by Sarah Ellis
In this far-flung family, Harry was the only one who stayed in Saskatchewan, settling in Regina, where he worked in radio, then got in on the ground floor of the exciting new invention of television.
Abel and his father did make it to Vancouver, where Mr. Butt remarried – a widow with several small children. Abel did very well in the role of adored older brother. He and Ivy kept in touch for their whole lives.
No Weatheralls remained in Milorie. The town itself, the setting for the beginning of Ivy’s great adventure, disappeared in the early 1960s. You will not find it on a current map of Saskatchewan. But in the memories of Ivy, William and the twins, and in the stories they tell their families, it is still there – a grain elevator pointing to the sky, summer dust between the toes, the taste of saskatoon berry pie, and the view clear through to half past tomorrow.
Historical Note
In 1926, 104,741 people left their homes to come to Canada. They were a variety of nationalities – French, Irish, Scandinavian, German, Scottish, Czech and others – but the largest immigrant group in that year were the English. Like immigrants everywhere, and at all times, they came in hope. In the new land they hoped for prosperity, freedom and adventure. English immigrants were also leaving behind what was, for many of them, an impossible situation at home. Working-class men went off to fight in the first World War with the government’s promise that when they returned there would be good jobs. For many, that promise turned out to be hollow and they returned home to poverty, unemployment and limited prospects for the future. Bitter and frustrated, some decided to try their fortunes across the seas, in the new world.
But why did they choose Canada?
Many families chose to come to Canada because they had connections among relatives and friends who had already immigrated. Before World War I many English people came to the Canadian west as homesteaders. They were given 160 acres of land for just ten dollars, with the agreement that they would build a house and cultivate the prairie. These adventurous, hard-working people raised families and created communities. English people who were considering a new home in later years knew that there would be people in Canada with whom they shared language and history.
In the 1920s the Canadian and British governments actively sought British settlers, but not with much success. Ottawa consequently had to turn to continental Europe for potential immigrants. Although these people helped build western Canada, many established settlers of Anglo-Canadian background feared that the new immigrants might make Canada what they disparagingly called a “mongrel” nation.
The railway also played a part in this wave of immigration. The Canadian Pacific Railway had land to sell and they needed buyers. To recruit immigrants, governments organized and funded incentive programs such as the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and the 3,000 Families Scheme. There was a program to bring over British schoolteachers to the Canadian west, plus the Canadian Cottages Agreement of 1924, in which the British government built homes on the prairie. There was even a scheme to bring over a hundred schoolboys to learn to become farmers.
The government and the railway also used publicity to encourage immigration. They produced brochures, posters, newspaper ads, displays – even motion pictures. These publicity materials showed pictures of vast sunlit plains covered in lush golden crops and populated by rosy-cheeked families. One young Londoner remembers a poster showing a field full of waving dollar bills.
Children’s magazines contributed to this romantic portrait of Canada. In stories and pictures Canada was portrayed as a land of outdoor adventure – galloping across the prairie, hunting, fishing, encounters with coyotes and grizzlies, a do-it-yourself world of freedom and challenge. To someone from a noisy, crowded city like London, where the only open place to play was the cemetery, it must have looked like heaven.
The problem with this picture of Canada is that it was an exaggeration. One immigrant woman described the “cottage” that she had been promised: “A hen house no windows half a door no stove or bed nothing but hen feed.” Much of the best farmland had already been assigned and some of the settlers ended up in a desert-like region of the prairies called the prairie dry belt, an area where special farming techniques are required.
The promotional literature for immigrants also underplayed the harsh climate of the prairies. The Canadian Settler’s Handbook assured potential immigrants that the climate was “healthful” and that “brilliant sunshine produces a sense of invigoration.” It neglected to mention storms so severe that cattle froze to death. Another exaggeration involved the warm reception immigrants were led to expect. In fact, Canadians were not universally welcoming to the English, whom many regarded as arrogant and snobbish. Finally, the jobs that the government promised did not always exist. One angry immigrant wrote, in 1929, that it was “all lies they [tell] you up at Canada House London.”
Many prairie immigrants of this period just didn’t make it. Of the three thousand families in the 3,000 Scheme, two thousand ended up leaving the region. Some families went to the cities of eastern Canada, where there were more jobs. Some men went to construction camps in the north. Some went south to the United States. Some gave up and returned to England.
For selected newcomers the immigrant dream came true. Blessed with a magic combination of hard work, initiative, support and good luck they flourished on the prairies. But many more simply made the best of it, pinning their immigrant hopes on the next generation. They raised children who came to regard Canada as home, and they in turn raised children who had never known another homeland.
When we look around a classroom of today we see, among the faces, some who are descendants of those English immigrants, strong people who took the huge risk of planting themselves in a new home.
Images and Documents
1.
Advertisements such as this Canada West poster promised immigrants a better life once they settled in the west.
2.
Family photo on board the Ausonia.
3.
A graphic for a tea-party menu that children could attend during the voyage. (See menu below.)
4.
Invitation to children’s tea party aboard the Ausonia.
5.
A poster encouraging immigrants to come to the Canadian west to “build your nest.”
6.
The prairie stretches far out behind these children from the Lloydminster area.
7.
The Moaner children on horseback, Milo area of Alberta, in the 1920s.
8.
Students outside a typical one-room prairie school — Reid Hill School in Vulcan, Alberta, 1921.
9.
This class photo from Spring Coulee School in 1924 shows a typical prairie classroom.
10.
Children using earphones to listen to their favourite programs on the radio.
11.
Making ice cream by hand in 1926. The ice cream mixture in the centre metal container is cooled by the surrounding ice and salt.
12.
Ladies’ nail-hammering contest at a picnic in Box Springs, Alberta, in the 1920s.
13.
Stooking wheat by hand in Saskatchewan in 1928.
14.
The grain elevator at Norquay, Saskatchewan, June, 1920.
15.
The Dominion of Canada in 1926.
16.
The Weatheralls’ route to Milorie, showing their disembarkation point in Quebec City, and their train route across the country to the Prairie Dry Belt area in southwestern Saskatchewan.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following:
Cover portrait: Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Canada, detail from Sheffield Family photo, colourized (NA-105-5).
Cover background: Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada as represented by the Canadian Tourism Commission.
1: Glenbow Archives Pam 971.2 C212 c 1925.
2 to 4: Author’s collec
tion.
5: National Archives of Canada C126302.
6: National Archives of Canada C30784.
7: Glenbow Archives NA-1367-90.
8: Glenbow Archives NA-2416-4.
9: Glenbow Archives NA-2894-6.
10: City of Toronto Archives SC 244, Item 8054.
11: Glenbow Archives NA-2506-6.
12: Glenbow Archives NA-2927-13.
13: National Archives of Canada C7786.
14: Saskatchewan Archives Board SAB R-A2260(2).
15 and 16: Maps by Paul Heersink/Paperglyphs. Map data © 2000 Government of Canada with permission from Natural Resources Canada.
Thanks to Barbara Hehner for her checking of the manuscript, and Dr. Bill Waiser for sharing his historical expertise.
In memory of my mother,
Ruth Elizabeth Steabner Ellis
With thanks to those who told me their stories: May Ellis, Link Steabner, Thelma Drinnan, William Lawrence, Margaret Bykevich and,
most of all, my dad, Joseph Ellis.
About the Author
CLA Honour Book A Prairie as Wide as the Sea is one of Sarah Ellis’s many books for young readers. She has won numerous other awards, among them the Governor General’s Award for Pick-Up Sticks, the Mr. Christie’s Book Award for Out of the Blue, the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Book Prize for The Baby Project and a Governor General’s Award nomination for The Several Lives of Orphan Jack. In 1995 Sarah was honoured with the Vicky Metcalf Award for her body of work. Her second novel in the Dear Canada series is Days of Toil and Tears, and her most recent is That Fatal Night, about a girl who survives the sinking of the Titanic.
“When I was a kid,” she says, “my favourite told stories were my parents’ stories of the ‘olden days.’ These were of two kinds – Dad’s stories of growing up in east London and Mum’s of small-town Saskatchewan…. Many of these stories, moulded to fit my own, made their way into A Prairie as Wide as the Sea.”
While researching this book, Sarah was going through 1920s microfilm files for what was then called the Regina Leader. Its Saturday supplement, called the Torchbearer’s Club, contained news about kids’ daily lives, everything from chasing gophers to tipping over outhouses. Even though the microfilm print was tiny, Sarah kept reading, looking for information about April Fool’s Day. “Would somebody have written an account of the tricks they played in school and at home?” Sarah said. “I whirred my last reel over to the relevant Saturday of 1927, just on the off chance. The headline to one letter, Childhood Pranks, seemed promising. I started to read, squinting and straining over the blotchy screen, and then I glanced down at the signature. Right there, in a library that is so new that it still smells like carpets, in the cold grey light of an uncongenial technology, I was visited by a ghost. The author of the letter was my mother, aged thirteen. She stood in front of me, present, substantial, immediate … ” Sarah’s mother had died decades earlier, so finding this letter from her mother, then a girl herself, was “a gift” – something Sarah had never expected to uncover while doing research about the character she would come to call Ivy.
“On first reading, the letter revealed a person I never knew. She was cheeky, a bit of a cut-up. Where was my quiet, contained, middle-aged mother? On a second reading, however, I met a person I knew well. My mother grew up with affectionate brothers. So did I. She liked slang. So do I. She enjoyed stories about herself as a little kid, as told by her mother. So did I. Most of all, she was obviously a writer. Me too. It is even harder to read microfilm when you’re crying.”
In addition to her own writing, Sarah reviews children’s literature for journals such as Quill & Quire and The Hornbook. She is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
While the events described and some of the characters in this book may be based on actual historical events and real people, Ivy Doris Weatherall is a fictional character, created by the author, and her diary and its epilogue are works of fiction.
Copyright © 2001 by Sarah Ellis.
Published by Scholastic Canada Ltd.
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eISBN 978-1-4431-1334-2
First digital edition, September 2011
Books in the Dear Canada Series
Alone in an Untamed Land, The Filles du Roi Diary of Hélène St. Onge by Maxine Trottier
Banished from Our Home, The Acadian Diary of Angélique Richard by Sharon Stewart
Blood Upon Our Land, The North West Resistance Diary of Josephine Bouvier by Maxine Trottier
Brothers Far from Home, The World War I Diary of Eliza Bates by Jean Little
A Christmas to Remember, Tales of Comfort and Joy
Days of Toil and Tears, The Child Labour Diary of Flora Rutherford by Sarah Ellis
The Death of My Country, The Plains of Abraham Diary of Geneviève Aubuchon by Maxine Trottier
A Desperate Road to Freedom, The Underground Railroad Diary of Julia May Jackson by Karleen Bradford
Exiles from the War, The War Guests Diary of Charlotte Mary Twiss by Jean Little
Footsteps in the Snow, The Red River Diary of Isobel Scott by Carol Matas
Hoping for Home, Stories of Arrival
If I Die Before I Wake, The Flu Epidemic Diary of Fiona Macgregor by Jean Little
No Safe Harbour, The Halifax Explosion Diary of Charlotte Blackburn by Julie Lawson
Not a Nickel to Spare, The Great Depression Diary of Sally Cohen by Perry Nodelman
An Ocean Apart, The Gold Mountain Diary of Chin Mei-ling by Gillian Chan
Orphan at My Door, The Home Child Diary of Victoria Cope by Jean Little
A Prairie as Wide as the Sea, The Immigrant Diary of Ivy Weatherall by Sarah Ellis
Prisoners in the Promised Land, The Ukrainian Internment Diary of Anya Soloniuk by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
A Rebel’s Daughter, The 1837 Rebellion Diary of Arabella Stevenson by Janet Lunn
A Ribbon of Shining Steel, The Railway Diary of Kate Cameron by Julie Lawson
A Season for Miracles, Twelve Tales of Christmas
That Fatal Night, The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton by Sarah Ellis
To Stand On My Own, The Polio Epidemic Diary of Noreen Robertson by Barbara Haworth-Attard
A Trail of Broken Dreams, The Gold Rush Diary of Harriet Palmer by Barbara Haworth-Attard
Turned Away, The World War II Diary of Devorah Bernstein by Carol Matas
Where the River Takes Me, The Hudson’s Bay Company Diary of Jenna Sinclair by Julie Lawson
Whispers of War, The War of 1812 Diary of Susanna Merritt by Kit Pearson
Winter of Peril, The Newfoundland Diary of Sophie Loveridge by Jan Andrews
With Nothing But Our Courage, The Loyalist Diary of Mary MacDonald by Karleen Bradford
Go to www.scholastic.ca/dearcanada for information on the Dear Canada series — see inside the books, read an excerpt or a review, post a review, and more.
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