The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 Read Online Free PDF Page A

45,000. Bill McCreary, the bulky, black-browed Irishman whom Sifton had made Commissioner of Immigration in Winnipeg, was overworked to the point of breakdown. The immigration hall could not accommodate the flow of newcomers, and the government was forced to pitch tents to handle new arrivals. Yet this was a comparative trickle. “I confess it makes my head swim trying to keep tab on the development that is going on,” John Dafoe of the Free Press wrote to Sifton in 1902. Long queues were forming at every land office. One weekend in 1903 at the Prince Albert office, men sat on camp stools from Friday night to Monday morning waiting to file on the homesteads they had selected. One such was a German-born farmer from Neustadt, Ontario, named William Thomas Diefenbaker, whose son, a future prime minister of Canada, kept him revived with innumerable pots of tea, rustled up between snatches of sleep caught under a billiard table in a nearby pool hall.
    By 1905 when Sifton left office, the annual intake of immigrants waspushing 150,000. Every board of trade in the West was copying the government propaganda, and the prairie country was in the throes of a boom. “It roars in… [one’s] ears like the race of machinery in a factory,” one travel writer exclaimed. “Maps, pamphlets, diagrams, reports, books, photographs swish around him like a tornado. They are handed to him on the railroad car; they are by his porridge bowl at breakfast in the morning. You go into a drugstore to buy a cigar, and the eye is fascinated by a brochure.… Being an ordinary hum drum individual … you read and you learn and are amazed at your own stupendous ignorance.… Every ten or twelve miles a town is springing up like a mushroom.… The chief product of many of these places is the pamphlet about their own virtues.…”

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A political animal
    Sifton took office with the reputation of being an iron man. In the words of an admirer, “he never gets tired, works like a horse, never worries, eats three square meals a day and at night could go to sleep on a nail keg.” During the Manitoba provincial campaign of 1896 he would climb off the train at Brandon at eleven at night, sit up until morning talking politics with friends, entertain at breakfast, and then take off in the winter’s cold by sleigh, speaking at Souris, say, in the afternoon, and Hartney at night before heading off to the railhead at Oak Lake to catch the train back home. “All he needed,” one of his companions recalled, “was to pull the buffalo robe around him to sleep in the rig.” In Ottawa he had the reputation of staying all night at his desk, leaving behind a pile of work for his clerks at 6 a.m. and returning at ten o’clock looking as fresh as ever. It was not that he had an iron constitution; his secret was an iron will power.
    But as Sifton’s work load increased, his health began to suffer. His years in office were punctuated by periodic breakdowns. After only a few months, the long office hours began to take their toll on him. By the end of July, he had reached a point where he could “neither eat, rest nor sleep”; yet he could not consider a holiday until he had wound up the last remains of the backlog of business – his legacy from the Conservatives.
    Plagued by high blood pressure and “insomnia, my old enemy,” he suffered a nervous collapse but bounced back after a one-monthseaside vacation. Two years later he was again in a state of near exhaustion. “I would as soon spend life in the treadmill as carrying the load of work I have to do now,” he wrote to a Winnipeg friend. In February 1902, his nerves were so badly upset that Laurier insisted he take a fortnight’s holiday. Yet the iron man reputation remained. Even today it is difficult to think of Sifton as a sickly, nervous insomniac. His image was always that of the man who could catnap on a nail keg.
    The strain and overwork were exacerbated by Sifton’s chronic deafness, an afflication he