By the late Nineteenth Century, the railroad had connected eastern Canada with the West Coast.

In the 1880s, the Canadian government began to "sell" the idea of western immigration in Europe. Clifford Sifton, Canada's Minister of the Interior, flooded England, the United States and European countries with pamphlets like "The Wondrous West," "Canada: Land of Opportunity," "The Last Best West," and "Prosperity Follows Settlement." Sifton posted advertisements in newspapers, sent speakers to deliver glowing descriptions of the good life in Canada, and even paid writers to set novels in the romantic Western prairies.

The offer to immigrants was free land in 65-hectare parcels.

The immigrants sailed to Canada in crowded, dirty steamships, then boarded trains for days of dreary travel across empty land, only to arrive on a flat, dry, empty prairie. The homesteaders lived miles from tiny towns, isolated from neighbours.

For many of the immigrants, that first shelter was a "soddie." They broke the earth into chunks of grass and dirt, and stacked the sods like bricks to make walls. Often, the roof supports were built out of the wooden wagons that carried them to their land.

Soddies were dark and small. Their thick walls made them cool in the summer and retained heat in the winter, but they became homes for insects and were damp in winter months.