Finnish immigration to North America
was common throughout the 1800s. Large families on small farms,
crop failures and famine in the mid-1800s, and political take-over
by Russia gave the Fins good reasons to get out. Those who immigrated
to North America were drawn to the American rural areas most like
home, such as, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan. There they
found work in lumbering and agriculture and adapted easily to
their new land.
In the late 1890s and early 1900s,
the Canadian government waged an aggressive campaign to draw settlers
to Western Canada. They specifically wanted farmers but only white,
Anglo-Saxon, and Scandinavian were considered "ethnically
desirable". Scandinavians, i.e., people from Norway, Sweden,
Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, were believed to be industrious,
and culturally and racially similar and thus readily assimilable.
Americans were preferred over all because they had money, goods,
and farming experience. The timing was perfect because by this
time, the American frontier, settled long before Western Canada,
had run out of free land. Rural families were not able to remain
together as older sons grew up because they could not get land
in the same community. The American agricultural land that remained
required irrigation and was considered undesirable. New strains
of wheat and new farming equipment designed for the northwest
had just been developed. Agents stationed in the American mid-west
mailed out promotional pamphlets and posters, and organized meetings,
exhibitions and tours to provide information about free homestead
lands and private property for sale in Canada. Advertisements
were placed in 7000 rural American newspapers and in response,
Ottawa received up to 1000 letters a day. In 1904 to 1905, eighteen
Canadian agents in the US received 70,948 letters of inquiry.
The result of this huge promotion was that a half a million Americans,
most of whom were farmers from the US mid-west, came to Canada
to settle in the western provinces. Gabriel and
Hilda Mattson and family were among them.
