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  • Farmers "Making Good": The Development of Abernethy District, Saskatchewan, 1880-1920
  • Kenneth E. Koons
Farmers "Making Good": The Development of Abernethy District, Saskatchewan, 1880-1920, 2nd ed. By Lyle Dick (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008. xxxii plus 303 pp. $34.95).

In Farmers "Making Good," Lyle Dick employs the methods and approach of microhistory to describe and analyze the settlement of the southern Saskatchewan frontier by Euro-Canadians beginning in the 1880s and the process by which, over the succeeding four decades, the region's society and economy matured as part of the emerging Canadian wheat belt. This volume originated from the need of the Canadian Parks Service for a study that would provide historical background and context for the development of an interpretive and restoration scheme for the W.R. Motherwell Homestead National Historic Site of Canada. Motherwell, an early settler of the Abernethy District, personified the idea of "farmers 'making good.'" He established himself as a successful wheat farmer and subsequently became a socially prominent and politically active leader of his community. Farmers "Making Good" is not in any sense a biography of Motherwell but in Dick's discussions of the socio-economic and political experiences of the inhabitants of Abernethy District, he returns often to the circumstances of Motherwell's career in order to provide examples of how trends discernible at the regional level manifested themselves in the lives of individuals.

Dick begins by examining various aspects of frontier settlement and development in southern Saskatchewan. Readers knowledgeable of settlement processes as they transpired on the frontier of the Midwestern United States will find much here that is familiar. Through unfair treaties, subterfuge, and outright fraud, the Dominion government removed aboriginal peoples from lands most suitable for farming and pushed them to marginal areas. Euro-Canadian settlers took up land that the government had subdivided on the basis of the "free homestead [End Page 303] system and survey," which featured townships of six square miles further subdivided into 36 sections of 640 acres each, with quarter-sections of 160 acres serving as the smallest officially recognized unit of land. Dick relies heavily upon techniques of quantitative analysis to help readers understand factors critical to the decision-making of settlers seeking to purchase prairie land to develop as farms, e.g., character of the terrain, natural fertility of the soil, access to wood and water, nearness to family or other members of one's ethnic group, the price of land, the perceived likelihood of future availability of nearby land, and proximity to rail lines projected to be built in the future.

Dick's discussion of factors such as these is based on his comparative analyses of data extracted from the "homestead files" of settlers of two districts, each composed of three contiguous sample townships. One district, settled largely by British and Anglo-Canadians, centers on the town of Abernethy, and a second district, settled mostly by Eastern European Germanic immigrants, surrounds the town of Neudorf. Dick finds that settlers who arrived on the frontier relatively early sustained higher levels of persistence, and over the long term demonstrated a greater degree of upward social mobility and held higher levels of wealth. In subsequent chapters Dick examines farm-building and agrarian entrepreneurship, and establishes that economic growth and development in the region hinged largely on the success of wheat production. But even a successful harvest of wheat did not ensure progress for farmers; low prices for the crop or high costs of its transportation to markets could undermine profitability. Poor harvests, low prices, and high transportation costs meant penury and real hardship for some farmers during the early years of settlement. In the longer term factors such as these led to "agrarian unrest," the subject of the book's final chapter.

Other chapters cover broader developments associated with the maturation of frontier societies, e.g., the emergence of a settlement continuum featuring service towns whose inhabitants provided goods and services to farmers of outlying districts, the advent of railroads connecting farmers to wheat markets in the east, and the development of a full range of social institutions such as churches, fraternal organizations, sports clubs, and the like...

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