The rock upon which so many immigration schemes have split has been the belief that the most essential requirement of all was people with money of their own. A Scot is the last man in the world to depreciate the value of money; but nobody is better aware that money is not the principal thing, when a family is invited to emigrate to a strange land. Distant fields look green. Distant farm work is very apt to look romantic. It is a beautiful contemplation for a man, tired of an old-world city and its grinding occupation, to gaze across half the world, and see himself the centre of an exquisitely balanced estate—the lowing herd winding slowly o’er the lea; the rustling fields of golden grain in the still more golden, evening sunglow; and the occasional sallying forth to shoot the game which chiefly retards the plough.
This vision of a new life, in a new world, has got seed-catalogue gardening beaten to a hum-drummery. It may go into a man’s history as a charming idyll of the mind, but it is likely to meet sudden death at a pair of calloused hands, a yoke of cattle who insist on running the wagon into the middle of a miry slough, and a plow which, striking a stone concealed in virgin soil, lifts its handle against an unoffending jaw. The West always needed people with the will to work, and an inherent attachment to the land, and not too proud to take guidance from those who had been through the mill. When money has gone and profitable experience hasn’t come; the will to work on the farm is likely to succumb to a desire to return to urban occupations, which, though they are good enough in themselves, are not Canada-builders, as farming is.
The Manitoba North Western subsidiaries and allies settled a great many people on the plains about Birtle, on the incomplete co-operative plan. But many of the selections were not wisely determined, and inadequate measures were taken to see that they made the best of their chances when once they were installed. Nobody can tell the story of the ineffectual attempts of a green old country townie to make a prairie farmer of himself as well as the man himself can, when his sense of humour is sharpened by, and has survived the discipline, cruel as it has often been. I am rather proud of having been a good potato harvester as a boy in Scotland, but that isn’t training enough to qualify one to depict the romantic difference between the prophecy of a Government folder a generation ago, and the alternately perspiring and freezing job of trying to make it come true.
Scarcely more than ten per cent. of the six hundred brigade made good on their homesteads. I spent many weeks one summer, after the railway had received a receiver, among the farmers around Saltcoats, trying to find customers for the lands which had fallen in to us, since the patents were granted, and the homesteads forsaken. In some cases we were glad to get a hundred and sixty dollars for land, improvements and all. If I confessed all the truth it might be not so very far removed from a story of the land-poor epoch in Minnesota, which assuredly is an opulent state of the Union to-day.
A farmer drove into a prairie town down there—Marshall, I think—with a calf for which he was seeking milk. Asked how he reached such a fix he said:
“Well, a stranger came to my place with this calf and wanted milk for it. We had none; so he asked me if I would trade something for the calf. I said ‘No’, but he was so cussed persistent that at last I told him the only thing I could trade for the calf was a section of land. He wouldn’t have it; but was willing to take half a section. Finally I accepted his terms. But I got ahead of him, after all; for when we came to make out the papers I found the sucker couldn’t read! and I’ve landed the whole durn section on him.”
One farmer whom I visited was an old naval man. He was literally a sailor on horseback. He was just starting out on his horse to round up his solitary cow. He would buy no more land; and, indeed, declared he would leave the country if only he could get out. “This is no country for a reasonable man,” he complained, “when you have to go eight hundred miles for cordwood.”
“That can’t be so,” I retorted, looking eastward towards the Porcupine Hills clothed with timber and abounding with game.