Bread Book

Bread Book

As immigration to the Prairies exploded in the first decade of the twentieth century, railway companies like the CPR, CNR, and Grand Trunk Pacific competed to bring prospective farmers to Western Canada. This brochure, cleverly shaped like a breadbox, illustrates how the companies used food as a motive for immigration. Quick-maturing crops and new dryland farming techniques made agriculture more viable in the West, and food in the form of both crops and livestock was the farm’s key economic driver. The brochure boasted of yields as high as 124 bushels of oats per acre and 55 bushels of wheat per acre. On the domestic scale gardening also improved the farmer’s quality of life. The brochure’s evocative images of grain in the Prairie sun, the Swift Canadian plant alongside the Grand Trunk Pacific tracks, and root vegetables and strawberries harvested from “the great garden of the west” encouraged farmers to come to Alberta and Saskatchewan to nourish both their bodies and their bank accounts. Clearly targeting American, Canadian, and British citizens after the closing of the American frontier, the brochures are also subtly xenophobic: most of the testimonial writers have Anglo-Saxon names, and one even comments that “The settlers in this vicinity [Battle River, AB] are nearly all Canadians and Americans and a better class of farmers would be hard to find anywhere” (15).

Grand Trunk Pacific Railway Company

1911