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  • Happyland: A History of the ‘Dirty Thirties’ in Saskatchewan, 1914–1937
  • J. William Brennan
Happyland: A History of the ‘Dirty Thirties’ in Saskatchewan, 1914–1937. Curtis R. Mcmanus. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011. Pp. 336, $34.95

Drought, dust storms, and farm abandonment on a large scale are among the best-remembered horrors of the Great Depression on the prairies, but Curtis McManus argues that for southwestern Saskatchewan this decade was only the culmination of a succession of dry years that dated back to 1914.

Southwestern Saskatchewan had initially been considered too arid to support cereal agriculture (it was thought to be better suited for ranching). Liberal Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver had different ideas, however, and in 1908 he threw this region open for homesteading. Settlers flocked in to take up land; new towns sprang up along the railway lines that soon criss-crossed the region; and schools, rural municipalities (including the Rural Municipality of Happyland), and other local institutions were established. All went reasonably well until 1914, when there was widespread drought across much of southwestern Saskatchewan. This marked a turning point in the history of the region: thereafter dry year followed dry year. [End Page 501]

McManus makes effective use of the records of ten (of the ninety) rural municipalities in this region, as well as local newspapers and community history books, to document the economic, social, and psychological consequences of the recurring droughts the southwest experienced between 1914 and 1924, and from 1929 to 1937. The most dramatic, of course, was the loss of population: ‘An estimated 70,000 men, women and children abandoned their farms, homesteads, and communities and fled from the southern and western plains of Saskatchewan’ during these years (13). This was, McManus argues, ‘the largest wholesale land abandonment disaster in all of Canadian history’ (7).

Much criticism is directed at successive provincial governments in Regina, and particularly at Francis Hedley Auld, Saskatchewan’s deputy minister of agriculture at this time. ‘From start to finish, from 1917 to 1924, Auld and the province retreated from either practical or moral responsibility; they downplayed the crisis and even went so far as to hide the problem from the media and the public as it mushroomed to greater and greater proportions. Auld’s refusal to admit to the existence of a dry area would survive all the way down to the 1930s when that belief was finally and with much sweat and tears, bludgeoned out of him’ (72).

But there is praise too. Forced evacuation from Saskatchewan’s dry areas never became government policy in this province, as it did next door in Alberta, which faced a similar crisis. ‘On [Auld’s] watch and during his tenure, the south and west plains survived the catastrophic years of 1914–37. . . to become the healthy area it remains today. If we take as our barometer of success the ultimate salvation and survival of the south plains then the Deputy [Minister] is to be commended for his actions’ (233).

McManus also has praise for the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (pfra), a federal agency created by R.B. Bennett’s Conservative government in 1935 and continued by successive Liberal governments thereafter. The pfra began the reseeding of abandoned land. It also encouraged farmers to employ new methods of tillage that would preserve soil moisture, and to plant trees that would serve as windbreaks. It established community grazing pastures to enable grain farmers to raise livestock (and thereby diversify their operations), and began to develop large and small irrigation projects across the region that John Palliser had once dismissed as too arid to support cereal agriculture.

This book is not without its shortcomings. A map ought to have been included to situate McManus’s study area within the province of Saskatchewan. As it is, McManus leaves the reader in some confusion. [End Page 502] Is he examining the area comprising the ninety rural municipalities on the ‘south and west plains’ that received relief aid during the drought of 1917–24 (249), or a larger area that would include the additional ninety-one rural municipalities that experienced serious drought conditions during the 1930s (251) or the entire Saskatchewan...

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