[JAMES] AN HISTORICAL WAR CROP 95 
Just one hundred years ago began the British immigration to 
Upper Canada. The soldiers home from the Napoleonic Wars were 
being disbanded, and many of them, seeking new homes, crossed the 
Atlantic and took up lands set apart for them in Upper Canada. 
The U. E. Loyalists had taken up lands and formed four more or less 
compact settlements—along the St. Lawrence from Gananoque to 
Cornwall, from Kingston westward around the Bay of Quinte, in 
the Niagara Peninsula, and in the two adjacent townships on 
Lake Erie. The settlers from overseas began to fill up the vacant 
sections on the frontier. Some settlements were also begun in the 
rear townships such as that on the military grants at Perth near the 
Rideau Canal, to which there came in 1816 some settlers from Ireland. 
For these settlers wheat was the important crop, as not only was it 
their own most important food, but it was their most valuable export 
product. For forty years and more wheat was “King” in Upper 
Canada. The greater immigration from the British Isles was begun 
in the forties, and, soon after, the extensive introduction of live stock 
added to the field products beef, mutton, butter, and cheese. The 
virgin soil of Upper Canada produced some large crops of wheat in those 
early days; 30, 40, and even 50 bushels to the acre were quite common. 
Ontario farmers in 1915 had hopes at one time of equalling, if not sur- 
passing, the crops of which they had heard their fathers and grand- 
fathers talk. And so they did in some cases, and would have done so 
quite generally if only the summer rains had ceased as harvest time 
drew near. As it was the average was the highest in six years and 
the total yield was over 12,000,000 bushels in excess of 1914. 
The western wheat crop of 1915 began in Ontario over seventy 
years ago. About 1842 a Scottish farmer named David Fife, in the 
township of Otonabee, Peterboro County, grew some wheat from a 
sample sent him by a friend in Glasgow, which soon spread through the 
neighbourhood, became a standard variety in Ontario, and then 
began ajourney westward. In about fifteen or sixteen years it reached 
Wisconsin and Minnesota, and a few years later found a congenial home 
in the valley of the Red River in Manitoba. The soil in the Red River 
Valley was by nature most favourable for the production of cereals, 
and in it there developed what grain and milling experts have recog- 
nized as the ideal type of world-wide wheat, giving it a name that has 
remained ever since as the highest world standard, namely, “Mani- 
toba Hard.” It may be noted here that this same soil is still capable, 
after forty years’ cultivation, of producing “Manitoba Hard.” Its 
richness has not been exhausted, but its accumulation of humus has 
been lessened, and, as a consequence, its moisture-holding power has 
been somewhat reduced, so that crop production is now more controlled 
