Settling on the Land
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Agriculture in the Peace River country began during the fur trade era as trading post employees quickly established gardens for their own needs. These early efforts were rewarded often with good crops. The missionaries also planted gardens and more ambitious crops demonstrating the agricultural potential of the Peace country.
Early prospectors looking for gold and independent fur traders also planted crops when they arrived in the Peace country. Their experiences and crops were reported by early surveyors and visitors like Charles Horetzky, who was also a photographer. He traveled to Dunvegan and Fort Vermilion in the 1870s with the botanist John Macoun. The two reported to the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1872 that the Peace River country had good agricultural potential.
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These early findings were supported by George Mercer Dawson of the Geographic Survey of Canada in 1879.
Critical views that did not support these early reports of exceptional agricultural potential in the Peace River country were written between the 1890s and 1900s. The critics included Warburton Pike, H. Somers Somerset, William Ogilvie, and James Macoun. Their findings were partly correct as the success of agriculture depended on location and reflected that some varieties of crops from the south needed longer seasons for success. Varieties of crops adapted to the northern conditions have made agriculture much more successful today.
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Two boosters of the Peace River were Jim Cornwall and Anel Maynard Bezanson. Cornwall arrived in 1897 and worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company at Lesser Slave Lake. He founded the Northern Transportation Company, which ran the Midnight Sun, the Peace River country’s first steamboat between Athabasca Landing and Mirror Landing. Cornwell lobbied the government of the newly established province of Alberta to build a railway to the Peace country in 1905. Cornwall was elected in 1908 as the MLA for the Peace River Constituency. In this role he organized a tour of writers and professors to the Peace River area.
Anel Maynard Bezanson arrived in the Peace River in 1906 and photographed what he saw. He wrote and published the promotional book, The Peace River Trail, and sold 5,000 copies. He returned to settle in the Peace country in 1910.
With the growing awareness of the Peace country in Canada, many were ready to make the long and difficult trip to this remote region to settle. The enthusiasm was strong among the pioneers as they were traveling to a territory that was still isolated and did not yet offer many of the services other newly settled places had like railways, government services, and communications.