Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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us,” and yet the agricultural countryside itself is shaped
by capitalist modes of production (Williams 1973: 293).
The CPR ready-made farm program reveals how rural
utopian ideals were used to entice settlers to the unfamiliar
landscapes of the Canadian Prairies; these strategies
and their consequences bear consideration in our contemporary
era, as mass development and image-making
reshape landscapes globally.
Endnotes
[1] For the role of the Canadian Expansionist movement in promoting
this changed view, see Owram 1980.
[2] The cost of work was added to the sale price o the farm; the
British farmer paid one-tenth of the price down, then the balance
in nine equal installments with six percent annual interest. In 1913,
payment terms for the farm were extended from a 10 to a 20-year
contract to relieve the financial burden of crop losses in 1911 and
1912; in 1923 the terms were extended to 34 years. (Naismith to J.
Murray, March 15, 1913, Glenbow Archives M2269-18).
[3] As reported in the March 26, 1910 issue of the Manchester Guardian,
each of the first ready-made farm families had ready capital
ranging from £200 to £700 ($1000 to $3000); the group included
an engineer, a former innkeeper, a retired civil servant, a builder, a
coachman, a dairy farmer, and a veterinary surgeon.
[4] Burke observed that vast landscapes, associated with infinite
vistas, potentially filled the mind with a pleasurable sensation of
‘sublime’ terror. However, as lived landscapes, settlers would have
encountered the vast Prairies as actual sources of pain and danger,
rather than as places of aesthetic pleasure.
[5] Cost and time savings generally result from centralized developments;
this principal is affirmed in a CPR memorandum, which
notes that “…this centralization of the colonies will permit of cheaper
and more rapid completion of improvements.” (Memorandum by
J.S. Dennis to CPR Advisory Committee, April 18, 1916 – Glenbow
M2269-458)
[6] Provisions for this possibility were incorporated in presentations
of the ready-made farm program. A speech by railway president
Sir Thomas Shaughnessy in January, 1910, described ready-made
farm holdings on 80 or 100 acres of irrigable land, or 160 acres of
non-irrigated land. By 1911, advertisements announced farms of
“80 to 320 acres”.
[7] Typical of this popular view was British émigré Catharine Parr
Traill’s experience of eased social relations in Canada, relative to
Britain:“hospitality without extravagance, kindness without insincerity
of speech” (Traill 1846: 202)
[8] Trees were not planted on the ready-made farms because of
maintenance; contrary to claims for the natural fertility of the soil,
trees demanded settlers to look after them. (P.L. Naismith to Hart,
Jan. 27, 1913 – Glenbow M2269-9)
[9] As Peter Naismith, general manager of the Department of Natural
Resources, explained “…we established a number of colonies,
building the houses, preparing the land and having everything
ready before the purchaser arrived. These farms we sold on a
very small first payment, and ultimately found that the result of the
purchaser not having sufficient equity in them, did not warrant him
in sticking and overcoming the obstacles due to all new settlers in a
new country, nearly so well as if he had a larger interest in the property.
We found that instead of the farms being sold as we thought,
they had to be sold in some cases a half a dozen times before we
got a purchaser who would stick, and the result was that there was
considerable depreciation, and in a good many cases some ‘writing
off’ before final sale was made.” (Naismith to Mead, Feb. 8 1921 –
Glenbow M2269-138)
References
CPR (1911): Settler’s Guide: A Handbook of Information for Settlers
in the Canadian Pacific Railway Irrigation Block. (Hedges 1939,
1971) Calgary: Canadian Pacific Railway Colonization Department.
CPR (1921): Irrigation Farming in Sunny Alberta. Chicago: M. Kallis
and Company.
CPR (1929): Irrigation farming in Sunny Alberta. Canadian Pacific
Railway Colonization Department.
Dewey, P. E. (1989): British agriculture in the First World War.
London; New York, Routledge.
Hedges, J. B. (1939, 1971): Building the Canadian West; the land
and colonization policies of the Canadian Pacific Railway. New
York, Russell & Russell.
Keating, W. H. ed. (1825). Narrative of an Expedition to the Source
of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods, etc.
Performed in the Year 1823. London.
Macoun, J. (1882): Manitoba and the great Northwest. Guelph.
Mills, G. E. (1991). Buying wood & building farms. Ottawa: National
Historic Sites, Parks Service, Environment Canada.
Owram, D. (1980): Promise of Eden: the Canadian expansionist
movement and the idea of the West, 1856 1900. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Rueck, Daniel. (2004): Imposing a “Mindless Geometry:” Surveyors
versus the Canadian Plains 1869-1885. Department of History.
Montreal: McGill University.
Traill, C. P. S. (1846): The Backwoods of Canada. London, C.
Knight.
Williams, Raymond (1973): The Country and the City. London,
Chatto & Windus.
Papers