A settlers’ homestead, cleared from the bush in Upper Canada, ca. 1800. Pen Pictures of Pioneer Life in Upper Canada, ElectricCanadian.com/pioneer/pen/Chapter 21.htm. Liberty, democracy, and freedom from want, hunger and an oppressive aristocracy were said to prevail among peasants from Europe in the Upper Canada of 1821, but anarchy and doomed democracy were widely predicted. […]
Tag: Immigrants
Toronto in great uproar as U.S. seeks fugitive slave
John Anderson, a proclaimed fugitive slave in Toronto who escaped from Missouri to Canada on the Underground Railway, was wanted by the Americans in 1860. English engraving, from “The Story of the Life of John Anderson,” 1863. “It was an anxious moment, as the Chief Justice produced his papers and began to read. The life […]
Murder of 120 Chinese foiled
Canada’s festering racism, under which Chinese suffered for decades, came dangerously close to mass murder claiming 120 lives before an attempt to dynamite two railway cars at Vancouver was foiled, Canadian Press reported May 20, 1910. The Chinese had arrived on the SS Empress of China for a scheduled “trip across the continent.” “The plan […]
New Canadians arrive by the shipload
“Seventeen special trains from Halifax and Saint John are due in Montreal” Saturday and Sunday, carrying 6,000 immigrants,” the Halifax Herald reported April 2, 1910. More than 12,000 arrived during the week. It has been “the biggest week in the immigration line that Canada has had for a good many years,” says the Herald. Most […]
A wart off the lap of luxury
The remittance man, who received modest remittances from his family in England, was the butt of constant Canadian jokes and ridicule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was usually a younger son who failed to inherit a share of the family fortune under the rules of progenitor. From the Regina Standard, January […]
Salvation Army’s “fallen women” not wanted in Canada
Sam Hughes, publisher, politician and soldier, doesn’t like the plan of Salvation Army founder General William Booth to help Britain’s “fallen women” transform their lives and prospects by emigrating to Canada and the United States. He voices his opinion in this item from his newspaper, the Lindsay, Ontario Victoria Warder, September 4, 1885: Booth, […]
Work hard or stay home
Be prepared to work hard or stay home, was the advice offered to prospective immigrants to Manitoba on April 15, 1879 by the Winnipeg Daily Times in the following article. Immigrants and adventurers. The people we need and those we don’t want. A floating population who find it hard to float. The eyes of all […]
Immigrants sleep on streets
Scottish immigrants evicted from their crofts to make way for sheep during the highland clearances of the nineteenth century, flooded into Canada. In Toronto, their first accommodation was sometimes a police station, and sometimes on the streets, according to this item from the Toronto Leader, July 7, 1864. About a hundred Scotch immigrants arrived in […]
Killer cholera enters North America
Pandemics 1832-1847 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. Some 52,000 immigrants, mostly destitute Irish, arrived at Quebec in 1832, carrying with them the cholera pandemic to first reach North America. An estimated 9,000 people died of cholera in Lower and Upper Canada in the first pandemic. By 1872, an estimated 20,000 […]
Teach Scots to read their Bibles
Instead of sending missionaries to spread the Christian gospel throughout the endless forests of Canada, a better and cheaper way would be to teach the illiterate highlanders who are leaving Scotland in the tens of thousands to read the Bible, a Reverend Mr. Mcleod tells the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. […]