Abstract
‘The history of migration is a history of alienation and its consequences’. That was the verdict of Oscar Handlin on the collective experience of 35 million immigrants in the United States in the century after 1820. Migration has always been a contentious phenomenon, the controversy generally focusing on whether it was beneficial or detrimental to the security and prosperity of donor and recipient countries and communities. The recurring, and much debated, dilemma for politicians and employers in places of supply was whether to promote or discourage an outflow that might—depending on circumstances—be hailed as an escape route for the destitute and disaffected, or demonized as a debilitating loss of brain, brawn and capital. Meanwhile, host societies were equally ambivalent about whether new arrivals represented a welcome injection of cheap labour or an offloading of the unemployable.
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Notes
- 1.
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, 1951, revised edition 1973), 3, 4.
- 2.
Handlin, Uprooted, 3, 304–5.
- 3.
See, for instance, Barbara Roberts, Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada, 1900–1935 (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988); Lorna R. McLean and Marilyn Barber, ‘In search of comfort and independence: Irish immigrant domestic servants encounter the courts, jails, and asylums in nineteenth-century Ontario’, in Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta and Frances Swyripa (eds), Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic, and Racialized Women in Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); James E. Moran and David Wright (eds), Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives (Montreal, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006); Angela McCarthy and Catharine Coleborne (eds), Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840–2010 (New York: Routledge, 2012). Anna Pratt’s study, Securing Borders: Detention and Deportation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), focuses on the second half of the twentieth century.
- 4.
Thomas M. Devine, To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 87.
- 5.
See, inter alia, Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Mental Health and Migration: The Case of the Irish, 1850s-1990s’; and David Wright and Tom Themeles, ‘Migration, Madness and the Celtic Fringe: A Comparison of Irish and Scottish Admissions to Four Canadian Mental Hospitals, c. 1841–91’, both in McCarthy and Coleborne (eds), Migration, Ethnicity and Mental Health, 15–38 and 39–54; Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘“A Most Miserable Looking Object”; The Irish in English Asylums, 1850–1901’, in John Belchem and Klaus Tenfelde (eds), Irish and Polish Migration in Comparative Perspective (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2002); 121–32; Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Irish Immigrants in a Colonial Asylum during the Australian Gold Rushes, 1848–1869’; and Angela McCarthy, ‘Transnational Ties to Home: Irish Migrants in New Zealand Asylums, 1860–1926’, both in Pauline M. Prior (ed.), Asylums, Mental Health Care and the Irish: Historical Studies, 1800–2010 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2012), 119–48 and 149–66; Marjory Harper, ‘Minds on the edge: immigration and insanity among Scots and Irish in Canada, 1867–1914’ (forthcoming, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, 2016); McLean and Barber, ‘In Search of Comfort and Independence’ (above, note 3).
- 6.
Exceptions are Ørnulv Ødegaard, Emigration and Insanity. A Study of Mental Disease among the Norwegian-born Population of Minnesota (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaards, 1932) and Marjory Harper, ‘A dysfunctional diaspora? Causes of mental illness among Scottish migrants to Canada, 1867–1914’, Neurosciences and History (official journal of the Spanish Society of Neurology), 2014; 2 (1); 1–7.
- 7.
The Halifax Port Authority commissioned ‘The Emigrant’ from Italian-born sculptor, Armando Barbon. It was unveiled in September 2013 at Pier 21, the Canadian Museum of Immigration.
- 8.
See, for example, Lars Ljungmark, For sale: Minnesota. Organized Promotion of Scandinavian Immigration, 1866–1873 (Gothenburg: Läromedelsförlagen, 1971).
- 9.
Anon., ‘“Settlers” in Canada: Rough Experiences of Emigrants’, Aberdeen Journal, 11 August 1903, p. 4, col. 8.
- 10.
Ronald Rees, New and Naked Land (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1988), 35. See also William F. Butler, The Great Lone Land: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North West of America (London: S. Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1872). Butler wrote of ‘this utter negation of life, this complete absence of history … One saw here the world as it had taken shape and form from the hands of the Creator’ (200).
- 11.
Quoted in Rees, New and Naked Land, 42.
- 12.
Rees, New and Naked Land, 14–15.
- 13.
William Wallace to Maggie Wallace, 29 June 1881, 23 February 1883, in William Wallace, My Dear Maggie: Letters from a Western Manitoba Pioneer, edited by Kenneth Coates and William R. Morrison (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1991), 21, 118.
- 14.
William to Maggie, 29 June 1881 in Wallace, My Dear Maggie, 21.
- 15.
Library and Archives Canada [hereafter LAC], The Journal of Lady Aberdeen, MG 27, C-1352, 1L B5, 7 October 1890.
- 16.
The Countess of Aberdeen, Through Canada with a Kodak, introduction by Marjory Harper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 121; Iver Bernhard, ‘Nyveien til Fevatn’, Ved arnen [By the Fireside], volume 59, no. 32 , 21 February 1933, p. 4, quoted in Dorothy Burton Skårdal, The Divided Heart: Scandinavian Immigrant Experience through Literary Sources (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974), 262.
- 17.
Saskatchewan Archives Board, Saskatchewan Archives Questionnaire [hereafter SAB, SAQ], no. 2, Pioneer Experiences: A General Questionnaire, x2/2 (1889), Archibald Angus Docherty. See also Wayne R. Norton, Help Us To A Better Land. Crofter Colonies in the Prairie West (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1994).
- 18.
See, for instance, Marjorie Wilkins Campbell, The Silent Song of Mary Eleanor (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983). In 1904 Campbell’s parents emigrated from London to Saskatchewan, where her mother was dismayed when, after trekking over the prairie for days, the oxen pulling their wagon halted at the site of their quarter section, marked only by the land surveyor’s four holes and marker.
- 19.
William to Maggie, 8 June 1883, in My Dear Maggie, 135. For a comparable example from the 1920s, see Monica Storrs, God’s Galloping Girl: The Peace River Diaries of Monica Storrs, 1929–1931, edited with an introduction by William L. Morton with the assistance of Vera K. Fast (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), 263.
- 20.
SAB, SAQ, no. 8, Pioneer Health. S-X2, 2676, Diggle, Lottie Clarke, question 13. Thanks to Dr Elizabeth A. Scott for sampling the health questionnaire on my behalf. The general questionnaire is analysed in Marjory Harper, ‘Probing the Pioneer Questionnaires: British Settlement in Saskatchewan, 1887–1914’, Saskatchewan History, 52: 2 (Fall 2000), 28–46.
- 21.
Vilhelm Moberg, The Emigrants (1951); Unto a Good Land (1954); The Settlers (1961); The Last Letter Home (1961), translated from Swedish by Gustaf Lannestock, with a new introduction by Roger McKnight (St Paul, Minn: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1995).
- 22.
Moberg, The Last Letter Home, x–xi.
- 23.
O. E. Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth. A Saga of the Prairie, translated from the Norwegian by Lincoln Colcord and the author (New York, London: Harper and brothers, 1929, revised edition 1991), 37–8. Ellipses in original.
- 24.
LAC, RG76, C-7396-7, vol. 248, file 179046, part 1, undated memorandum from Anne MacDonald to the Department of Immigration and Colonization, October or November 1924.
- 25.
Mary Percy Jackson, Suitable for the Wilds. Letters from Northern Alberta, 1929–1931, edited with an introduction by Janice Dickin McGinnis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 145, 16.
- 26.
Moberg, The Emigrants, 164–5.
- 27.
Rølvaag, Giants, 424.
- 28.
Rølvaag, Giants, 226.
- 29.
Rølvaag, Giants, 227.
- 30.
Rølvaag, Giants, 329.
- 31.
Aksel Sandemose, En Flytning krysser sitt spor (1933), trans. A.A. Knopf, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (New York, A.A. Knopf, 1936).
- 32.
Aksel Sandemose and Canada: a Scandinavian Writer’s Perception of the Canadian Prairies in the 1920s, translated and edited with a critical introduction by Christopher S. Hale (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 2005), 56.
- 33.
The name was changed to The Provincial Hospital for the Insane in 1897.
- 34.
Provincial Archives of British Columbia [hereafter PABC]. GR-1754, vol. 1, Provincial Mental Hospital, Essondale, Admissions Book, 12 October 1872 to 31 December 1912; GR-2880, Case Files, 1872–1912.
- 35.
The admission register provides an index to patient files because the register number assigned to an individual at admission was also used as the patient file number. Case note files from the 1870s and 1880s contain minimal information, but become much more detailed by the end of the century.
- 36.
PABC, GR-1754, vol. 1. Of the British-born, 60 per cent (242 individuals) were natives of England, 20 per cent (80 individuals) came from Scotland, 19 per cent (77 individuals) from Ireland and 1 per cent from Wales and the Channel Islands (5 and 2 individuals respectively). There were 29 Swedish patients, 15 Norwegians and 3 Danes, to whom have been added a further 13 from other Nordic countries, 11 Finns and 2 Icelanders. Using statistics from the 1891 Canadian census, the Scots accounted for 4.4 per cent of the provincial population, but 7 per cent of the asylum population in the sample. The comparative statistics for Scandinavian/Nordic immigrants in the provincial and hospital populations respectively are: 1.08 per cent and 4.87 per cent. Individual Scandinavian nationalities were not differentiated in the census statistics (Census of Canada, 1891, Place of Birth, Volume 1, Table D, p. 391).
- 37.
Census of Canada, 1891, Ages of the People, Volume 2, Table I, pp. 3–5.
- 38.
British Columbia Sessional Papers [hereafter BCSP], First Session, Fourth Parliament of the Province of British Columbia, Annual Report of the Asylum for the Insane for the year 1886, 441.
- 39.
Mary-Ellen Kelm, ‘Richard Irvine Bentley’, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 13 (Toronto and Quebec: University of Toronto and Université Laval, 2003–2015) http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/bentley_richard_irvine_13E.html (date accessed 2 April 2014); letter from Bentley to the Provincial Secretary, 29 October 1894, quoted in Leslie Roman et al., ‘No time for nostalgia!: asylum-making, medicalized colonialism in British Columbia 1859–1907 and artistic praxis for social transformation’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, vol. 22, no. 1, Jan-Feb. 2009, 37–8.
- 40.
BCSP, First Session, Seventh Parliament, 1894–5, Report of the Royal Commission on the Asylum for the Insane, 27 November 1894, 568–71. The patient had been found dead half an hour after being tightly laced into a strait jacket in contravention of the Medical Superintendent’s own rules which ‘strictly forbid the use of severe instruments of restraint’. See also Ninette Kelley and Michael Trebilcock, The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 95–8.
- 41.
BCSP, Report on the Hospital for the Insane, 1897, p. 830. See also Report, 1896, pp. 845–6; 1898, p. 1304.
- 42.
See, for instance, McCarthy and Coleborne, Migration, Ethnicity and Mental Health.
- 43.
Marjory Harper, ‘Rhetoric and Reality: British Migration to Canada, 1867–1967’ in Phillip Buckner (ed.), Canada and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 163–4.
- 44.
Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire. White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies 1830–1910 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), 126; Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 173–5.
- 45.
PABC, GR-2880, box 7, no. 949.
- 46.
PABC, GR-2880, box 20, no. 2003. Author’s italics.
- 47.
PABC, GR-2880, box 3, no. 371.
- 48.
PABC, GR-2880, box 13, no. 2680.
- 49.
PABC, GR-2880, box 30, no. 2999.
- 50.
PABC, GR-2880, box 30, no. 2981.
- 51.
PABC, GR-2880, box 14, no. 1497.
- 52.
BCSP, Third Session, Ninth Parliament of the Province of British Columbia, 1902, Report on the Hospital for the Insane, New Westminster, 1901, p. 464. In the 1850s the nearest asylum was in California, and patients were initially sent down to that State. See also Angela Hawk, ‘Going Mad in Gold Country: Migrant Populations and the Problem of Containment’, Pacific Historical Review, 80: 1 (February 2011), 64–96; and Hawk, ‘Madness, Mining, and Migration in the Pacific World, 1848–1900’, unpublished PhD, University of California, Irvine, 2011.
- 53.
PABC, GR-2880, box 13, nos 1432, 1431. Both men had relatives in the United States, in North Dakota and Wyoming respectively. While Finland is not a Scandinavian country, it shares a boundary with Sweden, and has some topographical and cultural similarities to its two western neighbours.
- 54.
PABC, GR-2880, box 14, no. 1497. E. had emigrated to the United States in 1875.
- 55.
PABC, GR-2880, box 5, no. 819.
- 56.
PABC, GR-2880, box 7, no. 1024.
- 57.
Shetland Archives, SC. 12/6/1915, J. to his mother, 9 June 1891.
- 58.
PABC, GR-2880, box 13, no. 1488.
- 59.
C. K. Clarke, ‘The Defective and Insane Immigrant’, University Monthly (University of Toronto), 8 (1907–8), 273–8.
- 60.
J. L. Davison and Charles Sheard (eds), Canadian Lancet: A Monthly Journal of Medical and Surgical Science, Criticism and News, XXVII (Toronto: Dudley and Burns, 1895), republished by Forgotten Books, 2013), 268–9. The quote is on page 270. In the database sample as a whole, heredity was given as a cause of illness in 72 of the 1,210 entries. For discussion of the significance of heredity in other locations, in both contemporary accounts and recent scholarship, see Orson S. Fowler, Hereditary Descent: Its Laws and Facts Applied to Human Improvement (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1847), 101–24; R. L. Macdonnell and A. H. David (eds), Canada Medical Journal and Monthly Record of Medical and Surgical Science, vol. I (Montreal: John Lovell, 1852), 640; Catharine Coleborne, Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 54–8; Angela McCarthy, ‘a Difficult Voyage’, History Scotland, 10:4 (July 2010), 26–31; Maree Dawson, ‘Halting the “Sad Degenerationist Parade”: Medical Concerns about Heredity and Racial Degeneracy in New Zealand Psychiatry, 1853–99’, Health and History, 14: 1 (2012), 38–55; and Catherine Cox, Negotiating Insanity in the Southeast of Ireland, 1820–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), Chapter 2, ‘Expansion and Demand’.
- 61.
PABC, GR-2880, box 30, no. 3019, mother to Dr Charles E. Doherty, Medical Superintendent, 12 September 1911; brother to Dr Doherty, 31 August, 16 September 1911; PABC, GR-1754, vol. 1.
- 62.
PABC, GR-2880, box 31, no. 3129.
- 63.
PABC, GR-2880, box 31, no. 3111.
- 64.
PABC, GR-2880, box 25, no. 2585.
- 65.
Thomas E. Brown, ‘Workman, Joseph, in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 12, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/workman_joseph_12E.html (date accessed 4 August 2014).
- 66.
PABC, GR-2880, box 4, no. 569. For details of the 1893 split, see James Lachlan MacLeod, The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). PABC, GR-2880, box 30, no. 3005 gives the case of a Finnish immigrant who had ‘received a visitation from God’ after going up to the Yukon in 1911.
- 67.
Hugh Maclennan, Each Man’s Son (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009, first published 1951), 66.
- 68.
Maclennan, Each Man’s Son, 129.
- 69.
BCSP, 1902, Report on the Hospital for the Insane, New Westminster, 1901, 472.
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Harper, M. (2016). Ethnicities and Environments: Perceptions of Alienation and Mental Illness Among Scottish and Scandinavian Settlers in North America, c. 1870–c. 1914. In: Harper, M. (eds) Migration and Mental Health. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52968-8_6
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