Agricultural settlement, urban development and the establishment of railway lines were closely interrelated. This map shows only the principal lines existing in 1911. Missing is the complex web of branch lines serving the thousands of hamlets, villages and towns clustered around one or more grain elevators every ten or twelve kilometres along the track. Each of these small communities, while serving its own surrounding countryside, was serviced by the nearest prairie city, and all came under the influence of Winnipeg, the central supplier of the region. Winnipeg, by virtue of its size and strategic location, was the only centre with sufficient concentrations of workers to have an effectively active working class.
Miners engaged in little united action before the First World War partly because of the limited communication between the scattered mining towns. In addition to a core of permanent, professional miners, farmers and migrant workers found work in the mining centres located in the mountains and foothills of Alberta, southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba. Especially in the winter, other agricultural and railway workers left the agricultural areas of the Prairies to the work in the northern lumber camps.
Courtesy: National Film Board of Canada, and National Museum of Man, National Museums of Canada
