Calgary & Southern Alberta

Combining, 1927
Courtesy of the Western Irrigation District

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, much was expected of Canadian farmers. Pioneers in a harsh, often unrewarding environment that lacked the technological aids and amenities familiar to today's farmers, they faced hardships unknown to their modern counterparts. Rail lines were sparse in number. The few roads stretched over the vast western prairie were often impassable, and transport by horse was slow. Farm families who came to southern Alberta thus found themselves isolated not just from the little towns where they could obtain the essential economic services and supplies they needed to grow and sell their crops, but also from hospitals, schools, churches, and the company of neighbours. Farmers who survived did so by virtue of hard work and self-sufficiency.

In a nation erected on an ideological foundation that valued individualism, these were innately admirable qualities. In the geographically expanding Canada of the time, moreover, many people saw the self-reliant farmer as the answer to prosperity and productivity for the entire nation. It is, therefore, small wonder that turn-of-the-century Canadians should have accorded the homesteading family of the prairies heroic stature. Nor is it surprising that by the early 1900s Alberta's farm-oriented "booster" press should have elevated rural life to near mythical status, depicting the western farm as a self-reliant, family-oriented enterprise pitted against the impersonal evils of climate, the federal government and the CPR.

Threshing
Courtesy of the Glenbow Collection

Some historians have begun to reassess this image. There can be little doubt that many of Alberta's pioneer farmers were dedicated to soil and family. Certainly, those who developed successful farms were independent and resourceful, and those who failed were often victims of external circumstances. In his recent history of the Vulcan area, however, Paul Voisey has compiled convincing evidence that the rate of farm failures during Vulcan's homesteading years prior to the Depression was far higher than scholars of the past suspected. To account for the magnitude of the failures, Voisey presents a convincing argument that while many immigrants obtained homesteads to start family farms, large numbers were roving pioneers and land speculators interested in acquiring quick profits rather than in "proving up" and gaining title to their land. Voisey suggests, moreover, that the farmers who succeeded did so because they ran their operations not as quaint traditionalists plowing the land for hearth and home, but as commercially-minded businessmen. Seen in this light, Alberta's rural landscape was populated not just by dedicated farmers, of whom there were many, but also by a diverse assemblage of capitalists, entrepreneurs, and adventurers.