Over 700,000 French-Canadians left the province of Quebec in the century between the War of 1812 and the outbreak of World War I. Most found their way into the manufacturing centres of New England or into the virgin lands of the American West. Attempts to redirect this exodus from the St. Lawrence valley into northern Quebec were disappointing. Those preferring to remain in Canada found their way into the logging and mining towns of Northern Ontario in the last two decades of the 19th century. The numbers who chose Western Canada were small by comparison. Repatriation campaigns undertaken from 1875 through World War I to attract French-Canadians from New England or the Western United States to free homestead lands on the Prairies met with only limited success. It is impossible to estimate how many were repatriated.
