouth of the Churchill River. Again the north was unlucky. Scurvy became acute and of Munck's crew of sixty-four men only three were alive in the spring to make the voyage home. Another half century was to pass before the value of this semi-frozen gateway was to be appreciated. In 1659---60, the French explorers, Radisson and Groseilliers, travelling with Cree Indians, pushed from the Lake Superior regions in the direction of Hudson Bay. We do not know how far they went, but they sensed the possibilities of a fur trade conducted via "The Great Bay of the North" and, failing to gain support from the Governor of Canada, sought help in England. They had no trouble in selling their scheme there, and in 1668 an expedition backed by Charles II, the Duke of York, and Prince Rupert, as well as London business men, set sail for Hudson's Bay, as Hudson Bay was then called. One of the two boats sailing under "Mr. Radishes and Mr. Gooseberry" was damaged and obliged to return to England. The other, the Nonsuch, returned in 1669 riding deep in the water under her cargo of valuable furs. The venture was a success and in 1670 King Charles granted a charter to "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay." The Company's first governor was Prince 7

Rupert, the King's cousin. That was the beginning of the Hudson's Bay Company, destined to play a great part in the development of the new country. It was also, if people had only lmown it, the beginning of a two-century struggle to hold a private fur-traders' empire against the open attacks of rivals and the "insidious" inroads of settlers. U these two and a haH million square miles of western Canada had a capital in the years which followed, it was at the mouth of one of the big rivers emptying into Hudson Bay. When the Gentlemen Adventurers decided to build a fort which would withstand any attack upon their kingdom, they chose a site at the mouth of the Churchill, across from the present majestic and modem terminal elevator with its capacity of two and a haH million bushels. They say that no elevator of its size in the world had so little to do in the first twenty years of its existence, and a somewhat similar comment might be made about the old fortifications. The gentlemen of the great Company built Fort Churchill in 1689 and it burned down almost immediately. When they built another fort, they decided to have one that couldn't be destroyed by fire. The fabulous Fort Prince of Wales, whose walls are there for all to see today, was started in 1731. It stands 310 feet by 317 feet, about the size of a city block, and nearly forty years passed before the mammoth undertaking was completed. Someone accustomed to astronomical figures may estimate the tons of huge granite stones required for walls seventeen feet high and between twenty-five and forty feet thick, each big enough to completely swallow a small cottage. Heavy fortification for a wilderness, we may marvel, but they were to guard what seemed the logical approach to a realm of untold wealth. It must be admitted that Fort Prince of Wales had an inglorious record. In 1782, the French admiral, La Perouse, entered the Bay with three ships, and captured the mighty fort without much trouble. The French captors tried to destroy it by fl.re and gunpowder but it didn't destroy easily. 8

In time it was partially restored for the benefit of posterity, but stands as a monument to human ingenuity and determination to make money rather than as a monument to courage and loyalty. When the traveller to the north has seen Fort Prince of Wales and realized the importance which was early attached to the north country, he should visit nearby Sloops Cove. Engraved in the rock is the famous name of Samuel Hearne, but there is also a sketch for eternity of one John Kelly being hung for the theft of a goose. Those who wintered at the mouth of the Churchill River in that pioneer period were glad to have something to do, even if it was only drawing pictures in rock. As long as the Hudson's Bay Company was satisfied to confine its trading to the Bay, there was little incentive to inland exploration, but French competition ultimately forced a change of policy and posts were extended to points nearer the source of the furs and nearer the country which had a totally unanticipated future in agriculture. Henry Kelsey, a restless Englishman in the company's employ at Fort Nelson, made journeys into the interior in 1688, and 1689; in 1690 he set out for the land of the Assiniboine Indians, whence he returned in 1692. But, following the loss of all the Bay forts except Nelson to the French under Troyes and Iberville in 1686, the company saw things differently. Kelsey was reinstated in favour and commissioned to go inland for the express purpose of making friendly contacts with the natives and diverting furs to the company's post. In 1691, he travelled through the northern parts of what are now Manitoba and Saskatchewan, saw many buffalo, mingled with the Indians, and proved to be a good salesman for his company. Before another such inland expedition was launched, the French-Canadian explorer, La Verendrye, and his two sons made penetrations into the prairies from the east. La Verendrye the elder determined in 1730 to reconnoitre westward in the interests of the fur trade, and within a few years 9

had forts extending to Red River. Fort Rouge was established at the forks of the Assiniboine and Red rivers in 1738 and was thus the first structure above the level of a tepee on the site which was to be Winnipeg. In the same year Fort La Reine, near the site of the present city of Portage la Prairie, was built, and from that point La Verendrye's two sons, LouisJoseph and the Chevalier, set out in 1742 westward and southwestward across the prairies. Following La Verendrye's efforts, French forts and trading posts were established along the Saskatchewan, and expansion inland became increasingly important to the Hudson's Bay Company. Anthony Henday left York Factory on the Bay in June 1754, commissioned to extend the company's business. A month later, he was paddling on the Carrot River in the central part of the present province of Saskatchewan. Travelling overland in a southwesterly direction, Henday saw buffalo for the first time on August 15. Five days later he crossed the South Saskatchewan River at a point not far from where Seager Wheeler, the first prairie wheat king, homesteaded one hundred and thirty-six years later. It may have been courage or it may have been ignorance, but Henday, it seems, had no fear of Blackfoot Indians. Travelling away westward, he found an encampment of Bloods, perhaps somewhere near the present day Willow Springs ranch where Frank Collicutt, after 1920, grazed the biggest herd of pure-bred Herefords in the world. Henday invited himself to be a guest and the Bloods received him well. He urged them to take their furs to his company on the Bay. He spent the ensuing winter with the tribesmen without losing his scalp, and returned to York Factory in the following spring. The return trip was almost entirely by river and, being down-stream, was made in much less time than the outward journey. The party paid a friendly visit at La Corne's Fort St. Louis, established two years before, and arrived back at York Factory just a few days short of a year from the date of 10

departure. But Hen day's experiences furnished more evidence that the Indians could not be expected to come great distances to trade at the company's posts on the Bay when the French trading establishments were erected in the heart of the Indian country. Samuel Hearne, also a servant of the Hudson's Bay Company, made trips from Churchill across the barren lands of the far north, and was the first to trek overland to the shores of the Arctic. His expeditions did not take him to the prairie country, although in 1774 he set up Cumberland House. However, company officials by this time realized what they were up against. There was only one thing to do-carry the trade to the Indians. At this time, the northwestern empire of the fur-traders was just over a century old. It was to endure for almost a century longer, but historical events were already sowing the seeds of its disruption. The cession of New France to England in 1763 had opened the inland waterways to "Canadian" traders of a new type, operating from Montreal. Some of the ambitious merchants heading the new companies came from the English colonies to the south; many of them were canny or reckless Scots; on the whole they seem to have combined the unscrupulousness which Haliburton's Sam Slick attributes to " Yankee pedlars" with the obstinacy which has periodically decimated the clans in support of lost causes. They were formidable rivals of the older company. The Frobisher brothers from Montreal were among the first to penetrate into the northwest. In 1774 Joseph Frobisher pushed as far north as the Churchill River, where he intercepted the Indians from up country on their way to Fort Prince of Wales. To the English company this was a punch below the belt. And worse was to follow. The Frobishers took a Montrealer with capital into their business, James McGill, later the founder of McGill University. Then they entered into a co-operative arrangement with Alexander Henry the elder, who had been trading with the 11

Indians about Fort Michilimackinac as early as 1761. This was a marketing pool, the first in the country, and it grew as other traders joined. It marked the beginning of the North West Company, an organization which became weighted with names like Alexander Mackenzie, Duncan McGillivray, Simon McTavish, and Simon Fraser-apparently the MacEwan clan was one of the few not represented. In both companies there were brave and inquisitive souls, men who did fine service in exploring and opening up the country. David Thompson, who served both the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company, stands out as a particularly strong character both mentally and morally, and one who contributed more than any other to exploration in what was destined to become the agricultural part of Western Canada. "Nor' Wester" Alexander Mackenzie assigned himself the task of finding a short and economical water route connecting the fur country with the oceans. Finding it neither in the Mackenzie River which, as he discovered in 1789, flowed north into the Arctic, nor yet in the Peace and Fraser Rivers (1793 ), he turned to look with renewed envy upon Hudson Bay, through which all traffic was controlled by the great rival company. With McGillivray, who became president of the North West Company, devoted to the same cause of finding a cheaper route, the Hudson's Bay Company was offered £2,000 per year for the privilege of bringing supplies in and shipping furs out by "the Bay." The offer was refused with a good deal of smug satisfaction, but the "Nor' Westers" lost none of their determination to share the use of Hudson Bay for their trade. Bitter rivalry culminated in bloodshed, and finally in 1821 the two organizations were united under the name of the pioneer company. It might have seemed, with this union, that the fur-traders' empire had been saved and that the Northwest would remain a hunter's paradise for centuries to come. But the cession of Canada to the British had not only brought the Montreal 12

traders into the picture. It had also freed the American colonies of the south from their dependence on the mother country for defence against French colonial aggression. The wave of expansion for which the Thirteen Colonies were already ripe was repelled severely by the extensive boundaries established for Canada, and colonial anger over the Quebec Act was a factor in bringing about the American Revolution. The true pioneer was already finding the Atlantic coast too crowded, and as economic conditions in Europe stimulated emigration to America, successive waves of frontiersmen spilled over farther and farther into the West. Children and grandchildren of loyalists who came in good faith to Canada after the American revolutionary war turn up in the pioneer records of Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the western states. European settlers were moving into the Atlantic seaboard and the lakes area and pushing westward. Expansion was in the air, and the frontier of settlement was moving westward visibly from day to day. At first, this might not have seemed a serious threat to the fur-traders' empire. Naturally and practically, the westward movement on this continent kept well to the south of the Laurentian shield and the sixty-five degree isothermic line, on the lands which seemed more immediately promising for agriculture. But when ideas are in the air, no one is immune. It was Hudson's Bay Company men themselves who sponsored the Red River settlement, thus establishing in their midst the vanguard of that force which, rather than any rival company, was eventually to prove their undoing. Agriculture slipped into the Canadian Northwest meekly and unobtrusively, as the handmaid of the fur trade. Vegetables and, in a few instances, wheat and barley were grown on small plots for the sole purpose of supplying food for the occupants of the forts or posts, and the farther the traders got from their bases of supplies the more important these became. Professor A. S. Morton, in his History of the Canadian West, draws attention to a minute from the 18

committee of the Hudson's Bay Company, dated May 16, 1674: "Ordered that there be provided ... a bushel of wheat and rye, barley and oats, or a barrel of each in casks, and such sorts of garden seeds as the Governor shall advise." A letter to the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company in America, dated May 29, 1680, stated that swine were being sent out to be propagated on Hayes Island. In the following year a letter, in Morton's files, to Governor Nixon reads: "We have sent 1 he Coate and 2 she Goates, 1 sow with Pigg which we have done in hopes thay will increase in ye Country and be of use and comfort to our people which is a thing that deserves your utmost care as well for the Good of the Factory as for the ease of the Compa. in the business of Provision." In 1733 La Verendrye sowed peas and corn on the southwest shore of the Lake of the Woods near the site of the reserves where his Indian allies, as pointed out by Irene Moore in her Valiant La V erendrye, today raise large crops of cereals. The first horses in what is now Manitoba were two head which his sons brought back from the southwest where the animals had bred from Spanish stock, and the Indians of the northwest soon became skilful horsemen. It was another Frenchman, La Come, who made some experiments in the growing of wheat in the Can-ot River Valley, Saskatchewan, between 1753 and 1756. The first attempts by Englishmen in that area were at Hudson's House, about thirty miles west of Prince Albert, where barley and cabbages were grown about the year 1780. Alexander Henry, the younger, harvested fifty bushels of turnips and eighty bushels of potatoes at an Alberta post in 1809, and reported on the barley crop at two posts in 1810. It was news in 1811 that the hens at Fort Edmonton began to lay on January 6. The Hudson's Bay post, Carlton House, was reported to be growing wheat, barley, oats, and potatoes before 1820. And when Governor Williams was resident at Cumberland House, before the amalgamation of the two

14

companies, he created a farm, grew barley, and brought in horses, cattle, and pigs. The success of these experiments suggested the possibility of doing something on a larger scale. Fur profits were not as large as they had been, and it would be fine if the cost of transporting flour and other food products across the Atlantic to the company's posts could be wholly or ahnost wholly eliminated. Potatoes and com, if grown in sufficient quantity, would provide added security against famine. It was no doubt the fusion of such ideas with a sympathetic consciousness of the problems of evicted Scottish crofters, and a general awareness of the developing westward trend on the North American continent, which led Lord Selkirk to sponsor the Red River settlement in the early years of the nineteenth century. Whether by accident or by design, Selkirk located his new settlement in the only district in W estem Canada where an annual precipitation of over twenty inches is combined with a July temperature of over sixty-five degrees. Even there the settlers encountered many privations and setbacks. In fact the extent to which these experienced farmers had for some time to depend on supplies, equipment, and even food brought in from outside suggests that the Indians, with their primitive equipment and lack of outside resources, had been following the wisest course in leaving agriculture strictly alone. After a rough voyage of sixty-one days, with sickness on board, the first Selkirk colonists had to winter on the shores of Hudson Bay, thus throwing out their whole schedule. When they finally reached the forks of the Red and Assiniboine in the spring of 1812, food was scarce and they were unable to get shelters prepared in time for the main body of settlers, so that all were obliged to spend the second winter farther south at Pembina. In the spring of 1813 they returned to their chosen site and Peter Fidler came down from Brandon House to survey the long narrow hundred-acre farms. These fronted on the river, after the fashion in Quebec, since the river was

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