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Go West Young man!The Lithograph in Western Canadian History
Photos Courtesy Of Glenbow Museum Bountiful harvest, pretty women, blue skies and not a mosquito in sight… the lithographs created to stir the imagination spurred more immigration with their bucolic images than possibly all of the printed tracts combined. With a railway in place and individual homestead plots surveyed, the western landscape was now “open” to commercial agriculture. The need for settlers stimulated the Homestead Act and initiated the greatest advertising campaign ever launched on Canadian soil. The primary thrust was a massive advertising campaign that relied very heavily on posters and pamphlets. Although these items primarily targeted prospective immigrants in English-speaking countries, in particular Great Britain and the United States, they were also distributed in French, German, Flemish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Dutch.
The results were impressive. In 1896, on the eve of the federal government’s full-scale advertising bombardment, 17,000 newcomers arrived in Canada. Just three years later, when the program was in full swing, the figure almost tripled to 45,000, and by 1905, it tripled again. In all, two million people arrived in Canada in the period from 1896 to the First World War. By 1911, the Canadian West had been transformed. There was a growing Euro-Canadian population, great expanses of wheat and other grains, prosperous farming towns and a burgeoning regional identity.
Often the Canadian government department and travel companies with a vested interest in settling the Prairies joined forces to produce posters that promoted western immigration. Posters printed on a lithographic press, a method which allowed bright colours and variations in tone, would include an advertisement for passenger liners such as White Star Line or Red Star Line or the railroad, Canadian Pacific Railway. The romanticized poster art always held out the promise of a bountiful harvest – and never once mentioned mosquitoes. Today some of the posters from that era have been saved in museum archives. Regrettably, very little if anything is known about the originators of the art. These images fueled a thousand dreams and peopled the West, yet the vast majority of the lithographs are unsigned and the artists remain unknown to this day. |
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By Terri Mason
The campaign used special artwork and photographs in combination with thrilling speeches from immigration agents. Everything was orchestrated in an effort to impress audiences with eye-catching images of a modern and vibrant country with a vast landscape that promised rich rewards. 
While the zeal of the overseas agents strongly contributed to the campaign to populate the West, it was the Immigration program’s advertising methods that captured the imaginations of European and American audiences.