INQUIRY IDEA I - FORGING A NATIONAL DREAM!

Consult these excerpts linked to the Web activity Inquiry Idea I "Forging a national dream!."

70) Did the railways affect westward expansion?

“[In the West], modern technology produced far quicker changes here than had been known in older settlement societies.  Railways to the West carried in farm families and their supplies in weeks, not months.  And though the enormous land had to be broken and planted, it largely did not have to be cut and cleared as in forest settlements back East; while rail lines also brought in sawn lumber for houses and barns, or livestock and farm machinery besides.  […] Telegraph lines, local newspapers, telephones (and soon new-fangled automobiles), all made Prairie settlers much less isolated than early colonists in New France, New Brunswick poor Upper Canada once had been. […]

“Here is the next big factor: the tide of immigration that flowed into Canada after 1896-97, much of it in migrants moving westward, so that a prairie population of under half a million around 1900 (chiefly in Manitoba) tripled in the next ten years.”

Careless, James Maurice Stockford. Canada: A Celebration of our Heritage, Mississauga, ON, Heritage Publishing House, 1997, p. 99.

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