Emigration from the United Kingdom to North America, 1763-1912 by Stanley Currie Johnson

Author:Stanley Currie Johnson [Johnson, Stanley Currie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781136933059
Google: kaC0AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-23T01:20:00+00:00

Population …………

5624

28,171

401

Inhabited houses ………

2064

9460

358

With the further extension over the Rocky Mountains of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1885 the province of British Columbia rapidly became available for European settlers. By reason of the fruitgrowing, cattle-rearing, lumbering, and mining possibilities of this area great numbers of emigrants have been attracted from the Mother Country, as well as much capital and a considerable population from the regions along the Pacific slope of the United States.

In a general way it may be affirmed that the fresh-arriving immigrant is seldom the man who actually pushes westward the frontier of his adopted country. He is more prone to take up his abode as close as ever he can to the port at which he landed, for his finances are often unequal to the strain of an expensive inland journey. By so doing he assists in the economic expansion of the maritime community, providing and creating labour, but he rarely undertakes work of a pioneer nature; this he leaves to the older settler, at any rate until the time arrives when he himself may no longer be considered a new-comer.1 Thus the immigrant settles on the seaboard provinces and pushes his forerunners inland. Later on either he or his children migrate westward to escape the pressure of those arriving after. Such is the movement set up by the inflow of a foreign population. Longstaff says,2 “In Canada even more than in the United States, it would appear that the new regions are mainly settled by natives of the American continent, work for which they are especially adapted. Not only is there a flow of population from the Old World to the New, but in America itself the cry is still, ‘Westward Ho!’ The descendants of the early settlers move on to begin again the work of subduing the wilderness as their forefathers did, while the blank spaces left in the more settled districts of the east are filled by fresh immigrants from Europe.” Describing the movement of population across the continent of North America, Professor Turner says,1 “Western occupation advanced in a series of waves; the Indian was sought by the fur trader; the fur trader was followed by the frontiersman whose cattle exploited the natural grasses and the acorns of the forest; next came the wave of primitive agriculture, followed by the more intensive farming and the city life. All the stages of social development went on under the eye of the traveller as he passed from the frontier towards the East.”

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