The Dominion of Nature: Environmental Histories of the Confederation Era workshop, Charlottetown, PEI, 31 July – 1Aug Draft essays. Do not cite or quote without permission. Wendy Cameron (Independent researcher), “Nature Ignored: Promoting Agricultural Settlement in the Ottawa Huron Tract of Canada West / Ontario” William Knight (Canada Science & Tech Museum), “Administering Fish” Andrew Smith (Liverpool), “A Bloomington School Perspective on the Dominion Fisheries Act of 1868” Brian J Payne (Bridgewater State), “The Best Fishing Station: Prince Edward Island and the Gulf of St. Lawrence Mackerel Fishery in the Era of Reciprocal Trade and Confederation Politics, 1854-1873” Dawn Hoogeveen (UBC), “Gold, Nature, and Confederation: Mining Laws in British Columbia in the wake of 1858” Darcy Ingram (Ottawa), “No Country for Animals? National Aspirations and Governance Networks in Canada’s Animal Welfare Movement” Randy Boswell (Carleton), “The ‘Sawdust Question’ and the River Doctor: Battling pollution and cholera in Canada’s new capital on the cusp of Confederation” Joshua MacFadyen (Western), “A Cold Confederation: Urban Energy Linkages in Canada” Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere (Concordia), “Viewing Canada: The cultural implications of topographic photographs in Confederation era Canada” Gabrielle Zezulka (Independent researcher), “Confederating Alberta’s Resources: Survey, Catalogue, Control” JI Little (Simon Fraser), “Picturing a National Landscape: Images of Nature in Picturesque Canada” 1 NATURE IGNORED: PROMOTING AGRICULTURAL SETTLEMENT IN THE OTTAWA HURON TRACT OF CANADA WEST/ONTARIO IN 1 THE CONFEDERATION ERA [one map; spaces for other illustrations left intact] Wendy Cameron Independent researcher Current project: Receiving Newcomers: A History of the Inland Immigration Service of Upper Canada/Canada West, 1830-1867 [email protected] This district is the farmland of Al Purdy’s poem “The Country North of Belleville”...the country of our defeat...where picnicking glaciers have left strewn with centuries’ rubble.” Purdy writes of flashes of beauty in a landscape of abandoned farms and tries to inhabit what held a generation to “a country where the young leave quickly.”2 The Ottawa Huron tract in Canada West, the former Upper Canada, was some 18,000 square miles in size. As initially defined it stretched from the Ottawa River valley to Georgian Bay, and it was bounded on the south by a first tier of settlement on the St Lawrence River and Lake Ontario.3 Optimistic promoters of the tract were inspired by the rapid settlement of American mid western states such as Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan that attracted record numbers of immigrants in the 1850s. Despite results far short of their hopes, the Ottawa and Huron country was peopled in the nineteenth century and 1Research for this paper was supported by a grant from Father Edward Jackman and the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. 2 Permission for publication not yet requested. 3 Library and Archives Canada [hereafter LAC], RG 17, Department of Agriculture, Vol. 1491, 97- 105, Report to the Executive Council, 12 September 1853, 101. 2 farmers played their part. Clearing the forest cover for farm land too often exposed pre-Cambrian rock formations and swamps or a thin top soil where new stones surfaced after each year’s frosts. After Confederation, more settlers came as railways fostered short term development in a way that roads had not. Yet many farms did not last longer than the lumber operation or mine that had kept them going until the resource was exhausted.4 Today this land is valued for recreational and cottage. Not far from these cottages, nature is taking back old orchards and unused fields still bounded by stone fences. Walking the abandoned farms of Purdy’s poem, the inescapable question is why did farmers try? Why here? Some farmers, immigrants especially, came because of propaganda spread by government agents using materials produced and officially endorsed by the Canadian Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics (elevated to a Department in 1862). This paper will take a step away from farm and farmer to look at government’s part in promoting marginal land to agriculturalists in Great Britain and on the continent. Why did the politicians behind this attempt to grow the country not take more account of the nature of the terrain? A case study is the more interesting for parallels with other ventures where political urgency outpaced evaluation of the land to be farmed. The scene was set for a project to bring farmers to Ottawa Huron tract by legislation passed in 1853 to permit government financing of roads into territory on the fringes of the Canadian Shield in both Canada West and Canada East.5 In recognition of the difficulty of access, the government used dedicated funds to open “colonization roads” into newly surveyed lands.6 In the tract, 4 Brian S. Osborne, “Frontier Settlement in Eastern Ontario in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Changing Perception of Land and Opportunity” in David Harry Miller and Jerome O. Steffan eds, The Frontier: Comparative Studies (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press 1977), for settlement of Kingston’s hinterland in the context of “the nature of the land.” 5 Florence B. Murray, ed., Muskoka and Haliburton: a Collection of Documents (Toronto: Champlain Society for the Government of Ontario, University of Toronto Press 1963), lxxx and 235, extracts from “An Act to amend the law for the sale and settlement of public lands,” Canada, Statutes 1853-3, 16 Vic., c. 159. 6 Marilyn G. Miller, Straight Lines in Curved Space: Colonization Roads in Eastern Ontario ([Toronto] Ontario Ministry of Culture and Recreation 1978); Florence B. Murray, “Agricultural Settlement on the Canadian Shield: Ottawa River to Georgian Bay” in Edith G. Firth ed. Profiles of a Province: Studies in the History of Ontario (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society 1967); Cole Harris, The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation (Vancouver: UBC Press 2008), 277-86 (Canada East), 366-9 (Canada West), and Map,8.10 3 surveyors laid out new townships within the grid formed by these roads. By 1867, 13 roads were at least partly constructed. 7 Illustration 1. Colonization Roads in Ontario Credit: Florence B. Murray, Muskoka and Haliburton 1615-1875 (Toronto: Champlain Society 1963), 185. Before Confederation, promotion of the Ottawa Huron tract to emigrant settlers evolved in two stages which can be traced in a series of pamphlets of varying lengths written and published under the Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics. Advertizing began with the opening of the first three roads. The Hastings and Addington roads led inland from Lake Ontario, and the Ottawa and Opeongo, intended to run from the Ottawa River to a terminus (never reached) on Georgian Bay, “Colonizing the fringe of the Canadian Shield;”Serge Courville, Quebec: A Historical Geography (Vancouver: UBC Press 2008, translated by Richard Howard) ch. 8. 7 Miller, Straight Lines, 21, lists seven running north south and six east and west. Settlers also built branch roads with assistance from an improvement fund. George W. Spragge, “Colonization Roads in Canada West,” Ontario History (1957, No. 4) 1957; Keith A. Parker, “Colonization Roads and Commercial Policy,” Ontario History (1975, No 1), 31-38. 4 served as a temporary northern boundary for surveyed townships.8 In the first stage of promotion in 1856 and 1857, the Bureau of Agriculture and Statistics distributed pamphlets abroad through agents other than their own. The Bureau printed pamphlets in the thousands in English for distribution in Britain and, translated into German, Norwegian and French, in somewhat fewer thousands for the continent.9 In the second stage, government agents appointed in Canada were sent abroad between 1859 and 1863 in a joint venture of the Bureau and the Department of Crown Lands. Their job was to oversee all the ways of spreading information and to reach emigrants with the advantages of Canada before they decided on a destination. This project went forward until 1862 under the umbrella of a liberal conservative administration led in Canada West by John A. Macdonald. Two politicians stood out. Philip Vankoughnet won election to the Legislative Council in 1856 with a call for the annexation of the North West.10 When the Hudson Bay Company successfully parried efforts to gain the North West for the province, he and other expansionists turned their attention to land within provincial boundaries. As minister of agriculture until 1858, and as commissioner of crown lands from 1858 to 1862, he took the lead in the Executive Council on developing the Ottawa Huron tract. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, best known as a Father of Confederation and its eloquent spokesman, honed his case for federation by promoting immigration as the only way to build population at the rate 11 required to fill vast new and future surveys. His forum was as chair of four successive select 8 Brian S. Osborne and Donald Swainson, Kingston: Building on the Past (Westport, ON: Butternut Press 1988); Gerald Boyce, Historic Hastings, 1867-1967 (Belleville: Hastings County Council 1867); and Joan Finnigan, Life along the Opeongo Line (Newcastle ON: Penumbra Press 2004). 9 Canada. Province, Journal of the Legislative Assembly [JLA], Appendix 54, Annual Report of the Minister of Agriculture for 1856, records 12,00 copies in English, 6,000 in German, 5,000 in Norwegian, and 4,000 in French. 10 W.L. Morton, “Philip Matthew Scott Vankoughnet,”