While the Prince and his party were camping, the train remained in Nipigon, a tiny village set in complete isolation on the edge of the river and in the heart of the woods.
It is a little germ-culture of humanity cut off from the world. The only way out is, apparently, the railway, though, perhaps, one could get away by the boats that come up to load pulp wood, or by the petrol launches that scurry out on to Lake Superior and its waterside towns. But the roads out of it, there appear to be none. Follow any track, and it fades away gently into the primitive bush.
It is a nest of loneliness that has carried on after its old office as a big fur collecting post—you see the original offices of Revillon Frères and the Hudson Bay Company standing today—has gone. Now it lives on lumber and the fishing, and one wonders what else.
Its tiny station, through which the Transcontinental trains thunder, is faced by a long, straggling green, and fringing the green is a row of wooden shops and houses equally straggling. They have a somnolent and spiritless air. Behind is a wedge of pretty dwellings stretching down to the river, tailing off into an Indian encampment by the stream, where, about dingy tepees, a dozen or so stoic children play.
There are three hundred souls in the village, mainly Finns and Indians become Canadians. They are not the Indians of Fenimore Cooper, but men who wear peaked caps, bright blouse shirts or sweaters, with broad yellow, blue and white stripes (a popular article of wear all over Canada), and women who wear the shin skirts and silks of civilization. Only here and there one sees old squaw women, stout and brown and bent, with the plaid shawl of modernity making up for the moccasins of their ancient race.
Small though it is, or perhaps because it is so small and observable, Nipigon is an example of the amalgam from which the Canadian race is being fused. We went, for instance, to a dance given by the Finns in their varnished, brown-wood hall on the Saturday night. It was an attractive and interesting evening. The whole of the village, without distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced (and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish girl, demure and well-dressed, who might have been anything from the leader of local Society to a clerk (i.e., a counter hand) in one of the shops. For all we knew, the plumber might have been dancing with the leading citizen's daughter, and the local Astor with the local dressmaker's assistant.
In any case, it didn't matter. In Canada they don't think about that sort of thing. They were all unconcerned and happy in the big, generous spirit of equality that makes Canada the home of one big family rather than the dwelling-place of different classes and social grades. This fact was not new to us; naturally, we had seen and mixed with Canadians in hotels and on the street elsewhere. In those gathering-places of humanity, the hotels, we had lived with the big, jolly, homely crowds without social strata, who might very well have changed places with the waiters and the waiters with them without anybody noticing any difference. That would not have meant a loss of dignity to anybody. Nobody has any use for social status in the Dominion, the only standard being whether a man is a "mixer" or not.
By way of a footnote, I might say that waiters, even as waiters, are on the way to take seats as guests, since, apparently, waiting is only an occupation a man takes up until he finds something worth while. Not unexpectedly Canadian waiting suffers through this.
What we had seen in the large towns, and in the large gregarious life of cities, we saw "close up" at Nipigon. The varied crowd, Finns, British, Canadian and Indian (one of the Indians, a young dandy, had served with distinction during the war, had married a white Canadian, and was one of the richest men present), danced without social distinctions in that pleasant hall to Finn folk-songs that had never been set down on paper played on an accordion. It was a delightful evening.
For the rest, those with the train fished (or, rather, went through all the ritual with little of the results), walked, bathed in the lake, watched the American "movie" men in their endeavours to convert the British to baseball, or endeavoured, with as little success, to convert the baseball "fans" to cricket. The recreations of Nipigon were not hectic, and we were glad to get on to towns and massed life again.
I confess our view of Nipigon of the hundred houses was not that of the Indian boy who discussed it with us. He told us Nipigon was not the place for him.
"You wait," he said. "Next year I go. Next year I am fifteen. Then I go out into the woods. I go right away. I can't stand this city life."
Canada, on Monday, September 8th, demonstrated its amazing faculty for startling contrasts. It lifted the Prince from the primitive to the ultra-modern in a single movement. In the morning he was in the silent forests of Nipigon, a tract so wild that man seemed no nearer than a thousand miles. Three hours later he was moving amid the dense crowds that filled the streets of the latest word in industrial cities.
He stepped straight from Nipigon to the twin cities of Port Arthur and Fort William. These two cities are really one, and together form the great trade pool into which the traffic of the vast grain-bearing West and North-West pours for transport on the Great Lakes.
These two cities sprang from the little human nucleus made up of a Jesuit mission and a Hudson Bay Company depot of the old days. They stand on Thunder Bay, a deep-water sack thrusting out from Lake Superior under the slopes of flat-topped Thunder Cape. The situation is ideal for handling the trade of the great lake highway that swings the traffic through the heart of the Western continent.
Port Arthur and Fort William have seen their chances and made the most of them. They have constructed great wharves along the bay to accommodate a huge traffic. Over the wharves they have built up the greatest grain elevators in the world, not a few of them but a series, until the cities seemed to be inhabited solely by these giants. These elevators and stores collect and distribute the vast streams of grain that pour in from the prairies, at whose door the cities stand, distributing it across the lakes to the cities of America, or along the lakes to the Canadian East and the railways that tranship it to Europe.
On the quays are the towering lattices of patent derricks, forests of them, that handle coal and ore and cargoes of infinite variety. And the [Transcriber's note: word(s) possibly missing from source] derricks and the elevators are the uncannily long and lean lake freighters, ships with a tiny deck superstructure forward of a great rake of hold, and a tiny engine-house astern under the stack. And by these grain boats are the ore tramps and coal boats from Lake Erie, and cargo boats with paper pulp for England made in the big mills that turn the forests about Lake Superior into riches.
Not content with docking boats, the twin cities build them. They build with equal ease a 10,000-ton freighter, or a great sky-scraping tourist boat to ply between Canada and the American shores. And presently it will be sending its 10,000-tonners direct to Liverpool; they only await the deepening of the Welland Canal near Niagara before starting a regular service on this 4,000-mile voyage.
They are modern cities, indeed, that snatch every chance for wealth and progress, and use even the power that Nature gives in numerous falls to work their dynamos, and through them their many mills and factories. And the marvel of these cities is that they are inland cities—inland ports thousands of miles from the nearest salt water.
These places gave the Prince the welcome of ardent twins. Their greeting was practically one, for though the train made two stops, and there were two sets of functions, there are only a few minutes' train-time between them, and the greetings seemed of a continuous whole.
Port Arthur had the Prince first for a score of minutes, in which crowds about the station showed their welcome in the Canadian way. It was here we first came in touch with the "Mounties," the fine men of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, whose scarlet coats, jaunty stetsons, blue breeches and high tan boots set off the carriage of an excellently set-up body of men. They acted as escort while the Prince drove into the town to a charming collegiate garden, where the Mayor tried to welcome him formally.
Tried is the only word. How could Prince or Mayor be formal when both stood in the heart of a crowd so close together that when the Mayor read his address the document rested on the Prince's chest, while at the Prince's elbows crowded little boys and other distinguished citizens? Formal or not, it was very human and very pleasant.
Returning through the town, something went wrong with the procession. Many of the automobiles forcing their way through the crowd to the train—which stood beside the street—found there was no Prince. We stood about asking what was happening and where it was happening. After ten minutes of this an automobile driver strolled over from a car and asked "what was doing now?"
We consulted the programs and told him that the Prince was launching a ship.
"He is, is he?" said the driver without passion. "Well, I've got members of the shipbuilding company and half the reception committee in my car."
In spite of that, the Prince launched a fine boat, that took the water broadside in the lake manner, before going on to Fort William.
Fort William had an immense crowd upon the green before the station, on the station, and even on the station buildings. Part of the crowd was made up of children, each one of them a representative of the nationalities that came from the Old World to find a new life and a new home in Canada. Each of them was dressed in his or her national costume, making an interesting picture.
There were twenty-four children, each of a different race, and the races ranged from France to Slovenia, from Persia to China and Syria. There were negroes and Siamese and Czecho-Slovaks in this remarkable collection of elements from whose fusion Canada of today is being fashioned.
The Prince drove through the cheering streets of Fort William, and paid visits to some of the great industrial concerns, before setting out for Winnipeg and the wide-flung spaces of the West.
We had a hint of what the Western welcome was going to be like from the Winnipeg papers that were handed to us with our cantaloupe at breakfast on Tuesday, September 9th.
They were concerning themselves brightly and strenuously with the details of the visit that day, and were also offering real Western advice on the etiquette of clothes.
formed the main headline, taking the place of space usually given to Baseball reports or other vital news. And pen pictures of Western thrill were given of leading men chasing in and out of the stores of the town in an attempt to buy a "Silk Lid" (a top hat) in order to be fit to figure at receptions.
The writer had even broken into verse to describe the emotions of the occasion. Despairing of prose he wrote:
Get out the old silk bonnet,Iron a new shine on it.Just pretend your long-tailed coat does not seem queer,For we'll be all properAs a crossing "copper"When the Prince of Wales is here.
The Ladies' Page also caught the infection. It crossed its page with a wail:
and it went on for columns to tell how silver slippers were the only kind the Prince would look at. He had chosen all partners at all balls in all towns by the simple method of looking for silver slippers. The case of those without silver slippers was hopeless. The maidens of Winnipeg well knew this. There had been a silver slipper battue through all the stores, and all had gone—it was, so one felt from the article, a crisis for all those who had been slow.
A rival paper somewhat calmed the anxious citizens by stating that the Silk Lid and the Striped Pants were not necessities, and that the Prince himself did not favour formal dress—a fact, for indeed, he preferred himself the informality of a grey lounge suit always, when not wearing uniform, and did not even trouble to change for dinner unless attending a function. The paper also hinted that he had eyes for other things in partners besides silver slippers.
These papers gave us an indication that not only would "Winnipeg be polished to the heels of its shoes" at the coming of the Prince, but to continue the metaphor, it would be enthusiastic to well above its hat-band. And it was.
Certainly Winnipeg's welcome did not stop at the huge mass of heels—high as well as low—that carried it out to look at the Prince on his arrival. It mounted well up to the heart and to the head as he left the wide-open space in front of the C.P.R. station, and, with a brave escort of red-tuniced "Mounties," swung into the old pioneer trail—only it is called Main Street now—toward the Town Hall.
The exceedingly broad street was lined with immense crowds, that, on the whole, kept their ranks like a London rather than a Canadian throng for at least two hundred yards.
Then this imported docility gave way, and the press of people became entirely Canadian. The essential spirit of the Canadian, like that of the citizen of another country, is that "he will be there." Or perhaps I should say he "will berightthere." Anyhow, there he was as close to the Prince as he could get without actually climbing into the carriage that was slowing down before the daïs among trees in the garden before the City Hall.
In a minute where there had been a broad open space lined with neat policemen, there was a swamping mass of Canadians of all ages, and the Prince was entirely hemmed in. In fact only a free fight of the most amiable kind got him out of the carriage and on to the daïs. The Marine orderlies, and others of the suite, joined in an attempt to press the throng back. They could accomplish nothing until the "Mounties" came to their aid, forced a passage with their horses, and so permitted the Prince to mount the daïs and hear the Mayor say what the crowd had been explaining for the past ten minutes, that is, how glad Winnipeg was to see him.
It was the usual function, but varied a little. Winnipeg has not always been happy in the matter of its water supply, and the day and the Prince came together to inaugurate a new era. It was accomplished in the modern manner. The Prince pressed a button on the platform and water-gates on Shoal Lake outside the city swung open. In a minute or two a dry fountain in the gardens before the Prince threw up a jet of water. The new water had come to Winnipeg.
Through big crowds on the sidewalks he passed through an avenue of fine, tall and modern stores, along Broadway, where the tram-tracks fringed with grass and trees run down the centre of a wide boulevard that is edged with lawns and trees, and so to the new Parliament Buildings.
Here there was a vivid and shining scene before the great white curtain of a classic building not yet finished.
In the wide forecourt was a mass of children bearing flags, and up the great flight of steps leading to the impressive Corinthian porch was a bank of people, jewelled with flags and vivid in gay dresses. Against the sharp white mass of the building this living, thrilling bed of humanity made an unforgettable picture.
The ceremony in the spacious entrance hall was also full of the movement and colour of life. In the massive square hall stairs spring upward to the gallery on which the Prince stood. On the level of each floor galleries were cut out of the solid stone of the walls. Crowded in these galleries were men and women, who looked down the shaft of this austere chamber upon a grouping of people about the foot of the cold, white ascending stairs. The strong, clear light added to the dramatic dignity of the scene.
The groups moved up the white stairs slowly between the ranks of Highlanders, whose uniforms took on a vividity in the clarified light. The Prince in Guard's uniform, with his suite in blue and gold and khaki and red behind him, stood on the big white stage of the stair-head to receive them. It was a scene that had all the tone and all the circumstances of an Eastern levée.
But it was a levée with a fleck of humour, also.
As he turned to leave, the Prince noticed beside him a handsome armchair upholstered in royal blue. It was a strange, lonely chair in that desert of gallery and standing humanity. It was a chair that needed explaining.
In characteristic fashion the Prince bent down to it to find an explanation. The crowd, knowing all about that chair and understanding his puzzlement, began to laugh. It laughed outright and with sympathetic humour when, abruptly handing his Guards' cap to one of his staff, he solemnly sat down in it for a second instead of going his way.
The chair was the chair his father and grandfather had sat in when they came to Winnipeg. Silver medallions on it gave testimony to facts. The Prince had not time to adopt a fully considered sitting, but he was not going to leave the building until he, too, had registered his claim to it.
In the big Campus that fronts the University of Manitoba, and ranked by thousands in a hollow square, were the veterans in khaki and civies who had fought as comrades of the Prince in the war. To these he went next.
It was a lengthy ceremony, for there were many to inspect. There were Canadian Highlanders and riflemen in the square, as well as veterans dating back to the time of the North-West Rebellion of '85. And there was also the regimental goat of the 5th West Canadians, a big, husky fellow, who endeavoured to take control of the ceremony with his horns, as befitted a veteran who sported four service chevrons and a wound stripe.
Here, too, the crowd was the most stirring and remarkable feature of the ceremony. It began with an almost European placidity of decorum, standing quietly behind the wooden railing on three sides of the Campus, and as quietly filling the seats in and about the glowingly draped grand stand before the University building. As the ceremony proceeded, however, the crowd behind the stand pressed forward, getting out on to the field. Soldiers linked arms to keep it back, soldiers with bayonets were drawn from the ranks of veterans to give additional weight, wise men mounted the stand and strove to stem the forward pressure with logic. But that crowd was filled with much the same spirit that made the sea so difficult a thing to reason with in King Canute's day. Neither soldiers nor words of the wise could check it. It flowed forward into the Campus, a sea of men and women, shop girls not caring a fig if theywere"late back" and had a half-day docked, children who swarmed amid Olympian legs, babies in mothers' arms, whose presence in that crush was a matter of real terror to us less hardened British—an impetuous mass of young and old, masculine and feminine life that cared nothing for hard elbows and torn clothes as long as it got close to the Prince.
Before the inspection was finished, before the Prince could get back to the stand to present medals, the Campus was no longer a hollow square, it was a packed throng.
And the crowd, having won this vantage, took matters into its own hands until, indeed, its ardour began to verge on the dangerous.
As the Prince left the field the great crowd swept after him, until the whole mass was jammed tight against the iron railings at the entrance of the Campus. The Prince was in the heart of this throng surrounded by police who strove to force a way out for him. The crowd fought as heartily to get at him. There was a wild moment when the throng charged forward and crashed the iron railings down with their weight and force.
There were cries of "Shoulder him! Shoulder the boy!" and a rush was made towards him. The police had a hard struggle to keep the people back, and, as it was, it was only the swift withdrawal of the Prince from the scene that averted trouble; for in a crowd that had got slightly out of hand in its enthusiasm, the presence of so many children and women seemed to spell calamity.
This splendid ardour is more remarkable, since, only a few months before, Winnipeg had been the scene of an outburst which its citizens describe as nothing else but Bolshevik.
That outcrop of active discontent—which, by the way, was germinated in part by Englishmen—had a loud and ugly sound, and its clamour seemed ominous. People asked whether all the West, and indeed, all Canada, was going to be involved. Was Canada speaking in the accents of revolt?
Well, on September 9th, there arose another sound in Winnipeg, and it was but part of a wave of sound that had been travelling westward for more than a month. It was, I think, a most significant sound. It was the sound of majorities expressing themselves.
It was not a few shouting revolt. It was the many shouting its affection and loyalty for tried democratic ideals.
When minorities raise their voices our ears are dinned by the shouting and we imagine it is a whole people speaking. We forget those who sit silent at home, not joining in the storm. The silent mass of the majority is overlooked because it finds so few opportunities for self-expression. Only such a visit as this of the Prince gives them a chance.
It seemed to me that this display of affection had a human rather than a political significance. It impressed me not as an affair of parties, but as the fundamental, human desire of the great mass of ordinary workaday people to show their appreciation for stable and democratic ideals which the peculiarly democratic individuality of the Prince represents.
Winnipeg is a town with a vital spirit. It has a large air. There is something in its spaciousness that tells of the great grain plains at the threshold of which it stands. It is the "Chicago of Canada," and hub of a world of grain, Queen City in the Kingdom of Bakers' Flour. And it is mightily conscious of its high office.
It springs upward out of the flat and brooding prairies, where the Assiniboine and the strong Red River strike together—the old "Forks" of the pioneer days. It sits where the old trails of the pathfinder and the fur trader join, and its very streets grew up about those trails.
From the piles of pelts dumped by Indians and hunters outside the old Hudson Bay stockade at Fort Garry, and the sacks of raw grain that the old prairie schooners brought in, Winnipeg of today has grown up.
And it has grown up with the astonishing, swift maturity of the West. Fifty years ago there was not even a village. Forty years ago it was a mere spot on the world map, put there only to indicate the locality of Louis Kiel's Red River Rebellion, and Wolseley's march to Fort Garry, as its name was. In 1881 it became just Winnipeg, a townlet with less than 8,000 souls in it. Today it ranks with the greatest commercial cities in Canada, and its greatness can be felt in the tingling energy of its streets.
The wonder of that swift growth is a thing that can be brought directly home. I stood on the station with a man old but still active, and he said to me:
"Do you see that block of buildings over there? I had the piece of ground on which it was built. I sold it for a hundred dollars, it was prairie then. It's worth many thousands now. And that piece where that big factory stands, that was mine. I let that go for under three hundred, and the present owners bought in the end for twenty and more times that sum. Oh, we were all foolish then, how could we tell that Winnipeg was going to grow? It was a 'back-block' town, shacks along a dusty track. And the railway hadn't come. A three-story wooden house, that was a marvel to be sure; now we have skyscrapers."
And fast though Winnipeg has grown, or because she has grown at such a pace, one can still see the traces and feel the spirit of the old spacious days in her streets. They are long streets and so planned that they seem to have been built by men who knew that there were no limits on the immense plains, and so broad that one knows that the designers had been conscious that there was no need to pinch the sidewalks and carriage-ways with all the prairie at the back of them.
Along these sumptuous avenues there still remain many of the low-built and casual houses that men put up in the early days, and it is these standing beside the modernity of the business buildings, soaring sky-high, the massive grain elevators and the big brisk mills that give the city its curious blending of pioneer days and thrusting, twentieth-century virility.
It is a town like no other that we had visited, and where one had the feeling that up-to-date card-indexing systems were being worked by men in the woolly riding chaps of old plainsmen.
In the people of the streets one experienced the same curious sense of "difference." In splendid boulevards such as Main, and Portage, which turns from it, there are stores worthy of New York and London in size, smartness and glowing attraction. And the women crowds that make these streets busy are as crisply dressed in modern fashions as any on the Continent, but there is a definite individuality in the air of the men.
Canadian men dress with a conspicuous indifference. They wear anything from overalls and broad-banded sweaters to lounge suits that ever seem ill-fitting. In Winnipeg there is the same disregard for personal appearance plus a hat with a higher crown. As we went West the crown of the soft hat climbed higher, and the brim became both wider and more curly.
There is, too, on the sidewalks of Winnipeg the conglomeration of races that go to feed the West. The city is the great emigrant centre that serves the farmers, the fruit-growers of the Rockies, the ranchmen in the foothills, and even the industries on the Pacific Slopes. Everywhere outside agencies there are great blackboards on which demands for farm labourers at five dollars a day and other workers are chalked.
To these agencies flow strange men in blouse-shirts, wearing strange caps—generally of fur—carrying strange-looking suit-cases and speaking the strange tongues of far European or Asiatic lands. Chinese and Japanese (whom the Canadian lumps under the general term "Orientals"), negroes, a few Indians, and a hotch-potch of races walk the streets of Winnipeg, and Winnipeg deals with them, houses them, gives them advice, and distributes them over the wide lands of Canada, where they will work and working will gradually fuse into the racial whole that is the Canadian race.
In the hotels, too, one notices that a change is taking place. The "Oriental"—the Japanese in this case—takes the place of the Canadian bell-boy and porter, and he takes this place more and more as one goes West. There are, of course, always Chinese "Chop Suey and Noodles' Restaurants," as well as Chinese laundries in Canadian towns; we met them as early as St. John's, Newfoundland; but from Winnipeg to the Pacific Coast these establishments grow in numbers, until in Vancouver and Victoria there are big "Oriental" quarters—cities within the cities that harbour them.
The "Orientals" make good citizens, the Chinese particularly. They are industrious, clever workers, especially as agriculturists, and they give no trouble. The great drawback with them is that they do not stay in the country, but having made their money in Canada, go home to China to spend it.
Most of the alien element that goes to Canada is of good quality, and ultimately becomes a very valuable asset. But the problem Canada is facing is that they are strangers, and, not having been brought up in the British tradition, they know nothing of it. The tendency of this influence is to produce a new race to which the ties of sentiment and blood have little meaning.
It is a problem which Britain must share also, if we do not wish to see Canada growing up a stranger to us in texture, ideals and thought. It is not an easy problem. Canada's chief need today is for agriculturists, yet the workers we wish to retain most in this country are agriculturists. Canada must have her supply, and if we cannot afford them, she must take what she can from Eastern Europe, or from America, and very many American farmers, indeed, are moving up to Canadian lands.
There is always room in a vast country such as Canada for skilled or willing workers, and we can send them. But the demand is not great at present, and will not be great until the agriculturist opens up the land. And the agriculturist is to come from where?
Certainly it is a matter which calls for a great deal of consideration.
The Prince made the usual round of the usual program during his stay, but his visit to the Grain Exchange was an item that was unique.
He drove on Wednesday, September 10th, to this dramatic place, where brokers, apparently in a frenzy, shout and wave their hands, while the price of grain sinks and rises like a trembling balance at their gestures and shouts.
The pit at which all these hustling buyers and sellers are gathered has all the romantic qualities of fiction. It is, as far as I am concerned, one of the few places that live up to the written pictures of it, for it gave me the authentic thrill that had come to me when I first read of the Chicago wheat transactions in Frank Norris's novel, "The Pit."
The Prince drove to the Grain Exchange and was whirled aloft to the fourth story of the tall building. He entered a big hall in which babel with modern improvements and complications reigned.
In the centre of this room was the pit proper. It has nothing of the Stygian about it. It is a hexagon of shallow steps rising from the floor, and descending on the inner side.
On these steps was a crowd of super-men with voices of rolled steel. They called out cabalistic formulae of which the most intelligible to the layman sounded something like:
"May—eighty-three—quarter."
Cold, high and terrible voices seemed to answer:
"Taken."
Hundreds of voices were doing this, amid a storm of cross shoutings, and under a cloud of tossing hands, that signalled with fingers or with papers. Cutting across this whirlpool of noise was the frantic clicking of telegraph instruments. These tickers were worked by four emotionless gods sitting high up in a judgment seat over the pit.
They had unerring ears. They caught the separate quotations from the seething maelstrom of sound beneath them, sifted the completed deal from the mere speculative offer in uncanny fashion, and with their unresting fingers ticked the message off on an instrument that carried it to a platform high up on one of the walls.
On this platform men in shirt-sleeves prowled backwards and forwards—as the tigers do about feeding time in the Zoo. They, too, had super-hearing. From little funnels that looked like electric light shades they caught the tick of the messages, and chalked the figures of the latest prices as they altered with the dealing on the floor upon a huge blackboard that made the wall behind them.
At the same time the gods on the rostrum were tapping messages to the four corners of the world. Even Chicago and Mark Lane altered their prices as the finger of one of these calm men worked his clicker.
When the Prince entered the room the gong sounded to close the market, and amid a hearty volume of cheering he was introduced to the pit, and some of its intricacies were explained to him. The gong sounded again, the market opened, and a storm of shouting broke over him, men making and accepting deals over his head.
Intrigued by the excitement, he agreed with the broker who had brought him in, to accept the experience of making a flutter in grain.
Immediately there were yells, "What is he, Bull or Bear?" and the Prince, thoroughly perplexed, turned to the broker and asked what type of financial mammal he might be.
He became a Bull and bought.
He did not endeavour to corner wheat in the manner of the heroes of the stories, for wheat was controlled; he bought, instead, fifty thousand bushels of oats. A fair deal, and he told those about him with a smile that he was going to make several thousand dollars out of Winnipeg in a very few moments.
An onlooker pointed to the blackboard, and cried:
"What about that? Oats are falling."
But the broker was a wise man. He had avoided a royal "crash." He had already sold at the same price, 83 1/2, and the Prince had accomplished what is called a "cross trade." That is he had squared the deal and only lost his commission.
While he stood in that frantic pit of whirling voices something of the vast transactions of the Grain Exchange was explained to him. It is the biggest centre for the receipt and sale of wheat directly off the land in the world. It handles grain by the million bushels. In the course of a day, so swift and thorough are its transactions, it can manipulate deals aggregating anything up to 150,000,000 bushels.
When these details had been put before him, the gong was again struck, and silence came magically.
Unseen by most in that pack of men on the steps the Prince was heard to say that he had come to the conclusion that to master the intricacies of the Exchange was a science rather beyond his grasp just then. He hoped that his trip westward would give him a more intimate knowledge of the facts about grain, and when he came back, as he hoped he would, he might have it in him to do something better than a "cross trade."
From the pit the lift took him aloft again to the big sampling and classifying room on the tenth floor of the building. The long tables of this room were littered with small bags of grain, and with grain in piles undergoing tests. The floor was strewn with spilled wheat and oats and corn. Here he was shown how grain, carried to Winnipeg in the long trucks, was sampled and brought to this room in bags. Here it was classified by experts, who, by touch, taste and smell, could gauge its quality unerringly.
It is the perfection of a system for handling grain in the raw mass. The buyer never sees the grain he purchases. The classification of the Exchange is so reliable that he accepts its certificates of quality and weight and buys on paper alone.
Nor are the dealers ever delayed by this wonderfully working organization. The Exchange has samplers down on the trucks at the railway sidings day and night. During the whole twenty-four hours of the day there are men digging specially constructed scoops that take samples from every level of the car-loads of grain, putting the grain into the small bags, and sending them along to the classification department.
So swiftly is the work done that the train can pull into the immense range of special yards, such as those the C.P.R. have constructed for the accommodation of grain, change its engine and crew, and by the time the change is effected, samples of all the trucks have been taken, and the train can go on to the great elevators and mills at Fort William and Port Arthur.
This rapid handling in no way affects the efficiency of the Exchange. Its decisions are so sure that the grading of the wheat is only disputed about forty times in the year. This is astonishing when one realizes the enormous number of samples judged.
In the same way, and in spite of the apparent confusion about the pit where they take place, the records of the transactions are so exact that only about once in five thousand is such a record queried.
The Prince was immensely interested in all the practical details of working which make this handling of grain a living and dramatic thing, showing, as usual, that active curiosity for workaday facts that is essential to the make-up of the moderns.
His directness and accessibility made friends for him with these hard-headed business men as readily as it had made friends with soldiers and with the mass of people. Winnipeg had already exerted its Western faculty for affectionate epithets. He had already been dubbed a "Fine Kiddo," and it was commonplace to hear people say of him, "He's a regular feller, he'll do." They said these things again in the Exchange, declaring emphatically he was "sure, a manly-looking chap."
As he left the Exchange the members switched the chaos of the pit into shouts of a more hearty and powerful volume, and to listen to a crowd of such fully-seasoned lungs doing their utmost in the confined space of a building is an awe-inspiring and terrific experience.
The friendliness here was but a "classified sample"—if the Winnipeg Exchange will permit that expression—of the friendliness in bulk he found all over Canada, and which he found in the great West, upon which he was now entering.
From Winnipeg, on the night of September 10th, we pushed steadily northwest, and on the morning of Thursday, the 11th, we were in the open prairie, a new land that is being opened up by the settler.
We were travelling too late to see the land under wheat—one of the finest sights in the world, we were told; but all the grain was not in, and we saw threshing operations in progress and big areas covered with the strangely small stocks, the result of the Canadian system of cutting the standing stalk rather high up. In the early night, by Portage la Prairie, we had seen big fires burning in the distance. They were not, as we at first thought, prairie fires, but the homesteader getting rid of the great mounds of stalk left by the threshing, the usual method.
In the early morning mist we came upon the big, flat expanse of Horn Lake, near Wynyard, over which flew lines of militaristic duck in wedge formation. The prairies lay about us in a great expanse, dun-brown and rolling. It is a monotonous landscape, and there were few if any trees until we got farther north and west.
The little prairie towns appear on the horizon a great distance away, thanks to the big grain elevators alongside the track. The grain elevators in these plains are what churches are in Europe; they have, indeed, the look of being basilicas of a new, materialistic dispensation.
The little towns under the elevators seem palpably to be struggling with the inert force of the prairie about them. Prairie seems to be flowing into them on every side, and only by a brave effort do houses and streets raise themselves above the encroaching sea of grass. Yet all the towns have a modern air, too. All have excellent electric light services in houses and streets, and all have "movie" theatres.
At the stations crowds were gathered. At Wynyard all the young of the district appeared to have collected before going to school. Catching the word that the Prince "lived" in the last car, they swarmed round it. Some one told them the Prince was still in bed, and with the utmost cheerfulness they began to chant: "Sleepy head! Sleepy head!"
At Lanigan, the next station, a crowd of the same cheery temper also raised a clamour for the Prince. As a rule he never disappointed them, and would leave whatever he was doing to go on to the observation platform at the first hint of cheers. But at Lanigan there were difficulties. The crowd cheered. Some one looked out of the car, made a gesture of negation, and went back. The crowd cheered a good deal more. There was a pause; more cheering. Then a discreet member of the Staff came out and said the Prince was awfully sorry, but—but, well, he was in his bath!
"That's all the better," called a cheerful girl from the heart of the crowd. "Wedon't mind."
The member of the Staff vanished in a new gust of cheering, probably to hide his blushes. Need I say the Prince didnotappear?
At Colonsay there was a stop of five minutes only, but the people of the town made the most of it. They had a pretty Britannia to the fore, and all the school-children grouped about her and singing when the train steamed in. And when it stopped, a delightful and tiny miss came forward and gave the Prince a bunch of sweet peas.
These incidents were a few only of a characteristic day's run. Every day the same sort of thing happened, so that though the Prince had a more strenuous time in the bigger cities, his "free times" were actually made up of series of smaller functions in the smaller ones.
Saskatoon, the distributing city for the middle of Saskatchewan, was to give the Prince a memorable day. It was here that he obtained his first insight into the life and excitements of the cowboy. Saskatoon, in addition to the usual reception functions, showed him a "Stampede," which is a cowboy sports meeting.
The Prince arrived in the town at noon, and drove through the streets to the Park and University grounds for the reception ceremonies. It is a keen, bright place, seeming, indeed, of sparkling newness in the wonderful clarified sunlight of the prairie.
It is new. Saskatoon is only now beginning its own history. It is still sorting itself out from the plain which its elevators, business blocks and delightful residential districts are yet occupied in thrusting back. It is a characteristic town on the uplift. It snubs and encroaches upon the illimitable fields with its fine American architecture, and its stone university buildings. It has new suburbs full of houses of symmetrical Western comeliness in a tract wearing the air of Buffalo Bill.
It grows so fast that you can almost see it doing it. It has grown so fast that it has outstripped the guide-book makers. They talk of it in two lines as a village of a few hundred inhabitants, but put not your trust in guide-books when coming to Canada, for the village you come out to see turns out, like Saskatoon, to be a bustling city full of "pep," as they say, and possessing 20,000 inhabitants.
The guide-book makers are not to blame. Somewhere about 1903 there were no more than 150 people within its boundaries. Now, from the look of it, it could provide ten motor-cars for each of these oldest inhabitants, and have about 500 over for new-comers—in fact, that is about the figure; there are 2,000 cars on the Saskatoon registers. Saskatoon was full of cars neatly lined up along the Prince's route during every period of his stay.
The great function of the visit was the "Stampede." This sports meeting took place on a big racing ground before a grand-stand that held many thousand more people than Saskatoon boasted. The many cars that brought them in from all over the country were parked in huge wedges in and about the ground.
Passing off the wild dirt roads, the Prince headed a procession of cars round the course before entering a special pavilion erected facing the grandstand. His coming was the signal for the Stampede to commence. It was a new thrill to Britishers, an affair of excitement, and a real breath of Western life. They told us that the cattle kings are moving away from this area to the more spacious and lonely lands of the North; but the exhibition the Prince witnessed showed that the daring and skilful spirit of the cowboys has not moved on yet.
We were also told that this Stampede was something in the nature of a circus that toured the country, and that men and animals played their parts mechanically as oft-tried turns in a show. But even if that was so, the thing was unique to British eyes, and the exhibition of all the tricks of the cattleman's calling was for those who looked on a new sensation.
Cattlemen rode before the Prince on bucking horses that, loosed from wooden cages, came along the track like things compact of India-rubber and violence, as they strove to throw the leechlike men in furry, riding chaps, loose shirts, sweat-rags and high felt hats, who rode them.
Some of the men rode what seemed a more difficult proposition—an angry bull, that bunched itself up and down and lowed vindictively, as it tried to buck its rider off.
From the end of the race-track a steer was loosed, and a cowboy on a small lithe broncho rode after it at top speed. Round the head of this man the lariat whirled like a live snake. In a flash the noose was tight about the steer's horns, the brilliant little horse had overtaken the beast, and in an action when man and horse seemed to combine as one, the tightened rope was swung against the steer's legs. It was thrown heavily. Like lightning the cowboy was off the horse, was on top of the half-stunned steer, and had its legs hobbled in a rope.
One man of the many who competed in this trial of skill performed the whole operation in twenty-eight seconds from the time the steer was loosed to the time its legs were secured.
A more daring feat is "bull-dogging."
The steer is loosed as before, and the cattleman rides after it, but instead of lassoing it, he leaps straight out of his saddle and plunges on to the horns of the beast. Gripping these long and cruel-looking weapons, he twists the bull's neck until the animal comes down, and there, with his body in the hollow of the neck and shoulder, he holds it until his companions run up and release him.
There is a real thrill of danger in this.
One man, a cowboy millionaire, caught his steer well, but in the crash in which the animal came down it rolled right over him. For a moment man and beast were lost in a confusion of tossing legs and dust. Then the man, with shirt torn to ribbons and his back scraped in an ugly manner, rose up gamely and limped away. The only thing about him that had escaped universal dusting was his white double-linen collar, the strangest article of clothing any "bull-dogger" might wear.
The Prince called this plucky fellow, as well as others of the outfit, into the pavilion, and talked with them some time on the risk and adventures of their business, as well as congratulating them on their skill.
Two comely cowgirls, in fringed leather dresses, high boots, bright blouses and broad sombreros, also caught his eye. He spoke to a "movie" man, who had already added to the gaiety of nations by leaping round in a circle (heavy camera and all) while a big, bucking broncho had leaped round after him, telling him that the girls formed a fit subject for the lens.
"I'm waiting until I can get you with them, sir," said the "movie" man.
"Oh, you'll get me all right," the Prince laughed. "There's no chance of my escaping you."
The "movie" man got Prince and cowgirls presently, when the Prince had invited them into the pavilion to chat for a few minutes. They were fine, free and independent girls, who enjoyed the naturalness and easiness of the interview.
During the meeting all the arts of the cowboys were exhibited. The lariat expert lassoed men and horses in bunches of five as easily as he lassoed one, and danced in and turned somersaults through his ever-whirling loop. There were some fine exhibitions of horse-riding, and there was some Amazonian racing by girls in jockey garb.
The human interlude was also there. A daring woman photographer in the grand-stand held up a cowboy. Disregarding her long skirts, she climbed the fence of the course and calmly mounted behind the horseman. Riding thus, she passed across the front of the cheering grand-stand and came to the steps of the Prince's pavilion. Unconcerned by the joy of the great crowd, she asked permission to take a snapshot, and received it, going her way unruffled and entirely Canadian.
The very thrilling afternoon was closed by the Prince himself. Walking over to the crowd of cattlemen, he stood talking with them and examining their horses. Presently, on the invitation of the leader, he mounted a broncho, and, leading the bunch of cowboys and cowgirls, swept down the track and past the stand. The people, delighted at this unexpected act, vented themselves in the usual way—that is, with extraordinary enthusiasm.