The population of the prairie region was not large enough to supply sufficient labour to bring in the annual harvest. As a result men were imported from Ontario, QuÄbec and the Maritimes to work on the farms. Every August the railway companies offered reduced fares to passengers willing to go west to harvest the crop. Generally these migrant workers would stay until October or November when, the work over for another season, they boarded the trains to return home. When the harvest was very successful even Eastern Canada could not provide enough men and the railways advertised in the United States and Britain for workers. This poster was one of those distributed throughout the United States. The railway companies encouraged the so-called harvest excursions because they hoped to sell some of their prairie land to excursionists who decided to remain in the West and homestead on their own. As well, because the railways carried the grain, they profited from a crop which might go unharvested without the migrants.
Excursionists were lured into the West by the promise of high wages and the dream of owning their own land. Wages were generally higher than in eastern Canada but the migrants were not always assured of getting work. They were not actually hired until they arrived and if the crop was poor or if bad weather delayed the harvest the men were simply out of luck.
The autumn excursions were embarked on by the young workers with a spirit of high adventure. They became part of a young man's coming of age. But there were many discouraging experiences along the way. On the train ride westward excursionists sat all day in crowded cars on hard, wooden seats. At night the seats were pulled out to make beds. Each man had to bring his own sheet and blanket. Meals were cooked on a stove at one end of the car and washing up was done at a bucket in the corner. Accommodation often was not much better when the men arrived at the farms. Farmers were not always willing to go to the expense of providing warm, clean lodgings for the migrants. Old chicken coops and abandoned boxcars were among the shelters inhabited by the excursionists during the frigid fall nights. The work was exhausting and mind-numbing. Six days a week the men laboured from sunup to sundown, first stooking the grain, then threshing it. Yet despite the hardships involved, tens of thousands of men joined the excursions each season.
Harvest excursions ceased about 1930. Crop failures and drought drastically reduced the number of workers needed to bring in the harvest and new machines which could do the work of many men permanently put an end to the demand for imported labour.
