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A Fertile Wilderness: The CPR’s
Ready-Made Farms, 1909-1919
Elsa Lam
Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning and Preservation, 2960 Broadway, New York,
NY, 10027 USA (e-mail: ehl2106@columbia.edu)
Abstract
This paper examines the Canadian Pacific Railway’s
ready-made farm program, a key component in the
creation of a new landscape image for the Canadian
Prairie West. From 1909 to 1919, the program built
and sold full, turn-key farms to novice British settlers.
These farms set into place standardized structures
and land allocations, comprising barns, houses,
sheds, fences, and even ploughed fields. Depicted
as emblematic of the Prairie landscape, completed
farms became part of CPR promotional imagery and
literature for audiences of potential immigrants. This
paper traces the active construction and promotion
of a series of utopian rural communities, rooted in
nineteenth-century landscape and agrarian ideals.
Keywords
Colonial settlements, transportation landscapes,
historical landscapes, landscape meanings, landscape
utopias
Introduction
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the received
view of the Canadian Prairies – the grasslands of present-day
Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba – underwent
a dramatic shift. At the beginning of the century, the
Prairies were viewed as a deserted, terrifying wasteland.
By the end of the century, a romantic view of the Canadian
West was popularized that saw the same landscapes
as an untouched, ‘fertile wilderness’ for both agricultural
production and social renewal. This paper explores one
manifestation of this dramatic shift in the perception and
development of a landscape - the ready-made farm colonies
created by the nation’s first transcontinental railway.
As described by explorers, surveyors, and fur-traders
from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Western
Canada was a hostile wilderness – to the North, a furtrading
hinterland, to the South, a barren and windswept
waste. This tone shifted when Canada annexed the
Hudson’s Bay territories in 1869. As both the federal government
and railway sought to make the region a centre
of growth in the 1880s, official geographical and scientific
reports were adjusted to meet expectations for its agricultural
potential [1]. Landscapes beyond the treeline, once
viewed as a “sterile, dreary waste” would before the end
of the century be described in leading scientific accounts
as presenting a rich soil, which with “a mere scratching
[would] supply a household with food” (Keating 1823:
238; Macoun 1882: 263-4).
The construction of a transcontinental railway became
a key imperative and symbol for the settlement of the
newly promising Prairie landscapes. Although driven
by profits rather than patriotism, the Canadian Pacific
Railway Company, contracted to the task, became a
touchstone of nation-building – a notion encapsulated in
the company’s 1919 motto: “Ask the Canadian Pacific
about Canada.” This position was reinforced by the
railway’s dissemination of images and information on the
Northwest, a principal aim of which was securing bone
fide settlers to generate rail traffic. Beyond sponsoring
artists, commissioning photographers, and publishing a
wide variety of marketing materials, the railway company
actively developed landscapes across the Prairies to this
end. The Development Department’s initiatives – which
included building demonstration farms and constructing
irrigation infrastructure - culminated in the ready-made
farm colonies.
The colonies were comprised of anywhere from 5 to
122 pre-built farms, each equipped with a house, barn,
implement shed, and fencing, as well as fifty acres of
ready-ploughed and sowed land, to be paid off over ten
to twenty years [2]. Although commercial colonization
companies had earlier offered pre-built tenant farms, the
CPR’s program surpassed its short-lived predecessors in
ambition and scale. Rather than producing patchwork development
on conventional agricultural land, it aimed to
establish stable, high-density farming communities in the
Alberta dry belt, initially aiming to establish thousands of
hand-selected farmers on ready-made farms in irrigated
lands (Mills 1991: 56).
Reserved for British Settlers
The first notable feature of the ready-made colonies was
their intended audience: married British settlers, with a
moderate amount of capital and, preferably, previous
agricultural experience [3]. In 1909, the CPR launched
its 24-farm Nightingale Colony with an aggressive
advertising campaign in British newspapers. “In order to
save the settler the inconvenience of having to build his
house, fence, and prepare his land in his first year while
he would rather be attending to his crops, the Canadian
Pacific Railway has prepared a number of Ready-Made
Farms,” proclaimed a 1910 ad in the Manchester Guardian,
noting in bold type, “They are reserved for British
Settlers” [Fig. 1]. This was consonant with a longstanding
Eastern Canadian vision of the West as an extension of
the Empire (cf. Owram 1980, Berger 1970) and com-