Item Detail
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11498
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0
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0
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English
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Forging the Western Tradition : Pioneer Approaches to Settlement and Agriculture in Southern Alberta Communities
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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University of Toronto
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Ph.D. diss.
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"As a predominately English-speaking, wheat growing region first settled in 1904 on the semi-arid grasslands of southern Alberta, the Vulcan area typifies hundreds of prairie communities founded during the great settlement boom. Environmental determinism, cultural determinism, the frontier thesis, and the metropolitan thesis have all been employed by historians to explain the nature of prairie society. While many historians attach great importance to some of these models and dismiss others, all of them have proven useful in this study. Frontier, environment, metropolis, and cultural heritage seemed to interact in complex ways to determine settlement and agricultural patterns in the Vulcan area. Highly mobile, single, young men from southern Ontario, the American mid-west, and the Inland Empire provided the area with most of its imported traditions and values. Strongly influenced by progressive era ideas about technology, science, business efficiency, and administrative expertise, these pioneers sought to create rural communities that would incorporate the best features of the metropolis and their homelands while avoiding the disadvantages of both. But they also hoped to incorporate the best that the frontier and the new environment offered. Realizing substantial capital gains from both farm and town real estate constituted one such benefit, and as the pioneers struggled to build up saleable properties, they launched aggressive campaigns to promote the new communities. At the same time, the settlers sought to apply progressive principles to agriculture without sacrificing their most cherished mid-western farm practices, but their goals often clashed with the reality of their circumstances. In spite of strong pressure to become mixed farmers, they specialized in wheat because it offered them greater profits than any other product given the restraints under which they laboured. After a disasterous experiment with the pseudo-scientific dry farming technique, which merely confirmed many mid-western prejudices, other pressures and restraints gradually forced them to adopt the more appropriate techniques of trash farming. Similarly, their progressive outlook, the flat, treeless landscape, and the availability of cheap frontier lands all inspired the vision of great bonanza farms. But these huge enterprises collapsed, and the family farm emerged as the most efficient and stable unit of production." [Author's abstract]