The Limits of Rural Capitalism: Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870-1940 9781442681644

Table of contents :
Contents
Maps, Figures, and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Shared Origins of Settlement
2. Making Families and Generations
3. The Economy of Family Farms
4. Credit, Commerce, and Market Change
5. Ending and Making Local Culture
6. Continuity, Inheritance, and Inequality
7. Leaving Rural Life
Conclusion
Appendix: A Note on Sources
Notes
Select Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Citation preview

THE LIMITS OF RURAL CAPITALISM: FAMILY, CULTURE, AND MARKETS IN MONTCALM, MANITOBA, 1870-1940

The Limits of Rural Capitalism is an important study of the social and economic development of the Rural Municipality of Montcalm, a largely French-Canadian community in southern Manitoba. It challenges the view in prairie historiography that agriculture had commercialized before the West was opened to settlement, and that ethnic communities alone resisted the market's potential. Using a novel combination of demographic, financial, and legal evidence, Sylvester shows that both Ontario and Quebec migrants came west within family networks, and that neither economic individualism nor ethnic clustering overshadowed the importance of family strategies. In an environment where landed proprietorship was the norm, the demands of parents on the unpaid labour of their children constrained the growth of labour markets, and concerns for farm succession limited the accumulation of wealth. In the shadow of an industrializing and urbanizing world, these people, who came mainly from the District of Montreal and eastern Ontario, sometimes via New England, raised large families, drew largely on the unpaid labour of kin, owned their own farms, limited financial entanglements with outsiders, and established multiple heirs. Although household autonomy diminished over time, the limits of rural capitalism persisted. Kenneth Michael Sylvester is a Grant Notley Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta.

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The Limits of Rural Capitalism Family, Culture, and Markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870-1940

KENNETH MICHAEL SYLVESTER

UTP

UNIVERSITY'OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2001 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4808-0 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8347-1 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Sylvester, Kenneth Michael, 1961The limits of rural capitalism : family, culture, and markets in Montcalm, Manitoba, 1870-1940 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4808-0 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8347-1 (pbk.) 1. Montcalm (Man.) - History. 2. Montcalm (Man.) - Economic conditions. 3. Montcalm (Man.) - Social conditions. I. Title. FC3395.M65S94 2001

971.27'4

COO-931943-3

F1064.M66S94 2001

An abridged version of chapter 6 appeared as '"En part egale": Family, Inheritance and Market Change in a Francophone Community on the Prairies, 1890-1930, 'Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 8 n.s. (1998): 39—62. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

vii

Maps, Figures, and Tables Acknowledgments xi

Introduction

3

1. Shared Origins of Settlement

12

2. Making Families and Generations 3. The Economy of Family Farms

29

46

4. Credit, Commerce, and Market Change

66

5. Ending and Making Local Culture 100 6. Continuity, Inheritance, and Inequality

7. Leaving Rural Life Conclusion

168

191

Appendix: A Note on Sources Notes

203

Select Bibliography

249

Illustration Credits

269

Index

271

Illustrations follow page 116

197

135

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Maps, Figures, and Tables

Maps 1 2

The Rural Municipality of Montcalm, Manitoba 10 Resident farm ownership by mother tongue, 1885, 1901, and 1921 17

Figures 1.1 Year of arrival of Quebec-born heads of household, 18761899 22 1.2 Year of arrival of anglophone and francophone heads of household, 1871-1900 27 2.1 Annual number of births, deaths, and marriages, parish of SaintJean Baptiste, 1877-1916 35 2.2 Seasonality of birth and infant mortality, Saint-Jean Baptiste, 18771911 39 4.1 Annual value of mortgages registered, by lending category, Montcalm, 1873-1921 71 4.2 Annual value of chattel mortgages, by lending category, Saint-JeanBaptiste, 1893-1940 75 Tables 1.1 National origins in Montcalm, 1885-1941 18 1.2 Combined search population, by birthplace and language 1.3 Birthplaces of Quebec-born francophones, by district and county 20

19

viii Maps, Figures, and Tables 1.4 Birthplaces of Ontario-born, by region and county 25 2.1 Sex ratios by age cohort and language, Montcalm, 1891 and 1901 31 2.2 Children as a proportion of population, by mother tongue, Montcalm, 1891 and 1901 33 2.3 Children under 10 per 1000 women, by mother tongue, Montcalm, 1891 and 1901 34 2.4 Annual number of baptisms, marriages, and burials (five-year averages around census date) and crude rates of birth, marriage, and death, per thousand population, and infant deaths, per thousand live births, parish of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, Manitoba, 1884-1913 36 2.5 Infant and child mortality as a percentage of total mortality, SaintJean Baptiste, 1880-1910 38 2.6 Estimated family size and marriage age of women 35—44, Montcalm, 1891 and 1901 41 2.7 Married farm-owning families and the demographic transition: age of groom and bride, and family size, by mother tongue and generation 42 2.8 Household structure by mother tongue, Montcalm, 1891 and 1901 44 3.1 Farm size, average acres occupied and improved, by province, 1861-1921 48 3.2 Farm stratification in Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba, 1861-1921: per cent of occupiers by farm size 49 3.3 Montcalm farm size, number of owner-occupiers, average acres occupied and improved, by language, 1885-1936 51 3.4 Livestock in Montcalm, average number of head per farm occupier, by language, 1891-1921 53 3.5 Montcalm grain production, number and per cent of acres sown to wheat, barley, and oats, 1885, 1891, 1916, 1921, 1926, 1931, and 1936 60 4.1 Largest 20 mortgage lenders, total and mean amount loaned, 18731921 70 4.2 Non-farm occupations in Montcalm, 1891 and 1901, and average monthly earnings, 1901 88 4.3 Registered loans secured by Lucien H. Tremblay, 1895-1910 93 4.4 Registered loans secured by Narcisse Moquin, 1898-1911 94 6.1 Residents, non-residents, and tenants, 1885-1921 141 6.2 Nominal persistence of resident farm owners, by language, 18851921 142

Maps, Figures, and Tables ix 6.3 Distribution of land ownership among resident farm owner-occupiers, 1891-1921 143 6.4 Gifts of land in Montcalm, by decade, 1890-1939 152 6.5 Postmortem transmission of wealth, by type of estate division and language, 1879-1930 154 6.6 Distribution of postmortem wealth, by decade, 1880-1929 163 A.I Comprehensiveness of land titles data for Montcalm 200

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Acknowledgments

Many people have offered encouragement in the research and writing of this book. The late Stanley Fraser was among the first. Stan found out about a researcher collecting tax data in the basement of Montcalm's municipal hall and offered free board at his home across the street. In return Stan received endless questions about his birthplace and mediocre stir-fry. Thanks are also in order for the municipal staff in Letellier for cheerfully accommodating my work. Back in Winnipeg, I made extensive demands on the staff at the provincial archives and they very graciously led me to water. A special thanks to Chris Kotecki for digging up material and Gilbert Comeault for introducing me to oral-history techniques. The staff of the Winnipeg Land Titles Office were equally helpful during a summer spent researching land titles in the Department of Justice building. East of the Red River, Monsignor Belanger granted access to the archdiocese's archives, and at the Societe Historique Saint-Boniface, curator Alfred Fortier guided me through the essentials of genealogical research and archivist Gilles Lesage provided special research assistance. I am grateful for the time of friends and colleagues who offered encouragement. Early support came from Christopher Armstrong, Sylvie Beaudreau, John Bingham, Dale Brawn, David Burley, Joseph A. Ernst, Ron Harpelle, D.J. Horton, Susan Houston, Peter Knights, Kathryn McPherson, Ronald Rudin, and John Saywell. I extend a special thanks to Fernand Ouellet. I was his last doctoral student and learned from him the importance of pursuing my own vision. This book contains a new chapter that extends the narrative found in the dissertation. It would not have been possible without the interest and support of Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen, who invited me to

xii Acknowledgments join their research seminar, the Winnipeg Immigration History Group. I gratefully acknowledge the funding provided to me by WIHG at the University of Winnipeg and the Prairie Centre for Research on Immigration and Integration at the University of Alberta. My thanks to Gerry and Roy for reading the manuscript at length and for numerous suggestions. Thanks also to John Herd Thompson for reading the dissertation and offering important suggestions. I am particularly grateful for the support of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Canadian Families Project, a Major Collaborative Research Initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and based at the University of Victoria. Thanks are due especially to Eric W. Sager and Peter Baskerville for allowing me time away from projectrelated work to complete revisions and for their advice in negotiating the revision process. Another senior colleague with the project, Peter Gossage, took time out during his sabbatical in Victoria to offer advice on demographic questions. Gerald Hallowell and Jill McConkey at the University of Toronto Press have offered steady encouragement. Their colleagues Frances Mundy and John St James were models of efficiency in preparing the manuscript for publication. This book has also been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally I thank my wife, Ann, for her love and support. Our household has doubled in size during the time it has taken to write this book. The project has commanded far too much of my attention during our lives together and, now, that of our young daughters, Sofia and Ella. My parents, Frank and Gaetanne, have always encouraged this particular journey, and I thank them for their love and patience. In spite of all the attention that this manuscript has received, any errors that remain are mine. Victoria, British Columbia 4January 2000

THE LIMITS OF RURAL CAPITALISM

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Introduction

This book was written in part because of countless kitchen table discussions with my maternal grandmother. She was born in Montreal and moved west during the Depression after marrying a young engineering student attending McGill. She stayed most of her life, but never really adjusted to leaving her beloved hometown. She always had a different perspective on what life was like in the West than my grandfather, who was born and raised in the Red River Valley. Her stories were of how difficult it was to fit into a small prairie town, of how narrow, provincial, and condescending the 'English' were in the West, especially towards French Canadians. His childhood stories were of the tough characters who frequented his father's country hotel during the 1920s, of men who drank themselves to within an inch of their lives and brawled to achieve similar self-destruction. To his final days, he remained drawn to the energy and optimism of his birthplace, and to the blend of languages and cultures he knew in his youth. Raised in cities, I never encountered the world my grandparents knew. On marathon summer trips to visit family in Winnipeg, I thought about the places beyond the roadside. For endless hours, I watched the prairie landscape unfold from the back seat of my parents' car as we returned like nesting birds from various points of exile across western Canada. My strongest memories are of the scale of the countryside, of fading towns with weathered false-front buildings and of cities that appeared without reason, out of nowhere, like distant harbours in a vast agricultural ocean. This book was a way of revisiting these memories and exploring a rural past that remains mysterious to most of us. To me it is a subject that is all the more exotic because so few modern historians in Canada have taken rural life to heart. Most simply regard the inhabitants of the country's rural past as mundane and unimportant. 1

4 The Limits of Rural Capitalism Perhaps the biggest mystery of prairie farming is that in spite of its scale the western countryside has never truly industrialized. Though agriculture is typically discussed in our contemporary economic vernacular as an industry, the ownership of the means of production continues to be organized by families rather than corporations, wage labour still does not dominate the productive process, and smaller producers have not gone away. Part of the answer to this mystery, this book suggests, can be found in the aims of farm families. Whatever the size of farms, the extensive form of agriculture practised in the West has meant that steadily larger farms brought more profit but not necessarily more efficiency.2 Because of the shortness of the growing season and the kind of produce yielded by the land, not everyone responded to the incentives of the market with a relentless search for profit. Efforts to create bonanza farms have typically fizzled because grain crops were not labour-intensive enough to bear the costs of wage labour over anything resembling an industrial work year.3 Instead the costs of maintaining farms have been borne by unpaid family labour. The rural capitalism discussed in this book, then, is not about the advance of agriculture as an industry but about the embrace of market principles and methods by ordinary farm families. It is about how and when their working lives and ambitions became commoditized and costed by the calculus of the market. Much has been written about prairie agriculture, but surprisingly little about the experience of farm families. Canadian historians have embraced studies of ethnic diversity in the prairie west but seldom the blend of annales, environmentalist, and phenomenological approaches American historians use to investigate rural life.4 Because the relationship between producers and distant markets has guided the work of so many economists and historians north of the 49th parallel, understanding the volume of national production has superseded analysis of farm life. Prairie history writing often begins with the premise that the embrace of market production was complete before settlers arrived. Attention has been devoted to the overreaching ambition of early agricultural development or to the religious and ethnic motivations of recreating self-contained Old World communities.5 But because of the tendency to integrate findings within the framework of staples political economy, there has been less discussion of how farm households adjusted to market change. Increasingly, however, this larger framework has come under challenge. Economic historians no longer assume that Canada's growth has

Introduction

5

been led entirely by export commodities, nor, when it comes to Canada's experience in agriculture before western expansion, do they assume that Ontario's farm economy had already made the transition to commercial farming. The current degree of consensus is striking concerning the sources of growth during the nineteenth century in Ontario.6 Whether they are partisans of econometrics or social history, most scholars agree that farm households limited their embrace of the market.7 Douglas McCalla has emphasized that pre-Confederation farm households were always involved in and responsive to the market but the small scale of the average Ontario farm made it an essentially 'precapitalist social unit.'8 Social analyses of rural life have taken a similar turn. Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow have recently challenged the various proletarianization theses which suggest that the 1860s and 1870s were a turning point in the development of Ontario's modern social structure. Through a careful sampling of the 1871 census they debunk the idea that rural populations were increasingly forced off the land at mid-century.9 Farmers continued to be the dominant class in nineteenth-century Ontario, as over a half of the male labour force identified themselves as farmers in 1871. Moreover, family farming was pursued in a social context where farmers substantially outnumbered landless labourers and no landed elite threatened independent proprietorship. The family economy's importance to late-nineteenth-century Quebec is also an area of agreement among students of its rural life. To date investigation of the late nineteenth century focuses mainly on new areas of settlement. In the Saguenay and Upper St Francis districts, Gerard Bouchard and J.I. Little have both identified ways in which local farm economies were not market-driven in spite of the growth of capitalist social relations.10 Little suggests that the farm families who carved an existence out of woodlands in the Eastern Townships did not respond fully to demands for foodstuffs from nearby lumber camps. Instead, two economies operated side by side: an internally generated agro-forestry on the farm and an externally controlled exploitation of timber centred in the forest. Although wage earning was important to farm families, paid work was seasonal and generally found outside of the home community. 11 Bouchard, by contrast acknowledges a more sustained connection between farming and wage earning in the Saguenay. He suggests that the people of this marginal agricultural frontier were in constant contact with the capitalist economy through off-farm work. Nevertheless, they were an essentially agrarian people who did not wed them-

6 The Limits of Rural Capitalism selves to market principles. Farm families continued to devote their resources to the reproduction of successor generations. Well into the twentieth century, establishing multiple heirs continued to be the central purpose of transmitting family property and continued to be achieved by gifting and other non-monetary forms of wealth transmission. Without commercializing agricultural production, the people of the region achieved continuity in landed autonomy only by more diverse and fragmented forms of dependence on the market. 12 The importance of markets to farm households in early-nineteenthcentury Quebec has led to protracted debate. At one time the close examination of the rural world touched off by Fernand Ouellet's oeuvre cast historians into sharply defined camps. Ouellet documented the unresponsiveness of agriculture to rising demand in the early nineteenth century, a situation that contrasted with the growth of the late eighteenth century.13 While Ouellet attributed the shift away from export and towards local commodities to a defensive climat de sensibilite, western competition likely had a larger impact in the 1820s and 1830s.14 The unresponsiveness of Quebec censitaires in the face of these changes is a theme echoed by Allan Greer, though for much different reasons. Greer argues that like most Old World peasantries, small farmers in seigneurial Quebec saw little reason to change when the burden imposed by seigneurial tenure absorbed their modest surpluses.15 This political economy pitted the landed elite, French and English, against a relatively egalitarian farm population. In Greer's view, opposition to the elite explains the preservation of the household economy and, ultimately, the support of censitaires for political rebellion in 1837.lh The breadth of market relations, however, is not a theme that has occupied the attentions of many historians of modern Quebec. Since the 1960s and 1970s historians have advanced an interpretation of post-Confederation Quebec that emphasizes its synchronization with Western society. Ronald Rudin reminds us how the current revisionism has largely overturned Quebec historiography's concern with French-Canadian thought.1 The revisionists of the 1960s and 1970s have built an interpretation that searches for the roots of modernity in Quebec's past. In order to fit Quebec society into a model consistent with change in Western society, this interpretation has emphasized sources of urbanization and secularization. The early to mid-nineteenth century has been reinterpreted as a period of steady material improvement and Quebec's industrial future identified in the past growth of villages and off-farm work.18 In countless ways the results of this research have successfully

Introduction

7

supplanted an impoverished historiography based on national-character arguments and strengthened our understanding of the nature of social change in an industrial age. Yet revisionism has also turned attention away from the specificity of rural change in the age of industrialization.19 By concentrating on the growth of capitalism in cities, revisionism has obscured the roots of modernity among the majority of francophones, who lived in the countryside. There were, of course, many elements of homogeneity to rural experience in the Canadas during the nineteenth century. Ethnicity or national origin did not define who shared in the search for economic independence. In a rural society characterized by small producers, as Canadian society generally was, maintaining and finding the means to make an independent living and passing on the resources for independence to one's children was the central focus of rural life. On the farm this effort required hierarchy and cooperation within families. Thus, wage labour and production for distant markets were not at the centre of rural economic life for the better part of the century. Increasingly, econometricians are as much at home with this insight as are social histonans.20 But Quebec's rural development did differ in the important sense that it had a seigneurial past, and this form of social exploitation cast a long shadow. Even as these tenures were ended in the 1850s and 1860s, the burden they imposed on farm families carried on in the new state-supervised land system. Seigneurial tenures were extinguished mainly by converting the obligations owed to seigneurs into ground rents. The work of determining the compensation to be offered to seigneurs for surrendering their privileges fell to the same government commission that began the work of codifying Quebec's civil law. The length of the reform process and the legal ambiguities that characterized land registration arrangements muddied the outlook in seigneurial Quebec for some time. Even if the new ground rents did not represent an overwhelming burden, as many historians and economists have argued,21 the civil code introduced in 1866 made no mandatory provision for their registration. The ground rents carried on until relief legislation was passed in 1935 and 1940. Meanwhile the reform process did not appear to expedite the formation of capital. Mortgage lending in Quebec, in spite of the wide distribution of property assured during the abolition of seigneurial tenure, continued to trail similar forms of capital investment in neighbouring Ontario before the early twentieth century.22 Historians, it is argued throughout this study, must find more room

8

The Limits of Rural Capitalism

for discussion of these basic structural conditions as well as the cultural frameworks that shaped people's responses to them. It is difficult to conclude, in the face of the mounting evidence, that rural capitalism was embraced uniformly or painlessly in North America.23 Precisely because rural communities could and did shape the pace of change, the noncapitalist, informal, dimensions of agricultural life continued to exist and take new forms, even as the wider society was enveloped in capitalist social relations. As Christopher Clark has argued in his seminal study of the Connecticut River valley, this was true even in a region situated near the birthplace of early American industry.24 Clark's study is admirable for its insistence that rural historians avoid the reductionist search for a single test of the transition to capitalism. It urges historians to cast the net wider than the point at which labour power is commonly hired for wages by the owners of land and industry.25 Instead we must look for market revolutions in the whole range of cultural changes associated with the degree of cooperation, kinship, and reciprocal exchange that traditionally prevailed in nineteenth-century rural life. Exchange, production, and labour relations must all be incorporated into a discussion of their evolving social meaning. Markets were not, as Clark argues, the source of change in themselves but were 'created in and derived from social circumstances.'26 David Danbom has argued that farmers on the Northern Great Plains were equally cautious. Well into the twentieth century farmers continued to follow what Danbom describes as a safety-first strategy, limiting their exposure to the inevitable swings of the marketplace. One U.S. government survey found in 1900, for instance, that 60 per cent of what farm families consumed was still made by their own hands.27 Danbom has also documented the resistance in cultural terms, reminding us that it was the urban critics of rural life who decried the low standards of country life and inefficiency of farm production.28 Calls for curriculum reform, school consolidation, and technological improvement were all manifestations of the urban drive to raise the standards of rural life. To some extent, rural people came to regard themselves as inferior, trying to live up to urban standards. But until governments began to provide safety nets farmers resisted wholesale commitment to the market. This book focuses on the story of one farm community in southern Manitoba. Montcalm was chosen because it was the only rural municipality on the Prairies peopled overwhelmingly by Quebec-born francophones. Its experience, I argue, was not far removed from the farm communities in eastern Canada from which its settlers came. Through-

Introduction

9

out the book, I refer to the people of the community as Montcalmois, inventing a term that I apply to both English and French settlers. Both groups came from smallholding traditions and did all the things necessary in their new environment to maintain the independence of farming households. They raised large families, avoided the paid labour of strangers, owned their own farms, embraced cooperative methods, limited financial entanglements with outsiders, and established multiple heirs. They were always sensitive to the rewards of the market, but they limited their exposure to its ups and downs. Like most rural folk in nineteenth-century North America, they hoped the journey west would ensure a more independent life and they resisted a wholesale embrace of rural capitalism.29 The book makes the case for an uneven development of capitalism in the rural west.30 Generally I have avoided the temptation to construct indices of capitalist change,31 yet for the sake of clarity a broad outline of the changes is offered here. I argue that structures favouring household autonomy continued to exist on the farm in several ways. Because families were large until after the turn of the century, the unpaid contributions of spouses, offspring, and kin continued to be the main source of labour power. Trade with distant markets was cumbersome during the first generation and financial entanglements with outsiders were limited. By the turn of the century, however, growing wheat exports were changing the local marketplace. As more cash entered local exchange, itinerant labour and new sources of credit were used to boost output. Disparities in wealth among farmers were reflected in the pattern of acquiring and transmitting immovable and moveable wealth. Cooperative ownership or use of farm machinery gave way to individual ownership. Eventually monied exchange was central to most activities in the farm economy. Merchants and farmers no longer accepted produce or services in exchange for debts. Cash or wheat was required. And inheritance settlements reflected the new reverence for the universal equivalent of money. In exchange for their part of the family patrimony, rather than caring for their parents in a prescribed manner, offspring agreed to pay mortgages extended to them by their parents. In this way the basic lineal values of transmitting the means of making a living survived but on a much different footing. The accretion of these forms of capitalist change is the grist of this study. Most of the narrative follows a thematic rather than a chronological organization. In some fashion each chapter addresses the market consciousness of farm families. The first part of the book concentrates

10 The Limits of Rural Capitalism

Map 1: The Rural Municipality of Montcalm, Manitoba (Source: Municipal Map)

Introduction

11

on the period before 1900, when the decisions about family farming were made by an older generation that led the migration to the West. Chapter 1 establishes the family-centred pattern of migration, mapping out the geographical and social origins of settler families. Chapter 2 discusses how the elevated fertility stimulated by western immigration extended the basis for economic independence. Chapter 3 explores the pace at which farm households responded to the scale of western farming, and the degree to which reciprocity and kinship informed new capitalized approaches to production. Chapter 4 marks the shift in the second part of the book to the period after the turn of the century. The chapter focuses on the growing sophistication of the local off-farm economy and the changing nature of the relationship between farmers and the monied economy. Chapter 5 turns the clock back briefly to the period before the turn of the century, discussing the racial and social boundaries created by settler society. Then it presses forward by exploring how the newcomers crossed those boundaries at the schoolhouse, in the municipal council, and in cultural life. Chapter 6 returns to the question of rural capitalism by examining the changes market forces brought to the transmission of family property. Finally, chapter 7 shifts away from the strict geographic focus on Montcalm to discuss how the second and third generation adjusted when access to productive wealth was not assured. Like youth elsewhere in the twentieth century, many refused to wait and left the countryside for metropolitan centres. Ultimately, their stories explain how different and disconnected the urban world was from the one that lay beyond the rural roadside.

Chapter 1

Shared Origins of Settlement

The common strategies of succession that guided rural folk to Montcalm, Manitoba, are seldom seen as part of a shared historical tradition. Ethnic clustering across the western interior is usually attributed to various forms of 'group settlement.' Yet underneath these organized migrations lay the most common social obligation of rural migrants. While Montcalm's settlers came from all over their native provinces and the northeastern United States, those who were able to emerge as members of the farm-owning majority relied heavily on the auspices of kin. The persistent element of community arrived under similar circumstances. An older married generation came west with a successor generation already approaching adulthood, usually their children or younger siblings. By the 1890s it was apparent that the nucleus of settlers, who were born in Quebec, emigrated to the United States, and came to Manitoba in 1876 and 1877, encouraged another wave of kin to join them in the West. These land-seekers came directly from rural Quebec between 1889 and 1891 and cemented the francophone character of the community. Montcalm also had a significant minority of Ontario settlers who arrived in a more dispersed fashion between 1872 and 1883. This gave the appearance of a more individual pattern of movement, but few settlers from rural Ontario actually arrived in Montcalm without their kin. Reconstructing the ties of kinship in both settlement groups reveals that both the Quebec- and Ontario-born fit a similar profile of rural families on the move. Typically, adult men and women arrived in Montcalm in their late thirties, married, with an average of just under four offspring, the eldest of whom was usually in his or her teenage years.1 Farm-owning families generally came from older rural districts in their

Shared Origins of Settlement 13 native provinces, either in eastern Ontario or the vicinity of Montreal, and had common backgrounds in family farming. Though emigration may have arisen from different regional circumstances, the search for land and a strategy of succession were common to their decisions to emigrate to the early west. Scholarship on the prairie west has generally used ethnicity to celebrate achievement or discuss resistance to the mainstream culture.2 When francophone migration is discussed, the question of resistance is raised in one of two ways. Either the movement of francophones to the Prairies is treated as part of the collectively motivated experience of non-English-speaking minorities, or the politics of preserving the French presence in the West takes centre stage.3 Both approaches raise assimilation as the problematique, either for the mainstream society or the minority. C.A. Dawson's work Group Settlement first assigned distinct collective motives to non-English-speaking minorities in 1936. Dawson cast French-Canadian settlers in terms not dissimilar to Mennonites, Mormons, and Doukhobors. To him French Canadians exhibited a higher degree of individualism, but a suspect individualism that was held in check by the desire to preserve a different culture.4 Not long after Dawson's work appeared, W.L. Morton also raised English-speaking settlement to a normative plateau, praising Ontarians as the fount of material and democratic progress in the Canadian west. The pre-eminence of Ontario settlers in Manitoba was essential to the triumph of what he dubbed the 'Ontario Democracy,' a world-view that defined progress as an emulation of rural Ontario's development.5 Arguably, recent scholarship on francophone migration falls into a similar trap by emphasizing the efforts of church officials and political leaders to promote immigration. This tends to discount the initiative of the migrants themselves, and reinforces the image of group settlement. Most historiography has unfairly contrasted the assisted nature of francophone migration schemes with the 'spontaneous' nature of migration from Ontario.6 On the surface Montcalm fits the comparison because the municipality had its origins in an assisted migration scheme and a group reserve of land. When Archbishop Alexandre-Antonin Tache dreamed of creating a solid block of French-speaking communities along the Red and Assiniboine rivers, Montcalm was to be the first of many francophone settlements across the West. Repatriated canadiens from the United States, it was hoped, would bolster existing Metis communities in allotments already granted under the terms of the Manitoba Act.7 Manitoba's first lieutenant-governor, Adams G. Archibald, was one of many to object to

14 The Limits of Rural Capitalism Tache's plan. To Archibald anything that deviated from individual allotment was not 'modern' and was bad for the economy.8 Tache nevertheless pressed ahead with his plan, gathering professionals in SaintBoniface into a fraternal organization known as La Societe de Colonisation de Manitoba in 1874. The first scheme floated by the society was to reserve townships east of the Red River. But Societe member and Conservative senator Marc-Amable Girard was rebuffed in his representations to the Department of the Interior.9 Another suggested site west of the Red River did not meet the expectations of the colonization society. Eventually the Societe settled on two townships nearer the west bank of the river that were to form the basis of a French reserve. In contrast to the flurry of correspondence between the francophone leadership in Saint-Boniface and the Department of the Interior, public land records indicate that a large group reserve was never made. Only a small grant of land, one section, was formally secured in the name of the Societe de Colonisation.10 The reserve myth survives, it seems, because enough settlers arrived in May and June of 1876 to give it substance. In actual practice the great majority of francophone settlers entered for public lands in Montcalm as individuals. Ottawa may have promised an exclusive right of entry, but the Dominion's local officials were reluctant to carry out such instructions. Joseph Royal, Societe member and editor of Manitoba's only French-language weekly, complained of the administrative foot dragging, accusing land agents of unlawfully denying entry to francophones. On occasion this did not deter the settlers from taking matters into their own hands. One incident in August 1878 witnessed a clash between francophone and anglophone settlers over disputed township land. When francophones were informed at the land office that their entry was unlawful, and learned that Ontarians had squatted the land by building huts, violence ensued, cabins were burned, improvements destroyed, and several persons injured.11 These disputes continued, partly because of administrative confusion, and eventually a policy was established to give right of entry to persons in 'peaceable' possession. In Letellier Township it meant that only two of sixty-seven homestead quarter-section grants, and 6 per cent of quarter-section lots as a whole, went to non-francophones before the end of 1884.12 In the township to the north, the scene of the melee in 1878, the story was different, because entry for public land had begun nearly two years before the first party of francophone repatriates arrived. Evolving land policy seems to have frozen conditions on the ground in Tache Township, where just over one-third (45 out of 125) of the quarter sec-

Shared Origins of Settlement 15 dons in the township were granted to non-francophones.13 In time Montcalm's settlers learned to fend for themselves because the assistance of officials and urban elites was short-lived, and land allocation did not deviate from the principle of individual allotment. As an interpretative construct, group settlement overstates the degree of organization brought to the migration process by the state, by elites, and perhaps by settlers themselves. More than a minor misreading of the dynamics of settlement, the concept has contributed to an overstatement of cultural difference by assigning collective motivations almost exclusively to minorities. Recasting our historical lenses in terms of the priorities of households unveils the extent to which, whether rural migrants were part of the dominant culture or not, westward movement was organized by succession strategies. Beneath the surface of national or provincial politics lay the local reality of hundreds of families on the move. Bruce Elliott's work makes this point with some elegance. Elliot followed the migration of over seven hundred Protestant Irish families to Upper Canada in the early nineteenth century. Communities that developed in Ontario, near Richmond in the Ottawa valley and London in Middlesex County, were the source of further migration to western Canada in the 1870s. The itineraries of the families were driven, Elliott argues, less by their desire for self-improvement than to better establish their children. They had been principally small and middling farm owners in the north of County Tipperary in Ireland, caught in a polarizing rural economy between large commercial farmers and small holders and labourers.14 Selling their holdings was a means of financing their passage, which, with the exception of the first emigrants, was unassisted. This circumstance explains why tenant farmers and labourers were unlikely to join the emigration. Over two generations the descendants of the original families expanded to contiguous communities in the Ottawa valley and southern Ontario. By the 1870s good land was increasingly difficult to acquire. In 1879 Thomas Greenway, future premier of Manitoba and then a resident of Middlesex County, helped to organize a settlement enterprise known as the Rock Lake Colonization Company. The company placed a first wave of Tipperary descendants in the Crystal City and Rock Lake district of Manitoba, and kinship ties attracted further migration. Families, then, were usually on the move, as the parents approached their early forties, in order to provide for their children's futures.15 These demographic patterns are not always evident in the many anal-

16 The Limits of Rural Capitalism yses of Dominion lands policy that exist. A focus on the implementation of policy tends to narrow historical inquiry to the time of public land distribution, without suggesting whether the public land policy conveyed any long-term advantages. In Montcalm, I took a different approach to building a profile of settlement generations. Because a significant proportion of settlers arrived after public land was distributed, and few single young men who entered for public lands arrived without their kin,16 I drew two cohorts instead from the farm-owning households that persisted in the community until the time of the 1891 and 1901 tax assessments.17 This retrospective approach permitted some assessment of the effects of public land policy and it allowed for a more robust assessment of the demographic patterns that underwrote successful settlement. I used the civil status and age of farm owners at the time of their arrival in Manitoba to make the distinction between a first and second generation of farm owners. The choice of cohorts from 1891 and 1901 also allowed me to cross-reference tax data with the manuscript census. The picture that emerged tells us a great deal about the social dynamics of becoming a farm owner but not much about village life, an omission that is redressed to some extent in chapter 4. Nevertheless the focus on farm owners is justified for the settlement period because of the size of the farm population. In 1891 just over 77 per cent of Montcalm's heads of household were farmers; in 1901 the proportion was 73 per cent. From this later vantage point, after public lands were distributed, it is clear that government assistance accounted for some but not all of the clustering visible in Montcalm's early settlement. The ethnic make-up of the community was not cemented by the time public lands were distributed in the early 1880s. The special census of Manitoba in 1885 indicated that only 50.1 per cent of Montcalm's population were of French origin. Less than five years later the proportion had risen to 74.3 per cent, and it remained roughly the same for the next half-century. What happened after public lands were distributed, then, was equally important to the pattern that developed. After the secession of one of Montcalm's townships to neighbouring Rhineland municipality in 1888, a development that accounts for the decline in German-origin population seen in table 1.1, Montcalm became an essentially French and English community. With the gradual reintroduction of German-speakers in the 1890s, English-speakers began a gradual decline. Nevertheless it was the family-centred pattern of migration that lead to a 50 per cent increase in the francophone population during the 1890s.

1885

1901

1921

Q English • French * German

Map 2: Resident farm ownership by mother tongue, 1885, 1901, and 1921. Each special character represents a property description assessed to a resident farm owner; blank spaces represent lots held either by the Crown or by non-resident owners (Sources: Rural Municipality of Montcalm, Tax Collector's Roll, 1885, Tax Assessment Rolls, 1901, 1921).

18 The Limits of Rural Capitalism TABLE 1.1 National origins in Montcalm, Manitoba (percent by census year and group of origin),

1885-1941 1885

1891*

1901*

1921

1931

1941

French British Metis** German1 Other

50.1 26.7

74.3 23.4

71.9 14.6

73.2 12.8

72.8 10.4

70.4 10.2

7.4

0.1

0.0

0.0

0.0

12.6

12.3

16.6

16.8

0.0

1.7 0.7 0.0

0.7

1.7

0.1

2.5

N

1544

1687

2620

2906

2997

3150

15.7

*Data compiled from the manuscript census. **There were 115 Metis people identified in Montcalm at the time of the special census of Manitoba in 1885-6. In the manuscript census a race question was posed in 1901, but not 1891. At least 29 persons were of Metis descent in 1891, and at least one young family of Sin 1901. Russian-born Mennonites formed the bulk of the German-origin population, though there were significant Lutheran elements in 1921,1931, and 1941. The above category combines persons declaring their national origins as Dutch, German, and Russian for purposes of consistency. Understandably, the local Mennonite population identified its origin as German in 1885, 'Dutch' in 1921, and 'Russian' in 1931. Sources: Canada, Census, 1891 (T-6294), 1901 (T-6434), 1921,1931, 1941; and Canada, Report of the Census of the Province of Manitoba, 7886 (Ottawa: Maclean, Roger & Co. 1887).

Population growth in the 1890s gives the impression of enormous change. And certainly the turnover in the farm ownership indicates that there were many newcomers to the community. A complete turnover of the farm-owning population during the 1890s would have brought the total number of assessed households in my search population to 499 (see table 1.2). Yet 119 farm owners, or 31 per cent, appeared on both tax rolls. So while the nominal turnover during the 1890s in the number of land owners was roughly 69 per cent, the change also masked obvious kinship ties between farm generations. Tracing the genealogies of these farm-owning households helped unearth the extent of family lineage, and made it possible to track variations in birthplace and to sequence the arrival of farm households in Montcalm.19 Because of the extremely high quality of vital-records keeping in Quebec, the effort to trace the counties of origin was far more successful for francophone farm owners. Province of birth could be inferred from the census and once a family name was traced to a specific community in

Shared Origins of Settlement 19 TABLE 1.2 Combined search population of resident farm-owning households from 1891 and 1901 tax years, by birthplace and language

Birthplace

French language

English language

Other language

N

N

N

N

Quebec Ontario Manitoba United Kingdom United States Other Missing*

212 1 6 0 19 0 2

5 58 9 28 1 0 4

0 0 2 0 0 30 3

217 59 17 28 20 30 9

Total

240

105

35

380

Total

Per cent of total

57.1 15.5

4.5 7.4 5.3 7.9 2.4

100

*Cases that could not be cross-referenced from the tax rolls to the census. Sources: Canada, Census, 1891,1901, and Rural Municipality of Montcalm (RMM), Tax Assessment Roll, 1891 and 1901.

Quebec, there was little difficulty in locating the marriage records of a settler or their parents. Of 212 Quebec-born heads of household who owned farms in Montcalm in either 1891 or 1901, 84 per cent were successfully traced to their county of origin in Quebec (see table 1.3). If the farm owner was single when he arrived in Montcalm, his county of origin was derived from his parents' place of marriage. Otherwise, married or widowed owners were traced through their own marriage records. Among the 178 farm owners successfully traced a strong pattern of local origins existed. Nearly half (47.8 per cent) originated from just four neighbouring counties near the confluence of the St Lawrence and Richelieu rivers: Yamaska and Richelieu on the south shore of the St Lawrence and, opposite them on the north shore, Maskinonge and Berthier. Fully one-third (32.6 per cent) of Montcalm's Quebec-born farm owners came from either Richelieu or Berthier. In regional terms the District of Montreal was the source of nearly three-quarters (70.8 per cent) of Montcalm farm owners, compared to 21 per cent who originated in counties in the District of Trois-Rivieres and just over 8 per cent in the District of Quebec. Westward movement was influenced not just by region of origin in Quebec but also by recent emigration to the United States. The textile industry in post-bellum New England created an enormous demand for

20 The Limits of Rural Capitalism TABLE 1.3 Birthplaces of Quebec-born francophones in search population, by district and county

County District of Montreal

District of Trois-Rivieres

District of Quebec

Total found Not found Total searched

Berthier Richelieu Deux Montagnes Napierville Rouville Chambly Vercheres Bagot Montreal St-Hyacinthe Terrebonne St-Jean Brome Iberville Joliette Laprairie Laval Shefford Yamaska Maskinonge Drummond Nicolet Champlain Megantic St-Maurice Rimouski Quebec Bellechasse Portneuf Charlevoix Lotbiniere Montmorency Temiscouata

Per cent of the total

Per cent of the found

126 40 18 10 10 8 6 6 5 4 4 4

59.4 18.9 8.5 4.7 4.7 3.8 2.8 2.8 2.4 1.9 1.9 1.9

70.8 22.5 10.1 5.6 5.6 4.5 3.4 3.4 2.8 2.2 2.2 2.2

3 2 2 1

1.4 0.9 0.9 0.5

1.7 1.1 1.1 0.6

Number

1 1 1 37 16

11 4 3

0.5 0.5

0.6 0.6

0.5

0.6

17.5

20.8

7.5

9.0

5.2 1.9 1.4

6.2 2.2 1.7

1 1 1

0.5 0.5 0.5

0.6 0.6 0.6

15 4 3 2 2 1 1

7.1 1.9 1.4 0.9 0.9 0.5 0.5

8.4 2.2 1.7 1.1 1.1 0.6 0.6

1 1

178 34 212

0.5 0.5 84 16 100

Source: Origins Data File (see appendix, p. 197, and note 19, pp. 209-10).

0.6 0.6 100

Shared Origins of Settlement 21 unskilled labour. Between 1860 and 1900 this demand culminated in population flows that resulted in a net migration of an estimated 328,000 francophones to New England.20 Many of Montcalm's settlers were caught up in this exodus, and lived in mill towns for several years before coming west. Two textile communities played a key role, acting as conduits for the further migration of families to the Canadian west. Forty-nine Quebec-born heads of farm households in Montcalm in either 1891 or 1901 were traced to prior residences in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, either through the birthplace of their children, landpatent applications, or published sources.21 Of those forty-nine households, thirty were specifically traced to residences in the industrial towns of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and Fall River, Massachusetts. This would seem unremarkable if it were not also the case that all but two of the heads of household arriving in Montcalm from Woonsocket and Fall River were born in Berthier, Richelieu, Yamaska, and Maskinonge - the same four counties of origin of most of Montcalm's Quebec-born farm owners. Divide the arrival of the Quebec-born at a median point sometime between 1876 and 1901 and the role of emigrants to New England is further amplified. By the close of 1881, for instance, ninety-nine Quebecborn heads of household had already arrived in Montcalm. Among them seven in ten can be traced to recent residences in the United States, half to Rhode Island or Massachusetts and a third to the cities of Woonsocket and Fall River.22 As figure 1.1 illustrates, Montcalm received the lion's share of its repatriates in 1876 and 1877, and it was this early immigration that was assisted by the Dominion government.23 Canada's repatriation agent, Charles Lalime, based in Worcester, Massachusetts, reported that he had personally conducted over 4100 repatriates to Manitoba between 1876 and 1886.24 A smaller but steady number of families continued to arrive in Montcalm from recent residence in the United States. But by the mid-1880s there was a noticeable shift to immigrants arriving directly from Quebec. Because land was harder to locate and more expensive over time, very few of the late-arriving settlers from Quebec were not the kin of the first wave of Montcalm settlers from New England. Whether assisted by the public purse or not, the migration process relied heavily on the auspices of kin. Virtually all returnees from the United States, for instance, arrived in family units headed by individuals approaching mid-life. Of the eighty returnees from the United States who would eventually own farms in Montcalm, forty-three heads of

22

The Limits of Rural Capitalism

FIGURE 1.1 Year of arrival of Quebec-born heads of household, by jurisdiction of most recent residence, 1876-1899

U.S. residents

Direct from Quebec

Source: Origins Data File (see appendix, p. 197, and note 19, pp. 209—10).

household were married when they arrived in Manitoba. Of the remaining men eventually to own farms, and not married at the time of their arrival, only two, both widowers, were unrelated to the forty-three married heads of household. Not all of these single young men were the sons of the married generation. Some were brothers to the older generation. Nevertheless, these single young men were an average of 17.1 years of age when they arrived in Manitoba. The timing of the older generation's movement to the West, then, was strongly associated with the urgency of establishing the next on the land. At the time of arrival the married generation of forty-three returnee households was, on average, headed by a 39.3-year-old male and a 34.5-year-old female.25 These couples had an average of 3.5 children, and were at a stage in their life cycle to benefit from the maturing labour power of family members.

Shared Origins of Settlement

23

The urgency was perhaps greater for older family heads like Ambroise Sarrasin. His family's experience illustrates the links between the generations of those who emigrated first to New England. This Quebec-born family head was already forty-five years of age when he and his wife Victoire Lachance, originally married in Berthier County, first emigrated in 1871 to Woonsocket, Rhode Island. By the time enough savings had been generated to consider a return to rural life, Ambroise had reached the age of fifty-one. Two of his sons, twenty-one-year-old Ambroise Jr and eighteen-year-old Xavier, were still single when they entered for homesteads and purchased pre-emptions in 1877.26 By the time of receiving patent in Manitoba in the fall of 1883, the three Sarrasin men would together own 960 acres of farmland. News of their good fortune undoubtedly inspired interest in Woonsocket and Berthier. The experience of another family from Berthier illustrates how kinship had a multiplying effect on the migration process. Liboire Baril and Genevieve Savoie left their native parish of Saint-Cuthbert in 1850, having just married, to establish themselves in neighbouring Maskinonge County. After thirteen years 'de travail et de misere' in Maskinonge the family left for Woonsocket.27 Another eight years passed and the family was on the move again for Manitoba in 1881. Having arrived later than most settlers from New England, thefifty-six-year-oldLiboire was obliged to purchase his first farmland for $1500, a substantial amount of which he was able to borrow.28 Soon more kin arrived directly from Saint-Cuthbert. In 1882 Liboire and Genevieve's nephews Napoleon and Gregoire joined them in Montcalm. In turn, their mother, Genevieve's sister Olive (nee Savoie) Gregoire, widowed six years previously, joined her sons in Montcalm in 1883, together with her six daughters.29 Families like these shared patterns of movement within Quebec before leaving. Most in lowland districts near Montreal, like the Barils, pushed into interior counties before turning to emigration to New England. Settlers from Drummond County, for instance, were descendants of families originally from lowland parishes along the St Lawrence in Yamaska County. The Drummond County connection was exploited by the priest in Montcalm's Saint-Pie-de-Letellier parish, Reverend Norbert Jutras, whose brother Moise lived in Saint-Germain-de-Grantham, Quebec.30 The families who migrated west with Moise Jutras in 1887 named Barnabe and Houle - were followed by others in 1888 and 1889 with origins in Yamaska - like Chasse, Fontaine, Forest, Lahaie, Lemire, and Proulx. In some instances the family ties were matrilineal and more difficult to unearth. Napoleon Forest, for example, came to Montcalm

24 The Limits of Rural Capitalism from Yamaska in 1888 with his wife and two children, a year after his sister Salomee Forest had arrived with her husband Noel Houle and their seven children from Drummondville. As the costs of entry into the community increased, migration was more likely to originate directly from Quebec and the class of the migrants changed. Contemporaries made note of the differences. Dominion immigration agent Jean-Etienne Tetu was stationed near the American border at Emerson between 1876 and 1886. In his annual report to the Department of Agriculture for 1877 he praised the settlers from New England: 'When one considers how little means these settlers had at the time of their arrival here and the mischances of all kinds to which settlement on the plains is subject, one cannot help remarking they have worked with energy.'31 By 1883 Tetu's counterpart in Worcester submitted a very different analysis. In his report to the minister Charles Lalime remarked that those leaving New England were generally more prosperous: 'These emigrants formerly were farmers and consequently are of the best class of emigrants, the great majority of them having sufficient homesteads, and some of them being able to buy improved farms.' Tetu echoed this view just as he was reassigned in 1890 to other duties in Winnipeg. Speaking more broadly of the movement of francophones into the province, he wrote, 'I would remark that in nearly all cases those who remained here purchased or rented improved farms in the older settlement [s], and from the fact that no assistance was asked for, it is satisfactory to be able to report, that they were in good circumstances and of a superior class, well supplied with agricultural implements and stock which they brought with them in most instances. »33 ^ In Montcalm a settler named Eusebe Cadieux was most emblematic of the change. The forty-three-year-old Cadieux arrived from Boucherville, Chambly County, in early 1893 with his wife, thirty-six-year-old Azilda Robert, and their four sons and four daughters.34 Eusebe's first purchase of land was a 153-acre river lot previously owned by his father-in-law, Olivier Robert; a deal made for $2000.35 By the time of the 1901 tax assessment Eusebe had acquired three more river lots, and his holdings totalled 439 acres, including the lot purchased from his father-in-law. Substantial livestock had also been purchased, including eleven horses, seven milch cows, eleven calves, and twelve hogs. Some 235 acres had been improved, while another 204 remained wooded.36 In 1911 with two sons and a daughter still at home Eusebe and Azilda had converted their tenure of river lots mainly into quarter-section holdings totalling 519

Shared Origins of Settlement 25 TABLE 1.4 Birthplaces of Ontario-born search population, by region and county

Region

County

Eastern Ontario Addington Carleton Dundas Durham Frontenac Glengarry Hastings Southern Ontario Halton Middlesex Simcoe York Northern Ontario Algoma Total found Not found Total searched

Number

Per cent of the total

Per cent of the found

23 3 4

40.4 5.3 7.0

5 2 1

8.8 3.5 1.8

4 4

15.4 7.0

10 3 1 5 1

17.5 5.3 1.8 8.8 1.8

30.3 9.1 3.0 15.2 3.0

1 1

1.8 1.8

3.0 3.0

33 24 57

58 42 100

69.7 9.1 12.1 15.2 6.1 3.0 16.7 12.1

100

Source: See table 1.3.

acres, near their original residence. Former river-lot holdings were now in the hands of their married sons Origene, 29, and Alexandre, 31, who held 564 and 217 acres respectively, and who, between them, owned 17 horses, 22 milch cows, 35 calves, and 35 hogs. Together, on farms within two miles of one another, pax Cadieuxana had grown to include some 1300 acres, 32 horses, 32 milch cows, 55 calves, and 50 hogs.37 For those able to join the ranks of the propertied after the land market was in full swing, the Cadieux's circumstances were more typical than not. As part of a second wave they came directly from farming in Quebec and were more bourgeois in means and ambition. A regional clustering of sorts was also found among the Ontario-born who came to own farms in Montcalm in 1891 and 1901. Most originated from counties where new lands had ceased to be available past the mid-

26 The Limits of Rural Capitalism nineteenth century. A clear majority, just over two-thirds (69.7 per cent), came from counties in eastern Ontario (see table 1.4). Exceptions to this pattern were households traced to Halton, York, Simcoe, and Middlesex - counties that, arguably, had reached the limits of their agricultural land bases. But because of the much more diffuse system of vital-records keeping in Ontario, my search was not as successful for the Ontario-born. Two-fifths of the household heads identified in the census as Ontario-born could not be traced to their county of origin, and the data must be observed with this in mind. Among those successfully traced to their counties of origin in Ontario, however, the evidence suggests that similar family dynamics were at work. The largest difference between the Quebec and Ontario families was that a much smaller proportion of Ontario-born heads of household were married at the time of their arrival. Only a fifth (six of thirty-four) of the Ontario-born who could be traced to their counties of origin were married at the time of their arrival in Montcalm, compared to over half of the Quebec-born who came from prior residences in the United States. Nevertheless the half-dozen married Ontario-born heads of households were similarly in their late thirties, 37.8 years of age, and blessed with a like number of children, 3.8 per household. More important, perhaps, the search indicated that only one of twenty-eight Ontario-born farm owners in the 1891 and 1901 tax years had actually arrived in Montcalm without their immediate kin. These future farm owners, born in Ontario and single during the migration to the West, were an average of 13.3 years old when they arrived in Montcalm.38 It is difficult to make much of this pattern because of the small number of anglophones who settled in Montcalm. But the level of economic individualism underwriting the supposedly 'spontaneous' pattern of Ontario migration to the west is very much a matter of perspective. Compared with francophones and their pattern of arrival in Montcalm, anglophones entered the community in smaller numbers over a longer period, and as the plotting of the arrival dates of future farm owners in figure 1.2 reveals, anglophone arrivals tailed off completely in the 1890s. Yet the ties of kinship underlying the more dispersed process of Ontario migration serve as a useful corrective to the myth of Ontario individualism. It is understandable that historians working from publicland records have concluded that western migration from Ontario was a more individual process.39 But when the migration process is examined retrospectively, from the perspective of post-settlement generations or

Shared Origins of Settlement

27

FIGURE 1.2 Year of arrival of anglophone and francophone heads of household, 1871-1900

• Francophone

Anglophone

Source: See figure 1.1.

cohorts, it is evident that kinship and life cycle strongly influenced Ontario migration to the rural prairie west. Recent research on a much larger scale indicates that this was indeed the pattern for other AngloCanadian settlers across the region.40 My findings from Montcalm only reinforce the importance of understanding succession strategies in rural-to-rural migration. Unless these family dynamics are part of the investigation the decisions of rural emigrants are stripped of their larger social meaning. Conclusion Whatever regional disparities influenced patterns of migration to the West, common strategies of succession underlay the movement of farm people to Montcalm. There were shared structures of family life that brought Montcalm's more persistent settlers to its farms. Group settlement alone would not have guaranteed the cultural make-up of the

28 The Limits of Rural Capitalism communities like Montcalm. Without extensive family ties to other landseeking kin, Montcalm's francophones would not have been in the majority for long. As in many other prairie communities entry into farm life depended on the informal contacts between public-land entrants and successive waves of settlers. Montcalm was hardly a closed shop, but access to the means of making a living on the land was initially mediated by families interested more in generational succession than material success. The timing and location of their entry into the West, as descendants of smallholder farming traditions, favoured the re-establishment of independent farm life. Before the advent of organized grain trading and the arrival of direct rail service, there would be plenty of time to reestablish life as it had been known. Soon enough the rush of commerce and scale of farm life in this new setting would begin to reshape local experience.

Chapter 2

Making Families and Generations

In an age when technology and expanding urban markets provided the stimulus to embrace farm enterprise, Montcalm family life worked to expand the capacity for household independence. Like many other North American communities, Montcalm's youthful and sex-balanced population responded to the promise of territorial expansion not by reducing but by maintaining or increasing pre-industrial birth rates. In a pattern that mirrored population expansion in the farm states of the American midwest, elevated fertility followed the migration of farm families to new areas of western settlement.1 Indeed, a fertility transition did not take hold in Montcalm until the turn of the century. Birth rates remained high for the married generation who led the migration to the prairie west, and the seasonality of conception varied little during the settlement era. Largely because of these demographics the family organization of farm life changed little before 1900. Hired hands were present in very few farm households during the settlement era. Family organization reinforced limits on the development of waged labour already imposed by a family-centred pattern of migration. Few newcomers lived in the community, outside of the three principal language groups, because in most cases young men and women on the move arrived in Montcalm with or to join their kin.2 The basis for social renewal was therefore largely internal to the community. Ultimately, in Montcalm, the fecundity of the settlement generation delayed adjustment to the imperatives of an increasingly commercial age. Population trends have not figured prominently in discussions of prairie settlement. Generally questions of land acquisition and tenure have exercised a greater influence on the Canadian historical imagination.3 Attention to demography in American historical writing has

30 The Limits of Rural Capitalism grown appreciably in recent years, particularly in relation to rural life. Most scholarship on the settlement of the rural midwest, for instance, has analysed levels of natural increase in immigrant communities.4 Generally this discussion proceeds from a premise similar to that found in scholarship on the Canadian prairies, that ethnicity is at the root of demographic difference.5 Both historiographies therefore tend to discount the extent to which native-born populations were influenced by similar population dynamics as they moved west. Yet population studies like those of Richard A. Easterlin have consistently emphasized that western migration was a stimulus to natural increase, and that patterns of fertility in the northern states were always related to the availability of western land. Easterlin stresses moreover that 'Yankee' parents developed a general expectation of providing for the well-being of every child, and this expectation prompted the massive movement of nativeborn Americans to the Midwest after 1865.6 Native-born rural families might just as easily have reoriented themselves to the expanding urban frontier in the late nineteenth century. In an era before child labour laws, family size was certainly not a barrier to making the transition to industrial employment.7 Moving west was in many ways a riskier endeavour than staying behind. Few rural families would have ventured the move if all that awaited them was the promise of earning wages. For most the promise of the West lay in the potential to provide a similar way of life to the next generation. The drive for economic independence, as much as the level of opportunity, helps explain why the human legacy of western migration was an increase in fertility. In Montcalm the pattern of population expansion was visible both at the community level and within reproductive families. Higher fertility was possible in part because sex ratios were relatively balanced in the prairie west. Because so much of the population was under fifteen years of age and situated in farm communities, imbalances never dominated the demographic outlook for long.8 The published census, for example, indicates that up to the turn of the century the surplus of men in Manitoba never exceeded a ratio of 123 males to every 100 females.9 Manuscript census data confirm this general picture for Montcalm, where sex imbalances never exceeded a ratio of 118 males to every 100 females. Most were in fact found in the adult population, and mirrored the arrival of the generation of unmarried farm owners identified in the previous chapter; that is, the imbalances were greatest in the cohorts aged 30 to 44 in 1891 and 45 to 59 in 1901. Outside of these age groups far more balance between the sexes existed, especially among those

Making Families and Generations 31 TABLE 2.1 Sex ratios by age cohort and language, Montcalm, 1891 and 1901 1891

French

English

German

Total

1901

M per 100 F

Males

Females

M per 100 F

313

307 132 85 47 26

102 116 156 98 138

398 264 146 102 38

471 247

60+

153 133 46 36

127 59 39

85 107 115 173 97

Total

681

597

114

948

943

101

0-14 15-29 30-44 45-59 60+

94 63 43 15 13

75 47 34 9 4

125 134 126 167 325

79 71 37 20 9

59 44 27 20 7

134 161 137 100 129

Total

228

169

135

216

157

138

0-1 4 15-29 30-44

_

_

_

45-59 60+

-

-

-

101 31 30 14 2

88 38 12 11 4

115 82 250 127 50

Total

-

-

-

178

153

116

0-14 15-29 30-44 45-59 60+

407 216 176 61 49

382 179 119 56 30

107 121 148 109 163

578 366 213 136 49

618 329 166 90 50

94 111 128 151 98

Total

909

766

119

1342

1253

107

0-14 15-29 30-44 45-59

Males

Females

Source: Canada, Census (manuscript), 1891 (T-6294), 1901 (T-6434).

aged fourteen and under. The consistency of the distributions presented in table 2.1, and the aging of the imbalances over time, suggests that the farm families that formed the core of the early migration had more sons than daughters. The gender composition of their families, it seems, had been an important factor in their migration decisions.10 Distributed by language, the ratios in table 2.1 indicate that the anglo-

32 The Limits of Rural Capitalism phone population experienced higher imbalances in most age categories. To some extent this can be explained by small numbers and political geography. Many of Montcalm's anglophone farm families maintained residences in the town of Emerson, which fell in a neighbouring municipality. Yet the anglophone community did not appear to replenish or retain its population as well as the francophone community. Part of the explanation rests with the higher imbalances of the anglophone community from the time of settlement. A much higher proportion of the future farm owners seen in chapter 1 were single when they arrived in Montcalm. The smaller proportion of married-couple households among anglophone migrants assured that the marriage market would be less localized. Unlike their francophone neighbours, anglophone men could not look to younger age groups within the immediate community for potential spouses and there does not appear to have been much intermarriage with members of other linguistic communities during the period examined. Instead, the demographic imbalances experienced by anglophones kept accumulating. The inability of the anglophone community to grow or retain its local population was especially evident in the rapid decline of the number of children under the age of ten during the 1890s. In the United States children under ten represented one-third of the rural population in the Midwest at the time of the 1860 census.11 Thirty years later in the Canadian west, children under 10 represented just over one-third of Montcalm's population in 1891. This level began to decline during the following decade and by the turn of the century the proportion fell to 31.7 per cent; among anglophones the proportion dropped to 23.5 per cent (see table 2.2). With in-migration already slowing in the 1880s, as we saw in chapter 1, the lack of population growth in the anglophone community in the 1890s suggests that young people were already on the move again. They may have found employment in neighbouring municipalities. But they did not relocate to other parts of Montcalm. For the most part it was young Mennonite farm families from adjacent communities who moved into the western part of Montcalm. Because they often left nearby aging kin behind, these local migrants represented an extremely youthful population. The proportion of Montcalm's Germanlanguage population under 35 years of age was 86 per cent in 1901, and the proportion of children under ten, 44 per cent. Within reproductive families, however, fertility in the anglophone community remained high by contemporary standards. Child-to-woman ratios, measuring the proportion of children under ten for every 1000

Making Families and Generations

33

TABLE 2.2 Children as a proportion of population, by mother tongue, Montcalm, 1891 and 1901 Age

1891

1901

(1977): 42-71. - 'Putting "Capitalism" in Its Place: A Review of the Recent Literature.' William and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995): 315-26. Morton, A.S. History of Prairie Settlement. Toronto: Macmillan 1938. Murchie, R.W. Agricultural Progress on the Prairie Frontier. Toronto: Macmillan 1936. Murray, Stanley Norman. The Valley Comes of Age: A History of Agriculture in the Valley of the Red River of the North, 1812-1920. Fargo: North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies 1967. Neth, Mary. Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community and the Foundations of Agribusiness in the Midwest, 1900-1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1995. Neufeld, E.P. The Canadian Financial System: Its Growth and Development. New York: St Martin's Press 1972. Noel, Francoise. The Christie Seigneuries: Estate Management and Settlement in the Upper Richelieu Valley, 1760-1854. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1992.

Select Bibliography 263 Norrie, Kenneth H. 'The National Policy and the Rate of Prairie Settlement: A Review.' Journal of Canadian Studies 14 (1979): 50-62. Opie, John. The Law of the Land: Two Hundred Years of American Farmland Policy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1987. Ostergren, Robert C. A Community Transplanted: The Trans-Atlantic Experience of a Swedish Immigrant Settlement in the Upper Middle West, 1835-1915. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1988. Ouellet, Fernand. Economic and Social History of Quebec, 1760-1840. Ottawa: Carleton University Press 1980. - Economy, Class and Nation in Quebec: Interpretive Essays Toronto: Copp Clark Pitman 1991. - 'La colonisation du Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean ... en perspective, 1850-1911. La marche des francophones dans 1'Est du Canada et vers la Nouvelle-Angleterre.' Saguenayensia 36 (1994): 8-27. Owen, Wendy, ed., The Wheat King: The Selected Letters and Papers ofAJ. Cotton, 1883-1913. Winnipeg: Manitoba Record Society 1985. Painchaud, Robert. 'The Catholic Church and the Movement of Francophones to the Canadian Prairies, 1870-1915.' (PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, 1976. — Un revefrancais dans le peuplement de la Prairie. St Boniface: Les editions des plaines 1987. Paquet, Gilles, and Wayne Smith. 'L'emigration des Canadiens francais vers les Etats Unis, 1790-1940: Problematique et coups de sonde.' L'Actualite economiquebV (1983): 423-53. Paquet, Gilles, and Jean-Pierre Wallot. 'Les inventaires apres deces a Montreal au tournant du XIXe siecle: Preliminaires a une analyse.' Revue d'histoire de I'AmmquefrunfaiseW (1976): 163-221. — Lower Canada at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: Restructuring and Modernization. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association 1988. Pederson, Jane Marie. Between Memory and Reality: Family and Community in Rural Wisconsin, 1870-1970. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1992. Pentland, H. Clare. 'The Development of a Capitalistic Labour Market in Canada.' Canadian Journal ofEconomics and Political Science 25 (1959): 450-61. Percy, Michael B., and Rick Szostak. 'The Political Economy of the Abolition of Seigneurial Tenure in Canada East.' Explorations in Economic History 29 (1992): 51-68. Peters, Jake. The Waisenamt: A History of Mennonite Inheritance Custom. Steinbach, MB: Mennonite Village Museum Inc. 1985. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press 1957. Potyondi, Barry. In Palliser's Triangle: Living in the Grasslands, 1850-1930. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing 1995.

264 Select Bibliography Pouyez, Christian, and Yolande Lavoie, with Gerard Bouchard, Raymond Roy, Jean-Paul Simard, and Marc St-Hilaire. Les Saguenayens: Introduction a I'histoire despopulations du Saguenay, XVIe-Xxe siecles. Sillery: Presses de 1'Universite du Quebec 1983. Ramirez, Bruno. On the Move: French-Canadian and Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860-1914. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1991. Redish, Angela. 'Why Was Specie Scarce in Colonial Economies? An Analysis of the Canadian Currency, 1796-1830.' Journal of Economic History 44 (1984): 71328. Regehr, T.D. 'Bankers and Farmers in Western Canada, 1900-1939.' In John Foster, ed., The Developing West: Essays in Honour of Lewis H. Thomas, 303-36. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press 1983. Rice,J.G. 'The Role of Culture and Community in Frontier Prairie Farming.' Journal of Historical Geography 3 (1977): 155-75. Richtik, J.M. 'Manitoba Settlement: 1870 to 1886.' PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1971. Robbins, William G. Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1994. Roby, Yves. LesFranco-Americains de la Nouvelle Angleterre, 1776—1930. Sillery, QC: Les editions du Septentrion 1991. Rothenberg, Winifred. From Market-Places to a Market Economy: The Transformation of Rural Massachusetts, 1750-1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992. Rozensweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983. Rudin, Ronald. Banking en francais: The French Banks of Quebec, 1885—1925. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985. - In Whose Interest? Quebec's Caisses Populaires, 1900—1945. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1990. - 'Revisionism and the Search for a Normal Society: A Critique of Recent Quebec Historical Writing.' Canadian Historical Review 73 (1992): 30-61. Ruggles, Steven. Prolonged Connections: The Rise of Extended Families in Nineteenth Century England and America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1986. Russell, Peter. 'Emily Township: Pioneer Persistence to Equality?' Histoire sodale / Social History 22 (1989): 317-32. Saint-Onge, Nicole. The Dissolution of a Metis Community: Pointe a Grouette, 1860-1885.' Studies in Political Economy 18(1985): 149-72. - 'Variations in Red River: The Traders and Freemen Metis of Saint-Laurent, Manitoba.' Canadian Ethnic Studies 24 (1992): 1-21. Sarrasin, Marie Olive. Histoire de la Paroisse de Saint-Joseph. Altona, MB: D.W. Friesen & Sons 1964.

Select Bibliography 265 Schapiro, Martin Owen. Filling Up America: An Economic-Demographic Model of Population Growth and Distribution in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Greenwich, CT:JAI Press 1986. Scott, Joan W. Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press 1988. Seguin, Normand. La conquete du sol au 19e siecle. Quebec: Editions du Boreal Express 1977. Seguin, Normand, ed. Agriculture el colonisation au Quebec. Montreal: Boreal Express 1980. Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press 1991. Shammas, Carole, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin. Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1987 Shick, Blair C., and Irving H. Plotkin. Torrens in the United States: A legal and Economic History and Analysis of American Land-Registration Systems. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books 1978. Siddiq, F.K. 'The Size Distribution of Probate Wealth Holdings in Nova Scotia in the Late 19th Century.' Acadiensis 18 (1988): 136-47. Silver, Arthur I. The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation, 1864-1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982. Solberg, Carl. The Prairies and the Pampas: Agrarian Policy in Canada and Argentina, 1880-1930. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1987. Soltow, Lee. Men and Wealth in the United States: 1850-1870. New Haven CT: Yale University Press 1975. Sprague, D.N. Canada and the Metis, 1869-1885. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Lavirier University Press 1988. - 'Dispossession vs Accommodation in Plaintiff vs. Defendant Accounts of Metis Dispersal from Manitoba, 1870-1881.' Prairie Forum 16 (1991): 13756. Steckel, Richard H. 'Household Migration and Rviral Settlement in the United States, 1850-1860.' Explorations in Economic History 26 (1989): 190-218. - 'Census Manuscript Schedules Matched with Property Tax Lists: A Source of Information on Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality.' Historical Methods 27 (1994) :7l-85. Stoll, Steven. The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. Berkeley: University of California Press 1998. Strong-Boag, Veronica. 'Pulling in Double Harness or Hauling a Double Load: Women, Work and Feminism on the Canadian Prairies. 'Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (1986): 32-52.

266 Select Bibliography Sundberg, Sara Brooks. 'A Female Frontier: Manitoba Farm Women in 1922.' PrairieForum 16 (1991): 185-204. Swierenga, Robert P. 'The New Rural History: Defining the Parameters.' Great Plains Quarterly 1 (1981): 211-23. Swyripa, Frances. Wedded to the Cause: Ukrainian-Canadian Women and Ethnic Identity, 1891-1991. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993. Taillefer, Jean-Marie. 'Les Franco-Manitobains et I'education, 1870-1970.' PhD thesis, University of Manitoba, 1988. Taylor, Jeffery M. Fashioning Farmers: Ideology, Agricultural Knowledge and the Manitoba Farm Movement, 1890-1925. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center 1994. Thompson, John Herd. 'Bringing in the Sheaves: The Harvest Excursionists, 1890-1929.' Canadian Historical Review 59 (1974): 467-89. - The Harvests of War: The Prairie West, 1914-1918. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1978. - 'Writing about Rural Life and Agriculture.' In John Schultz, ed., Writing about Canada: A Handbook for Modern Canadian History, 97-119. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall 1990. - Forging the Prairie West. Toronto: Oxford University Press 1998. Thornton, Patricia, and Sherry Olson. 'Family Contexts of Fertility and Infant Survival in Nineteenth-Century Montreal.' Journal of Family History 16 (1991): 401-17. - 'Infant Vulnerability in Three Cultural Settings in Montreal, 1880.' In Alain Bideau, Bertrand Desjardins, and Hector Perez Brignoli, eds., Infant and Child Mortality in the Past, 216-41. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997. Tilly, Louise, and Joan Scott. Women, Woi-k and the Family. New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston 1978. Tyman, John Langton. By Section, Township and Range: Studies in Prairie Settlement. Brandon, MB: Assiniboine Historical Society 1972. Urquhart, M.C. 'New Estimates of Gross National Product, Canada, 1870-1926. Some Implications for Development.' In Robert E. Gallman and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Long-Term Factors in American Growth, 9-94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986. Urquhart, M.C., eds., K.A. Buckley, asst. ed., 1st edition, and F.H. Leacy, ed., 2nd edition. Historical Statistics of Canada. Ottawa: Statistics Canada 1983. Vecoli, Rudolph J. 'Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted.'Journal of A merican History 51(1964): 404-17. Vicero, Ralph D. 'Immigration of French Canadians to New England, 18401900: A Geographical Analysis.' PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1968. Vickers, Daniel. 'Competency and Competition: Economic Culture in Early America.' William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1990): 1-28.

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Illustration Credits

Archives de la Societe historique de Saint-Boniface, Manitoba: original church and rectory in Saint-Jean-Baptiste, SHSB 1780; Thibault family, MSB 0328; streetscape of Letellier, SHSB 15093; streetscape of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, MSB 0299; Montcalm's founding cures, SHSB 3742; original Saint-Jean-Baptiste hotel, SHSB 2178; Nadeau and family, SHSB 0445; farmers from Saint-Joseph, SHSB 6906; Flour mill and elevator in Saint-Jean-Baptiste, SHSB 2183; Saint-JeanBaptiste parade on its way to Winnipeg, SHSB 1913; Fete Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Saint-Boniface, SHSB 16836; Titan Tractors, SHSB 4412; presses at West Canada Publishing, SHSB 4495 Jean Louis and Marie Laure Perron: women of Saint-Joseph at Artisinat meeting Public Archives of Manitoba: Hotel Pierre Parenteau, c. 1910, N 3876; Guertin general store, N 3873; Parent, Jacques 1; Antoine Vandal with grandson, N 3877 Louis Sabourin: harvest time at the Sabourin farm

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Index

Adelman, Jeremy, 47, 74 agriculture: commercialization of, 56, 46- 9; inheritance practices and, 137-9; livestock holdings, 60- 1; market change visible in estate administrations, 161-4; role of markets in, 66- 7; role in reducing social boundaries, 113; scale of market surpluses, 59-61 Altona, 89 Altona Machinery Co., 90 Altona Printery, The, 90 Ancient Order of United Workmen, 156 Anderson, T.C. (stockbroker): gains control of Pelissier Ltd, 181-3 anglicization: New England's mill towns and Winnipeg compared, 174-5 Anishinabe, 106 Arcand, Louis (farmer): opposed to church subsidies, 122 Archibald, Adams G., 13-14 Ashdown & Co., 82 Assomption, parish of (Transcona): risk of assimilation in, 177 Ayotte, Alexandre (farmer), 56

Ballantyne, Simon (farmer), 82; opposed to church subsidies, 122 Bank of Montreal, 76 banks, chartered: absence from mortgage lending and farm credit, 67-8; focus on better-capitalized farmers, 77; novelty of bank financing for farmers, 77-8 Banque Canadienne Nationale, 76, 188 Banque d'Hochelaga: opens branch in Winnipeg, 178 Baril,Joseph (notary): agricultural society member, 114 Baril, Liboire (farmer), 23 Barnabe, Hercule (farmer): estate of, 157 Barnabe, Leopold (farmer), 58 Barnabe, Vincent: inter vivos transfers of, 146- 7 Barnes & Co., 82 Bawlf, Nicholas, 83 Beaubien, Aime (farmer): agricultural society member, 114 Beauchamps, Noe (farmer): pious bequests of, 133 Beaver Brewing and Bottling Co., 180

272

Index

Bellemare, Onesime (farmer), 54 Bernier, Frank (farmer): short-term borrowing practices of, 74- 6 Berthier County (Quebec): cloth production in Montcalm compared to that in, 62; settlers from, 23, 62 Bissonette, L.D.: opposed to church subsidies, 122 Bissonette, Marie Rose (hatmaker), 86 Blanchet,J.G., 108 Bois, Hector (billiards proprietor), 86 Boiteau, Isidore (farmer): opposed to church subsidies, 122 Boiteau, Isidore (farmer), 56 Boiteau,Johnny (farmer), 56 Boiteau, Joseph: member of SaintJean-Baptiste Society, 112 Bouchard, Gerard, 5, 136 Bourgearel, Henri (French consul): seeks support for Third Republic, 188- 9 Brault, Toussaint (druggist), 86; member of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, 112 Breton, Narcisse (farmer): chair of United Grain Growers local, 114 Brunei, George (tailor), 86 Bruyere, Jacques: challenges of bringing high culture to workers and farmers, 187 Bruyere, Marthe: corruptions of French in local usage, 186 cadet movement: promotion of, by urban professionals, 177-8 Cadieux, Eusebe (farmer), 24; use of dower restriction in estate of, 157 caisses populaires, 185 Calder, Donald (farmer): Grain Growers member, 114

Calder, William (farmer): Grain Growers member, 114 Calgary Brewery & Malting Co., 180 Campbell, John S.: agricultural society member, 114 Canada Permanent Ltd (Toronto), 69, 72, 95 'Canadian Bankers Association, 73 Canadian Land Corporation, 97 Canadian Order of Foresters, 156 Canadian Pacific Railway, 83 Careless, Maurice, 46 Carl ton, NWT, 103 Caron, Lucille (domestic), 172 Catholic Order of Foresters, 112 Central Farmers' Institutes, 114 Cercle Ouvrier, 185, 187-8 Champagne, Arthur (farmer): longterm borrowing practices of, 72; short-term borrowing practices of, 76- 7 Charles Nosworthy & Co., 57 chattel mortgages: use of, 74— 7 Chevrier, Eudore (Blue Store proprietor), 184 Clark, Christopher, 8 Clark, Samuel, 83 Clement, Zotique (farmer): 132; estate of, 164- 5 Club Belgique, 177 Cohen, Majorie Griffen, 63 Collum, S.J. (merchant), 75; agricultural society member, 114 Comeault, Napoleon (merchant), 84, 90; supports subsidies to local business, 126 commerce, local: expansion of, 85- 7; the new economy and generalstore merchants, 90- 1; role of general-store merchants in, 78- 9

Index 273 Comptoir Agricole, 96; creature of Winnipeg lawyer, 179 cooperatives, 185 Credit Foncier Franco-Canadien, 69, 105; opens branch in Winnipeg, 178 Crescent Creamery Co., 96 Crookston (Minnesota), 79 Crowe, Herbert, 83 cultural divisions of labour: conservative Catholics reassert authority, 184- 8; differences in urban and rural outlooks, 115 cultural paradoxes: ironies of new age, 133- 4 dairy production, 60-1, 64 Danbom, David, 8 Daneault, Treffle: executor of Josephine Leblanc's estate, 160; member of SaintJean-Baptiste Society, 112 Darroch, A. Gordon, 5, 48 Davis, Edward (farmer): opposed to church subsidies, 122 Dawson, C.A., 13 debt: farm succession and, 73; land prices and, 70 -3 Delorme,Joseph (farmer): member of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, 112 Department of the Interior: evolution of public lands policy, 15-16; land disputes, 14— 15 Depatie, Sylvie, 136 Dery, Charles B. (farmer), 81; beaten in front of church, 130- 1 Desaultels, Edmond (baker), 86 Desautels, Francois, 131 Desrosiers, Charles (baker), 86 Deux Petites Pointes (Two Little Points), 82

Dick, Lyle, 47 dime, la, 131-2 Dionne, Ernest (farmer), 63- 4 Dionne, Maria (farm daughter): milktesting expertise of, 63 disenfranchisement: narrowing of opportunities on the farm, 169- 70 Ditz, Toby, 162 Dominion City, 76 Dominion Elevator Co., 83 Dominion Lands Act, 194 donation: 136, 151 Douglas, C.S. (newspaper editor), 79 Doukhobors, 13 Dozois, Alfred (municipal secretary), 123 Drewry's Brewery, 180 Dufferin races, 113 Duluth, 82 Dumontier, Diana (hatmaker), 86 Dun & Bradstreet: rating the credit of village enterprises, 84- 7 Dupas,Joseph (merchant): in county court, 55 Dupas, Pierre, Hormidas, and Alberic (brothers), 56 Ekachique, Marguerite (Metis bride), 106 election melee (1878), 109- 11 Elliot, Bruce, 15 Emerson Herald, 112, 129

emigration: patterns of rural to urban migration, 168- 73, 176- 7; resulting from changes in inheritance practice, 164 - 6 Empson, Charles (implement dealer), 90 Ens, Gerhard, 101, 102 Equitable Trust Co., 97

274 Index ethnic diversity, 4 ethnicity: assimilation, 13; clustering, 12-13, 16-17, 192; demographic difference, 30; evolution of local identity, 192; Fall of France and francophone identity, 189-90; forging a wider identity, 184— 5 exchange mediums: availability of currency, 79, 81-2; webs of social obligation, 80-1 F.A. Fairchild Co., 58 Family, Church and Market, 47 family economy: informal dimensions of, 46 -7 family farms: economy of, 4 -6 family size: estimated and reconstituted, 40 -3 Fargo, 82 farm credit: changing nature of shortterm market, 76-7; chartered banks and, 67 Farmers Making Good, 47 Farmer's Union: members of, 82 farm machinery: cross-cultural ownership of, 58; entry of American implement makers, 55-8; joint ownership and reciprocal use of, 55-7; resistance to new technology, 54 -5 farm size: in Montcalm, 50-1; in Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba, 48 -51 farm succession: migration and, 12— 13; land distribution and, 50-1 fertility: child-to-woman ratios and, 33 fertility: farm generations and, 40 -1 fertility transition: timing of, 34 -7 fete nationals, 112; evolution of in Winnipeg, 177-8

Fillion,Jean Baptiste (farmer): agricultural society member, 114 Fillion, Rev. Joseph David: dispensations for inter-faith unions, 111; election melee and, 110 -11; endorses promissory notes, 122; keeping land for French settlers, 108; original impressions of Montcalm, 100; public schools, reaction to,116 Fillion, Louis (farmer): supporter of Comptoir Agricole, 179 Forrester,J.D. (farmer), 82 Fort Dufferin, 105, 113 Fortier, Joseph (restaurateur), 86 Fowke, Vernon, 46 Fraser, David (farmer), 82 Fraser, Donald (farmer), 82 Fraser,John (farmer): estate of, 155 Fraser, Peter (implement dealer), 90 Frechette, Antoine (farmer), 56 Freehold Savings Co., 149 Gaffield, Chad, 172 Gagan, David, 69, 137 Gentes, Felix (merchant), 85 George White and Sons (merchants), 58 Gjerde,Jon, 63 Goulet, Roger, Jr (provincial schools inspector), 118- 19 government, municipal: farmers' polity, 123- 4; new roadwork regime, 125- 6; public-health and relief expenditures, 127-9; resisting standardized assessment, 127; separating church from state, 122-3; subsidies t,o local business, 126-7 grain marketing: early market points and shipping rates, 82-3; effect of

Index organized trading on local economy, 84, 90 grain production, 59- 60 Grand Forks, 79 Granger,Joseph (farmer): estate of, 144- 5; member of Saint-JeanBaptiste Society, 112 Grant,John (farmer), 110 Graveline, Louis (merchant), 90, 113 Greenway, Thomas, 15 Greer, Allan, 6 Gregoire, Napoleon (farmer), 62 Gretna (Manitoba), 140 Grist Mills Elevator Co., 83 Group Settlement, 13, 15, 192 Haggart Bros. Manufacturing, 56, 149 Henripin, Jacques, 35 Hepburn, R.R. (banker-broker), 79 Houle, Alfred (farmer), 57 household composition, 43-5 H.S. Wesbrook (merchant), 58 Hudson's Bay Company, 102 implement agents, 55-7 Indianapolis, 165 inequality: age distribution of land ownership, 141, 143-4; gifting left to wealthy, 151-3; growth of, 139; plurietablissement and, 144; wealthy farmers as creditors to farm community, 162 infant death: birth cycles and, 39-40; causes of, 37-40 inheritance practices: compensatory nature of postmortem divisions, 154; continuity of purpose, 164- 5; educational bequests in wealthier estates, 166; emigration evident in estate administrations, 164- 5;

275

modernity of, 135; in Ontario, 137; in Quebec, 136; shift toward divisions of movable wealth, 153- 4; use of dower among anglophone settlers, 155- 6 International, The, 79, 82, 111 International Harvester, 55 inter vivos: aging of gifting parents, and use of, 151-3; anglophone use of, 137; evidence used for analysing, 200; gifting of land, 135-6 Ireland, J.S. (tax assessor), 123 Irvine, Andrew (farmer), 58; Grain Grower member, 114; use of dower in the estate of, 156 Irvine, Sam (farmer): Grain Grower member, 114 Irwin, G.L. (banker-broker), 79 Jeanne D'Arc: cult of, and panfrancophone identity, 178 Jellison, Katherine, 63 J.I. Case Threshing Machine Co., 55, 75 John Deere Plow Co., 55 Johnson, Thomas (land claimaint), 109 Jolibois,Jean Baptiste,Jr (Metis land claimant), 103 Jubinville, Raymond (farmer), 58 Jutras, Rev. Norbert: advice for keeping the young on the farm, 172-4; dispensations for inter-faith unions, 111-12; irreverence of parishioners, 131; move to Emerson, 106; short-course agricultural instructor, 63; supporter of Comptoir Agricole, 179; view of aboriginals, 106; view of public schools, 116

276 Index Keroack (booksellers), 178 Kiwitiyash (native princess), 105 Kleine Gemeinde, 47 Klyne, George (merchant), 110 Lachance, Victoire (farm wife and legator), 23; estate of, 165 Lacharite, Alfred (farmer), 57 L'Action Catholique, 186 Lalime, Charles (federal repatriation agent): 21 land speculation: non-resident ownership and, 140— 1 Landed Banking and Loan, 94 Lang, Robert (federal land official), 109 Lanthier, Antonio (furrier), 172 Laprairie (Quebec), 138 L'Association d'Education des Canadiens Francais du Manitoba, 120, 185 L'Association Fermiers de Saint-JeanBaptiste, Ltd, 90 Lavallee, Paul (farmer), 58 Lavoie, Maj. J.C. (CEF veteran): promotes regular forces, 187-8 Lawrence, Fred (Independent Labour MLA), 188 Leblanc,Josephine (legator), 159 Leclair, Marie (lega,tor), 157 Le Devoir, 186 Letellier Consumers Co-operative Ltd, 90 Letellier Lumber & Coal, 90 L'Heureux, Lucie (dressmaker), 86 Liberte,La, 115, 185 L'lle Jesus, 136, 138 Little, John Irvine, 5, 153- 5 livestock: and food requirements, 53-4

Loewen, Royden K., 47, 89, 170- 1 London Canada Loan and Agency Co., 72 Los Angeles, 165, 166 Lower Fort Garry, 102 Macdonald, John A.: intervention in lands case, 108 Macpherson, C.B., 48, 193 maintenance agreement, 139 Manitoba, Le, 56, 115 Manitoba Investment Association, 104 Manitoba Mines and Natural Resources, 145- 6 Manitoba & North West Loan Co., 105 Marais River, 105 Marchand, Benjamin (Metis land claimant), 103-4 Marcil, Louis (barber), 86 Marion, Ephrem (farmer): agricultural society member, 114; justice of peace, 131; favours keeping statute labour, 125; favours religious subsidies, 122; supports subsidies to local business, 126; witness in county court, 55 Marion, Moise (farmer), 81 markets: commitment to, 8; uneven development of, 9, 191, 194- 5 marriage age: estimated, 40-1; reconstituted, 41-2; rise in average, and decline in family sizes, 43- 4 Martin, Alphonse, 110 Martin, William, 83 Martin Mitchell Co., 83 Massey-Harris, 75, 86; local agent sues for non-payment, 54 — 5 McCalla, Douglas, 5

Index 277 McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., 55 McDonald, Christina (legator), 155 McFerran, Mary (legator), 156 McFerran, Robert (farmer): Grain Growers member, 114 McGaw, Samuel, 83 Mennonites, 13; rural industrialization and, 89- 90, 170 merchants: earnings of, 86 Merchants Bank, 74 messes chantes, 132

Metis: advent of rural capitalism and the, 101; attitudes of French settlers to, 105- 7; land claims in Montcalm, 102-5; local dispersal and destinations of, 104— 7 Metis, Le, 110 metropolitanism, 195 migration: family organization of, 12, 21-4; of Ontario-born settlers, 25 7; of Quebec-born settlers, 19- 21 Minneapolis Threshing Machine Co., 55 Mitchell, James, 83 Moldowan, Ike (merchant), 75 Moquin, Narcisse (farmer), 95 Morin, Clementine (farm wife), 62-3 Mormons, 13 Morris Rink & Athletic Co. Ltd, 96 mortality, 37 mortgage credit: land titles evidence, 199- 200; use of, to acquire land, 67-73 Mortlock, Ernest (merchant), 76 Morton, W.L., 13 Muir, Robert, 83 Nadeau, Auguste (farmer): inter vivos transfers of, 148- 50; supports pub-

lic schools, 116; as young farmer, 58 National Trust Co., 72 New England: emigration to, 18, 91 New Year's levee, 113 Nolin, Augustin (Metis groom), 106 North British Investment Co. (Glasgow) , 69 Northern Elevator Co., 83 Northern Mortgage Co., 97 Northern Pacific & Manitoba Railway, 83, 106 Nor'wester, 115

Ontario: migration to the West from, 13, 15; social conditions in, 5 Ontario Bank, 80 opportunity structures: recent British immigrants and Winnipeg's skilled trades, 175; urban knowledge and, 169, 171-2 Ouellet, Fernand, 6 Parent, Edouard (farmer): educational bequests of, 166 Parent, Francois (miller): 85; member of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, 112 Parent,Jacques (private banker): allocation of investments, 95- 7; educational bequests of, 166; forecloses farm, 149; mortgage-loan portfolio of, 92-5; provides bridge loan, 57 Parent, Joseph (implement dealer), 86 Parent, Rosina (legator), 159 Parenteau, Pierre (merchant): agricultural society member, 114; becomes hotelier, 91; Dun & Brad-

278 Index street rating of, 85; loan to Frank Bernier, 75; member of SaintjeanBaptiste Society, 112; sponsors grist-mill operation, 83; subsidies to local business, 126 parish life: card parties, 187 Patriote de I'Ouest, 186 Pederson, Jane-Marie, 63 Peel County (Ontario), 69, 137 Pelissier, Cleophas: takes over brewery in 1922, 180-1 Pelissier, Henri: beginnings and growth of brewery, 169, 178- 80 Pelissier,Joseph (hotelier): educational bequests of, 166 Pelletier, Rev. Nazaire: fundraising problems, 131; intercedes on Jutras's behalf, 106; parishioners support fete nationale, 112 Pembina, 102, 104, 105 Peres Viateurs (Otterburne), 132 Peron, Yves, 35 Plamondon, Pierre (merchant): educational bequests of, 166 Plante, Hermine (legator), 156 Plouffe, Joseph, 56 plurietablissement, 167 population (local): age distribution of, 32-3; ethnic composition of, 18; nominal persistence of, 140- 2; turnover of, 16 Port Arthur, 83 Potvin,Joseph (farmer): in county court, 80 Pouyez, Christian, 35 Prairies: historiography, 4, 46- 7, 193 pre-settlement society: land use and development during, 102-3 Proulx,Joseph (farmer): in county court, 80

public lands: availability and inheritance strategies, 139- 40; 'premature' settlement, 193; regulations governing distribution of, 108- 9; scramble for, 100, 103- 5, 107-9; squatters and, 103- 4, 108-9 public schools: attendance levels in, 119- 20; levels of pay in Montcalm's, 118-19; limits to anglicization in, 120-1; local trustees support bilingual compromise, 115-17; minimal inspection of, 117-18 Quebec: family economy in, 5; historiography, 6- 7; sole transfers to widows in, tradition of, 155 Regehr, T.D., 73 registration, land: nature of Manitoba's, 68-9 registration, small debts: nature of Manitoba's, 74 rente des banes, 132 rente viagere, 138 Rhineland, rural municipality of, 16 Ricard, Treffle (farmer), 57 Rimouski, 91 Ritchie, Henry (squatter), 103 Robert, Olivier (farmer), 71 Robert, Zacharie (farmer), 159 Roblin, Rodmond, 83; local support for his experiment in public ownership, 114 Roseau River Indian reserve, 105, 113 Roy, Gedeon: member of SaintjeanBaptiste Society, 112 Royal, Joseph (newspaper editor), 14 Rudin, Ronald, 6 rural capitalism: embracing, 191;

Index 279 growth of, 67-70; the role of local capital in, 91-7; transition to, 4,

7-8 Sacre-Coeur, parish of (Winnipeg): pluralism of the, 176- 7 Saguenay (Quebec), region of: inheritance in, 136, 138; mortgage lending in, 69; population trends in, 35; transition to capitalism in, 5 St Amant, George (merchant), 76 Saint-Amant, Rev. J.C.: early advocate of caisse populaire in Letellier, 188 Saint Andrews (Manitoba), 102 St Cloud, Minnesota, 103 Sai n te-Rose-du-Lac, 166 Saint-Francois-Xavier, 101, 102 Saint-Jean-Baptiste, parish of: fertility in, 34 - 7 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society: Montcalm members of, 112; Winnipeg activities of, 177 Saint-Norbert, 101 Sarrasin, Ambroise (farmer), 23, 165 Sarrasin, Francois-Xavier (farmer), 55 Saurette, Joseph (farmer): chair of United Grain Growers local, 114 Saurette, Paul and Louis (farm-supply merchants), 90 Savoie, Genevieve (farm wife), 23 Savoie, Solange (office clerk), 172 Schelpe, Rev. Henri: urges 1930s youth to be serious, 185 Scott, Rev. John: establishes mission at Roseau River, 113 secularism: popular culture and, 129— 30 Seguin, Normand, 69 seigneurialism: capital markets and, 7 , 67

settlement: cohorts of farm owners, 16 sex ratios, 30 -2 Shepard, William (farmer): Grain Grower member, 114 Simonet, Rev. Louis, 105 social boundaries: creating, 101-12; crossing, 113- 15; effect of popular culture on, 129-30 Societe de Colonisation, La, 14 Soeurs de la Charite, La Corporation des: foreclosure case brought by, 145-6 soirees dramatiques, 186 Soltow, Lee, 5, 48 Spinning, D.W. (farmer), 58 Standard Trust Co., 97 staples: production of, and metropolitan finance, 67 Tache, Archbishop AlexandreAntonin, 13-14 Talbot, Peter (MLA), 184 Tappan, Lewis: development of credit rating and, 85 tax-assessment data, 16; cohorts, 1978 Taylor, Jeffery, 193 Tetu, Jean-Etienne (immigration agent): member of Saint-JeanBaptiste Society, 112; organizes New Year's levee, 113; reports on early settlers, 23 Thibault, Theophile (militia captain): bows out of provincial election, 110; favours keeping statute labour, 125; favours religious subsidies, 122; supports subsidies to local business, 126 Torrens, 199

280 Index Trail, W.J.S. (grain buyer), 82 Tremblay, Lucien H. (farmer), 93; member of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, 112 Trust & Loan Co. (Kingston), 69, 72, 93, 149 trust and loans: role in expanding credit available to farmers, 67-9 Turner, Francis, 58 Union Nationale, 177 Union Saint-Joseph, 177 urbanization: diffusion of employment throughout Winnipeg, 174 — 7; models of urban acculturation, 176-7; rates among Mennonites and francophones, 170 Valcourt, Albert (baker), 86 Val Marie, Saskatchewan, 164 Vandal, Joseph: member of SaintJean-Baptiste Society, 112 Vandal, Virginie: household regime of, 62 Vecoli, Rudolf, 169 Vercheres, 138 Vermette, Joseph: estate of, 160 Victory Bonds, 96 vieux bien, 136 village economy: growth and diversification of, 86- 9; unskilled labour in, 87-8 village life: Easter brawl, 130-1; growth of retirement in, 147-8; popular culture, 130 Vimy: commemoration and appeal to French Canada, 189

Voisey, Paul, 47, 193 wage labour: limits of, 29; proportion of households with hired hands, 44 -5 Ward, William (farmer), 58 Waterous Engine Works Co., 57, 92 Watson Manufacturing, 55, 56, 75 wealth: growth of liquidity in farm estates, 161-4; valuations of personal property, 50-3. See also inequality Webb, R.H., 184 West Canada Publishing, 169, 179 western migration: fertility levels and, 30 Winkler, Enoch (merchant), 140 Winnipeg: cross-cultural pattern of business alliances in, 183- 4; pattern of economic development, 175 Winnipeg Free Press, 186 Winnipeg Grain Exchange, 83 Winnipeg Stock Exchange, 180 Winnipeg Tribune, 186 women: age at marriage and fertility control, 37- 44; division of labour in farm households, 63- 4; the family economy and, 61-3; farm succession and, 155- 7; farm technology and, 63- 4; gender-neutral divisions of wealth, 159- 60; self-employment and earnings of, 86 Wright,John (farmer), 82 Yamaska County: settlers from, 23