Keys to History

The Scottish connection with the CPR can be seen in many contexts. Most importantly, the railway and its subsidiary passenger-ship company played a vital role in bringing Scottish immigrants to Canada and the Canadian prairies. Here a party of Scottish crofters, or tenant farmers, is preparing to leave Britain on a Canadian Pacific steamship, en route to farms in western Canada, to "prairie lands sunkist and blest." As crofters, they would have worked for a landowner, perhaps one of the wealthy aristocrats like the Duke of Sutherland, who owned 1.5 million acres of land. In Canada they could own their own farms.