Feb. 20, 1911: Wives wanted for West
A Canadian Northern Railway official was in the “Old Country,” (England), on a mission of marriage.
Thomas Howell, the company’s general emigration agent in charge of finding settlers for Western Canada, was seeking 5,000 English women to come and marry single Canadian farmers and mechanics.
The Canadian Northern Railway, a transcontinental railway between Quebec City and Vancouver via Ottawa, Winnipeg and Edmonton, reached Edmonton in 1905, shortly after it was named capital of the newly formed province of Alberta.
A story in the New York Herald picked up by the Journal said the eligible English lassies would have their choice of 50,000 bachelors — 30,000 of whom owned their own farms — and the rest mechanics and artisans living in small towns.
As a result of his marriage mission, Howell announced that in future, Canadian Northern Steamships Limited, owned by the Canadian Northern Railway, would carry a woman officer who would act as a chaperone and would be known as the “ship’s mother.”
She would take direct orders from the ship’s captain and rank next to him.
A special uniform was being designed for her with three gold braid rings on her sleeves in the approved naval style.
She would take her meals at the captain’s table and be in command of her own staff of assistants.
The women who would fill those positions had already been chosen, and their names had been submitted for the approval of the National Council of Canadian Women.
The duty of the ship’s mother would be to oversee everything affecting the comfort and well-being of the female passengers.
She would have the fullest powers and be entitled to enter any woman’s cabin at any hour of the day or night.
Fred Salter, European manager of the Grand Trunk Railway, was quoted as saying: “Western Canada is full of men who are willing to become the best husbands English girls could wish for. These men are a fine type, many of them college bred. English girls must not think that the Canadian farmer is a big, red-shirted, bearded man, with beetling brows, and whose clothes bristle with Bowie knives and revolvers.
“On the contrary, they are decent, hardworking, thrifty, ambitious, and the best physical specimens in the world.”
In response to the opening of the Prairie provinces by rail, and an overabundance of educated single women in Britain, thousands of unmarried women boarded a steamship for Canada, then took a steam engine across country to find husbands and settle places like Alberta.