The elevator has become a common image of the prairies, silhouetted against the sunset, standing bright red against a golden field, or dominating a country town. This photograph shows a row of elevators at Indian Head, Saskatchewan. One might conclude that these structures were dreamed up by an advertising agency to contrast with the flat landscape but they are, in fact, functional buildings. They took their shape not from the image-makers but from the needs of their machinery and bins.
The purpose of the elevator is to weigh grain, store it, partially clean it and load it into rail cars. Its name originates with the principle on which it works. Grain in bulk form is almost like a liquid and, like a liquid, it will flow downhill from an elevated point. When grain is brought to the rail siding in wagons and trucks, it is graded and weighed at the receiving scale, dumped into a pit beneath the scale, then elevated by a conveyor belt of buckets called the "leg" to the top of the building. From here, it is channelled into the storage bin allocated to that type and quality of grain. When sufficient grain is available and a rail car is in place, the bin's contents are weighed on the shipping scale, dumped into a pit and elevated once again in order to be channelled into the boxcar. The grain then travels to large storage terminals, usually at harbour points such as Vancouver, Thunder Bay and Churchill, where it is cleaned of weed seeds and other foreign particles before being loaded on ships. For a cross section view of the interior of a grain elevator see illustration 12 of Jean Morrison's Thunder Bay: Gateway Between East and West (Canada's Visual History, volume 38).
Though the elevator is an inexpensive and ingenious mechanism for handling grain, it has been the source of many important disputes in prairie history. Its high initial cost meant that a few large corporations established most of the early buildings at the shipping points and could operate as a cartel. These line elevators were soon accused of price-fixing and of unfair weighing and grading practices. The farmers' response was to organize grain growers associations which eventually won government regulation of grading and weigh scales and, even more important, established farmer-controlled cooperative elevator companies. The United Grain Growers and the three provincial pool elevator companies are all descendants of this cooperative movement.
