Track 7 Research notes
(from Canada’s Story in Song – book)
- Canadian government took over Rupert’s Land from Hudson’s Bay Company
- Rupert’s land named for Prince Rupert, king’s cousin and the company’s first governor
- encouraged settlement by offering a free grant of a quarter section (160 acres) to anyone who would live on it for three years and start farming it
- only charge - $10 for registering the claim
- thousands of British working men who never owned land
- month-long trip across the ocean on ships, coaches across the country until they reached a prairie station
- overland by cart or wagon to reach unsettled prairie, put up some kind of rude shelter
- Rupert’s land: northern Quebec and Ontario – north of the Laurentian watershed; all of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, portion of the Northwest Territories and what is now Nunavut
- trees scarce, many homes built of sod
- food scarce and monotonous
- weather was bad – drought and dust storms in summer, frost and blizzards in winter
- grasshopper plagues and prairie fires, relentless wind
- many settlers couldn’t hack it
- in the 1880s, during the first great rush, some 60,000 entered Manitoba in one year
- in ten years, from 1881 to 1891, the population of Manitoba and NWT only increased by 70,000
- when the Canadian Pacific Railway was finished in 1885, the homesteaders began to push into the territories that would later become Saskatchewan and Alberta
- between 1885 and WWI thousands of settlers poured into the Canadian west to face the back-breaking work of clearing land, ploughing it, and planting crops that were all too often ruined by drought, frost, or insects.
- many came up from the US, for by the 1890s all the free land in the American west had been taken up and newcomers had to pay $50 an acre
- the Alberta Homesteader gives a graphic picture of pioneer life on the prairie
- largest immigration to west took place from 1897 to 1930, especially after 1905
*** springs from the song “The Greer County Bachelor”
***sung to the tune of “The Irish Washerwoman”, sometimes to “Villikens and His Dinah,” “Sweet Betsy from Pike”
See also The Canadian Encyclopedia: Occupational Songs, Anglo-Canadian
