160 acres of free land (1/4 section) for $15 per year tax - to be had for the cost of getting to Winnipeg. (Usually it cost less than $100.00 to come from Europe) and to farm it for three years. Few women immigrants came, most were men. By 1911 Prairie men far outnumbered prairie women. Calgary - 17,000 men to 9,000 women.

Arriving in Canada - those with money paid high prices - up to $325 for a wagon and horse. Others walked to reach their claims. They cut the sod and piled it to make an earthen cave. They broke the soil with a single-furrow plough. Then the men walked back to town and took jobs laying train tracks to earn money for food, coal, tools, an axe, a gun, a proper house. Women cooked jackrabbit day after day. Men fought grasshopper plagues and grassfires started by train-engine sparks. Farmers fought sawflies, hail, drought, rust, and frost. Steam tractors were used. A lot of immigrants flocked back to the cities in the winter where they would try to find work in slaughter houses, sweatshops, laundroma

Two other large groups of people immigrated to Canada. Polish immigrants and Dutch immigrants.

The trains carried some of the war brides west to crucial first meetings with in-laws, with whom most of them would live until the war was over and their husbands came home. Heading west many were awed by the immensity of the land and its loneliness. Some of the Canadian boys had embroidered the truth about their life back home when they went courting. Visions of stately homes dissolved with the first views of clapboard Prairie houses and cosmetic drudgery. A few did return home but 95% overcame hankerings for cheery old England and settled down to stay.

There were very special bonds between Canada and Holland. Canadians had been the chief liberators of Holland. Crown Princess Juliana of the Netherlands lived in Ottawa during the war, and a room in Ottawa Civic Hospital was declared Dutch territory so that her third daughter could be born "on Dutch soil". Canada responded quickly to a request after the war to take 15,000 members of Dutch farm families from their overcrowded country of flooded farmlands and bombed cities. Dutch families with as many as 15 children got off the planes in Vancouver or Toronto. A further 15,000 arrived during the next decade and for years Holland expressed its gratitude to Canada with an annual gift of thousands of tulip bulbs. They would bloom each spring in the growing network of federal parkways and gardens.

Some topics in this essay:
Nova Scotia, Arriving Canada, Golden West, Pipe Assiniboia, , Jewish Relief, Civic Hospital, Mormons Utah, Night Toronto, Vancouver Toronto, jewish refugees, displaced persons, war brides, 160 acres, love money, war orphans, immigrated canada,