Chapter 8. The Economy since 1920
8.5 The Great Depression
The 1930s Depression is profoundly and deeply associated, in the popular mind, with the prairie Dust Bowl, one of the greatest environmental catastrophes in Canadian history. It was, in fact, something like a ticking time-bomb.
The British sent an expedition across the Prairies in the 1850s, led by John Palliser (1817-1887). Thereafter, his name was given to a tract of arid land along the 49th parallel. Palliser’s Triangle was identified as the northern tip of the Great American Desert, a region identified in the 1820s as stretching like a wall north from Texas and west from the 100th meridian to the Rocky Mountains. In 1874 a corps of 275 North-West Mounted Police, led by Commissioner George Arthur French (1841-1921), were dismayed to find Palliser’s Triangle so inhospitable. Sent to the West to begin the process of the Canadian occupation of Indigenous lands, French’s troops struggled to find drinkable water and, when they met up with Sioux soldiers, French “impressed upon them the fact that we did not want their land.”[1] He wasn’t lying. There was nothing about the region to suggest any farming potential to French and the Mounties. Thereafter, the plains and prairies entered into a wet period, the landscape turned a more promising shade of green, and its agricultural limitations were brushed aside by a Canadian government eager to populate the region with producers of food and consumers of manufactured goods.
Elsewhere on the prairies, and deep into the American plains as well, the prevalent form of agriculture in these years was dry land farming, which involves breaking the soil (with iron or steel ploughs) to a significant depth to release the moisture captured below ground. Once that moisture is used by the crops or evaporates, there is little to hold together the topsoil other than broken plant roots. After a generation or so under the plough, that part of the soil’s integrity vanishes as well. A drought — even a single year with little or no rain — could cause significant and widespread damage.
The “southern route” taken by the CPR ensured that Palliser’s Triangle was quickly surveyed and homesteaded. Improved grain prices in the 1920s led to more aggressive and widespread sod-busting across the prairies. When drought began in 1930 — an unfortunate coincidence with the Wall Street Crash — the reach of modern agriculture across the centre of North America had reached a new peak. Everything came to a head in the 1930s due to bad choices in the distribution of land, the heavy and sudden resettlement of the West, an over-aggressive and industrial approach to soil use, the elimination of trees as windbreaks (instead, trees were used as fuel and building material for homesteads), a booming economy in the 1920s, and the depletion of aquifers.
The Dirty Thirties
Palliser had recognized — more than 70 years earlier — that the southern Prairies were subject to drought conditions and these,