Hardscrabble

The High Cost of Free Land

Author: Donna E. Williams

A tale of deception, hardship, and tragedy, Hardscrabble: The High Cost of Free Land takes readers to the Muskoka backwoods in the latter decades of the nineteenth century when unscrupulous politicians, emigration agents, and philanthropists alike lured unwitting settlers to farm the Canadian Shield's rocky terrain.

The difficulty of carving a hardscrabble farm out of Ontario's backwoods was vividly described by Canadian pioneer Susannah Moodie in her book Roughing It in the Bush, but just thirty years after Moodie's experience, the tragic tale was being repeated in Muskoka. In the late 1860s, the Ontario government aggressively promoted free land grants, keen on populating this beautiful but rocky district lying atop Ontario's Canadian Shield region.

Hardscrabble opens again the fierce debates in Ontario's Legislature when the Free Grants and Homestead Act was first introduced in 1868. Should Muskoka's land be opened to settlement or reserved for Indians? From the beginning, many vented serious doubts about the free land scheme, based on failures elsewhere with similar projects to artificially entice settlers. In the end, such caution was ignored by overeager free grant adherents.

The story of Hardscrabble also takes readers to Britain, where emigration philanthropists urged the government to send the country's poor to Canada, then follows these emigrants as they left the familiar behind to make a new life in the Canadian wilderness. The initial romance of living off the land was soon dispelled, however. These hapless souls faced clearing the land, building shelters, and sowing crops in desolate, remote locations frequently miles from the few roads that crossed the district.

The free grants scheme was not unique to Muskoka. Gifts of free land had already been attempted in other parts of Ontario, in Australia, and in the United States. But Williams' extensive research leads her to conclude that Muskoka's experience epitomizes better than any the wrongheadedness of placing already-poor people on remote land unsuited for farming.