(man) It's hard to believe
that when the Selkirk Settlers
arrived in Manitoba
200 years ago,
and they were told you can't
farm in Western Canada.
This is a land of ice and snow,
it's fur country,
and you can't farm here,
it's not possible.
[drums & melodica play]
♪
♪
[drums, guitar, & melodica
play in bright rhythm]
[woman voices the credits]
And the members of...
(male narrator)
Manitoba is a spacious land,
the easternmost
of the prairie provinces
located in the heart of Canada
and the giant Hudson Bay
Watershed.
Once known as Rupert's Land,
it was called
the Postage Stamp Province,
believed to be
unsuitable for agriculture and
only valuable for the fur trade.
Who could imagine what
this province would become?
[soft lapping of the waves
against the shore]
(James Hunter; Scottish accent)
The Highlands of Scotland
well into the 18th century
were a tribal society.
We had clans as everyone knows,
and clans of chiefs
and the whole setup wasn't
dissimilar
to that of Native American
society in North America.
As the Industrial Revolution
in Britain got underway
and there was
a huge demand for wool,
their big product became sheep.
To introduce sheep farming on a
large scale into the Highlands
necessitated getting rid of
a lot of the people
who were already there.
Hence the Highland Clearances.
So there were mass evictions
right across
the entire northern part
of Scotland.
(Jacquie Aitken;
Scottish accent) Within
the space of about 8 years,
nearly every strath in the
County of Sutherland
had lost 95% of its
indigenous population.
They'd either moved to the coast
to take up
the small lots of land,
they may have entered
some of the industries,
like the fishing industries
at Helmsdale,
they also might have decided
to go to the factories
in places like Glasgow to work
in the cotton industry.
These people, some of them
were relocated
onto the coast of Sutherland
itself,
others moved to other parts
of Britain, but
increasingly were these people
and Highlanders more generally
were emigrating
to North America.
(Jacquie Aitken) They would have
heard these stories
about the new lands in North
America,
land that you could have,
and it could be yours
and yours alone, and it was
free, and it was free to use--
if you worked hard, nobody
would take it away from you.
And this was something that
must have been very enticing.
I don't think Lord Selkirk
probably knew
who would take up his offer.
It didn't take long
and Lord Selkirk heard
that nearly 500 people
in Kildonan had signed up.
(male narrator)
Thomas Douglas was born
on St. Mary's Isle
in Kircudbright, Scotland,
the youngest boy of 13 children.
Thomas, 5th Earl of Selkirk,
was an idealist and a
philanthropist,
and he inherited vast sums
of money
because all of his brothers
died young
and as a result,
he had a very large fortune.
And he used
that fortune to charter ships
to take struggling Highlanders
from Sutherland
and other parts
of the Highlands lands
to Red River Settlement,
which turned out to be
the beginning of Winnipeg.
(Dr. Gordon Goldsborough)
I don't think you can live
in Manitoba your whole life
without knowing a little bit
about Selkirk.
I think the thing I admired
most is that
he had very strong principles
about correcting wrongs,
and I think he looked at the
Scottish Highland Clearances
as a fundamental wrong.
He realized that he could do
things now,
he had money in his hands,
and he had the knowledge and the
imagination to do something.
Almost at once he became
interested
in some kind of immigration
scheme
that would take Highlanders
to North America.
Well, he was a wealthy man;
he had a very big stake
in the Hudson's Bay Company
and he was able to obtain
an extremely large area of land
that was going to be used
for settlement and farming,
and, of course,
the future expansion of farming
would arise from it.
[fiddle plays
in folk-dance rhythm]
(Jacquie Aitken) He was looking
for some hardy,
sturdy men to go and set up
this new farming settlement
in the middle of the prairies
in Manitoba at a place called
Red River, and this was
the first agricultural
settlement that was
associated with the Hudson's Bay
Fur Trading Company,
and it was quite an important
part of the story,
and this was really the
initiative of Lord Selkirk.
(Dr. Jack Bumsted)
A number of fur traders
had told him
about the promise of this area,
and of course,
one of the things that impressed
them all was the dirt.
The dirt is black, everybody
realized,
this ain't like Scotland. Right?
where the dirt is gray
and sandy-colored.
This is good agricultural stuff.
(Dr. Harry Duckworth)
It's clear that the company was
onboard, because they sold him,
for 10 shillings, 116,000
square miles of land.
Much of it, as we know,
was magnificent land.
It included Southern Manitoba,
reached into parts of
North Dakota and South Dakota,
reached into Northwest Ontario,
also into Saskatchewan.
But the center of it was
the place
where the Red and the
Assiniboine River come together,
what we refer to as The Forks
in Winnipeg.
(narrator)
Glacial Lake Agassiz retreated,
leaving fertile soils
in the Red River Valley.
(Allan Ashworth) Lake Agassiz
formed then
when glaciers which had occupied
all of Canada and the northern
tier of the United States,
as they start to melt at the end
of the last Ice Age,
and huge amounts of meltwater
are being formed
as the glaciers melt back into
Canada, that meltwater
then becomes trapped by higher
land to the south
and it starts
to form Lake Agassiz.
And then as that ice
continues to melt,
the lake just continues
to grow northward.
Lake Agassiz then existed
from about 13,000 years ago
to about 8-1/2-thousand
years ago.
The reason the lake is
important then,
these flat surfaces
that we have in this area,
as the melting at the northern
end, they were supplying
huge amounts of sediment
from the glaciers into the lake.
They convert then to clays
and so you get
a very high preponderance
of clays and silts in the soils.
So that with the freshly-ground
mineral matter that's in there,
the potassium and all the other
elements that are represented
in those crushed-up soils, that
leads to generally good soils
and soil development
for good agriculture.
(narrator)
Native people are
thought to have
entered the area of Manitoba
about 6,000 years ago,
moving north
from the southern plains.
As nomadic people, they traveled
to their food supply,
primarily the bison herds.
Over time, they found convenient
places to settle for a while.
One of those places
was at The Forks
of the Red
and the Assiniboine Rivers,
which became a well-known
gathering place.
A little north of The Forks,
indigenous people
began to plant crops
like corn and potatoes.
Here the soil
was rich and well-drained.
(Clarence Nepinak) They would be
eating a lot of vegetables,
like plant foods, depending on
the season, you know,
and as each season changed
sort of thing,
there were different animals
that they were able to harvest
because they weren't always
living in the same location.
Well, the type of food that was
eaten at that time
was food that was plentiful.
They'd go and do community hunts
and then they would
share all the meat
that they brought back.
But there was also berries
that we also picked.
With more Europeans coming,
they had different foods
and then, of course,
the indigenous people
had their foods as well.
So there was this whole aspect
of trading and sharing.
(narrator)
In 1812, the first party
of settlers arrived
and met unlivable conditions;
no food, no shelter.
(Lord Selkirk)
It was many hundreds,
and they came over by ship
to Hudson's Bay
and many of them
landed at Churchill,
then made their way
down to the south
and eventually arrived
at Red River.
And what they hadn't
bargained for
was the 5 months of ice
and snow.
And the friendship he formed
with Chief Peguis
of the First Nation Saulteaux
meant that Chief Peguis
would in fact protect them
and the settlement.
Peguis took them under his wing,
so to speak.
I think he did a lot
to help them survive
the first few months and years,
at a time when they weren't
really adapted to this and
weren't fully prepared
for the kind of weather they
encountered, the kind of
activities that they could
engage in, the fact that we had
a much longer winter than they
would have had in Scotland.
He basically helped them
get established.
Peguis was a hereditary chief,
and he,
he was very influential
with the Europeans
that were around The Forks
here in the area of Winnipeg.
(Dr. Gordon Goldsborough)
People often think
he had been here his whole life,
but he wasn't.
He had come here from the area
of Southern Ontario
that we now say is around
Sault Ste. Marie, so in fact,
I think maybe he had
some affectional affinity
for these people because,
like him, they were newcomers,
and now that he had become
adapted to this area,
he maybe felt some kind of
kinship with them
and that he had an obligation to
help them get settled in too.
(Blair Rutter)
That's what I find so incredible
about the Selkirk Settler story
is that they persevered,
and I think a lot of it
had to do with owning
a piece of land.
Because they were driven off
the land in Scotland--
they were always tenants there.
When they came to Canada, they
were granted a piece of land,
they knew that if they could
stick with it,
that this was going
to be theirs,
and no lord or no one else
could evict you.
The ownership of land and the
respect for property,
that was something that was
really important
to the Selkirk Settlers
and why they were so determined
to persevere
in the face
of all these hardships.
(Phyllis Fraser) My ancestors
arrived
with the Lord Selkirk Settlers.
The first one to arrive here
was my great, great, great
grandmother,
and she arrived in late October
in 1812,
and her name was Catherine
McGilvera,
and she'd recently been married
to Hector MacLean.
They arrived, it was
a very, very rough time;
that first winter the settlers
had to go down to Fort Daer,
which is now Pembina,
North Dakota,to winter
because there was no food,
there were no provisions
made for them here.
And they survived the winter,
but Hector died the next spring.
So here was Catherine, 20 years
old, a widow with a baby, and
she remained in the settlement
and several years later
she met a fur trader by the name
of John Pritchard.
And John Pritchard had been
a fur trader
with the North West Company,
and he wanted
to become a settler,
he wanted to be
affiliated with
the Hudson's Bay Company.
After a 24-hour courtship,
they were married!
They settled in Red River
and had 10 children,
and their daughter married
a settler
who came with the 1815 group,
and that was John Matheson.
So he and Catherine are my
great, great grandparents.
(narrator)
Miles Macdonell
had been sent to Red River
as the advance man
to establish housing
and to source food
for the expected settlers.
I've never quite understood
why Miles Macdonell has the
reputation he has.
When he brought the settlers
here, they didn't really
respect him at all, and he made
somewhat dubious decisions,
he was the one that issued
the Pemmican Proclamation
that said you couldn't take
pemmican out of the settlement.
The main part of the North West
Company's trade
was much further north than west
and their concern
was to feed canoe brigades,
which had to go a very long way
into the Northwest and come out
again with the furs.
And to do that they used
pemmican.
It was basically a very
high-calorie, high-protein food,
which was ideal
for fur brigades.
I call it the fuel on which
the fur brigades ran.
Pemmican Proclamation was
designed to prevent provisions
from leaving the settlement.
And goodness knows,
the settlement needed
all the provisions it could get.
But the trouble was that it
probably exceeded his authority,
moreover,
it brought the wrath of the
North West Company on his head.
What he was basically telling
the North West Company was
you will have to shut down
your pemmican operations.
Well, they weren't
going to do that,
and so they began harassing
the colony.
(Phyllis Fraser)
The hardships were huge;
they had huge challenges.
They were caught in the middle
of a fur trade rivalry
between the Hudson's Bay Company
and the North West Company
and the North West Company
wanted them gone,
and they encouraged them
in various ways to leave.
Also, there was no food
for them,
and without the support
of Chief Peguis
and his people and
the Métis buffalo hunters,
they would have starved.
(narrator)
There was considerable tension
between the North West Company
and the settlers
brought to the area
by the Hudson's Bay Company.
The main economic activity in
the area had been the fur trade.
As the Hudson's Bay Company
and the North West Company
competed for furs, rivalry was
the normal state of affairs
and became even worse with
the arrival of the settlers.
Everything boiled over
in June of 1816.
Cuthbert Grant and his group of
North West Company followers
were coming across the prairie
at Seven Oaks
and Governor Semple
and his group of settlers
came out to meet them.
There's a lot of controversy
about what actually happened;
a gun went off.
[loud CRACK!]
And a fierce battle took place
and 22 of the settlers
were killed that day.
Selkirk and his people always
thought of it as a massacre.
It probably wasn't, it was an
inadvertent collision
between settlers
and mixed-blood,
but it was a very unequal
encounter
because the settlers were not
militarily inclined.
The mixed-bloods were well-armed
and experienced shooters.
Not surprisingly the result was
heavy loss of life
on the settler part,
virtually no loss of life
on the mixed-blood part.
(narrator)
After the Battle
of Seven Oaks in 1816,
peace came to Red River,
but the challenges
of droughts, pests,
crop failures, and floods,
like the devastating 1826 flood,
persisted.
In 1826 we have the first
of the great floods
in recorded history
in the Red River area.
The Red River rises by 20 feet;
almost everybody lives
on the banks of the rivers,
and of course, the settlement
is virtually wiped out.
Large numbers of settlers leave,
but this is not necessarily
a bad thing.
The colony did grow after 1817,
not so much because there were
new settlers coming in
from Scotland,
because there weren't very many,
but the fur traders
tended to retire here because
this was a community,
and it had some characteristics
of European life.
(Dr. Jack Bumsted)
As a result of the merger
of the two trading companies
in the 1820s, there are
a lot of surplus employees.
The opportunity comes in 1826 to
use the settlement as a place
where retired members of the fur
trade and their families can go.
It was a good place for the fur
traders, who in general,
were married to women who were
either natives or Métis
and who would probably have had
a very difficult time
retiring to Europe
where the society
was so very different.
So it was a good place
to raise a family
if you were a retired
fur trader.
[acoustic guitar;
softly finger-picking]
It's hard to believe that when
the Selkirk Settlers
arrived in Manitoba
200 years ago,
and they were told you can't
farm in Western Canada,
this is a land of ice and snow,
it's fur country,
and you can't farm here,
it's not possible--
they were told that.
The big accomplishment of the
settlement was to show
that you could establish a
farming economy on the prairies.
The big thing about a farming
settlement
is the density of population.
As soon as you start laying out
the prairies
in quarter-section farms, you
can have quite a big population.
(Dr. Jack Bumsted) So one of the
reasons that Selkirk moves
into this territory is
an imperial motive;
he's trying to preserve
most of Western Canada
and part of the Western
United States
from the rapacious Americans...
who will otherwise take it over
entirely.
(Dr. Harry Duckworth)
So the settlement grew
and eventually, of course,
it became Winnipeg,
Canada took over
the rest of the country in 1870.
There was a policy
of European immigration
over the next 40 years,
and all kinds of Europeans
came out here who would never
have been brought
if it hadn't been known
that it was possible
to have this dense population
as a farming settlement.
They started the waves of
immigration that followed
and because the Selkirk Settlers
came here,
others started to follow,
and the Icelanders
and Ukrainians,
and just every other group.
Now there's
a Philippine community,
there's so many others
who've come
and make Manitoba home--
we're very multicultural--
perhaps because
of the Selkirk Settlers.
(narrator)
Settling the West for
agriculture was a bold move.
Early surveys had disagreed
over the West's suitability
for agriculture.
Manitoba's new survey,
beginning in 1871,
created townships
of 36-square-mile sections,
each section was 640 acres.
This new method replaced
the original Red River survey
based on the early Quebec system
of long, narrow river lots.
(Dr. Paul Earl) What, of course,
sparked the settlement
in any kind of numbers
and any kind of volume
was the building of the CPR,
which was completed in 1887.
Sir John A. Macdonald's
intention was
to tie the country together
and to tie Vancouver
and British Columbia
in with the eastern provinces,
but, of course,
they had to cross
the Great Plains to get there.
(Jamie Wilson)
Sir John A. Macdonald,
the good and the bad about him
as our first Prime Minister,
some of the good things
he did was,
he forced treaties to be signed.
He also brought in
a piece of legislation
allowing First Nations to vote
in eastern Canada.
On the other hand, there was
very aggressive practices
on the government's side to
displace people from the land
and move them north away from
where the railroad was
going to be.
They basically used forced
starvation
to help relocate
First Nation communities.
They would've had claims where
the rail line was going to be.
(narrator)
Rail service made
the settlement of the West
a reality during the 1880s.
Sir John's national policy
included the concept of settling
the plains area
and creating
a rural farming economy there.
(narrator)
As an incentive to build a
transcontinental rail line,
the CPR had been granted
a monopoly
on rail line development.
(Dr. Ed Tyrchniewicz)
Clifford Sifton was
the Minister of Immigration.
He in many ways determined
which ethnic group was
going to go where,
so we ended up with the German,
the Mennonite groups,
going into Southern Manitoba,
in Morden,
Winkler, Altona area
and the Steinbach area.
They were essentially
settling into areas
that had good agricultural land
and they were able
to be quite successful at it.
Some of the Eastern European
groups tended to get dumped off
into Southeast Manitoba
in the poorer quality land,
and yet they felt
they still had good soil
because it was better than
what they had come from.
(narrator)
Between 1879 and 1881,
58,000 immigrants
came to Manitoba.
Settlement continued and
the late 1890s and early 1900s
saw more than 30,000 immigrants
from the Ukraine.
In 1896, Clifford Sifton
spared no expense
and increased
advertising abroad.
These advertising claims in
today's terms would be
considered a scam
because
they essentially presented
this area as a cornucopia.
And we know
that this environment
that we work with in here is,
it's very harsh,
but it's also very fragile,
and so people came here
with very high expectations
of wealth and prosperity.
And many of them had
their hopes completely dashed
within a very
short period of time.
(Rob Tisdale)
Homesteading in Canada was
quite an organized affair.
The railways financed
construction
through the capital assets
of the land itself.
The government granted
the railways land,
the railway surveys
these lands
on both sides of the rail line,
they would sell these lands
or bring people to these lands
to homestead a 3/4-section,
if you will.
That would bring the population
that the railways needed
to create commerce, and it was
a thriving business--
the real boom of the 1880s
through to, really
up to the 1920s.
(Laura Rance) The Canadian
government wanted to get
this vast prairie region settled
mainly because
they didn't want the Americans
to stake claim to it.
And so they came up with this
scheme with the railways
in order to draw people
to the area.
What it did was offer people
essentially free land.
They had to pay a $10
registration fee,
but they had a free
quarter-section, 160 acres.
What they had to do in order to
get this land was to proof up or
get 40 acres of their quarter-
section into production, and
they had to build a permanent
structure within 3 years.
That was easier said than done
in a part of the world
where there weren't
a lot of trees at the time.
A lot of these people
lived in sod huts
for a significant number
of years. [steam whistle blows]
(narrator)
As a result
of the government's programs,
more than 3 million people came
to Canada between 1896 and 1914.
Selkirk passed away in 1820
and never got to see
the success
of his agricultural experiment.
He developed tuberculosis and
died at a very early age,
but the agreement he signed
with Chief Peguis of the
First Nation Saulteaux
had this sentence in it,
"The agreement would last
for as long as the sun shines,
the grass grows,
and the rivers flow."
(Phyllis Fraser)
Manitoba was built on
agriculture and the family farm.
At the turn of the century,
agriculture was the reason
that the Manitoba Legislative
Building is
this huge, beautiful building,
because it was booming,
we were going to be
the Chicago of the North.
[drums & melodica
play in bright rhythm]
[woman voices
the following credits]
And the members of...
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