A DECADE OF DECISION. 1900-1910

Illustrated History of
Western Canadian Agriculture
Copyright 1980 Western Producer Prairie Books
185 pages,
ISBN 0-88833-059-6 bd.
ISBN 0-88833-068-5 pa.

The Manitoba government in 1903 named a commission to inquire into the need for a provincial college and when the resulting report favored such an institution, the legislature voted $75,000 for the purchase of land. The chosen site was one of 117 acres of riverlots on the south side of the Assiniboine River. There, on what was known later as the Tuxedo Site, the Manitoba Agricultural College was built to follow the Ontario pattern of complete separation from the university, in 1906. W. J. Black was named as principal,4 and the first course offered was to extend over two winter seasons and lead to Diplomas in Agriculture. Eighty-four pupils registered, each one making payment of $13.00, of which $5.00 were for tuition, $5.00 for contingencies and $3.00 for room and board for the first week. Before the end of the first two years, students were asking for extended courses leading to a university degree, Bachelor of Science in Agriculture. This was arranged and the first graduates received their BSA degrees from the University of Manitoba in 1911.

The distinction of being the first student to register at the college and thus the first to enroll in a university-recognized program of studies in agriculture in western Canada went to a young man from Carman, Thomas J. Harrison, later professor Harrison. And in the spring of 1911 when ten students qualified for degrees in agriculture, the first candidate over the platform and hence the first in western Canada was F. Walter Crawford, later comptroller of the University of Manitoba.

Of the ten members of that first graduating class, C. G. Partridge, J. C. Smith and H. M. Thompson lost their lives in the First World War. The others gained distinction in agricultural service, Ward Jones as superintendent of agriculture for the CPR; A. J. McMillan as a deputy minister of agriculture in Manitoba; J. C. Noble with the Dominion seed branch; J. C. Smith as livestock commissioner in Saskatchewan before going overseas; W. W. Thompson in the Canadian Co-operative Wool Growers, and M. J. Tinline as superintendent of the Brandon Experimental Farm.

Saskatchewan was the next province to provide for agricultural education and under the wise leadership of the first president of the University of Saskatchewan, Dr. Walter C. Murray, the province broke with tradition and brought the Agricultural College to occupy a place at the very heart of the university, beside the College of Arts and Science. Presided over by Dean W. J. Rutherford, the Saskatchewan college offered two courses, the degree course leading to the BSA and the associate course leading to the Diploma in Agriculture.

And following closely upon Saskatchewan, Alberta offered diploma courses at three schools of agriculture administered by the department of agriculture, at Olds, Vermilion, and Claresholm, beginning in 1913; two years later, the degree course integrated with the university, was started under the deanship of E. A. Howe.

If questions were asked about the leading agricultural triumphs in the decade in question, somebody among the pioneers would mention the Dominion government's long-awaited promise to build a railway to the shores of Hudson Bay. Western farmers, handicapped by distance from world markets and the high cost of rail transportation, knew that a rail connection to a Hudson Bay port would make the distance from Saskatoon to Liverpool a thousand miles shorter than via Montreal. They knew that the northern water route had been used successfully by the Hudson's Bay Company for 200 years and even though the shipping season was relatively short, there was no reason why a railroad to the salt water would not lead to great economies. Almost every agricultural convention for years heard a resolution praying the government to build the railroad but the pleas seemed to fall upon deaf ears until western people talked about building the railroad themselves. But when a general election was called in 1908 and Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier was campaigning for re-election of his Liberal government, he made the promise while speaking at Niagara Falls on September 18. "This railway is a necessity," he conceded. "The Government will build the railway's

The sod-turning was in 1910 and progress was moderately good until World War I when all work was suspended. Nobody quarreled with the suspension but the long delay in resuming construction after the war brought loud complaint; the rails did not reach the Port of Churchill until 1929. The volume of shipping over the route was not as great as was expected but western farmers retained their confidence in the potential of the northern route and were sure the day would come when the short cut to Liverpool would prove its great value to the western growers.

In at least one farm area there was no decision. In the matter of farm power, the conflicts were intensified rather than resolved. The horsemen lost none of their confidence; manufacturers were making steam tractors bigger and managing to sell them, and the noisy gasoline tractors were threatening as never before. Only the sweeps with their ever-winding motion and the treadmills like endless escalators were becoming obsolete. Further changes were coming but what would they be? The steam tractors, like the ancient dinosaurs, had to become bigger before they disappeared.

In the meantime there were strange developments in California where the mechanical monsters known as combined harvester-threshers or traveling threshers had caught the agricultural imagination. There, two inventive and industrial giants, Charles Holt and Daniel Best, seemed to be competing to build the biggest. When Best fielded a combine drawn by a steam tractor, replacing seventy-five mules, Holt came out with a combine said to have a fifty-foot cut. By 1904, the first combines were being fitted with auxiliary engines; by 1906 Holt was using a crawlertype tractor to haul the combine and by 1911, he was building the first self-propelled machine.

A combined harvester-thresher which may have been the first in western Canada was brought to Saskatchewan in either 1909 or 1910 to the order of C. P. J. Shand and Harry Edmonds of Spy Hi11. It was one of Holt manufacture cutting a twelve-foot swath, powered by a huge bull wheel and pulled by a 30-60 Hart-Parr gasoline tractor. Another combine appeared at Spy Hill about the same time and one at Aneroid said to have been home made - in 1913, but more years would pass before such things would be widely accepted by prairie farmers. In the meantime, still bigger tractors and threshers were being introduced. Again, the California manufacturers, Holt and Best, led in the production of massive tractors. Holt's steam tractor No. 88, made in 1903, was equipped with drive wheels seven feet, six inches in diameter, each of them six feet wide and three on each side. With these six big drive wheels, the tractor had a total width of forty-five feet, eight inches. It is difficult to imagine why anybody would have wanted anything as big and cumbersome.

When it was no longer practical to make bigger threshing machines, George Lane, of Bar U Ranch fame, bought the biggest steam tractor available in England - one with upright cylinders - to be delivered at his grain farm at Champion. After furnishing it with two pulleys, he used it to drive two big threshers placed side by side. With this placement it was not possible for more than two of the ten stook wagons to unload at the same time but Lane had four spike pitchers in addition to the two teamsters feeding into the twin machines, three pitching to each separator. The net advantages were doubtful although one saving was effected by having the separator man supervise two machines instead of one. Only Charles Noble adopted the idea and tried it for a few years.