The history of British North America in the quarter of a century that followed the War of 1812 is in the main the homely tale of pioneer life.Slowly little clearings in the vast forest were widened and won to order and abundance; slowly community was linked to community; and out of the growing intercourse there developed the complex of ways and habits and interests that make up the everyday life of a people.
All the provinces called for settlers, and they did not call in vain.For a time northern New England continued to overflow into the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, the rolling lands south of the St.Lawrence which had been left untouched by riverbound seigneur and habitant.Into Upper Canada, as well, many individual immigrants came from the south, some of the best the Republic had to give, merchants and manufacturers with little capital but much shrewd enterprise, but also some it could best spare, fugitives from justice and keepers of the taverns that adorned every four corners.Yet slowly this inflow slackened.
After the war the Canadian authorities sought to avoid republican contagion and moreover the West of the United States itself was calling for men.
But if fewer came in across the border, many more sailed from across the seas.Not again until the twentieth century were the northern provinces to receive so large a share of British emigrants as came across in the twenties and thirties.Swarms were preparing to leave the overcrowded British hives.Corn laws and poor laws and famine, power-driven looms that starved the cottage weaver, peace that threw an army on a crowded and callous labor market, landlords who rack-rented the Connaughtman's last potato or cleared Highland glens of folks to make way for sheep, rulers who persisted in denying the masses any voice in their own government--all these combined to drive men forth in tens of thousands.Australia was still a land of convict settlements and did not attract free men.To most the United States was the land of promise.Yet, thanks to state aid, private philanthropy, landlords' urging and cheap fares on the ships that came to St.
John and Quebec for timber, Canada and the provinces by the sea received a notable share.In the quarter of a century following the peace with Napoleon, British North America received more British emigrants than the United States and the Australian colonies together, though many were merely birds of passage.
The country west of the Great Lakes did not share in this flood of settlement, except for one tragic interlude.Lord Selkirk, a Scotchman of large sympathy and vision, convinced that emigration was the cure for the hopeless misery he saw around him, acquired a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company, and sought to plant colonies in a vast estate granted from its domains.Between 1811 and 1815 he sent out to Hudson Bay, and thence to the Red River, two or three hundred crofters from the Highlands and the Orkneys.A little later these were joined by some Swiss soldiers of fortune who had fought for Canada in the War of 1812.But Selkirk had reckoned without the partners of the North-West Company of Montreal, who were not prepared to permit mere herders and tillers to disturb the Indians and the game.The Nor'Westers attacked the helpless colonists and massacred a score of them.
Selkirk retorted in kind, leading out an armed band which seized the Nor'Westers' chief post at Fort William.The war was then transferred to the courts, with heart-breaking delays and endless expense.At last Selkirk died broken in spirit, and most of his colonists drifted to Canada or across the border.But a handful held on, and for fifty years their little settlement on the Red River remained a solitary outpost of colonization.
Once arrived in Canada, the settler soon found that he had no primrose path before him.Canada remained for many years a land of struggling pioneers, who had little truck or trade with the world out of sight of their log shacks.The habitant on the seigneuries of Lower Canada continued to farm as his grandfather had farmed, finding his holding sufficient for his modest needs, even though divided into ever narrower ribbons as le bon Dieu sent more and yet more sons to share the heritage.The English-speaking settler, equipped with ax and sickle and flail, with spinning wheel and iron kettle, lived a life almost equally primitive and self-contained.He and his good wife grew the wheat, the corn, and the potatoes, made the soap and the candles, the maple sugar and the "yarbs," the deerskin shoes and the homespun-cloth that met their needs.They had little to buy and little to sell.In spite of the preference which Great Britain gave Canadian grain, in return for the preference exacted on British manufactured goods, practically no wheat was exported until the close of this period.The barrels of potash and pearl-ash leached out from the ashes of the splendid hardwood trees which he burned as enemies were the chief source of ready money for the backwoods settler.The one substantial export of the colonies came, not from the farmer's clearing, but from the forest.Great rafts of square pine timber were floated down the Ottawa or the St.John every spring to be loaded for England.The lumberjack lent picturesqueness to the landscape and the vocabulary and circulated ready money, but his industry did little directly to advance permanent settlement or the wise use of Canadian resources.
