In 1910, the New York Dramatic Mirror's Motion Picture Section included this announcement:The kinetogram (the bi-monthly bulletin of the Edison Company) announces that the Edison Company recently made special arrangements with the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company to take an Edison crew of photographers and a selected stock company of players by special train to Vancouver, stops being made on the way to enact dramatic subjects in appropriate localities. The party left June 22 and are now at work.

According to Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895-1939 by Peter Morris, this venture was a resounding success. You can read the relevant snippet here (outside link).  Go to page 46 of the book. The goal  was to attract Americans to the Canadian West. The films were well reviewed in the U.S. according to Morris.

13 silent shorts were filmed, 10 of which were melodramas. The Internet Movie Database describes the plot of one of the stories, An Unselfish Love. "Unsuccessful in his suit for Mabel, John goes to a farm in Western Canada. Mabel's father convinces her that John has found a sweetheart, so she accepts an old suitor. A spinster who cares for John sees he still cares for Mabel, so she brings her out west…"

Like D.W. Griffith, Dawley really cranked them out in that period. (Dawley considered himself the "first American director" but Griffith's work has stood the test of time.)  He manages to get in A House of Seven Gables and his most famous work Frankenstein done while on this project. One of the three documentaries filmed for the CPR is The Life of the Salmon. Oh Canada!!

Here's a related article on this Tighsolas website: Advertising for Americans to Come to Canada, 1910 Technical World Magazine. This speech given in the House of Commons in 1908 implies the dark side of all this: Canada wanted to open the West, but wanted Americans or Canadians first. Not those "other" people. Here's the 1900 Laurier Budget speech (a bit of it) that has a remark that sheds more light on this type of racism. Here's an essay I wrote on Edison on this website. And here's another essay about the films I watched at school--not about salmon, but about the busy hardworking beaver. Propaganda?