Muddling Through: The Remarkable Story of the Barr Colonists

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“I should judge that any man who can successfully farm in Florida can
do so in my colony.” The extract, from a telegram sent by the Reverend
Isaac Barr to a Belfast man who wished to settle in Saskatchewan, sums
up the essence of the Barr Colony. In 1903 nearly 2000 British
immigrants, most of whom had never lived or worked on a farm, followed a
smooth-talking Anglican priest to the heart of an unsettled prairie to
set up a farming paradise.

“Canada for the British” was Barr’s rallying cry. While this
sentiment rang sweet to the ears of Canada’s Department of
Immigration, few realized that the reverend’s vision was so
ethnocentric that he planned to exclude even British Canadians from his
colony. Advice, when offered, was usually scorned. The result was that
the colonists learned everything the hard way. Urban housewives,
suddenly deprived of servants, had to learn to bake their own bread with
frozen yeast in stoves stoked with green wood. Fledgling farmers refused
to remove the harnesses from their draft animals for fear they would not
be able to remember how to put them on again. Crops withered, livestock
died, and many a proud Briton ended up as a ward of the despised
Canadian government. The Reverend Barr himself was soon chased off the
colony, accused of everything from incompetence to profiteering. Yet, in
that manner for which the British race has become legendary, the
majority did “muddle through” and eventually thrive.

Although this work often reads like a long-lost Gilbert and Sullivan
comic operetta, it is real history and the third book by award-winning
popular historian Lynne Bowen. The Barr Colony was also a personal
pilgrimage for Bowen, whose own grandparents had answered Barr’s siren
call to muddle. She combines official government documents, personal
diaries, Barr propaganda, and personal interviews to produce a text that
is authoritative in its overview and intimate in its details.