"THIS LAND MUST BE GOOD FOR SOME KIND OF FARMING...": DOMINION LANDS POLICY, DROUGHT AND AGRICULTURAL REHABILITATION IN SOUTHWESTERN SASKATCHEWAN, 1908-1935

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History University of Regina

by Carl Anderson Regina, Saskatchewan December, 2008

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1+1 Canada UNIVERSITY OF REGINA

FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH

SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE

Carl Eric Anderson, candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in History, has presented a thesis titled, "This Land Must be Good for Some Kind of Farming...": Dominion Lands Policy, Drought and Agricultural Rehabilitation in Southwestern Saskatchewan, 1908-1935, in an oral examination held on December 8, 2008. The following committee members have found the thesis acceptable in form and content, and that the candidate demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of the subject material.

External Examiner: Dr. Randy Widdis, Department of Geography

Supervisor: Dr. J. William Brennan, Department of History

Committee Member: Dr. James M. Pitsula, Department of History

Committee Member: Dr. Raymond Blake, Department of History

Chair of Defense: Dr. Michael Trussler, Department of English ABSTRACT

The federal government's opening of the entire Palliser Triangle to large scale agricultural settlement in 1908, along with a series of devastating droughts over the ensuing decade, resulted in severe hardships for settlers and an intolerable agricultural relief burden for the Saskatchewan government. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into

Farming Conditions—the province's formal response to the problem—identified certain adjustments in agricultural methods, natural resource use and settlement patterns in its

1921 report that, if put into practice, might gradually help to stabilize production and income levels in Saskatchewan's semiarid farming regions. Certain constraints hampered provincial efforts to implement the report's key recommendations during the 1920s, and the federal government kept its involvement to a minimum, as it viewed agricultural rehabilitation as a mainly provincial problem. As the experience of severe drought and widespread crop failures during the 1930s demonstrated, the province was financially unable to sponsor a comprehensive agricultural rehabilitation program on its own. This, along with a rapidly deteriorating political and economic situation on the prairies— finally forced the federal government to own up to the oversights in its earlier Dominion

Lands policy by passing the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act in 1935. The effectiveness of the activities under the Act owed much to the earlier implementation of certain recommendations of Saskatchewan's 1921 investigative commission.

li ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would never have been able to complete this thesis without the help of certain people. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Bill Brennan. It was his

History 100 class that originally got me interested in pursuing historical studies. His availability, patience and many helpful comments were muchly appreciated—indeed, he embodies everything that a thesis supervisor should be. I would also like to thank Greg

Marchildon for his interest in this project. He provided many constructive comments over the last three years three years that helped guide me in my thinking. As well, I would like to thank Roberta Lexier and Brett Quiring for their research assistance at the

Library and Archives Canada and the Saskatchewan Archives Board, respectively. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the Department of Graduate Studies and Research for providing the Graduate Scholarships and Teaching Assistantships in 2005 and 2006.

A special thank you goes to Marilyn Bickford for answering my many questions about procedures and formatting and for guiding me through numerous administrative details.

And finally—and perhaps most of all—I would like to thank my parents, Bart and Mary.

Without a doubt, this project would not have been possible without their unwavering support and encouragement. This work is dedicated to them.

in TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS v

PREFACE 1

CHAPTER ONE: "Dominion Lands" Policy and Drought Relief in

Southwestern Saskatchewan, 1908-1920 13

CHAPTER TWO: The "Better Farming" Commission, 1920- 1921 41

CHAPTER THREE: Making a Start: Implementing the Better Farming Commission's Recommendations, 1921-1929 80 CHAPTER FOUR: Robert Weir, the Saskatchewan 'Dust Bowl' and the Origins of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, 1929-1935 110

CONCLUSION 140

APPENDIX 145

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 156

iv PREFACE

"The problem of the farmer", wrote one American commentator in September

1935 as severe drought was reducing millions of acres of cropland across the Great Plains of North America to a 'dust bowl,'

turns on the question, How far can he go in reaping the bounty of the land in wet years and yet survive the penalties of inevitable drought? The problem of the government is to determine whether a man shall be allowed to grow grain in places where he can do so and ought not to.]

In Canada, this question had also come to weigh heavily on Robert Weir, Minister of

Agriculture in R.B. Bennett's Conservative government. Over the previous five years, countless farmers in Canada's portion of the Great Plains—an area also known as the

Palliser Triangle—had suffered immensely from crop failures, water shortages and a catastrophic drop in grain prices. This region was (and remains) the heart of Canada's important wheat growing industry, and dealing with the crisis had become nothing short of a national undertaking. Ottawa had been forced to advance many millions of dollars to the cash-strapped governments of Manitoba, Alberta and particularly Saskatchewan to help them provide relief to avert mass starvation in the drought area. Weir was all too aware that the continual provision of relief, though vitally necessary to keep the farmer on the land, was like throwing money into a bottomless pit: it offered no practical solution to the drought and dust storms that were ravaging the prairie landscape.

In certain respects, the unfolding agricultural disaster on the prairies was a legacy of the federal government's "Dominion Lands" policy. From 1870 to 1930, Ottawa had retained control of all lands and natural resources in the Prairie Provinces to oversee their development. However, adaptation to the harsh prairie environment proved to be a classic struggle between man and nature (see Figure 1) and was considered to be the 1 2 settler's responsibility. Farming in the semiarid and drought-prone Palliser Triangle was an often risky business that depended on the use of soil and water conservation methods for its success, and a large amount of land in the area turned out to be unfit for cereal agriculture—particularly in the Dry Belt of southeastern Alberta and southwestern

Saskatchewan. Alas, those who settled in the region were given very little information on sustainable dry farming methods, nor did they have access to long term climatic records or scientific soil survey data for guidance in selecting their land. They would also discover that the system of rectangular homesteads did not always allow for an equitable distribution of surface water supplies or access to grazing land. As the dry conditions of the 1930s showed, the cultivation methods they had learned were incapable of preventing a complete crop failure and had caused extensive soil erosion, while the lack of moisture withered vegetable gardens and hay and forage crops for livestock, making it difficult for farmers and ranchers to provide for their own subsistence. In desperation, many simply abandoned their farms to the wind and the weeds, creating a whole new set of problems.

One thing was for sure, a system of agriculture and natural resource use appropriate for the region's ecology had to be found. But doing so required initiative over and above what the afflicted farmers, municipalities and even provinces could muster.

Faced with worsening economic, social and political conditions on the prairies,

Weir introduced the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act in Parliament in April 1935. The

Act—passed without opposition—laid the foundations for a new federal agency that would soon become known as the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA).

"... [I]t is our purpose", explained Weir to the House of Commons on 10 April,

to assist the farmers, and to demonstrate whether or not the people in these areas can continue to live there with only very little more moisture than they are now 3 receiving. Our first aim is to do everything possible to make these people self- sustaining. Secondly, we must decide which areas are best suited for grain growing, which are best suited for ranching, and the best way to handle those areas which are intermediate.2

Under the provisions of the Act, the federal government sought to achieve these ends in

two ways. First, it aimed to improve productive techniques by providing specialized

agricultural advice at the farm level. Substations of the Dominion Experimental Farms

Service and "Agricultural Improvement Associations" were established in the drought

area to demonstrate proven tillage methods to control soil drifting and ways of reclaiming

abandoned farmland and to foster cooperative action on dry farming problems. Financial

and technical aid was also extended to farmers and ranchers to create dugouts, small

dams and irrigation systems to maintain gardens and farm animals and to grow reliable

supplies of feed for livestock. Second, Ottawa took responsibility for fixing mistakes in

land use and assumed the costs involved. Following an amendment to the Act in 1937,

the federal government along with the provinces began using scientific soil survey data to

permanently remove inferior grain growing land from cultivation, a good deal of which

was turned into fully-serviced "community pastures" for the use of nearby farmers and

ranchers. These promoted a more stable farm economy in the region by providing an

alternative source of grass in case of drought. Farmers situated on these inferior lands were also given aid in relocating to areas that could support grain growing.3

The passage of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act is commonly understood as a

crucial turning point in Ottawa's perception of the prairie region.4 Indeed, its program of

activities was effective in promoting positive and long term adjustments to agricultural techniques and resource use in the area. However, this proactive public policy did not develop in an ideological vacuum. Some historians have suggested that the process of 4 fixing the mistakes of Dominion Lands policy began earlier than 1935 and that the provincial governments played an important role in determining which adjustments were necessary. Drought had really been a regular hazard to farmers in the Palliser Triangle since the earliest days of settlement, but it was during a series of dry years in the Dry Belt after 1917 that the inadequacy of traditional dry-farming methods and the inferiority of certain lands for grain growing became most clearly manifest. Though it affected a smaller area over a shorter time span, the drought caused major crop failures and soil erosion and called for heavy public relief expenditures. Many began to ask the question

"What is to be done with our dry areas?",5 and in 1920 the Saskatchewan government made the first formal attempt to deal with the situation by establishing the Better Farming

Commission (BFC). Its final report identified certain long term directions for dry farming research and land use in Saskatchewan's portion of the Palliser Triangle. It recommended experiments on crops and tillage methods suited for a semiarid climate and suggested better ways of passing on this knowledge to farmers. It also recognized the existence of inferior wheat growing land and suggested methods of dealing with it.

These included the prohibiting of further homesteading; a scientific soil survey of the province (beginning with the Dry Belt area) to delineate those lands best left as pasture and those suited for grain production; the converting of land unfit for wheat growing into community pastures; and allowing those who had settled on inferior lands to file for a second homestead on better land elsewhere.

Agricultural rehabilitation policy in the Palliser Triangle is a subject as yet little explored by historians. Scholarship on the issue has focused mainly on the work of the

PFRA and has largely ignored its ideological and political antecedents. In 1967, popular 5 historian James H. Gray wrote what is still the most complete account of the PFRA's founding and early activities. Men Against the Desert discusses at length the efforts of farmers, crop scientists and PFRA and other government officials to overcome soil erosion, insect pests and crop diseases in the early 1930s and the PFRA's later attempts to develop rational land use and settlement policies for the Palliser Triangle. But Gray also admits that "[i]t was not simply that the PFRA was organized, investigated what had to be done, and then went out and did the job. Rather it was that previous investigations had long since discovered what had to be done."6 He mentions the BFC as well as Alberta's corresponding drought area study, but does not examine their activities in any detail.

A recent Mi A. thesis entitled "The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration and the Community Pasture Program, 1937-1947" by D.M. Balkwill stands as a significant

addition to PFRA historiography. Through its development of community pastures,

Balkwill argues, Ottawa revealed a new appreciation of "the ecological diversity of the prairies and the need for agricultural activities to suit the region's natural limitations."

Using PFRA records, newspapers and the George Spence Papers in the Saskatchewan

Archives Board, he analyzes how the PFRA's community pasture program was applied and received in the Prairie Provinces and stresses the economic, political and social factors that hampered efforts to get control of land for pasture and resettlement purposes.

He also briefly mentions governmental land use adjustment initiatives in the 1920s, but mainly as a background to PFRA activities. As Balkwill indicates in his conclusion:

Drought near the end of the First World War prompted federal and provincial governments to devote more attention to local circumstances and adapt agricultural practices to better suit the natural environment. But federal efforts to revise agriculture were neither intensive nor long lived. Information from soil surveys was not yet available, and schemes to use sub-marginal land for community grazing were neither actively encouraged nor financially supported.7 6 Saskatchewan's struggle with drought in the pre-1930 era is more thoroughly addressed in Barry Potyondi's In Palliser's Triangle: Living in the Grasslands, 1850-

1930 (1995). This environmental history of Saskatchewan's short-grass prairie discusses the region's early use by Aboriginal and Metis groups, the rise and fall of the ranching economy and the subsequent appearance of 'sodbusters,' and the difficulties they faced in farming its dry soils. Potyondi devotes significant attention to the Dry Belt drought after

World War I, studies the BFC and the Saskatchewan government's efforts to apply its recommendations and mentions the demise of these initiatives due to the return of better weather and the recovery of wheat prices in the mid-1920s. He argues that

[t]he weight of this historical record to 1930 suggests, in fact, that typically farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan were not husbanders of the soil caring for it in an enlightened manner. Rather, they were more like engineers, using the latest science and technology to bend nature to their will, ever conscious that although the natural world might occasionally rebuff their efforts, they were ultimately masters of their own economic destiny.8

Potyondi's study ends in 1930 and he does not develop the story to its natural conclusion: that farmers and the senior governments had to work together on a new level to achieve the desired agricultural stability in the Palliser Triangle.

Other histories of Palliser Triangle agriculture in the early twentieth century tend to emphasize the drought's social effects and understate government responses. David C.

Jones's Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Dry Belt (1987) is the leading scholarly study of the "dryland farming disaster" in the decade after World War I. Jones looks at the experience on both sides of the Alberta-Saskatchewan border, but due to the greater intensity and duration of the drought in Alberta, he deals primarily with that province. He discusses in depth how the crisis forced thousands of Dry Belt settlers to flee, resulting in the collapse of rural society. However, Jones says little about political 7 reactions to the crisis. He briefly mentions the BFC, but does not analyze its recommendations in any detail. Jones argues that the senior governments and the "false prophets" of dry-farming science were unwilling to admit the existence of crop failures and focuses on the high human costs of the federal government's settlement policy.9

In 2004, Curtis McManus examined Saskatchewan's side of the "dryland farming disaster" more thoroughly in an M.A. thesis entitled "Happyland: The Agricultural Crisis in Saskatchewan's Drybelt, 1917-1927." McManus echoes Empire of Dust in many respects. Using local histories and records from eight drought-area municipalities, he discusses the homesteading of a portion of the province's southwestern plains after 1908 and the difficulties settlers and municipalities there faced in dealing with land unsuited for grain-farming during an extended period of drought. But the thesis also studies the

Saskatchewan government's reaction to the crisis; it argues that the province "repeatedly failed to assess properly the nature and magnitude of the problem and this problem with perception would exist unchanged until the calamity of the 1930s." Using the

Department of Agriculture Papers in the Saskatchewan Archives Board, McManus makes an unconvincing attempt to show how the province avoided responsibility for assisting settlers there. This refusal, he contends, stemmed from the belief that "the fates of the province...and the agricultural industry were crossed", and that the province refused to promote an out-migration from the drought area because it was incompatible with this belief. McManus indicates that the province, in tandem with Ottawa, finally acted on the

BFC's plan for the evacuation of settlers in 1923 "due to sheer weight of pressure."10

However, he studies none of the BFC's other recommendations and does not seriously consider the possibility that Ottawa also had a responsibility for dealing with the crisis. 8 McManus's interpretation is reflected in Bill Waiser's Saskatchewan: A New

History (2005). Waiser discusses agricultural development in Saskatchewan's drought

areas and examines the province's early efforts to promote diversified farming through

various education extension activities. He assesses the drought's negative effects in the

southwest after World War I and briefly mentions the BFC's origins and its main recommendations. However, Waiser misconstrues the BFC's purpose when he says that

"nowhere did it question the suitability of the land for settlement," and he condemns the provincial government for its lack of sympathy for settlers in the region.

Other scholarly histories of prairie settlement and development touch upon

agricultural rehabilitation policies only briefly.11 In 1939, Saskatchewan political

economist G.E. Britnell wrote The Wheat Economy, perhaps still the most thorough study

of Saskatchewan agriculture. Britnell analyses the prairies' economic, demographic and

transportation structures in the context of wheat production and offers some background

about the development of methods to combat drought in the 1930s and public officials' realization of the need to "re-establish the economy on a basis which will reduce the waste of human and economic resources in the future." Britnell devotes part of a chapter to the PFRA's early activities, but he does not mention earlier rehabilitation initiatives. Mention of the post-World War I drought is limited to one paragraph; Britnell writes that "[r]apid exploitation made mistakes in land utilization inevitable...Little was known of the relative adaptability of different soils to wheat production."13

Tidbits of information on changes in agricultural methods and land use in the

Palliser Triangle after World War I can be found in Volumes II and V of the Canadian

Frontiers of Settlement series. In Agricultural Progress on the Prairie Frontier (1936), 9 R. W. Murchie provides an in-depth analysis of census data to explain changes in land use on the prairies and devotes a chapter to the Dry Belt. However, the work is concerned mainly with the economic and sociological aspects of adjustment and does not examine its political side. Chester Martin's "Dominion Lands" Policy (1938) studies the aims behind Canada's disposal of lands in the western interior during the period 1870-1930.

Martin argues that western lands were used in the interests of rapid settlement and the building of a Pacific railway, and that Ottawa was determined to control prairie lands until these goals were accomplished.15 The 1930 transfer of the natural resources to the

Prairie Provinces signaled the completion of these twin "purposes of the Dominion," but

Martin asserts that this process had serious future repercussions.

Settlement, thrust en masse and almost haphazard into rigid quarter sections, had yet to be adjusted or readjusted to the 'controls' of scientific agriculture. Over much of this, provincial supervision and enterprise was indispensable—soil surveys, improved agricultural techniques, and a thousand adjustments to local conditions of climate and topography. But interests of almost incalculable national importance are yet at stake; it is safe to say that some of the most imperative "purposes of the Dominion" have yet to be worked out in Western Canada.16

Martin ends his discussion in 1930 and provides no information about agricultural rehabilitation efforts by provincial and federal authorities during the 1920s.

Some additional information on this issue can be found in Lisa Dale-Burnett's interdisciplinary Ph.D. dissertation entitled "Agricultural Change and Farmer Adaptation in the Palliser Triangle, Saskatchewan, 1900-1960." Focusing on a block of fourteen rural municipalities in southwestern Saskatchewan, the dissertation studies the geographic, socio-cultural and socio-economic factors that influenced farmers' gradual adaptation to environmental, economic and social changes. It relies on oral history to show how individuals, families, communities and institutions shaped this adaptation 10 process, mainly in the period 1940-1960. Dale-Burnett discusses government aid with respect to debt mediation, cooperative marketing, agricultural education and the development of farm technology, but mainly within the context of the PFRA's work from

1 7

1935 on. The BFC's ideas and recommendations are mentioned only in passing.

No scholar has as yet attempted to conduct a thorough study of the policymaking process behind agricultural rehabilitation activity on the Canadian prairies in the interwar years or even in Saskatchewan alone. If such a study were to be done, it would have to tackle the following questions. How and why did the Saskatchewan government first become concerned about the long term well-being of agriculture in the Palliser Triangle?

What was the nature of the early policy responses? How did the political culture of the times and the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments

determine how they were conceived and implemented? And ultimately, what convinced the federal government to introduce the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act in 1935, and how did the activities under the Act fulfill what had been started in the 1920s?

This thesis will argue that the need for adjustments to farming practices and resource use in Saskatchewan's Palliser Triangle region was first officially recognized not in the Dirty Thirties, but during the succession of dry years just after World War I. It was the Saskatchewan government that was expected to both develop and implement a rehabilitation plan for the drought-damaged wheat economy. However, due to financial and legal constraints, it was never able to effectively do so without Ottawa's help, even after control of prairie lands and natural resources was transferred to the Prairie Provinces in 1930. The federal government finally accepted its share of the blame for the problem in 1935 after having doled out many millions of dollars worth of relief to the province in 11

response to the most legendary drought in Canada's history. Chapter One will discuss

the opening of the semiarid plains to agricultural settlement in 1908 and the economic,

social and political crises that had resulted by the end of World War I. Chapter Two will

analyze the BFC and its recommendations, arguing that the BFC had really called

attention to 'solutions' that provincial officials were already aware of, and indeed had begun to promote. Chapter Three will examine the implementation and fate of the BFC's

recommendations as well as the resulting adjustments in southern Saskatchewan.

Chapter Four will demonstrate how the sheer magnitude of the drought crisis in

Saskatchewan's portion of the Palliser Triangle after 1929 forced Ottawa to intervene

with the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act in 1935.

This thesis will examine a range of primary sources in an attempt to confirm this

hypothesis. The Saskatchewan Archives Board contains the records of the Saskatchewan

Department of Agriculture as well as the papers of contemporary provincial politicians who lived at the time—namely W.M. Martin, C.A. Dunning and CM. Hamilton—that

may offer insight into the Saskatchewan government's attitudes concerning the need for

and development of agricultural rehabilitation policies for the Palliser Triangle. The

Annual Reports of the Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture as well as certain newspapers and farm journals may also provide useful details on both the nature and

effectiveness of these policies. As well, the House of Commons Debates, the Canada

Sessional Papers and the papers of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett and of the federal

Departments of Agriculture and the Interior in Library and Archives Canada may help

shed new light on Ottawa's growing appreciation for the need to adjust agriculture and settlement to the Palliser Triangle's ecological peculiarities in the 1920s and 1930s. 12 ENDNOTES—PREFACE

'isaiah Bowman, "The Land of Your Possession" Science, Vol. 82, No. 2126 (27 September 1935), 289. 2Canada, House of Commons Debates, 10 April 1935, 2604. 3A. Stewart, "The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Programme" The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science Vol. 5, No. 3 (August 1939), 310-24. 4Writing in 1937, Saskatchewan political economist G.E. Britnell asserted: "[djrought and depression have indicated that throughout the region emphasis has shifted from problems of exploitation to problems of conservation and that, accordingly, an attempt must be made to re-establish the economy on a basis which will reduce the waste of human and economic resources in the future." Twenty years later, V.C. Fowke, another Saskatchewan political economist, affirmed that the PFRA "has worked for twenty years with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, its efforts in substantial part devoted to correcting the mistakes of the homestead period" [G.E. Britnell "The Rehabilitation of the Prairie Wheat Economy" Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science Vol. 3, No. 4 (November 1937), 508; V.C. Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 285-86]. 5This quotation is actually a headline found on page 13 of the 5 September 1919 edition of the Manitoba Free Press. 6James H. Gray, Men Against the Desert (Saskatoon and Calgary: Fifth House Publishers, 1996), 1, 6. 7Daniel M. Balkwill, "The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration and the Community Pasture Program, 1937-1947" (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2002), iii, 94. 8Barry Potyondi, In Palliser's Triangle: Living in the Grasslands, 1850-1930 (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: PurichPublishing, 1995), 111. 9David C. Jones, Empire of Dust: Settling and Abandoning the Prairie Dry Belt (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1987), 139. 10Curtis McManus, "Happyland: The Agricultural Crisis in Saskatchewan's Drybelt, 1917-1927" (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2004), 8, 19, 48, 73. See also Curtis McManus, "History, Public Memory and the Land Abandonment Crisis of the 1920s" Prairie Forum Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall 2008), 257-74. uIn The Search for Stability (1959), for example, Charles Schwartz examines how early Saskatchewan farmers, through government or cooperative action, sought to maximize returns from their industry in four areas: markets, prices, incomes and production. He begins by stating that "the story of Saskatchewan agriculture...is best described in terms of man's transformation of and adaptation to, his environment." However, Schwartz's work is mainly concerned with the economic aspects of stability, especially in the post-World War II era; mention of government efforts to shield farmers from the vagaries of their physical environment is limited to hail insurance, and discussion of the PFRA is relegated to two paragraphs at the book's end [Charles Schwartz, The Search for Stability (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1959), 6]. 12G.E. Britnell, The Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1939), 216. ,3Ibid., 37. 14R.W. Murchie, Agricultural Progress on the Prairie Frontier (Toronto: Macmillan, 1936) in W.A. Mackintosh and W.L.G. Joerg, eds, Canadian Frontiers of Settlement. 15A.S Morton and Chester Martin, History of Prairie Settlement and "Dominion Lands" Policy (Toronto: Macmillan, 1938), 196-97 in Ibid. 16Ibid., 534-35. 17Lisa Lynne Dale-Burnett, "Agricultural Change and Farmer Adaptation in the Palliser Triangle, Saskatchewan, 1900-1960" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Regina, 2002). CHAPTER ONE: "Dominion Lands" Policy and Drought Relief in Southwestern

Saskatchewan, 1908-1920

In 1905, the Canadian government issued a propaganda pamphlet for prospective immigrants entitled "1905: The Biggest Crop Year in the History of the Canadian West."

It proclaimed that "profitable prices" and exceptional seeding weather that year had been

"succeeded by unbroken rains, bright sunshine and one of the best harvest seasons the

West has ever known," resulting in a record-breaking wheat crop and "almost unclouded successes" for prairie farmers.1 A similar pamphlet assured settlers that the virgin prairie could be brought into cultivation with "a mere scratching of the soil".2 The promotion of the Canadian prairies as an agricultural paradise was indeed successful in drawing hordes of settlers to the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alas, many thousands of them would discover that this policy was badly misguided. In truth, diverse ecological conditions are to be found in the region, not all of which are favourable for extensive wheat farming. Sadly, the federal government was more concerned about rapid development and made little effort to appreciate these distinctions. This oversight was clearly manifested when the Dominion Lands Act was amended in 1908 to encourage homesteading in the short grass plains between Moose Jaw and Calgary.

Such circumstances revealed a glaring ambiguity in the Canadian federal system.

Though Ottawa ultimately determined where prairie settlement would occur, each settler became the responsibility of the province once he fulfilled his homesteading duties. By the end of World War I, this reality had become painfully clear to the Saskatchewan government. The haphazard settlement of the Palliser Triangle combined with a series of devastating droughts in the region after 1908 to cause widespread crop failures and unimaginable hardship for settlers there. However, not only was the province expected to 13 14 provide relief assistance in times of agricultural distress (in the form of seed grain and

livestock feed), it was also largely responsible for coming up with a solution to the problem. By 1920, it was obvious to many that the continual provision of relief was a

symptom of a more serious illness, and provincial officials felt pressured to consider a more practical and long term solution to the problem.

In the public mind, Saskatchewan is often thought of as "flat" and "covered" with wheat fields. A brief review of the facts shows this to be only partly true. The province's

arable region can be divided into four distinct "Ecozones" (see Figure 2); in each the relationship between climate, soils and topography determines its agricultural capability.

The northern limit of viable agriculture is the Boreal Transition Ecozone. It features a

level to gently sloping terrain, has numerous streams and sloughs and receives an average

of 17.8 inches of precipitation per year. Its humid climate supports heavy growths of tall

grasses, shrubs and trees, resulting in fertile, black topsoil that is rich in organic matter

(i.e. humus). Similar conditions prevail in the Aspen Parkland Ecozone to the south,

though annual precipitation there is slightly lower (16.5 inches) and more of the area is

grassland rather than forest. Such an environment makes both regions well adapted for

stock raising and for growing a wide variety of grain, forage and hay crops.

The agricultural possibilities of the Mixed Grassland Ecozone are more limited.

This vast region is also known as the Palliser Triangle and is the prairies' driest area,

experiencing a significant annual moisture deficit (where evaporation exceeds total precipitation).4 But this Ecozone can itself be split into areas with varying degrees of aridity. The Moist Mixed Grassland (the Palliser Triangle's outermost fringe) has a sub- humid climate—receiving 15 inches of precipitation per year—and is characterized by a 15 flat, almost treeless landscape. Its dark brown soils contain somewhat less humus than the Parkland's, but are well adapted for extensive wheat farming. Grain growing in the

Dry Mixed Grassland is more risky. This area is situated atop the Missouri Coteau plateau—the region that extends westward of a line joining Weyburn, Moose Jaw and

North Battleford to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.5 Its climate is semiarid,

normally receiving 13.8 inches of precipitation per year. The region (also referred to as the "semiarid plains" for the purposes of this study) corresponds roughly with old federal

Census Districts Three, Four, Seven and Eight and provincial Crop Districts Three, Four

and Seven (see Figures 3 and 4). At the core of this area is the so-called Dry Belt.6 It lies

in the Rocky Mountains' rain shadow and is routinely subjected to warm and dry

Chinook winds. It typically gets no more than 10 or 11 inches of precipitation annually,

and as a result its topsoil contains relatively little humus and has a light brown colour.

The agricultural potential of the Dry Mixed Grassland is tied to at least three other

factors. Surface water resources (i.e. lakes, sloughs, rivers and streams) in this area are relatively scarce, especially during a dry spell. A variety of soil textures, including heavy

clay, silty clay, clay loam, loam and sandy loam can also be found there.7 As a rule, heavier-textured soils retain moisture better than soils of lighter texture and give higher

crop yields, and the sandy loams generally cannot be cultivated without blowing away in drier years. As well, the region's topography is generally rougher than in the other zones; land that is overly rugged results in excessive runoff of an already deficient rainfall, and its soils tend to be thin and/or stony. Such conditions result in a comparatively high proportion of "submarginal" wheat growing land—that is, "land on which no farmer,

Q however skillful, can support a decent standard of living." The Dry Mixed Grassland is 16 ideal stock raising country: its many coulees provide shelter; its hardy short-grasses make nutritious fodder; and the Chinooks moderate winter's impact. It is important to note that submarginal wheat growing land will yield plentiful grain harvests in years of above average precipitation.9 But such conditions are the exception, not the norm. In reality,

Canada's southern plains are prone to frequent, serious drought.10

As is well known, the first scientific examination of the prairie region's suitability for extensive agriculture began in 1857, when the British and Canadian governments sent expeditions, led by John Palliser and H.Y. Hind respectively, to what was then known as the Northwest. They based their appraisals on the region's vegetation and soils, and they identified two main sub-districts in the western interior. The most promising area for settlement was the "fertile belt" (which corresponds with the Parkland). But they were much less optimistic about the vast plains area to the south. Palliser identified a "central desert...forming a triangle having for its base the 49l parallel from longitude 100° to

114° W, with its apex reaching to the 52nd parallel of latitude."11 The absence of trees, the brown soil and the incidence of sage and cactus in some areas12 led him to conclude that the region—which would become known as the Palliser Triangle—was too dry for farming. As well, Hind dismissed the area west of the Missouri Coteau as a "treeless plain, with a light and sometimes drifting soil.. .and not, in its present condition, fitted for the permanent habitation of civilized man."13 Both men could only offer generalizations, since they had only seen small parts of the region, and also during a dry spell. Still, they were familiar with earlier American surveys of the continental interior and they correctly identified the region as the northern tip of the Great American Desert.

Palliser's and Hind's remarks altered Canadians' perceptions of the Northwest. 17 Since fur trading had long been the region's main economic activity, it was generally thought of as a sub-arctic wasteland. By the 1850s, however, many saw the Northwest as essential to Canada's future. Good, cheap farmland in Canada West was by then running short, sharply reducing the flow of European immigration to British North America and forcing many Canadian farmers and their sons to seek their fortunes in the American

Midwest. Commercial, financial and industrial interests in Canada East and Canada West also needed access to an expanding agricultural hinterland for their continued prosperity.

It had become increasingly evident that immigration and agricultural settlement generated lucrative economic activities. Not only did settlers require transportation services to get to their destinations, they needed capital equipment (including horses, farm implements, buildings, furniture, hardware, clothing and foodstuffs) and credit facilities to pay for it to establish their farms. Reports of a "fertile belt" in British territory implied the possibility of a new agricultural frontier and a pathway to the Pacific, and acquiring the Northwest became a key aim of the new nation—Canada—created in 1867.15

In 1870, control of the Northwest was transferred to the Dominion of Canada, and the new Dominion government proceeded to launch a series of developmental initiatives that ultimately became known as the "National Policy." It kept control of all ungranted lands and natural resources in Manitoba and the North-West Territories after 1870 for the

"purposes of the Dominion."16 In 1873, the Department of the Interior was established to survey and allocate agricultural lands in the western interior. By 1887 much of the region had been surveyed into a grid of six-square-mile townships of thirty-six equal sections that were in turn divided into 160-acre 'quarter sections'—the basic homestead unit. The

Dominion Lands Act of 1872 granted settlers patent to a quarter-section on most even 18 numbered sections in exchange for a $10 fee and minimum residency and cultivation requirements. Ottawa set up immigration agencies abroad and distributed literature with

glowing reports of settlement prospects on the prairies. In 1881, 25 million acres of land

"fairly fit for settlement" was offered to the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR)—the land

could be selected in all but two of the odd-numbered sections in each township—and

another seven million acres were set aside to help construct other rail lines. A policy of tariff protection ensured that the region's economy would be linked to central Canada.

Still, the settlement of the Canadian prairies had to be based on an economic activity that would provide a livelihood for the settler and generate traffic for a railway, and wheat production ultimately filled both these roles. Indeed, since bread had become a food

staple in the industrial nations of Western Europe in the nineteenth century, wheat was in

high demand, and railways were ideal for moving bulky commodities such as grain. It was also important within the context of the British Empire. If the Canadian prairies became "a granary of that most strategic of all materials, food, the Empire would be self-

sufficient and this would 'render that Empire able to defy the world.'"17

Because the Northwest's ability to produce wheat would determine its value to the

nation, its 'desert' image had to be downplayed to encourage settlement. In the early

1870s, the Dominion government recruited Ontario botanist John Macoun to conduct a more thorough study of the Palliser Triangle to determine its suitability for agriculture.

Macoun—described as an "incorrigible optimist"—never wavered in his assessment of the prairies' agricultural potential. In 1877 he indicated that with the exception of a

"limited" area, the desert was a myth, though it is important to note that Macoun, like

Palliser and Hind before him, based his observations on vegetation, not soil type, and that 19 he visited the region during a succession of unusually wet years.18 Even so, Macoun's propaganda provided the agricultural justification for the CPR's decision in 1881 to abandon an already-surveyed route through the North Saskatchewan River valley and instead build its main line through the heart of the Palliser Triangle. As historian Bill

Waiser notes, the CPR really chose this southern route to "meet the threat posed by the

American Northern Pacific Railroad and to secure the traffic of the Canadian West for its own line" regardless of the quality of the land there.19

Such optimism betrayed a deep misunderstanding of the prairie environment.

Although Dominion Lands policy provided for the orderly settlement of the West, it paid no attention to the idea of scientific land use. Federal land surveys were not accompanied by detailed soil studies that would have excluded from settlement those areas unfit for profitable, long term cultivation. To be sure, federal survey teams had gathered limited data on soils, vegetation and topography in their travels, but it was very irregular and seldom quantified.20 Of course, to be fair, long term climatic data for the North-West

Territories did not exist at the time. It should be noted that conservation—the "planned management of a natural resource [forest, mineral, water, land and wildlife] to prevent exploitation, destruction, or neglect"—was a nebulous concept in North America in the late nineteenth century. As one American historian has argued, the frontier setting fostered a "Myth of Superabundance" in natural resources that made "wise management of the land and provident husbandry superfluous." There was also little proof that the

'checkerboard' system of land tenure was well suited to the Palliser Triangle's ecology.

Time would show that topography usually did not coincide with the boundaries of a quarter-section. In regions where there was great local variation in soil productivity, 20 limited areas of good land were often divided among several quarter-sections in such a way that none of them would ever be profitable farms. As well, it did not always allow

for a fair distribution of surface water supplies to farmers and ranchers, nor did it permit them easy access to supplementary pasture to maintain their livestock during dry years.

But the federal government was apparently little concerned about such matters.

In truth, the settler was expected to bear the main burden of adapting to local conditions.

In keeping with the laissez faire political culture of the time, freedom of enterprise for

individuals and businesses was to be guarded at all costs. Canadian frontier settlement was frequently depicted "as a project undertaken by self-reliant individuals bent on self

improvement"; federal immigration literature hoped to attract "men of good muscle who

are willing to hustle" to bring prairie lands into cultivation with minimal supervision.

Though Ottawa did absorb some of the settler's expenses on his arrival to Canada, he was responsible for choosing his own land, and he had only himself to blame if he found that

it was unfit for cultivation using the costliest of all methods: the process of trial and error.

Once the settler had acquired the title, or 'patent' to his homestead he became the responsibility of other levels of government. According to the British North America

(BNA) Act, the provinces were left in charge of property and civil rights, local taxation, infrastructure, education, health and generally "all matters of a local or private nature" to provide for incoming settlers' needs.24 (Many of these responsibilities would be passed on to the municipalities). "Agriculture" was enshrined as a shared federal-provincial authority in the BNA Act, but the provinces were ultimately expected to handle issues relating to local agricultural improvement.25 Prior to 1867, governments in the British

North American colonies gave subsidies to "agricultural societies" to educate farmers in 21 proper farming practices, hold shows and exhibitions and to import quality livestock, seed and farm implements.26 At Confederation, supervision of such activity was left with the provinces, and they were also given the responsibility for establishing institutions to conduct scientific agricultural research and to disseminate the results to the public via formal education processes; the Ontario Agricultural College (OAC), founded in 1873, was then the chief example of such an institution in Canada.27 The provision for shared jurisdiction, as political economist V.C. Fowke has explained, ensured that the federal government "should have the right to intervene in the broader and more significant elements which pertained to agriculture and immigration according to the commercial interpretation which had gradually developed in the pre-Confederation period."28

Barely two decades had elapsed since Confederation when Ottawa was forced to step across its line in the sand. It was apparent that the Northwest was not attracting the hoped-for droves of immigrants; in fact, drought in the Palliser Triangle in the period

1879-1886 had devastated the fledgling prairie wheat economy and compelled a great many of the earliest settlers to leave in frustration. The situation was particularly distressing because nothing like the OAC existed in the North-West Territories to tackle the region's particular agricultural problems. Parliament therefore responded in 1886 by passing the Experimental Farms Stations Act. It established the Dominion Experimental

Farm Service (DEFS) and provided for the creation of research farms at five sites in

Of]

Canada, including one at Indian Head, North-West Territories. Although some were under the impression that these would be agricultural colleges like the OAC, Ottawa's plan was for an institution solely for research: its main concern was to bring prairie soils into production as quickly and cheaply as possible. The DEFS would undertake 22 experiments on the premise that small beginnings by the federal government might be

multiplied as farmers learned by example, and its extension programs were designed to

encourage individual enterprise: the research results would be delivered to the public

passively via annual reports, pamphlets and the press. A provincial agricultural college

would be expected to assume the education function and eventually take over the

research function. DEFS personnel got to work right away, and among other things the

Indian Head Experimental Farm researched summerfallowing as a means of making

semiarid lands economical to farm. American farmers had long understood the benefits

of this practice, which involved plowing up alternating sections of land in late May

followed by repeated harrowing over the rest of the year to clear it of vegetation, helping

the soil to 'store up' rainfall for the next year's crop.

Because summerfallowing had traditionally been used as a means of reviving

failing land—and because prairie lands were new and fertile—many settlers were not

immediately convinced of the need for this labour-intensive cultivation practice, nor was

it practiced consistently by those who did adopt it. Still, summerfallowing generally did

result in an improvement in grain yields in the Palliser Triangle, and DEFS personnel promoted it to eager audiences throughout the area.34 Popular theories to explain why

summerfallowing worked soon began to emerge. As South Dakota professor and farmer

H.W. Campbell famously argued, the heat and wind drew moisture out of the soil through

capillary action. He advocated packing the earth to increase subsoil moisture and the regular cultivation of a surface 'dust mulch' comprised of soil particles "ranging from the

size of a pin head to that of a walnut" to retard evaporation.35 Summerfallowing and the

"Campbell method" were widely promoted as 'fail-safe' methods of growing grain in the 23 semiarid region of North America in the 1900s. In 1905, the Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture and the CPR began distributing Campbell's publications to new settlers.36

As well, the Department was associated with the International Dry Farming Congress, founded in 1907 as a forum to discuss "the fundamental principles of soil culture as practiced by Professor H.W. Campbell." Eleven such Congresses were held in cities

TO across the Great Plains from 1907 to 1916, each of which drew thousands of people.

The growing popularity of summerfallowing, along with good precipitation in the

southern prairies and a rise in wheat prices in the 1900s reinforced the perception that the

Palliser Triangle had an ideal agricultural climate and ushered in an era of phenomenal

growth.39 Saskatchewan shone brighter than any other prairie province. Its population soared from 91,259 to 491,279 between 1901 and 1911, and it accounted for nearly three- fifths of all prairie homestead entries from 1905 to 1911.40 Wheat replaced all that went before it: between 1901 and 1911, the province's total cultivated acreage grew from

656,000 to 9.1 million acres, and the number of farms rose from 12,445 to 95,013. By

1910, Saskatchewan was producing more wheat than Alberta and Manitoba combined.41

Still, the semiarid plains west of the Missouri Coteau were generally considered unfit for settlement at the time Saskatchewan became a province. In fact, the Department of the Interior had not bothered to finish surveying the region's townships into sections, and the CPR had refused to select any land there.42 Early federal policy toward the area favoured ranching rather than grain growing. The Dominion Lands Act permitted any bona fide settler to lease areas adjoining their farms for small-scale grazing.43 With the

CPR's arrival in the early 1880s, ranchers gained access to new overseas beef markets, and the Conservative government in Ottawa was soon persuaded to devise a lease system 24 that allowed larger and more profitable ranches. In 1881, 21-year grazing leases of up to

100,000 acres at an annual rate of one cent per acre were introduced, facilitating the emergence of many large cattle companies that would dominate the Canadian range for the next 25 years. Because federal officials wanted to see the prairies filled with a large farm population rather than a handful of ranchers, all grazing leases were subject to cancellation on two years' notice where the land was needed for homesteading.44

However, the small but politically influential group of western ranchers argued forcefully that their leaseholds were inherently unfit for cereal agriculture. They had an ally in William Pearce—a senior official in the Department of the Interior. Pearce well understood that large areas of the southern plains would make poor farmland. He felt ranching was the region's future, and in 1886 he helped set aside all unclaimed springs, rivers and creek fronts as public stock-watering reserves and began to actively discourage squatting on grazing leases. But the flood of settlers into the North-West Territories after

1896 intensified the demand for settlement land and signaled an official shift in attitude toward the semi-arid plains. As historian David Breen has observed, farmers "appealed to a morality that was much more in step with the buoyant enthusiasm of nation building that gripped the country" at the time. 'Settlement' and 'progress' became synonymous, and ranchers were now regarded as a "landed and reactionary establishment" blocking the way.45 Such sentiments were personified in Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior from

1905 to 1911. Oliver had long advocated unrestricted settlement and was convinced that few areas in the West were completely unfit for agriculture. Thus he instituted policies to keep the rancher from interfering with the homesteader: he abolished the stock-watering reserves and curtailed the size of new grazing leases.46 He told his Inspector of Ranches 25 that new leases would be confined to land that was found to be "too gravely, stony, sandy or of too rough a surface for agriculture", and that climate was not to be considered in determining which areas were suitable for farming. Such circumstances—along with an unusually cold and snowy winter in 1906-07 that wiped out roughly half of all cattle in southwestern Saskatchewan—had ruined most of the larger ranching outfits by 1910.48

In 1908 Frank Oliver went a step further by pushing through an amendment to the

Dominion Lands Act to allow homesteading in the semiarid plains west of Moose Jaw

(see Figure 5). To sustain the flow of immigration to Canada and complete the settlement of the West—as well as to pay for a new Hudson Bay railway—the CPR's land grants in the area were liquidated and settlers were permitted to pre-empt land in an adjoining odd- numbered quarter section for a $10 registration fee and a purchase price of $3 per acre.49

It was felt by this time that a 320-acre farm, operated using the summerfallow method, would give farmers a greater chance of success in the area.50 But due to abnormally high rainfall in certain parts of the Dry Belt from 1897 to 1916, and because the best farmland had already been taken, land-hungry settlers overlooked the region's aridity, and Oliver and his Conservative successors after 1911 were not about to dissuade them.51 The result was a land rush. Homestead entries in western Canada jumped from 21,544 in 1907 to

30,169 the following year and peaked at an average of 40,000 per year for the period

1909-1912.52 The 'pre-emption area' was largely occupied within a decade: there were

66,284 people in the region in 1906, and 342,448 by 1916.53 Saskatchewan's population grew by more than 150 per cent between 1906 and 1916, but in the southwest the increase was more notable.54 From 1901 to 1916, the area's population rose tenfold, from

17,692 to 178,200 (one quarter of the province's population) and the total number and 26 area of farms grew from 2,436 and 927,512 acres to 37,954 and 13,913,603 acres, respectively.55 The CPR (once disdainful of the semi-arid plains) launched an ambitious branch-line construction program in the area in response to the settlement boom: it built

860 miles of railway south of the South Saskatchewan River between 1910 and 1915.56

These statistics—while remarkable—say nothing of the hardships associated with homesteading on the semiarid plains. The region received adequate precipitation in 1909,

1911, 1912 and 1913. But 1907 and 1908 were drought years; settlers were disheartened by "the desiccating July winds of 1907 that shelled grain on the stalk."57 Another dry year came in 1910; wheat yields in the South-West and West-Central crop districts averaged just 35 per cent of their 1909 levels and the total wheat harvest fell by half.

Drought returned in 1914. This time, almost the entire pre-emption area south of the

South Saskatchewan River suffered partial or total crop failure; average wheat yields in the South-Central and South-Western crop districts were just two and ten bushels per acre, respectively. Unluckily, a recession accompanied the droughts: a bushel of wheat selling for $0.85 in 1909 had fallen to $0.68 by 1913.58 Such conditions resulted in the cancellation of countless homestead entries in the pre-emption area.59 The cancellation of a homestead usually meant one of two things. In some cases, those who were the first to homestead in a given region filed on any quarter-section right away in order to stake a claim. They would then try to find better land in the area and, if successful, cancel their first entry and file another one. ° But most often a cancellation meant that a new homesteader had little experience with agriculture in a semiarid region. Most of them, in fact, had come from the relatively humid climates of Europe, the American Midwest and eastern Canada. As historian James H. Gray has noted, they had generally 27 learned how to farm where a cow could be kept on an acre of land, where all the horses needed to farm 100 acres could be kept on the forage and pasture from a 10-acre field. They had learned their trade with moldboard plows, discs and harrows, in an environment where the need never existed to rush the planting of their seed to catch the spring rains.. .51

Saskatchewan's agricultural leaders wasted few opportunities to blame the crop failures on settlers' ignorance of or refusal to use 'proven' dry farming methods. In the

Agriculture Report for 1910, for example, A.F. Mantle—the province's Deputy Minister of Agriculture—asserted that "...improper or insufficient preparation of the soil to retain moisture was a more important factor than the lack of rainfall in accounting for this

fit") year's decrease of production." But the droughts did create other serious problems.

The crop failures were often so bad that many settlers did not even get back the seed they had sown, while others sold what little crop they did harvest to stave off insistent creditors.63 What is more, the failure of feed grain and hay crops also left them unable to nourish their work horses (essential to plant a crop) much less feed other livestock.64

Because settlers were technically wards of the federal government until they had proved up their homesteads, they could expect to receive seed grain and feed relief in times of distress to help them to carry on. 5 However, this was charged as a lien against their quarter-section of land to be paid before the patent was issued, since the intention was not to make poverty pleasant. "Once a man is taken hold of by the Government and treated as a ward," Interior Minister Clifford Sifton had explained in 1899, "he seems to acquire the sentiments of a pauper, and forever after will not stand on his own feet or try to help himself."66 The burden of providing relief fell to the municipalities (and ultimately the provincial government) once the settler fulfilled his homesteading requirements.

But as early as 1907 it became obvious that the province was hard-pressed in 28 dealing with any crop failure that affected a large area. Although the Dry Belt was dry that year, late seeding and a wet summer elsewhere in the Palliser Triangle caused widespread crop failures, calling for an estimated 3.3 million bushels of seed wheat, oats and barley (worth about $3 million) for relief; Saskatchewan alone required four-fifths of this total.67 But by the time the disaster's extent was fully appreciated, much of the best seed grain had been shipped to markets outside the province. And even if some seed grain was still available, the Saskatchewan government could not afford to buy it. Its main revenue sources at the time (corporation, railway and inheritance taxes, land titles fees, auto and liquor licenses and a Dominion subsidy in lieu of lands) were small and offered little flexibility in times of emergency; indeed, gross provincial revenues in 1908 were only $1.8 million!68 The province also had no means of distributing seed grain;

Rural Municipalities (RJVIs) were not organized in Saskatchewan until 1909 and until

1912 in Alberta. Ottawa, by contrast, was well equipped to deal with the emergency.

The federal Department of Agriculture performed a number of regulatory functions for the Canadian grain trade, and it thus had access to large quantities of good seed grain.

The CPR, along with the Dominion Lands agents located across the prairies, could also deliver the seed grain where it was needed. Most importantly, the federal government had access to larger revenue sources that could be used to prevent extensive starvation and the collapse of the prairie wheat industry.69

The Department of the Interior was not unaware of the problem, but Frank Oliver wanted a "thorough and amicable understanding between the provincial and Dominion governments" regarding relief distribution before it made any commitments. The acreage ratio of patented to unpatented homestead land in Saskatchewan at the time was about 1 29 70 to 1. However, Oliver flatly refused to pay for relief on patented lands, arguing that because "[registration of liens on properly owned property rests with the provincial government...any security taken for advances must be taken by and through that • 71 authority." Since time was of the essence, however, he agreed to loan Saskatchewan and Alberta the funds necessary to allow them to cover their share of relief that year.72

The Saskatchewan government then passed the Seed Grain Act in 1912; it placed the burden of providing agricultural relief in future years on rural municipal councils.73

It was not long before Ottawa was forced to set an important precedent with respect to drought relief. With the onset of World War I in August 1914, Britain and her allies required imports of foodstuffs—especially wheat—in huge quantities to support the war effort. The demand spurred a sharp increase in wheat prices (wheat worth $0.68 per bushel in 1913 fetched $1.31 by 1916) and prairie farmers were encouraged to prepare as much land for cultivation as possible. Unluckily, the dry conditions that summer made it hard for them to respond to this patriotic call of duty. Because a large proportion of the affected cropland was still in the hands of the Crown—and because the RMs in the drought area were apparently unable to handle the relief burden—the senior governments agreed to once again share the relief responsibilities.74 The Saskatchewan government committed to spend $1.2 million on public works projects in the drought area (principally road and bridge construction and the digging of reservoirs), and collected and distributed 7S

63 tons of winter clothing to 879 families in the area. Ottawa was to supply and distribute seed grain to occupants of unpatented and patented lands in the Moose Jaw,

Swift Current, Maple Creek, Medicine Hat and Lethbridge Dominion Lands districts at seeding time in 1915.76 It initially shied away from its pledge because the demand for 30 seed grain relief greatly exceeded original estimates; by the end of January 1915, the

Department of the Interior had received over 6,000 seed grain applications from holders of patented land in Saskatchewan outside the above-stated Dominion Lands districts.77

This nearly doubled the estimated cost, since high wartime wheat prices made seed grain expensive. But because prairie lands were really serving the "purposes of the

Dominion," Ottawa agreed to pay the full cost of seed grain and feed relief for farmers on unpatented and patented lands in all four western provinces, and the provinces passed legislation giving Ottawa a first lien on farmers' land as security for repayment.78 By mid-1915, Ottawa had spent $12.3 million on relief, nearly three-quarters of it in

79

Saskatchewan.

Still, federal officials insisted that the drought was an anomaly. In a March 1915 address to the House of Commons, Prime Minister Robert Borden was confident that "the crops for the coming year will be so ample as to justify most amply" his government's relief expenditures. The relief provisions were even thought to be good immigration publicity for Canada. Settlers in Montana were also suffering from drought in 1914, yet the American government had given them no relief. R.B. Bennett, Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Calgary at this time, told the House that "[t]he people of the

United States have been very much impressed with the difference in treatment" and claimed that one of his constituents "recently had ten inquiries to take up land in southern

Alberta because it is apparent that our settlers are so generously treated in times of trouble and stress and drouth and that it is a good country to settle in."80

In a dramatic twist of fate, the 1915 prairie wheat crop would go down in history as the largest harvested to that point. Good precipitation in all areas of Saskatchewan 31 over the preceding fall and winter resulted in a bumper crop of 174 million bushels with an average yield of 25 bushels per acre—half the total wheat crop of Canada.81 The southwestern Crop Districts produced nearly 75 million bushels of wheat, or 42 per cent of the province's famous harvest that year; in fact, yields on many farms in these districts reached 40-50 bushels per acre.82 These favourable conditions helped scores of settlers to get established and prove up their farmsteads (the acreage ratio of patented to unpatented homestead lands in Saskatchewan stood at 8.7 to 1 by 1920).83 Many of them decided to put up their newly acquired land as security to obtain credit for further expansion in land, buildings and machinery. From 1916 to 1919, wheat acreage in the southwest increased by 86 per cent, from 2.5 million to 4.5 million acres (see Figure 6). The demand for land was so strong that new settlers often had no choice but to take up land previously deemed unfit for cultivation; in 1915, for example, one 15,000 acre ranch in the Gull Lake area was thrown open for homesteading, and each of it 98 quarter-sections of land were filed upon. After Parliament's passage of the Soldier Settlement Act in 1917, there was even pressure to turn two of the largest remaining ranches in southwestern Saskatchewan—the

Wallace and the Matador—into homestead lands for returning Great War veterans.84

Sadly, the good times proved to be short lived. Drought returned to the southwest in 1917 and again in 1918. By the latter year, wheat production in the southwestern crop

Of districts had fallen to 34 per cent of their 1915 totals. Once again, a massive relief effort was required to meet the emergency, but with most of the affected cropland now in private hands, the RMs were expected to handle it. In 1917, the Saskatchewan legislature amended the Seed Grain Act to increase the amount of seed grain that could be loaned to a farmer (due to the larger acreage that was being prepared for crop) on a provincial 32 government guarantee.86 The Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture took complete responsibility for the provision and distribution of seed grain in the Local Improvement

Districts (LIDs).87 Predictably, the federal government was anxious to minimize its role in relief administration—especially since the war was now over. In 1918 it arranged with the Saskatchewan Department of Municipal Affairs to have the secretary-treasurers of the

RMs take seed grain applications on its behalf from farmers on any remaining unpatented lands; $520,000 was spent in this way from 1918 to 1920.88

Unluckily, the drought continued into 1919. That year the crop failure area was even larger than that of 1914: it engulfed twenty LIDs and an estimated 150 RMs, including some in southeastern Saskatchewan. Moreover, drought area farmers, debt ridden from wartime expansion and indebted to Ottawa for the 1915 relief advances, were unable to repay what they had been loaned. In 1920, C.A. Dunning (Saskatchewan's

Provincial Treasurer from 1916 to 1922 and Minister of Agriculture from 1919 to 1920) reported that only 9 per cent of the $48,008.20 worth of seed and feed advanced to dried out farmers in the LIDs in 1918 had been repaid, and that a further $50,143.50 in relief had had to be advanced in 1919.90 RM councils fared no better; of the 93 RMs that dispensed relief in 1920, only two had recovered more than 75 per cent of the amount due; six had collected between 50 and 70 per cent, and the rest had collected from 5 to 50 per cent by 1921.91 Ironically, the province would add to this burden in 1920 by passing the Municipalities Relief Act which enabled RMs to loan basic relief provisions such as fodder, flour and coal as well as seed grain to needy farmers with a provincial guarantee of repayment.92 By 1919 many RMs were already on the edge of bankruptcy due to tax delinquency. The RM of Morse, for example, forwarded a resolution to Dunning that 33 summer stating that it had been unable to collect tax arrears for the past four years and was "in no position financially" to provide relief; it pleaded for the Saskatchewan government to initiate more relief work there.

In July 1919, Premier W.M. Martin had publicly reassured the province that his government was "fully alive" to the problem and would "...leave no stone unturned to grapple with it."94 And indeed it did. It made arrangements with lumber and mining companies to advance fares to drought area farmers interested in winter work and encouraged the railways to hire them for branch line construction in an effort to help them get off the relief rolls and earn a living.95 To avert the mass starvation of many thousands of livestock in the southwest, the province also reached an agreement with

Ottawa and the railways to purchase fodder in areas that had a surplus (amounting to an incredible 11,000 carloads by May 1920) and shipped it to drought-area farmers free of charge.96 As well, the province bought carloads of yearlings and heifers from those farmers at market prices to sell to farmers in districts where feed was available.97

These relief expenditures soon took their toll on provincial finances. By 1920, the province had guaranteed nearly $2.8 million in bank loans to RMs to enable them to supply relief (it had actually paid out some $1.2 million to the banks in fulfillment of these guarantees).98 This, combined with $499,000 spent on relief for LIDs and the province's share of freight on feed, comprised nearly 35 per cent of gross provincial revenues that year.99 Dunning publicly declared that his government had "no apologies to offer for incurring this very large expenditure in relieving the distress of the settlers, who, through no fault of their own, faced an exceptionally hard winter without sufficient food or fuel...or feed for their starving animals."100 But he also understood that relief— 34 though vitally necessary—could not go on forever. He solemnly told one correspondent in August 1919 that the recent crop failures were "probably the most serious agricultural problem the Province has ever faced" and that providing the needed relief for another year "may prove to be beyond the financial ability of the Province."101

By 1920, it had become obvious to many that there were indeed serious problems with agriculture on the semiarid plains. In little more than a decade, about $12 million had been expended on agricultural relief in Saskatchewan by all levels of government since the area had been opened for settlement (see Figure 9). Certain questions loomed large. Had Ottawa's policy of unrestricted settlement on the semiarid plains been such a good idea? Were summerfallowing and other "scientific" dry farming methods really a panacea for drought and chronic aridity? Were some regions of the Palliser Triangle completely unfit for cereal agriculture? Whatever the case, the province's leaders could ill afford to ignore the situation. The tens of thousands of farmers in the region—though despondent and debt-ridden—were also voters, and the Saskatchewan Liberal party had ruled the province continuously since 1905 by paying close attention to farm interests.102

The Martin government essentially had two options for dealing with the situation: it could continue to shell out money for relief and relief-loan guarantees for LIDs and RMs respectively, each and every drought year and eventually go bankrupt, or it could try to find a more constructive and long term solution to the problem. It chose the latter. 35 ENDNOTES—CHAPTER ONE

"Canada. 1905: The Biggest Crop in the History of the Canadian West (Ottawa: Department of the Interior, 1905), 2-4, 9-12. 2Quoted in Bill Waiser, The Field Naturalist: John Macoun, The Geological Survey and Natural Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 53. 3D.F. Acton, et al. The Ecoregions of Saskatchewan (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1998), 104-08; 125-30. 4Throughout much of the Palliser Triangle, precipitation constitutes less than 70 per cent of potential evaporation, except for an area on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border known as the Dry Belt where precipitation constitutes less than 60 per cent of potential evaporation [Donald Lemmen and Lisa Dale- Burnett, "The Palliser Triangle" in Ka-iu Fung, ed., Atlas of Saskatchewan, Second Edition (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, 1999), 41]. 5Lynden Penner, "Missouri Coteau" in The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2005), 620. 6Scholars have interpreted the Canadian Dry Belt's geographical dimensions differently. In his important 1956 study of the area, geographer Jack R. Villimow described it as "one half the size of Palliser's Triangle... and extending at least 100 miles beyond the northern limit of the Triangle." In 1987, prairie Dry Belt historian David C. Jones defined it as "the area roughly between 107 degrees west longitude and 113 degrees west longitude, sitting as the head of a bullet on the international boundary and curving northward to virtually 52 degrees north latitude." A map included in the inner cover of Jones's book Empire of Dust shows that the prairie Dry Belt engulfs a somewhat larger area of southeastern Alberta than southwestern Saskatchewan [Jack R. Villimow, "The Nature and Origin of the Canadian Dry Belt" Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 46, No. 2 (June 1956), 212-13; Jones, Empire of Dust, 13]. 7Soil 'texture' refers to the amount of clay, silt and sand particles found in a particular soil. These range from clay, in which clay particles dominate to coarse sands which contain very little clay. In between are the loamy soils that are mixtures of clay, silt and sand particles [H.C. Moss, History of the Saskatchewan Soil Survey, 1921-1959 (University of Saskatchewan: Saskatchewan Institute of Pedology, 1983), 2]. 8Alberta, A Report on the Rehabilitation of the Dry Areas of Alberta and Crop Insurance (Edmonton: King's Printer, 1936), 9. 'Unknown to prairie soil scientists and farmers until the 1950s, levels of nitrogen in plant-available form (nitrate nitrogen) on summerfallow land were much greater than on land that was cropped. While this was the case in all soil zones, the amounts accumulated during the fallow year were much higher in the black and grey (i.e. wooded) soil regions to the north. These soils had greater amounts of organic matter and nitrogen and hence more capacity for release of nitrate nitrogen than the Dark Brown or Brown soils. If summerfallowed, nitrogen levels on brown soils are sufficient for growing crops, and scanty annual rainfall prevents lime and other essential minerals from leaching deep into the subsoil beyond the reach of plant roots. Hence, plant food is readily available, provided that enough moisture is received to dissolve it into usable form [W.J. Carlyle, "The Decline of Summerfallow on the Canadian Prairies" The Canadian Geographer Vol. 41, No.3 (1997), 271; Ibid., 19]. 10Tree-ring analyses have shown that subnormal precipitation has been common to the region over the past 300 years. [David J. Sauchyn, et al. "Aridity on the Canadian Plains" Geographic physique et Quaternaire Vol. 56, Nos. 2-3 (2002), 252, 255]. 1 'John Palliser quoted in Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on the South Saskatchewan River Project (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1952), 82. Put in a modern-day perspective, this area does resemble a rough triangle. The base follows the United States border, from Manitoba's Turtle Mountains in the east to within 50 miles of Calgary in the west. The apex of this triangle is just south of Saskatoon. 12Jones, Empire of Dust, 1. 13H.Y. Hind, Reports of Progress; Together with a Preliminary and General Report on the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition (Toronto: John Lovell, 1859), 31. Early Canadiana Online Website, Available: http://www.canadiana.org/ [Accessed 20 January 2006]. 36

Approximately 35 years before Captain Palliser's exploration of the Canadian prairies, the American cartographer and explorer Stephen Long had mapped the 'desert' region of the continental interior, otherwise known as the Great Plains, or 'The Great American Desert.' [Walter Nemanishen. Drought in the Palliser Triangle: A Provisional Primer (1998). Available: http://www.agr.gc.ca/pfra/publications e.htm, (Accessed 29 October, 2003), 5; David C. Jones, We'll All Be Buried Down Here: The Prairie Dryland Disaster, 1917-1926 (Calgary: Historical Society of Alberta, 1986), xxx]. Douglas Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West (University of Toronto Press, 1980), 12-14; Chapter Two; Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy, 26. 16 Statutes of Canada, 1870 Vict. 33, c. 3, c, 25. 17Quoted in Owram, 113. Jones, Empire of Dust, 12-14. 19Bill Waiser, "A Willing Scapegoat: John Macoun and the Route of the CPR" Prairie Forum Vol. 10, No. 1 (Spring 1985), 66. 20W.A. Mackintosh, Prairie Settlement: The Geographical Setting (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934), 205 (Appendix on Soils). 21Stewart L. Udall, The Quiet Crisis (New York, Chicago and San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 54. 22Thomas S. Axworthy, "Liberalism" in The Canadian Encyclopedia [Online] Available: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com [Accessed: 10 April 2008]. 23V.C. Fowke, "The Myth of the Self-Sufficient Canadian Pioneer", Royal Society of Canada, Transactions, 54, Series III, (June 1962), 23-37 and Allan Smith, "The Myth of the Self-made Man in English Canada, 1850-1914" Canadian Historical Review Vol. 59, No. 2 (1978), 189-219; D.J. Hall, "Clifford Sifton: Immigration and Settlement Policy" in R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, eds. The Prairie West: Historical Readings (Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1985), 290. 24Department of Justice Canada, The Constitution Act, 1867 [Online] Available: http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/const/cl867 e.html# 25Section 95 of the BNA Act states: "In each Province the Legislature may make Laws in relation to Agriculture in the Province, and to Immigration into the Province; and it is hereby declared that the Parliament of Canada may from Time to Time make Laws in relation to Agriculture in all or any of the Provinces, and to Immigration into all or any of the Provinces; and any Law of the Legislature of a Province relative to Agriculture or to Immigration shall have effect in and for the Province as long and as far only as it is not repugnant to any Act of the Parliament of Canada" Department of Justice Canada Website, "The Constitution Act, 1867" [Online] Available: http://laws.iustice.gc.ca/en/const/cl867 e.html [Accessed 8 December 2006]. 26W.M. Drummond, et al, A Review of Agricultural Policy in Canada (Ottawa: Agriculture Economics Research Council of Canada, 1966), 2-6. 27The OAC's mandate was to advance "the knowledge of the facts, principles and laws of the science and art of agriculture, horticulture and arboriculture under the climatic conditions" of that province and had initiated research and formal education programs on cereals, forage crops, grasses and trees; soils and tillage methods; the breeding and raising of livestock; and dairying [Ontario, Report of the President of the Ontario Agricultural College, Guelph, for the year commencing Is' January and ending 31st December 1881 (Guelph, Ontario: Ontario Agricultural College, 1882?), 1-3]. 28V.C. Fowke, Canadian Agricultural Policy: The Historical Pattern (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947), 160, 149. 29The experience of Alexander Kindred, a pioneer of the Wolseley district, was typical. "[In 1885] we had only 10 bushels [per acre] of very badly-frosted wheat. I took some to Indian Head and traded it for flour, shorts and bran. I had no money to pay expenses.. .In 1886 we had 80 acres of crop. Not a drop of rain fell from the time it went in until it was harvested. I sowed 124 bushels and threshed 54." Horror stories like these undoubtedly tarnished the Northwest's reputation and resulted in slow immigration to the region; by 1900, only 91,000 and 73,000 people were living in the territories that now comprise Saskatchewan and Alberta, respectively [Quoted in Morton, 86; Dave Sauchyn, "A 250-Year Climate and Human History of Prairie Drought" in Dave Sauchyn, et al, eds. The Science, Impacts and Monitoring of 37

Drought in Western Canada (University of Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2005), 29; W.A. Mackintosh, Prairie Settlement: The Geographical Setting (Toronto: Macmillan, 1934), xi, xii; Canada, Royal Commission on South Saskatchewan River, 94]. 30The Revised Statutes of Canada, 1886, 49 V., c. 57. 3IThe federal government's plan for the DEFS closely followed the recommendations of Dr. Charles Saunders, who had visited the important agricultural colleges in the United States and Canada on its behalf in 1885 to determine their benefits for the proposed Canadian system. "From the facts...," Saunders argued in his 1886 report "regarding the expenditure connected with agricultural education in teaching colleges in America, added to the necessary cost of equipping the various institutions, it is evident that the outlay is very large in proportion to the number of persons directly benefited. Further, it has been shown that agricultural experimental stations have been of very great service in supplying much needed information and stimulating progress in agriculture wherever they have been established, and that these good results have been and are being brought about at comparatively small cost. In Canada agriculture may be said to lie at the foundation of the nation's prosperity.. .but since any very large outlay at the commencement might be injudicious it would perhaps be better to consider first the most pressing needs, and provide for them as soon as practicable, leaving the important subject of agricultural education in colleges for future consideration" [Charles Saunders, "Report on Agricultural Colleges and Experimental Stations, With Suggestions Relating to Experimental Agriculture in Canada, 20th February 1886," in Canada, Sessional Papers, 1886, No. 10, 49 Vict. A. 18, 268]. 32TheRevised StatutesofCanada, 1886, 49 V., c. 57. •- •- - 33Ibid., 106-07. 34Angus Mackay—the first director of the Indian Head Experimental Farm—argued that summerfallowing, when used in a three year crop rotation, was "the only safe way of growing grain in this country" [Quoted in Morton, 106]. 35H.W. Campbell, Campbell's 1907 Soil Culture Manual (Lincoln, Nebraska: The Campbell Soil Culture Co., 1909), 118-26, 250. 36R. Bruce Shepard, "W.R. Motherwell and the Dry Farming Congress in Canada" Saskatchewan History Vol. 49, No. 2 (1997), 21-22. 37Quoted in Mary W.M. Hargreaves, "The Dry-Farming Movement in Retrospect" Agricultural History Vol. 51, No.l (1977), 155; Ibid., 22-25. 38Gary D. Libecap, "Learning about the Weather: Dryfarming Doctrine and Homestead Failure in Eastern Montana, 1900-1925" Montana Vol. 52, No. 1 (2002), 29. 39In the period 1906-1910, the average price of No. 1 Northern wheat at Winnipeg was 19 cents per bushel higher than that for the period 1891-1900 [Morton, 125; Dave Sauchyn, "A 250-Year Climate and Human History of Prairie Drought" in Sauchyn, et al, eds. The Science, Impacts and Monitoring of Drought..., 29]. 40Waiser, Saskatchewan, 494. 41Britnell, The Wheat Economy, 36, 50. 42In the early 1880s, the CPR established ten demonstration farms along its main line between Moose Jaw and Calgary in an attempt to 'prove' that grains and vegetable gardens could be grown on the short grass plains as successfully as in Manitoba. Despite some early optimism, the farms' long term results led the CPR to reject much of the land adjacent to its mainline west of the Third Meridian. The railway's agricultural work was focused on irrigation farming in Alberta for the next few decades [Jones, Empire of Dust, 14-15; James. B. Hedges, Building the Canadian West: The Land and Colonization Policies of the Canadian Pacific Railway (New York: Russell & Russell, 1939), 321]. ^Statutes of Canada, 1872, 35 Vict., c 23. 44Ibid., 1876, 39 Vict. c. 19. 45David Breen, "The Ranching Frontier in Canada, 1875-1905" in Lewis H. Thomas, ed. The Prairie West to 1905: A Canadian Sourcebook (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975), 226. 46According to David Breen, Oliver took personal control of his department's Timber and Grazing Branch, but he was forced to maintain a "token system, which never offered cattlemen more than two years' security" because many of the large ranching interests still exerted considerable political clout in the 1900s [Breen, Ranching Frontier..., 141]. 47Quoted in Ibid. 38

Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History, 56-57. See also Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (New York: The Viking Press, 1962), 221-38. 49The settler was obliged to pay for one-third his pre-emption within three years and pay off the remainder in five annual installments [Statutes of Canada, 1908, 7-8 Edw. VII, c. 20; Martin, 418-21]. 50As Oliver explained to the House of Commons, "if a man can only farm one half of his land each year [the other half lying fallow] then he must have twice as much land if he is going to raise as much crop" [Canada, House of Commons Debates, 23 June 1908, 11141]. 51Sauchyn, "A 250-Year Climate and Human History...," 29. 52Saskatchewan Farmer, June 1920, 12. "Roughly 50,000 quarter sections were pre-empted in Saskatchewan alone [Canada, Royal Commission on South Saskatchewan River, 106; Saskatchewan, Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Farming Conditions [hereafter Better Farming Commission] (Regina: King's Printer, 1921), 8]. 54Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Saskatchewan, 1926: Population and Agriculture (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1927), 9. "Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 34. 56Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on the South Saskatchewan River Project (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, Queen's Printer and Controller of Stationery, 1952), 106. 57Potyondi, 92. 58Saskatchewan, Report of the Grain Markets Commission (Regina: King's Printer, 1914), 14-15. 59Historian Chester Martin has estimatedthat 57 per cent ofall original homestead entries filed on Dominion Lands in Saskatchewan from 1911 to 1930 were cancelled. Cancellation rates on the semiarid plains were among the highest on the prairies. In his 1914 report, the Dominion Lands agent for the Maple Creek Dominion Lands District (opened just a year before) noted that "the good land in this district is practically all taken up now, and cancellations are the order of the day..." Indeed, 47 per cent of the 4,467 homestead and pre-emption entries in that District in 1913-14 were cancelled; rates as high as 57 per cent and 63 per cent in the Moose Jaw and Medicine Hat Dominion Lands Districts, respectively, were even recorded that year [Martin, 431; Canada, Sessional Papers, 5 Geo. V, 1915, No. 25, 32] 60One 1946 study of the RM of Mankota found that 53 per cent of the quarter-sections therein had been filed on more than once for homesteads or preemptions, and 18 per cent three or more times [D.M. Loveridge and Barry Potyondi, From Wood Mountain to the Whitemud: A Historical Survey of the Grasslands National Park Area (Parks Canada: National Historic Parks and Sites Branch, 1983), 160]. 61Gray, 19. 62Saskatchewan, Report of the Department of Agriculture (hereafter Agriculture Report), 1910 (Regina: Government Printer, 1911), 66. 63The series of poor crops after 1908 left many settlers unable to repay their debts. The Beaver Lumber Company, for example, informed W.R. Motherwell, Saskatchewan's Minister of Agriculture, in an August 1914 letter that it had "extremely large outstandings" at nearly all of its twenty lumber yards in southwestern Saskatchewan" [SAB, W.R. Motherwell [hereafter Motherwell] Papers, R-2.719, File #164, Manager of the Beaver Lumber Company Ltd. to W.R. Motherwell, 18 August 1914]. 64In the South-Western crop district, for example, the combined average yield of oats and barley was just 0.9 bushels per acre compared with 31 bushels per acre the previous year [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1914, 113]. 65For example, the federal Department of Agriculture had extended $60,000 in relief to Manitoba settlers in response to severe grasshopper infestations in that province from 1873 to 1875, and it had also provided nearly $47,000 in seed grain to settlers in the North-West Territories following severe drought and killing frosts in 1884-85 [Fowke, Canadian Agricultural Policy, 221; Morton, 89]. 66Clifford Sifton quoted in Hall, 293. 67Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1907, 93, 111; "Correspondence and Papers relating to Seed Grain Distribution of 1908 in the Provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta", Canada, Sessional Papers, 8-9 Edw. VII, No. 25c, A. 1909, 19-20. 68D.B. Climenhaga, "Public Finance in Saskatchewan during the Settlement Process, 1905-1929" (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1949), 70-75; Canada, Canada Year Book 1932, (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1933), 734-36. 39

69The Dominion Department of Agriculture performed several important regulatory functions for Canada's agricultural industries. In the 1880s it began inspecting, cleaning and grading western grain bound for foreign markets, and Ottawa had assumed broader authority over grain transportation and storage facilities (both country elevators on the prairies and the larger terminals at the Lakehead and elsewhere) with the passage of the Manitoba Grain Act in 1900 [Fowke, Canadian Agricultural Policy..., Chapter 9]. 70In 1910, the acreage ratio of patented to unpatented lands in Saskatchewan was 1.2 to 1 [Martin, 410]. 71Frank Oliver to W.R. Motherwell, 27 November 1907 in "Correspondence and Papers...", Canada, Sessional Papers, A. 1909, Ibid, 5. 72Saskatchewan borrowed $1.8 million from Ottawa in 1908 to cover its share of relief. In the end, only $566,000 was ultimately spent on relief in that province that year [Canada, Sessional Papers, 9-10 Edw. VII, No. 25, A. 1910, 6-15; Figure 9]. 13 Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1912, c. 31. 74In 1915, the ratio of patented to unpatented lands in Saskatchewan was 2.8 to 1 [Martin, 410]. "Saskatchewan, Public Accounts of the Province of Saskatchewan for the Fiscal Period ended April 30, 1915 (Regina: Government Printer, 1915), 124, 151; Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1914, 10, 11, 111. 76Regina Morning Leader, 2 February 1915, 1. 77J. Castell Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs, 1915 (Toronto: The Annual Review Publishing Company, 1916), 654. 78iCanada , House of Commons Debates, 23 March 1915, 1334. 7*SAB9 c , Department of Agriculture [hereafter Ag.] Papers, R-266, File #111.18, "1915 Seed Grain Fodder and Relief." 80Canada, House of Commons Debates, 23 March 1915, 1330, 1339. 81 Archer, 171. 82Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1915, 120. 83Martin, 410. 84[Canada, Sessional Papers, 7 Geo. V, A. 1917, No. 25, 4; Waiser, Saskatchewan, 258-9; Manitoba Free Press, 5 September 1919, 13]. 85Ibid., 21-22; Ibid., 1918, 111; 1919, 105; 1920, 17. Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1917, c.47. 87The exact definition of a Local Improvement District (LID) varied during Saskatchewan's early history. At the end of World War I, LIDs (unlike rural municipalities) had no form of local municipal organization and taxes were levied and collected by the provincial Department of Municipal Affairs for road and bridge construction and other 'local improvements.' LIDs were generally found in the province's more sparsely populated frontier regions and covered much larger areas of territory than RMs. Because they were directly administered by the provincial government, the Local Improvement Districts Act was amended in 1917 to enable it to provide seed grain to needy persons in exchange for a lien on their land [Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1917 (Second Session), c.29; Saskatchewan, Department of Municipal Affairs Annual Report, 1919-20 (Regina: King's Printer, 1920), 18-19]. 88Jones, Empire of Dust, 121. 89According to the 1921 Census, there were twenty LIDs situated within the five Census Districts (2, 3, 4, 7 and 8) located in Saskatchewan's drought area in 1919 [Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Sixth Census of Canada, 1921, Vol. V: Agriculture (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1925), 163-65]. '"Saskatchewan, Journals and Sessional Papers of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Saskatchewan, 1920 (Regina: King's Printer, 1920), 55. 91Ibid., Department of Municipal Affairs Annual Report, 1920-21 (Regina: King's Printer, 1921), 9- 10. ^Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1919-20, c.33. 93SAB, Charles A. Dunning [hereafter Dunning] Papers, R-7.3, File #X-12-2, Ben McGregor (Sec. Treas. of RM of Morse, No. 165) to C.A. Dunning, 25 July 1919, 16,313. Similar messages appear in Ibid., Roy S. Wells (Sec. Treas. of RM of Monet, No. 257) to W.M. Martin, 15 July 1919, 16,289 and H.B. Myers (Sec. Treas. of RM of Pleasant Valley, No. 288) to C.A. Dunning, 16 August 1919, 16,333. 94Swift Current Sun, 18 July 1919, 1. 40

Saskatchewan Farmer, July 1920, 5; Regina Morning Leader, 9 August 1919, 28; SAB, Ag. Papers, Papers, R-261, File #22.15, Thos. Malloy to F.H. Auld, 24 November 1919. ^Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1920, 257. 97Regina Morning Leader, 9 August 1919,28. 98Saskatchewan Farmer, July 1920, 5. "Gross provincial revenues for Saskatchewan in 1920 totaled $9,903,885 [Canada, Canada Year Book 1932, (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1933), 734]. ™Saskatchewan Farmer, July 1920, 5. 101SAB, Dunning Papers, File #X-12-2, C.A. Dunning to W.T. Badger (MLA for Rosetown), 18 August 1919, 16,329. 102J. William Brennan, "Charles A. Dunning" in Gordon Barnhart, ed. Saskatchewan Premiers of the Twentieth Century (University of Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2004), 69. CHAPTER TWO: The "Better Farming" Commission, 1920-1921

Undeniably, the agricultural crisis in southwestern Saskatchewan had become one of the province's most pressing problems by 1920. The Martin government was unsure of the best means of dealing with it, but it was evidently aware that farmers and scientists in Saskatchewan and elsewhere on the Great Plains were also beginning to search for solutions to the challenges of dryland farming. F.H. Auld, Saskatchewan's Deputy

Minister of Agriculture, began to receive a number of requests that his Department invite some of these individuals to share their experiences in a conference at some central point in the province's drought area.1 George Spence—Member of the Legislative Assembly

(MLA) for southwestern Saskatchewan's Notukeu riding and a concerned Dry Belt farmer—helped promote the idea, and his efforts soon caught the attention of the press.2

Auld and Spence had also found an ally in CM. Hamilton, C.A. Dunning's replacement as Minister of Agriculture, and Hamilton soon announced his plan to hold a "Better

Farming Conference" from 6 to 8 July 1920. Petitions from the Swift Current Board of

Trade would persuade Hamilton to select that city as the site for the gathering.3

The Better Farming Conference was duly held (ironically, perhaps, it rained heavily in the Swift Current area while it took place).4 "There are those...," declared

Hamilton boldly during the Conference's opening address

who say that the western and southwestern portions of the province should never have been settled, that a great mistake was made when farmers were allowed to go in and take up homesteads, that this large area should have been left to the ranc[h]ers. I am not prepared to take that ground at the present time. The fact is the people are here and I believe it to be our duty to put forth every effort to endeavor to put agriculture on a sound basis throughout the whole area of the Province of Saskatchewan.5

The press praised the Martin government for its resolve to do something about the crisis,6 42 but discussion at the gathering highlighted some sobering realities about agriculture on

the semiarid plains. Some delegates stressed that chronic aridity and frequent drought

were a fact of life in the area, and that those who farmed there would have to adapt

accordingly.7 Others opined that a good deal of its land area should never have been

broken up for grain growing and must be turned back to grazing.8 A three day gathering

was hardly expected to reach any definite conclusions, and the Conference passed a

resolution urging the province to make "a detailed study of the situation" to find out what

might be done to improve upon those methods of farming and settlement already in use in

southwestern Saskatchewan. The Martin government was quick to respond, and the

Royal Commission of Inquiry into Farming Conditions—popularly known as the Better

Farming Commission (BFC)—was appointed the next month.

The Saskatchewan government's use of a royal commission to investigate the

agricultural problems of the Palliser Triangle constitutes what modern political science

calls a "symbolic response",10 and a number of explanations have been offered as to why

this approach is used. One reason, according to G. Bruce Doern and Richard W. Phidd,

is "because there is genuinely no solution to the problem at hand," and can be a valid

means of collecting information to formulate public policy. Neil Bradford has noted that

royal commissions have often been cynically regarded as "stalling mechanisms or

devices for obfuscating issues and defusing controversy." However, J.E. Hodgetts has

suggested that they serve at least one other purpose: to provide a "stamp of approval for a

line of action to which the government is already firmly committed."11 The BFC really

called attention to 'solutions' that provincial officials were already aware of, and had begun to promote. 43 The BFC—comprised of Chairman W.J. Rutherford, Dean of the Saskatchewan

College of Agriculture (SCA); Secretary F.H. Auld; John Bracken, President of the

Manitoba College of Agriculture and formerly professor of field husbandry in the SCA;

H.O Powell, Manager of the Weyburn Security Bank; and two farmers from the drought area, Neil McTaggart of Gull Lake and George Spence—got to work right away. On 24

August 1920, the day after it was formed, it met at the Saskatchewan legislature to hammer out a program of investigation. Its avowed purpose was to "ascertain the facts of the situation with a view to determining what developments would be in the best interests of the country as a whole", and it defined its official area of study as that region west of a line joining North Portal and Elbow and south of the South Saskatchewan River.12 The help of other experts was apparently required, for three "subcommittees" comprised of other faculty members of the SCA were created to carry out the investigative work. The

BFC was also given the power to hold public hearings, and it soon announced dates for sittings in twelve communities in southwestern Saskatchewan once the subcommittees had completed their investigations.

From the outset, the commissioners had to look one fact squarely in the eye: the extension of the wheat growing frontier into the semiarid plains had been accomplished only with difficulty. To be sure, the area had become hugely important to Saskatchewan.

In 1920, its three southwestern Crop Districts accounted for over 40 per cent of its total wheat acreage, and their spectacular wheat harvests in 1915 and 1916 had helped cement the province's reputation as "Canada's Bread Basket" (see Figure 6). The region's soils had been brought into production through the use of farm implements like the chilled steel plow and the disc harrow and dry farming techniques such as summerfallowing and 44 the "Campbell method." However, the severity, extent and frequency of the crop failures seen in the southwest over the preceding decade had shown that there was no such thing as a 'fail-safe' dry farming method. Although such techniques did help to reduce the risk of a total crop failure in a single drought year, they could conserve moisture only if moisture existed, and during a series of dry years they were incapable of producing a profitable crop. Furthermore, the intense cultivation required of these dry farming methods (i.e. the creation of a fine surface dust mulch) also produced ideal conditions for erosion by the wind. "The farmers of this locality", complained an official of the

Saskatchewan Grain Growers' Association (SGGA) local for Bickleigh (40 km southwest of Rosetown) to F.H. Auld in a 1918 letter,

have in the past pinned their faith to two pet hobbies of the Dept. of Agriculture[: s]ummerfallow and its attendant dry farming methods.. .Both good so far as they go, but both at times falling short of expectations, and much in need of thoughtful revision.. .It may indeed be humiliating to know that the grain crops in a great wheat producing country like Sask. are liable in any season to be dried out, hailed or frozen, but the fact remains, and it is better to admit the fact and face the situation squarely, rather than endeavor to camouflage it as has been done, it is amply proven in this locality and we doubt not in others, that the best known methods of agriculture will fail to bring results some years.14

The commissioners also looked upon southwestern farmers' dependence on wheat monoculture with some concern. In truth, Saskatchewan's agricultural leaders had long warned farmers of the dangers of "putting all their eggs in one basket." The highly variable nature of world wheat prices appeared to support such a contention; the robust

European markets that had driven prairie agricultural expansion during World War I had begun to shrink by the time the BFC was created; between 1919 and 1920, the average price of a bushel of wheat in Canada had fallen from $2.37 to $1.62—a decrease of nearly one-third.15 The only "safe" system of agriculture, they argued, was one in which 45 livestock comprised a central part. WJ. Rutherford held this view. An expert in animal science, Rutherford had served as Saskatchewan's Deputy Minister of Agriculture in

1908 and 1909 before becoming Dean of the SCA in 1910—a position he would hold until his death in 1930.16 As he told one audience in 1909,

a farmer who has his farm well stocked with livestock, has an insurance against crop losses. He will at all times have animals of some sort or other to sell, for which he will be able to realize at least a fair cash remuneration, and then too, this farmer has a means of utilizing many of the bi-products [sic] of his farm that would otherwise go to waste and he can in the form of mutton, pork, wool, milk, or work, market these bi-products so as to effect an economic gain to himself and the community.17

Rutherford's assessment was really little more than a tired cliche. It is important to note that the postwar recession had also wreaked havoc with livestock markets (cattle prices had fallen by 55 per cent from 1918 to 1924), rendering moot the argument that mixed farming provided "an insurance against crop losses."18 And the commissioners

could not deny certain realities about agriculture in the Palliser Triangle. Put simply, the

growing of wheat was (and would long remain) the region's dominant economic activity because it was well adapted to a semiarid climate. Its deep roots allowed it to withstand

drought better than other cereals, and the heat produced harder, higher quality wheat kernels. As well, wheat growing yielded larger and faster returns than dairying or stock

raising and did not demand the mixed farm's array of buildings, corrals and fences, wells

and windmills, haying equipment and breeding stock—considerations of first importance when men and money were scarce. And of course, the homestead system and the network of grain elevators and railways in the region had been built upon the production

of wheat for sale on international markets. At the time of the 1921 Census, field crops

(mainly wheat and its support crop, oats) accounted for 88 per cent of the value of all 46 agricultural products sold in the four southwestern Census Districts, whereas livestock sold live or in processed form made up just three and nine per cent, respectively.19

However, stock raising was not promoted solely for economic reasons. The diversified farm was thought to be a 'better' farm, plain and simple. Indeed, if a farmer lost his main cash crop in a drought (and the income upon which he relied to purchase groceries and other items for his family), he might be able to produce at least a portion of his food supplies on his own farm and—ideally—eventually become less of a relief burden to the municipality. Possibly influenced by the "Country Life" ideology prevalent

9ft in North America in the early twentieth century, Saskatchewan's agricultural leaders viewed farming as no mere business, but as a way of life.21 To enhance the appeal and stability of rural life throughout the province, they spent considerable energies promoting what was called "Better Farming" (i.e. utilizing the land more efficiently, employing state of the art techniques to produce greater yields and improved quality in both grain and livestock). The provincial Department of Agriculture continued and elaborated upon traditional education extension policies; it provided grants to agricultural societies and various stock breeding associations; distributed 'how-to' bulletins on such topics as farm horticulture, stock raising and dairying; and supplied lecturers to Farmers' Institutes to discuss the latest trends in field and animal husbandry. In 1910, management of all education extension activities in the province was transferred to the SCA (established in

1909).22 Settlers could even obtain trees and shrubs from the Department of the Interior to provide fruit, shelter and beautification for their farms.23

And stock raising evidently did persist as an integral part of farm life in the

Palliser Triangle. As Canadian prairie historian Paul Voisey has explained, "it provided 47 many settlers with a comforting link to home and tradition" even when practiced "in a token manner."24 Most settlers in the region had come from areas where mixed farming was common practice, and they often did raise their own meat, eggs and milk on their prairie homesteads for subsistence and sold the surplus to neighbours.25 And they were indeed keeping plenty of livestock at the time of the BFC: the 1921 Census counted about

420,000 head of cattle, sheep and swine and two million poultry in addition to some

325,000 horses on the 32,502 farms in the four southwestern Census Districts.26 Though a large number of the cattle (perhaps 40 per cent) were on ranches, at least three-quarters of all farms in those districts reported cattle and poultry and half reported swine.27

But these settlers were all too aware of the challenges associated with maintaining their livestock during a drought. They often either had to accept relief feed to carry their animals through the winter or sell them in poor condition at a sacrifice, further depressing market prices. The shortage of feed and finances had in fact left many unable to hold on to their animals; an analysis of livestock statistics in the southwestern Crop Districts indicates a 22 per cent drop in the total number of cattle, sheep, swine and poultry between 1918 and 1920 (see Figure 7). Still, Saskatchewan's Livestock Commissioner affirmed in his 1920 annual report that many southwestern farmers "bear evidence that in numerous cases their cattle and hogs carried them over and supplied them with the necessities of life which they could not have secured from any system of grain farming during the past three years." The BFC faced a difficult problem indeed: it had to recommend a means of increasing local feed production to make it possible for these farmers to keep their livestock that was at the same time in step with an economy that had become geared toward wheat production. 48 As a first step, a "Subcommittee on Drifting Soils" was created to study the problems of crop production in a semiarid climate and to suggest possible remedies. Its personnel—including Roy Hansen and Manley Champlin, professors of soils and field husbandry in the SCA and S.H. Vigor, the provincial Field Crops Commissioner—chose

to advocate the views of their colleague John Bracken (its main contribution to the BFC

report was really a long quotation from Bracken's recently published book Dry Farming

in Western Canada). An authority on soil science and dry farming, Bracken had written many bulletins and pamphlets on crop production in western Canada since joining the

SCA in 1910.30 "The 'dust mulch'", wrote Bracken "has no place in the agriculture of

any dry country where high winds prevail." Bracken's remark was hardly contentious.

The experience of severe drought and crop failures in large parts of the Great Plains just

before World War I had shown that the Campbell method could not guarantee a crop; in

fact, H.W. Campbell's influence in the International Dry Farming Congress declined

greatly after 1909.31 Bracken outlined certain tillage methods for soil drifting control that

had gradually found acceptance elsewhere on the northern Great Plains, chiefly in the

United States. One of these entailed the use of special cultivators that left the topsoil in a

lumpy (as opposed to a powdery) state to prevent it from blowing away in the wind.

Another involved plowing fields into alternating strips of fallow and crop that were laid

out at right angles to the prevailing winds so as to prevent cumulative erosion.32

But the commissioners were particularly impressed with another dry farming

technique gaining popularity at the time. Bracken indicated that the worst soil erosion

often occurred not during the summer, but in the spring before the crop had germinated or

in the winter if the snow cover was light. The "chief and most permanent means" of 49 mitigating this threat, he contended, was to restore fiber and nutrients to these soils by planting "cover crops" on otherwise bare summerfallow as "summerfallow substitutes".33

Sowing grains such as wheat, oats and especially winter rye in the fall could help anchor the topsoil during the winter. He also suggested growing fodder crops such as alfalfa, sweet clover, corn and sunflowers in rotation with wheat during the summer to leave behind protective stubble for the rest of the year. To be sure, these crops' cash value paled in comparison with wheat's, but they had the potential to provide the added benefit of a forage supplement for cattle, hogs, poultry and other livestock. Bracken's advice on

"summerfallow substitutes" was really based on the results of two decades of intensive research conducted by the United States Department of Agriculture's Office of Dry Land

Agriculture.34 While growing cover crops appeared to defeat summerfallowing's main purpose on the Great Plains (namely moisture conservation), they had been selected for their drought-resistance and their efficient use of soil moisture (corn was best in this regard). Farmers in Kansas, Nebraska and North and South Dakota had been practicing it successfully by this time (in fact, Manley Champlin had taught in the South Dakota

Agricultural College before joining the SCA in 1920 and was fully acquainted with it).35

The BFC report was not unreserved in its enthusiasm for the "summerfallow substitute" system. In fact, it was hesitant to recommend it as a "complete solution" due to the fact that the appropriate cover crops had so far "never been given a comprehensive trial in the south-western districts."36 As John Bracken solemnly told the Better Farming

Conference, both agricultural scientists and farmers in the province faced the problem of placing agriculture "on a scientific foundation."37 In a time when moisture availability as a factor in grain growing on the semiarid plains was becoming more appreciated,38 long 50 term precipitation records existed for just three localities in Saskatchewan's portion of the

Palliser Triangle. What is more, the fledgling SCA was scarcely in a position to offer definite policy advice on crop production in the area. Bracken told one audience in 1917 that the SCA had conducted "hundreds of experiments" on grain and forage crops and tillage methods over the past six years, but he stressed that the work "[did] not answer the problems of other soils and other climatic zones of the province."40

"The principal thing needed", affirmed the BFC report emphatically "is MORE

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE", and it therefore urged the senior governments to gather more data on climate, crop production and cultivation methods on the semiarid plains.41 Its first recommendation was for the Dominion Meteorological Service (the main weather reporting agency in Canada) to collect additional precipitation records in southwestern

Saskatchewan to enable resident farmers and agricultural scientists "to know exactly the climatic conditions under which they are labouring."42 Because Saskatchewan now had its own agricultural college—and because it was desirable for education and research to be closely entwined to ensure the best possible instruction—the report also recommended that the SCA be empowered to set up a series of "substations" in the area to help it to be better informed of the region's agricultural capabilities. These substations were to be big enough to conduct field husbandry and "balanced farming" experiments. In order to do these effectively, the report advised that they be located at "convenient centres" and

"with due reference to climatic and soil conditions."43

However, matters were complicated because the federal government was still very much active in the field of agricultural research. In fact, the number of DEFS facilities had grown considerably since 1886 to serve Canada's other agricultural frontiers.44 By 51 the time of the Better Farming Conference, the Borden government had also announced its intention to establish a new Experimental Station at Swift Current.45 In truth, farmers and Saskatchewan politicians had been petitioning Ottawa to establish a DEFS facility in the pre-emption area ever since it had been opened for settlement.46 The relatively good wheat harvests in 1911-13 and the disruption of World War I may have momentarily quelled public enthusiasm for the idea, but it had been passionately reignited by 1919 as the number of crop failures and homestead cancellations in southwestern Saskatchewan mounted.47 Ottawa's decision to comply with these demands may have stemmed from guilt over its promotion of soldier settlement in the area.48 Still, it held to its belief that the provinces should eventually oversee agricultural research in Canada. At a conference of officials of the federal and provincial Departments of Agriculture in March 1920, the federal government had actually offered to retire from the field of agricultural research by handing over DEFS facilities to the provinces in which they were located. The provinces, on counting the cost, apparently declined the offer; indeed, Saskatchewan was then in such poor financial condition that it probably could not afford to establish substations of the SCA for some time. In reply, the federal Deputy Minister of Agriculture is reported to have stated that "...the Dominion should continue to run the [DEFS] stations as they do now until the Provinces were ready to take them over, and if the Provinces want them tomorrow they can have them."49

Ottawa, then, would be mainly responsible for agricultural experimentation work in the Palliser Triangle region for the foreseeable future. As education was an exclusive provincial jurisdiction, the BFC commissioners understood that Saskatchewan could best focus its energies and resources on the task of disseminating what was known to farmers. 52 But of course, research on crop production and tillage methods had only scarcely begun, and farmers were in immediate need of any available information that might help them solve the agricultural problems of their region. Aggravating matters was the fact that the

"one-size-fits-all" approach to agricultural education had been tried and found wanting.

The province had expanded its education extension programs in an effort to reach the settlers pouring into the pre-emption area; Farmers' Institutes, for example, were held at

164 points in the province in 1909—and 370 the next year.50 In 1914, the Department

and the major railways also introduced "Better Farming Trains" to visit towns along major rail lines; these featured instructors of the SCA and included soil tillage and crop rotation lecture and exhibit cars; livestock cars; dairy and poultry lecture cars; machinery

and model farmstead exhibit cars; and horticulture and household science cars. But such

initiatives had their shortcomings. The Better Farming Trains—though popular—could

only contact a fraction of the farm population and visited southwestern Saskatchewan just

three times between 1914 and 1920.51 And even if they did attend the lectures and view

the exhibits, farmers often did not have the time, money or inclination to apply what they

had learned in their particular localities by carrying out systematic tests. The secretary of

the Joint Committee of the Grain Growers' Associations of South Cypress illustrated this

reality in a July 1920 letter to CM. Hamilton.

.. .Mixed farming, which with Stock, fodder crops and tame hay, and a possible income from several sources seems to promise the solution of this very difficult problem, is, unfortunately, hopelessly out of the reach of most of us who in the past ten years have exhausted out never too plentiful resources experimenting, groping as it were in the dark for the proper methods, only to find so varied have been the seasons, that the suitable tillage for one year has been the mistake of the next.52

Corporations with a stake in Palliser Triangle agriculture were also anxious to see 53 a more satisfactory adjustment to local conditions in the region. Financial institutions had become especially concerned about rising governmental relief expenditures and soaring farm debt. Because federal and provincial relief loans were a first lien on a farmer's property, all other mortgages were pushed to second place. With many prairie farmers still paying off their federal relief loans from 1915—and with news in 1919 that the province was again planning to distribute relief—many financial agencies panicked.

By year's end, the Martin government had passed the Seed Grain Advances Act, guaranteeing all seed grain relief loans made by mortgage companies and giving them first lien on the farmer's crop as security for repayment.53 Despite this, many financial institutions refused to do any further business in Saskatchewan.54 At the same time, however, their only hope of collecting payment was if farmers somehow stayed on the land, and it was thus in their best interests to become part of the rehabilitation process by helping these farmers to "play it safe" however and wherever possible.55

The BFC commissioners then pondered the question: how to help? In keeping with the principle of laissez faire, Saskatchewan's education extension programs were

intended to encourage individual enterprise, not to force farmers to farm in a certain way.

But ownership of farmland was now in the hands of tens of thousands of people spread over an area of great variation in soil productivity. This suggested the need for a system of education extension that showed farmers the way to farm more effectively on their

own land. Interestingly, such a system was not unfamiliar in Saskatchewan. In 1915, the

Dominion Department of Agriculture—in keeping with the wishes of the federal

Commission of Conservation (established in 1909)—had established a Canada-wide network of "Illustration Stations" as outposts of the main DEFS farms. Nine Stations 54 were set up in southwestern Saskatchewan; these 40-acre facilities, which explored the

feasibility of producing grain in wheat-fallow, wheat-wheat-fallow and wheat-wheat-

corn/sunflower/clover rotations were located on private farms and were operated under

the supervision of the Indian Head Experimental Farm.56 The Stations did much useful work, but they were not without their critics.57 On the one hand, they were likely too few

in number to be reached by more than a handful of people; one Ponteix area farmer, for

example, told F.H. Auld in a February 1920 letter that perhaps "75% of the people south

of Ponteix in our municipality do not know that there is a demonstration farm at

Pambrun" and that "98% do not know one thing that has been accomplished by

demonstrations there..."58 And even if a farmer did visit a Station, as one man at the

BFC's Shaunavon hearing complained, there was often "no one there to explain

anything..."59 It was desirable to enlist the cooperation of large numbers of farmers in

solving the agricultural problems of specific areas. According to the BFC report, doing so

might involve hiring a corps of "specially trained men" to carry out "cooperative

experiments" with farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan.60

In North America, the usefulness of cooperative experiments a means of solving

agricultural problems at the local level had first been demonstrated in the United States.

In 1903, American agricultural educator Seaman Knapp had received funding from a

group of Texas merchants and bankers to organize a campaign to fight a devastating boll

weevil plague in southern cotton growing states. He recruited a large group of specially

trained "demonstrators" to work directly with individual farmers on their own land to

show them how to control the pest. Knapp's "Cooperative Demonstration Work" system proved to be highly successful; it spread rapidly northward and was adapted to tackle the 55 problems of other agricultural regions.61 For example, the Better Farming Association of

North Dakota—founded in 1911 under the joint sponsorship of banks, millers, grain

elevator companies and lumber and implement dealers—hired a corps of "county agents" to provide practical farm-to-farm guidance on the use of progressive tillage methods and

stock raising on a cost-shared plan with counties 62 By 1913, the Association employed twenty five agents, secured the cooperation of 5,105 farmers, and claimed to have contacted, directly and indirectly, 40 per cent of the state's farming population. (Similar

associations were set up in Minnesota and South Dakota over the next two years). This

system had become so popular that in 1914 the American government passed the Smith-

Lever Act to provide annual federal grants to state agricultural colleges to help them train

their own "extension agents," the work to be supported by state and local governments.63

The Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture had actually tried to introduce a

similar system in the province in response to the massive crop failure of 1914.64 In 1915

it attempted to convince RMs to hire "county agents" like those in North Dakota. But

RMs were much smaller than typical counties in that state, and with fewer ratepayers

could not afford to employ one.65 The Department therefore hired four "Agricultural

Representatives" directly that year to serve western and southwestern Saskatchewan, and

one of their main functions was to organize 25-acre "demonstration fields" of cover crops on private farms like those found in North Dakota.;66 financial institutions helped supply the necessary seed for this work.67 (These fields were really intended to become a source of seed with which to grow much larger areas of summerfallow substitute crops). Oddly enough, the Canadian Parliament had also facilitated this initiative through its passage of the Agricultural Instruction Act (1913), which provided for unconditional grants over ten 56 years to the provinces to improve rural economic, social and educational conditions.68

The Agricultural Representatives had made an encouraging start to their work, though it

all but ceased after three of the four men enlisted for overseas service in 1916.69 Still, the

BFC was anxious to study the progress of similar initiatives south of the border, and it

sent a "Subcommittee on Investigation and Extension" (comprised of John Bracken, CM.

Hamilton and H.O. Powell) to visit agricultural colleges and research stations in North

Dakota and Minnesota to observe their methods of experimentation and the functioning

of their county agent programs. Sure enough, the BFC recommended that Agricultural

Representatives be reintroduced in the province, but it suggested that blocks of four RMs

forming a square could hire them on a shared cost basis with the Saskatchewan

government: the province would pay his salary while the RMs would pay his traveling

and office expenses and supervise his work.

Still, the BFC report encouraged farmers to experiment with summerfallow

substitutes and stock raising on their own wherever possible. Indeed, the commissioners

recognized "no distinct line of cleavage between experiments and demonstrations in

agricultural work", and small, independent field tests scattered throughout southwestern

Saskatchewan could be valuable object lessons to other farmers.71 Possibly due to the

influence of the Agricultural Representatives and the demonstration fields during the war,

cover crops had evidently gotten a modest toehold in the region; one survey conducted in

1918 had interviewed 100 farmers in the area who had practical experience with alfalfa,

79

fall and winter rye, brome grass, millet, corn, sweet clover and sunflowers. This, along with experience already obtained with these crops elsewhere on the Great Plains, was no doubt what inspired the provincial Department of Agriculture to sponsor the Better 57 Fanning Conference. It can even be argued that the gathering was intended to be an education propaganda device: it featured "practical farmers" from the drought area and representatives of agricultural colleges and research stations in Saskatchewan, Alberta,

Minnesota, Montana and North and South Dakota, and F.H. Auld had told each of them to share their experience with stock raising, forage crops and summerfallow substitutes.73

The event itself, which drew about two hundred delegates and perhaps hundreds more local farmers over its three-day duration, was, in a sense like a miniature International

Dry Farming Congress and was well covered in southern Saskatchewan newspapers.7

Part of the BFC report was also written like a 'handbook' for the use of individual farmers. Through its public hearings, the BFC tried to get more information direct from farmers in the drought area on crop production and stock raising. Thirty to fifty farmers attended each of these meetings; though many of them were under the impression that they were to receive rather than to give dry farming advice and the commissioners thus ended up with more questions than answers.75 Twenty-seven of these questions were reprinted in the BFC report "to furnish some idea of what the farmers' problems are and the efforts they are making to solve them and to obtain help in solving them."76 The report also exhorted its readers to do anything that would "aid in making the farm more homelike and comfortable," and it contained information on summerfallow substitute crops; varieties of livestock to consume them; building silos to store up reserves of fodder and seed for use in future years; and planting gardens and trees for windbreaks. "When more experimental work is done locally," affirmed the report, "the results will indicate whether any improvement can be made in the proposed system. But in the meantime it is submitted by your Commission as the safest and best plan to follow." 58 However, the BFC realized that the introduction of new dry farming methods and education extension programs in southwestern Saskatchewan were not in themselves a complete solution to the problem. Growing cover crops might help ease feed shortages in the winter. But most livestock still needed access to grazing land in the summer, and it had become apparent that the half-section farm provided for in the Dominion Lands Act amendment of 1908 could not simultaneously provide enough pasture and land for the production of winter feed in addition to a cash crop of wheat. At the time of the 1921

Census, the typical southwestern Saskatchewan farm occupied 406 acres, 176 acres of which were "unimproved" and consisted almost entirely of natural pasture (see Figure

11). Where a farmer was using horse power for fieldwork and had even a few head of livestock, such an area of grazing land was undersized and soon eaten bare; indeed, the minimum acreage required to provide pasture and feed for a horse or cow for one year on the semiarid plains ranged from 30 acres in an average year to as much 120 acres in a drought year!78 But by this time, farmers in the area generally found it difficult to find more land on which to graze stock. Prior to the war, nearly every grain growing district in the province had at least some rough or uncultivated land nearby for anyone to use as pasture. However, all but the worst homestead land in southwestern Saskatchewan had been taken up by 1920, and most farmers found themselves surrounded by other farms.79

And even if they could buy land from their neighbours, the war-driven prosperity had caused a sharp rise in land prices in the southwest.

Of course, ranchers were also looking for new sources of grass. Southwestern

Saskatchewan was still the heart of the province's range cattle industry, containing about three quarters (2.3 million acres) of its total area of federal grazing leases in 1920.81 By 59 this point, however, a few large corporations controlled the remnants of the big cattle companies that had folded up after 1910; the Gordon, Ironsides and Fares Company of

Winnipeg, for example, held a million acres north of Piapot as well as a 250,000 acre lease near the Frenchman River in 1921.82 Like farmers, the small ranchers left behind resented that large companies were tying up so much land and wanted a more equitable distribution of grazing land. However, the number of smaller grazing leaseholds had also increased in the preceding decade. In keeping with the recommendations of the federal

Ranching and Grazing Investigation Commission (1913), the Borden government had reinstated closed ten-year grazing leases in 1914. Though ranchers no doubt welcomed them, the improved lease arrangements—along with good beef prices during the war— had caused a sharp rise in the total grazing lease acreage in the province and had reduced grazing land availability in the southwest.84 Clearly, the existing system of land tenure in the region was no longer serving the needs of farmers or ranchers. At a June 1920 meeting, the Saskatchewan Stock Growers' Association (SSGA) passed a resolution asking the federal and Saskatchewan governments to survey the "the rough and sandy hill lands of the Province" to make them available "for the raising of stock by the farmers and stockmen of Saskatchewan." The Better Farming Conference passed a similar motion.85

The BFC therefore dispatched a "Subcommittee on Grazing Lands" (consisting of

George Spence and Professor A.M. Shaw of the SCA) to do exactly this. A spokesman for the ranching community—Jack Byers, a stockman and president of the SSGA—was included probably because of pressure from the ranching industry. The Department of the Interior was also persuaded to send its Commissioner of Dominion Lands, J.W.

Greenway, to serve on the subcommittee so that Ottawa would have, in F.H. Auld's 60 words, "...advice and information regarding local conditions and the viewpoint of the

settlers themselves."87 It must be noted that the federal government was already taking a

second look at its system of land distribution in the Palliser Triangle. In November 1920,

Prime Minister Arthur Meighen would announce that he was considering returning

control of all lands and natural resources to the Prairie Provinces. Because it was not

thought desirable to have any large acreages of Crown land tied up in long term grazing

leases in the event of a transfer, Minister of the Interior James Lougheed secured an

Order-in-Council that month introducing a three year cancellation clause on all new

grazing leases.88 Lougheed supposedly disliked ranchers and favoured homesteaders; he

ultimately wanted to see all remaining grazing leases liquidated and transformed into

grazing areas for the use of nearby farmers. In September 1920, the Subcommittee on

Grazing Lands issued questionnaires to "a considerable number" of farmers and ranchers

in the southwest inquiring (among other things) whether a "community pasture" might

help rectify the summer pasture shortage. As indicated in the subcommittee's final report

to the BFC, the respondents "almost invariably" agreed that it would.90

Community pastures were not a new idea. The Metis—like the French habitants

under the seigniorial system in Quebec—had established 'strip farms' with frontage

along certain prairie rivers; the strips ran far back and were combined in grazing

commons.91 Stock raisers in a region about 70 km north of Swift Current had also been

using an area of three townships of Crown land as a public pasture. However, the

commissioners knew that an effective community pasture required more than land; not

only were fences and corrals needed, competent advice and supervision for the grazing, breeding and marketing of the pasture's cattle were also necessary. Such details involved 61 significant financial and organizational resources, but the BFC report did not propose that the Saskatchewan government become involved directly. Rather, it advocated the time- honoured principle of cooperation, or mutual aid, to allow groups of stock owners to operate community pastures; indeed, the province had already laid the necessary foundations by passing the Agricultural Cooperative Associations Act (1913). The BFC report suggested that these pastures might emulate the "Live Stock Associations" that the

Forestry Branch of the Department of the Interior had introduced in 1911 to allow stock raisers to graze cattle in forest reserves: these were founded on a constitution provided by the Branch and managed by cooperatives in exchange for a grazing fee per head of stock.93 By providing supplementary grazing, it was also hoped that community pastures might keep farms in the better grain growing areas at about half a section in size, since fewer farm units in an RM translated into a higher per capita tax burden and/or a decline in municipal services.94 Because federal grazing leases constituted the most readily available source of land for cooperative community pastures at the time, the BFC report recommended:

That the Department of the Interior be asked when considering applications for renewals of grazing permits on Crown lands in Saskatchewan, to give preference in future to applications from resident farmers organised [sic] on a community or co-operative plan under The Agricultural Cooperative Associations Act, or on a plan similar to that now employed for the management of grazing upon forest 95

reserves.

The BFC also touched on problems relating to variations in water availability that the Dominion Lands Act had not taken into account. "A water supply", affirmed the BFC report "makes stock raising and dairying possible, and where these are possible, farming may be so diversified as to make one very largely independent except in years of complete failure.. ,."96 Those who settled in the inner Palliser Triangle area were usually 62 forced to dig deep wells to access water, though these often produced poor quality and/or insufficient supplies for household and agricultural use. In such cases, a dugout or a

small dam on an existing water course was also used to trap whatever moisture fell from the sky; indeed, southwestern Saskatchewan's rolling topography provided limitless sites

for such projects. Because constructing these was costly for an individual, the provincial

government did provide at least some assistance. In 1888, the Territorial government had begun renting well boring equipment to help settlers find water, marking the start of an

extensive water supply development program that included bonuses to private operators

of well drilling outfits, the drilling of public wells and the construction of dugouts and

QO

small dams to create community storage reservoirs. The Saskatchewan government

continued this work after 1905, but it was eager to shift much of it to the municipalities

and the private sector as soon as possible. Because farmers and ranchers were in charge

of developing water supplies on their own property, readers of the BFC report were

simply told to obtain pamphlets on the construction of small reservoirs from the

Department of the Interior and the provincial Department of Highways.100

The BFC report also mentioned large-scale irrigation as a means of alleviating the

impact of recurring drought, but without much enthusiasm. Prospects for commercial

irrigation in southwestern Saskatchewan—like that which had been practiced in southern

Alberta since the 1880s to grow large acreages of marketable crops—were relatively

limited.101 Unlike the latter, the former is served by only one large river: the South

Saskatchewan. But the valley it flows through is too far below the surrounding plains,

and the cost of elevating the water by gravity canals or pumps for irrigation had long been seen as prohibitive. However, the various creeks and streams radiating from Wood 63 Mountain and the Cypress Hills provided many opportunities for small flood irrigation schemes in adjoining lowlands; these offered possibilities for irrigation ranging from an acre or two for vegetable gardens and orchards up to several hundred acres for the production of hay and other feed for livestock. Ranchers and farmers had recognized this as early as the 1890s, and by World War I some 64,000 acres in the southwest were irrigated.102 Such projects had the potential to at least reduce the need to import large quantities of livestock feed and other relief into the Palliser Triangle during a drought.

Since control of all natural resources rested in the federal government's hands, it alone was responsible for conducting the research to determine where it was desirable to have irrigation. In 1894, Parliament had passed the Northwest Irrigation Act to regulate the use of water for irrigation purposes, and the Irrigation Branch of the Department of the Interior was set up to measure stream flow and runoff to ensure that water grants were not issued in excess of supply and to define the rates so that future conflicting claims might be easily adjusted.103 In response to the growing demand for irrigation water on the prairies, the Reclamation Service of the Department of the Interior was created in

1917 to determine the most suitable areas for irrigation and to find the best means of developing them.104 It began new surveys of irrigable areas in southern Alberta, designed reservoirs and canal systems to, serve them, and estimated their cost.105 Early in 1920 it began similar studies in Saskatchewan's Battle Creek and Frenchman River valleys, and the Better Farming Conference urged that these be completed "as rapidly as possible."106

Traditionally, large private companies had been in charge of the actual development of irrigation infrastructure. But it was thought that the construction of small irrigation projects in southwestern Saskatchewan—like community pastures—might be suitably 64 handled by farmers and ranchers acting cooperatively. Interestingly, the Saskatchewan legislature had already made it possible for them to do this by passing the Irrigation

Districts Act in February 1920 to allow "cooperative irrigation associations."107

However, it was not possible for all farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan to succeed where they were. A large number of them, in fact, were situated on submarginal wheat growing land, and the provincial Department of Agriculture received many letters from them illustrating their plight. "Any man of ordinary intelligence who has been on the job here since 1917," wrote one Great Sand Hills-area farmer "knows what this country is and knows that it will never do for farming." A spokesman for one group of destitute farmers near Senate (south of the Cypress Hills) wrote to Premier W.M. Martin indicating that they were "all willing to pay in full" their relief debts to the government if some arrangement could be found to transfer persons "who are at present located on land that is useless to maintain them to land more suitable for general farming purposes to enable them to retrieve their former position...."109 Indeed, abandoned farms were already in evidence in certain areas, and some warned of further abandonments if definite action was not taken soon.110 One Maple Creek-area farmer told F.H. Auld in a letter that he knew of "many settlers" still wanting to take up land in his district

and that conditions will be new to them, and if information could be given them before they make a false start it might be the means of averting a tragedy. I fail to see what benefit it can be to Canada to place people where there is no hope for them to succeed. This land must be good for some kind of farming and if people can be guided at the start it may prevent their ruin.111

Writing in the Agriculture Report for 1920, Auld affirmed that many farmers

"could not have continued" without relief aid from the provincial government, but he admitted that "there is little doubt that in some cases the assistance was the means of 65 continuing in impossible surroundings some who cannot be expected to succeed in their

present locations."112 Certain localized areas of western and southwestern Saskatchewan

had actually become good-for-nothing wastelands as a result of cultivation, especially

areas of light and sandy soils. For example, the SGGA local at Tessier (100 km

southwest of Saskatoon) wrote to the provincial Department of Agriculture in June 1920

stating that 70,000 acres of cropland in that area had been ruined on account of soil

drifting. The phenomenon was also acute in the Mortlach district west of Moose Jaw.113

In some areas, the topsoil was so badly eroded that nothing but the heavy clay hardpan

remained. These were aptly named "burnouts" because they were uncultivable.114

The BFC's Subcommittees on Drifting Soils and Grazing Lands had visited these

and other areas to gather the essential facts, but they were at a loss to recommend what to

do with them. Certainly, it was desirable to return such land to the use for which nature

intended—namely the grazing of livestock. But few scientific experiments with drought-

resistant grasses to restore the "prairie wool" had been undertaken by this time, though

some abandoned parcels of land in the southwest were apparently already going back to

grass all on their own.115 The federal government had meanwhile done nothing to

prevent any remaining tracts of submarginal wheat growing land from being

homesteaded. Given the strong demand for settlement land at the time, it had ignored the

Ranching and Grazing Investigation Commission's recommendation that the pre-emption

area be permanently closed to homesteading. In fact, it had reserved the right not to renew any grazing lease if it was needed for settlement, and ranchers watched sadly as

"sodbusters" continued to plow up thousands of acres of once good grazing land. The

BFC therefore recommended that the Department of the Interior call a definite end to 66 homesteading in all of southern Saskatchewan—defined as that area south of the

Canadian National Railways (CNR) mainline between Kamsack and Lloydminster—and

that any remaining Crown land in that area be made available for grazing.116

The BFC report also argued that "to abandon [submarginal wheat growing] lands

would be the first step toward finding a way to use them...." It thus recommended that

the Dominion Lands Act be amended to allow those who had obviously settled on inferior

land in the south to file for a free second homestead elsewhere. Interestingly, the Act did

not state how a settler could earn his patent to another homestead after he had exhausted

110

his homesteading privileges. However, the federal government was apparently willing

to reassess this policy. Premier Martin had written to Minister of the Interior James

Lougheed on several occasions in the latter half of 1920 informing him of the desperate

situation of many southwestern Saskatchewan farmers.11 In an October 1920 letter

Lougheed informed Martin that he was willing to entertain .. .a recommendation that where it is decided that it is in the public interests [sic] to move the settlers of any particular district, those who are the owners of or entrants for land should be placed in the same relative position with respect to any vacant or available parcel of Dominion Land of equal area that they might select elsewhere conditional upon relinquishment of the present holding.120

By this point, most of the remaining Crown land fit for settlement in Saskatchewan was

located north of the CNR mainline. Based on evidence submitted at the BFC's public

hearings, the commissioners did not expect that a large number of farmers would be

interested in moving; "[o]nly in a few cases" recalled CM. Hamilton in 1921, ".. .was the request made that permission be secured to abandon their homesteads and move to some other portion of the province."121 In truth, they had little idea how much submarginal

land there was in the southwest; the Subcommittees on Drifting Soils and Grazing Lands 67 had only visited small parts of the region in their investigations, and the BFC report made

the overly hopeful assertion that perhaps "fifteen per cent or more" of its land area was

inferior.122 Studies completed in the 1940s and 1950s would show that about 44 per cent

of all land in the area is submarginal (see Figure 10).

Nevertheless, the BFC did address the issue of what to do with submarginal wheat

growing land that had been (or would be) abandoned. "It seems", noted the BFC report

optimistically, "...that some of this class of land if of sufficient extent may some time be

utilized as community pastures when it ceases to be used for grain growing."123 But the province did not have the authority to seize it and withdraw it from cultivation (though

RMs could acquire title to privately-owned land through non-payment of taxes and relief

advances). In fact, municipal regulations then in effect promoted the abuse of grazing

land. Uncultivated land was taxed at the same rate as improved farmland, leading many

to grow wheat on it if good precipitation or grain prices were expected in the hope of

getting a higher return from it. Petitions from the SSGA had led the Saskatchewan

government to appoint an investigative commission in 1915 to deal with this and other

issues. This influenced the passage of legislation in 1916 setting $2 per acre as the maximum annual municipal tax rate for federal grazing leases.124 Still, federal grazing

leases (like cropland) were taxed on a per-acre basis, not by their productive capacity.

"... [A] rate of taxation consistent with the producing value of the land", noted the BFC report "should be an encouragement to use such land for the purpose to which it is best adapted."125 Financial institutions no doubt agreed with this appraisal, since solid data on the fertility of their clients' land could help make their lending policies more efficient.

The first prerequisite for legislation that could effectively govern land utilization 68 was a "classification of land," and a scientific soil survey was seen as the fundamental starting point. In North America, large-scale soil surveys had first gotten underway in the

United States in 1899. Under the direction of the United States Bureau of Soils, state agricultural colleges and experiment stations began to: gather information on soil texture and humus content to classify soils and their relative productivity; chemically analyze soils to ascertain their suitability for different crops; determine the topography of the land; and to learn the uses to which the land was put (some states such as Illinois had done this work independently). Within twenty years, such surveys had covered 25 per cent of the nation's land area.126 In 1920, the state of Michigan—in possession of large acreages of deforested, idle and tax-delinquent land in its northern counties at the time— had begun laying the groundwork for a pioneering "land economic survey" that would commence two years later; it examined the history of agricultural production; land tenure, property values, population data and transportation facilities to determine the most profitable use of the land. Wisconsin initiated a similar study at about the same time.127

Such work had gotten off to a slower start north of the border. Unlike the United

States, Canada did not have a federal "Bureau of Soils." Soil surveys were deemed a provincial undertaking mainly because only the provincial agricultural colleges had enough staff with the necessary training. The OAC conducted Canada's first major soil survey in southern Ontario from 1914 to 1920, and the Manitoba and Alberta Agricultural

Colleges had initiated more limited soil surveys in the southern areas of those provinces in 1917 and 1920, respectively.128 The SCA's Soils Department had opened in January

1920 and had only taken soil samples at sixteen sites in Saskatchewan by the time of the

Better Farming Conference.129 In 1916, land classification work had begun in New 69 Brunswick in connection with the federal Commission of Conservation, but it was never extended to other provinces, and it was not as thorough as the Michigan survey.130

Due to the relatively limited experience with soil survey and land classification work in Canada, the BFC's Subcommittee on Investigation and Extension visited state agricultural institutions in Illinois and Wisconsin to study their investigative methods.131

The commissioners eventually wanted to see a "land economic survey" completed in

Saskatchewan, but they knew that a soil survey was the first step.132 They recommended that the SCA begin such work in southwestern Saskatchewan and extend it throughout the province. Two main types of soil surveys were known at the time: a

"reconnaissance" survey and a "detailed" survey; the former was a quick scan of the land to outline regions of similar topography and soil type, while the latter involved soil testing, classification and mapping and was used where intensive agriculture was practiced. Since extensive agriculture was the norm on the Canadian prairies, the BFC report advocated a hybrid of the two surveys that would be "fairly rapid, fairly cheap and yet sufficiently detailed to be useful to the farmer, county agent and investigator alike."133

Because this soil survey would cover Crown lands within the province (thus benefiting

Ottawa also), the report insisted that the Saskatchewan and federal governments share its cost equally.

What conclusions can be made about the BFC report? It is evident that the BFC commissioners were putting a "stamp of approval" on a plan to which the Saskatchewan government was already committed. The recommendations for growing summerfallow substitute crops to halt soil erosion and to provide a forage supplement; the introduction of agricultural representatives to aid in the experimentation with these crops at the local 70 level; the creation of cooperative community pastures to provide more summer pasture; and the development of farm and ranch water supplies and small scale irrigation were all aimed at helping farmers and stock raisers on the semiarid plains to become more self- sustaining by enabling them to maintain their livestock in dry years. Such policies were in line with commitment of Saskatchewan's agricultural leaders to promote "Better

Farming," and the commissioners could refer to precedents both in Saskatchewan and in other jurisdictions for guidance. By encouraging farmers (individually or collectively) to solve their own problems, these recommendations were also in line with conventional attitudes toward the role of the state in the economy. The report's proposals for the ending of homesteading in the Palliser Triangle; the provision of second homesteads for settlers on submarginal wheat growing land on better land elsewhere; and soil surveys of the province complemented these recommendations; if settlers on inferior lands in the drought area were assisted to leave, they would no longer be a relief burden to southwestern RMs in drought years, while the best and worst grain growing lands would be clearly outlined and eventually be removed from cultivation. Still, implementing these recommendations would be challenging. Extensive research on the environment of, and suitable agricultural techniques for, the Palliser Triangle lay ahead of the federal and provincial governments. Other issues no doubt loomed large. Would the Saskatchewan government be capable of financing a renewed "Better Farming" campaign and a major soil survey? Would Ottawa be willing to fulfill its end of the deal? And perhaps most of all, would farmers be receptive to the BFC's recommendations? Only time would tell. 71 ENDNOTES—CHAPTER TWO

'See for example SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.13, J.H. Veitch to C.A. Dunning, 18 February 1920. 2Swift Current Sun, 23 March 1920, 2; 6 April 1920, 2; Regina Morning Leader, 31 March 1920. 3Regina Morning Leader, 29 April 1920, 1; Swift Current Sun, 21 May 1920, 1; SAB, CM. Hamilton [hereafter Hamilton] Papers, M-13, File #10, A.S. Bennett (President of the Swift Current Board of Trade) to CM. Hamilton, 1 May 1920. 4SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.13, newsclipping, Swift Current Herald, 8 July 1920, 2. 5SAB, R-184, File #2.1, Official Report of the 'Better Farming Conference' [hereafter Conference Report], 7. 6See for example Regina Morning Leader, 8 July 1920, 4; Swift Current Sun, 9 July 1920, 2; SAB, Ag. Papers, File #23.13, Swift Current Herald, 8 July 1920, 2 [Newsclipping]. 7SAB, Conference Report, 105-20; 126-29. 8Ibid., 11,86, 89-90. 9Ibid., 167. '"Government concern "can be shown symbolically, as opposed to taking more concrete actions, by making a speech expressing concern, by studying the problem, by holding meetings and discussions and consulting interests, by reorganizing a department of creating a new one...or by making available certain kinds of information so that people affected are better able to take their own action as individuals or in collective groups or associations" [G. Bruce Doern and Richard W. Phidd, Canadian Public Policy: Ideas, Structure, Process, 2nd Ed. (Scarborough, Ontario: Nelson Canada), 208]. "ibid.; Neil Bradford, "Innovation by Commission: Policy Paradigms and the Canadian Political System" in James Bickerton and Alain-G. Gagnon, Eds., Canadian Politics, 3rd Edition (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1999), 548; J.E. Hodgetts, "Should Canada Be De-Commissioned? A Commoner's View of Royal Commission" Queen's Quarterly Vol. 70 (Winter 1963), 475. 12Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 14. 13These communities were Mortlach, Herbert, Leader, Cabri, Gull Lake, Tompkins, Maple Creek, Senate, Eastend, Robsart, Shaunavon and Ponteix. 14SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #22.15, R. Fenerty to F.H. Auld, 15 December 1918. 15Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Handbook of Agricultural Statistics Part 1: Field Crops, 1908-63 (Ottawa, Queen's Printer, 1964), 18. 16Author unknown, "Rutherford, William John" in the Saskatchewan Encyclopedia, 789-90. 17W.J. Rutherford quoted in Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1908, 121-22. 18By the end of World War I, the average Winnipeg Price for a good quality butcher steer was $11.60 per hundredweight. By 1924, this price had fallen to $5.27 per hundredweight—the lowest price for beef since the disastrous winter of 1906-07 [Potyondi, 60-62]. ''Statistics calculated from Canada, Sixth Census of Canada, 1921: Volume V—Agriculture (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1925), 122. 20In the period 1900 to 1920, many in North America were concerned about rapid urbanization and how it threatened to destroy the agrarian foundation upon which society rested. Convinced that deficiencies in rural life were driving people to the cities, they promoted a philosophy that extolled country over urban living. It hinged on the idea that farmers' individualism and independence made them "morally upright, simple, and contented," while their close association with nature caused them to be "more healthy, virtuous, and religious" than the city dweller. Such ideas had really been around since antiquity. However, the Settlement Era had underlined the values of hard work, thrift and improvisation, and agricultural colleges, university extension departments, land dealers, women's groups and the farm press resurrected them in their efforts to promote permanent agriculture. For example, the Farmers' Advocate recalled Cicero's remark that "[n]othing can be more profitable, nothing more beautiful than a well-cultivated farm...The whole establishment of a good and assiduous husbandman...abounds in pigs, in lambs, in poultry, in milk, in honey" [William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920 (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1974); David C. Jones, '"There Is Some Power About the 72

Land'—The Western Agrarian Press and Country Life Ideology" Journal of Canadian Studies Vol. 17, No. 3 (Fall 1982), 96-108]. 21As late as 1940, W.R. Motherwell, Saskatchewan's Minister of Agriculture from 1905 to 1918, affirmed that he had always believed fanning to be "as honourable and noble a profession as any to which men could devote their lives and second only to the Christian ministry" [Regina Leader Post, 24 April 1940, 5]. 22Allan R. Turner, "W.R. Motherwell and Agricultural Development in Saskatchewan, 1905-1918" (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1958), Chapters 2 and 3. 23In 1901, the Department of the Interior established a tree nursery at Indian Head, North-West Territories; 58,000 seedlings issued to 44 settlers in 1901 grew to 1.8 million seedlings to over 1,000 settlers three years later [Hall, 286]. 24Paul Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 94. 25Voisey points out that in the period 1920-1940, farm families in the Vulcan district of southern Alberta consumed over half the eggs, three-quarters of the butter and 95 per cent of the milk that they produced [Ibid., 81-86; 95; see also Edith Rowles, "Bannock, Beans and Bacon: An Investigation of Pioneer Diet" Saskatchewan History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 1952), 6-9]. 26Canada, Sixth Census of Canada, 1921: Volume V—Agriculture (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1925), 722-23. 27This works out to about 10 horses, 8 cattle, 2 sheep, 2 pigs and 61 head of poultry on each farm [Ibid.]. 28In December 1919, for example, one Herbert-area farmer wrote to Premier W.M. Martin stating: "Before most of us farmers were able to sell a few pounds of butter of a few eggs to live on but as there is not feed we had to get rid of the cows and butcher the chickens[.] [S]ome out here even just killed then- chickens off in the fall for they were to [sic] poor to buy feed to keep them over the winter and the chickens were to [sic] thin to cook them [Quoted in Jones, ed., We'll All be Buried..., 88]. 29Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1920, 221. Fanners in southwestern Saskatchewan interviewed by BFC personnel in the fall of 1920 "invariably"—and often "emphatically"—answered "Yes" to the question "Is the keeping of livestock essential to your success?" [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.12, "Report of Sub-Committee [on Grazing Lands] of Saskatchewan Better Farming Commission" 4 October 1920, 4]. 30John Kendle, John Bracken: A Political Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 24. 31 At the 1909 Congress at Cheyenne, Wyoming, it was resolved that "no special system of so-called dry farming, or scientific methods shall be advocated, but that the Congress shall aim to give as much definite information about each and all systems" as possible. The organization ultimately became a forum for diverse interpretations of dryland farming [Mary W.M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900-1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 105]. 32John Bracken, Dry Farming in Western Canada (Winnipeg: The Grain Growers' Guide Ltd., 1921), 269-70. 33Ibid., 267. 34Hargreaves, "The Dry Farming Movement in Retrospect," 155-58. 35Bracken, chap. 16. Manley Champlin gave a detailed overview of the "summerfallow substitute" system in an address to the Better Farming Conference [SAB, Conference Report, 40-50; 129-32]. 36Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 36, 54. 37SAB, R-184, File #2.1, Conference Report, 20. 38Having seen the extreme variability of rainfall in the semiarid plains region since its opening for large-scale homesteading in 1908, Saskatchewan's farm leaders had gradually become hesitant to recommend summerfallowing as a cure-all for drought. "We believe here" wrote one official for Prelate, Saskatchewan (in the heart of the Dry Belt) to F.H. Auld in July 1921 "that we have the best District in the Province if we only had sufficient moisture. I have been here through 1918 and 1919 and it is my opinion that good summerfallow will produce at least some crop in any year. There are farmers here who have always got some crop and it seems to me that it must simply be because they farm properly." In his reply, Auld refused to say that summerfallowing would guarantee "a living and pay operating expenses" for all 73 farmers in that area. "I used to think as you do that those who farm properly would get some crop every year. If you seek from the farmers in the district an explanation of why some men have crops and others have not, you will invariably be told that those with the crops got a little shower that no one else in the district benefited from. It is true that our rains are very local and there is possibly more than an element of truth in the statement. The weakness of such a district as yours is that the good crops come too rarely to make a good average over a period of years" [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.11, J.J. Keeler to F.H. Auld, 22 July 1921; F.H. Auld to J.J. Keeler, 27 July 1921]. 39Since 1914, the Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture had been collecting weather data for the Dominion Meteorological Service at a number of points in each Crop District, including a dozen within the BFC's study area [Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 19-33]. 40John Bracken quoted in Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1917, 301. 4'Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 51. 42Ibid., 33. 43Ibid.,51. 44From 1906 to 1914, new stations had been established in southern Alberta's irrigated region; at four points in the Aspen Parkland to research mixed farming; and at two locations in the northern agricultural areas of Ontario and Quebec [Fowke, Canadian Agricultural Policy, 238-39]. 45Following a meeting with the Swift Current Board of Trade in April 1920, J.H. Grisdale—the federal Deputy Minister of Agriculture—declared publicly that he "did not have to be convinced of the urgent need of [an Experimental Farm] for this large district" and indicated that he had already selected a site near the city. The site was well located: the city of Swift Current was strategically located on the CPR and able to provide an array of amenities, and soil conditions at the site vary from light loam to heavy clay loam [Swift Current Sun, 6 April 1920, 1; Canada, Department of Agriculture, Experimental Station, Swift Current, Sask. Results of Experiments, 1931-1936 Inclusive (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1938), 5]. 46W.R. Motherwell—Saskatchewan's Minister of Agriculture from 1905 to 1918—had written to his federal counterpart more than once asking him to consider a new experimental farm in southwestern Saskatchewan. "Owing...to the average rainfall being less than eastern Saskatchewan," wrote Motherwell in May 1910, "it is... imperative that the best and most scientific methods of tillage be pursued if the best results are to be obtained. Last season was an unusually favourable one, with the result that up to February of this year Swift Current had made larger shipments of wheat than any other single point in the province. Hundreds and thousands of settlers are now and have been for the past two or three years rushing into the southwestern portion of our province, who stand in need of all the advice and assistance that can be obtained from both Federal and Provincial governments in regard to the best system of farming necessary to ensure success under semi-arid conditions." No reply from the federal government appears to have been received [SAB, Motherwell Papers, File #42, W.R. Motherwell to Sidney Fisher, 28 May 1910; see also 25 March 1911]. 47This is reflected in editorial comments made in certain prairie newspapers. In April 1920, for example, the editor of the Saskatchewan Farmer stated that he had received numerous inquiries "...about cultivation of the land and what crops to grow, what trees to plant, would corn be a success, etc., etc. Only an Experimental Farm could give reliable information about such subjects from practical experience. We can only suggest and advise. This whole district has only been settled by farmers within the last 10 years. They have been following the methods practiced by farmers in Manitoba or in the eastern parts of the province of Saskatchewan. They have been too busy experimenting for themselves. They are now seeking Government assistance to pull them through after two or three crop failures" [Saskatchewan Farmer, April 1920, 21; see also Manitoba Free Press, 5 September 1919, 14 and Swift Current Sun, 6 April 1920, 2]. 480ne Swift Current spokesman informed the federal Minister of Agriculture in 1918 that 25.4 per cent of soldiers who had filed for homesteads in his area at the time of enlistment had no prior farm experience, while another 41.8 per cent had less than three years. Clearly, these veterans would need practical guidance to prevent their ruin [W. Leland Clark, "Experimental Farms and Illustration Stations: An Agricultural of Political Consideration?" in John E. Foster, ed. The Developing West: Essays on Canadian History in Honor of Lewis H. Thomas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1983), 210]. 49Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review..., 1920, 100; SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #11, untitled memo, F.H. Auld to CM. Hamilton, circa 1921, 7. ^Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1909, 123; 1910,205-17. 74

5'Public enthusiasm for the Better Farming Train was remarkable. For example, when it visited Shackleton (near Cabri), where there were scarcely a dozen buildings, between four and five hundred people showed up to "learn something at the train and not to spend a day in town." Some 38,000 people visited the train in 1915 alone. Southwestern Saskatchewan was singled out for attention in 1914 and 1915, and special emphasis was given to soil tillage and weed control methods to eager audiences there. But the trains would not visit the region again until 1919, and they did not operate at all in 1918—likely due to the disruption of the war [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-260, 1.34, Unnamed correspondent to F.H. Auld, 7 January 1920; Swift Current Sun, 24 July 1914; 29 June 1915]. 52SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.13, Lewis John Harvey to CM. Hamilton, 19 July 1920. "Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1919-20, 10 Geo. V, c. 53. 54A 1921 letter to Dunning from one Toronto lending institution is typical: "[T]he additions to the list of defaulting Municipalities, etc., have been such recently that a virtual boycott now exists among the Insurance, Trust etc. Companies regarding all Saskatchewan securities...[I]t is our firm conviction that all Local Authorities in your Province will experience great difficulty in marketing their securities until some steps are taken to restore the confidence of the bond holders" [SAB, Dunning Papers, File #X-15-15, H.J. Birkett to C.A. Dunning, 28 April 1921, 20,484. This file contains correspondence with bondholders, banks and insurance companies about defaulting municipalities in Saskatchewan from 1918 to 1921 and provides insight into the attitude of eastern Canadian investors toward that province]. 55See for example Ibid., J.M. Livingstone (Acting Division Manager for Credit Foncier Franco- Canadien) to C.A. Dunning, 23 July 1919, 16,304. 56Southwestern Saskatchewan's first illustration stations were located at Shaunavon, Assiniboia, Pambrun, Herbert, Cabri, Prelate, Maple Creek and Gull Lake [J.S. Campbell, The Swift Current Research Station, 1920-70 (Canada Department of Agriculture, Historical Series No. 6, 1971), 6-7] 57There is an important comparison to be made with the federal Illustration Stations in Alberta and Saskatchewan. Conditions in southern Alberta were consistently drier than those in southwestern Saskatchewan until the late-1920s. In 1920, the editor of the Swift Current Sun pointed out that "...the experiments in South Western Saskatchewan last year were more successful than in Southern Alberta, and a much better average." The continuation of the drought in southeastern Alberta into the mid-1920s, by contrast, yielded disastrous results. In 1924, as David C. Jones has noted, "virtually all the stations experienced crop failure" [Swift Current Sun, 19 March 1920; Jones, Empire of Dust, 145-46]. 58SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.13, J.H. Veitch to F.H. Auld, 8 February 1920. S9Shaunavon Standard, 28 October 1920, 1. S0Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 68. 61Roy V. Scott, The Reluctant Farmer: The Rise of Agricultural Extension to 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), Chapters 8-10. 62The purpose of the "Better Farming Association" was the "dissemination of information among, and the education of, the farmers of the State of the North Dakota, upon the subject of modern scientific methods as applied to agriculture," specifically "the promoting of better and more profitable cultivation of the soil, including rotation and diversification of crops, raising of livestock and poultry, manufacture of dairy products and like subjects. Counties could get their own agent if they agreed to split the cost of employing them with the Association [Mary W.M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains, 1900-1925 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 190, 265-67]. 63Bowers, 89. 64According to American dry farming historian Mary Hargreaves, the repudiation of the Campbell method within the International Dry Farming Conference resulted in a corresponding reduction in the discussion of that method. "Whether by educational or promotional leaders the discussion [at the Congresses] increasingly emphasized the importance of forage crops, silos, livestock, and a diversified farm economy" after 1910. In fact, many leaders in the North Dakota Better Farming Association were active in the Congress; a vice-president of that Association, for example, served as the state's executive committeeman for the Lethbridge Dry Farming Congress in 1912 [Ibid., 112]. 65The average RM in Saskatchewan at the time covered between 200-250 square miles, while counties in North Dakota, for example, occupied anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 square miles or more [Rod Bantjes, '"An Imperfect Architecture of Power': Class and Local Government in Saskatchewan, 1908- 1936" Prairie Forum, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), 47-48] 75

These four "Agricultural Representatives" were graduates of the Manitoba Agricultural College and were stationed at Shaunavon, Swift Current, Rosetown and North Battleford. They were to "utilize all available avenues for improving agriculture" in their respective areas, and their duties included: organizing agricultural societies, cooperatives and competitions; assisting in securing markets and better prices for farm products; and helping to improve rural life conditions by promoting farm diversification and beautification. They were also responsible for organizing and supervising a series of "demonstration fields" in western and southwestern Saskatchewan to—in W.R. Motherwell's words—"demonstrate what can be done by proper soil preparation even in a dry country." Under this scheme, willing farmers hosted demonstrations in summerfallowing and in growing corn, fall rye, barley, alfalfa and winter wheat on up to 25 acres of their own land [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1914, 97-105; 1915, 12-23; Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs, 1915, 654]. 67In the spring of 1915, the Canadian Bankers Association provided free corn seed to any prairie farmer who promised to sow one acre for green feed for livestock, and it arranged shipping discounts with the railways on all seed it sent to its branches in the Prairie Provinces. (The member banks included: the Bank of Montreal, the Merchants' Bank of Canada, the Canadian Bank of Commerce, the Bank of British North America, the Union Bank of Canada, the Royal Bank of Canada, and the Bank of Toronto). That year the chartered banks in the Prairie Provinces also jointly mailed some 100,000 leaflets procured from the Saskatchewan Department of Agriculture on corn growing and summerfallowing to their rural customers [SAB, Ag. Papers, Ag. 3, File #21, G.W. Allen to T.F. Ellis, 8 February 1915; V.C. Brown to A.F. Mantle, 15 February 1915; Thos. Acheson to Duncan Marshall, W.R. Motherwell and Geo. Lawrence, 23 March 1915; and R.U. Weir to A.F. Mantle, 3 April 1915; Regina Morning Leader, 17 February 1915,

68The farm movement, although defeated on the issue of reciprocity, was sufficiently powerful in 1911 to extract a certain campaign promise from Prime Minister Robert Borden. In 1913, Parliament passed the Agricultural Instruction Act that provided $10 million over ten years for the provinces. Although Ottawa was intervening in the education field, it made no stipulation as to how the money was to be spent. Saskatchewan used its $81,728 annual share to finance its agricultural education programs. The money was divided between three major public agencies. The Saskatchewan College of Agriculture used its share to pay staff salaries and expenses connected with research and extension work; the Department of Education used its share to fund agriculture and domestic science programs in rural schools and to supervise boys' and girls' clubs and school fairs; and the Department of Agriculture used its share to finance the Better Farming Train, distribute educational bulletins and promote instruction and demonstration work in livestock, dairying, soil cultivation and cooperative enterprises in agriculture [Jeffery Taylor, Fashioning Farmers: Ideology, Agricultural Knowledge and the Manitoba Farm Movement, 1890-1925 (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1994), 28; Commission of Conservation Canada, Administration of the Agricultural Instruction Act (Ottawa, 1915), 1; Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1916, 15-16]. 69In the North Battleford district alone, demonstration fields were established on some thirty farms in 1915. However, the Agricultural Representatives were likely too spread out to be effective; one of them was in charge of an 8,000 square mile area. The North Battleford representative served until 1918, at which time he was transferred to the extension division of the College of Agriculture [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1915, 12-23; 1917-18, 10] 70Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 68-9. 71Ibid.,52. 72Grain Growers' Guide, 12 May 1920, 8. 73The dry farming experts were: FJ. Alway, a professor at the Minnesota Agricultural College; F.B. Linfield, director of the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station at Bozeman, Montana and W.R. Porter and Manley Champlin, professors in the North and South Dakota Agricultural Colleges, respectively. John Bracken and W.F. Fairfield, director of the DEFS station at Lethbridge was also invited to the Better Farming Conference. Auld then prescribed a series of topics to be discussed: defects in our present agricultural methods; means of supplementing our fodder supply; corn; sweet clover and alfalfa; sunflowers; perennial grasses; building up a fodder reserve; the place of livestock in dry farming; the silo and its uses; and a system of farm management for the drier portions of the West. [SAB, Ag. Papers, R- 76

261, File #23.13, F.H. Auld to W.F. Fairfield, 11 March 1920; Circular Letter fromF.H. Auld to RMs, 27 May 1920]. 74On the first day of the Better Farming Conference, the Swift Current Sun indicated that it had met at the city's Princess Royal Theatre. However, George Spence would later recall that "[fjarmers and others from far and near were out in full strength." Spence noted that the attendance had eventually become "so great" that "the conference had to meet in the old skating rink, as there was no other available building in Swift Current large enough to accommodate the crowd" [Swift Current Sun, 9 July 1920, 1; George Spence, Survival of a Vision, Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada Website [Online] Available: http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/205/301/ic/cdc/agrican/pubweb/hs30024.asp#hs3 307 [Accessed: 06 October 2008]. 75The Eastend Enterprise and the Shaunavon Standard are the only available newspapers in the SAB that provide accounts of the BFC's public hearings. Both indicated a sense of unhappiness with the gatherings. First, attendance in both towns was small; the Eastend paper observed that "[p]ractically no advertising was given that such a meeting was to be held." The Eastend paper also noted that many farmers who came out "were disappointed, having attended under the impression that the idea of the meeting was to receive information instead of giving same." The editor of that newspaper even feared that the BFC had left thinking that the district was "on the verge of starvation." He cited an example where "...two of our farmers were asked if they had made any success of farming; one replied that he had managed to keep the wolf from the door, and the other that he had managed to get sufficient to eat. The commission [sic] were probably led to believe that these men lead a hand to mouth existence. Another man had a tale of woe and explained that he had tried dairying and failed; had tried grain growing and failed and had even tried three weeks at raising sheep and finally decided that none of these classes of farming were successful. One man thought that sweet clover was a failure and had even sown some while the snow was on the ground without getting results. Generally, farmers are not communicative in regards to their successes, and we venture to think that had the sitting been more fully advertised and more time given the farmers to explain their methods instead of holding them down to concrete answers to questions, more information would have been elicited and the commission more fully fulfilled its purpose" [Eastend Enterprise, 21 October 1920, 1, 4; Shaunavon Standard, 7 October 1920, 2]. 76Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 50-51. 77Ibid., 55, 58. 78 Alberta, A Reporton the Rehabilitation of the Dry Areas..., 38. 79In 1920, the Dominion Lands agent for Moose Jaw informed the press that "homestead lands south of the South Saskatchewan River are practically exhausted" [Saskatchewan Farmer, June 1920, 13]. 80In the Maple Creek/Richmound area, for example, average land prices rose from $2.85 per acre in the period 1907-11 to $15.75 per acre in the period 1917-21; prices at Medicine Hat even reached $24 an acre—on par with land values in the Aspen Parkland of east-central Saskatchewan (land values in Census District 5 in 1921 were $24.99 per acre). Land values are calculated by dividing the total value of land by the total area of occupied farms in a given census district [Murchie, 270; Canada, Sixth Census of Canada, 1921: Vol. V—Agriculture (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1925), 122]. 8lTotal leased acreage in the province in 1921 was over 3 million acres [Kai-iu Fung, ed., 65; Ibid., 37]. 82SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.12, A.J. Unsworth to F.H. Auld, 14 January 1921; Loveridge andPotyondi, 137. 83Among other things, the Ranching and Grazing Investigation Commission investigated whether certain districts should be closed forever to homestead entry and set aside for grazing and the advisability of extending the term of grazing leases. It recommended that those areas in the south country where no more than 25 per cent of the land was fit for agriculture be withdrawn from settlement and used for grazing; that settlers on these lands be allowed to file for a second homestead elsewhere and that ranchers be given the opportunity to lease their abandoned holdings; and that permanent, ten-year grazing leases of up to 24,000 acres be instituted. However, reaction to the Commission was mixed. Since large parts of its proposed "grazing tract" had grown one or more satisfactory crops, many farmers feared they might be driven from their lands and that the cessation of homesteading would result in a return to frontier conditions. And while provincial authorities were sympathetic to the cattle industry, they, like Ottawa, were also interested in maximum settlement, and in areas unfit for grain farming they wanted as large a 77 ranch population as possible. Alberta's Livestock Commissioner, for example, advocated the longer leases, but argued that they should not exceed ten sections (6,400 acres) in size; this would ensure enough families in a township to support a school. Because the region was already settled and municipal institutions had been established, the federal government compromised; it passed an Order-in-Council (P.C. #296) in February 1914 approving the Commission's recommendations for the cattle industry and allowing closed, ten-year leases of up to 12,000 acres of vacant Dominion lands unfit for grain farming. However, the pre­ emption area would remain open to homesteading [Canada, Ranching and Grazing Commission..., 1, 4-6; Breen, The Ranching Frontier..., 191; Alberta, Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture of the Province of Alberta, 1912 (Edmonton: Government Printer, 1913), 202-03; Canada Gazette, 28 February 1914,2916] 84In 1914, the average Winnipeg price for a good quality butcher steer was $7.20 per hundredweight. By 1918, it had reached $11.60 per hundredweight—a 161 per cent increase. The total acreage of grazing leases in the province rose from 1.7 million acres in 1913 to over 3 million acres in 1921 [Kai-iu Fung, ed., 65; Potyondi, 60]. ^Saskatchewan Farmer, September 1920, 17; SAB, Conference Report, 171. 86In September 1920, Hugh McKellar, the secretary of the SSGA, wrote to CM. Hamilton reminding him that a typical rancher knew "the value of rough lands and deep ravines for pasture perhaps better than any professional agriculturalist" [SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #10, Hugh McKellar to CM. Hamilton, 2 September 1920; F.H. Auld to Jack Byers, 9 September 1920]. 87SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.13, F.H. Auld to W.W. Cory (Deputy Minister of the Interior), 13 August 1920. 88The Order-in-Council, dated 4 November 1920 amended grazing regulations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and the Peace River district of British Columbia: "Should the Governor in Council at any time during the term of the lease think it to be in the public interest to withdraw any portion of the lands herein described or to cancel the lease, the Minister of the Interior may on giving the lessee three years' notice withdraw such land or cancel the lease" [Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 42; Breen, 232]. 89Breen, 286, endnote #73. '"Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 12; SAB, "Report of Sub-Committee [on Grazing Lands]...," 1-5. 91Alberta, A Report on the Rehabilitation..., 39. 92Examples of this include the province's sponsorship of cooperative creameries (to promote diversified farming) beginning in 1907, telephone cooperatives in rural areas in 1909 and the creation of the Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator Company two years later [Archer, 150-57; Barnhart, "Walter Scott" in Barnhart, ed. Saskatchewan Premiers..., 19-21; D.S. Spafford, "The Elevator Issue, the Organized Farmers And the Government, 1908-1911" Saskatchewan History Vol. 15 (Autumn 1962), 83-84; Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1914, 188-90]. 93Canada, Sessional Papers, Vol. XLV, 1 George V. A. 1911, No. 25, 24. 94The advantages of having a closely settled and well organized community with good roads, schools, churches, telephones, hospitals, etc., requires no elaboration, as it can easily be seen that these conveniences and their efficiency are likely to be greater in a closely settled area than in a sparsely settled community, while the cost of maintenance would be less [Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 41], 95Ibid., 42. 96Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 15-16. 97In 1911, the Saskatchewan government surveyed the main sources of domestic water supply around the province on behalf of the federal government. The results showed that "wells form the chief source of supply;" water obtained from springs, creeks and sloughs formed the second most important source; and some farmers with greater financial means excavated their own dugouts. In areas where water could not be conveniently secured through the above means, the provincial Department of Public Works built dams in coulees and natural water courses and excavated reservoirs to trap run-off [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1911, 67-72], 98Thomas, 4-5; Northwest Territories, Department of Public Works Annual Report, 1899 (J.A. Reid, Queen's Printer, 1900), 34-35. 78

"Saskatchewan's Department of Public Works maintained the test auger program until 1912 when it was transferred to the RMs. Though many settlers undoubtedly benefited from the provision of test augers and other supplies for the establishment of wells, the Department's report for 1910-11 indicated that that the program had become a "considerable inconvenience." A number of private firms had set up well drilling operations in the province and it saw no need to compete with them [Saskatchewan, Department of Public Works, Annual Report, 1910-11 (Regina: Government Printer, 1911), 72]. 100Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 15-16. 101A number of major rivers emanating from the Rocky Mountains' eastern slope make large parts of southern Alberta well adapted to large scale irrigation, and private interests had established irrigation works adjacent to these in the 1880s [Morton, History of Prairie Settlement, 114-15]. 102Canada, Department of the Interior, Report on Irrigation Surveys and Inspections, 1916-17 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1917), 18, 68-72. 103E. Alyn Mitchner, "William Pearce and Federal Government Activity in the West" Canadian Public Administration Vol. 10 (1967), 240-42. 104Canada, Sessional Papers, 10 Geo. V, No. 25, A. 1920, 3. 105Ibid., 12 Geo. V, No. 25, A. 1922, 3. 106SAB, R-184, File #2.1, Conference Report, 168. 101 Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1919-20, 10 Geo. V, c. 84. 108SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.11, Thos. Lannan to F.H. Auld, 15 July 1921. 109SAB, Martin Papers, R-7.2, Reel #25, A.W. Last to W.M. Martin, 14 July 1920, 39545. 110A spokesman for the RM of Cymri—located on the eastern fringes of the BFC's study area—had written to F.H. Auld in October 1920 stating that his area had suffered five consecutive crop failures so far. He added that "[nfjany farmers are leaving, principally tenants, although a number of owners are also leaving, mostly for the United States, and these will naturally bring bad tidings to their new locations, to the detriment of the province. There are a number of farms vacant, with no prospect of getting them worked next season, and it is to be feared that there will be a great number more vacated.. .It is the belief of the Council that the Better Farming Commission which has investigated like conditions in other parts of the province, could be of material assistance by investigating conditions as they exist here and help to find a remedy as well as by giving the community the benefit of what they have already learned" [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.12, S. Molberg to F.H. Auld, 27 October 1920]. mIbid, Thomas Rennie to F.H. Auld, 21 November 1920. 112Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1920, 9. 113SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #10, Alex E. Cumming to CM. Hamilton, 10 June 1920; John Hodges to CM. Hamilton, 14 September 1920. 114Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 15. U5SAB, "Report of Sub-Committee [on Grazing Lands]..." 1. 116Ibid.,40. 11 Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 44. ll8Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior from 1896 to 1905, had simplified the regulations, but he refused to allow a free second homestead after the patent on the first one had been issued; he insisted that many people would not 'stick it out' on their land in the face of adversity if a free alternative were available [Hall, 283]. ll9See for example SAB, Martin Papers, R-7.2, Reel #25, W.M. Martin to James Lougheed, 23 July 1920, 39571 and 15 October 1920, 39573. 120Ibid., James Lougheed to W.M. Martin, 19 October 1920, 39574. 121SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #10, CM. Hamilton to J.H. Mitchell (Secretary of the Prince Albert Board of Trade), 21 May 1921. 122Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 43-44. 123Ibid., 43. 124Loveridge and Potyondi, 143; Saskatchewan, Final Report of the Live Stock Commission of the Province of Saskatchewan, 1918 (Regina: King's Printer, 1918), 15. 125Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 38. I26SAB, R-184, File #2.1, Conference Report, 132-40. 79

127Albert Z. Guttenberg, "The Land Utilization Movement of the 1920s" Agricultural History Vol. 50, No. 3 (July 1976), 483-84; P.S. Lovejoy, "Theory and Practice in Land Classification" Journal of Land & Public Utility Economics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 1925), 167-75. 128J.A. McKeague and P.C. Stobbe, History of Soil Survey in Canada, 1914-1975 (Ottawa: Canada Department of Agriculture, Historical Series No. 11, 1978), 7-8. 129Moss, 1; SAB, R-184, File #2.1, Conference Report, 21. 130Canada, Commission of Conservation Annual Report. 1917 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1917), 209- 11. 13'Roy Hansen—who was trained at the University of Illinois before joining the faculty of the SCA—made explicit reference to the positive results obtained from soil survey work in that state in an address to the Better Farming Conference [SAB, R-184, File #2.1, Conference Report, 132-40]. 132Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, AA. 133Ibid., 49. CHAPTER THREE: Making a Start: Implementing the Better Farming Commission's Recommendations, 1921-1929

The BFC report was made available for public distribution in March 1921. Press reviews were generally positive. The Grain Growers' Guide, for example, called it "the outline of a reconstructed agriculture for the semi-arid section of Saskatchewan" and urged all farmers in the region to obtain a copy "and submit it to a thorough study."1

Corporations with a stake in Palliser Triangle agriculture held similar views. For instance, the Merchants' Bank of Canada sent a circular letter to all of its branches in southern Saskatchewan urging them to compare their clients' farming methods with the program outlined in the BFC report when considering the extension of farm credit. But some misinterpreted the report when it was first released. On 29 January 1921, the

Regina Morning Leader startled many with the headline "Evacuation of Dry Districts

Recommended." The article, which was a basic summary of the report, asserted that its proposal to allow drought area farmers the opportunity to exchange their holdings for a new homestead was "one of the most important of the [BFC's] many recommendations."3

No apparent reason for this view was given, and Deputy Minister of Agriculture F.H.

Auld quickly replied to the paper's editor explaining that the BFC did not

recommend the extensive evacuation of the southwest, but does recognize that there are lands under cultivation which will not stand to be summerfallowed once in two years or even once in three years without blowing so badly as to be impossible to farm properly.. .4

Such confusion was an omen of things to come. It is likely that few actually read the

BFC report carefully enough to understand its message. The federal and Saskatchewan governments did make an honest effort to implement the BFC's recommendations in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, the task was a large one, and while much good work was

80 81 accomplished during that decade, it was not as much as might have been expected.

The senior governments responded quickly to the BFC's plea for more research on the Palliser Triangle's physical environment to determine its agricultural possibilities.

The federal government, it will be recalled, had already made the first move. In June

1920, Parliament voted $25,000 to begin construction of the Swift Current Experimental

Station, which officially opened about a year later.5 According to J. Baden Campbell, the historian for the Station, the twenty-seven questions on crop production and stock raising in the BFC report "were actually recommendations presented to formulate, in part, the program for research" at the new facility.6 But it was not expected to yield definite results overnight. "It is well known among those who conduct experiments in agriculture," wrote Station superintendent J.G. Taggart in his 1923 report, "that the results of any single year's work may be wholly misleading when compared with the average of a period of from five to ten years' work." He thus warned his readers that

"they should not attempt to draw definite conclusions from data here presented."7

Indeed, it would not be until after 1929, and the series of dry years that followed that the

Station's dry farming experiments would begin to yield conclusive results. It must also be noted that the federal Department of Marine and Fisheries had made arrangements in

1921 to open twelve new meteorological stations in Saskatchewan.8

For its part, the Saskatchewan government had made a start with soil survey work. In 1921, the legislature voted an appropriation for this purpose,9 and the

Saskatchewan Soil Survey was established under the direction of Roy Hansen, head of the SCA's Soils Department. That March, CM. Hamilton and F.H. Auld had also met personally with officials of the federal government to discuss the BFC report's 82 recommendation (among others) that Ottawa contribute to the cost of conducting the soil survey. W.W. Cory, the Deputy Minister of the Interior, had spoken favorably of federal financing for areas where some Crown land remained. Predictably, though, Cory—as

Auld put it—"did not seem to recognize any obligation upon the Dominion where lands are alienated."10 In October 1921, the federal Deputy Minister of Agriculture did inform his provincial counterparts that his Department was interested in gathering more data on soils to assist land settlement, crop production and meteorological studies across Canada, and he invited them to a conference at Ottawa to discuss the possibility of federal coordination of existing provincial soil surveys and initiating such work in provinces where no start had yet been made.11 But differences of opinion at the conference resulted in an impasse. Commenting on the meeting in a letter to Cory, Auld said that Quebec and Prince Edward Island had been in favour of "any assistance" that Ottawa might give.

But delegates from the Prairie Provinces insisted that any federal aid for soil surveys should consist solely of "a cash subsidy equivalent to the expenditure of the province for similar work" and that the direction of the work should lie with the province.12 A

"federal bureau" of soils was thought to be a hindrance rather than a help by this point, especially to those provinces that had already begun soil surveys.

In the end neither Saskatchewan nor any other province received financial aid from the federal government for soil surveys in the 1920s (though Ottawa and the SCA did swap technical data).14 Even so, Roy Hansen commenced his duties in the summer of

1921, well aware of the immense task that lay ahead. His team had planned to conduct the bulk of its investigations by car, traveling on as many municipal roads and road allowances as possible to cover at least two sides of every section in order to gather 83 sufficient soil samples. But all weather roads were few and far between, and narrow, winding trails over rough terrain were often the only means of access to many rural areas, especially in the extreme southwest.15 Hansen therefore decided at the outset that the

BFC's request for a 'hybrid' soil survey was impractical at the time. "If at some future time more detail is required," he told CM. Hamilton in his 1921 report, "it must be done with horses and a camping outfit."16 His team began in areas where there were more roads, and had examined eighty three townships in the southwest by the end of 1921.17

Officials at the University of Saskatchewan also began planning the system of

'substations' of the SCA that the BFC had recommended. In early 1922, the government began drafting a bill to empower the University to acquire land for such a purpose, though as it turned out the University Act (1907) already gave it the power to do so.18

These facilities were to be substantial: each was to occupy a quarter-section of land and have enough buildings, stock and equipment to carry out adequate tests. In 1922, they estimated that there would be no more than nine such facilities, each with an initial capital outlay of up to $25,000 plus $10,000 per year for maintenance. There was considerable public interest in the proposed substations: the provincial Department of

Agriculture received many letters from farmers and farm groups offering land for such a purpose. They were told in response that they would have to wait for the results of the soil survey before sites would be selected.

In the meantime, the province mounted a new "Better Farming" campaign in southwestern Saskatchewan. In 1920, the SCA and the Department of Agriculture joined forces with the railways to resurrect the Better Farming Train. It followed the same format and summer schedule as in previous years and was reaching some 33,000 people 84 annually by 1923.21 The province and the CPR also ran "agricultural instruction cars" in

the southwest in 1921 to acquaint farmers with the BFC's philosophy: 12,265 people

attended meetings held at sixty points across the region and received some 12,000 copies

of the BFC report.22 In addition to the usual array of agricultural fairs, conventions and

short courses, the Department also experimented with other forms of agricultural

extension. For example, it sponsored members of Agricultural Societies to attend "field

days" at the DEFS farms at Indian Head, Scott and Rosthern, at the SCA and even at the homes of progressive farmers in their respective areas to view cultivation and fodder crop

demonstrations.23 In 1921, agricultural societies were also empowered to offer cash prizes for forage crop competitions. Interestingly, a second "Better Farming Conference" was even held at Saskatoon that year.24

In 1922, Agricultural Representatives were also reintroduced into the southwest.

Legislation enabling four neighbouring RMs to hire one in cooperation with the province does not appear to have been passed by this point. This really did not matter, since those

RMs that were most in need of one at the time were financially unable to employ one.

But the province still went ahead and hired five Agricultural Representatives to serve the

LIDs in the southwest: one was stationed at Maple Creek, two at Robsart, one at Cadillac and one at Limerick. That year they supervised summerfallow substitute demonstrations

(using corn, clover, oats, and brome and rye grasses) in cooperation with local farmers; organized weed control campaigns; distributed gopher poison and helped control grasshopper infestations; judged crop competitions; promoted cooperative livestock shipping; and held 98 extension meetings attended by a total of 3,615 persons. They also surveyed farms in their respective areas to help determine soil types, livestock numbers, 85 the total acreage of land in crops and the farming methods employed.25

Evidence suggests that southwestern farmers were taking this advice. It must be noted that wheat prices had continued to fall since the BFC report's release, from $1.62 in 1920 to $0.67 in 1923.26 Unluckily, this fall in prices was not accompanied by a similar drop in living costs, wages, freight rates or interest charges on debts incurred before and during the war, and this exacted a heavy toll on farm incomes. This perhaps made farmers more inclined to keep more livestock. From 1920 to 1924, the number of cattle, sheep, swine and poultry in the southwestern Crop Districts rose from 2.7 million to nearly 3.7 million head (see Figure 7). From 1921 to 1922, total wheat acreage in the area fell by 747,584 acres, or 13 per cent, and farmers did experiment with cover crops to provide a forage supplement and to control soil drifting. The number of cooperative demonstrations in the southwest is not known, though it is worth noting that in the South­ western crop district alone the acreage of winter rye increased from 46,909 in 1920 to

899,889 in 1921—about 75 per cent of the total provincial acreage.28 Fodder corn also got off to a modest start in the southwest, the total acreage rising from 1,850 to 40,598 acres from 1918 to 1924.29 In 1922, the provincial Department of Agriculture even reported "a heavy correspondence" on silos and silage crops. As the Agricultural

Representative for the Eastend-Robsart area affirmed in his 1923 report,

The year 1922 was a very opportune time for the introduction of the District Representative service to South-western Saskatchewan. It appeared to be the turning point after six years of adverse crop conditions. The failures of the previous years had a tendency to create a receptive mind for any suggestions on fresh enterprises introduced by one working in the capacity of an Agricultural Representative.... l

But such initiatives had barely gotten off the ground when the adverse economic conditions of the early 1920s forced the province to adopt a policy of retrenchment. 86 Rather than tap new revenue sources, as the other Prairie Provinces did, the Dunning government balanced the budget by curtailing both capital and ordinary expenditures.

Due to rising highway maintenance and public welfare costs, and because education expenditures were fixed by statute, the savings were realized mainly by cutting government services. In 1921, the combined cost of legislature, government and justice accounted for 28.7 per cent of total ordinary provincial expenditures; by 1926 it had fallen to 22.3 per cent. Oddly enough, spending on agriculture declined from seven per cent of total ordinary expenditures to 2.6 per cent in the same period—the largest funding cut imposed on any government department.32

All of this came at a time when Ottawa was determined to reduce its role in agricultural extension and research when it duplicated what the provinces were doing.

In a November 1922 letter to F.H. Auld, W.R. Motherwell, Minister of Agriculture in the

Mackenzie King government, promised that should a university substation be located near one of the federal Illustration Stations, "we will very speedily close up our station, as we recognize that just as soon as the Province is in a position to do this class of work we can to advantage move on elsewhere." He was even "considering the advisability of moving the Rosthern Experimental Farm, notwithstanding all the money that had been spent there, because of its proximity to the University Farm and the consequent duplication of service."33 But Motherwell's Department was apparently still inclined to remain true to its policy of creating new research stations in areas not already served by one: in 1927 it established the Dominion Range Experimental Station at Manyberries in southeastern Alberta to study problems related to ranching in a semiarid climate.

In 1923, Saskatchewan's Better Farming campaign was dealt another blow when 87 Ottawa announced that it would not be renewing the Agricultural Instruction Act. For

Saskatchewan, this federal grant represented 21 per cent of its total agriculture budget in the 1922-23 fiscal year and was used to finance all education extension work in the province, including the Better Farming Trains, the Agricultural Representatives and the staff salaries of the research and extension service.34 Needless to say, Ottawa's move was as surprising as it was unpopular; CM. Hamilton told one correspondent in 1923 that

the Federal Government apparently taking the view that education being the duty of the provinces, the responsibility does not lie with the Federal Government in promoting it.. .We all know that agriculture needs all the support it can get at the present time instead of having any of the props knocked out from under it.35

Hence, the province was forced to cut back its agricultural education programs. In May

1923, Hamilton announced that no agricultural instruction trains of any sort would operate in Saskatchewan during the coming year. He affirmed that the trains "set the people thinking along the lines of improved methods," but that they were "one of the things that we can get along without, at least for this year."36 In 1924, the Department did introduce two scaled-down versions of the Better Farming Trains (the Forage Crops

Seed Train and the Better Livestock Train), but these were geared more toward sales than education. It was also necessary to end the Agricultural Representatives service.

It must also be noted that southwestern farmers' enthusiasm for Better Farming also appeared to diminish with the return of good wheat growing conditions. Moisture levels throughout Saskatchewan (including the southwest) improved considerably in the

1922 crop season, resulting in a handsome wheat harvest of 250 million bushels—the largest yet recorded in the province's history; the southwestern Crop Districts together accounted for 42 per cent of this harvest. The 1923 wheat crop was larger still (see Figure 6). The postwar recession had also begun to recede by this time; a bushel of wheat worth $0.67 in 1923 had jumped to $1.23 by 1925. Naturally, southwestern farmers, many of whom were saddled with major relief and other debts accumulated in previous years, began to expand their wheat acreage to cash in, and their willingness to acquire more livestock evidently waned. It is impossible to know how the rural populace as a whole responded to the Better Farming campaign. However, the correspondence of certain provincial officials does shed some light on the issue. Shortly following a tour with the Better Livestock Train in 1924, Saskatchewan's Livestock Commissioner told

F.H. Auld in a letter that

it is not very easy making the sale of bulls. The people are quite pleased with the appearance of the animals and do not seem to think that the prices are out of order. It is just that they seem to think that they simply have not got the money and some say that they do not want to go into debt any further, although they will usually admit that it would pay to buy a better bull.39

What was true of bulls was also true of forage seed. After a three day tour on the Forage

Crop Seed Train in 1926, the provincial Publications Commissioner wrote to Auld:

A three hour stop, with 3 lectures and the discussions and questions which always follow and are much too valuable to be curtailed in any way, is insufficient to allow time enough to deal with the farmers, only a proportion of whom come to the cars with a definite idea of what seeds they require and what acreage they are prepared to devote to forage crops. These know what they are doing and are ready to buy if the prices suit them, without losing time, but many others require more or less argument either from officials or from other farmers, and before they know it the time has arrived for the train to go and they leave without purchasing.

As well, southwestern farmers appear to have made little, if any, effort to develop new artificial water supplies on their property. The total number of private dugouts and dams in existence in the region at the time is not known, though the 1922 annual report of the Department of the Interior did note "a large number of small reservoirs in coulees or 89 on well defined watercourses" on farms and ranches throughout southern Alberta and

Saskatchewan.41 Of course, debt-ridden Palliser Triangle farmers would not have been keen on incurring the expense of constructing a dugout, but it is also possible that many of them did not have serious water problems. In 1920 and more so in 1921, precipitation in Saskatchewan's three southwestern Crop Districts was better than average; indeed, the

BFC's Grazing Lands Subcommittee noted in its final report that water for stock raising purposes was available "in practically all the districts visited."42 It would not be until the

Dirty Thirties that farmers throughout the Palliser Triangle generally came to appreciate the value of a water supply that could withstand a series of dry years.

Notable progress appears to have been made regarding adjustments to Dominion

Lands policy in the Palliser Triangle. CM. Hamilton and F.H. Auld were unable to meet with Interior Minister James Lougheed to discuss the BFC report's recommendations when they visited Ottawa in March 1921.43 But Deputy Minister of the Interior W.W.

Cory gave them a sympathetic ear and promised to notify them of his Minister's attitude toward the BFC's findings as soon as possible.44 Indeed, they made their appeal at a time when both the federal and provincial wings of the Liberal and Conservative parties were trying to cope with many agricultural problems in the West—of which drought was only one. The war had magnified long-standing grievances Western farmers had toward

Ottawa over such matters as tariff policy; freight rates; federal control over Crown lands and natural resources in the Prairie Provinces; immigration policies; wartime recruiting policies that had deprived farmers of labour; and federal wartime and postwar grain handling and marketing policies. Many had all but lost faith in the ability of the two traditional parties to deal with their concerns and began considering a third alternative, 90 the National Progressive Party (founded in 1920), which was fast becoming a serious political force on the Canadian prairies.45 Still, the Department of the Interior insisted that any changes to Dominion Lands policy would also have to consider Alberta. Indeed, the worsening drought in southeastern Alberta had become the political issue in that province by this time. Relief expenditures in that province had reached a remarkable $8 million by 1923, and the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) had buoyed the spirits of many Dry Belt farmers by their promise to address the crisis if elected.46 Cory had written to Auld in the summer of 1921 stating that his Department was not inclined to announce a definite policy on granting second homesteads until the results of an Alberta government investigation had come in.47 Still, the Meighen government did take the all- important first step. On 27 September 1921, all Crown land in the Prairie Provinces was reserved from homestead entry, sale or grazing lease until further notice.48

No further action was taken on this issue for the next several months because federal politicians were gearing up for an election that December. The Conservatives were defeated, and Liberal leader W.L. Mackenzie King replaced Meighen as Prime

Minister. King's was the first minority government in Canadian history; the Progressives held 65 of the 231 seats in the House of Commons (compared with the Conservatives'

50).49 What is more, King's Liberals were decimated in the West; just four of the 43 prairie MPs were not Progressives, and Progressive candidates won huge majorities in the

Dry Belt ridings of Medicine Hat, Maple Creek, Kindersley and Swift Current.50 Though adroit political maneuvering on the part of W.M. Martin had averted a Progressive takeover in Saskatchewan that year, Alberta's Liberal Premier Charles Stewart was not so lucky. In July 1921 Stewart suffered a crushing electoral defeat at the hands of the UFA. 91 Not a single Liberal was elected in Alberta's drought area (and only 15 in the entire

province).51 As for Charles Stewart, he became Minister of the Interior in Mackenzie

King's new government and inherited the challenge of finding a solution to the grave

situation facing settlers on the semiarid plains.

Stewart began by following up on what Lougheed had proposed. In May 1922

the Department of the Interior officially divided the Prairie Provinces into three distinct

zones. Area A comprised all lands south of Township 16 (the territory to the south of the

CPR mainline) in Alberta and Saskatchewan; all vacant Crown lands in this area were

withdrawn from homestead entry indefinitely; however, available lands therein were

opened to applications for grazing leases. Area B consisted of the region north of

Township 16 west of the Third Meridian in Alberta and Saskatchewan; the right of

homestead entry in that area was temporarily withdrawn pending inspection of all vacant

Crown lands to determine if they were suitable for settlement. Area C included all of the

territory lying to the north and east of areas A and B in the three Prairie Provinces and the

Peace River block in British Columbia. All land in this area that had been withdrawn

from settlement in September 1921 was once again opened for homestead entry.52

Stewart also tried to address the "second homestead" issue. Indeed, depopulation

had become a problem in the semiarid plains by the early 1920s, giving the issue a new

urgency. As relief and other debts mounted, many Saskatchewan Dry Belt RMs were

forced to either tighten the rules governing relief distribution or cancel relief altogether,

leaving many with little choice but to abandon their farms. The 1926 Census counted

about 2,500 fewer farms in the four southwestern Census Districts than in 1921; the heaviest abandonment occurred in Census District Eight in the heart of the Dry Belt.54 92 One recent study has used the tax sale records of certain Dry Belt RMs to conclude that the exodus from the region may have been worse than the Census records indicate. In

Census District Four, one RJVI alone seized and sold 419 parcels of land between 1921

and 1925. "The seized land most often represented a failed settler...which means that,

conceivably, 419 settlers abandoned their land."55

Ottawa was finally disposed to act because Alberta's Dry Belt study—the Report

of the Survey Board for Southern Alberta—was now complete, and its recommendations

closely resembled the BFC's.56 On 21 October 1922, the federal Cabinet approved an

Order-in-Council (P.C. #2181) allowing settlers in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan who had not yet proved up their lands to file for a new homestead on a suitable quarter-

section of available Crown land in the northern grain belt "with credit for all settlement

duties performed by him prior to such transfer."57 Settlers who held patented lands via homesteading or purchase were also entitled to a second homestead (quarter-section for

quarter-section) in the north with no further settlement duties if they forfeited same to the

Crown with a certificate of title "showing no encumbrance" on their land.58 However,

the issue of granting second homesteads to farmers whose homestead rights were

exhausted, and whose lands had either been encumbered with liens or seized through

mortgage foreclosure, was more complex. The adverse climatic and economic conditions had left countless drought-area farmers in default to banks, farm implement companies

and other creditors. They also owed millions of dollars worth of unpaid taxes and seed grain and relief loans to their respective municipalities and to the provincial government.

As well, promoting a migration of farmers ^mt of the drought areas would leave a higher municipal tax burden upon those left behind. Ottawa therefore insisted on obtaining 93 provincial consent before it approved these applications (but it did permit them to reserve

a desired plot of land until the Dominion Lands Act was amended to allow them to earn

patent to another homestead). Interestingly, the Department of the Interior also expected

the province to investigate each application to determine which farmers would move.59

Saskatchewan authorities were less than pleased with the initial arrangement.

"There is no settler", insisted Auld in a November 1922 Department memo, "located on

land of inferior quality in any part of Saskatchewan which the Provincial Government

wishes to see remain there..."60 But he questioned why the province should be called

upon to provide staff to investigate applications for relocation. The Department of the

Interior was really the agency best suited for this work: it had a corps of homestead

inspectors stationed in the drought areas with access to federal surveyors' records and

other information regarding the location and settlement history of each homesteader. In

the end, Ottawa agreed to assign its homestead inspectors (with their range of resources)

and pay their salaries while they assisted the province in this work. P.C. #2181 also did

not indicate a specific area from which requests for second homesteads would be granted;

Auld informed Saskatchewan Premier C.A. Dunning in a January 1923 memo that his

Department had received a number of applications from men who had homesteaded in

Saskatchewan but were no longer living there.61 Consequently, a new Order-in-Council

(P.C. #818) was passed that May restricting the area from which settlers could apply to

move to south of Township 31.62 Other applicants were under the impression that they

would be let off the hook for their debts by moving.63 The province was quick to note that it would be the unsuitability of a farmer's existing location for agricultural purposes,

and not the amount of his debts, that would determine whether his application would be 94 approved. As Hamilton told Cory in a February 1923 letter,

[t]here are thousands of farmers whose present location would furnish them a living if it were not for their debts, and if the question of a man's debts is to be taken as justifying his removal to another location there would be a whole lot of our farmers ready to make the move with all the depopulation of units which would follow.64

Provincial officials were especially concerned because the proposed Dominion

Lands Act amendment to grant free second homesteads contained a clause that would require the province to certify that the applicant had "conscientiously endeavoured to

farm the land" but had failed "through no fault of his own."65 In the above letter

Hamilton feared that this invited controversy because it would be difficult to make "an

impartial opinion on the part of one [not] entirely familiar with all the facts of the case."

As a result of further negotiations between the two governments, the Act was amended in

June 1923 empowering the Minister of the Interior to grant free second homesteads if the

applicant could produce a provincially-endorsed certificate indicating that he had failed in his old location "because of circumstances not favourable to successful agriculture."66

The province had also made arrangements with the CPR and the CNR to evacuate

families from unproductive lands in the drought area in January 1923. After brokering a

deal with the federal government and the railways to each share one-third of the cost with the province, the Saskatchewan government arranged for free transportation for up to two railway cars of machinery, furniture and livestock per family. It also agreed to pay one- third of the freight charges on the personal property of those whose second homestead applications the province had approved.68 According to the Saskatchewan Agriculture

Reports for the years 1923 to 1927, free second homesteads were granted to 400-500 people and free transportation was provided to another 215.69 At the same time, the 95 Saskatchewan government did make an effort to help the debt-ridden farmers left behind.

As a result of a September 1922 conference, a Debt Adjustment Bureau was created. By

1925, it had handled over 9,300 cases involving almost $73 million in liabilities.70

The senior governments also did what they could to assist prairie farmers to cooperate to achieve rehabilitation objectives. In keeping with the wishes of the Better

Farming Conference, the Department of the Interior initiated new irrigation survey work in southwestern Saskatchewan. On 1 July 1920, all hydrometric survey work in Alberta and Saskatchewan was centralized in the Water Power Branch, resulting in greater efficiency and standardization of methods. From there, the Branch continued its studies of irrigation possibilities in the Battle Creek and Frenchman River areas and by 1922 had located reservoir sites and irrigation canals and estimated the costs of constructing them, conducted soil alkalinity studies and prepared topographic maps.71 Despite this, no

"cooperative irrigation associations" appear to have been established under the provincial

Irrigation Districts Act by this point. On the one hand, this may have stemmed from the relatively good moisture conditions in the southwest at the time. In his 1922 report, the director of the federal Reclamation Service also argued that this was

due no doubt to scarcity of money consequent upon four dry years. Many large schemes already licensed or about to be licensed are not using the water which is being reserved for their use under the provisions of the [North-West Irrigation Act] and new settlers with small holdings are in the meantime being deprived of the benefits of this water. Readjustments or cancellations will have to be considered in the near future unless greater interest is shown by the holders of unused, or partially used, water rights.

Development of community pastures was more encouraging. The allocation of grazing land had become a hot topic in Ottawa since the BFC report's release. The larger ranching interests in the West (mainly in Alberta) had objected strongly to Interior 96 Minister Lougheed's reinstatement of the three year cancellation clause on new federal grazing leases. Meanwhile, the idea of community grazing as a means of assisting farmers in the semiarid region had become popular on the prairies; Alberta's drought commission would recommend community pastures.73 On 12 April 1922, Charles

Stewart—a longtime friend of ranchers—had secured an Order-in-Council (P.C. #786) bringing back the ten-year, closed leases of not more than 12,000 acres, but the following proviso was also inserted to keep advocates of community grazing contented.

When a tract of land unfit for agricultural purposes, which is compact in form and comprises three sections or more, becomes available for grazing either through the cancellation of a grazing lease or otherwise, the Provincial Government, if considered advisable by the Minister of the Interior, may be given an opportunity to acquire a lease thereof for community grazing purposes, covering a period often years, and subject to a rental at the rate of not more than 2 cents per acre per annum.74

It was arranged that the Department of the Interior would notify the province when such an area became available. In March 1923 the Saskatchewan legislature passed the

Grazing Lands Act authorizing the province to acquire by lease "such public lands of the

Dominion" and also by purchase or lease "the lands of private individuals adjacent thereto" that were fit for grazing in order to establish "community grazing districts."75

Groups of farmers and ranchers, who were adjacent to a particular lease, were organized into cooperatives, and possessed enough stock to occupy it on the basis of one animal per thirty acres, would be eligible to enter into a ten-year lease agreement with the province at a rate of two cents per acre per year.76 The operation of the community grazing district

(i.e. the adoption of bylaws and the management of the district, including the collection

77 of fees and determining the type of bulls to be kept) would be left up to the cooperative.

The Saskatchewan Agriculture Report for 1923 indicated a "deep interest" in 97 community pastures. "Community grazing associations" were often incorporated well in

advance of the expiry of the desired grazing lease, and in some cases impatient farmers

pressured certain leaseholders to relinquish parts of their leases to permit community

grazing.78 In 1926, associations at Ponteix, Monchy, Plato and Robsart were granted four

leases totaling 34,101 acres. One particular lease (a 116,893 acre tract once leased to the

Matador Land and Cattle Company that had expired in 1923) was deemed to be too large

for a community grazing association to operate; thus, the province decided to manage it

directly. On 14 June 1922, following months of talks in anticipation of the transfer, the

federal Cabinet issued an Order-in-Council (P.C. #1245) agreeing to lease the land to the

Saskatchewan government for free on the condition that the province would charge users

of this land the same fee that had been set forth through P.C. #786. The province hired

a full time manager for the "Matador Pasture" in 1923.

The grazing associations were generally well managed.80 Writing to Auld in

1927, one Department inspector was especially impressed with the Whitewater Grazing

Association at Monchy.

I noticed that all bulls were castrated and the cattle branded with the Association brand. Horses the same. They also have a very complete corral system and their pastures fenced to prevent the young heifers running with the herd bulls. They are using entirely registered bulls and stallions.81

But the number of farmers using the pastures was not as large as one might have

expected. In 1924, only 4,523 head of livestock grazed on the Nashlyn, Edgehill and

Matador Pastures, but there were nearly half a million cattle in southwestern

Saskatchewan that year (see Figure 7). The 1925 Agriculture Report noted that there was

"ample accommodation for a much larger number of livestock" at the Matador Pasture than the farmers of the district were providing. 98 The return of favourable grain growing conditions after 1922 undoubtedly cooled farmers' interest in community pastures. In fact, the demand for settlement land began to increase, and Ottawa was pressured to open Area A to settlement. As early as 1923,

CM. Hamilton told Charles Stewart in a letter that he had received complaints from officials of certain RMs and school districts in Area A that "a considerable area of good land" had been withdrawn from homestead entry "and thus not made liable for taxation."

They argued that since conditions had become "more normal" the land should be reopened for entry.83 Farmers bent on growing grain also began to encroach upon community grazing areas. In April 1925, for example, Auld received a letter from one

SGGA local insisting that land in two townships within the Matador Pasture was "equally suitable for grain raising to those lands immediately adjacent thereto on the outside of the pasture" and "respectfully urge[d] the desirability of these lands being opened up for settlement."84 In December 1926, Auld received another petition requesting that a quarter-section of land be withdrawn from the Three Bar lease and given to an individual

Of for homesteading.

Such requests put both Hamilton and Stewart in an awkward position. Because soil surveys of Area A had only just begun, they had no authoritative data on which to base a warning to settlers about homesteading in the region. Moreover, there appeared to be little hope of speeding up the soil survey work. Due to the lack of finances and trained men, the SCA could only send out a single field party to carry out the soil surveys.

Though this work were usually done during the summer months, the staff often had to return to Saskatoon to deal with mail and other business. Over the winter the staff was also busy analyzing soil samples, writing reports and preparing soil maps for publication 99 in addition to teaching students.86 Hence, the time required to complete a soil survey was considerable; the Saskatchewan Soil Survey's first two reports, published at the end of

1923, covered blocks of just four RMs each in the Moose Jaw and Swift Current districts, and a third report—released in 1925—covered a similar sized area along the international boundary south of the Cypress Hills (see Figure 8). Though these reports were no doubt a solid start to soil survey work in the province, they profiled only a small part of southwestern Saskatchewan. Because of this, the substations the SCA had planned to establish in the region were never built. The Saskatchewan government was meanwhile being bombarded with new demands for soil data.

To its credit, the Department of the Interior declined to reopen Area A to general homesteading. But it apparently had been persuaded to carry out first hand inspections of all remaining unclaimed Crown lands in the area to determine what might be done with them. These inspections were only rudimentary and certainly not scientific soil surveys.

By February 1924, Dominion homestead inspectors had surveyed 647 quarter-sections

(103,520 acres) of land in Area A.89 Their report indicated little, if any, good land left; nearly two-thirds of these quarter-sections were classed as fit for grazing only, while the remainder were deemed suitable for homesteads or "stock homesteads" not worth more than $4 to $5 per acre.90 Some 288 of them were located on two townships of land reserved for the federal Department of Agriculture for cattle quarantine and inspection purposes. However, many of the quarter-sections outside this zone were situated near better farmland. Federal politicians felt that those who lived in the region should have the first opportunity to purchase or lease these lands for grazing. It was also thought that the sons of people who had homesteaded in the area should have the first choice of any of 100 the 'better' land that was available. As one Progressive MP from southern Alberta declared before the House of Commons in May 1925,

There are a great many young men coming of age and there are no homesteads available to them unless they go several hundred miles north; and it is rather a hardship, after these old pioneers have gone into that country and established a community, suffering all the hardships which pioneers have to endure, to see the few homesteads that are left picked up by outsiders. l

Parliament therefore decided that people who already lived in the region (those who knew the conditions and were eking out a living) should be allowed to stay and settle members of their family. The Dominion Lands Act was amended accordingly that June.92

Wheat growing conditions meanwhile continued to improve. Excellent moisture conditions throughout Saskatchewan in 1927 resulted in an incredible 321 million bushel wheat harvest the following year (about half of Canada's total wheat crop); southwestern farmers would harvest about half of this total (see Figure 6).93 All of this resulted in one final 'land rush' in the region. In 1927, Ottawa informed the holder of the "76" lease (the last remaining large private ranch in southwestern Saskatchewan) that it would not consider a renewal, and its 77,000 acres were immediately thrown open to homesteaders.94 In the 1928 session of Parliament, Charles Stewart had even proposed an amendment to the Dominion Lands Act to allow anyone to file for a homestead on any remaining Crown land in Area A, though protests by certain Dry Belt MPs forced him to retract this motion. But the next year the federal Department of Agriculture bowed to pressure to open up all but six sections of its cattle quarantine reserve township in Area A to settlement.95 Homestead entries at the Moose Jaw Dominion Lands office (the only such office in southern Saskatchewan after 1925) jumped from 378 in 1925 to 855 the next year and reached 1,611 by 1928.% By 1930, a total of 4,746 homestead entries had 101 been filed in the area. The CPR and the CNR had facilitated this movement by building nearly 400 miles of new branch lines in the southwest between 1927 and 1931.97

What did these adjustments to Dominion Lands policy ultimately accomplish in southwestern Saskatchewan in the 1920s? On the one hand, it can be argued that they helped fulfill the BFC's recommendation that "to abandon [submarginal wheat growing]

QO lands would be the first step toward finding a way to use them...." The policy of granting second homesteads and of providing free transportation to help destitute farm families to 'start over' on better land outside the Palliser Triangle is to be commended.

Even so, the few hundred farm families that benefited from the policy in Saskatchewan represented a small percentage of those who had been forced to abandon their farmsteads using their own meager resources—truly a deplorable aspect of Dominion Lands policy.

Had the Dominion Lands Act amendment of 1923 occurred five years earlier, it is likely that hundreds, if not thousands, more Palliser Triangle farm families would have seized the opportunity to abandon their inferior, unproductive lands in favour of a 'free' second homestead elsewhere during the 1920s.

Nevertheless, the abandonment of land in southwestern Saskatchewan did have a beneficial effect on those farmers who were left behind. Because crop yields in the area were typically lower than elsewhere on the prairies, experience had shown that the profitable farm unit was one that worked large areas of cheap land. Though exact figures are unavailable, a percentage of the abandoned farmland in the region was probably at least adequate for grain growing, and many farmers likely took it over to expand their cultivated acreage." It may also have become easier for established farmers to buy more land in the 1920s. The period of inflation during World War I had led to a period of 102 reaction early in the next decade; average land prices in the southwestern Census

Districts fell by 23 per cent in the period 1921 to 1926.10° The abandonments also made it easier for southwestern farmers to acquire more summer grazing land for their livestock. Because previously cultivated land reverted to grass and weeds if left alone, many fanners were using abandoned farms nearby (under lease or squatter's rights) for pasture and forage purposes. Through non-payment of taxes, several Dry Belt RMs had also acquired control of many quarter-sections of land, a lot of which may have been submarginal; oftentimes these parcels of land were sold at "tax sales," some reportedly selling for just $50 [about $650 in 2008 dollars] in back taxes.101 As well, the Dominion

Lands Act amendment of 1925 had given many farmers the opportunity to lease or purchase any remaining unclaimed Crown land for grazing.

Such factors—along with the return of good wheat prices and fair weather by the mid-1920s—undoubtedly contributed to a notable increase in farm sizes by the end of the decade. In the period 1921 to 1931, the average farm in the four southwestern Census

Districts grew from 406 to 532 acres—a 31 per cent increase (the ratio of improved and unimproved acreage per farm remained about the same in 1931 as it did in 1921); in fact, a large number of farms in the Dry Belt occupied well over a section by this time (see

Figure ll).102 Farmers in the southwest—and indeed, all over the prairies—were also investing in power machinery to work their larger spreads; in the period 1926 to 1931, the number of tractors in the southwestern Census Districts increased from 6,500 to 12,500; combine harvesters from almost none to 3,200; and motor trucks from 1,300 to 4,500.103

These facts suggest that if land and grain prices stayed at a reasonable level, farmers on the semiarid plains had a chance of making a profit even under hazardous conditions. 103 The idea of cooperative community pastures as a means of providing reserves of

grass in the case of drought did not become as popular as expected. As of 1929, only

8,000 head of livestock (including 1,233 horses and 6,797 cattle) were grazing on all six

community pastures in southwestern Saskatchewan, the combined area of which was

barely 223,000 acres.104 It is possible that leasing land for a community pasture from the

province was discouraging process; applicants typically had to wait some time before the

desired federal grazing leases actually became available, and only some of the tracts that

were offered to the province were accepted (just two of the eighteen community grazing

associations formed by 1925 held operating leases).105 What is more, many of the leases

offered to the province were likely too small to be practical to an incorporated grazing

association or were located where no local demand for community grazing existed.

Many farmers may have chosen instead to find parcels of available land that were closer

to home for summer grazing. As a result, those cooperative community pastures that did

exist served only a fraction of all farmers on Saskatchewan's semiarid plains.

Still, it must not be forgotten that the adjustments to Dominion Lands policy

together with the improved wheat growing conditions by the mid-1920s resulted in an

increase in the absolute number of farm units in Saskatchewan's semiarid plains area.

Between 1926 and 1931, the total number of farms in the southwestern Census Districts

grew by about 10 per cent (the highest number there would ever be), and the total area of

all occupied farms rose by 29 per cent, from 13.5 million to 17.4 million acres. By 1931,

farms occupied a record 85 per cent of the total land area of each Census District (see

Figure 11). The Dominion Lands Act amendment of 1925 undoubtedly assisted this movement by allowing homesteading on all but the worst wheat growing land. 104 In final analysis, how successfully and/or completely were the recommendations contained in the BFC report implemented in the 1920s? The federal and Saskatchewan governments had certainly made a solid start on research as to the physical environment of, and appropriate farming methods for, the semiarid plains. The province had also made an honest attempt to promote Better Farming and local agricultural experimentation in the region and negotiate adjustments in Dominion Lands policy with Ottawa. But certain factors worked against these efforts. First, gaining a scientific appreciation for the region's agricultural capabilities would not occur overnight. Second, the province was financially limited in its ability to implement those recommendations that affected it.

Third, though the federal government does deserve credit for making changes to the

Dominion Lands Act, it did not perceive the situation in Saskatchewan at the time as a

"national emergency" and thus did not feel obliged to assist the province more than it had to. Fourth, the poor wheat growing conditions that prevailed in the period 1917 to 1921 had begun to disappear by 1922. "The farmer", explains one American rural sociologist

must perceive the need for a new practice. He is not likely to be much concerned with something like grasshopper control until he is confronted with a serious infestation...[RJapid change is quite likely to follow crises such as drought, flood, low prices or insect infestations.106

Though semiarid plains farmers evidently embraced "Better Farming" ideas at the outset, the above-average precipitation levels experienced by mid-decade produced deceptively good wheat harvests, which resulted in the settlement and resettlement of more submarginal land in the region. The ecological disaster that would engulf the Palliser

Triangle in the 1930s would demonstrate the need for new agricultural practices and wise use of the land like never before. As we shall see, only the federal government was capable of providing the initiative for a comprehensive agricultural rehabilitation plan. 105 ENDNOTES—CHAPTER THREE

^ Grain Growers' Guide, 23 March 1921, 14. 2SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.12, J.L. Clarke (Rural Service Department Manager of the Merchants' Bank of Canada) to District Managers (Circ. Letter #30). 3Regina Morning Leader, 29 January 1921, 15. One Dry Belt farmer, for example, wrote a letter to the editor of the Regina Morning Leader in response asserting that if this actually was the BFC's main recommendation, "the Provincial and Federal Governments are guilty of a gross neglect of the settlers of this section of the province." [Regina Morning Leader, 16 February 1921, 4]. 4Ibid., 18 February 1921,4. 5Swift Current Sun, 8 July 1921, 1. 6Campbell, The Swift Current Research Station, 4. 7Canada, Department of Agriculture, Experimental Station, Swift Current, Sask. Report of the Superintendent J.G. Taggart, B.S.A. for the Year 1923 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1924), 8 in SAB, J.G. Taggart Papers, R-378, File #11. Saskatchewan, Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Saskatchewan, 1921-22 (Regina: King's Printer, 1922), 24-25. 9This appropriation amounted to $6,320.11 [Saskatchewan, Public Accounts, 1922-23, 154]. 10SAB, Ag. Papers, R-260, File #1.33, F.H. Auld to W.R. Rutherford, 31 March 1921; Swift Current Sun, 5 April 1921, 3. "ibid., R-261, File #23.11, J.H. Grisdale to F.H. Auld, 5 October 1921. 12Ibid., F.H. Auld to W.W. Cory, 16 November 1921. 13Ibid., Roy Hansen, "Information, Personal Opinions, Etc; Re Soil Surveys," 2-3. 14The federal government and the SCA did cooperate in certain practical ways with respect to soil surveys. Roy Hansen based his early soil maps on "revision maps" that the Topographical Surveys Branch had been preparing based upon old township maps in some settled areas, and the Branch also assisted the Soil Survey in publishing soil maps. The Department of the Interior also sent several of its Dominion Lands surveyors to study soil science at the SCA in the winter of 1921-22. As well, CM. Hamilton informed the Saskatchewan legislature in December 1921 that the federal Department of Agriculture had "removed its laboratory for physical analysis of soil from Ottawa to the University of Saskatoon [sic]" [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.11, Roy Hansen to F.H. Auld, 23 August 1921; Ibid; Saskatchewan, Journals... 1921-22, 24-25]. 15SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.12, Roy Hansen to F.H. Auld, 14 June 1921. 16SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #11, Roy Hansen, "Report on the Soil Survey in Saskatchewan for 1921." 17Ibid. 18Section 5 of the University Act gave the university power to "acquire by gift, purchase or in any other manner both real and personal property of any nature and kind whatsoever for the uses and purposes of the university and for such uses and purposes to possess, hold and enjoy the same." Section 66 also gave the university power "[t]o maintain and keep in proper order and condition such real property as it may deem necessary for the uses of the university and to erect and maintain such buildings and structures thereon as in its opinion are necessary and proper" [Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1907, 7 Edw. VII, c. 24]. 19SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #11, memo from F.H. Auld to CM. Hamilton, 8 April 1922. 20See for example SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #22.15, G.L. Wheatley to C.A. Dunning, 26 April 1920; Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #11, J.T. Wilson to J.A. Maharg, 21 June 1921; Ag. Papers, R-260, I. 296, F.H. Auld to Manley Champlin, 7 April 1922 and J.S. Carr to CM. Hamilton, 20 April 1922. 2lThe resurrected Better Farming Train of the early 1920s consisted of: four livestock cars, one lecture car for boys and girls, one poultry and dairy lecture car, one field husbandry lecture car, one household science lecture car, one nursery car, one farm machinery exhibit car, one field crops exhibit car, one poultry exhibit car, one dairy and farm mechanics exhibit car, one feeding methods exhibit car, and sleeping and dining cars for the staff [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1923, 10]. 22Ibid., 1922, 14; 1923, 10; Saskatchewan, Journals...1921-22, 24-25. 106

23 Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1923, 322-23; 1925; 330-31; SAB, Ag. Papers, R-260, File #1. 296. Saskatoon Phoenix, 13 April 1921, 1, 4, 13. •^Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1923, 11. 26Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Handbook of Agricultural Statistics Part 1: Field Crops, 1908-63 (Ottawa, Queen's Printer, 1964), 18. 27From 1916 to 1923, the Consumer Price Index in Canada rose 38 per cent, from 31.9 to 43.9 (1971 = 100). It reached a peak of 54.3 in 1920 and 47.8 in 1921 before tapering off [Leacy, Historical Statistics of Canada, Second Edition, Series K8-18]. 28Total winter rye acreage for the whole province increased from 172,449 to 1,208,299 between 1920 and 1921 [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1921, 10]. 29Ibid., 1924, 185. 30Ibid„ 1922, 18. 31SAB, Ag. Papers, R-259, File II.8, Report of J.A. Gray, B.S.A, 1 June 1923. 32Climenhaga, 89-96; Appendix A, Statement 1, IV, xv. 33SAB, Motherwell Papers, File #163, W.R. Motherwell to F.H. Auld, 13 November 1922, 23488- 489. 34Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1923, 13. 35SAB, Hamilton Papers, File #11, CM. Hamilton to O.R. Gould, M.P., 6 November 1923. 3SRegina Leader-Post, 17 May 1923, 3. 37The Forage Crop Seed Train delivered lectures on the value, production and utilization of forage crops. It reached 76 points and 8,014 people in the province in its first year and sold 46,000 pounds of sweet clover, alfalfa, corn, sunflower, Western Rye, Brome grass and millet seed. The Better Livestock Train featured cars of purebred dairy cattle, market steers, draft horses, sheep, swine and poultry for sale to the farming public. It reached 40,270 people in 1924, beating the Better Farming Train's record by nearly 7,000 [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1924, 79-80; Ibid., 1925, 69, 145-46; SAB, Ag. Papers, R-260, File #1.35, pamphlet, "Saskatchewan Better Live Stock Train, 1924" 5 July 1924.]. 38From 1924 on, its five employees worked under the SCA's Extension Department as 'district representatives.' Though number of representatives increased to twelve, there was also an increasing demand for their services, and two positions were actually removed from the southwest. The agent at Cadillac, for example, saw his field territory increase from four to seven LIDs and another eight RMs; thus, as he noted in his 1925 report, "considerably less investigational, experimental and organization work was.. .done in this district as compared to former years." 39SAB, Ag. Papers, R-260, File #1.35, J.G. Robertson to F.H. Auld, 1 June 1924. 40Ibid., Saskatchewan Commissioner of Publications to F.H. Auld, 5 February 1926. 41Canada, Sessional Papers, 12 Geo. V, A. 1922, No. 25, 11-12. 42Precipitation data tabulated from Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1940, 102; SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.12, "Report of Sub-Committee [on Grazing Lands]," 4. 43SAB, Ag. Papers, R-260, File #1.33, F.H. Auld to W.R. Rutherford, 31 March 1921. 44Swift Current Sun, 5 April 1921, 3. 4 Paul F. Sharp, The Agrarian Revolt in Western Canada: A Survey Showing American Parallels (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), 130. 46Alberta Premier-elect Herbert W. Greenfield promised that his government would do everything possible to solve the problem, going so far as to say that should the southeast "fall" even after this, then his government was "prepared to fall with it" [Jones, Empire of Dust, 119]. 47SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.11, W.W. Cory to F.H. Auld, 18 July 1921. 48LAC, Department of the Interior Papers, RG-15, Vol. 1146, Reel # T-15514, "Circular letter to all Agents of Dominion Lands except in the B.C. Railway Belt and the Yukon", 27 September 1921. 49Robert Craig Brown and Ramsay Cook, Canada, 1896-1921: A Nation Transformed (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 336. 50The 1921 election results in the four main Dry Belt federal ridings were: Medicine Hat: Prog.- 10,295, Cons.-2,698, Lib.-l,135; Maple Creek: Prog.-13,344, Cons.-3,672; Kindersley: Prog.-13,911, Cons.-2,995; and Swift Current: Prog.-9,848, Cons.-2,158, Lib.-4,223 [Parliament of Canada, History of Federal Ridings since 1867 (Online) Available: www.parl.gc.ca1 107

5'Alberta voters elected 38 UFA members to the Liberals' 15, with the other 8 seats being shared by independents and Labour [Carrol Jaques, "Charles Stewart, 1917-1921" in Bradford J. Rennie, ed. Alberta Premiers of the Twentieth Century (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2004), 52; Jones, Empire of Dust, 119]. 52LAC, Department of the Interior Papers, RG-15, Vol. 1146, Reel # T-15514, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior to the Dominion Lands Agents for Lethbridge, Calgary, Swift Current, Moose Jaw and Saskatoon, 1 June 1922. "McManus, 83-85. 54Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Saskatchewan, 1926..., 220-21. 55McManus, 98. 56Alberta's drought area study—also known as the Southern Alberta Survey—was published in January 1922. It made reference to the "...valuable assistance made available in the Report of the Inquiry into Farming Conditions in Saskatchewan..." in its acknowledgements page. Its recommendations generally followed those of the BFC's, including summerfallow substitutes to control soil drifting, mixed farming, community pastures, soil surveys, agricultural representatives and relocation of settlers. However, the Alberta report featured more a lengthy discussion on irrigation, largely because of the relatively strong potential for large-scale irrigation development in southern Alberta. It also devoted significant attention to the worsening problem of debt among farmers, school districts and rural municipal governments in the Alberta Dry Belt. The province would act on its recommendations by passing the Drought Relief Act in 1922, succeeded by the Debt Adjustment Act the next year [Alberta, Report of the Survey Board for Southern Alberta (Edmonton: Government Printer, January 1922); Gregory P. Marchildon, "Institutional Adaptation to Drought and the Special Areas of Alberta", Prairie Forum, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Fall 2007), 258]. "Canada Gazette, 28 October, 1922, 1826, P.C. 2181. 58SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #14, Department of the Interior Circular Letter "To all Agents of Dominion Lands except in the B.C. Railway Belt and the Yukon," 16 November 1922. 59SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.11, W.W. Cory to F.H. Auld, 18 July 1921. 60Ibid., "Memo, re: Transfer of Settlers," 10 November 1922. 61SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #14, F.H. Auld to C.A. Dunning, 31 January 1923. 62Ibid., enclosed copy of P.C. #818, 9 May 1923. 63See, for example: 64SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #14, CM. Hamilton to W.W. Cory, 13 February 1923. 65Ibid., W.W. Cory to C.A. Dunning, 26 January 1923. ^Statutes of Canada, 1923, 13-14 Geo. V, c. 44. 67Ibid., Ag. Papers, Ag 2.7, File #7, C.E. Jefferson (General Freight Agent, CPR) to F.H. Auld, 13 January 1923; W. Hatley (Assistant General Freight Agent, CNR) to F.H. Auld, 6 January 1923. 68Ibid., W.W. Cory to CM. Hamilton, 15 November 1922. ^Saskatchewan, Agriculture Reports, 1923, 13-14; 1925, 12; 1926, 13; 1927, 391-92; 1928, 179. Data is approximate. Statistics for the total number of second homestead approvals and settlers receiving free transportation to move in Saskatchewan are unavailable for 1925 and 1927, respectively. Saskatchewan's experience with drought and resettlement in the Palliser Triangle during the 1920s stands in sharp contrast to that of Alberta. In the period 1921 to 1929, total provincial and municipal relief expenditures in Saskatchewan totaled about $300,000-a trifle compared with the amount spent during the previous decade (see Figure 9). Severe drought conditions had persisted in large parts of Alberta's Dry Belt from 1917 to 1927. By 1926, 1,851 farm families in that province had taken advantage of the offer of free transportation, while many more left under their own initiative. So serious was the situation that in 1927 the Alberta government formally dismantled the local governments in a large region of southeastern Alberta in favour of a centrally controlled administration known as the Special Areas Board. Such drastic measures were never taken in Saskatchewan during the 1920s because [Alberta, Department of Agriculture Annual Report, 1924 (Edmonton: King's Printer, 1925), 20-22; 1925, 14-15; 1926, 14; Jones, Empire of Dust, 122; Marchildon, "Institutional Adaptation to Drought...," 251-72]. 70Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1925, 322. 71Canada, Sessional Papers, 12 Geo. V, No. 25, A. 1922, 26. 72Ibid., 11. 108

In August 1920, for example, the Grain Growers' Guide asserted: "[i]f those who govern the agricultural policy of the country are sincere in their effort to promote the livestock industry, the end of long time leases ought to be in sight. Landowners in the immediate vicinity should have the first opportunity of lease and the half-section farmer should be able to avail himself of these resources just as much as his more prosperous neighbour" [Grain Growers' Guide, 25 August 1920, 35]. 14Canada Gazette, 22 April 1922, 4465. 15 Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1923, 13 Geo. V, c.47. 76The Agricultural Cooperative Associations Act was amended in February 1922 to allow "[a]ny five or more persons who desire to associate themselves together as an incorporated association for the purpose of producing, purchasing or selling livestock or farm products on the cooperative plan..." [Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1921-22, 12 Geo. V, c. 52]. 77SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #14.1, unnamed pamphlet. 78In 1923, for example, farmers adjacent to the Sand Lake Pasture in the southern part of the "76 Ranch" in southwestern Saskatchewan were putting pressure on its manager, Gordon Ironsides, to open up parts of the tract as a community pasture. In 1927, one group of farmers in the Big Stick Lake district even wrote directly to the Department of the Interior alleging that certain ranchers were not maintaining the minimum number of cattle on their leaseholds. If this were true, the Department reserved the right to cancel the lease, and the land would subsequently be leased to the province. In the end, the Department of the Interior dismissed these allegations as false [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #14.1, F.H. Auld to George Spence, 27 September 1923; W.W. Cory to George Spence, 12 April 1927]. 79In a 3 May 1922 telegram to B.L. York, Controller of Timber and Grazing Lands, Auld insisted that his province "would not be in favour of touching [the Matador Lease] if we are to have the expense of administration as well as rental charges [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #14.9; Canada Gazette, 24 June 1922,5511]. 80Not all of the pastures were successful. The 18,000-acre Edgehill lease at Parkbeg, for example, did make its lease payments to the province in the early years, but eventually ran into financial trouble. In 1928, the lease was cancelled with $936.52 in arrears [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #14.3, Acting Deputy Minister of Agriculture to the Secretary, Treasury Board, 9 January 1929]. 8'ibid., Edw. Forsyth to F.H. Auld, 11 August 1927. 82Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1925, 13. 83SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #14, CM. Hamilton to Charles Stewart, 3 March 1923. 84SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #14.9, George Unwin to F.H. Auld, 18 April 1925. 85SAB, Department of Natural Resources Papers, NR-4, File #7, 'Correspondence re. Community Grazing Tract, W.7, 1923-1947'. 86Moss, 2. 87In 1931, F.H. Auld informed one Alberta correspondent that Saskatchewan had had nothing in the way of "Provincial Demonstration Farms" until 1930 when the province purchased a one and a half section parcel of weed infested and sandy land to "acquire definite practical experience with methods to control weeds and soil drifting." It was called the "Provincial Weed Experiment Farm" and was originally under the joint supervision of Dr. L.E. Kirk, forage crops specialist in the SCA and the provincial Department of Agriculture. The only other provincial farms in Saskatchewan, outside of the University property, were the Institutional Farms in connection with jails and mental hospitals under the direction of the Department of Public Works [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-260, I. 296, F.H. Auld to J.F. Andrew, 30 May 1931; Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1932, 15]. 88In 1927, for example, the Western Canada Land Inspectors' Association expressed concern at its annual meeting that a detailed soil survey of the Prairie Provinces would "require at least 30 years at the present rate of progress to complete." It forwarded a resolution to CM. Hamilton urging the province to complete at least a preliminary soil survey within three years [SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #10, S.J. Thorburn to CM. Hamilton, 31 March 1927]. 89The Dominion homestead inspectors' reports contained information on whether or not there was anyone in occupancy; the character of the land irrespective of the locality or climatic conditions; the improvements performed (when and by whom and the value of same) and the valuation per acre placed on each quarter-section independent of any improvements. 109

90LAC, Department of the Interior Papers, RG-15, Vol. 1146, Reel # T-15514, W.H. Gresley to Mr. Hume, 7 February 1924. 91Canada, House of Commons Debates, 5 May 1925, 2881. 92The amendment read: "No person shall be granted entry for lands situate within that part of the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta south of the south boundary of Township 16 in the Dominion Lands system of survey unless such person submits evidence satisfactory to the Minister of the Interior that he or she is in permanent residence and conducting farming operations upon a farm not less than eighty acres distant not more than nine miles in a direct line from the parcel for which entry is desired, exclusive of the width of road allowances crossed in the measurement, or that such person is the father, mother, son, daughter, brother or sister of a settler in permanent residence and conducting fanning operations as aforesaid" [Statutes of Canada, 1925, 15-16 Geo. V, c. 10]. "Statistics Canada Website, http://estat.statcan.ca/cgi-win/CNSMCGI.EXE, Table #001-0017. 94Potyondi, 6. 95In July 1929, the RM of Surprise Valley forwarded a petition to the federal Ministers of Agriculture and the Interior and to the Saskatchewan Minister of Agriculture requesting that "all that portion of the said township, which is not needed for quarantine purposes" be opened for homestead entry "as soon as conveniently possible" [SAB, Hamilton Papers, M-13, File #14, W.C. Hoffman (Secretary- Treasurer of RM of Surprise Valley) to CM. Hamilton, 6 July 1929]. 96Canada, Sessional Papers, 15 Geo. V, A. 1925, No. 12, 48; 16 Geo. V, A. 1926, No. 12, 40; 17 Geo. V, A. 1927, No. 12, 39; 18 Geo. V, A. 1928, No. 12, 36; 19 Geo. V, A. 1929, No. 12, 37; 20 Geo. V, A. 1930, No. 12,37. ''Saskatchewan, Annual Report of the Department of Railways, Labour and Industries, 1930 (Regina: King's Printer, 1930), 14-15; 1930-31, 16-17; 1931-32, 23-24. 98Saskatchewan, Better Farming Commission, 44. 99As early as 1920, one farmer mentioned in a letter to F.H. Auld that he knew of landowners who had moved off the land who were working for wages off the farm [SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #23.12, John Melrose to F.H. Auld, 20 October 1920]. L00Canada, Sixth Census of Canada, 1921..., 122; Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Saskatchewan, 1926, 220-21. 101McManus, 98; Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator [Online]. 102One survey of 277 farms conducted at the heart of the Dry Belt (focusing on the Maple Creek, Richmound, Hilda-Irvine and Bow Island regions) by the Canadian Pioneer Problems Committee in 1930 revealed the average farm size in those areas to be 805 acres [Murchie, 273, Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Saskatchewan, 1921, 256-60; 1931, 600-01]. 103In the period 1926-1931, the number of tractors on all farms in the Prairie Provinces increased from 50,000 to 82,000; combine harvesters from practically none to 9,000; and motor trucks from 6,000 to 22,000 [Ibid., Census of Saskatchewan, 1926, 212; Ibid., Census of Canada, 1931, 628; W.A. Mackintosh, The Economic Background of Dominion-Provincial Relations (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1939), 45]. 104SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #14.1, "Statement of Livestock Grazed on Community Pastures in Saskatchewan," circa 1929. 105Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1925, 213. 106Herbert F. Lionberger, Adoption of New Ideas and Practices (Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, 1960), 13-14.

Ill at last in joint possession of enough data to supervise a project of agricultural rehabilitation. But the province was all but bankrupt by 1934 and could do little on its own. The drought situation in southern Saskatchewan and the influence of Saskatchewan politicians were decisive in bringing about a proactive federal response, which finally came in April 1935 with Parliament's passage of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act.

The turmoil experienced on the Canadian prairies during the 1930s is a familiar story and need only be reviewed briefly. Following the collapse of the New York Stock

Market in October 1929, world prices for wheat and other staples fell to record lows: a bushel of No. 1 Northern wheat that had sold for $1.23 in 1925 fetched only 49 cents in

1930.2 Many countries reacted by levying stiff import duties to protect their own economies, worsening the situation; in March 1930, for example, the United States (a key market for Canadian beef, dairy and poultry products) enacted the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, which erected barriers against the importation of these and other commodities.3

Saskatchewan (where 85 per cent of the workforce at the time depended on agriculture and where 75 per cent of farm incomes were derived from wheat) suffered more than any province in Canada.4 To make matters worse, a severe drought struck Saskatchewan's south- and west-central areas in 1929; the province's wheat harvest was only one half of what it had been the year before. The drought returned in 1930 and again in 1931, and by the latter year the Saskatchewan wheat harvest was 20 per cent smaller than that of 1929.5

All of this exacted a heavy toll on farm incomes. Between 1925 and 1931, farm cash receipts in the province fell from nearly $334 million to $66 million—a drop of 80 per cent. By 1933, farmers' purchasing power and the province's average per capita income had fallen by 63.8 per cent and 72 per cent, respectively, from their 1929 levels.6 Relief 112 in unparalleled amounts was necessary to meet the emergency.

Of course, the RMs were expected to lead the relief effort, and Saskatchewan's

Co-operative government—a coalition of Conservatives, Progressives, and Independents under Conservative Premier Dr. J.T.M. Anderson—dusted off and amended existing rural relief legislation (namely the Seed Grain Act, the Seed Grain Advances Act and the

Municipalities Relief Act) in 1930 and 1931 to allow them to borrow the required funds with a provincial guarantee of repayment.7 But the crop failures and low wheat prices took a heavy toll on municipal finances, making it impossible for these local governments to provide relief for very long. Indeed, drought relief involved more than the provision of foodstuffs, fuel, clothing, seed grain and fodder by this time. Thanks to the increase in prairie farm mechanization in the late 1920s, tractor fuel, engine oil, grease, binder twine and parts to repair implements had also become a major part of farm operating expenses.

The provincial government stepped in to help, but it too was overwhelmed by the relief burden. From 1930 to 1931, its agricultural relief expenses rose from $4.9 million to

$15.8 million.8 Since 1929 the province had been financing its growing deficit with bank loans; from 1928 to 1932, a surplus of $1.1 million turned into a deficit of nearly $6 million, and the province's public debt ballooned from $2.5 million to almost $35 million.9 By 1932, the province's borrowing powers were exhausted. Federal financial assistance was now Saskatchewan's only hope.

Elected in July 1930 on his bold pledge to "find work for all who are willing to work, or perish in the attempt," R.B. Bennett—Canada's Conservative Prime Minister— had provided $20 million through the Unemployment Relief Act in an emergency session of Parliament that fall to provide direct relief and to help the provinces and municipalities 113 pay for job-creating public works projects.10 While Bennett was more inclined than his predecessors to assume federal responsibility for relief, he initially dismissed the depression and drought as unfortunate, but short-lived. He claimed to have a solution to the economic crisis, and assisting agriculture played an important role in it. The first plank in the Conservatives' election platform promised new tariffs to restore the home market for both manufacturers and farmers; Bennett felt that higher Canadian tariffs might one day "blast a way" into other desirable markets for Canadian farm products.11

The second committed the party to "foster and develop agriculture and the livestock and dairy industries" so that home production might replace imports.12 Bennett had chosen

Robert Weir, the Conservative member-elect for Melfort and a renowned stock breeder, to lead the federal Department of Agriculture in bringing his plan to life.

Weir had farmed in Saskatchewan's Carrot River Valley (between Prince Albert and Melfort) since 1922. He invested wisely in land and purebred livestock during the postwar recession and used the best scientific breeding and feeding methods available to quickly build up one of Canada's most successful mixed farms; by 1930 his horses and cattle had won many blue ribbons and gold medals. It was therefore not surprising that

Weir's agricultural policy reflected his own approach to farming. The dramatic fall in wheat prices after 1929 stemmed from a glut of wheat on world markets brought on by huge grain crops in Australia, Argentina, Russia and Canada. As Weir saw it, Canada had to become less dependent on wheat exports. He, along with other agricultural analysts at the time, felt that Canada's cheaper, lower grade grain exports could (and should) be kept in the country where they might be fed to livestock. Not only would they be removed from the competition of other countries' lower quality grain (thereby raising 114 prices for Canadian wheat), they might be sold to Canadian farmers at a cost comparable to the world price and be "manufactured" into finished livestock and livestock products for export. Weir—a former resident of Regina—understood that farmers in the Palliser

Triangle had long specialized in the production of cereals; now he hoped to encourage a dramatic increase in livestock production that would in turn create a "home market" for

1 ^ prairie grains that would benefit at least some prairie farmers.

The first stage in Weir's agricultural policy involved finding new markets for

Canadian livestock, especially cattle, Canada's chief live animal export at the time. His first act in office was to arrange for trial shipments of cattle to Britain.14 The second stage included efforts to reduce production costs and to raise the quality of livestock and livestock products at the farm level. Weir advocated lower interprovincial freight rates to help Canadian stock raisers take advantage of prairie grains, and at the end of 1930 his

Department began lending purebred bulls and selling quality sows to Canadian farmers at reduced shipping rates.15 He also sought to make farmers more aware of the best scientific methods and technical advice; the third stage of Weir's policy aimed to transform the various DEFS facilities scattered throughout Canada into "local educational centers" that would do just that. Seed grain inspection and help with soil testing and fertilizer application would be provided to grain farmers, and free disease inspections for poultry would also be offered to weed out unproductive birds. As well, Weir's policy promised more research on livestock feeds and education campaigns to acquaint farmers and ranchers with those feeds that gave the best results.1

It was not long before Weir's agricultural policy caused a stir. In a letter to one correspondent in December 1930, opposition leader W.L. Mackenzie King criticized 115 Weir's "home market doctrine" given the fact that "Canada depends on the sale of her

1 7 wheat more than all else." King had a good point. In truth, Canada's cattle exports were worth a tiny fraction of the value of its wheat exports at the time.18 Assuming that

Canadian farmers could rapidly enlarge their livestock herds, they would still only use a mere fraction of the hundreds of millions of bushels of grain prairie farmers grew each year. And while tariffs might have helped the manufacturers of central Canada, they did nothing for those Canadians who relied on export markets. They were actually a disadvantage, since other countries were not inclined to admit Canadian farm products— no matter what the quality—if Canada refused to accept their products in return.

Between 1930 and 1931, the number of live Canadian cattle shipped out of the country fell by a staggering 80 per cent, and the value of exports of dairy and meat products dropped by one third and two thirds, respectively. World wheat prices also continued to fall; a bushel of wheat worth $0.49 in 1930 fetched only $0.35 two years later.19

By the summer of 1931, the drought situation in southern Saskatchewan was consuming the attention of Prime Minister Bennett as well as his Minister of Agriculture.

The affected area had grown to engulf nearly the entire province south of Saskatoon, and an estimated one-third of all RMs in the region were completely destitute by this point.20

In an address to the House of Commons that July, Bennett expressed his concern that

"perhaps [the prairie drought] is the greatest national calamity that has ever overtaken this country."21 He introduced the Unemployment and Farm Relief Act in a panic to provide relief aid for the drought-stricken farmers of the Prairie Provinces. Though its terms were more generous than the 1930 Act, Bennett refused to commit to a permanent relief policy (the Act was set to expire on 1 March 1932) and he continued to insist that 116 the provinces be responsible for issuing the money. Because of the disaster's extent in

Saskatchewan, the Co-operative government set up the Saskatchewan Relief Commission

(SRC) to distribute federal and provincial relief.22 In its first year of operation, roughly

305,000 people received relief, about one-third of the province's population at the time.23

By the end of 1934, the SRC had distributed some $35 million in relief—about $545 million in 2008 dollars.24 The depression was meanwhile taking a heavy toll on federal government revenues. From 1929 to 1933, customs duties (its chief source of revenue) fell from $187 million to $66 million—a drop of almost two-thirds. Weir came under pressure from the Liberal opposition and his own party to explain the vast amount of federal money pouring into his home province. At the end of 1932, Weir complained in writing that it was becoming ever more difficult "to keep continuously before the minds of Cabinet, the difference in the Saskatchewan situation", and he begged the SRC's chairman to reduce the number of relief recipients so he could argue that it was adopting a tougher policy.26

Ottawa clearly could not keep paying the operating expenses of half of Canada's largest export industry. But Weir was hard pressed to come up with an alternative policy.

Part of his difficulty likely stemmed from his own lack of experience with agriculture in the Palliser Triangle: the Carrot River Valley had never experienced a drought since it had first been settled.27 While wheat yields in Saskatchewan's four southernmost Crop

Districts averaged just four bushels per acre in 1931, farmers in Weir's home Crop

District were harvesting 23 bushels per acre. (In fact, the central and northern grain belts received above average moisture that year). Soils in the Palliser Triangle, by contrast, had become so dry that they blew away in the wind. Summerfallowing was still 117 generally practiced throughout the area, and was largely responsible for the infamous

"black blizzards" that darkened prairie skies in broad daylight—one of the most striking images of the Great Depression. Indeed, soil erosion had become so widespread that some of the Triangle's best (as well as its poorest) grain growing lands were now affected. Hay, forage and feed grain crops also withered along with the wheat crops in much of the region, resulting in massive feed shortages. In 1931-32, Ottawa was forced to provide 141,000 tons of relief feed for prairie livestock (worth about $7 million), most of it for Saskatchewan.29 What is more, streams, sloughs and even wells began drying up all over the Palliser Triangle, making it difficult, if not impossible, for farmers to maintain vegetable gardens or livestock for basic subsistence; in fact, many were forced to haul water from as much as four or more miles away as the drought intensified.

Indeed, Weir himself would admit that livestock had to have water within two miles of their pasturage if they were to remain in good condition.

Of course, farmers might have dug deeper wells or constructed dugouts and stock watering dams to trap whatever moisture fell from the sky. However, with agricultural incomes at their lowest level in decades few could afford to build such projects. What is more, many of the dugouts that did exist were too shallow to provide enough water for more than one dry year.33 Many farmers felt that their only recourse was to abandon their farms and seek a living elsewhere. By this time, most of the available settlement land in the Prairie Provinces was tucked away in the more heavily forested parts of the Boreal

Transition Ecozone; indeed, it was generally believed that the region's moderate climate and rich supplies of water, timber and game would provide at least a modest livelihood for drought-stricken prairie farmers and destitute townspeople.34 An estimated 9,000 118 families or 45,000 persons trekked north between 1931 and 1938; the greatest movement occurred in 1931 and 1932 after the complete crop failure over most of the prairie region in 1931.35 Both the federal and Saskatchewan governments assisted this migration in an effort to reduce the number of people on the relief rolls. Indeed, after a 1,000 mile tour of the Saskatchewan drought area in August 1931, Weir expressed his own belief in a press statement that much of the land in the districts he visited "will be abandoned, so far as farming is concerned, for better land."36 The SRC helped pay the cost of moving

1,626 families, 2,514 train-car loads of settlers' effects and 1,525 carloads of livestock to new farms in the north during its three year existence.37 And in 1932 and again in 1934,

Ottawa, the province and the farmer's home RM each agreed to contribute one-third of a sum not exceeding $600 for each settler who moved to a northern homestead; roughly

1,000 families received aid under this scheme during both years.

It was not that something could not be done to rehabilitate the drought-stricken prairie wheat economy. Both the federal and provincial governments were at long last in a position to offer solid policy advice. Dry farming experiments that had been conducted at the Swift Current Experimental Station were yielding conclusive results by this time; the series of dry years since 1929 had allowed useful comparisons to be made with the results obtained in the period 1921-1928. It found that the bare summerfallow method produced the highest crop yields in the brown soil zone. By contrast, growing corn, sunflowers, alfalfa and other crops in rotation with wheat as a means of controlling soil drifting and weeds and providing feed for livestock (as had been practiced elsewhere on the Great Plains) had proven impractical. Due to the Canadian prairies' relatively short growing season, such crops did not fare as well as they did further south. In areas where 119 evaporation usually exceeded precipitation, the "summerfallow substitute" practice was

also incapable of carrying over as much moisture for the next year as carefully worked

clean fallow.39 As well, it was impossible to control weeds in the cover crop using

ordinary farm implements. The Swift Current Station's 1936 report concluded that

[t]he tendency of the summer-fallow substitutes is, therefore to defeat the two main purposes of summerfallow, namely, conserving moisture and decreasing the weed menace. This, together with the reduced yields of grain following the summer-fallow substitute prevents recommendation.

Evidence showed that cereals (wheat, oats, barley and rye) would remain the most

important crops in the Palliser Triangle. Not only was their cash value the highest of all

cultivated crops, they also constituted the most reliable supply of hay and fodder in dry

years.41 Since the maximum grain yields were achieved on bare summerfallow, the Swift

Current Station had researched cultivation techniques to prevent soil drifting. The use of

the plow and the disc harrow in summerfallowing had virtually ceased by 1932 and were

replaced by the one-way plow, the moldboard plow, the duck-foot cultivator and the rod

weeder. These implements destroyed weeds while leaving the soil surface in a ridged,

lumpy condition with other 'trash' or protective cover intact. Staff at the Swift Current

Station had also experimented with other farm machinery. They had found, for example,

that when a double-disk drill followed the duck-foot cultivator, seed was planted at

uniform depth in the soil without disturbing the trash cover's lumpy surface.42 As well,

the Lethbridge Experimental Station had been studying 'strip farming' during the 1920s,

and farmers in southern Alberta had reportedly begun adopting it with great success.43

The Saskatchewan Soil Survey had also made remarkable progress by this point, thanks largely to the interest of Dr. E.S. Archibald, the director of the DEFS. Following

a visit to an area in Manitoba where feed grown on poor soils caused defects in cattle, 120 Archibald became convinced of the need for faster and more standardized soil surveys and mapping systems throughout Canada. In 1929, officials of the federal Department of

Agriculture had met with soils professors from the Universities of Saskatchewan and

Manitoba, and their deliberations resulted in the DEFS setting aside $3,000 to $7,000 annually per province for this work.44 This enabled the Saskatchewan survey to double the number of teams in the field, and by 1931 the entire area south of Township 48 had been covered. By 1933, soil survey reports for nine areas in the province (eight of which were in the Palliser Triangle) had been published (see Figure 8).45 These could provide at least an idea of where submarginal wheat growing lands were located and could serve as the basis for an economic land classification study.

Important strides had been made in other areas. Since the 1920s, the Dominion

Forage Crops Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan had been researching certain drought resistant grasses to reseed overgrazed pastures and to reclaim submarginal wheat growing land that had been plowed up, and successful field tests with these grasses had also been carried out at the Range Experiment Station at Manyberries. The staff at

Manyberries had even begun constructing a series of deep dugouts and small earth dams on coulees to collect run off to provide permanent water supplies for farms and ranches.

By the early 1940s, these had raised the Station's stock carrying capacity from less than

100 head of cattle to 300 cattle plus 500 sheep and provided enough water to flood irrigate over 300 acres of land for hay production. Interestingly, many of these projects were constructed with a relatively small capital outlay; one of the earth dams at

Manyberries had reportedly been built for about $400 (roughly $4,900 in 2008 dollars).47

Weir, it will be recalled, had already promised to transform DEFS facilities across 121 the country into "local educational centers." With these in place, the abovementioned information could easily have been passed on to Palliser Triangle farmers. Alas, it was at precisely this time that Prime Minister Bennett—who insisted on keeping a balanced budget—was least inclined to consider new spending. In fact, the operating budgets for the various federal departments had been sharply curtailed to compensate for rising relief costs; from 1932 to 1934, total ordinary expenditures in the Department of Agriculture were cut by 31 per cent, and funding for the DEFS by 36 per cent.48 At this point, Ottawa was satisfied to sit back and let the province deal with the crisis. After all, agricultural education had traditionally been the provinces' domain, and natural resources and their development were now a provincial problem.

But the cash-strapped Saskatchewan government was in no position to do so. In fact, the province's agricultural education extension system was far from adequate to acquaint Palliser Triangle farmers with the latest dry farming methods in any systematic fashion. In 1927—likely due to the better economic conditions in the province at that time—the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities had asked the province to consider legislation that would establish a system of Agricultural Representatives like the

BFC had recommended, a request to which the Saskatchewan legislature had acceded to the next year.49 RMs in the Last Mountain Lake and Weyburn areas had soon made arrangements for obtaining an Agricultural Representative, but the service was soon dropped due to the tough economic times.5 Provincial grants to Agricultural Societies were also curtailed, leading to a corresponding decline in their activities throughout the province; from 1929 to 1932, the number of plowing demonstrations held annually fell from 58 to 12, and the number of field crop competitions dropped from 48 to ll.51 122 Unluckily, such cutbacks coincided with a revival in interest for "Better Farming" among prairie farmers. The fall in wheat prices after 1929 had evidently convinced them to keep more livestock; the number of cattle, sheep, swine and poultry in southwestern

Saskatchewan rose by 24 per cent from 1928 to 1934 (see Figure 7). But due to the extraordinarily dry conditions after 1929, farmers and ranchers again found themselves struggling to find enough grass for their livestock during the summer. Those few who could afford it leased or bought grazing land from the Saskatchewan government.52 They could also use the cooperative community pastures set up in the southwest during the

1920s, though these too were suffering thanks to the drop in farm incomes. From 1930 to

1938 inclusive, the community grazing associations posted losses, and because the province offered them no organizational or financial assistance they were overcome with confusion and debt.53 The Matador Pasture was a noteworthy exception to this. Likely because it was provincially managed and was a comparatively small expense to the public treasury, it was not only surviving, but paying its own operating costs as the 1930s progressed. In fact, the SCA even conducted studies on the comparative value of purebred and crossbred cattle and sheep there in 1930 and 1931.

Still, there remained the problem of improving water supplies on Palliser Triangle farms and ranches, and the Saskatchewan government could offer little practical help. In

1931, following the passage of the Water Rights Act and the Water Powers Act, the Water

Rights Branch of the Department of Natural Resources was set up to take over the activities that the Water Power Branch of the Department of the Interior had overseen since 1920.55 In 1934, the Branch's annual report indicated that the drought had brought about an increased demand for farm water supplies and a rise in the number of inquiries 123 as to water rights, but that the lack of finances and staff had held up this work.56 The feasibility of projects involving the use of water could only be determined with up to date information on stream flow and run off. The Department of the Interior had agreed to provide its experienced personnel after the natural resources transfer to finish whatever hydrometric data collection and irrigation survey work was already underway in the province. But it withdrew them in 1931, claiming that it was "unable to provide funds for the maintenance in any province of services which we are unable to render to each and every province."57 The province tried to re-hire one of them on its own to continue this

CO work, but due to its poor financial state was soon forced to let him go.

As well, the policy of assisted settlement in the Boreal Transition Ecozone was proving to be a dead end. Oddly enough, the Saskatchewan government had opened up all homestead land in the province despite recommendations by the BFC as well as the

Royal Commission on Immigration and Settlement (1930) that soil survey and economic land classification work precede any further settlement. Despite its progress since 1929, the Saskatchewan Soil Survey still had not ventured north of the North Saskatchewan

River, and the area's agricultural capabilities were thus largely unproven. As it turned out, prospects for drought area refugees in the north were generally worse than in the

Dust Bowl. Much of the 'available' settlement land there tended to be in wooded or swampy areas that were difficult or impossible to prepare for cultivation.59 In fact, most of the northern migrants still needed relief once they reached their destinations, creating a huge burden for the northern RMs; indeed, even after five years few had cleared more than twenty acres of land.60 The northward migration also made life more difficult for those left behind in the drought area. The 1936 census counted nearly 12,500 abandoned 124 farms in the drought areas of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.61 These took in some three million acres and were a menace to nearby arable cropland. Abandoned farmland was highly subject to soil erosion, and crops and pasture in adjoining areas were being sandblasted—and even buried—by the wind-borne soil particles. It also became heavily infested with weeds, which in turn became a source of weed seeds and a breeding place for grasshoppers and other insect pests.

Clearly, promoting an out-migration from the drought area only changed the nature of the problem and did nothing to advance a solution. As early as 1931, some public officials could see that something had to be done to keep Palliser Triangle farmers where they were, and the fumbling efforts of a Saskatchewan drought commission roused them to action. In August 1931, the Co-operative government had established the

Commission on Conservation and Afforestation under J.F. Bryant, the provincial

Minister of Public Works, to provide some policy direction as to how it could mitigate the effects of the prolonged drought.62 It gathered as much information as possible on forestry and water conservation, but curiously it did so with the aim of discovering how the causes of drought might be eliminated. It thought that extensive tree planting and damming up huge areas of water would appreciably increase atmospheric moisture, thereby generating more precipitation in the drought area. To be sure, such ideas were scientifically unsound and the province's Liberal newspapers ridiculed both the Bryant

Commission and the Anderson government.63 Weir's own officials in the Department of

Agriculture also rejected the Commission's main assumptions. But they did agree that an organized soil and water conservation program on the prairies would yield certain practical benefits. In a January 1932 letter to Bryant, E.S. Archibald expressed his view 125 that

irrigation from storage dams where such are feasible and the prevention of soil drifting and undue evaporation from the growing crops by the use of properly planted shelters and these supplemented by proper strip farming and cultural methods would go a long way to meet such emergencies as existed in 1931.

In December 1931, fifty delegates representing federal and provincial agricultural

institutions in Saskatchewan gathered at Saskatoon. They emphasized that grain growing

by the summerfallow method would long remain the dominant form of agriculture on the

prairies, and they discussed how strip farming and trash covered fallow might control soil

drifting in the province's drought area.65 Two weeks later, a new subcommittee of the

Bryant Commission met at Regina to discuss how these measures might be implemented.

Weir attended this meeting, and a number of senior officials within his Department were

instructed to assist the province in this work.66 By May 1932, the Indian Head forest

nursery station had provided thousands of tree and caragana seedlings for shelterbelt

demonstration plots at the Regina jail, and supplies of clover and grass seed were

supplied from elsewhere.67 In September 1931, the chief water engineer for the CNR had

also helped the Bryant Commission identify a number of suitable dam sites within the

drought area with the goal of building them as federal-provincial public works projects.

Weir had publicly expressed his approval of the idea and promised to lay it before

Cabinet.68 But Bennett ultimately refused to pay the suggested $200,000 federal share.69

- It is also possible that enthusiasm for these activities waned somewhat, since moisture

conditions throughout the prairies actually improved in 1932 and 1933.

In 1934, however, drought returned with a vengeance to the Palliser Triangle.

Water and feed shortages for livestock were worse than ever; authorities in Saskatchewan

estimated that the province would require $7 million in relief feed and fodder for the 126 coming winter, in addition to basic relief provisions.70 Soil erosion had become so widespread that groups of farmers in parts of the Palliser T(riangle began to experiment with tillage methods such as strip farming in an effort to control it; one group of farmers in the Shaunavon area, for example, formed the Shaunavon Strip Farming Association that July.71 In response, Robert Weir asked the Swift Current Experimental Station to

77 help organize more "strip farming associations" in the region. He also felt that the work of DEFS facilities in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta could be organized into a more focused program, and early in 1934 the directors of those facilities were asked to review whatever information they had on soil drifting control and to identify directions for further study.73 (These included: more extensive soil surveys to form the basis of a land utilization policy in each province and further research on managing insect pests and the raising of crops and livestock in a semiarid climate).74 That June, Archibald wrote to

Weir stating that his officials were prepared to discuss these items in a round table conference with Provincial men in each of the three provinces, where those interested from the colleges and provincial departments may criticize and generally support the work we anticipate doing on Experimental Farms, existing Illustration Stations and if necessary a few additional special Illustration Stations originated [sic] for this purpose.75

The federal Department of Agriculture had even tried to help the Saskatchewan Soil

Survey continue its work. Shrinking revenues had forced the Saskatchewan and federal governments to withdraw funding for soil surveys by 1932.76 In light of the homestead failures in the north, however, Archibald told the federal Deputy Minister of Agriculture in a May 1934 letter that he was "...setting aside from our unallotted item a sum

77 sufficient to provide an average of one or perhaps two thousand dollars for this work." Unfortunately for the Bennett government, the political situation in Saskatchewan 127 also took a turn for the worse in the summer of 1934. The Co-operative government was firmly crushed on 19 July. The Conservatives did not win a single seat while the Liberals won fifty. (The Farmer-Labour party, founded just two years earlier, won five seats).78

Bennett and Weir now faced an experienced Liberal Premier in Saskatchewan: James G.

Gardiner. Gardiner's Liberals had been highly critical of the policy of assisted northern settlement (and the conditions that resulted) and had called for greater regulation of it.

Once in power they actively discouraged more dried-out farmers from moving north and began to help the destitute settlers already established there.79 Gardiner also abolished the SRC and placed relief administration back in the hands of rural municipal councils to bring about what he believed would be greater efficiency and economy with respect to relief distribution. Saskatchewan's financial situation was indeed grave when Gardiner took office; his government had inherited a provincial treasury that was almost bare and a public debt that had ballooned to nearly $50 million since 1932. That September he was forced to go to Ottawa to request more money for public works relief projects.

However, the Prime Minister was in no mood to oblige a province that was now controlled by his political enemies. Earlier that year, Bennett announced that federal relief contributions would be made on an ad hoc basis, the amounts to be determined on the provinces' need for and ability to deal with direct relief.82 Despite Saskatchewan's immense relief requirements, he gave the province just $200,000 to cover the month of

August. In a surprising about face, Bennett insisted that the only way his government would provide more relief was if it completely took over all relief administration in the province's drought area!83 Gardiner—an ardent defender of provincial rights—rejected such a notion. Instead, he blamed his inability to obtain more relief funding on Bennett's 128 partisanship. In a press statement in early October 1934, Gardiner declared that "the federal government has offered no assistance to Saskatchewan to handle the existing serious conditions in the southern drought areas of the province...."84 As

Saskatchewan's sole representative in the federal Cabinet, Weir was expected to know something about the drought situation, and the province's Liberal newspapers joined with

Gardiner in condemning the Bennett government for its inability to redress the drought problem. "It may be...," wrote the editor of the Regina Leader-Post,

that Ottawa does not like the present government of Saskatchewan and does not approve the methods for handling relief set up by the Gardiner Administration. It might provide or lend money to Saskatchewan if the Government of Saskatchewan were willing to do things in a different way.. .By next year it is highly probable that there will be a new Government at Ottawa and it is possible that a new set of men will give real consideration to the problem of Saskatchewan. New federal members from Saskatchewan may have more influence at Ottawa than the present members who have been concerned chiefly with assisting Mr. Bennett to pass legislation that has added little to the welfare of Western Canada.. .Those from the West who have had to deal with Hon. Robert Weir at Ottawa report his attitude as hopeless on the matter of the western relief situation.85

The partisan criticisms of a Liberal newspaper might be readily dismissed, but not those of an eminent Canadian businessman: E.W. Beatty, president of the CPR. Beatty had toured southern Saskatchewan in August 1934 and insisted that the region's problems could no longer be solved by relocating its residents elsewhere. Such a policy, he argued,

would be unfair to the people involved, unfair to the drouth areas and a great mistake for the province...The solution of the problem lies rather in the governments standing by the farmers with required assistance to bring them through the emergency, coupled with soil conservation on lands adapted to grain growing and the development of grazing land for grazing purposes, and a policy of water development and conservation for use on the farms.86

Beatty was supported by John Bracken, Premier of Manitoba since 1922. Bracken had maintained a keen interest in all things agricultural since his time as a professor at the 129 SCA and his service with the BFC in 1920. Crop conditions in southwestern Manitoba were just as bad in as in southern Saskatchewan in 1934, and Bracken had written to

Prime Minister Bennett on several occasions describing them.87 He also gave an address on prairie drought rehabilitation to the Canadian Club in Winnipeg in October 1934.

"The problem has now assumed proportions of national scope," Bracken declared, and he outlined a fourfold program of reclamation for the prairie drought areas. First, more trees should be planted for shelterbelts and more dugouts constructed for water storage.

Second, submarginal wheat growing land should be withheld from settlement permanently and regrassed for pasture. Third, education programs should be initiated to inform farmers about soil and moisture conservation. Finally, all reclamation activities should be guided by thorough soil, topographical and climatic surveys and economic studies of farms in the Prairie Provinces. Bracken ended with this appeal:

Our duty is clear. We need a central coordinating body to bring unity and direction to the plan. The Dominion is that authority that should set it up. We need the cooperation of all the prairie provinces. We need the advice of the best technical men of the nation.. .The program, if it is to be worth while, will require heavy expenditures; the Dominion government is the only government that can oo

provide the necessary additional funds.

For his part, Bennett was facing increasing pressure to do something more than provide relief to farm families in the Palliser Triangle. By this time, the Roosevelt New

Deal—especially its soil and water conservation initiatives in the drought ravaged farm states—was being reported in the press. In one letter, an ex-Conservative MLA for

Saskatchewan explained the prairie situation to his Conservative colleagues in Ottawa. We need some propaganda out right now ourselves to put us right with the people. Conservatives have not got their ear close enough to the ground, we are not listening as our Liberals friends are doing. Rooseveldt [sic] is sure going over big in the U.S.A. No reason why we cannot do the same. 130 With his government in its final year in office, Bennett knew that drastic steps would be necessary to survive the next election, and it was in Saskatchewan where his party stood the best chance of restoring its sagging fortunes on the prairies. From an electoral perspective, the province was more important than either Alberta or Manitoba, with a population 26 per cent larger than Alberta's and 32 per cent larger than Manitoba's based on the 1931 Census. This would translate into more federal seats in the 1935 election: 21 federal seats for Saskatchewan compared to 16 for Alberta and 17 for Manitoba.91

Weir also tried to mend fences. Rewriting history, he argued in a press statement that he "had never taken the view" that a large number of the families in Saskatchewan's drought area should be moved elsewhere and added that "[a]nyone who looks back over the great crops these districts have produced must be convinced that with proper methods they could be made big producers again." He then toured southern Saskatchewan to try to reassure farmers and salvage his political reputation. Speaking to a Weyburn audience in October, he said that "if he were fanning in the south he would stay here" and he reportedly used horror stories of northern settlement to explain why. Weir also outlined the various soil and water conservation strategies that his Department had been working on. But because control of all lands and natural resources now lay with the provinces, he insisted that "the situation is one primarily for the province to deal with as the dominion can only take such action as the provincial government will permit."

But the provinces were determined to do something with or without federal help.

In January 1935, while Bennett was presenting his own 'New Deal' through a series of paid radio broadcasts, Gardiner—inspired by Bracken's ideas—met with the Alberta and

Manitoba Premiers and their Ministers of Agriculture in Saskatoon. They formed a 131 committee to gather and make available "all scientific information" on climatic and soil

conditions and proper farming methods for the drought area.94 Gardiner then notified

Weir of the meeting and requested federal representation on the committee, arguing that

"similarity of problems in three provinces and national importance of putting agriculture

of drought stricken area on a more sound basis seemed to us to warrant common plans

and concerted action."95 The committee planned to meet again on 7 February, and to

cover the expenses of compiling the data each province was asked to put up $5,000; it

was hoped that Ottawa would match that amount.96

Sensing a political trap, Weir refused to participate. He claimed in his response to

Gardiner that one of the two civil servants he had planned to put on the committee was

sick, making the meeting date impossible.97 He explained his real reason for abstaining

in a private letter to Bennett dated 30 January 1935.

There is no doubt.. .that the recommendation will be for the Federal Government to supply all finances to the provinces. My own opinion is that Premier Gardiner's move is purely political. The provinces really have no outstanding men for this work, and I believe Premier Gardiner wants to get some credit for setting up machinery, which will only find out what is already known, while the officials of the Federal Department of Agriculture will do the work, assisted by no

the provinces spending money advanced by the Federal Government.

Instead, Weir instructed his Department to set up its own drought rehabilitation agency,

the details of which were first announced to the House of Commons on 5 February. The

scheme originally centered on transforming up to a dozen townships in the drought areas

of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba into "demonstration areas" administered directly by the DEFS and an advisory board made up of a spokesman for the banking industry, a

successful farmer, a successful rancher, and four officials of the federal Departments of

the Interior and Agriculture (Weir did not even propose any provincial government 132 representation).99 Farmers and ranchers in these areas would be given advice on tillage methods to control soil drifting; free trees and grass seed to plant shelterbelts for farmyards and to reclaim eroded farmland; and technical and financial aid to construct dugouts and/or small dams.100 Weir felt that such a program might remain in effect for at least five years and involve a budget of perhaps $1 million for the first year.101

Weir's announcement instantly set off a confrontation between the Saskatchewan government and Ottawa. Premier Gardiner indicated in a press statement the next week that he certainly welcomed the expenditure of federal money in his province for drought area rehabilitation, but he felt that Weir would "get a great deal further in solving the agricultural difficulties of one-half of the province" by cooperating with his government than he would "...if he simply tries to set himself up as the last word in the solution of the problem...."102 Gardiner opposed the "demonstration areas" idea, arguing that

Ottawa could not reclaim land that the province now owned. But the scheme's impracticality was obvious; on 7 February the editor of the Leader-Post argued that

"there are 40,000 farmers affected in the drouth areas and the immediate number who come under Mr. Weir's proposed demonstration project might total 320."104 J.G.

Taggart—who had left his position as superintendent of the Swift Current Experimental

Station to become Gardiner's Minister of Agriculture by this time—also aired his objections to the press, arguing that "we cannot allow these farmers to wait without applying such knowledge as we have towards their problems."105

Given the fragile political situation on the prairies, such protestations evidently convinced Weir to change his strategy. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act—passed without any opposition in Parliament—was passed on 11 April 1935. The Act provided 133 for new advisory committee that included representation from the three Prairie Provinces.

This committee, in turn was mandated to

consider and advise the Minister as to the best methods to be adopted to secure the rehabilitation of the drought and soil drifting areas in the Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and to develop and promote within those areas systems of farm practice, tree culture and water supply that will afford greater economic security.. ,106

Weir received $750,000 for the first year of operations and $1 million for each year for the next four years. Soil and water conservation and drought land reclamation activities began immediately and were overseen by staff of the DEFS. Unfortunately, Weir would only see the beginnings of these activities as federal Minister of Agriculture. On 14

October 1935, the Bennett Conservatives went down to a crushing defeat at the hands of

Mackenzie King's Liberals. In western Canada, only three Conservatives managed to hold on to their seats. Still, a solid start to rehabilitating the prairie wheat economy for the long term had been made, and the activities under the Act were far from over.

What ultimately persuaded the federal government to introduce the Prairie Farm

Rehabilitation Act"? The foregoing analysis suggests that the rapidly decaying political, economic and social circumstances on the prairies—chiefly in southern Saskatchewan, the epicenter of the legendary 1930s drought—had compelled the Bennett government to consider a truly constructive means of rehabilitating the ailing prairie wheat economy as a last ditch effort to avert annihilation at the polls in the upcoming federal election.

Robert Weir's original policies for agricultural recovery in Canada were of limited assistance to wheat growers in the Palliser Triangle, and the policies of providing millions of dollars worth of relief aid and encouraging dried out farmers to leave the region was ultimately causing more harm than good. At the same time, though, it was 134 only in 1930s that an effective strategy for agricultural rehabilitation was possible. Hard data on soils, tillage methods and crop production in the Palliser Triangle was finally

available in convincing detail. This also coincided with a strong revival in interest in

Better Farming among Palliser Triangle farmers as well as a renewed awareness of the usefulness of artificial water supplies for farms and ranches, and an increased demand for

supplementary pasture. Despite the fact that the Saskatchewan government now controlled all lands and natural resources in its area of jurisdiction, it was unable to orchestrate and implement a scheme of agricultural rehabilitation in its drought-stricken

Palliser Triangle area. Only the federal government, with its superior financial and legislative powers, was capable of bringing such a scheme to fruition. 135 ENDNOTES—CHAPTER FOUR

Report of the Royal Commission on the Transfer of the Natural Resources of Manitoba (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1929), 41. 2Canada, Statistics Canada Website, http://estat.statcan.ca/cgi-win/CNSMCGI.EXE. Table #001- 0017. 3From 1929 to 1933, Canadian cattle exports to the United States fell from $13.8 million to $400,000 and of milk and cream from $3.8 million to $700,000 [Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, Vol.1 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1940), 145]. 4Feed grains and livestock accounted for the remaining 8.4 and 9.5 per cent, respectively in 1929 [Waiser, Saskatchewan, 278; Saskatchewan, A Submission by the Government of Saskatchewan to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations (Canada, 1937), 173]. Saskatchewan, Submission to the Royal Commission, 148 6Britnell, The Wheat Economy, 71. ''Statutes of Saskatchewan, 1930, c. 48; 1931, c. 61; c. 62. 8Canada, Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, Vol. I,, 170; Vol. Ill, Table 40, 110. 'Saskatchewan, A Submission..., 399. 10R.B. Bennett quoted in Pierre Berton, The Great Depression, 1929-1939 (Anchor Canada, 1990), 65. "Larry Glassford, Reaction and Reform: The Politics of the Conservative Party Under R.B. Bennett, 1927-1938 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 78. 12Quoted in Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs, 1929-30, 96. 13For a detailed discussion on Robert Weir's early life and his accomplishments as federal Minister of Agriculture, see Gregory P. Marchildon and Carl Anderson, "Robert Weir: Forgotten Farmer-Minister in R.B. Bennett's Depression-Era Cabinet" Prairie Forum, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Spring 2008), 65-98. 14Melfort Journal, 26 August 1930, 2; Saskatchewan Farmer, 2 September 1930, 3. 15Regina Daily Star, 6 September 1930, 4; Toronto Globe and Mail, 20 November 1930, 2; Canada, House of Commons Debates, 7 May 1931, 1360, Hopkins, Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs, 1930-31, 479. 16Richard Churchill, "Canada's New Agricultural Policy" MacLean 's Magazine 15 March 1931, 12, 64. 17LAC, W.L. Mackenzie King Papers, Reel C-2320, Vol. 177, W.L. Mackenzie King to Donald MacGregor, 3 December 1930, 150827. 18In 1929, Canada's live cattle exports were worth just three per cent of the value of its wheat exports [Canada, Canada Year Book 1932, 426-29]. 19Ibid., 428-29; 432-33; Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, 145. 20LAC, R.B. Bennett [hereafter Bennett] Papers, MG-26K, Reel #1433, Vol. 779, "Report of The Minister of Labour in Connection with Western Enquiry on Unemployment, 1 July 1931," 4-5. 21R.B. Bennett quoted in Canada, House of Commons Debates, 1 July 1931, 3247. 22E.W. Stapleford, Report on Rural Relief due to Drought Conditions and Crop Failures in Western Canada, 1930-1937 (Published by the authority of the Hon. James G. Gardiner, Minister of Agriculture, 1939), 32. 23Gregory P. Marchildon and Don Black, "Henry Black, the Conservative Party and the Politics of Relief," Saskatchewan History Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring 2006), 4. 24H. Blair Neatby, "The Saskatchewan Relief Commission, 1931-1934" Saskatchewan History Vol. 3, No. 1 (1950), 54; Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator [Online]. 25In September 1931, the deepening world recession had also forced Britain and twenty five other countries (not including Canada) to go off the gold standard, and the resulting currency devaluations caused Canada to lose further ground in world markets for wheat, pulp and newsprint [John Herd Thompson with Allen Seager, Canada, 1922-1939: Decades of Discord (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985), 215; F.H. Leacy, ed., Historical Statistics of Canada (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1983), Series H9]. 26Robert Weir quoted in Marchildon and Black, 12-13. 136

"According to long term yield records, the Carrot River Valley (also known as the "Melfort Plain") stands as Saskatchewan's most productive agricultural region and one of the most productive farmland areas in Canada. The region has never known a drought or a major crop failure [D.F. Acton, et al., 114-15; Daria Coneghan, "Melfort" in The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan, 594]. 28In the period 1929-1935, average precipitation in Crop District Eight (that portion of Saskatchewan northeast of the intersection of Highways 2 and 5 to the Manitoba border) was 25 per cent higher than the provincial average [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1940, 102; Britnell, The Wheat Economy, 51]. 29Gray, 155-56. 30Some farmers in the Climax and Frontier areas of southwestern Saskatchewan, for example reportedly had to haul water four miles or more by 1934 [D.B. MacRae and R.M. Scott, In the South Country: A reprint of articles which appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon Star-Phoenix in September, 1934, as the result of a tour of the drouth-stricken districts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba (Saskatoon, 1934), 9]. 31 Weyburn Review, 11 October 1934, 1. 32"The bright boys who talk glibly of mixed farming" wrote one prairie farmer's wife to the editor of the Western Producer early in 1931 "know little if anything of the water problem existing on most of the farms in the west. We have eleven horses, fourteen cattle, five of them are milk cows working full steam ahead for us at present, bless 'em, two hogs, 125 pure bred chickens, but our old well, seepage from the slough, could not provide enough water for this bunch during dry spells so we had a well drilled, went to a depth of three hundred and sixty feet to get water and sunk my husband in such a hole of debt he was just crawling out of when this year's troubles gave him such a crack he flopped right down a[g]ain." Building a stock watering dam was also an expensive proposition, costing as much as $15,000 each (about $227,000 in 2008 dollars) by one estimate at the time [Western Producer, 29 January 1931, 11; Alberta, A Report on the Rehabilitation, 38]. 33In his 1933 report to the Bryant Commission, T.C. Main, the chief water engineer for the Canadian National Railway, noted the growing number of farm dugouts across southern Saskatchewan, but added that "the amount of water collected in these reservoirs is disappointing and occasionally none whatever is obtained" [LAC, Bennett Papers, MG-26K, Reel #1282, Vol. 567, "Report to Commission on Conservation and Afforestation" by T.C. Main, circa 1933]. 34For more on the "back to the land" movement in Canada, see Robert England, The Colonization of Western Canada: Study of Contemporary Land Settlement (London: P.S. King and Sons Ltd., 1936) and L.M. Grayson and M. Bliss, eds. The Wretched of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1973). 35Britnell, The Wheat Economy, 202-03. 36Quoted in Western Producer, 20 August 1931, 1. "Gray, 202. 38Britnell, The Wheat Economy, 208. 39Kenneth Norrie, "Dry Farming and the Economics of Risk Bearing: The Canadian Prairies, 1870- 1930" Agricultural History Vol. 51, No. 1 (1977), 144. 40Ibid., 20. 41Canada, Department of Agriculture, Experimental Station, Swift Current, Sask. Results of Experiments, 1931-1936 Inclusive (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1938), 12. 42Ibid., 18-19. 43SAB, Ag. Papers, R-261, File #22.15, W.H. Fairfield to F.H. Auld, 27 January 1932. 44LAC, Dominion Department of Agriculture Papers, RG-17, Vol. 3263, File #435 (2), E.S. Archibald to Ff. Barton (federal Deputy Minister of Agriculture), 1 May 1934. 45Moss, 3-4. 46Canada, Dominion Range Experimental Station, Manyberries, Alberta, Progress Report, 1937- 1947 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1947), 10-13; Gray, 102-04, 174-75. 47Canada, House of Commons Debates, 5 February 1935, 500. 48Canada, Public Accounts, 1932 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1933), 19; 1934, 20. ^Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1928, 10; SAB, Ag. Papers, R-259, File #11.8, J.J. McGurran (Secretary of Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities) to F.H. Auld, 7 July 1927. ^Western Producer, 20 September 1928, 24. 137

5'Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1933, 11. 52The Saskatchewan government had inherited about 3.7 million acres of Dominion grazing leases in 1930. It disposed of pasture lands to farmers and ranchers in two ways: through annual or long term leases and by direct sale. As of 30 April 1932, 411 long term and annual leases comprising a total of 417,602 acres had been issued, and 38,400 acres of pasture land had been sold to 240 applicants. The total acreage of long term grazing leases issued and pasture land sold nearly doubled the following year [Saskatchewan, Department of Natural Resources, Annual Report, 1932-33, 2,4]. "Whatever reserves the community grazing associations had accumulated during the relatively prosperous 1920s had turned into deficits by 1933. Following a tour of southwestern Saskatchewan in 1936, one official of the Saskatchewan Department of Natural Resources commented in a report that "[c]ommunity leases seem to be a sound method of utilizing these public lands but administered at present they are destined to be a sort of worry to the Department. No one has more than a $25.00 or $50.00 interest and is therefore leaving the anxiety to a committee of embarrassed neighbours who find that collections are difficult" [Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1932, 63; 1933, 39; 1934, 44; 1935, 108; 1936, 72; 1937, 55; 1938, 104; SAB, George Spence Papers, GR-80, V, File #8 (g), Oscar Dechief Report to Minister of Natural Resources, 20 June 1936, 4]. 54In the 1923 fiscal year, the actual operating expenses for the Matador Pasture totaled $7,855.19. For the remainder of the decade it averaged $9,853.64 per year, and oddly enough the average rose to $11,755.75 for the years 1929 to 1935 inclusive, including an additional disbursement of $22,381.74 for the SCA to conduct cross breeding experiments with livestock in the 1930 fiscal year. Because the province— as opposed to a small cooperative grazing association—would have handled the Matador Pasture's overhead expenses (including fences, corrals, bulls, etc.), the cost of using that pasture for individual patrons may also have been relatively low, which may explain why it remained solvent even through the Great Depression [Data tabulated from Saskatchewan, Public Accounts, 1923-24 to 1935-36; Murchie, 65]. 55John T. McLeod, "Provincial Administration of Natural Resources in Saskatchewan, 1930-1955 (University of Saskatchewan, Unpublished M. A. thesis, 1955), 96. 56Funding for the Water Rights Branch was the lowest of all nine branches within the Department of Natural Resources except the Parks Branch [Ibid., Appendix A, Table 8]. "SAB, Department of Natural Resources Papers, NR 1/1, File #W-600 ES, T.G. Murphy (Minister of the Interior) to J.T.M. Anderson, 9 January 1931 and 17 April 1931. 58Ibid., John Barnett (Minister of Natural Resources) to R.J.G. White, 23 June 1931. 590f the first 7,000 northern homestead entries, less than four per cent were filed on so-called "valuable" settlement lands, while 82 per cent were on "ordinary" lands sold at the $1 per acre minimum [Britnell, The Wheat Economy, 205]. 60One group of settlers in the Debden-Big River region, for example, wrote to the Department of Natural Resources in 1935 describing local conditions: "At the last meeting of [the Settlers Committee of Big River, Debden, Greenwater and Ormeaux] many of the settlers are on relief. They are all very hard up. We have at least 87 per cent on relief. The children have no shoes and need clothes. Pneumonia seems to be found in many houses. Many have been without meat for several months. A very high percentage of settlers are beginning to suffer from a lack of variety in their food, some have been going hungry. We ask that free permits be given to these people to catch a few fish and perhaps a deer. They are all in very bad circumstances" [D.P. Fitzgerald, "Pioneer Settlement in Northern Saskatchewan" (University of Minnesota, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, 1965), 331]. 61The "drought area" occupied federal census districts 4 and 8 in southwestern Manitoba; 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 in southern and southwestern Saskatchewan; and 1,3,5 and 7 in southeastern Alberta [Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of the Prairie Provinces, 1936: Population and Agriculture (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1938), 276, 722, 1174]. 62SAB, J.F. Bryant Papers, M-10, File #55, Saskatchewan Legislature, Order-in-Council, O.C. 913a/31, 13 August 1931. 63Ibid., File #86, newsclippings: Regina Leader-Post, 23 December 1931; Saskatchewan Farmer, 31 December 1931; Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 31 December 1931. 64Ibid., File #58, E.S. Archibald to J.F. Bryant, 7 January 1932. 65Ibid., newsclipping, "Farm problems are considered at conference," File #86. 138

66Ibid., "Report of Special Committee of the Sub-Committee on Soil Drifting to the Commission of Conservation of Water and Afforestation made at Regina, 6 January 1932", File #86; Regina Leader-Post, 5 January 1932, 2. 67 Ibid., File #61, J.F. Bryant to C.J. Mackenzie, 25 May 1932. &sIbid., File #86, newsclipping, Regina Leader-Post, 24 September 1931. 69Ibid., File #67, J.F. Bryant to A.J.H. Bratsberg, 17 November 1931; File #60, Robert Weir to J.F. Bryant, 1 March 1932; R.B. Bennett to J.F. Bryant, 3 March 1932. ™Regina Leader-Post, 10 September 1934, 1, 2. 71Ibid., 6 July 1934, 19. 72Strip farming associations were established at Gull Lake, Limerick and Aneroid by the end of 1934 [SAB, Department of Agriculture Papers, R-261, File #22.23, "Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Program, Swift Current Area, Summary of Preliminary Reports, 20th November 1935," 3]. 73LAC, Dominion Department of Agriculture Papers, RG-17, Vol. 3263, File #435 (2), E.S. Archibald to Robert Weir, 8 June 1934, Dominion Department of Agriculture Papers, RG-17, Vol. 3263, File #435 (2); letter, E.S. Archibald to Deputy Minister of Agriculture, 17 July 1934, Ibid., Vol. 3264, File #435 (8). 74Ibid., Vol. 3264, File #435 (8), E.S. Archibald to Deputy Minister of Agriculture, 17 July 1934. 75Ibid., E.S. Archibald to Robert Weir, 8 June 1934. 76Moss, 3. 77LAC, Dominion Department of Agriculture Papers, RG-17, Vol. 3263, File #435 (2), E.S. Archibald to H. Barton (federal Deputy Minister of Agriculture), 1 May 1934. 78Waiser, Saskatchewan, 318. 79The Gardiner government established the Northern Settlers' Reestablishment Branch of the Department of Municipal Affairs in 1935 [T.J.D. Powell, "Northern Settlement, 1929-1935" Saskatchewan History Vol. 30, No. 3 (1977), 93-4]; 80In 1938, the federal Department of Agriculture (under the leadership of James G. Gardiner) had released a report known as the Stapleford report (named after E.W. Stapleford, its author) that reported on the western relief situation. The political bias in the report is unmistakable: "the writer of this report has come to the conclusion that the present system of relief administration in the rural areas provides the most equitable and economic procedure which has yet been devised" [E.W. Stapleford, Report on Rural Relief due to Drought Conditions and Crop Failures in Western Canada, 1930-1937 (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1939), 39]. 81The breakdown on Saskatchewan's debt included: $29 million to the Dominion (secured through one year treasury bills); $5.9 million to railways, oil companies, merchants and commission houses for relief seed, feed, repairs to farm machinery, etc; $480,000 to farmers and other citizens who contributed land, livestock, groceries, implements and so on to the government for relief purposes; $285,000 to private citizens for rural direct relief; $150,000 to contractors for roadwork; and $11 million to the banks (secured by treasury bills) [Regina Leader-Post, 10 September 1934, 1-2]. 82Paul Boothe and Heather Edwards, eds. Eric J. Hanson's Financial History of Alberta: 1905-1950 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003), 139. 83Regina Leader-Post, 16 October 1934, 8. 84James G. Gardiner quoted in Winnipeg Free Press, 1 October 1934. 85Regina Leader-Post, 2 October 1934, 4. 86E.W. Beatty quoted in Western Producer, 30 August 1934, 1. 87LAC, Bennett Papers, MG-26K, Reel #M-1282, Vol. 567, John Bracken to R.B. Bennett, 8 June 1934; 18 June 1934; and 3 July 1934. 88Quoted in Western Producer, 1 November 1934, 8. 89See for example Regina Leader-Post, 2 February 1934, 11; and 5 September 1934, 4. 90LAC, Bennett Papers, MG-26K, Vol. 567, Reel #M1282, W.O. Fraser to M.A. MacPherson, 12 November 1934, forwarded by MacPherson to R.B. Bennett. 91Leacy, ed., Series Y17-29. See also Gregory P. Marchildon, "Drought, Depression and the Political Origins of the PFRA", draft article currently under consideration by the Canadian Historical Review. 92Ibid. , 13 September 1934, 3. 139

Weyburn Review, 11 October 1934, 1. 94Quoted in Regina Leader-Post, 14 February 1935, 1. 95Quoted in Canada, House of Commons Debates^ 12 February 1937, 820. 96Regina Leader-Post, 14 February 1935, 5. 97Canada, House of Commons Debates\ 12 February 1937, 820. 98LAC, Bennett Papers, MG-26K, Reel #M-1280, Vol. 562, Robert Weir to R.B. Bennett, 30 January 1935. "Ibid. 100Canada, House of Commons Debates, 5 February 1935, 496-500; Regina Leader-Post, 6 February 1935,1 101LAC, Bennett Papers, MG-26K, Reel #M-1280, Vol. 562, Robert Weir to R.B. Bennett, 30 January 1935. 102James G. Gardiner quoted in Regina Leader-Post, 14 February 1935, 1. 103Regina Leader-Post, 6 February 1935, 1. 104Ibid., 7 February 1935, 4. 105J.G. Taggart quoted in Ibid., 6 February 1935, 1. mStatutes of Canada, 1935 25-26 Geo. V., c. 23. CONCLUSION

What can be learned by studying government agricultural rehabilitation initiatives in Saskatchewan's portion of the Palliser Triangle between 1921 and 1935? Revisiting the questions posed in the Preface may provide an answer. How and why did the

Saskatchewan government first become concerned about the long term well being of agriculture in the Palliser Triangle? Such concern first emerged immediately following a series of dry years there at the end of World War I. These had created great hardship for the farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan, of course, but also for the municipal governments there, since the responsibility for providing relief aid in times of agricultural distress fell initially on the Rural Municipalities. However, the magnitude of the disaster eventually compelled the provincial government to assume a larger and larger share of the cost. By 1920 it was becoming apparent that if the drought continued much longer the province might very well go bankrupt providing direct relief and relief loan guarantees to the affected Rural Municipalities. This thesis has taken a fresh look at

Saskatchewan's early agricultural history by drawing a link between rising relief expenditures in the drought-stricken Palliser Triangle and the province's decision to conduct a reassessment of agriculture and settlement in the area.

What was the nature of the early policy responses? In 1920, the Saskatchewan government formally responded to the situation by setting up the Better Farming

Commission. Though the agricultural possibilities of the Palliser Triangle (and especially of the semiarid plains) had undoubtedly been overestimated, they were still substantial.

The commissioners recognized that wheat production would remain the Palliser

Triangle's economic mainstay, and because the region had already been settled and

140 141 municipal institutions established, the commissioners also understood that they had to work with conditions as they were. While the weather was beyond human control, it was thought that the hazards associated with wheat monoculture might at least be reduced if

Palliser Triangle farmers could be encouraged to produce as much of their own food supplies as possible by keeping more livestock. The BFC report really called attention to

'solutions' that provincial officials were already aware of, and indeed had begun to promote. In brief, its main recommendations urged action in three areas. First, more research on the physical environment of—and on appropriate agricultural techniques for—the Palliser Triangle was needed. Second, a better means of education extension was suggested to: facilitate an awareness of possible cultivation methods to stop soil drifting and provide a feed supplement for livestock. Third, changes in resource use in the region were advocated to address oversights in Dominion Lands policy; these would ensure: a more effective allocation of surface water supplies and grazing land to ensure the viability of farms in the better wheat growing areas, and the relocation of settlers obviously situated on poor wheat growing land to better land elsewhere. Such changes involved action by both the provincial and federal governments. This thesis has broken new ground by offering an in-depth study of the BFC's main recommendations and by analyzing their significance for the activities under the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act.

How did the political culture of the times (specifically attitudes towards the role of the state in the economy) and the division of powers between the federal and provincial governments determine how the BFC's recommendations were conceived and implemented? The BFC did not envisage a radical form of government intervention with respect to agricultural rehabilitation in the Palliser Triangle. Rather, the Saskatchewan 142 government—in keeping with the laissez faire political culture of the time, sought to put the spotlight on the individual farmer and how he could be helped to adapt, either individually or through local group action. Indeed, it was apparent that promoting new dry farming techniques across a large area could not effectively be done any other way.

Because education was exclusively a provincial domain, the SCA and the Saskatchewan

Department of Agriculture did what they could to promote the BFC's recommendations among drought-area farmers. Such efforts were hampered by limited finances and the return of good wheat growing conditions in the mid-1920s. Greater success was achieved in the field of research. The provincial government established the Saskatchewan Soil

Survey and its federal counterpart the Swift Current Experimental Farm. However,

Ottawa did not perceive what was happening in Saskatchewan from 1917 to 1919 to be a national emergency and, apart from the new Experimental Farm, gave the province little, if any practical assistance. Still, it does deserve credit for at least heeding the BFC's recommendations and cooperating with the province to make adjustments to Dominion

Lands policy. All told, these did have the effect of helping farmers in southwestern

Saskatchewan's better grain growing areas to become more firmly established. This thesis has made an original contribution to the literature by analyzing the policymaking process behind the implementation and fate of the BFC's recommendations.

Ultimately, then, what convinced Ottawa to introduce the Prairie Farm

Rehabilitation Act, and how did the activities under the Act fulfill what had been started in the 1920s? All told, politics played a decisive role in getting the Act into the federal statute books in 1935. Indeed, the unprecedented economic turmoil in the years after

1929 had forced Canadians to look to Ottawa for help like never before, and the Bennett 143 administration had responded to their pleas by introducing progressive social legislation, a notable example being the creation of the Wheat Board in 1935. But although this new attitude toward state intervention was inspired by the notion that the individual was no longer the master of his own fate, the basic philosophy of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation

Administration (PFRA) was to put the spotlight back onto the farmer and how he could be helped to solve his own problems. It is clear that the task of conquering the 'prairie desert' was beyond the ability of any single individual or institution, including the federal government. Farmers, as before, were given assistance to help themselves. The most important difference, however, lay in the practical assistance they received that neither they, nor the provincial government, could have provided. For one thing, conclusive results of the dry farming experiments carried out at DEFS facilities at Swift Current,

Lethbridge and Manyberries were now available. As James H. Gray has demonstrated in great detail in Men Against the Desert, the PFRA's encouragement of the widespread adoption of strip farming and trash covered fallowing after 1935 halted the severe soil erosion that had devastated large parts of the Palliser Triangle. At the same time, federal financial and engineering assistance allowed thousands of farmers and ranchers in the

Palliser Triangle to acquire their very own dugouts and small dams. PFRA-sponsored activities also finally brought many of the BFC's recommendations to fruition.

Agricultural Improvement Associations (one of the PFRA's signature programs) proved to be highly effective in promoting the adoption of soil and water conservation methods among drought area farmers, but they operated under the supervision of experts (much like the Agricultural Representatives) employed directly by the DEFS. In 1936, PFRA money helped the Saskatchewan Soil Survey to publish a report covering the entire 144 province south of Prince Albert, and this work laid the foundation for economic land classification studies in the brown soil zone that by 1952 had definitely outlined those areas that were best adapted for grain growing, ranching or a combination of the two.

Following the 1937 amendment to the Act to include land utilization and resettlement in the PFRA's activities, community pastures were reintroduced in the Palliser Triangle as a means of keeping submarginal wheat growing land out of cultivation permanently and providing added grazing (the vast majority of these were in southwestern Saskatchewan).

Though these pastures were federally-controlled, Ottawa worked closely with provincial authorities to acquire the land, and it was the Saskatchewan government's experience with managing the Matador Pasture in the 1920s that inspired the federal Department of

Agriculture to establish community pastures. This thesis has shed new light on the efforts of the Bennett government and its Minister of Agriculture, Robert Weir to grapple with the agricultural crisis that beset the Prairie Provinces—especially Saskatchewan.

This analysis raises the further question: are politicians or bureaucrats the real heroes of this story? Although the establishment of the Better Farming Commission in

1920 and the passage of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act in 1935 were the result of the decisions that politicians made, it is clear that public servants played a leading role in determining what line of action should be followed. Indeed, R.B. Bennett's government would not have been in a position to introduce, nor his successors to implement, a program of agricultural rehabilitation for the Palliser Triangle if it had not been for the research efforts of officials of the Saskatchewan College of Agriculture and the

Dominion Experimental Farm Service over the previous twenty years. APPENDIX

Figure 1

in wm M

T^>

Brian Gable, 1985, All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

145 Figure 2

,1,1Cf 10607 60 jj ' ECOZONES tJU Taiga Shield FSj Boreal Shield [ 1 Boreal Rain 1 ; Prairie I — Ecoregions

SOILS \ A Brown Chernozerrtic, Solonetzic (Brown) and Vertisols. LsRoiigs B Dark Brown and Black Chernozemic. ^""~V C Dark Brown Chernozemic, Solonetzic (Dark Brown) and Vertisols. Meadow L*B { D Black Chernozemic and Gleysols. E Black and Dark Gray Chernozemic, Dark Gray Luvisols, Gray Luvisols, Gleysols, V-nF v1* V\ .'uortraftSsC '••'Prince Abert and Organics. , Norttfr- F Gray Luvisols, Brunisols, Organics, and Organic Cryosols. Bafflefoid G Organics, Gray Luvisols, and Brunisols. w^p-^F H Brunisols, Gray Luvisols, Organics, and Organic Cryosols; dominance of bedrock exposures. x C vM J Brunisols, Organics, and Organic Cryosols; occasional bedrock exposures.

Svwft K Brunisols, Organic Cryosols, and Organics; numerous bedrock exposures. Current Moose JaW\ L Brunisols, Organic Cryosols, and Organics; dominance of bedrock exposures. L A ">x V 1 R ' ' Lr„../ Easts*) '\ 4? 110" 102

Source: D.F. Acton, et al. The Ecoregions of Saskatchewan, 20. Figure 3: Federal Census Districts in Saskatchewan

SASKATCHEWAN 1954 . The. province for Census; Pour les fia3 dss publications publication purposes is divided du receriseaeot la province est re- into 18 Divisioasi £acb Ci.wl3ion partia ah 18 DiyisIohsB Cbaque Divi- cosiprlses. the Sural .and .TSrban Huni- aton ccmprend les munioipalit^s ru- cipnlities iri.thin its boundaries, raids ©Vurbaines dans ses limltas. See schedule for complete details* Voir da.scrlpttoa pour plus de da"tai,l3» Divisions outlined thus; Lindtes de Divisions Subdivisions outlined thus; Limites de Subdivision;

LU-1 M_L M

Source: Dominion Bureau of Statistics, Census of Saskatchewan, 1936: Population Agriculture (Ottawa: King's Printer, 1938), page number not indicated. 148 Figure 4: Saskatchewan's Crop Districts

Source: Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1924,256.

NOTE: The 'Regina' and 'Saskatoon' text and the provincial boundary lines have been added and enhanced, respectively to improve the map's clarity. Figure 5: The Pre-emption area in Saskatchewan

Source: Loveridge and Potyondi, 156.

NOTE: This map has been modified slightly from its original format for the purposes of this study. Figure 6

Acreage, Production and Average Yields for Wheat in the Three Southwestern Saskatchewan Crop Districts, 1916-1939

As a % of As a % of Average Provincial Total Total Total Total Yield Average Production Acreage. Provincial Provincial (bushels per (bushels (hi basfcels) Acreage Production acre) per acre) 1916 2,474.580 29% 39..110353 32% 16.8 15.1 1917 2,473.305 30% 31,495,360 27% 12,6 14 J 1918 3.848.590 42% 25.296.547 27% 6.0 10.7

1919 45597s430 43% 25,676,802 29% 5.4 9.5 1920 4,239,154 42% 48,946,910 43% 11.6 12.3 1921 5.965.369 44% 76,441.880 41% 12.0 14.6 19.22 5,217.785 42% 105,281.000 42% 18.4 19.9 1923 5.539.973 43% 122.579,738 45% 22.3 21.4 1924 5,859.902 . 45% 61,311,000 46% 8.8 9.8 1925 5,875,614 45% 100,453,000 42% 16.3 18 J 1926 5.670.091 42% 79,373.000 36% 12.6 16.8 1927 5,699.128 44% 112,669,300 45% 21.6 20.1 1928 6.066.529 44% 154,943,000 48% 25.6 22,7 1929 6,665.652 46% 62,889,000 39% 10.7 12.7 1930 6,687,500 47% 84,401,000 41% 14.0 16.4

JLJP&J $, 6.866.652 46% 44,376.000 33% 7.3 10.3 1932 6,980,600 45% 84,525,000 40% 13,6 15.0 1933 6.758,300 46% 27.613,000 22% 4.1 10.4 1934 5,683,800 43% 29.865.000 26% 5.5 9.7 1935 5,753,800 44% 60,220,000 42% 9.8 10.6 1936 6.618.600 45% 26.420,000 24% 3.5 8.1 1937 5.814.000 42% 3,260,000 9% 0,6 3.5 1938 5.755,600 42% 51,510,000 37% 9.5 10.5 1939 6.008.800 42% 104,679,000 42% 17.4 17.6

Data Tabulated Frana ; Saskatchewan, Agriculture R gporis, »16, ISus , m% vm, vni 1923,193" and !9M 0. Figure 7

i Livestock in the Crop Districts of Southwestern Saskatchewan, 1918-1934 i Southwest • Provincial

• Cattle Sheep Swine Poultry I , Total -Total 11918 373.720 44313 171,546 2,901.165 3,490,744 9,935,117 3919 388,047 47,071 133356 3332,911 3,801,385 10,474,368 i 1920 368343 52581 92332 2393,659 2.707,415 8,414.020 j Percent Change—1918-192 -22% -15% 1921 494,027 59,110 148381 3,607.398 4308,916 11,738,138 3922 466,364 74.980 151,510 2,600335 3,293,189 10.062,894 3923 477,811 45.891 185.962 3.165.484 3,875,148 11.433,946

1924 482.593

FIG. 42—Index map to soil surveys of the Prairie Provinces as at June, 19:>3. Surveys numbered' 101, 102, 201, etc., to 603, were published fay the Topographical Survey of Canada (outlines here shown are based on. an index--map issued by that office), those designated Rcpt. 1, Bull. .11, etc., were published by the College of Agri­ culture of the Universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta respectively (see p. 510,"footnote 17), those in Manitoba marked Geo!. 1771 and Geol. 1802 were published by the Geological Survey of Canada. The outlines of the unpublished surveys in. Manitoba and Alberta, marked 1, 2, 3, etc., are based on a manuscript map by Dr. J. D. Newton.

Source: Martin, Dominion Lands" Policy, 541 Figure 9

Federal/Prwincial/Municipal Relief Advances in Saskatchewan, 1907-1939 •Relief Season Total Amount of Relief Advances Total for Period 1907-08 $566,005.91 \ 1908-09 : 1909-10 1910-11 1911-12 S199.859.53 1912-13 ' 1913-14 1914-15 S8.655.698.41 ; 1915-16 1916-17 $8,484.00 1917-18 5123,388.16 j 1918-19 $224,797.95 1 1919-20 $2,660,310.56 ;• 1920-21 S356.215.50 S 12.794.760.02 1921-22 $203,854.46 ! 1922-23 $94.40 ; 1923-24 '• 1924-25 S90.648.98 1925-26 S5.000.00 1926-27 S533.34 i 1927-28 $1,099.00 ; 1928-29 S301.230.18 ; 1929-30 SI .983.176.70 ! 1930-31 $4,647,491.52 : 1931-32 SI 8.342.156.83 1932-33 S3.356.101.70 • 1933-34 $12,313,449.67 i 1934-35 S17.843.119.42 : 1935-36 S7.345.824.67 : 1936-37 518,443,580.40 ; 1937-38 •S47.816.010.22 1938-39 513,143,326.71 $145,234,237.84 Rural Public Works Relief (e.g. road work). 1907-1939 510,000,000.00 Miscellaneous Relief (e.g. farm labour bonuses), 1907-1939 515,000,000.00 Total for all relief advances,, 1907-1939 $183330,228.04 Source: Reproduced from Saskatchewan, Agriculture Report, 1943. 160. Figure 10

Economic Lamdl Classification Studies in Saskatchewan's Brown Soil Region, 1940-1952 South Central Srese- Crovenlock- Evftbrow- FesVafley-Eston- Totals for all Saskatchewan Rosetown- Eastend-Maple Name and Year of Surrey Lacadena(l$40) Kfod«nsiey(1952} Conquest (1944) Creek (194% Areas Total Land Area (Acres) 1,943.000 11,542,787 2.572.398 3.888.623 4357,458 24,304,266

•*%%** WaS- % Acres % Acres % Acres % Acres % Acres % ; Class V (Excellent Wheat Land) 155,440 8 206.294 1.8 493,326 19 0 0 367,534 8.1 1.222.594 5 Class TV (Good Wheat Laud) 139.896 7.2 1,381.409 12 337.794 13 53,935 1.4 666,691 15 2,579,725 11 Class IH (Fair Wheat Land) 540,154 28 3.304,773 29 521815 20 473,653 12 710,265 16 5,554,6*° «*•»*? i Class II (Marginal Wheat Land) 322.S38 17 2.117.885 18 434,794 17 571302 15 854,061 20 4^00^80 .18 'Class I {Subatargioal Wheat Land) 784,972 40 4.532.426 39 780,869 30 1789,733 72 1,773,485 41 10,661,485 44 ;; Sources: C.C. Speace and EC. Hope, An Economic Classification of land In F$); Six Municipal Divisions, South Central Saskatchewan (Ottawa: .Department of Apiculture, TechaicalBulletinNo. 36,1941), 1$; RA. Stmt, An Economic Classification of land in the Elrosg-ltosetown-ConquestArea, 1944 : (Ottawa: Department of Agriculture. I54S)S 3-5: RA.. Start. An Economic Classification cfland in ikg Govmiock-Easiend-Maph CrwikArea, Saskatchewan, : 1946 (Ottawa: Department of Agriculture, 046), i; T.0. Rkeken and MJE. Andai, A Farm Business Study in the Fox- ¥alim-Esmn-Kimmrsim Area of 'Saskatchewan (Ottawa: Department of Agriculture, !§52). IL 155 Figure 11

Agricultural Land Use in Southwestern Saskatchewan by Census District, 1921-1936

Total #3 #4 #7 #8 Per Southwest Farm Total Land Area (Acres) 4,893,440 4,850,560 4,781,440 5,928,960 20,454,400

1921 Area of Occupied Farms 3,380,580 2,531,761 3,407,529 3,880,333 13,200,203 406 Number of Occupied Farms 8,547 5,783 8,939 9,233 32,502

Occupied Farms as a Percentage 69% 52% 71% 65% 64% of Total Area of Census District Improved Farmland 1,923,325 1,037,847 2,231,385 2,275,601 7,468,158 230 Unimproved Farmland 1,457,255 1,493,914 1,176,144 1,604,732 5,732,045 176 Percent Natural Pasture 96% 95% 93% 98% 94%

1926 Area of Occupied Farms 3,453,680 2,617,699 3,468,505 3,916,020 13,455,904 448 Number of Occupied Farms 7,928 5,478 8,196 8,412 30,014 Occupied Farms as a Percentage 71% 54% 73% 66% 66% of Total Land Area Improved Acreage 2,244,532 1,216,221 2,396,315 2,410,554 8,267,622 275 Unimproved Acreage 1,209,143 1,401,478 1,072,190 1,505,466 5,188,282 173 Percent Natural Pasture 90% 95% 93% 97% 94%

§1931 Area of Occupied Farms 4,213,609 4,220,078 3,944,544 5,028,897 17,407,128 532 Number of Occupied Farms 8,939 6,347 8,556 8,900 32,742 Occupied Farms as a Percentage 8fi% 87% 82% 85% 85% of Total Land Area Improved Acreage 2,816,918 1,796,576 2,771,709 3,166,288 10,551,491 322 Unimproved Acreage 1,396,691 2,423,502 1,172,835 1,862,609 6,855,637 209 Percent Natural Pasture 94% 96% 91% 95% 94%

1936 Area of Occupied Farms 4,126,144 4,055,072 3,781,502 4,961,986 16,924,704 564 Number of Occupied Farms 8,101 5,538 7,747 8,608 29,994 Occupied Farms as a Percentage 84% 84% 79% 84% 82% of Total Land Area Improved Acreage 2,696,221 1,729,811 2,593,430 3,169,574 10,189,036 340 Unimproved Acreage 1,429,923 2,325,261 1,188,072 1,792,412 6,735,668 225 Percent Natural Pasture 86% 95% 95% 96% 93%

Source: Census of Saskatchewan, 1921,256-60; 1926,220-21; 1931,600-01; 1936,746-49. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Manuscript Collections

F.H. Auld Papers, Saskatchewan Archives Board (SAB).

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156 157 Regina Daily Star, 1930.

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Bracken, John. Dry Farming in Western Canada Winnipeg: The Grain Growers' Guide Ltd., 1921.

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Campbell, J. Baden. The Swift Current Research Station, 1920-70. Canada Department of Agriculture, Historical Series No. 6, 1971.

MacRae, D.B. and R.M. Scott, In the South Country: A reprint of articles which appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon Star- Phoenix in September, 1934, as the result of a tour of the drouth-stricken districts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Saskatoon, 1934. 160

Nemanishen, Walter. Drought in the Palliser Triangle: A Provisional Primer, January, 1998. Available: http://www.agr.gc.ca/pfra/publications e.htm, (Accessed 29 October, 2003), 5.

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Unpublished Theses/Dissertations

Balkwill, Daniel M. "The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration and the Community Pasture Program, 1937-1947." Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2002.

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Dale-Burnett, Lisa Lynne. "Agricultural Change and Farmer Adaptation in the Palliser Triangle, Saskatchewan, 1900-1960." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Regina, 2002.

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McLeod, John T. "Provincial Administration of Natural Resources in Saskatchewan, 1930-1955. Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 1955. 166 McManus, Curtis. "Happyland: The Agricultural Crisis in Saskatchewan's Drybelt, 1917- 1927." Unpublished M.A. Thesis, University of Saskatchewan, 2004.

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Statistics Canada Website [Online] Available: http://estat.statcan.ca