The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914 by Pierre Berton

Author:Pierre Berton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780385673662
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2011-08-10T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

The Passing of the Old Order

1

Sifton’s mysterious departure

2

The new era

3

The Indian dilemma

4

The Imperial Force

1

Sifton’s mysterious departure

Nineteen hundred and five, like most other years, was one of beginnings, endings, and turning points, in Canada as in the rest of the world. Jules Verne died; Greta Garbo was born. Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, Freud his “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.” Russia crushed a revolution; Norway and Sweden parted company. Ty Cobb began his baseball career and Isadora Duncan opened her dancing school. The Rotary Club was born; so were the Wobblies. Picasso began his “pink period”; Debussy wrote “Clair de Lune”; Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. The world was introduced to Ovaltine, Vicks VapoRub, Palmolive Soap, and the first neon sign. The New York censor closed Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession after a single performance. And in Pittsburgh, David Belasco had a new hit, The Girl of the Golden West.

The Golden West! In Canada that phrase had a romantic ring, for the West had reached the half-way point of what can be called its Golden Age. Nine years had passed since Clifford Sifton and the Laurier Liberals took office and launched the settlement wave. Another nine lay ahead before the opening thunder of the Great War would cut off the flow of immigrants. In the West, too, 1905 was a year of beginnings and endings. It was the year in which two new provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, were carved out of the old North West Territories. Provincial autonomy, for which Westerners had fought so long and often so bitterly, was a fait accompli at last. And 1905 was also the year in which Clifford Sifton suddenly resigned as Minister of the Interior in the Liberal government, signalling the end of one era and the beginning of another. The two events were not unconnected.

Sifton’s resignation followed the federal election in the late fall of 1904, a particularly hard-fought contest, bitter and acrimonious in the Minister’s case. Sifton’s nerves were badly shattered. As soon as he had cleaned up the backlog of work in his office after the Liberal victory, he left Ottawa at the end of the year for treatment in the mud and sulpho lithia water baths of the Indiana Springs Company at Mudlavia. His staff expected him back within two or three weeks, but Sifton stayed out of the country for two months. His nerves, he wrote to Laurier, were much worse, “more shaken than I thought.” He did not return until after Parliament opened near the end of February, 1905.

It is difficult to picture the imperturbable Sifton, the platform battler who sprang joyously into the lists each time an election was called, emerging with nerves shaken so badly he was forced to immerse himself in mud for the best part of two months. But then the fight in his own constituency had been particularly nasty. Vicious rumours flew about regarding Sifton’s private life: stories that he had been caught in an affair with a married woman, that he would be named co-respondent in a messy divorce suit.

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