On this date in 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt took note of a serious labor shortage across the West in general and the state in particular. Canada had made a systematic effort to attract new settlers to the western provinces, and the construction of 3,600 miles of Canadian railroads also required enormous numbers of laborers. The Devils Lake Inter-Ocean reported that the administration was taking steps to address the exodus of nearly 100,000 people to Canada the previous year. The newspaper