FRENCH-SPEAKING SETTLERS ON THE PRAIRIES, 1870-1920
Robert Painchaud
If we think of French Canada only in terms of Quebec, we overlook the contribution of the million or so French-speaking people living in other provinces. The francophones living in Western Canada today represent an important minority because their presence is evidence of the French fact in all the regions of Canada. Linguistic and cultural absorption in the wider and more numerous anglophone population threatens in the West to the point where the 1971 Census revealed an increasing number of people of French-speaking origin who no longer understand French and a decreasing number who use the language. It is some compensation that more people of non-French background are learning and using French.
The history and present-day position of francophones in the West poses interesting questions. What would Canada be like, today, if the proportion of French speaking people in Western Canada were higher? Imagine a West where 25 or 30 percent of the population was French-speaking, compared to the less than 10 percent found in each of the three Prairie Provinces. What would have been the course of Canada's struggle with bilingualism if more francophones had settled in the West in the period 1870-1920? Would separatist or independence movements and parties have arisen in Quebec? Would there be less suspicion between French and English Canada? Or would the presence of an even larger French-speaking population have added to Canada's linguistic and cultural problems? Of course, no one can begin to answer these questions. But the course of Canadian history might have been quite different. One need only recall that in the century separating the War of 1812 and the Great War, some 700,000 French-Canadians left the province of Quebec in search of fortune and a home elsewhere. Thousands did eventually repatriate themselves by settling in the West, but the large majority took root in New England or in other regions of the United States and gradually became part of the American "melting pot".
Interpretations
Why did these French-Canadians prefer another country to Canada? Why did they not choose the Canadian Prairie West over the American West? Historians have proposed a number of explanations. Arthur I. Silver argues (CHR, Vol. 50, no. 1., (1969) that following Manitoba's entry into Confederation, French-Canadians from Quebec did not move into the new province in as large numbers as the Ontarians because of their "negative and defeatist attitudes" toward a land so far removed from their patrie. Also, their "disbelief in the material value of prairie land" reflected a conservatism which contrasted sharply with the "frontier" spirit of the Ontarians. This lack of pioneering mentality among French-Canadians could be traced, Silver argues, to the Conquest which "had probably taught French Canadians to curb their own ambition" so that a sense of defeatism and discouragement permeated French-Canadian society. It is true that the nineteenth century Quebec press reports which described the Red River Region as cold, barren, and desolate were hardly optimistic. Presumably, French Canadians were unfavourably impressed by tales of floods, famine, and loneliness in those distant lands. Silver maintains that they were unable to generate enough optimism about the new lands to travel far from their patrie of Quebec and adapt to a distant region of Canada. Finally, says Silver, it may be that French Canadians were wary of the West where lurked the Protestant and the Orangeman!
Silver's interpretation raises certain contradictions. It is hard to believe that the French Canadians were not frontiersmen. Had they not opened up the canoe routes to the West? Did not their presence in the American mid-west show also that many were prepared to settle far from their patrie? Many simply preferred the industrial centers of New England to the farming areas of the west because agriculture, despite the popular image of the habitant-farmer, had never been their vocation. And one wonders if their fear of everything English and Protestant has been grossly exaggerated.
Economic historians present another view of French-Canadian migration patterns. Albert Faincher and Gilles Paqinet (Recherches Sociographiques, V. 3 (sept.-dec. 1964)) maintain that, in the final analysis, people migrate for personal reasons related to their hopes for a better social and economic future. French Canadian concentration in the industrial centres of New England should be viewed in the context of North American settlement patterns. Economic conditions in Quebec in the 19th century led hundreds of thousands of French Canadians to disregard the urgings of the clergy and politicians to remain on the land. Nor did they respond to calls for the colonization of les pays d'en haut, the northern area of Quebec. Entire parishes emptied themselves as the young people, soon followed by other relatives, sought menial jobs in tanneries in Maine, Vermont, or Massachusetts. Others worked their way westward to Kansas and Iowa or as far as California. The decision to move into an industrial milieu, admittedly close to Quebec in the case of the New England states, according to the economists, should be interpreted more in an economic framework than in cultural terms.
Had Quebec industrialized at an earlier period, it is quite possible that French Canadians would have remained in their province. Albert Faucher and Maurice Lamontagne ("History of Industrial Development", in Marcel Rioux and Yves Martin, French-Canadian Society, Carleton Library Series, 18, 1964) explain the lag in Quebec's industrialization by the geographical and locational factors which led to the development of Ontario before that of Quebec. One need not add, of course, that the possibility of industrialization in Western Canada had not yet arisen.
The Role of the Church
Whatever the impact of frontierism, or the lack or it, or of geographical and economic forces on French Canadians, the Catholic Church stood in the forefront of those who sought to promote French-speaking settlement and colonization in the West. Church leaders such as Archbishops Taché (1854-1894) and Langevin (1895-1915) of St. Boniface defined the objectives of colonization efforts, recruited clerics and laymen to undertake the establishment of colonization societies or the foundation of new communities, lobbied constantly in Ottawa for the appointment of agents, and personally invited other Church leaders from Quebec, France, Belgium, and the United States to assist them.
The goals of colonization efforts changed from time to time. Taché's objective in the early 1870's, was to form a bloc of compact French-speaking parishes around the existing Métis settlements. He established a newspaper, Le Métis, in 1871, and followed it up with a Société de Colonisation du Manitoba founded in 1874. But the arrival of the first large contingent of "colonists" in the spring of 1876, all of them repatriated from the New England states, coincided with the exodus of the Métis toward the plains of the Saskatchewan River and the shores of Lake Manitoba. Subsequently, the Church argued, instead, that French-Canadians should pursue national objectives by ensuring that their nationality exercise the influence in Western Canada owing to it as the first European society established there. The preservation of duality - French and English - became the primary concern of the French-speaking leadership.
Taché's arguments in favour of a strong French-speaking presence in the West were repeated by all his successors. Repeated calls for Quebec support were made, but clerical and political leaders in Quebec were concerned with the wholesale abandonment of entire parishes for the industrial centers of New England, and were not impressed with suggestions that yet more emigration from Quebec was desirable. They argued, in turn, that French-Canadians should remain in their province lest they lose their majority there and their influence in Confederation. The policy proclaimed in 1871, when the Quebec clergy conceded in a pastoral letter that those who wished, absolutely, to leave the province should choose Manitoba and Western Canada over the United States was never modified. In the 1920's, Quebec politicians were still reminding Church leaders in Western Canada of this statement, insisting that colonization agents should not actively attempt to depopulate Quebec in favour of any other region.
French-speaking and Catholic Immigration
Two developments influenced the objectives of the Church in the West: the question of separate schools which arose in the prairie provinces in the late 1880s and the large-scale eastern European immigration which followed after 1896. In order to recover the rights to publically-financed confessional schools large numbers of supporters were required to impress politicians that French-speaking and Catholic people were determined to obtain their linguistic and educational rights. The influx of immigrants from overseas partially helped in this respect because many of these were Catholic, either of Ruthenian, Polish, or German origin. It was not easy, however, to unify these distinct national and cultural groups into a concerted political force. Furthermore, the presence in communities of two or more linguistic groups posed a serious dilemma. Should the common bond of religion take precedence over nationalistic considerations? There was some fear that the French would lose their special status in a multicultural West. The Roman Catholic Church, which was predominantly francophone in the prairies, sought to reconcile the need for a strong Catholic political voice with the desire to preserve the French culture and language. French-speaking Church leaders reasoned that the survival of cultural and linguistic attributes strengthened the faith among the various nationalities, and, consequently, adopted, for the francophone population, the role of protector of minority and religious rights and leader of a Catholic, multicultural community. It was necessary, therefore, for clergy to be fluent in two or more languages. Archbishop Langevin refused the service of a number of priests and religious communities who could not meet these requirements. Both he and his fellow bishops recruited or trained priests and nuns to serve the French, Flemish, German, Polish and Ruthenian communities. Missionaries also continued their work among the native peoples of the West in the languages of the tribes.
Colonization agents
To achieve their colonization objectives, the French-speaking leaders in the West turned to governments, colonization societies, missionary-colonizers, newspapers, and organizations such as the Société St-Jean-Baptiste. Chief among these, perhaps, were the missionary-colonizers who founded parishes or filled out existing ones by bringing out settlers. Men like the abbés Fillion and Beaudry in Manitoba, or the abbés Gravel and Lefloch in Saskatchewan, or Father Lacombe and the abbé Morin in Alberta travelled extensively, as government agents or as representatives of their bishops. They wrote pamphlets, gave lectures, corresponded with interested families and groups, and guided them to homesteads or to other lands in the West. Other prominent colonizers were Dom Paul Benoît, a monk who came to Manitoba from France in the early 1890s and established such communities as Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes and St. Claude and Abbé Jean Gaire, another French priest, who founded a score of settlements in southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, from Grande-Clairière to Wauchope, between 1887 and 1925.
Colonization societies were organized in all three provinces to attract French-speaking compatriots by securing entire townships for them or by seeking to obtain reduced transportation rates for their families and belongings. Often, these groups were headed by professionals and businessmen desirous of attracting potential patrons for their services. At other times, they sought to pool capital to purchase lands vacated by farmers and resell them to people of their own background. Patriotic and religious slogans accompanied these undertakings which were seen by many as part of a "mission" to firmly establish the French and Catholic groups in the West.
Newspapers served as propaganda tools in enticing French-speaking people to take up lands in the West. Le Métis (later, Le Manitoba), Le Patriote (Saskatchewan), and Le Courrier de l'Ouest (Alberta), among others, published extensively on colonization and immigration matters. Subscribers were invited to send these to interested friends and relatives. Members of the St. Jean Baptiste Society furnished these weeklies with details of the available lands and business opportunities in their communities. These stories were aimed at demonstrating the advantages of settlement in the West. What influence they had in bringing out settlers is not known.
Other colonization efforts
Both the Federal and provincial governments took an interest in French-speaking settlement on the Prairies. Early in the 1870s, the Mackenzie government set aside townships in Manitoba for prospective French-Canadian repatriates from the United States. In the 1880s, the Conservatives subsidized a colonization newspaper, Le Colonisateur Canadien, distributed in Quebec and the New England States. Furthermore, the appointment of Hector Fabre as High Commissioner for Canada in France opened up new avenues for French-speaking European immigration to Western Canada through the pages of the paper Paris-Canada which first appeared in 1884. Under the Liberal government after 1896, "returnmen" were sent to Europe to lecture on the opportunities available in Western Canada to immigrants from France and Belgium. The government of Manitoba opened an office in Montreal in 1902 and delegated clergymen and laymen to travel to parts of the United States where French-Canadians were found in large numbers in the hope that a number of them would be willing to return to Canada.
French-speaking colonization efforts had other friends. From the outset, the Canadian Pacific Railway furnished passes to colonizers, sent its agents on tour with the missionary-colonizers, and, on one occasion in the early 1900s, worked closely with the abbé J.A. Ouellette to establish a French-speaking colony in southern Alberta. In Quebec, there were groups like La Société de Rapatriement de Montréal or La Société des Artisans Canadiens-Français which provided limited support for colonization ventures in the West. In Europe, the Société d'Immigration Français or the group of La Canadienne sought to interest capitalists to invest in the purchase of large tracts of land on which settlers could be placed in compact communities complete with all institutional structures. In addition, there were journalists, wealthy aristocrats, and clergymen who had often travelled to Western Canada and who believed in the future of French-speaking colonies there.
Colonization and Immigration Patterns
The first French-speaking group settlement in Western Canada after 1870 was organized on two townships provided by the Federal Government along the Red River south of Winnipeg-St.Boniface. A slowdown of the economic cycle in the New England states together with transportation subsidies and free homesteads in the prairies created an influx of a few hundred, mostly needy, families into the new parishes of Letellier, Ste. Agathe, and St. Pierre-Jolys. These were repatriated families who began arriving in the province after 1875.
The Manitoba "boom" of 1879-1882 attracted a few prosperous families and entrepreneurs from Quebec. The influx of a small bourgeois class gave rise to optimism among the French-speaking prairie elite, but their dreams of a burgeoning francophone society collapsed after the inevitable economic crash of 1882 when most of the new setters returned to Eastern Canada, vowing never to invest in Manitoba and spreading unflattering stories about the West. A raging debate ensued between the French presses in Manitoba and Quebec. The debate had little effect because the fate of the francophones as a minority group, in Manitoba at least, had already been sealed, and because the 1880s were, in fact, lean years on the Prairies. Frosts came early and crops were poor. The influx of Ontarians also levelled off. The North-West Rebellion and the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway created a flurry of excitement, but neither event seriously affected the movement of French-speaking people into the region although there were attempts by land agents in the United States to divert settlers from Canada's West by raising the spectre of a "wild" country unsafe for families of colonists.
In the mid 1880s, French-speaking leaders like Archbishop Taché, and Thomas-Alfred Bernier, a prominent Catholic in the Franco-Manitoban community, began to look to Europe for reinforcements. Delegations of European businessmen and aristocrats toured western Canada after 1885. As a result, French-speaking communities took root outside the Red River valley. This was the beginning of what was seen as a concerted plan of action to establish a chain of parishes stretching westward to the Rockies.
Immigrants from France and Belgium, especially, formed the core of these new communities. Rural elements left the ``old'' country because of anti-clerical governments. Wealthy families entrusted their immature sons to the care of priests and established families in the hope that the rugged life would instill character. The family withheld funds until the young man had proven himself, and only then would he be allowed to take a homestead or purchase an estate of sorts. In other cases, aristocratic groups were formed and attempts made to establish feudal communities where undesirables would be excluded and class divisions respected. Examples of these are found in Fannystelle (Manitoba), St. Hubert (known in early days as La Rollandrie, Saskatchewan), and Trochu (Alberta). The ranches, dairy farms, and other agricultural settlements formed by these French-speaking Europeans added significantly to the diversity of the francophone population in terms of cultural and economic input.
The massive immigration of Eastern Europeans into Western Canada after 1896 put pressure on the francophone population. The abbé Gaire's efforts to establish a compact string of settlements were hampered by the overwhelming number of non-French-speaking arrivals. After 1905, the abbé Louis-Philippe Gravel bolstered the position of his compatriots by establishing a number of communities around Gravelbourg. Meanwhile, other agents were adding new settlers to the area around Prince Albert, and, in northern Alberta, the abbé J.A. Ouellette expanded the French-speaking Métis base of St. Albert, founded by Father Albert Lacombe in 1861. Repatriation efforts contributed, in part, to the successful foundation of new parishes, while the migration of Franco-Manitoban farming elements in favour of the other two provinces became an established pattern.
This development so alarmed French-speaking leaders in Manitoba that, by 1910, the rapid decline in the population of the ``old'' parishes along the Red and Seine rivers, led them to consider steps to stem the tide. They feared lest their group fall behind their counterparts in Saskatchewan and Alberta and, of course, were wary of the influence of a declining population on their status as a minority. Patriotic appeals could not provide solutions to their departure. The sons of farmers either did not wish to take up homesteads in other less advantageous parts of the province or could not obtain lands in the parishes where they were born, and consequently moved further west.
The Great War did not end the colonization efforts of the francophones. They believed it afforded them an opportunity to increase the French-speaking population while European immigration decreased. Unfortunately, many French and Belgian men returned to their homelands and failed to live through the war, while for many French-Canadians, the Conscription Crisis in Canada reinforced their fears about the unsympathetic nature of the population outside of Quebec. Furthermore the rapid urbanization and industrialization of Quebec provided more opportunity at home. French-oriented cooperatives, established just before the outbreak of the war, were equally unsuccessful in promoting the benefits of Western settlement and farming during a period of high prices. In the 1920s, funding from governments for repatriation and colonization schemes was difficult to obtain. The Montreal-based office for missionary-colonizers was phased out. A final effort to consolidate the position of scattered French-speaking settlements by buying out the Mennonite communities separating them in some areas of Manitoba and Saskatchewan was not successful.
The Survival Question
C.A. Dawson, in his Group Settlement: Ethnic Communities in Western Canada (Toronto: Macmillan, 1936), argues that "peculiar peoples" have sought in bloc settlements the means of achieving their survival as "cultural islands". Railways, he contends, became one of the agents in the process of assimilating these groups into the larger and wider community. We can add to Dawson's list other agents such as schools, radio, and television; in short, the general pressures of an evolving society.
Against these assimilative tendencies, French-speaking communities have used many of the same tools: newspapers, language, religion, and a score of cultural and political institutions. Today, for example, there are weekly francophone newspapers in the Prairie Provinces, radio stations, television facilities, theatre groups, colleges (St. Boniface, Gravelbourg, and St. Jean in Edmonton), and many other organizations seeking to promote and expand the francophone presence in Western Canada. Some Canadians argue that unless there are active French- speaking communities throughout Canada, then the formation of an independent Quebec becomes evident. French-speaking minority groups outside Quebec have, therefore, become important factors in the discussion between federalist and nationalist forces in Quebec. It is important for the student of Canadian history to understand the origins of these communities which could, in our time, become pawns in what might be the central debate in Canada's second century.
