The grain economy has been examined in a wide range of historical literature. First-person accounts of the homestead experience can be fascinating, as is demonstrated by James Minifie's Homesteader: A Prairie Boyhood Recalled (Toronto: Macmillan, c1972). A prairie novel with a similar subject is R.J.C. Stead's Grain (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963; first published in New York: G.H. Doran Co., 1926). A young missionary's experiences are recounted in J.B. Bickersteth, The Land of Open Doors: Being Letters from Western Canada 1911-1913 (first published Toronto: Musson Book Co., 1914 and London: W. Gardner, Darton, 1914; reprinted with a new introduction by the author, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), and a young girl's memories of prairie towns are presented by Fredelle Bruser Maynard in Raisins and Almonds (Toronto: Doubleday Canada; Garden City, N.Y., 1972).
In The Pioneer Years 1895-1914: Memories of Settlers who Opened the West (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, cl976; Garden City, N.Y.) Barry Broadfoot demonstrates the uses of oral history, though his Ten Lost Years: 1930-1939; Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1973) is a more effective work based on the same technique. A very interesting first-hand account of the Depression is James H. Gray's The Winter Years: The Depression on the Prairies (Toronto: Macmillan, 1966).
The most thorough study of the wheat economy and the grain marketing system is Vernon Clifford Fowke's The National Policy and the Wheat Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973, cl957). A lively first-person account is Hopkins Moohouse's Deep Furrows (Toronto: G.J. McLeod, 1918). A critique of the modern food industry is presented by Don Mitchell in The Politics of Food (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1975). The geography of the wheat economy is surveyed in several articles in John Warkentin (ed.) Canada: A Geographical Interpretation (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Maclean-Hunter Press, c1976) and George R. Stevens, History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (New York: Macmillan London: Collier Macmillan, 1977), T.D. Regehr, The Canadian Northern Railway: Pioneer Road of the Northern Prairies 1895-1918 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; Maclean-Hunter Press, c1976) and George R. Stevens, History of the Canadian National Railways (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1973).
On the farmers' political movements, see W.L. Morton, The Progressive Party in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967, c1950) and Walter D. Young, Democracy and Discontent: Progressivism, Socialism and Social Credit in the Canadian West (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969; McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978). The cooperative movement is examined in Ian MacPherson's Each for All: A History of the Co-operative Movement in English Canada 1900-1945 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1979) and The Co-operative Movement on the Prairies 1900-1955 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1979; Historical Booklet no. 33).
A modern government-sponsored survey of rural life is presented in Marc Adelard Tremblay and Walton J. Anderson (eds.) Rural Canada in Transition (Ottawa: Agricultural Economics Research Council of Canada, 1966). A Canada Studies Foundation project edited by Ron Wood and entitled The Agrarian Myth in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975) introduces similar rural themes.
1993 Update
CANADA'S GRAIN ECONOMY
Ian MacPherson and Gerald Friesen
The history of the Prairies has been rewritten in the last twenty years. The role of Aboriginal peoples and of women, the relation between capital and labour, even the material and cultural expressions of the population have been reconsidered. These changes have affected our understanding of the grain economy as of so many other aspects of Prairie history.
The role of Aboriginal peoples in modern Prairie agriculture is discussed in Sarah Carter's Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy (MontrÄal, 1990) and Peter Douglas Elias's The Dakota of the Canadian Northwest: Lessons for Survival (Winnipeg, 1988). And a forthcoming book by Gerhard Ens, Trader, Tripper, Hunter, assesses the adaptation of the Metis to agriculture in Red River.
The farm as enterprise is also the subject of important publications. The following are the most accessible.
Dick, Lyle. Farmers "Making Good": The Development of Abernethy District, Saskatchewan, 1880-1920. Ottawa, 1989.
Jones, David, and Ian MacPherson, eds. Building Beyond the Homestead: Rural History on the Prairies. Calgary, 1985.
MacPherson, Ian, and John Thompson. "The Business of Agriculture: Prairie Farmers and the Adoption of 'Business Methods,' 1890-1950." Canadian Papers in Business History 1 (1989).
Voisey, Paul. Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community. Toronto, 1988.
The role played by women in the world of farming is addressed directly in Veronica Strong-Boag's "Pulling in Double Harness of Hauling a Double Load: Women, Work and Feminism on the Canadian Prairie" (Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 3 [1986]) and Mary Kinnear's "'Do you want your daughter to marry a farmer?': Women's Work on the Farm, 1922" (Canadian Papers in Rural History 6 [1988]).
Two of the many recent publications on the ethnic differences in Prairie settlement are Family, Church, Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and the New Worlds, by Royden Loewen (Toronto, 1993) and Canada's Ukrainians: Negotiating an Identity, edited by Lubomyr Luciuk and Stella Hryniuk (Toronto, 1991).
The impact of recent international literature has been varied. Comparisons of the Prairie experience and that of other countries have resulted in some important new insight. See Jeremy Adelman's "The Social Bases of Technical Change: Mechanization of the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890-1914" (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1992) and Harriet Friedmann's "World Market, State, and Family Farm: Social Bases of Household Production in the Era of Wage Labour" (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1978). In addition, recent theoretical perspectives have challenged the language used to discuss farms. See the political study by David Laycock, Populism and Democratic Thought in the Canadian Prairies, 1910 to 1945 (Toronto, 1990) and the revisionist work by Jeffrey Taylor, Ideology, Rural Social Science and Alternative Visions of the Manitoba Countryside, 1890-1925 (forthcoming).
