Canada and the British immigrant

British Columbia has many rivers navigable in parts of their course, some of which, like the Columbia in the Kootenay, broaden into lakes, upon which ply quaint-looking, stern-paddle steamers drawing very little water. The Fraser, which rises in the Rocky Mountains and is navigable, though not uninterruptedly, for about six hundred miles, is the largest river, whose course is wholly within the province. It is a stream which every traveller on the Canadian Pacific Railway must remember, for the trains journey, for one hundred and thirty miles, with the rushing waters down the terrific, sharply-cut canyons, till, almost within sight of salt water, the river broadens into calm and the railway turns aside to reach Vancouver.

Far north, near Prince Rupert, the Skeena River, which is navigable for about seven months each year for two hundred miles from its mouth, enters the sea. It is the second in size of wholly British Columbian rivers, and is destined before long to become almost as well-known to travellers and tourists as the Fraser itself, for the Grand Trunk Pacific has taken advantage of the way it has cut through the mountains to gain the sea. Other notable rivers are the Thompson, the Naas and the Kootenay, within the province; and the Columbia, the Peace, the Stikine, and the Laird, which rise and flow within it for considerable distances, but pass beyond its boundaries before reaching the sea.

The rivers of British Columbia are swarming with fish, and so are the waters which wash the mainland coasts—some seven thousand miles in length, if the shores of inlets and bays are taken into account. In 1911-12 the value of the catch, amounting to over thirteen and a half million dollars, exceeded that of the preceding year by four and a half millions, and for the first time British Columbia was the leading province of the Dominion in the fisheries. She owes her supremacy in this respect to salmon, though vast numbers of halibut, herring, sturgeon and other varieties of fish are taken in her waters. Amongst these are the oolachan or candle fish, a small oily fish from which the Indians make a substitute for butter.

Much of British Columbia’s catch of herrings goes to China, and some of her sturgeon are sent, strange to say, to her great rival in the fisheries, Nova Scotia. As for her salmon, when canned it goes all over the world. Chinamen do much work in the salmon canneries and a machine recently introduced is known as “the Iron Chink,” from the fact that it does the work of many Chinamen in cleaning and cutting the fish. Lobsters are not found in British Columbian waters, but crabs and shrimps and prawns are plentiful. The Japanese do much fishing along the coasts, and from Vancouver many of their gasoline launches go out. A whaling company which uses fast steamers and machine guns has several stations on Vancouver Island; and parts of the monsters, taken chiefly for the sake of the whalebone and oil, are exported as food to Japan.

I have, however, begun to discuss the great groups of industries at the wrong end. Important and rapidly increasing as are the fisheries of this ocean-washed province, the value of their annual product is at present far surpassed by that of the mines, then of the forests, and thirdly, by that of the farms and orchards taken together.

The discovery of gold played a great part in the making of the province. In the earlier decades of the nineteenth century British Columbia was occupied only by the Indians and by the traders of the Hudson Bay Company, with posts scattered at wide intervals through the wilderness. About 1839 a few Scotch and Canadian farmers were brought out to supply the traders with some of the necessaries that had hitherto been brought round by Cape Horn from England.

Meanwhile, the United States was casting envious eyes on the country; but after noisy demands on the part of some Americans for the whole coast as far north as the Alaskan boundary, it was agreed by the Treaty of Oregon in 1846 that the 49th parallel of north latitude should be the mainland boundary, and that the whole of the island of Vancouver should remain under the British flag.

In 1849 that great island was granted to the Hudson Bay Company, on condition that they should bring in settlers. The conditions were not fulfilled, and as late as 1854 there were scarcely five hundred white people on the island, including the traders; but in 1857 it became known that gold had been discovered along some of the rivers of the mainland (New Caledonia, as it was then called), and in the following spring thousands of prospectors arrived at Victoria. The little town was soon surrounded by an encampment of rude huts and tents, and the newcomers swarmed across to the new “Eldorado” in all kinds of craft, some paying for their temerity with their lives.

The rush of gold seekers caused the government to try to open roads to the mining country, and the traveller on the railway through the Thompson and Fraser valleys catches many a glimpse of the old “Cariboo road,” sometimes clinging to the cliff as much as a thousand feet above the water. This road has been practically abandoned since the opening of the railway; but now government is again occupied with the project of a highway from Alberta to the Pacific coast.

In the first decade, after the rush to the “diggings” began, about fifty million dollars’ worth of the precious metal was obtained in the Cariboo and Cassiar country, and still gold is being obtained there by more scientific methods of working. There are also valuable deposits of silver, lead, copper, zinc, coal, building stone and brick clay, all of which are worked more or less; and the different mining camps employ a large number of men. The value of the mining output for 1912 was about thirty-two and a half million dollars.

This was followed pretty closely by the value of the lumber of the year, which equalled $28,000,000 (£5,600,000). The forest area, including that covered by small trees, has been estimated at over one hundred and eighty-two million acres. Along the coast and up the river valleys of the mainland and on Vancouver island are many magnificent trees. The most valuable commercially are Douglas fir, cypress, red cedar, white spruce and western hemlock. On the coast the trees are larger than further inland; and it is said that the climate is so favourable to their growth that they increase in size very much more rapidly than in most other parts of America. British Columbia, like other provinces, has begun to realize the immense value of its forests, and is taking steps to preserve them, but about a third of the “cut” of the Dominion comes from this province, and thousands of men find employment in the woods and the saw mills.

Not many years ago the agricultural possibilities of this region were scarcely regarded seriously, but it has a splendid home market for all the products of the farm; and last year the value of the agricultural produce (including fruit, of which British Columbia is beginning to make a specialty) was equal to more than three-quarters of the lumber output. But this is only a beginning. A recent estimate gives the area of known cultivable land at twenty-four million acres, of which about ten millions is in the Peace River country, but hardly one-eighth of this land is at present in use, and much of the interior of the country is practically unexplored. There are districts in the Kootenay, about the Okanagan lake, in the neighbourhood of New Westminster, upon Vancouver island and in some other regions, which are fairly well settled, and in these is grown a vast quantity of beautiful apples and other fruit. In fact, fruit is the greatest agricultural product of British Columbia, and last year the yield of the orchards and fruit “ranches” was estimated at $14,000,000, or about equal to that of the fisheries. This is the only farm product which at present goes out of the province; but the estimated value of cereals, beef, dairy produce and all the other miscellaneous yield of the farms accounted only for another eight million dollars. Government is making efforts in various ways to stimulate agriculture. For instance, it aids the establishment of co-operative creameries; but millions of dollars are spent annually outside the province for meat, cheese, butter, poultry, eggs and articles of food, which might well be supplied from the prolific soil of British Columbia were there only more hands to work it.

At present, however, this province is in the somewhat peculiar and unsatisfactory position of having a mere fraction of its people (one-quarter) living on the land. The population was put down in the last census year as 392,480 (of whom the males were in excess of the females by nearly one hundred and eleven thousand), and of this number the two cities of Vancouver and Victoria accounted for over one hundred and fifty thousand. Now these cities, with their suburbs, are said to have a population of two hundred thousand, or nearly half the total for the province.

Both Vancouver and Victoria are already extremely important ports, and expect much additional ocean trade when the Panama Canal is opened. The northern port of Prince Rupert is also busy, although the railway, of which it is the terminal, is not yet completed. There are many other ports and inland towns; mining, railway construction, and lumbering camps all needing supplies; and the man who understands dairying or market-gardening or fruit growing has a choice of opportunities in British Columbia.

In the Peace River district is a block of Dominion lands which may be taken up by homesteaders on the same terms as the free grants in the other western provinces. (See Appendix, pg. 297, Note B.) A strip of land twenty miles wide on each side of the Canadian Pacific Railway main line belongs to the crown, and until December, 1911, was administered by the Minister of the Interior at Ottawa, but is now under the management of the provincial government.

Provincial crown lands are offered for sale at from $5 (£1) to $10 (£2) the acre, or for lease for cutting hay or other purposes. They may be pre-empted by settlers—in which case there are conditions of improvement and residence, in addition to the payment of $1 (4s. 2d.) per acre in four equal annual instalments. Pre-emptions are limited to one hundred and sixty acres of agricultural lands, and no one may hold more than one claim at a time; nor can an alien obtain title deeds for a pre-emption; but anyone desiring full and reliable information as to how to obtain provincial land should write to the Chief Commissioner of Lands, Victoria, British Columbia.

The Canadian Pacific Railway and other companies and private persons also offer unimproved or improved agricultural lands for sale at prices ranging from $5 (£1) the acre up to $500 (£100) for irrigated land in a good situation, while bearing orchards may cost as much as from $1,000 (£200) to $12,000 (£2,400) an acre.

By clauses recently added to the land regulations of British Columbia it is provided that any self-supporting woman over eighteen years of age (except a wife living with her husband) may pre-empt one hundred and sixty acres of agricultural land on the same conditions as men; and this provision is made applicable to deserted wives, and women whose husbands have not contributed to their support for two years, as well as to spinsters and widows.

It is most important, however, that it should be understood that the agricultural lands available for pre-emption or purchase direct from the government are situated almost entirely in districts difficult of access and ill-provided with roads and bridges, whilst a considerable amount of capital is necessary for the purchase of good land in well-settled districts.

The government of British Columbia reserves one-quarter of all town sites and of lands divided into small lots (of one acre or less), and these are usually sold by public auction.

It seems very natural that along the coast and amongst the mountains the population should be gathered into centres, larger or smaller, where they can enjoy some of the comforts of civilized life unattainable by isolated settlers, and the practice certainly has its advantages with regard to social and church life, and the education of the young. In British Columbia, by the way, free government schools are established where twenty children between the ages of six and sixteen can be brought together. In 1912 there were 538 schools in operation, including twenty-three high schools. At Vancouver there is a provincial Normal School; also a number of private schools and colleges; while the Vancouver and Victoria colleges are in affiliation with McGill University, Montreal, and provision has been made for the endowment of a university of British Columbia, by the setting apart of two million acres of public lands.

Men of small capital are strongly advised to go in for “intensive” culture of a small farm, rather than to attempt to take a large piece of land or to devote themselves solely to fruit culture, for orchards in bearing are expensive, and to wait for returns till a newly-planted orchard becomes productive is also costly; but quick returns can be obtained from the keeping of poultry and pigs, and the growing of early vegetables for a town or mining camp.

Small holdings simplify the labour problem, which is acute in British Columbia, and complicated by the difficulties attendant on Oriental labour. This is much employed, in spite of the feeling that, for the sake of Canada’s future, the unrestricted admission of Orientals would be a grave mistake. That is a question, however, which it does not belong to the purpose of this book to discuss.

XV

THE YUKON AND NORTH-WEST TERRITORIES

NORTH of British Columbia lies the Yukon territory, which about sixteen years ago suddenly became interesting to the world on account of the discoveries of gold on two streams flowing into the Klondyke. This is itself a tributary of the Yukon river, which is navigable for over sixteen hundred miles in its course from White Horse, through the territory bearing its own name and through Alaska, to the Behring Sea. There is no need to write of the stampede to the Klondyke in the late nineties. The production of gold in the Yukon gradually declined after 1901, but mining is still its chief industry, and the introduction of more elaborate methods of mining are now again increasing the output. The territory is rich also in copper and coal, both of which are being mined with success. There is a good local market for coal at Dawson, which, founded in 1896, had at one time a population of twenty thousand. This had fallen by 1911 to four thousand, however.

The climate is very severe in winter, especially during January and February, and in the northern part of the district the ground never thaws for more than a foot in depth; but the surface thaws, and only a few miles south of the Arctic Circle the summer climate is said to be pleasant, and hardy vegetables such as turnips and cabbages can be grown.

Just beyond the borders of the Yukon district, on the banks of the Mackenzie river, stands the most northerly of the Hudson Bay Company’s posts—Fort McPherson. It has been described as “truly an Arctic village. The sun never sets for about six weeks in summer, and is constantly below the horizon for the same time in winter.” It is visited by the Eskimos of the shores of the Arctic Ocean and by the whalers, chiefly from San Francisco.

Several years ago the whole whaling fleet was entrapped by the ice, and its crews obliged to go into winter quarters at Herschel Island. Here there is a detachment of the Mounted Police, who have to face all kinds of difficulty and danger in keeping order and doing their duty—often of a humanitarian character—in the northern wildernesses. Usually they carry through their undertakings with marked success, but occasionally they are the victims, or the heroes of a tragedy.

In winter a small body of the police make a regular patrol from Dawson to Fort McPherson and back; but in 1911 the patrol did not return, when expected, and its four members, having “failed to make the pass over the mountains,” were found dead in the snow, but one day’s march from safety.

Amongst the resources of this wild north land, besides its mineral wealth, of which no doubt a very small proportion is yet discovered, is its excellent fish—white fish, Arctic trout, the “inconnu” (peculiar to the Mackenzie river, and so named by Mackenzie’s party), and salmon of numerous varieties. It is also likely to remain for generations to come the hunting ground of the fur trader, for wild animals, large and small, abound; and if the land proves of value for little else, its fur-bearing animals—especially if some measures should be taken to preserve and protect them—will be an increasing source of wealth to the Dominion.

As for the inhabitants of the land, there are several tribes of Indians and Eskimos speaking different tongues, whilst the white race—apart from the miners and business men of the Yukon—is represented chiefly by traders and missionaries. For several generations the Roman Catholic and Anglican missionaries have been doing brave work in the frozen north, and a large proportion of the Indians have embraced Christianity in one form or the other.

But we must pass on, for this portion of Canada cannot be said to offer large opportunity as a field for British immigration, though it has been a field where Britons, as explorers or heralds of the Cross, have again and again proved their kinship to the Norse heroes of older days.

XVI

THE MAN WHOM CANADA NEEDS

HITHERTO, in our progress through the Dominion and its provinces, I have been trying to show what Canada has to offer to the newcomer; and if I were asked to sum it up in one word—it would be that word which has been already used so frequently in the pages of this book—“opportunity!” But I wish to devote the remainder of this volume to the immigrant himself (or herself), first discussing the type Canada needs and desires; and secondly, making a few suggestions which, I hope (with vivid recollections of what it means even under favourable conditions to be a new arrival in a strange land), may be of real help to the immigrant.

To the self-respecting man or woman there is probably nothing more attractive about the Dominion as a field for immigration than the fact that this great promising young nation does need immigrants. What can be more depressing to anyone than the sense of being a superfluous member of the human family—a person whom no one really wants—a worker regarded chiefly in the light of an occupier of a position keenly desired by someone else?

But Canada absolutely needs more human beings, and, above all, she needs workers. Let no one mistake, however. She does not need, and if by the most careful sifting of the newcomers she can prevent it, she will not have drones in her hive—unless, indeed, they come well-provided with the honey prepared by the workers. In other words, of course, the man who has more or less capital finds it easy enough to gain admittance to the Dominion, and may even continue to live in idleness therein. This is a fact accomplished to the scorn of his neighbours, by many a “remittance-man” in east or west, who has had the ill-luck to be provided with just money enough to enable him to evade the Scriptural dictum: “If any man will not work, neither shall he eat;” but, of course, the overwhelmingly large number of Canada’s immigrants are not burdened with any superfluity of worldly gear.

The much-talked-of “opportunity,” moreover, is not (is it necessary to state the fact?) opportunity to pick up gold in the streets, or to win a fortune without labour. In isolated cases, men have gained wealth with surprising rapidity by some piece of luck, or special business astuteness, but opportunity for the ordinary man means a probability—amounting almost to a certainty—that good, honest, intelligent work in any one of a wide range of different lines will receive its due reward. It means also that for the man with a little more than the average energy and ability and insight there are in this new land, with its frequent changes of conditions, its constant opening out of new regions and of hitherto unused natural resources, many more chances of “making good” than under the more stereotyped conditions of older countries.

The man whom Canada needs is strong and healthy, preferably young enough to be readily adaptable to new conditions, sound in mind and well taught, trained and educated. The man she desires most of all is one of the good blood of the British Isles, imbued with love for the old flag of the Empire, and for the ancient traditions of his race; one who will help in the building up of Canada on the same lines as those on which the work has been begun—as a free British nation within the Empire; one, in short, who is adapted by heredity, education and previous history to understand this ideal of nationhood, and to take his place in the furtherance of it.

Good British immigrants are the more needed—to aid in leavening the whole lump—because to-day Canada is the goal for people of many races and languages, who, in most instances, have everything to learn of the institutions and the ideals of the nation, which (according to laws perhaps too speedily allowing to foreign men a voice in the affairs of the country) they will soon be helping to mould. That the problem is serious will be seen from the fact that, according to the figures of 1911-12, and apart from the English-speaking immigrants from the United States, more than one immigrant in each four that year was a foreigner in birth and speech, and in some years the proportion of foreigners has been higher. The immigration of the afore-mentioned year represented no less than sixty-five nationalities in all, including Ruthenians, Bulgarians, Chinese, Hebrews, Italians, Finns, Scandinavians—literally by the thousand.

There are whole districts in the West largely settled by groups of foreigners. For instance, in Saskatchewan, between Saskatoon and Prince Albert, the Canadian Northern Railway runs through a region which, though colonized in part by English-speaking people, is dotted with foreign settlements. Amongst these are the quaint community villages, built of mud, of that Quaker-like Russian sect, the Doukhobors. Some of their number gave at one time considerable trouble to the authorities, and endangered their own lives by going on strange pilgrimages in the depths of a Saskatchewan winter to seek for Christ, Whom they believed to have returned to earth; but in general they are a quiet, inoffensive, cleanly, honest people. In the same district are many Galicians, less remarkable for cleanliness and sobriety of demeanour than the Doukhobors, and often living in small mud huts thatched with straw, which, though of picturesque exterior, are often ill-ventilated and ill-kept within.

The schools, however, are rapidly making “Canadians” of the younger generation—in speech, and perhaps to a certain extent in ideas.

The prairies have also their Icelandic and Norwegian and Swedish settlers, who are generally credited with being of an excellent type. Then in the cities and in the railway construction camps are Italians, somewhat quarrelsome and ready to use their knives amongst themselves, but excellent workers in all the digging and delving necessary for the making of a railway line or preparing for the foundations of some great new building. It is said to be the ambition of many an Italian to become the owner of a fruit store, and to judge by the numbers of such little shops in every city—over whose treasures of apples and oranges and bananas a dark-eyed woman or child is keeping guard—it must be an ambition often fulfilled.

It is odd, indeed, how the different nationalities seem to have such strong predilections for particular trades. Every considerable centre of population in Canada must surely have its Chinese laundries, very numerous in the large towns. The Chinese, too, go into business as restaurant keepers, or keepers of tea and curiosity shops; and in the West they enter domestic service in private houses or hotels. But one never sees a Chinaman engaged in the rag-and-bottle-collecting business, for instance. Indeed, that occupation seems to be left wholly to the Jews; while the porters on the Pullman cars are nearly always negroes, with an occasional Jap on the western lines.

It is often said that much of the hardest and heaviest work in city and mine and railway making is done by foreigners. In that respect alone the country owes them a real debt; but there is no doubt that the bar of differing language and customs prevents Canada getting the best contributions to her total strength from the little-understood and often-misunderstood foreigners. As time goes on the Canadians may be more successful than hitherto in bridging the gulf that separates them from the newcomers of alien speech, but at present the tendency is for the foreigners to cluster together in certain districts in the country—certain quarters in the cities—where it is difficult to reach them with Canadianizing influences. In unskilled labour and in some more skilled trades they are formidable competitors to the newcomer from the British Isles. But in a measure—because of their coming in such numbers—the Briton is all the more the man Canada wants; and it is satisfactory that the proportion of British-born to the whole number of immigrants has of late tended to rise. During the decade ending March, 1912, the British immigrants outnumbered the foreign-born by nearly 300,000. This is leaving the newcomers from the United States out of account; but they also outnumbered the foreigners.