Homes and Careers in Canada

by Harry Jeffs

Let me take first the prospects of an English farm labourer. Of course, if he is a haunter of the public-house, if he only works because he must, if he has in him the soul of a slave, if he is a born shirker, he is not likely to do in Canada unless a moral transformation should take place and change him to a new man altogether. The ideal labourer emigrant is the man who works in his own garden and in his allotment in his own time, who lives a decent life, keeps away from the drink, and out of his wages and what he grows in his garden and allotment contrives all the while to be putting a little by. Such a man, revelling in work, with a fair amount of intelligence and some ambition, can scarcely fail in Canada. He is the man who will be received and welcomed with open arms by the farmers competing with each other for competent, willing labour. I was told in the Ministries of Agriculture at Winnipeg and Regina that lists are kept of hundreds of farmers who are applying for such men and are willing to guarantee them work during the six months between sowing time and the gathering in of the harvest. The Ministries of Agriculture are more than willing to assist such men in every way to find suitable situations. Many of the farmers are prepared to advance the passage money to really good men willing to sign on for the season. They are boarded and fed and receive a wage equal to £4 or £5 a month.

The difficulty, of course, will be with the married man, having a wife and children. It would be best for him to make arrangements to leave the wife and children at home for a year if he can possibly manage it. By the end of a year, if he is the right sort of fellow, he will see his way and perhaps be able either to take a homestead or to enter on an arrangement for a year or two of continuous employment and to make a home for the wife and children. Such a man, with the money he may save in a couple of years, would find it quite easy, if he does not desire to take a homestead which may be in a lonely district and may mean considerable hardship for two or three years, to take on easy instalment terms a ready-made farm within an area that affords a certain amount of society. It is the woman rather than the man who finds the loneliness of the homestead on the fresh-broken prairie almost unbearable. She cannot live without the company-keeping and social gossip of the village. The man is busy on the land; he has the inspiring sense that his foot is on the ladder of success; he dreams of going on from little to more, and from more to much, and of ultimately becoming a very substantial man. It is not always so with the woman. She finds it far more difficult to reconcile herself to the lonely conditions. Of course, if she is the right sort of woman to be a farmer’s wife, and can find her interest in raising chickens and such occupations, she will, after settling down, be happy enough; but there is always the risk, and if the man can possibly secure a ready-made farm he considerably reduces the risk of the woman’s moping and wanting to return to the familiar village in the Old Country again, even though it may mean returning to 15s. a week and no prospect but the old age 5s. a week at seventy.

The Provincial Governments, agricultural associations, and a number of financial corporations are very willing to give every assistance to a bona-fide settler on the land. When he has established the fact that he is a safe man to trust, he may get his stock and implements on credit, and the land will be broken at a nominal charge to lessen the burden of his first effort.

A Canadian writer says he knows of specific cases in which English immigrant buyers paid $30 and $15 an acre respectively for farms.

“One case was a very choice piece of land near to the social and educational advantages of a large town, and another enjoyed the same favourable position but was not quite such good land throughout, but had the very best grazing where it could not be used for cereals or root crops. In the one case the payments ($30 an acre) were completed in seven years, and in the other ($15) five years were found sufficient to acquire a clean bill of the rights to the property, and both men are wealthy citizens to-day. This does give assurance that is certainly needed in the face of the misrepresentative and conflicting statements which have been circulated in the Motherland, where it is impossible to verify on the spot one account or another. It provides an opening at once for the family or for the young couple without children, who are rightly advised that they should not take up a homestead at a point far distant from social life, at least until they have had experience, which they can only acquire by living in close touch with neighbours who are farming to some purpose.

“Candidly, the homesteads now available, and until the railway system has been further developed, are too far away from the railway track. But it is only a question of a few years of legitimate development until these points have been opened up, where some of the finest land on the continent will be brought within easy reach of the world’s markets. In the meantime, and while the new-comer is gaining experience and paying by his labour for a piece of land that can never depreciate in value, he is not precluded from selecting and acquiring his homestead. But the writer cannot advise penniless individuals to come out in the hope of taking up homestead duties at a remote point from the railway with the expectation of making good on it right away. The man with a bit of capital cannot fail to employ it to far better purpose in Canada than he is ever likely to use it at home. He need not ‘risk’ it until he has had every opportunity to test his investments on the spot. It is broadly on the land, the value of which by the legitimate process continues to increase with every season in which it has come under the hand of the cultivator. In the more thickly populated centres land values have increased enormously within the short period of five years; many of these, no doubt, have been rushed up to a fictitious figure by real estate jobbers, but where large manufacturing and wholesale houses have been compelled to establish themselves in response to a demand that is almost unprecedented in its all but instantaneous growth, these values are at once legitimate and permanent.”

From a very informative booklet issued in connection with the “International Dry Farming Congress” at Lethbridge, Alberta, in October, 1912, I extract these interesting particulars about the conditions of prairie settlement and farming:—

“Settlement progresses so rapidly that pioneering is shorn of its desolation. It is no uncommon event to find a whole township or an entire district taken up in a single summer. The pioneer will always have neighbours in his new Alberta home. Roads and schools follow in due course. Recent legislation has established a system of local government which affords all the machinery necessary to a local community to carry out public improvements. Commercial life develops very rapidly. The settlement of a district is invariably followed by the extension of the telephone and the railway.

“Land is cleared and prepared for cultivation at comparatively small cost. In the southern part of the province no clearing is necessary. In the central and northern part, where there is considerable scrub and timber, the cost of preparing the land for crops is higher and will vary from $5 to $10 per acre. The trees are nearly all surface rooted, and in a few years the most thickly wooded farm will be as free from roots as a market garden. Raw homesteads in a year or two become profitable farms. Towns spring up along the railway as if by magic, and the erstwhile wilderness is transformed into a populous and prosperous community.

“From the earliest times explorers have expressed the greatest hope in the future of Alberta. It was the home of the most powerful and civilized Indian tribes of the whole North-West. Its luxuriant pastures supported vast herds of antelope, deer and buffalo, while its mountains, lakes and canyons comprised the richest territory exploited by the fur companies.