Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  That night Jim became very ill and in the morning I had a sick man on my hands. I knew it was going to be a close thing. My best chance would be to try and locate the Leather River ranch which would be, I thought, about thirty miles south of our camp — and this I decided to try for. Fortunately the sun was shining the next morning or I would have been lost in a very short time so far as going south was concerned. With Jim lying in the bottom of the sleigh and almost everything I had piled on top of him I travelled steadily south all that day. There could be no stopping. Darkness came and I then used the stars to guide me. Then on the snow I found a faint sleigh trail. How it had come there I did not know. As it seemed to be going south it might lead to the ranch but I had no idea as to this. I had to take a chance. Jim was still lying flat on the bottom of the wagon box. I put the reins in his hands and told him I was riding ahead but I doubt if he understood me. I slung the axe in my belt, swung on Nipper and made the race of my life for about two miles, following the faint trail. I rode finally into the yard of the Leather River ranch. I put Nipper into one of the open stables and tore into wood chopping for some stove wood, working like a fiend. There was a stove in the shack with a stovepipe going outside through the wall and protected by some tin. I had a fire nicely going when the team walked into the yard. They had been able to follow the trail in some way though in the dark it was hardly discernible. 27

  Like many of those who responded to the questionnaire, Robert Wood claimed to have written home regularly, and it was through correspondence that most emigrants described their experiences of pioneering on the prairies. In 1881 PeterWallace (fifty-nine) left Glasgow with his sons,William (twenty-two) and Andrew (fifteen), to take up a homestead in western Manitoba, which was then experiencing a temporary land boom as a result of railway development. The Wallaces first purchased Canadian Pacific Railway land near Brandon, but in 1882 sold it in order to make a more speculative purchase to the north west, in the Shell River area, expecting that the railway would soon follow. This was a misjudgement, for it was not until 1909 that the railway reached their local town of Shellmouth, and for the first five years the nearest rail connection was forty miles from their farm. Despite the difficulty of selling their produce beyond the low-priced local market, they survived and made headway, probably through a combination of hardwork and the possession of a sufficient cushion of capital to make an early purchase of land, implements and stock, which in turn generated more capital and allowed them to pay debts as they arose. Unlike some prairie settlers, they also enjoyed an active social life, regularly visiting neighbours and attending religious and secular events in town. Peter Wallace was president of the Russell Agricultural Society, William — who purchased a parlour organ in 1883 — served as organist and choirmaster in both the Presbyterian and Anglican churches and Andrew became a stalwart of the Masonic Lodge.

  For twenty-three years the Wallaces’ experiences were described in regular letters from William Wallace to his schoolteacher sister Maggie, letters which she preserved and brought with her when she and her husband emigrated in 1904. Two months after making their first land purchase, William described the pros and cons of frontier life:

  You already know all the particulars of our journey here, but will be curious to learn why we did not proceed farther and secure more land. The reasons were our oxen were unloaded, and this delayed us when travelling, and caused extra expense. When we arrived here our oxen were jaded and our purse very light, rendering it impossible to proceed much farther. The land we did take up is without doubt a good investment, By the end of the next summer season we could sell it and our stock at a sum that would refund the principal and pay our expenses coming here and also, if reckoned desirable, home again with possibly 50 or 100 [pounds] additional. Now all this considered, causes me to think over the fact of whether or not you should join us at the time agreed. I will try to inform you of both sides.

  The climate, so far as we have experienced it, is simply unparalleled, but the winter will be, I am afraid, very unpleasant. All admit hereabouts that extraordinary precautions have to be taken, rendering travelling dangerous. Confined thus to the spot, I fear the long dark nights will be very monotonous. The soil is peculiarly and particularly rich, but the country’s aspect is not very picturesque. Plain after plain is all that can be seen, with hardly a tree to relieve the scene. In the summertime it is very beautifully arrayed, with gorgeous and many-coloured flowers, but that is only for a comparatively short period. During winter it is just one flat after another of white snow. This, you can imagine, will be very dreary …

  The inhabitants, our neighbours, are our principal cause of dislike. Nearly every one of them came from Lower Canada. The stock question is ‘what part of Ontario do you come from?’ … They as a class are very undesirable society. A good-going Yankee is pleasure compared to them. They are about the greediest, least thankful, unenthusiastic lot I could imagine. Their ignorance of everything but surroundings is awful, and renders intercourse wearisome and unentertaining. Boors and clodhoppers is exactly the term they deserve. You would think they imagined that all things were common. Into the house they will march without asking your leave, no matter whether Sunday or Saturday they take an unblushing inventory of everything, spit all around and talk commonplace. No things or articles are safe from their borrowing proclivities. Notwithstanding this horror they are [a] hardy, hardworking, fine-looking, rough-and-ready class of people, Now, how would you like ten years or so at the least of these surroundings and society with sometimes pretty hard work?

  But this is not all. We are at present hampered for want of money, and before you come out we must borrow £50 to build a house. It is almost impossible to obtain logs. We will require to build of lumber or sawn boards. After two years we will be sure to have sufficient money, but at first we will be a little scrimped. Now the question before we do this is, will you care about coming out? 28

  The themes of relative impoverishment and the desirability of Maggie ’s emigration recurred frequently in William’s letters. In June 1882, shortly after they had moved to Shell River, he asked her if she could spare £20, since ‘there have been a number of unforeseen and unavoidable items of expenditures’, but added that she should ‘run no hazard of being short’ in saving for her own emigration, since ‘we could pull through more easily than you could’. At that time he was confident the railway would pass within two miles of their settlement, ‘so our fortune is looming’. 29 Prosperity was usually anticipated rather than fully enjoyed, however, not least because of repeated disappointments over railway communication and an abortive attempt to build a permanent homestead in a location where there was no water. Like many of his neighbours, William was also critical of the federal government’s settlement regulations, as well as its heavy taxation of prairie farmers, and predicted a secession of the western provinces which would bring an end to railway monopolies and usher in free trade. Yet on the whole he was content with his own circumstances and the prospects of his adopted country. Although he regularly asked his sister to send out newspapers and journals from home, he had no desire to return to Scotland. ‘I think I would get crazed were I to awake in Glasgow and find out that my Manitoban life had been all a dream. I could not live in the city smoke again,’ he wrote in 1885. 30

  There are some parallels between the experiences of William Wallace and John McBean. Both men were alternately optimistic and pessimistic, depending on their circumstances at the time of writing, although McBean had a greater tendency to cynicism. He emigrated twenty years after the Wallaces, at a time when the federal government and the Canadian Pacific Railway were making a concerted effort to attract British emigrants through agency work and sponsoring tours by influential individuals from Scotland. ‘The whole business is looked upon here as a huge swindle,’ he wrote to his sister in September 1902. ‘It is entirely the work of Lord Strathcona and the Canadian Pacific Railway, which dominates the Government of this country in every conceivable way.’ 31
Like Wallace, McBean regarded the settlers as ill-bred and pretentious:

  The people have sprung up in a short decade from labourers, farm servants, and incapable mechanics, with a mixture of well educated pennieless ne ’er do weels, to farmers owning from a quarter to a mile and a half of land, with stock, implements, and a buggy; and they feel that the position requires an assumption of dignity in accordance with the circumstances. The assumed dignity is foreign to their natures, is aggressively ostentatious, and its effect is disagreeable. Etiquette is studied from books, and a display of its most objectionable phrases go bandied about the table at every meal. 32

  John McBean was not enamoured of the ‘drudgery’ of working on the farm of a ‘disagreeable tyrant’ when he first arrived in Manitoba. Within six months, however, that career was cut short by illness and accident, and he was subsequently employed as an itinerant journalist by an agricultural periodical, the Farmers’ Advocate and Home Magazine. Although he enjoyed the writing assignments, which included articles of advice for would-be emigrants, he disliked touting for the subscriptions and advertisements on which he depended for payment of his expenses and salary. Nor was he fit enough for the rough life on horseback required for canvassing work on the prairie frontier, and after resigning his post in April 1904 he found similar work with the rival Nor’ West Farmer. But he had jumped from the frying pan into the fire, for his duties were just as onerous, with even less job security and the ‘lonely monotony of a new town every day and a new bed every night’, as he traversed the prairie in sub-zero temperatures, waiting in small towns for farmers who never appeared. No doubt the hardships of his lifestyle contributed to his frequent illnesses and premature death, for in addition to the persistent fear of dismissal, he had to live on a salary which he regarded as inadequate and savings that were increasingly eroded by medical expenses. His travels were enlivened by encounters with fellow Scots, who, he claimed, played a disproportionate role in the frontier life of Manitoba, as farmers, stock breeders, journalists and doctors, an impression not gained from William Wallace ’s occasional encounters with Scots a generation earlier. After becoming engaged to the daughter of a substantial farming family, he was persuaded to upgrade his view of prairie farming, and just before his death, as we have seen, he was negotiating both for the purchase of 640 acres near Killarney and for the emigration of his brother, whose joint investment would have allowed him to clinch the deal.

  A contemporary of John McBean was much more disillusioned about prairie life, lamenting, four months after he arrived in Red Deer, that it was ‘the last place on God’s earth that I would care to remain in’. He was also much less sanguine than William Wallace about misleading information from railway promoters, claiming that he had been defrauded, as had the 400 other settlers who had accompanied him on the colonist train to Calgary, in the hope of making their fortunes:

  Fortunes, did I say? Well, if the truth were told, many of them come out to eke out a miserable existence … This [Red Deer] is a little place with a little over 1000 inhabitants, and is just like many another little Western town. The people are sleepy, with no ‘go’ in them … The other places are no better, and many of them much worse. Edmonton, the only town of importance north of here, is overdone, and property is up to famine price. Our idea in coming to this country was to take up the free homestead land, and go in for farming and stock raising, but everything is so different to how it is coloured and puffed up in their pamphlets that I for one drew the line. For instance, we are told that splendid homesteads can be had within a mile or two of the railway for 10 dollars, which, in plain English, is a downright lie. The nearest homestead land I could get was about 35 miles, and to get land which was at all worth taking even at the price of 10 dollars (£2) for 160 acres, I have to go out from railway and town 60 to 80 miles. 33

  The experiences of Scottish farmers in the United States were equally mixed. ‘I bless God every day that I followed your advice not to farm at home and that I had discrimination enough to decide upon the United States as my place of rest,’ wrote wealthy brewer James Robertson in 1830, from his 300-acre farm on the banks of the Hudson River. He had a large frame and brick house with commodious outbuildings and staff accommodation, and generally enjoyed life with fishing, sailing, good wine and a well-stocked library. Recommending the area to any of his friends from Strathmore in Angus who could spare £1,000 to invest in a good farm, he thought it ‘surprising that people are so blind as still to emigrate to Australia or over Canada’. 34 Shetlander Peter Tait too preferred his farm at Joliet, Illinois, to the tree-covered wilderness of Canada, as did Robert Young from Ayrshire, who in 1860 reconnoitred land on both sides of the border before bringing his family over to a largely Scottish community in North Tama County, Iowa. Unfortunately, within fifteen months of arriving, three of his ten siblings died, of pneumonia, drowning and typhoid, victims of the harsh pioneering environment. 35 James Alexander, who emigrated from Aberdeenshire to farm in Nebraska in 1873, disapproved of the idea that a ‘Scotch Colony’ should be formed in the state, arguing that the false security of communal settlement, as well as unmerited financial assistance, encouraged the wrong type of emigrant. A convinced individualist, he had, on arriving at Lincoln, parted company from his fellow Aberdonians, who, although ‘neighbourly and agreeable ’, insisted on retaining their incomprehensible Doric dialect in conversation with Nebraskans. 36 Attempts by Scots to farm communally do seem to have been fraught with difficulty, if the story of the Victoria colony in western Kansas, founded in 1871—2, is anything to go by. Its creator, George Grant, a crofter’s son who had made a fortune in the cloth business in London, attracted almost 200 fellow Scots and also introduced the first Aberdeen Angus cattle to the United States, but investors shied away when the colony was vilified in the Scottish press, subsequently crumbling in the wake of drought, grasshoppers and Grant’s premature death in 1878. 37

  In the Antipodes, as we have seen, the emphasis was on sheep farming. In return for trivial licence fees, many Scottish pastoralists in Australia acquired huge acreages, flocks, bank balances and reputations. Philip Russell, who in 1821 left the family farm in Fife after his father had fallen on hard times and could no longer provide for his thirteen children, went to Van Diemen’s Land to manage a retired East India Company officer’s farm. His success induced his brother George to join him ten years later, until in 1836 George moved to Port Phillip to work for the newly formed Clyde Company of Scottish pastoralists. Within three years he was managing 8,000 sheep and almost 300 cattle at an annual salary of £100 and a share of the profits, and when he died in 1888 he left over £318,000. 38

  As settlement expanded, large numbers of Scots cattle and sheep farmers ‘squatted’ on land to which they had no legal title, until in 1836 the government allowed them to buy squatting licences for £10 a year. They came from the Highlands as well as the Lowlands. Godfrey McKinnon, who farmed at North Goonamba, had done well enough by 1864 to pay a brief visit home — not entirely willingly, for ‘if my mother was not there to meet me I never would go back to Skye, nothing could persuade me to go home but to see her’, he wrote to his friend John McDonald in Uist, in a letter which also outlined his achieve-ments:

  I had very hard work of it the first three years that I was in the country but now I can take it a little easier … I have done very well for all the time I have been in the Colony more than if [I] had been in Skye for the rest of my life tho’ I would live for fifty years more. I have got a beautiful piece of country and first rate stock of both sheep cattle and horses. I have gone to great expense with my sheep purchases — imported rams. It will pay me very well in a few years. I had a splendid clip of wool this season and I expect a better next clip. 39

  The expansion of the farming frontier into the interior brought the pas-toralists into unexplored territory. Although they were sometimes assisted in their expeditions by Aboriginal guides, the settlers increasingly came into conflict with the nomadic Aborigines, whom they
displaced from their sacred lands and sometimes killed. In the Antipodes as in North America, European settlers saw the land as theirs for the taking, and its indigenous population was regarded as irrelevant or expendable. Moral and anthropological unease about the anticipated extinction of a whole race of people was slow to develop in Australia and New Zealand, where there was much less evidence of economic and cultural interaction than in the United States and Canada. ‘Our natives have been much more quiet lately and I think every year they will become more accustomed to our ways if not civilised,’ wrote D. S. Murray from China Farm, Canning River, to his mother in 1839. 40 When Angus McMillan, an emigrant from Skye, explored the Gippsland area of Victoria the following year, he was initially accompanied by an Aboriginal guide but in 1843 he, along with other Scottish settlers, played a leading part in the Warrigal Creek massacre, in which an estimated 60—150 Aborigines were killed. 41