Immigration
Gender
Urban Culture
Native Encounters
[1]
In order to transport people and products into and out of Western Canada, the National Transcontinental Railway Act was passed on October 24, 1903. To encourage pioneers, the Canadian government passed the Dominion Lands Act that gave immigrants 160 acres of western land if they lived on the land for three years and paid a $10 registration fee. In tandem with generous land policies, Clifton Sifton, Minister of the Interior ran a successful marketing campaign in Europe and America. Initially, he thought citizens from the British Isles would be best suited to cultivate the prairies, but in fact immigrants from Ukraine, Gallacia, Hungary, Germany, Poland, Russia and Scandinavia proved most capable of adapting to the harsh climate and conditions.[27] [2]
[3]The significant increase in Saskatchewan’s population—from 91,000 in 1901 to 492,432 in 1911—can be attributed to a growing discontent among some Europeans. Overcrowding, high taxes, unemployment, religious discrimination, and the looming threat of war led many to emigrate. Fertile soil, a new frost resistant strain of wheat, rail transportation, and lenient government land policies made Canada an ideal destination.[28] [4]
Capitalizing on the rapid growth in population, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway purchased 86 town-sites—to be at distances no less than 7 miles and no more than 15 miles apart—establishing towns along its route even before settlers arrived.
[5]A gender imbalance affected all aspects of life in the West, and the effect was heightened among the vanguard of colonization efforts—the railway workers. In addition to physical labors (Jacobs’s account of survey work is a clinic in masculinity), men took responsibility for domestic duties: cooking, cleaning, and performing other support functions typically considered women’s purview. Jacobs wrote of the importance of household management, but also indulged in efforts to beautify his campsite, planting flowers and hedges.[29] [6]His efforts as a “landscape gardener” did not further the survey goals, but did offer the team some of the feminine comforts of home.
More rare were women on the railway. Bernice Medbury Martin, married to a Grand Trunk Pacific employee, wrote of a life which was both more and less circumscribed than it had been in her hometown. She was often left alone in her cabin and hunted for game,[30] [7]but she remained responsible for domestic work (or the management of employees hired to perform it). When she travelled propriety dictated that she have an escort.[31] [8]Though gender roles were blurred, they were not forgotten.
[9]In “Diary of a Tenderfoot,” the short holographic diary in the collection, Jacobs remarked on a conversation en route to Winnipeg where the man claimed: “Winnipeg is the coming city of the dominion, the gateway to the imperial west that will one day feed all of Europe.”[32] [10] The railway was a sign of a new economic order and rapid social change. Part of the appeal of Western living was freedom from constraints. Everything was large—landscapes, building, people—and the newness of the cities contributed to an attitude of excitement.[33] [11]
But there were downsides to rapid growth. The gender imbalance was obvious on the streets of Winnipeg, and the “lack of [women’s] refining influence” was not a positive attribute. Thirty years after its incorporation, Winnipeg still retained the feeling of an outpost.[34] [12]
[13]
Entertainment options were limited and residents hungered for cultural institutions. They were willing to wait for hours to buy tickets, and the first performance of the Grand Opera sold out. Jacobs wrote extensively of his impressions of musical performances, critical of the story of Lohengrin and effusing “I never enjoyed a thing more in my life than Tannhauser!”[35] [14] This imported culture served as a link to friends and family in older, established cities in the east.
While the consumption of cultural performance was important, its mere existence served a function as well. Organizations like the Grand Opera and the Mozart Choral Society and Orchestra in Pittsburgh were cultural markers, worthy of support and evidence that a city was capable of supporting the arts. A city’s cultural institutions were a marker of civilization, vital to the elevation of western cities from boisterous frontier towns to imperial polities deserving of national (or even international) respect.
What about the people who called this great wilderness home? As the railroad became a harbinger of a new social and economic order, Canada’s indigenous populations became a hindrance to progress and were often times displaced from their lands. In theory, land rights were protected under the Indian Act of 1876 which stated that:
If any railway, road or public work passes through or causes injury to any reserve belonging to or in possession of any band of Indians, or if any act occasioning damage to any reserve be done under the Authority of any Act of Parliament, or the legislature of any province, compensation shall be made to them therefore in the same manner as is provided with respect to the lands or rights of other persons.[36] [15]
[16]Reserve land dispossession became a highly contested debate amongst politicians, outside interests, local residents, and First Nations, in the early part of the twentieth century. Those in favor of removing the Natives from their lands argued that oversized reserves were “vacant and idle” barriers to development.[37] [17]Laws could not slow the progress of modernization and traditional Native lifeways were altered by the onset of industrialization throughout the Canadian provinces. Many bands, dependent upon hunting, fishing, trapping, and agriculture, were reluctant to surrender parts of their reservations for rail construction. Yet, shortages of food became common due to a sharp decline in game and fur animals resulting from “white settlement and overhunting.”[38] [18]As a people tied to the land for food and shelter, the First Peoples of Canada had a hard time adjusting to the rapid advancement of technological change and the surrender of reserve land to Canada’s burgeoning national railways became commonplace.[39] [19] Furthermore, if any Natives opposed the appropriation of reserve land they were up against “the combined forces of God, Law, and Business.”[ [20]40] [20]
To the men working on the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, the indigenous populations were a peculiar people. In Norman Jacobs’ letters we find an idealistic young man, romantic about the world around him. Parallel to the story of the railroad, the young writer saw modern technological development as an extension of empire and also as a way to advance his own personal expansion west. Living in the age of conquest, Jacobs was well versed in the language of the times. In his journal, “Diary of a Tenderfoot,” Jacobs claims that, “Methinks the East Indian Company, the Hudson Bay Co., and the South African Co. were something more than mere gigantic mercantile enterprises, a nations mission, greater by far than the mere preaching to the world of dreams and religious theories, send out your sons Mother England. Send them out willingly and with rejoices to death by sea and plains, jungle and swamps! Go forth and colonize. Assuredly, Allah is Allah and it is good to be an Englishman.”[41] [21]Though cheeky, Jacobs's words are exemplary of the dominant British attitude at the turn of the last century. The letters illustrate that upon Jacobs’ first encounter with indigenous populations he saw them as childlike beings. Their lack of exposure to new technologies led him to believe that they were “quelled from a different part of the evolutionary chain then he was.”[4 [22]2] [22]
[23]However, as the journey progressed the surveyors became comfortable living among the natives. Their patriarchal attitude subsided as many men began to view the natives with a newfound respect for the way in which they manipulated the untenable Canadian wilderness.
Living among the native populations in Canada had a profound effect on Norman Jacobs. His ev
[24]olution from an idealistic youth to a man trying to understand the world around him can be seen over the course of his five year correspondence with Bessie Frank. In fact, by the time he wrote his last letter in 1910, we can see how the four year period spent living among the North American populations may have affected his spirit. In this letter Jacobs, then living in London, had grown tired of the general apathy exhibited by the public toward the British empire’s imperialistic ventures. His brief stint working on the railroad left him feeling sympathetic to the colonized peoples of Australia, Africa, and of course Canada. Watching the culture of the Habitants—French settlers in Canada—slowly disappear before the “ever-advancing ware of the Anglo-Saxon” was unsettling to the young man.[43] [25] His experience showed him that technological advancement in Canada, though good for progress, also necessarily displaced the lives of those who called it home.
[26]
[27]
[28]
[29]
[30]
[31]
Sources [32]