The West recovered quickly from the strains of the North-West Rebellion, especially in Alberta Territory, which had not been seriously affected. One dramatic symbol of this was the development of ranching. Ranching got under way in 1880 with the appearance on the North Atlantic of refrigerator ships, which allowed the export of frozen meat. But it was the export of live cattle to Britain, by 1884, that marked the real beginning of the age of Alberta ranching.
The North-West Mounted Police had come into southern Alberta in the fall of 1874, after an arduous trek overland from Manitoba. The nwmp threw out the American whisky traders (or rather, they simply melted away) who had debauched the Blackfoot. By the early 1880s the buffalo had disappeared, and cattle could now follow. Ottawa then made leases available, and ranching developed rapidly in the high-rolling range land west and south of Calgary. It was easy, with those big grazing leases. A good Hereford calf worth, say, $5 when born, could be fed on free, nourishing, sun-cured Alberta grass and in three to four years be worth ten times the price. In 1884 Canada exported fifty-four thousand head of live cattle to England. By 1900 it was double that, with heavy exports going also to the United States.
The men who managed the Alberta ranches were mainly easterners and not Americans as is sometimes suggested. They were educated professionals. As the western historian David Breen puts it, “Power in the Canadian West was exercised not by men carrying six-shooters but rather by men in well-tailored waistcoats who often knew the comfortable chairs in the St. James and Rideau Clubs.” Some American foremen were brought in early on, but by 1880 the cowboys were Canadian or British. The law-and-order ethos of the Canadian range was strong, and the gun law of the American frontier was regarded as an unwanted (and unwarranted) import from south of the 49th parallel.
Harvesting on the Sandison farm with Massey Harris binders, Brandon, Manitoba, 1892. These workers are stooking wheat after it has been cut and bound in sheaves. Wheat harvested this way could be cut even before it was fully ripe, for it would then ripen stooked, and could be threshed as there was time. Note the number of people on hand needed for this harvest. Photo by J. A. Brock and Co.
Much of the ranching was made functional by the new Canadian Pacific Railway. Its achievement was a great adventure, and rightly have Canadians celebrated it; no one can travel from Calgary to Vancouver, even now, without being impressed. It was one of the great Canadian success stories, but like many such, it was a near thing. The principals of the cpr took big risks, not only financial but personal. The cpr had to be a first-class road, otherwise it could not have been run in winter, and Sir George Stephen, Sir Donald Smith, Sir William Van Horne, and others staked their money and their reputations on it. In the end, by 1900, the railway was making money for them and for its shareholders. Everyone knows about the driving of the last spike, November 7, 1885, on a misty day at Craigellachie, 80 kilometres (50 miles) west of Revelstoke. Perhaps more important was the first transcontinental passenger train: it left Montreal Monday evening, June 28, 1886, and arrived at Port Moody, B. C., at tidewater, at noon on Sunday, July 4. That was five and a half days.
As important, at least for the development of Vancouver, were the Empress ships that came in 1891 to bridge the Pacific. In October 1889 the Canadian Pacific placed on order three liners from Britain to establish a monthly service to Japan and China.
Cowboys on a cattle round-up near Cochrane, Alberta, c. 1900. Ranching expanded in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan until 1907, when a fierce winter killed much of the stock and wiped out hundreds of operators; many of them turned to wheat farming instead. Photo by Montgomery.
On April 28, 1891, the first of them, the Empress of India, docked in Vancouver. She was 6,000 tons, one of the largest then afloat on the Pacific service. She had left Liverpool on February 8 and come by way of the Suez Canal, with more than a hundred first-class passengers—the nearest approach to a world cruise yet offered. It was a major beginning for Canada on the Pacific; the Empresses’ white hulls and long, elegant, clipper bows, their 16 knots and punctuality, dominated Vancouver’s sense of itself and of the world for the next fourteen years.
British Columbia’s history shifted dramatically, too. The province of the 1870s had been the “spoilt child of Confederation”; but after 1886 her history is better called “the Great Potlatch.” In the 1901 census British Columbia had 180,000 people, at least ten times what it had had in 1871. Vancouver was an international seaport, and there was a huge mineral production in the rest of the province: coal, silver, zinc, lead, and gold. Like all development it had some grim side effects: the great disparity of wealth between capital and labour and the bad working conditions in the mines would produce some devastating strikes in the next years and give British Columbia a long-lasting sense of class-consciousness. Indeed, British Columbia produced contrasts. It was a little like Vancouver itself, with the Empress liners docking at one end of Granville Street, at the other a bridge across False Creek leading first into a forest of stumps and after that into real forest.
World History
