CHAPTER XIIIThe Tree of Freedom
THAT BUGLE again! You cannot hear it, but I know it is calling, for to-morrow is the birthday of the giant twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan. One more night under the stars, a brisk morning ride, and we canter up to the old fur-trading post. Paul Kane’s 139 people, “all living within the pickets of the fort” and not a white woman among them, have grown to 14,000, and, from their clothes and complexions, they might be in London or Toronto.
In all the big crowd, gathered to hear the Governor-General of Canada proclaim the birth of a new Province with Edmonton for capital, we look in vain for beaded redskin or shaggy voyageur. We discover one cowboy, got up for the occasion, in buckskin coat and fringed leather shaps, and he looks as singular in such a gathering as a canary among sparrows—or a sparrow among canaries—for the ladies’ dresses and the fluttering Union Jacks make up a scene as bright as anything in the bird creation. And side by side with the cowboy’s bronco stands—an automobile. If we ask for the Hudson’s Bay Company, we are directed to a modern department store; yet, on investigation, we discover the old fur-trading Edmonton still busy behind the scenes. A million dollars’ worth of furs pour in every year from a multitude of outposts in the north, to be sorted and packed for the markets of the world.Two New Provinces Born
Settlers look longingly up the trail by which the furs come down, and already all the surveyed land for eighty miles north, except the heavy brush, is taken up. In fact, pioneers are squatting twenty miles beyond the survey. But many of the late arrivals at Edmonton are men of some means who will buy land within easy reach of a railway. Among them are scores of families who have abandoned California, many good Dutch farmers from Pennsylvania, and hundreds from the Western States. At the same time, the “Galicians” are being largely reinforced, and they cannot afford to be as particular. They take brush land without hesitation, clear it, and, having spent much toil transforming it into farms, take root as firmly as the toughest willows they have just pulled out.
Our ear catches fragments of many tongues, therefore, in this expectant crowd, till the platform fills and the ceremony begins.
Think of what this ceremony means, both here and at Regina, which to-day becomes the capital of the new Province of Saskatchewan and will have its own festivities as soon as the Governor-General can arrive.
It is the blossoming of a tree of freedom, planted many years ago. In early days the Hudson’s Bay Company was the autocratic ruler of the West; but in 1835, finding it difficult to keep order in the growing Red River Settlement and along the frontier, the Company formed fifteen leading residents into a “Council of Assiniboia,” which appointed justices of the peace and organized a volunteer force. In 1870, as we have seen, southern Manitoba became a Province, electing its ownTree Must Be Cultivatedlegislature for local affairs and members of parliament to share in making laws for the whole Dominion. Its Lieutenant-Governor, appointed by the Federal Government, was also Governor of the territory beyond, from Manitoba to the Rockies.
In 1876, this territory was put under a separate Lieutenant-Governor, with a Council, in which elected representatives of the people had a share in the law-making. Battleford was chosen as the capital. In 1882, the southern part of the territory was divided into three Provisional Districts—Assiniboia, Saskatchewan north of that, Alberta west of both, and Athabasca in the north-west; Regina, which could now be reached by rail, became the capital. In 1888 a regular Legislative Assembly was set up, all its members being elected, though without complete provincial powers. And now, in 1905, the old districts have been abolished, and the land is divided between two full-fledged Provinces, ranking with the older Provinces of the East, with Manitoba, and with British Columbia, which has been a Province ever since it joined the Federation in 1871.
This tree of freedom—how shall we cultivate it? This power to pass our own laws, to make and unmake our Governments—how shall we use it? The Tree of Freedom must have constant care and cultivation, or it cannot yield good fruit; just as an orchard tree needs water, and fertile soil, and eternal vigilance against devouring parasites. The orchardman has to study, and learn the best thing to do, and do it with energy, or his trees will die, and his business too.
Human beings—ourselves—are more interesting to us than anything else. The art of politics, which is theWe are “Our Brother’s Keeper”art of free human beings living together, is therefore the most interesting of all arts. It can only seem dry and dull to us if we don’t see what it is and how it concerns us.
We can’t possibly “keep out of politics,” for as long as we are alive we have to live in the same world with all sorts of other people, who don’t all like the things we like, and can’t all earn their bread in the same way; and the art of arranging for different kinds of people to live and work in harmony together is simply “politics.”
“Good politics” is unselfish. Even if there were only one family in the world, its members would not all think alike, or have exactly the same interests. They would constantly have to give in to each other. If each member insisted on its own likes and interests, the family would break up at once. No man can “be a law to himself” alone; nor can a country, still less a part of a country. We are all “our brother’s keeper,” and bound to think of his interests as well as our own.
Step by step, our great human family has made great progress in the first essential art of civilization, the art of living together. The tribes of England, for instance, after hating and fighting each other as fiercely as the tribes of Canada did a few years ago, not only made peace, but united in one English nation. The tribes of Scotland did the same; even the Highlanders and the Lowlanders, speaking different languages, saw the folly of fighting, and united in one Scottish nation. England and Scotland went on fighting each other, but presently they too saw the folly of it, and united to form one Kingdom. Each country, each county, each village, may have its own ideas, even its own conflicting interests, but recognizes these as small compared with the jointThe Art of Living Togetherinterests of the whole, and allows no local or sectional desire to lessen its overwhelming loyalty to the duty of Union.
In Canada we have learnt the same lesson, though we meet some individuals who have not yet completed their education in the art of good citizenship. In the earliest days, Quebec was jealous of Montreal. Later on, Lower Canada, including both Quebec and Montreal, was at daggers drawn with Upper Canada, or Ontario. The Maritime Provinces were reluctant to federate with “the Canadas”—but did. It was a magnificent step forward when our whole country became united from sea to sea, and no step backward now can be dreamed of without shame.
British Columbia has some interests and ideas which are not shared by the Prairie Provinces; the desires of the western and eastern ends of the prairie are not always the same; the West as a whole has many discussions with the East as a whole, just as various parts of the East have still great differences among themselves. For that matter, two cities or two districts in the same Province, either East or West, often have differences, sometimes petty and sometimes grave. But every difference between district and district, Province and Province, East and West, however great it seems when we think of our individual interests alone, is small in comparison with the greater interests, the nobler duties, which unite us all. No difference can be allowed to interfere for a moment with the supreme and sacred duty of Union. And every difference can be settled, with difficulty or with ease according as we are careless or enthusiastic in the devotion of thought, study, ingenuity and unselfish good-will, to perfecting ourselves in the essential art of living together.Our Great Union
A greater union is ours to-day, greater even than the union of all our Provinces in one Dominion. We may be a long way yet from “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World”; but we must set our faces steadily in that direction, for the nations of the world cannot go on jostling and “daring” each other without disaster. No nation can ever again be absolutely “independent” of the rest, even if that were a high ideal, and not, as it is, a low one. The nations must learn the art of living and working together. Recognizing others’ interests as well as their own, they must join to study and perfect arrangements which will make the idea of war between them as absurd as it would be to-day between England and Scotland, Kansas and Iowa, Alberta and Saskatchewan, or Canada and Australia.
We have our feet securely now on the first well-tested step of the ladder. We have the priceless possession of a united commonwealth of self-governing nations which we call the British Empire; and what we have we shall hold. No force of reaction and dissension can rob us of that firm footing and separate us from our sister-nations, unless we fall asleep. We are trying a second step, the League of Nations, and hope it will bear; we must do our best to strengthen it; but meanwhile we have our own British league of nations, and that has stood the test of the hardest knocks in history.
The next step may be an arrangement between our Empire and that of the United States—which is just as much an “empire” as ours, if anyone is bothered by mere names. This West of ours, containing so many thousands born or long resident in the United States, can do much to strengthen the ties between these two empire-commonwealths. But, until our neighbors awakeThe Two Sister Empiresfrom the dream of irresponsible isolation, and come forward boldly to take their sister-empire by the hand, we must all make it perfectly clear to them that neither bribes nor boycotts can break our union or shake our independence.
In the future an international patriotism will flourish, to the confusion of strife-makers and to the great satisfaction of the peace-loving mass of mankind, whose essential one-ness is already an axiom of science and religion. Until we can have the greater patriotism, let us carefully cultivate the less.
CHAPTER XIVOn the Wings of the West
“Cela est bien dit; mais je sais aussi qu’il faut cultiver notre jardin.”“That is well said, but I also know that we must cultivate our garden.”
“Cela est bien dit; mais je sais aussi qu’il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
“That is well said, but I also know that we must cultivate our garden.”
AFTER many adventures, the speaker of these famous words at last found satisfaction, which nothing else had brought, in winning his daily bread from a little patch of earth.
Our “garden” is so big that we should still need months of travel to see it all, even now when trains are running over 20,000 miles of western railways. Our lawns and beds are measured by the million acres; our shrubbery, the forest, by the million acres too; with mountain ranges for our ornamental rockery, an ocean for our fish-pond. As the crow flies, a thousand miles divide a Manitoba farm on Lake of the Woods from an Albertan farm on Peace River; and the bird would have another 500 miles to fly before he saw the end of the West on the British Columbian coast. Fifteen hundred miles—nearly the breadth of the Atlantic, from Newfoundland to old Ireland.
Let us take an airplane, and beat the crow. In a space so vast, there are vast differences, of climate and soil, of people and their ways; but in a zig-zag flight, with sharp eyes and ears, we can discover a good deal of what is being done in various ways to “cultivate our garden.”Victoria, and the Eye of Canada
There are four of us—a Manitoban, a Saskatchewander (the name is his own invention, he says), an Albertan and a British Columbian. But I think our airplane will carry a few guests without a breakdown. Let us offer a ride to our visiting brothers and cousins from the East. The trip will do them good, and we shall enjoy their company.
Sir Sandford Fleming, the engineer, who came west in 1872 to spy out a route for the promised railway, took thirty-six days of hard riding, over forty miles a day, to reach the foothills of the Rocky Mountains from the Red River. Eleven years later, as he tells us, he made the trip by Canadian Pacific in fifty-six hours. To-day a traveller by the same railway does it in thirty hours. We shall cover three or four times that distance in thirty minutes.
We rise from the sea where the sun has a habit of setting, and steer for the coast explored by Captain Cook. At the foot of Vancouver Island we hover above the Jewel City, the city of flowers, Victoria. Do you smell the roses? A gem of architecture, the Parliament Building of British Columbia, rises from its garden on the shore of a land-locked port. Flying over fields of strawberries, we circle a high, wooded hill crowned by a shining watch-tower. From its revolving dome looks out the sleepless Eye of Canada, the priceless telescope, famed among astronomers, busy discovering suns that shone before the world was born. Our practical country is no longer a mere hanger-on of the international brotherhood of science and literature and art.
We leap the straits, alive with salmon, and steer for a clump of giant trees, cedars and Douglas fir towering 250 feet in air. Big ships are steering that way too, forWhat the Navy Meansthose trees are the gateposts of the Dominion. There is a steamer just going in, the fastest on the Pacific. In a few hours her precious cargo of oriental silk will be speeding across the continent from Vancouver by special train. Here is another, coming out, bound for Australia and New Zealand. Here come two more, both laden with grain, one for Japan and the other for England by way of Panama. In twelve months fifty million bushels of prairie wheat have passed through this western gate.
That silent ship with a few blue-coated figures on deck—she carries no grain, but every ounce of grain is carried under her protection. The prairie farmer, a thousand miles from salt water, carries on all his business under the sheltering flag of the British fleet. Without that protection a few years ago our wheat trade would have fallen to ruin in a night; the freedom of the seas would have vanished—and with it the freedom of the world. Neither the mother-land herself, nor Canada, nor even the United States, could have sent her army to the rescue, but for the splendid efficiency of the British fleet. We call it an engine of war, but its chief duty and pride is to keep the peace. Its quiet patrol of the sea is the most effective insurance against the risk of war; and for this protection we Canadians pay not one cent. The British blue-jacket is feared only by war-lovers and law-breakers. He is the guardian of the peace at sea, as surely as the policeman is its guardian on land.
Vancouver, where forty years ago scarce an axe had broken the silence of the forest, is a great city now, and likely to be the greatest sea-port on the west coast of America. This Province, by the way, ownsFish, Forest and Mine1,900 ships—more than any other Province in the Dominion.
Over the verdant coastal plain we fly, with its rich berry farms and dairy farms, and away up the narrow sea, beloved of tourists, between numberless islands and the mainland pierced by many a mountain fjord. Hundreds of fishermen are out in their little boats, catching halibut, which in a few days will appear on the dining tables of St. Paul or Chicago. British Columbia catches $20,000,000 worth of fish in a year, with salmon heading the list and halibut next. No other Province comes near that total.
Those mighty forests on our right, too, furnish $30,000,000 worth of wood, which means nearly 450,000,000 cubic feet of standing timber cut down. Quite as much as that probably goes up in smoke. Are we so gorged and bloated with riches that we must burn up our possessions to get rid of them? By the careless act of a moment we destroy wholesale the gifts that nature has taken centuries to grow for our use.
Sweeping into a picturesque fjord, we see a little town clinging to a steep hillside, with a huge mill covering the shore: a paper town, sending out shipload after shipload of transformed forest to be covered with printer’s ink.
Another arm of the sea brings us to a famous silver mine. In gold and silver mining, and in mineral production as a whole, this Province is second only to Ontario. In lead and zinc the score is “British Columbia first and the rest nowhere.” At Prince Rupert, the ocean terminus of the Canadian National Railway, we strike inland and follow the track for hundreds of miles. The land is neither mountainous nor so heavily timbered: open spaces appear.A Pioneer Family
The sound of hammering comes up from a pioneer settlement. A farmer is building a new barn. Now he stops. Mrs. Settler is just home with the wagon, from the creamery. “They were asking if we couldn’t send in more cream,” she says. “I’ll buy another cow,” says Mr. Settler, “while the buying’s good. And half that $300 I made trapping last winter is in the bank yet.”
Children come running out of the house, three of them; a fourth, a small boy, has been helping his father; Mrs. Settler goes indoors and comes out with a fifth in her arms. This looks good. I think we must land here.
We all sit down and chat under the shade trees that father was careful to leave when he cleared the land for his garden. It turns out that the man and his wife were a country boy and girl who drifted into the city, as so many do. “But when the babies began to come,” says the lady, “we both made up our minds to get out where they could grow up in freedom as we did, and learn to do things for themselves, as they never would in town. That more than makes up for not having quite such a good school, even if we hadn’t the education to help them keep ahead of the school work all the time, as we do. And as for us, we’re not crazy about the white lights and all that; we get all the white light we want from Mr. Sun—when he gets up he don’t wait long for us! No, we’ve never regretted coming out here, and only wish we’d come sooner.”
“You don’t find the work too much for you, then, with your five children?”
“Five! There’s seven—the two biggest are out stacking hay, Jim on the stacker and Jenny riding the sweep. They just love to handle the teams alone, without being interfered with, and made me promise to take“Living Simply, Living High”the cream to-day so they could. They seem to think the farm work is just a big sort of play.”
“I guess they find it pleasant because they never hear you and your husband talking as if it was unpleasant.”
“No, indeed; why should we? Of course, we don’t let them overdo it—nor ourselves either. We study, and plan, and find out all sorts of labor-saving dodges and devices; and we cut out the frills, too, in clothing and cooking and everything else. I reckon we’ve got the ‘simple life’ down to a pretty fine point, and enjoy it all the more. The West has got to work out a way of living for itself, and not make itself miserable trying to follow fashions that grew up where people had servants to do everything for them. We’ve got to choose: we can either have children and happiness and health, with the simplest possible life, or wear ourselves out with drudgery, trying to ‘keep up with the Joneses’. If the Joneses talk to me about a ‘high standard of living,’ I say that’s just what we’ve got and they haven’t.”
Yes, the high standard of living we have to set before ourselves, and before the people we ask to join us, is a high standard of working, a high standard of learning and thinking, with a high standard of family life and public spirit. In these we shall enjoy a high standard of living indeed.
“The wife is right,” says her husband, laughing, as I look to see how he is taking all this. “I wouldn’t say so if she starved us, or sent the children to school in rags, would I? But it seems to me, the more she has to do, the better she gets things done. Planning does it, I reckon—just thinking and planning.”
“Use your brains and save your hands, eh?”
“That’s the size of it. Next time the Prince ofThe West and the WarWales comes out to his ranch, you send him along, and I reckon she’d cook him a four-course dinner on a chip-and-a-half of firing, if he was keen on style, which he doesn’t seem to be. Of course we’ve got a fireless cooker; she planned it from one she saw in a paper, and little Jim made the box. But, listen! There they are.”
Melodious sounds are echoing through the woods—“Comin’ through the rye,” sung in unison by two robust young voices, and jingling tug-chains for accompaniment.
With that music echoing in our ears, and the “three cheers” of the whole happy family as we take off, we sail away down the middle of the Province to the South.
There’s the Okanagan Valley, with its beautiful houses, set gem-like in their gardens, looking out on battalions, brigades, whole army corps of apple and cherry and plum and peach and apricot trees, knee-deep in vetch and alfalfa; on spreading fields of tomatoes, onions and celery, and potatoes; all watered from the mountain streams close by. And this is only one, though the chief, among the fruit valleys of this rich and corrugated Province.
“They used to laugh at us,” an English orchardman says, “and what they called our ‘style’—‘Piccadilly in the Wilds,’ and all that—but we know how to work.” No, if we ever laughed we stopped when we saw 3,400 men—3,400 from a total population of 15,000—pouring out of this valley to fight for our common cause. When those thousands hurried off to the War, those who were left doubled up and did their work for them, as far as human beings could. . . . Of the 590,572 men in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, we do not forget that 200,569 came from these four Western Provinces,Mountain Marvelsbesides 2,327 from Yukon. British Columbia sent 51,438, Alberta 45,146, Saskatchewan, 37,666, and Manitoba 66,319.
Turn east again, across a labyrinth of mountain and forest. A blast of hot air rises from one spot—a highly effective kind of hot air, too. That smelter pours out sixty million pounds of refined zinc in a year—nearly the whole zinc production of Canada.
That broad valley where two rivers meet, the Columbia and the Kootenay, was filled with dense jungle a few years ago. It has been transformed into a garden, by the co-operative industry of the Doukhobors. This is the headquarters of their community. That black snake winding for miles up to the head of a waterfall is their new irrigation pipe-line, and that big building beside the railway is their jam factory.
Higher, now! Ten thousand feet up, and still we have to twist and turn to avoid the higher peaks. We are nearing the Great Divide of the Continent. A sea of Rocky Mountains, piercing the azure sky with spires and domes and pyramids of white and grey, till sunset magic changes all to flaming red; mountains towering over glaciers and snowfields, which pour their torrents down through pine-clad glens and dark ravines. A lake of brilliant blue, set in a royal ring of snow-soft pearls and glacial diamonds. That is Lake Louise: many travellers call it the most beautiful spot in this rich land of beauties. More lakes, more cataracts, more glaciers, more peaks that pierce the sky; a land of myriad marvels; a treasure house of all that is grand and beautiful.
The crack of a rifle, and a mountain lion rolls down the slope, as the echo volleys from cliff to cliff. TheThe Fire Patrolbig-game hunter’s paradise, this; the paradise of tourists, alpine climbers, artists, and all who cannot be satisfied with anything short of perfection.
“I have been there and still would go,It’s like a little heaven below.”
“I have been there and still would go,It’s like a little heaven below.”
“I have been there and still would go,It’s like a little heaven below.”
“I have been there and still would go,
It’s like a little heaven below.”
Hundreds of peaks have never yet been climbed, and many daring alpinists come in every year to win fresh victories over the mountains, with the help of Swiss guides who live in those picturesque chalets perched on a height overlooking the Columbia, back there at Golden.
We are not the only navigators of the upper air to enjoy this bird’s-eye view of the earthly paradise. As we glide down the eastern slope of the mountains another airplane sweeps up to meet us—and now it is past and away to patrol the high forest. It comes from High River, near the Prince of Wales’s Canadian home. There, as well as at Winnipeg and Vancouver, the Department of National Defence keeps up stations of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Its fliers carry out many useful operations, such as patrolling the coast against drug and liquor smuggling and illegal fishing; carrying surveyors and their supplies, and treaty money for Indian tribes; aerial photography, especially for the survey of water-powers; and, most of all, patrolling the forest on the watch against fires. Many a fire that might have done untold mischief has thus been discovered and checked before it could get beyond control. By wireless telephone a flying plane has sent back word of such a fire to the station 190 miles away.
CHAPTER XVA Flight Across the Plains
AWAY WE glide, down the eastern slope. We have entered Alberta now. A farming Province? Yes, all the Prairie Provinces are. That is their chief glory, for agriculture is the one industry that man cannot do without, unless he cuts down his numbers by ninety-nine per cent. and tries to live like his savage forefathers, by hunting and fishing alone.
Yet farming is not everything, even here. We only hear of what comes off the surface of the prairie, as a rule; but underground there is wealth we have scarcely begun to touch. Look at those coal mines on the mountain slopes—down south and up north, and away out on the plain. One-seventh of all the coal in the world is right here in Alberta. Already she digs out more than any other Province in Canada.
“When we came in first and dug our well,” an old settler once told me, “we threw out two wagon loads of coal. One time we made a little camp fire at night and were surprised to find it still burning in the morning. We had made our fire of sticks on a bed of coal, without knowing it.”
British Columbia, richer in water-power, and with plenty of coal within easy reach, will one day be the busiest manufacturing workshop of the whole Pacific slope. But Alberta and Saskatchewan have great water-powerWater Power and Manufacturestoo, and Manitoba has more than all three put together.
It is hard for any one to believe, who thinks of the Prairie Provinces as flat, that their streams have “fall” enough to create the tremendous water-power which careful measurement shows them to possess. But look! One of the streams that join to make the Bow River starts at a height of 6,775 feet above sea level. Even from Calgary the water falls 2,150 feet, and from Edmonton 750 feet, to the meeting place of the North and South Saskatchewan; from that point it falls 540 feet more before entering Lake Winnipeg; and between the Lake and the sea at Port Nelson is an additional fall of 710 feet. In the south-east, the water from Lake of the Woods has to fall about 350 feet to reach Lake Winnipeg.
“Liquid gold,” the brown water deserves to be called, now running to waste in all our rivers. We only use a minute fraction of it all, to make electric light and power. One day we may use it, as they now do in Norway, to extract from the air all the nitrogen we need to put back in the land, to replace what we have taken out in wheat. The richest soil cannot be drained of its riches without becoming poor.
It is not lack of power that keeps even the prairie from developing great manufactures, but only lack of a great population to buy the goods. Long haulage of raw material does not prevent large-scale manufacturing in other “purely agricultural” regions.
You don’t like statistics, perhaps—I don’t exactly love them myself—but a few picked figures now and then are good to chew on. Take these, for instance:
Already the manufactures of Western Canada amount to $333,000,000 in a year. British Columbia standsThe Zephyr Called Chinookfirst with $149,000,000, Manitoba next with $94,000,000, then Alberta with $51,000,000 and Saskatchewan with $38,000,000. “Vegetable products” account for $88,000,000, including $42,000,000 from flour and grist mills; “Animal products,” for $73,000,000, including $31,000,000 from slaughtering and meat packing, and nearly $21,000,000 from butter and cheese; “Wood and paper,” for $88,000,000, of which British Columbia contributes $62,000,000. Textiles exceed $17,000,000, and iron and steel industries $13,000,000.
· · · · · ·
The foothills past, we sail out over the plain in company with the balmy Chinook. A wonderful wind this zephyr, as the Greeks called it—
“Sweet and low, sweet and low,Wind of the western sea.”
“Sweet and low, sweet and low,Wind of the western sea.”
“Sweet and low, sweet and low,Wind of the western sea.”
“Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea.”
In the middle of winter it has come to my farm, a hundred miles east of the mountains, and driven the mercury up to 75. Not “in the shade,” of course; but why stay in the shade when you can be out in the warm sun?
The city of Calgary, as we fly over it now, has five times the people it had when we rode through it twenty years ago. And the face of the country east and south has completely changed. The West is not satisfied with new roads and railways, it must have new lakes and rivers too. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company has tapped the Bow in two places, and the streams flowing out spread over a three-million-acre block in 4,000 miles of irrigating ditches and canals. It is the biggest irrigation scheme in the world, except a few carried out by powerful Governments. The farmers of several neighboringIrrigation, Bees, and Gasdistricts have now co-operative irrigation systems of their own, with the Provincial Government’s help.
What a contrast, between the waist-deep sea of green alfalfa and the dry land still untouched by the life-giving water of the Bow! Southern Alberta does not lack moisture: an inexhaustible supply pours down from the mountain snow in never-failing streams.
Look at that three-acre picture, set in a broad green frame of maple, ash, willow, poplar and dainty caragana, and filled with melons, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, giant cabbages, onions and potatoes—all watered, like the farm beyond, from the St. Mary River, near Lethbridge. “I thought there was no such color as green up here when we came in first,” says the farmer’s wife, “but that was before we turned the water on. And look at it now!” It is a sight for sore eyes.
Do you hear the hum of bees? They are flying to and from that cottage yonder. The lady knitting at the door, under a shady porch of wild hop-vine, says she makes $10 per square foot of her “holding,” which is a two-by-two wooden stand with a hive on it. The bees pasture on the neighbors’ alfalfa, and bring her $40 worth of honey in a season. Reckon what that comes to per acre, if you have the time and arithmetic. Somebody must have reckoned it up, for he has just brought in ten million bees for distribution through these Western Provinces.
Eastward still we fly. Do you smell gas? That is the “medicine” of Medicine Hat. Puncture the earth, and up it comes: ready-made light and heat. Hot-house flowers grown by that heat have beautified the tables of Montreal, 2,000 miles away.Quality, in Cattle and Sheep
Here we are skimming over a cattle ranch. The old-style ranch is not quite dead, but is on its last legs—like the old-style caterpillar that shrivels up into a chrysalis before its resurrection into a beautiful new-style butterfly. Listen to the rancher talking to one of his neighbors. “I’ve got to go out of business,” says he.
“No,” says neighbor; “just change it, as I did. I used to let the beasts rustle, and turn them off as four or five-year-olds. Now, the market for that sort of stuff is gone. I breed them and feed them through the winter, so they’re in fine shape as two-year-olds, and at the worst of times I get a good enough price for a good beast. Here’s the latest Government report from the Winnipeg stockyards: ‘The market was draggy owing to the poor quality of the offerings, but there was a good demand for anything showing quality and flesh.’ They’ve been telling us that for years, and it’s time we took it in.”
Hear the music rising from the next ranch—sheep baa-ing for their lambs. Their owner was not satisfied with the common range ewes, weighing about 100 pounds and giving five or six pounds of wool. Six years ago he began buying pure-bred rams, and now his average is 175 pounds of sheep and nearly ten pounds of wool. Quality, only quality pays. And quality in the beast shows quality in the man.
We are in Saskatchewan already. Here is another fine Parliament Building in the middle of a garden, with pleasure boats on a lake. Little “Pile of Bones,” as it was before the railway came, is now Regina, Queen City of the Middle Province. On a cabinet minister’s window-sill is a beautiful vase. No, it is not imported from England or France; it is made of fine white SaskatchewanNew Homes for Oldclay, the only deposit known in Canada. But it is not this rare white clay that makes the wealth of Saskatchewan; it is the common brown dirt.
We speed through the sunny air, and over the vast central plain. Would you recognize it? The unbroken wilderness, where twenty years ago we rode day after day without meeting a soul, is now a checker-board of golden wheat fields, dotted with farmhouses and big barns, villages and schools, and crossed by a network of railways, each a string of elevator-beads—not only the Canadian Pacific now, but two other transcontinental systems, the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk, now merged in the Canadian National.
Nearly all the sod shacks have gone. From most of the log cabins the people have moved into new frame houses, though many of the old dwellings have been cased in to make the new. The frame house itself has been vastly improved, in looks as well as convenience. The natural taste for beauty is finding expression, as it was seldom allowed to in hard pioneering days. Hundreds of prairie habitations are pleasant to look upon, tasteful in color and form, with shady verandas, and gardens neatly fenced.
I wish it could be said that the average prairie farmhouse was provided with a bathroom, hot and cold water, and drainage, and kept comfortably warm in the coldest spells of weather; but only an exceptional district here and there has a majority of its homes as well equipped as that. Ten years from now, such a district will be no longer exceptional.
Look at that network of wires along the roadsides, and running into nearly every house. This Province uses 96,000 telephones, Manitoba 68,000, Alberta 64,000 andTrees for Use and BeautyBritish Columbia 79,000. That means 958,000 miles of wire. It is not as if we were short of post-offices; over 4,200 serve these four Provinces; with 350 rural delivery routes, so that many thousands of country folk get their letters, and papers, and even “cash on delivery” parcels, without going to any post-office.
Do you notice another change? The “bald-headed prairie” is not so bald now. It was not always so bald as we saw it a few years ago, but the Indians took to setting the prairie on fire to drive the buffalo. Where this was checked and the trees had a chance, they spread fast.
Most of the pioneer settlers were too busy at first to think of planting trees to beautify their new homes. Many, unfortunately, had no intention of making permanent homes here; they would make just enough “improvements” to get their patents, and then sell their homesteads and go off to repeat the process farther afield; they were “land speculators” just as truly as those who bought large tracts to hold it for high prices. Some of the real home-makers, however, had enough foresight to plant trees around their shacks at the very start.
Look at that charming picture. A neat white farmhouse, with a wide veranda, green lawns and flower-beds, divided from the barnyard by a hedge of blue spruce and lilac. The whole range of buildings is sheltered on the north, west and east, by a thick grove of maples and poplars thirty or forty feet high. That has all grown up in twenty years. The farmer began planting trees the year after he reaped his first crop.
Westerners discovered after a while, and especially after soil drifting had become a nuisance, that trees“We had to Learn”were needed to protect our fields from the wind. The Dominion Government and the Canadian Pacific both started tree nurseries, distributing millions of seedlings and cuttings to farmers, who plant them in shelter belts along their fences. In 1924 the Government Forestry Stations supplied 5,215,800 of these young trees, to 4,593 applicants.
This Province grows more wheat than any other in the Dominion, than any State in the Union to the south. But listen!
There is a grain-grower speaking. “I had a hard time at first,” he says, “and left for the States. I found things worse in the farming line there, as indeed they are to-day. Thousands quit this country, like me; we didn’t know how to get a crop. We had thought of the West as a sort of big ready-made farm. ‘All you have to do is tickle the earth with a plow and she laughs with a harvest,’ we used to think. We were too new to the country; and we were mostly young men, and in too much of a hurry. We hadn’t a lot of old farmers around us, as people have in older countries, to tell us that hard times were always followed by good times.”
“No,” say I, “we were a nation of newcomers; and we are not much more now, for what is half a century in the lifetime of a country? Besides, we had pulled up stakes somewhere else to come here; so it seemed the simplest thing to pull them up again and go somewhere else. We had to learn the good habit of ‘sticking it.’ Some men here are simply nomads, throw-backs to our pre-historic hunting tribe, and they will go on moving for ever. Perhaps when they have sampled the whole of this continent and find they can’t get farther west than the Farthest West, they may try the Farthest EastClimate and Criticsand settle in China till they are ready to start a fresh migration on the track of their early ancestors, through Asia to Europe again!
“Perhaps they will find the perfect climate, somewhere. I have sampled all sorts of climate in Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and never found one that escaped fierce criticism from the inhabitants. I met a man the other day who had thought to find it in Southern California,—‘lie on your back and let the fruit drop into your mouth,’ you know. He had come back a wiser man. And he showed me a story by an eminent American author, in the most popular magazine of his country, describing a personal experience at Los Angeles. Here are his very words:
“ ‘Three days and nights of dry suffocation; gasping for breath in the stinging, scorching, withering, enervating heat; days of shrill, shrieking, moaning wind that smites you hip and thigh; of excruciating and shriveling blasts from the blistering pit of that vast shameless inferno, the deadly desert, where dead things lie and bleach, and poisonous reptiles bask on the sun-baked rocks; days when your skin is pelted and prickled with invisible bullets of alkaline dust; when depression reigns, vitality ebbs, and nerves are set on edge.’
“ ‘Three days and nights of dry suffocation; gasping for breath in the stinging, scorching, withering, enervating heat; days of shrill, shrieking, moaning wind that smites you hip and thigh; of excruciating and shriveling blasts from the blistering pit of that vast shameless inferno, the deadly desert, where dead things lie and bleach, and poisonous reptiles bask on the sun-baked rocks; days when your skin is pelted and prickled with invisible bullets of alkaline dust; when depression reigns, vitality ebbs, and nerves are set on edge.’
“Every climate may have a fit of sulks or temper now and then; but ours at its worst never inflicts anything like that. It may put an extra edge on our appetite, but not on our nerves. It is a magnificent nurse of hardy, healthy men and women.
“We can always find plenty to grumble at, if we“Get out of the Rut”think grumbling will improve our digestions, wherever we go. You remember the sporting offer that the Premier of this Province made to one of his people who said he was ‘fed up and wanted to quit’—‘Tell me when you’ve found a better place and I’ll lend you the fare.’ When the man had studied up conditions in every country in the geography, and taken a glance at Mars, he turned back quite cheerfully to his own Western farm and hitched up his team for the fall plowing.”
“Yes,” says our friend, “the man who stayed, or came back as I did, and took pains to learn what the earth really wanted, is the happiest man to-day.
“We learned to select and test our seed grain, and that accounts for the high proportion of number one wheat that makes the Canadian West famous now. We learned to summer-fallow a third or a half of our land every year, to preserve moisture for next year’s crop. But that’s a terribly wasteful plan, besides turning the fibry soil into dust that blows off and takes the young crop with it. We’ve got to go on learning, that’s all, and get out of the old rut, and go in for regular rotation of crops, or at least lay down the fields in pasture, turn and turn about, to give the land a chance to recover. That means more livestock, and some of us won’t take the trouble. But it has to be done, for the sake of those who come after us. The country won’t die when we do.”
“True for you! Fortunately we are getting ashamed of the old false idea that when a man has bought a pieceAutomobiles and Extravaganceof land, or got it as a homestead, he has a right to do as he likes with it. That land is a piece of Canada. The land of Canada is all that the people of Canada will have to live on, to the end of the world. Who are we, that we should dare to spoil it for all who come after us, taking out of it in thirty or forty voracious crops of grain the plant food which nature has taken thousands of years to accumulate?”