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Canada

Richard E. Bennett

Within months of the organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in upstate New York in 1830, Mormon missionaries were preaching their newfound gospel in nearby Canada (or British North America, as it was then known). In the 1830s and 1840s, some 2,500 Canadians joined the Church, many of whom gathered with other converts in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and eventually the Great Basin. Several of these Canadian converts, such as John Taylor, William Law, Mary Fielding, and Theodore Turley, figured prominently in the later rise of the Church. Geographically proximate to Palmyra, New York, and Kirtland, Ohio, these converts were gained as the result of early Mormon missionary forays into Upper Canada either following established Methodist preaching circuits, returning to Canada to teach family and friends, or responding to scattered invitations to preach. Brigham Young and his brother, Phineas, were instrumental in converting many former Methodists in the Kingston-Earnestown-Loughborough-Sydenham area in 1832 and 1833. Joseph Smith, Jr., converted the Freeman Nickerson family in the Mt. Pleasant area just west of Niagara Falls. Parley P. Pratt reaped a rich harvest of followers in the Toronto area in 1835. And John E. Page converted well over 1,000 people in 1836 and 1837 in the Portland-North Crosby-Boston Mills area in the Rideau Canal district north of Kingston. Fewer converts were realized in the provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, and fewer still in old Quebec (Lower Canada). By 1850, with so many departed, Mormonism in eastern Canada was but a memory.

Fifty years later, however, the scene shifted from eastern to western Canada and the approach had changed from one of plucking to one of planting. At a time when the Church was expanding in the Rocky Mountain West, while experiencing persecution because of its adherence to polygamy, the Canadian West looked particularly attractive. John Taylor, an English-born Canadian from Toronto who had converted 50 years earlier and who succeeded Brigham Young as president of the Church, at one point seriously considered moving Church headquarters from Salt Lake City to Victoria Island but settled, instead, on sending Charles Ora Card north to plant a new colony on safer British soil. Card scouted out a new settlement in southern Alberta in 1886, but did not select the Lee's Creek site, now Cardston, until 1887. Pursued by American marshals because of his adherence to plural marriage, Card and his original party--consisting of eight families with their cattle and household goods--were assisted over the St. Mary River and into Canada in June 1887 by a detachment of the North-West Mounted Police.

At that time the Canadian government, fearing possible American annexation of this southerly region of western Canada, was encouraging new settlements of every kind. Mormon communal skills and agricultural prowess, coupled with aid from Salt Lake City as well as from Ottawa, gave the early Cardston settlers a distinct advantage over neighboring settlers. Isolated but industrious, Mormons were gradually accepted into Canadian society. As the advantages of settling in Alberta became known, more Mormons moved northward, resulting in the founding of surrounding settlements south of Cardston. These included Aetna (1888), Mountain View (1890), Beazer (1891), Leavitt (1893), and Kimball (1897), all platted in characteristic grid pattern format common to other Mormon farm villages in the western United States. Cardston itself was laid out in square blocks, each containing 8.4 acres and subdivided into eight lots.