creating order: the liberals, the landowners, and the
DRAINING
OF SUMAS LAKE, BRITISH COLUMBIA

JAMES MURTON

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the draining of Sumas Lake, British Columbia, Canada, by the provincial government in the 1920s. I argue that both the B.C. state and local landowners believed in the virtue of the ordered landscape of agrarian ideology. Both supported a quest to order nature that clashed with a disordered and inter-connected natural environment, leading to massive cost overruns on the building of drainage works and the creation of farmlands. The state battled local landowners over who would pay for the project. Landowners argued that the drainage had not made their farms more profitable. Yet both groups continued to agree that the drainage represented progress and improvement. The landowners' continued support of the project despite its cost and their meager gains suggests that the problems of the project lay less in the general logic of the state than in the discourse of liberal agrarianism that both supported. The financial and environmental problems of the project owed more to the limits of this shared vision than to inherent limitations in the state's relationship with nature or the local.

LATE IN 1919 a high-powered group of British Columbia (B.C.) politicians and bureaucrats traveled outside Vancouver and into the agricultural lands of the Fraser Valley. At the little town of Huntingdon the group–Premier John Oliver, Minister of Agriculture E. D. Barrow, and William Latta of the Land Settlement Board (LSB), the province's agricultural settlement and development agency—met with a group of local landowners. On the agenda was Sumas Lake, or, to be more specific, the LSB's plans to do away with it. With the approval of the landowners and of nearly everybody else who mattered in the province, the Land Settlement Board was planning to drain Sumas Lake.	1
Draining the lake was an old idea. Plans and schemes stretched back to the 1870s. For those who favored an orderly, settled countryside, Sumas Lake was an ongoing problem. For one thing, it was hardly orderly. Flowing into the mighty Fraser River and so subject both to its floods and to those of several other streams, it was unusually variable. Over the course of a year, it might vary from a winter low of nine feet deep to a spring high of thirty-six feet, and maps could agree only on its general outline. In 1894 what is still the largest flood on record on the Fraser caused the lake to double in area, covering both local Indian reserves in water.1 The lake was also simply a barrier to Euro-Canadian settlement. Nestled in between Sumas Mountain on the north, and Vedder Mountain and the U.S. border on the south, it was skirted by railway tracks and roads, which held it back, most of the time, with ditches and dikes. In a province short on flat and clear, let alone arable, land, it occupied a large chunk of potentially prime farmland not sixty miles from Vancouver (see Map 1).	2
Map 1: Sumas Diking District. Cartography by Eric Leinberger, © UBC Press 2007. Adapted from "Sumas Drainage, Dyking and Development District in the Lower Fraser Valley, Province of British Columbia. Choice Farm Lands for Sale," pamphlet, 1926, BC Archives, Library Collection, NWP 971.24 S949c. . . . There are about 16418 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.