Arrival and Settlement

For American immigrants to Canada, the process of arrival and settlement needs to be discussed both in terms of chronological periods and in terms of particular subgroups.

A handful of Americans were appointed as officials of Nova Scotia after it was reorganized as a colonial administration in 1713, and, since the seventeenth century, a larger number had summered in various parts of the Atlantic region to participate in the fisheries. But the real influx began after the fortress of Louisbourg, which had been captured by New England troops with British naval assistance in 1745 and afterwards occupied by Americans, was returned to the French in 1748. At first the Americans consisted of official appointments and a number of merchants, many coming from Louisbourg. The New Englanders were not universally popular in early Nova Scotia, one British newcomer observing, “Of all the people upon earth I never heard any bear so bad a character for Cheating designing people & all under the Cloack of religion.”

The British government attempted between 1749 and 1752 to people Nova Scotia with colonists recruited in Britain (often disbanded soldiers and sailors) and on the continent of Europe (the so-called “foreign Protestants”). The policy was not particularly successful and was very expensive, and so, following the reconquest of Louisbourg in 1758, the Nova Scotia authorities turned to New England for prospective settlers. With the aid of grants from Britain, notices were placed in New England newspapers advertising the availability of prime farm land (much of it improved by the expelled Acadians) as well as free transportation and other subsidies. Such an offer had a particular appeal in land-hungry parts of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and southeastern Massachusetts, and it was these areas that provided most of the 8,000 to 12,000 “Yankees” who arrived in the province between 1759 and 1762. The migrants tended to move, particularly to the agricultural lands of the Annapolis and St John’s River valleys, as communities of families with kinship ties; however, the fishing ports of Nova Scotia’s south shore, which were settled in this period, often contained chiefly single young men, many of whom were only sojourning in the province.

The American immigrants brought their particular dialects of English and a propensity for evangelical-style religion within a Puritan-Calvinist context. By the time of a detailed census of Nova Scotia (including Cape Breton, a northern section that would become New Brunswick, and St John’s Island, later to be renamed Prince Edward Island) in 1767, Americans were easily the largest single component of the total regional population, representing about half of an otherwise polyglot mixture of English, Irish, Scots, Germans, Acadians, and native peoples. This ethnic dominance would help ensure that New England ways would prevail in many parts of the province, and, despite an enormous British immigration to Nova Scotia after 1790, parts of the province still have a “Yankee” feel to them today.

Although the Nova Scotia subsidies were ended in 1762, the British government continued to hope to attract Americans northward, particularly to newly acquired parts of the Empire with “alien” populations, such as Quebec. Several hundred American-born merchants moved into Quebec after the conquest of 1760, and the Proclamation of 1763 (which enunciated British policy for the conquered territories) was based upon the assumption that Americans would settle there; former officers and soldiers in the British army were offered extensive land allocations. Land grants throughout British North America were made exclusively to males, and indeed the American migration northward of this period contained many single males, although there were often families among the newcomers from New England. The extent of the foreignness of Quebec after 1763 combined with the growing hostility between Britain and her American colonies to prevent an American influx to the colony, but a few hundred Americans did take up land outside Montreal and Quebec, especially in the Richelieu valley. One of these Americans, Moses Hazen, would recruit habitants for the American army in 1776. Others, such as the legendary Peter Pond, entered the western fur trade via its Quebec base. In Nova Scotia, a combination of economic depression and growing political conflict drove many American settlers back to New England after 1765, and settlement remained precariously perched in isolated communities on the eve of the American Revolution.

Large numbers of Americans had not been attracted northward between 1763 and 1775, but the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1775 produced an initial trickle of refugees that rapidly turned into a flood. As much as 20 percent of the American population of European origin supported the British cause, and, when the warfare was finished, the American Revolution had produced a greater proportion of exiles to the total population than the French, Russian, or Cuban revolutions. In the first years of the conflict between Britain and her colonies, most of those exiled Americans who left the United States were members of the office-holding classes or clergymen of the Church of England. If they could afford it, these exiles preferred to head for the mother country, but some took up residence in Nova Scotia and Quebec. Larger numbers of refugees, many of them not members of the ruling élite, began heading northward after 1778, when the New York frontier burst into open conflict between rebels and Loyalists. The conflict was made more intense when the Six Nations of the Iroquois were – against their will – drawn into its orbit, particularly after 1779, when an American army laid waste the Iroquois villages in the Hudson valley. By 1780 there were hundreds of exiles, both native and European, outside the fortifications at Fort Niagara, and they began settling the Niagara peninsula soon afterwards.

The British lost the military struggle in 1781 and turned to making peace with the rebels by sacrificing their American allies and supporters. While negotiations dragged on in Europe, Loyalist refugees and soldiers were drawn to New York, the major centre of British authority and power on the eastern seaboard. There, they waited anxiously for word about the peace negotiations, and, in the meantime, agents fanned out across Britain’s loyal American empire from Nova Scotia and Quebec to the Caribbean, investigating land and political conditions in the event of the worst. By the autumn of 1782, it was fairly clear that the Loyalists were among the big losers of the peace negotiations, and Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander-in-chief at New York, began to arrange for the movement of large bodies of people to Nova Scotia (which then included New Brunswick). The islands of St John, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland had no readily available land and were not destinations for the migrations of 1782 and 1783.

On 22 September 1782 Carleton sketched out a policy for Loyalist relocation, emphasizing that land grants were to be “considered as well founded Claims of Justice rather than of mere Favor” and were to be made without fees or quitrents. He expected that families would receive 240 hectares of land and single men 120 hectares, and he also promised tools from New York stores. Initially overlooked were those soldiers in the various provincial regiments recruited in America, but this oversight was corrected early in 1783 and the policy for civilians was extended to them. Blacks were fully freed to depart New York after complex negotiations with the Americans in 1783, and over 3,000 individuals recorded in a “Book of Negroes” (about 10 percent of the total departing for Nova Scotia) took their places in the transport vessels being assembled in New York harbour.

Moving and compensating the Loyalists would be an expensive business, representing a major act of public support for colonization, one of the largest ever executed by the British government in its history; the settlement of Australia cost more but was more complicated, involving as it did the transportation of convicts half-way around the world. The ultimate cost of Loyalist resettlement figured in the millions of pounds and made earlier expenditures in Nova Scotia seem insignificant. Newfoundland would receive no Loyalists, while Cape Breton and Saint John’s Island (the latter very indirectly) received about 1,000 each. About 35,000 arrived in Nova Scotia, and over 10,000 sought refuge in the colony of Quebec, mainly in what would become Upper Canada, although more than 2,000 settled around Sorel near Montreal. The British policy of the post-1763 period of insisting that settlement be self-financing was swept away, and under emergency conditions the loyal colonies of her Empire received a publicly subsidized injection of much-desired English-speaking American colonists.

In general terms, the Loyalists could be divided into two categories: refugees (including whites, blacks, and native peoples) and disbanded soldiers (some of whom were American but many of whom were German, Irish, Scots, and English). Among the refugees were substantial numbers of recently arrived and unassimilated immigrants to the American colonies, often Scots; members of German-speaking Anabaptist communities such as Mennonites and Tunkers; more than 3,000 American blacks, mainly ex-slaves, whose culture was Afro-American rather than American; and several thousand Iroquois. The majority of the refugees and disbanded soldiers were Americans forced into exile because of their political allegiance, and their values, including an attachment to the institution of slavery, would predominate in most Loyalist communities in British North America.

No complete demographic picture of the Loyalists is currently available, and an accurate one is probably impossible. There are simply too many holes in the data. Even the fullest files, those on Loyalists receiving compensation from the British government, are incomplete, and, in any case, those Loyalists are not a representative cross-section of the settlers. Yet the demographic data that does exist is suggestive. As far as the national origin of the Loyalists is concerned, there are two sets of figures. One, for those in Nova Scotia (including New Brunswick) claiming compensation, shows 721 American-born among 1,422 total applicants (or just over 50 percent). A similar relationship exists for the Loyalists in eastern Upper Canada, with American-born and foreign-born exactly equal in numbers. The percentage of American-born was doubtless higher among later refugees than among those who had come during the war. Most of the foreign-born came from the British Isles, of course, and many may have become thoroughly Americanized, although most had immigrated in the 1760s and 1770s. A disproportionate number of Loyalists (as many as 50 percent) had previously resided in New York, but this was perhaps not surprising given the fact that New York was so close to Quebec and the centre for Loyalists at the end of the war. As for ages of the new arrivals, the data is best for Loyalist heads of families. One study of Loyalists on St John’s Island indicates that the average age of disbanded soldiers was 33 years and that of civilian refugees 35.6 years.

Occupationally, the Loyalists represented a cross-section of the American colonists, with farmers the largest single group (over 80 percent) and considerably smaller numbers of artisans, merchants, and professionals. Ascertaining how many women and children accompanied or joined heads of household in exile is extremely difficult. Available evidence indicates that most private soldiers granted land were single men without families, while close to half of non-commissioned and commissioned officers and over half of civilian refugees settled with their families. Thirteen percent of Loyalist claimants were women, which meant that one in eight Loyalist heads of household was actually a female. Just over 30 percent of adult Loyalists in eastern Upper Canada were women.

As the above figures suggest, women were an important part of the Loyalist movement. Many women, left at home by husbands who sought refuge behind British lines or went off to fight for the British, were harassed, plundered, and persecuted by the patriots before being forced into exile. There was much stress and a sense of powerlessness resulting from their situation, particularly since many males did not consult fully with their wives before making their cataclysmic political decision. Exile meant long periods in temporary quarters as dependent parts of a patriarchal military and civilian regime. The majority of women Loyalists were undoubtedly American in origin, probably a larger percentage than in the Loyalist population as a whole, since many immigrants had come to the colonies as single men and married native-born wives.

Blacks and native peoples were also important components of the Loyalist resettlement. Since both groups were composed of individuals born in the Thirteen Colonies, they were more American in terms of their place of origin than were the Loyalists in general. The Mohawks of the Iroquois Confederacy had gone farther in the direction of assimilation than had most other native groups, and they were the principal component of the First Nations Loyalists. As for the blacks, they were mainly set apart from the other Loyalists, particularly in Nova Scotia, and most of them left Canada for Sierra Leone in the 1790s because of a sense of mistreatment and frustration. While they were in Canada the blacks had had little time either to solidify a previous Afro-American culture or to develop a new emergent one.

The great migration of Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia took place in 1783, with troop transport ships bringing thousands of newcomers to the region. There were two principal destinations: the mouth of the Saint John River and Port Roseway (renamed Shelburne) on the southwest coast of the province. In the western portion of the province of Quebec, a tent city came into being in 1784 at Cataraqui (Kingston, Upper Canada), and smaller settlements spread across the region; many were formed by military units acquiring blocks of land. Almost without exception, these Loyalist communities proved extremely transient. Shelburne, which had over 10,000 people at its peak, was but a tiny village by the 1790s. Even Saint John and Kingston, which achieved greater permanence, had enormous turnover rates, as did most of the tiny settlements. According to contemporary witnesses, most of the Loyalists who left British North America did so to return to the United States after the hard feelings of the war had died down. Although there is no firm data, as many as half of the 50,000-plus refugees of the period 1775–85 may not have remained permanently in Canada. This returning exodus would remain characteristic of Americans who immigrated to Canada as political exiles.

While the mid-1780s marked the conclusion of most Loyalist settlement in the Maritimes, the movement of American settlers into British North America continued beyond it. A number of the new migrants went to Lower Canada (Quebec) – the English-speaking population of that colony tripled from 10,000 to 30,000 between 1791 and 1812 – but far more settled in Upper Canada. Some of the newcomers – often called “late Loyalists” – were Quakers and Mennonites encouraged by offers of exemption from military service, but they were soon joined by a large influx of westward-moving American pioneers who took up land readily available from the government or private entrepreneurs. Until 1798 the Upper Canadian government regarded these Americans as Loyalists, permitting them to take an oath of allegiance with few questions asked.

Gradually the number of post-Loyalist American newcomers virtually overwhelmed the Loyalists, and, with few other immigrants arriving from Europe, Upper Canada particularly became increasingly concerned about the “American menace,” especially as friction between Britain and the United States heated up in the later years of the Napoleonic Wars. By the time of the War of 1812, Americans composed as much as 80 percent of an Upper Canadian population estimated by a contemporary in 1813 as 136,000. They also represented 10 percent of the population of Lower Canada.

The War of 1812 marked a distinct watershed in the history of American settlement in British North America. Especially in the Canadas, the war fostered hostility to American settlers on the part of both government and political élite, and in later years this hostility would combine with the enormous influx of British immigrants and the attractions of lands in the mid-western United States to reduce the American presence considerably. To be sure, virulent anti-Americanism was characteristic mainly of Upper Canada. A series of early frosts beginning in 1816 was probably more effective in keeping (or driving) Americans away from the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada than hostility to “Yankees,” although the French-Canadian majority in the Lower Canadian House of Assembly was not particularly enthusiastic about Americans, seeing them essentially as part of an effort to anglicize their society. People in the Maritimes moved back and forth across the border without much concern, but not many American settlers were attracted to the region after 1815. For British North America in general, British immigration replaced American as the fundamental driving force of frontier expansion, and the largest American immigration of the period 1815–71 was a distinctly specialized one, in the form of the fugitive slave.

The Loyalists had brought substantial numbers of slaves, as well as the fully developed institution of slavery, into British North America in the 1780s. A series of court cases in various provinces in the last years of the eighteenth and the first years of the nineteenth century had greatly limited the spread of the institution, however, as did legislation in Upper Canada in 1793. Legal opposition to slavery between 1793 and 1808 had made it virtually impossible to defend slavery publicly, and no one tried to do so. But slavery was not actually abolished until the imperial parliament passed legislation in 1833, to take effect the following year.

Yet hostility to slavery was not the same thing as sympathy for freed blacks, as the refugee blacks who settled in Nova Scotia between 1813 and 1816 could attest. These 2,400 blacks were those left behind British lines during the various occupations of American territory during the war, mainly in Maryland and Virginia, and most (2,000) were brought to Nova Scotia. In that province they were dumped upon plots of land too small to be viable and public subsidies were quickly ended. Local officials began agitating for their relocation either to the United States or to Africa, and some were sent to Trinidad in 1820. Most remained, however, to become the basis for the modern black community in Nova Scotia. These blacks experienced considerable prejudice and discrimination from the white community, and they were hardly treated as equals in terms of education and land.

Blacks had begun crossing the border into Upper Canada after 1815, and by the end of the 1820s they had created several border communities at Amherstburg and Niagara. But the real movement of blacks began after 1830. Contemporaries claimed that there were as many as 75,000 fugitive slaves resident in Upper Canada in 1860, and a modern estimate places the number of blacks in the colony at 40,000, three-quarters of whom were fugitive slaves or their offspring. Censuses showed far fewer blacks (4,669 in 1851, 11,223 in 1861), but their data was notoriously unreliable and Canadian officials themselves questioned the figures. Curiously, the censuses showed more females than males among British North America’s black population, whereas most fugitive slaves were males. The exodus from the United States doubtless increased after 1850 with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which provided for the return of slaves who had escaped to free states within the union.

Whatever their numbers, neither freed blacks nor fugitive slaves found Upper Canada to be the ideal refuge. Employment in menial positions was not hard to find (by the 1830s most waiters in Niagara Falls hotels were blacks), but obtaining land was more difficult. Although many Canadians were prepared to be helpful, there was considerable prejudice against the blacks and a rapid growth of patterns of segregation. The new arrivals also suffered from the same anti-Americanism that characterized attitudes towards white settlers, with considerable fears expressed that they would exhibit disloyalty to Canada in times of crisis with the United States. The blacks constantly belied these concerns; indeed, according to the Reformer William Lyon Mackenzie, most remained “extravagantly loyal” and willing to “uphold all the abuses of government and support those who profit by them.” Moreover, in the view of government observers, black hatred of American slaveowners helped keep them loyal. In any event, almost a thousand blacks volunteered for military service to help put down the Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada and many subsequently served in militia units. There were a few attempts at planned settlements by various philanthropists and charitable organizations, but most of them failed miserably. Only the Buxton settlement near Chatham, created by a separate and independently managed stock company in the 1850s, demonstrated any viability at all, although its founder, Presbyterian minister William King, in 1860 confessed his inability to “roll back the prejudice” against blacks. Nevertheless, 300 families were settled and 5,000 acres were brought under cultivation before the settlement dispersed in the 1870s.

The main attraction of British North America for fugitive blacks was not its colour-blindness but its fairly consistent refusal to extradite those who had successfully crossed the border for offences not liable to prosecution under Canadian laws. Since Canada did not recognize slavery, there was no crime involved in escaping from it, and both the colonial and the British governments tended to see most collateral crimes committed in the course of escaping (such as horsetheft) as mere pretexts for seeking the extradition of fugitive slaves. Despite the Webster-Ashburton treaty of 1843, which contained clauses on extradition, the British government held fast on the right of courts to decide on a fugitive’s motives for committing a crime; no fugitive slave was ever extradited under this treaty.

Not all fugitive slaves who set out for Canada actually reached their destination, and many freed blacks crossed into British North America as well. An organized group of San Francisco free blacks left that city for Vancouver Island in 1858, and as many as four hundred families of freedmen, most of them literate small-property owners, eventually arrived in Victoria, later moving to remote places such as Salt Spring Island. This movement of freed blacks into British Columbia was a part of a larger movement of Americans into British North America’s isolated western colony in the 1850s and 1860s. The new arrivals were adult males – mainly ones previously located in California – who were attracted by the discovery of gold in the interior of the colony. Estimates have placed the number of incoming miners as high as 25,000. The percentage of these who were actually American nationals is not known, but most of the newcomers had acquired mining experience in California whatever their nationality. That California experience included the organization of extralegal governmental structures, and the British Columbia authorities were quite fearful of similar developments in their colony. With the American war against Mexico (and the annexations of Texas and California) only recently completed, such fears were hardly fanciful. American westward expansion had been executed by using the presence of American settlers (all demanding annexation) as an excuse for official government action to take over territory claimed by others.

In the event, there was far less gold to be readily found in shallow diggings in the Fraser valley than had been the case in California, and, despite the discovery of new fields farther north in the Cariboo Lake region and in the Kootenays, the bulk of the miners quickly disappeared. Most of British Columbia’s gold could not be extracted with the simple techniques of small prospectors; deeper digging required complex technology, capital, and industrial organization. British Columbia would later in the century attract many Americans to exploit its mineral resources, but they were either industrialists or mine workers rather than individualistic prospectors.

The decade of the 1860s was one of great complexity for Canadian attitudes towards the United States, for American immigration, and for Americans already resident in Canada. In the first place, the United States became rent in 1861 by its great Civil War, which may have driven a few pacifists north but essentially kept Americans busy at home for many years. Despite a residual sympathy for the southern states, most Canadians probably supported the Union side, particularly after the war in 1863 became associated by Abraham Lincoln with the emancipation of slaves. Support for the north was strengthened when a handful of Confederates moved to Canada to conduct guerilla operations against the Union, particularly the notorious St Albans, Vermont, raid of 1864. The British government also supported the Union, and it devoted increasing attention to ways of defending British North America from American invasion or annexation. There were real fears that the victorious United States (the Confederacy was clearly on the defensive after 1863) would employ its enormous army to conquer Canada when the war was over, using various war claims against Great Britain as the pretext. Threatened invasions of Canada by armed Irish-Americans, the Fenians, in 1866 and 1867 seemed to bear out these concerns, as did the American purchase of Alaska in 1867 and constant American annexationist rhetoric. One result of the American military threat was the union of several of the provinces of British North America (Upper Canada, Lower Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick) as the dominion of Canada in 1867.

As a result of these complex circumstances, there was little American immigration to Canada during the 1860s; indeed, there was substantial migration from Canada to the United States, particularly on the part of blacks returning south after emancipation. At the same time, however, the decade saw the foundations laid for a permanent Anglo-American entente that would have a profound effect on Americans in Canada. Despite the rhetoric, both the United States and Great Britain refrained from provoking a direct confrontation during and after the Civil War. Instead, the two nations quietly continued to survey their joint boundary until a treaty could be negotiated to resolve their many differences. The resultant Treaty of Washington in 1871 permitted Britain to withdraw its military presence from British North America while it recognized the existence of Canada as an autonomous if not totally sovereign nation. Anglo-American detente opened a new era in Canadian-American relations; it also prompted a resurgence of American immigration into Canada.

Between 1871 and 1914, American migrants to Canada included three categories of people: businessmen, who came either to operate within the expanding resource economy or to found manufacturing establishments; workers, who were drawn (often on a seasonal basis) into the resource industries; and farmers, who helped to settle the newly opening Canadian west. All these groups had a significant impact on the Canadian economy, but the largest by far was the farmers.

The movement of Americans into the Canadian west divides into two periods: 1871–96 and 1896–1914. In the first period, immigration was relatively small in numbers. Apart from the cattlemen, sheep ranchers, and traders who crossed back and forth across the border – and whose presence was one of the reasons for the creation of the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 – only a few American settlers arrived in the west. While some recruitment was done, mainly by the government of Manitoba, most of the movement of settlers was due to the natural geographical affinity between the great plains on both sides of the 49th parallel. The second period – 1896–1914 – witnessed far more substantial American migration. After 1896, indeed beginning some years earlier, the Canadian government actively recruited settlers, and between the mid-1890s and World War I more than half a million American farmers took up residence in western Canada.

The settlement of the “Last Best West” was much influenced by American precedent. The system of surveying the land was developed by the Canadian government between 1869 and 1871 following extensive consultation with the United States Land Office. There were some Canadian variations, but the basic rectangular system adopted was American, as were the measurements (a section size consisted of 640 acres and a township of 36 sections). The most common form of official recruitment was by use of personal correspondence from existing settler to prospective settler, a technique first employed in settling Wisconsin in the 1850s. The greatest lure was “free” land eligible to be settled under preemption and homesteading provisions that originated in the United States and were essentially copied by the provinces and the dominion of Canada. Under homestead policy as it was ultimately developed, a settler in western Canada could receive after a few years a quarter-section of land (160 acres) for the cost of the fees of patenting it, providing that he improved it and built a house upon it. Many homesteaders were indeed land speculators, and in the end more settlers bought their land from land and railroad companies than homesteaded it. Much of the settlement in what is now Alberta and Saskatchewan occurred in the so-called Palliser’s Triangle, a dry belt with marginal rainfall. Experienced American “dry” farmers were held to be the best settlers of such land, although many new arrivals were given false expectations by a period of above-average rainfall before 1911.

If inexpensive or cheap land was the Canadian “pull” factor, economic conditions in the United States provided the “push.” Many American farmers were unable to escape the status of farm labourer or tenant because of the high costs of American land. Others hoped that, by selling their lands at inflated prices and buying cheaper land in Canada, they would be able to pay off their debts and expand their operations. Most of the migrants after 1896 came from the agricultural states of the American mid-west. Whether former farm owner, tenant, or labourer, the majority of the immigrants came with families and capital. Some arrived by railroad, others by covered wagon. The official estimate of wealth per capita was $1,000 and the total amount of cash and property taken into the Canadian west by Americans between 1900 and 1920 was calculated at between 270 million and one billion dollars. By the time of the 1911 census, there were 16,326 American-born inhabitants in Manitoba, 81,357 in Alberta, and 69,628 in Saskatchewan. Yet by that date too, many Americans had already returned to the United States. Statistics on the American-born were in any case deceptive, since the movement from the United States to the Canadian west included many ex-Canadians and recently immigrated foreign-born. One scholar, Paul Harvey, has argued that the American-born among the prairie immigrants of the period 1901–11 constituted less than 60 percent of the total; slightly more than 50 percent of the American-born in the prairie provinces in 1916 were of British origin, the remainder being of German (16.6 percent), Scandinavian (15.7 percent), French (5.5 percent), and Dutch (2.2 percent) background. At the same time, American-born departures from the west were heavy between 1912 (when drought conditions began in Palliser’s Triangle) and 1914 (when Canada joined World War I).

The fear that “the map of Manitoba and the North-West Territories [Saskatchewan and Alberta] might soon be – figuratively speaking – dotted with garrisons flying the Stars and Stripes,” as one British journalist put it in 1903, proved as groundless in the Canadian west as it had earlier been in Upper Canada. Indeed, American settlers were far more likely to become Canadian citizens than other immigrants of the period. Between 1902 and 1914, more than 74,000 American citizens were naturalized, over one-third of the total of Canadians naturalized in these years. The minister of agriculture possibly exaggerated in 1902 when he claimed that 70 percent of American immigrants to the Canadian west had been naturalized, but his remark was on the right track.

While the typical American immigrant to western Canada before 1914 may have been a mid-western farmer, there were many exceptions. The immigration total contained a substantial number of members of various minority groups not totally comfortable with the dominant American society. The groups can be divided into two types, the religious ones and the racial ones. Religious groups included the Mormons and the Mennonites; racial groups included American blacks and native peoples.

The first real movement of Mormon settlers from the United States began in 1887, when a party led by Charles Ora Card arrived in what is now southwestern Alberta. By 1906 the Mormon settlements around Cardston contained nearly 4,000 people. Ultimately 8,500 Mormons immigrated to Canada between 1898 and 1914, mostly settling in the Cardston region. Like the Mormons, the Mennonites were a religious community out of step with mainstream American experience. And like the Mormons too, the number of Mennonites of American origin was small, perhaps no more than 5,000 in total. Unlike the Manitoba Mennonites, who had come straight to Canada from Europe and were concentrated in specific districts, these new settlers were widely distributed across the west.

Not many blacks came to Canada between the American Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, but, beginning in 1899, deteriorating racial conditions in the United States led to some interest in black migration to western Canada. This potential migration was rapidly squashed by Canadian immigration authorities; only a trickle of blacks into Canada was officially reported by the federal government in the early years of the twentieth century, and many may have been rejected at border inspections. Keeping native peoples and border Metis out of Canada was considerably more difficult than excluding blacks, since native peoples had little respect for the international border and crossed to and fro throughout the period of western settlement. Several thousand Indians fled northwards in the 1870s and 1880s from the United States cavalry and land-hungry settlers, some to return to the United States and others to remain in Canada. Neither Canada nor the United States particularly wanted to claim the Indians as citizens.

The outbreak of World War I cut the influx of all immigrants – including Americans – into Canada. But the beginnings of the decline had been evident just prior to the war, caused by economic depression and signs that the days of the “Last Best West” were nearing an end. The number of Americans migrating to Canada dropped from more than 100,000 per annum in the years 1910–13 to 97,712 in 1913.

A few Americans came to Canada expressly to join the war effort, particularly in the Royal Air Force. Total American immigration to Canada averaged about 40,000 annually for the war years, with a disproportionate number of the new arrivals still settling in western Canada. The Canadian government continued to support western settlement, seeing the prairies as the breadbasket of the Allied war effort. The only distinctive feature of the migration in these years involved the movement of pacifists and certain pacifist religious groups to Canada, particularly after the United States entered the war in 1917. Despite the controversial nature of Canadian conscription policy, there were more exemptions for pacifists in Canada than in the United States, including some historic arrangements with pacifist religious communities such as the Mennonites and Doukhobors. The arrival of Mennonite and Hutterite conscientious objectors during the war provoked considerable public debate, since some of these people insisted not only on military exemption but on the continuation of their right to speak in and be educated in German.

Most of the Mennonites who crossed the border were single young men of draft age who joined existing Mennonite communities. The Hutterites, in contrast, moved as a people. Sixteen of seventeen communities in South Dakota removed to Manitoba and Alberta in 1918, encouraged and supported by the Canadian government despite their pacifism. For the Canadian authorities, the gains to western agriculture outweighed the problems of exemptions for military service, particularly since immigration officials stressed that “these people are very desirable . . . clean, honourable, industrious and law-abiding.” Unlike the Mennonites, the Hutterites did not demand separate schools. In Manitoba, most of the Hutterites settled among Franco-Manitobans west of Winnipeg, a decision that may have assisted their acceptance in their new home since French Canada was in general opposed to conscription. In Alberta the Hutterites moved to the southwest corner of the province.

Although the Hutterites were able to bring their household goods and farm equipment with them from South Dakota, they had sold their land at distressed prices and purchased relatively expensive land in Canada. The Hutterite colonies in Canada were thus unable to acquire sufficient Canadian land in 1918 to avoid overcrowding, and the brethren were quickly forced to establish new colonies – twenty-three in Alberta and Manitoba between 1918 and 1922.

Between 1919 and the 1960s American immigration to Canada was marked by very little publicity and controversy. The 1931 census showed that the United States was the second leading source of Canada’s foreign-born population, behind only England and Wales and ahead of Scotland, Poland, Russia, and Ireland. Average annual immigration of Americans to Canada averaged 23,000 in the 1920s, 9,700 in the 1930s, 7,000 in the 1940s, 10,000 in the 1950s, and 12,000 in the first half of the 1960s. These numbers meant that the total number of American-born residents of Canada decreased in every census until 1971, and the proportion of Americans to total foreign-born Canadian residents equally declined.

Throughout the period, the regional preferences of the American newcomers altered dramatically. In the 1920s, the prairie region was still the most popular destination and the Maritimes the least. In the 1930s Ontario became the most popular intended destination, and would remain so, while British Columbia would become proportionally more popular in every decade. In some ways, total numbers are less important for the regional impact of American immigration than are proportions of total immigration. In terms of total regional immigration, Americans throughout this period consistently represented a disproportionate percentage of Atlantic Canada’s regional total. Quebec attracted more Americans than the entire Atlantic region, but many fewer than Ontario. Despite the fact that Ontario was by far the most consistent lure for American immigrants, they equally consistently made up a smaller percentage of total immigration in Ontario than in any other region. On the other hand, despite smaller numbers, Americans always represented a high proportion of British Columbia immigrants.

Over the period 1919–65, the occupational structure of American immigration and of the American-born in Canada changed as well, shifting from agricultural to professional vocations. In 1908, 83 percent of American immigrants declared farming to be their intention; by 1968 only 3 percent of Americans said they would farm, while a full 53 percent intended to hold a professional occupation. A similar shift occurred among the American-born. This pattern of abandonment of farming for professional work – while common to all immigrants and Canadian natives too – has been much more extreme for American-born residents of Canada and American immigrants.

The relatively homogeneous and uncontroversial patterns of American immigration to Canada during the 1919–65 period shifted markedly for a few years after 1965. Official numbers of immigrants increased dramatically – half of all emigrants leaving the United States in the years from 1965 to 1990 went to Canada – and there were probably large numbers of American-born resident in Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s not included in any official data. One obvious reason for the change was the Vietnam War, which produced another wave of refugee immigration to Canada. But the war resisters were not the only new American immigrants, nor even necessarily the most controversial. The mid1960s saw a major expansion of Canadian higher education, with a number of new universities constructed. Unable to staff its burgeoning universities with its own nationals, Canada turned abroad, particularly to Britain and the United States, to recruit a professoriate. In 1963, 390 university teachers immigrated to Canada (24.4 percent from Britain, 44.6 percent from the United States).

By the peak year of 1969, that immigration had risen to 2,398 (with percentages of British and Americans virtually identical to those of 1963). After 1969 the percentage of Americans increased to a figure closer to half of the total. Between 1965 and 1975 more than 16,000 university teachers arrived in Canada from abroad, nearly 50 percent of them American in origin.

American war resisters could be divided into three categories: the draft dodgers, the deserters, and – a group that is difficult to analyse in any detail – immigrants who were not formally part of the military system but were nevertheless hostile to the current American climate of opinion. The draft dodgers, who were avoiding military service by voluntarily removing themselves from the United States, were for the most part well-educated middle-class young men who were welcomed in Canada. The deserters, also young men but less well-educated and less demonstrably middle-class (reflecting the class bias of the American draft system), received a more mixed reception in Canada, partly because they were not such obviously qualified additions to Canadian society, partly because Canadians themselves had ambivalent feelings about desertion from duty. The political radicalism of many resisters led to some negative reactions from Canadian society.

Jews were over-represented among the dodgers, and Catholics among the deserters. Both dodgers and deserters tended to congregate in large Canadian cities, especially Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Toronto was the centre of many resister organizations and the place of publication of Mark Satin’s well-known Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada (1968). It sold over 100,000 copies in eight editions. Dodgers tended to have the full support of their families from the outset; deserters often operated without family blessings, at least initially. Many other American immigrants of the Vietnam period were pulled to Canada by economic opportunity while pushed from the United States by unpopular American policies. Though some war resisters eventually returned to the United States after amnesties were declared, many others remained in Canada, often becoming Canadian citizens. Most resisters felt that American amnesty offers were too conditional to be taken seriously. A call by the Canadian government in 1973 for illegal immigrants (not all of whom were American war resisters) to register with immigration authorities met with some success. It was estimated that 2,500 illegal resisters came forward, although many others remained underground. Paradoxically, many resisters felt less completely Canadian because they lacked one of any Canadian’s principal birthrights: the privilege of travelling openly in the United States.

In this century, the American-born have consistently been less urban a population than either the Canadian-born or foreign-born population as a whole. In the cities, Americans have integrated into the overall population, and there are no “American districts.” Outside the cities, there are a few areas of heavy American concentration, most of them bordering the United States. Each represents a distinct historical development. The American-born in Madawaska County, New Brunswick, for example, are chiefly the children of francophone parents who have returned to the region from sojourns in the United States. In Rainy River, Ontario, the American-born, like many of their counterparts elsewhere in the country, are the descendants of immigrants drawn to Canada by the pulp and paper industry. In southwestern Alberta, the American-born represent the remnants of the Mormon settlement of Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.