The Land of Open Doors: Being Letters from Western Canada 1911-1913

The letters collected in this volume preserve the vivid and thoughtful impressions of a young man who came to western Canada in the early twentieth century. J. Burgon Bickersteth joined the Anglican mission in Edmonton a year after its establishment in 1910. As a lay missionary he travelled in the country northwest of Edmonton for two years, during the first year among homesteaders, and in the second among railroad builders. In his letters to friends and relatives in England he described the land he found so captivating and ‘life in the raw’ as he witnessed it day by day. He wrote ‘of some discomfort, of occasional hardships, but most certainly of absorbing interest and unique opportunity.’ On his return to England in 1913 he was encouraged to publish his letters by Lord Grey, the recently retired governor-general of Canada. The Land of Open Doors appeared the next year, with the letters edited only for factual errors and punctuation. For this reprint, Mr. Bickersteth has prepared a new introduction to the letters he wrote over sixty years ago.

(Social History of Canada 29) 

J. Burgon Bickersteth (1888-1979) was Warden of Hart House, University of Toronto, from 1921 to 1947. He died in Canterbury, England.