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watersheds: conceptualizing
MANITOBA'S
DRAINED LANDSCAPE, 1895–1950
SHANNON STUNDEN BOWER
ABSTRACT
This article considers land drainage in the wet prairie region of Manitoba, Canada, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It explains why watershed-based drainage funding, proposed in the early 1920s as a means of financing the more substantial ditching necessary to address the province's drainage problems, was embraced by some Manitobans, resisted by others, and repeatedly rejected by provincial administrators. Federal government settlement policy, on one hand, and communities of interest derived from the local topography of southern Manitoba, on the other, defined the terms of the debate over watershed-based funding. While scientific uncertainty and political change were contributing factors, it was in large part to mitigate conflict between highlanders and lowlanders that the province ultimately assumed a larger role in funding drainage. The history of drainage in Manitoba's wet prairie, while broadening understanding of the challenges of mobile nature amid grid-based agricultural settlement, also illustrates the importance of considering the specific environmental conditions for resettlement and the workings of provincial and municipal governments. At such local scales, the intertwined character of the human and physical landscapes is particularly apparent.
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THE SURVEY GRID AND THE NATURE OF THE COUNTRY | |
| SOON AFTER THE CREATION of the Province of Manitoba, Canada, in 1870, the head of the new provincial government instructed Legislative Clerk Molyneux St. John to study local factors that might affect agricultural settlement. St. John's report, submitted to Lieutenant Governor Adams Archibald a few months later, emphasized "the number of muskegs or swamps which are found in several parts of the Province." While valuable as sources of hay and water, these wet areas could interfere with cropping. "It is therefore not unreasonable to assume," St. John concluded, that the "land which a settler should be entitled to take up must in some measure depend on the nature of the country." In his view, the shape and size of the parcels of land made available to settlers should reflect their environmental characteristics.1 |
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St. John's report was an important recognition of the need to accommodate water patterns in the wet prairie. The term "wet prairie" was used by nineteenth-century newcomers to describe parts of the north-central United States that were, as later observers would determine, ecologically similar to much of southern Manitoba.2 It reflects a key difference within the prairie region, underlining the environmental contrast between the drier west and the wetter east.3 There is a parallel historiographical distinction to be made: While aridity has attracted some attention from historians, the problem of excess surface water has been less studied.4 The phrase "wet prairie" also conveys how some aspects of the eastern prairie environment remained unchanged even as the tall grass prairie was plowed for fields of cultivated grain. Big bluestem and other grasses characteristic of the tall grass prairie may now be hard to find in many places, but what were perceived as surface water problems continue to bedevil Manitoba farmers. |
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