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The Globe’s early championing of the region gave way to coverage that sometimes took the tone of reporting on a foreign country
In The Globe’s earliest imaginings, the West was a land of rivers, plentiful game and fertile soil, a “magnificent empire” that lay between the Great Lakes and Rocky Mountains just waiting to be conquered.
“The wealth of 400,000 square miles of territory will flow through our waters, and be gathered by our merchants, manufacturers and agriculturalists,” stated a particularly grandiose 1863 Globe opinion. “Our sons will occupy the chief places of this vast territory, we will form its institutions, supply its rulers, teach its schools, fill its stores, run its mills, and navigate its streams.”
Hard pragmatism lay behind that rhetoric. In the years before Confederation, the Province of Canada, which encompassed portions of what is today Southern Quebec and Ontario, found itself trapped between the western-reaching American colossus to the south – its Civil War ending and its ambitions endless – and the vast lands under the control of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the north and west. If Canada could not expand, it might soon perish.
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