Cmc: The Last Best West: Advertising for Immigrants to Western Canada

Government claims to lands in Western Canada was one matter but maintaining sovereignty over these lands was quite another. Sir John A Macdonald's approach to maintaining sovereignty in western Canada by not losing the land to American prospectors was to encourage Canadian settlement and immigration into the west. This Museum of Civilizations site demonstrates, through primary source images, how the governments of Canada and Britain used advertising to convince potential immigrants to settle in the Canadian west from 1870 through to the 1920's.