In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Farmers ‘Making Good’: The Development of Abernethy District, Saskatchewan, 1880–1930
  • Ken Sylvester
Farmers ‘Making Good’: The Development of Abernethy District, Saskatchewan, 1880–1930. Lyle Dick. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008. Pp. 242, $34.95

This is the eleventh volume in the Parks and Heritage series published by University of Calgary Press, focusing on national parks and historic sites in North America. It is also a second edition of a manuscript originally published by the Canadian Parks Service in 1989. The acknowledgements in the new edition of ‘Making Good’ suggest that the figures and maps have been updated, and arguably to good effect. But on the whole the text is largely unchanged, or at least the tiny smattering of references published after 1989 in the substantive chapters suggests as much. Readers searching for fresh or updated research will be disappointed. What they will find, if they are careful readers, is a wide-ranging effort to grapple with questions that remain largely unanswered.

Dick’s work was a pioneering effort in micro-history, an intense study of a local area meant to illuminate much larger historical processes. It took the challenge of empiricism seriously in a scholarly era when digitizing individual-level records involved making computer punch cards and writing Fortran code – not many people’s cup of tea by any stretch of the imagination! A close reading of the new introduction, however, does provide the kind of road map, one that we have now come to expect from a very accomplished scholar and author of the Innis Prize–winning Muskox Land. The tone of the new introduction is understandably less deferential to received sociological or anthropological ideas and instead lionizes the emergence of other micro-histories as the basis for a wider investigation of the Canadian West’s development. Dick calls for more, not less, of these studies but urges that their design in future pay far more attention to the comparative dimensions of change.

The book had its origins in research to support Parks Canada’s creation of the W.R. Motherwell farmstead as a national historic site. Motherwell was a successful homesteader from Ontario who became active in farm politics and went on to serve in Liberal governments in Regina and Ottawa, eventually becoming Canada’s minister of agriculture. Dick uses the material history of the Motherwell farmstead to make an argument about the formation of an aggressive middle-class farm class in the early part of the twentieth century, whose interests are differentiated from those of neighbouring farmers. The differences stem in large measure, Dick argues, from a kind of ‘founder’s effect’ created when Ontarians arrived early in the [End Page 351] Abernethy district, claimed the best homestead lands during the public land period, and left subsequent settlers to find land farther north of the cpr mainline in marshy and wooded land. The Ontarians benefited from the early access to the best soils over the subsequent fifty years of development. Dick’s thesis is meant to challenge C.B. Macpherson’s classic observation that prairie farmers were a pretty homogenous lot and that these ‘independent commodity producers’ embodied both conservative and radical politics because of their class position. Dick’s class formation argument, that there was a sharp division between wealthier farmers, who promoted modest reform, and smaller farmers, who favoured radical change, is the main contribution of the book.

It is surprising that the ideas here have not been taken up on a larger scale in the nearly twenty years since the book was first published. Several other themes deserve to be revisited. The book relies mainly on homestead entry files, which focus on the land allocation process. Dick traces the effect of free public land by searching for homesteaders in land titles and tax records to see how long they persist in the community. Understandably he finds considerable advantages accrued to the original settlers. But in terms of the social process that allows them to reproduce their status between generations, the book’s view of middle-class formation is anecdotal, relying heavily on the life history of its chief protagonist, W.R. Motherwell. After public land distribution is closed, we have...

pdf

Share