Speaking of the arable belt that is two hundred miles wide, Mr. Tyrrell said there is little or no summer frost there. At Nelson, gardening commences, he understood, at the end of May, and frost does not appear until about September 20th. He went on to make the following useful statement: “People must not suppose that vegetation is affected by the isothermal line, which merely connects points that have the same annual mean temperature. As things do not grow in the winter, the winter temperature has nothing to do with farming possibilities. The summer temperature is the only temperature that counts for growth in the northern country. As between two places in different latitudes, you have to take into consideration the length of the day and the amount of sunlight. Where the days have eighteen hours’ sun a plant will grow faster than where the days have only fourteen hours’ sun.” And again: “The large body of water in Hudson Bay and James Bay has an equalising effect on the winter temperature of the surrounding country, tending to make the summers cooler and the winters milder.”
And so, I think, the evidence is abundant that, when trains run between Winnipeg and Hudson Bay, one section of the Great North Lands, emerging from the mists of obscurity and misapprehension, will take its place among the most productive and habitable regions of the British Empire.
CHAPTER XI
EXPERIENCES OF IMMIGRANTS
Readers of this book will, I hope, include many persons who think of emigrating to Canada; and fain would I answer the question uppermost in their minds. “What experiences await us there?” they will be anxious to learn.
I have interviewed many settlers in the various provinces, and their testimony admits of being focused into three statements of well-nigh universal application—of application, indeed, to all save persons who are exceptionally lucky or exceptionally stupid. These three statements are: (1) Life in Canada involves work, and hard work. (2) The first year, and perhaps the first two years, will be a time of stress and of struggling with difficulties. (3) Then there comes the “turning of the corner,” with assured prosperity to follow as the result of continued effort. Nothing, indeed, is more sure than that, in Canada, work commands an ample reward.
But my three generalities, after all, leave all the details unstated; and I cannot fill in those details more convincingly than by reproducing the actual personal experiences, as chronicled almost from day to day, of a typical English family who settled in Canada. But the story of what befell Mr. and Mrs. Rendall must be preceded by a word of explanation. They were members of the large party who, in the spring of 1903, emigrated under the auspices of the Rev. I. M. Barr—a party whose affairs were destined to attract some attention from the English Press by reason of special difficulties involved in an isolated location. Nowadays plenty of free land can be found within twenty miles of a railway; but the Barr colonists were destined to begin their new lives in a situation far more remote from means of quick transportation. Thus, if Mr. and Mrs. Rendall were typical English immigrants, their early experiences give an exaggerated impression of what the average settler has to expect.
“With my family,” Mr. Rendall wrote, “I left England on April 8th, 1903, on the Lake Simcoe, as I was unable to settle up my affairs in time to join the Barr party on the Manitoba. I may say that I had been a farmer in the Old Country all my life. The place I rented in Devonshire had been farmed by my forefathers for over two hundred years. I was paying rent at the rate of over £2 an acre, in addition to rates, tithe, taxes, and wages. A crisis came. The landlord would not reduce the rent or do any repairs to the dwelling-house or out-buildings, all of which were falling into ruin; so I determined to throw up the life of slaving for others and strike for independence in Canada.
“Having obtained from head-quarters all necessary information respecting free-grant lands in the North-West, I applied for a homestead for myself, and another for one of my men, Barnes, who had determined to throw in his lot with mine. Then, with my wife and two children (aged two and four), I left the Old Country, with many a heartache at parting, yet with a strong determination to face all difficulties, and to succeed in the end.
“We left Liverpool on April 8th, and arrived at St. John’s on April 13th,” records the husband succinctly. In the lady’s diary the voyage received more attention. “A gentleman slipped over the stairs leading to the cabin,” she notes, “and broke his leg. There was a birth on board; and a foreigner in the steerage cut his throat, and is not expected to live. In addition to all this, they have discovered no less than twenty stowaways.”
This Devonshire family lost no time in proceeding by rail to Saskatoon, where they found the other Barr colonists in a large temporary encampment. “I made my own independent arrangements,” Mr. Rendall wrote, “and took a room for my wife and children. We reached Saskatoon on April 15th, and stayed there till April 29th. My first business was to purchase a wagon and pair of horses with harness. This meant spending $508, a stiff outlay, but a necessary one. I also bought a camp stove, a plough, harrows, and a good supply of nails and tools. Having packed up our traps, we set off to drive to Battleford. We had duly provisioned ourselves for the journey, which was fortunate, as, contrary to what we had been told, it proved impossible to get anything on the road—a condition of affairs that caused much misery and privation to many of the poor colonists.