Creating Place in Early Canada

Abstract

The many local places created by immigrants and their descendants in early Canada developed within one of three characteristic frames: towns, work camps, and countrysides. The towns, the most conservative, largely reproduced the ways of small European towns. Work camps subjected groups of men, abstracted from intricate European social formations, to the conditions of work associated with particular staple trades. Countrysides, where most people lived, were loci of rapid social and cultural change. The availability of land and scarcity of labour provided opportunity for the poor and disincentive for the rich, and compressed European social hierarchies. The convergence of Europeans from different regional backgrounds, coupled with the many influences of new environments, created distinctive rural cultures. In early Canada, these new countrysides were scattered along a northern edge of North American agriculture. Small and bounded, they soon filled, westward Canadian alternatives were inaccessible or occupied, and the surplus young migrated southward into American melting pots. A scattered country that was neither European nor American, and that was inherently diverse, was in the process of formation.