New Canada and the new Canadians

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NEW CANADA

AND

THE NEW CANADIANS

First Edition, May igoy
Second Edition, October igoy

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Many thousands of people from
the east of the Austrian Empire and
the adjoining districts of Russia
and Rumania, all known in Canada
as Galicians, have settled in the
Prairie Provinces. They are often
too poor to buy even a plough, and
this Russian is reaping with a
"cradle"; but prosperity comes
to them by leaps and bounds.

new cana:

AND

THE NEW CANADIANS

HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY

AUTHOR OP
THE STORY OP CANADA," * THE NEW WORLD PAIRY BOOK," ETC.

PREFACE BY

LORD STRATHCONA

COLOURED AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
AND MAP

HORACE MARSHALL & SON
LONDON

DEDICATED

TO
ALL WHO LOVE THEIR COUNTRY

AND WHOSE COUNTRY IS

THE BRITISH EMPIRE

CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface, by Lord Strathcona ... 9

Author's Foreword . . . .13

The West in Time of War— ... 19

The Hudson's Bay Company— The West taken over by
Canada— The Red River Rebellion of 1870— The Saskatche-
wan Rising of 1883 — Frog Lake Massacre— Siege and Relief
of Battleford— Battle of Cutknife Hill— Pursuit of Big Bear
to Beaver River.

The Rush to the West— . . • 51

Immigration Statistics— Emigration from the United
States— What the West is— Railways—The Land Available
— Wheat Possibilities.

Modern Manitoba— .... 67

Winnipeg — Icelanders — Wheat Cultivation — Mixed
Farming— The Hudson's Bay Route.

Middle Saskatchewan ; and the English-
men— ...... 86

Salvation Army and Foresters — Canadian Northern
Railway— Prince Albert— The ''All-British" Colony —
English Immigrants.

The Park Lands; and the Americans— . 104

Original and Adopted Nationality — Americanism and
British Citizenship— Farm Speculation— The "Best Terri-
tory on Earth."

Middle Alberta ; and the Galicians— . 123

How the Galicians live — Mild Winters — A Norwegian
Colony — A Sanctuary for Big Game.

332

6 CONTENTS

Edmonton, and the Far North— . . 131

The Capital of Alberta — Urban Land Prices — Squatters
— A great Railway Centre — Peace River — Wheat in Yukon.

REGINA TO BATTLEFORD ; AND THE DUKHOBORS— 140

The Capital of Saskatchewan — Provincial Rights— South-
east Saskatchewan — Experimental Farm System — Germans,
Jews, and Hungarians — North to Saskatoon — Dukhobor Life.

A Battlefield Revisited— . . . 160

Transformation ofBattleford—Nighton the Trail— Indian
Warriors farming— Cutknife Hill twenty years after-
Americanized French-Canadians — Religious Work.

The Dry Patch— ..... 181

The Prairie Primeval— Alkali and Antelope— Half-breeds
of Sixty-mile Bush — A Waterless Waste— The South Sas-
katchewan—Swift Current— Cypress Hills— The Drought
Problem.

Southern Alberta; The Cattle and Horse
Ranchers — ..... 199

The success of Wheat— Macleod — Big Ranches broken up
— The Foot-hills — The Chinook Wind— Demand for Horses.

Blackfoot Indians, and Latter-Day Saints— 214

Condition of the Tribesmen— Viceroy and War-dance—
The Mounted Police — Mormon Ways.

A West Beyond the West— . . .235

The Crow's Nest Pass, yesterday and to-day— A Glimpse
of British Columbia.

How the New Canadians Live— . . 241

Food, Drink, Air, and Water — Religion and Recreation —
Schooling and Taxes.

The Future— . . . . .250

More Knowledge wanted — More Communication — The use
of cheap Postage — Emigration — Finance.

Index .....•• 261

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A Very New Canadian .

Map of the Prairie Provinces

The Fort Garry of 1870

The Winnipeg of To-day

Harvesting

Threshing

A Salvation Army Colonist

In the Park Lands

Coming in from the States

Travelling by Ox-Team

A Stern-Wheel Steamer on a

River
Urban Infancy : Milestone
Urban Adolescence: Portage
An Indian Brave as Farmer
Dukhobors
An Irrigation Canal in Alberta .
Cattle and Horses at the Hay-stacks
A Horse Ranch ....
Ploughing a Prairie Wheat-field .
A Blood Indian Dance

Highland and Lowland in the
Farthest West

Frontispiece

Opposite page 9

24

24

64

n 80

88

120

120

128

Northern

la Prairie

136

144
144
152
152
192
200
208
224
224

240

PREFACE

I have been asked to write a few introductory
remarks to Mr Kennedy's new volume, and I
do so with much pleasure. Mr Kennedy knows
Canada well, and, although he has now resided
in England for some years, has kept up his
connection with the Dominion by frequent
visits. His book is especially interesting from
his contrasts of the position of the country at
different times and under different circumstances.
My experience of the North-West goes back
farther than Mr Kennedy's. When I first went
there it was very difficult of access, and indeed
could only be approached with any comfort,
and not much of that, through the United States,
or by canoes by the Ottawa River, Lake Huron,
Lake Superior, and the rivers and lakes, with
portages between, through what were then the
wilds of Rupert's Land, on to Lake Winnipeg.
At that time Winnipeg did not exist. Its present
site was occupied by Fort Garry, a principal
post of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the
inhabitants were few in number. Between Fort
Garry and the Rocky Mountains there was no

10 THE DAYS OF THE BUFFALO

settlement on the great prairies, except here
and there another Hudson's Bay Post, or an
Indian encampment. In those days the buffalo
still roamed over the plains, although in de-
creasing numbers. Like many other things,
this picturesque animal, so valuable to the
Indians, had eventually to go, first because of
the value of its hide, and second because its
existence was incompatible with the march of
civilization and progress.

The position of Western Canada to-day is
very different. Now there are railways in every
direction, and further lines are being built each
year to accommodate the immense numbers of
settlers who are making their homes on the
prairies. The Territories are divided into the
Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and
Alberta, besides other districts. The population
is rapidly increasing, but only the fringes of
the fertile plains are occupied, and there are
still less than a million people between the Great
Lakes and the Rocky Mountains. They are,
however, producing nearly two hundred million
bushels of grain of all kinds annually at the
present time, and will in the course of another
five or ten years, if all goes well, raise a sufficient
quantity to make the Motherland independent
of foreign countries for her food supply. But
this is not all. Large numbers of cattle are

MEN AND MONEY n

exported, as well as dairy produce, and the
trade of the country generally is advancing by
leaps and bounds. There is no reason why
Western Canada should not become as important
and as well populated as the western territories
of the United States. And the fact that people
are flocking across the boundary from the latter
country is evidence of the advantages which are
offered under the British flag.

Western Canada, like other portions of the
Dominion, wants two things badly — men and
money. There are millions of acres of fertile
land still unoccupied capable of providing happy
homes for a very large population ; and the
immigration is rapidly becoming a great move-
ment. An immense amount of capital is being
spent in providing new railways, in opening
up the country and its many resources, and this
will serve to make any slight depression in
business, if it should come in the next few years,
less felt than it would be under normal circum-
stances. The increase in the population of
Canada, and especially in the western portion,
is a factor of strength in the Canadian situation,
and will also tend to increase the wealth and
power of the whole Empire.

Canadians think Canada a great country now,
— and so it is, and none of us can properly estimate
what its position is going to be in the future.

12 THE FUTURE

It has an immense coast line on the Atlantic
as well as on the Pacific. It is in close touch
with the markets of South America on both
oceans.

The Canadian Pacific Railway provides a
rapid alternative route between the United
Kingdom, China, Japan and Australia, and
two other trans-continental roads are being
constructed. All these are indications of the
rapid manner in which Canada must grow and
develop, and of the opportunities that are at
her doors for the expansion of her trade. Canada
also furnishes a very favourable market for many
of the staple manufactures of Great Britain,
the imports of which, by the way, have rapidly
increased since the preferential tariff came into
force. As regards not only internal development
and inter-provincial trade but external commerce,
the prospects are of the brightest kind. This
applies to every part of the country ; and I
confidently refer those who wish to know some-
thing of the great West, at first hand, from one
who is very competent to give accurate and
reliable information, to Mr Kennedy's volume.

STRATHCONA.

1st May 1907.

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

Shall I go to Canada ? This question comes to
me from every part of the country.

Sometimes it is " Shall I send my son ? " —
never, I am sorry to say, " my daughter," though
the scarcity of women in Canada is more marked
than their preponderance in the mother-country.
Often it is not care for kindred, but philanthropic
anxiety that asks, — " Do you think poor Smith
should emigrate ? He's out of work and on his
beam ends." Or " would you advise young
Brown to go ? There's no future for him here."
By way of variety, come the questions of those
who have made up their minds. "I am going
to Canada. What part of the country do you
think I ought to make for ? What sort of a
place is it ? What are my chances ? " And
so on, to the end of a long chapter. Then there
are people who think of investing money in
Canada, and want to be assured of the lasting
grounds for her prosperity. And, finally, there
are the innumerable folk who have a relation
out there already and want to hear more than
he tells them of his new home.

»3

14 CANADA REDISCOVERED

It is useless to say, u Ask the Canadian Govern-
ment's emigration officials." The rejoinder is
prompt, — " Yes, I have read their pamphlets,
and I daresay they are all right. But you are
not an official, and not even a Canadian, so you
can give an independent opinion ; and you have
lived a long while out there, so you ought to
know all about it."

I do not. Indeed, there is no man living who
does. Canada is too huge, too varied, most of
it too inaccessible. You might spend a life-time
wandering over it without seeing it all. It is
true, however, that I have known Canada for
more than a quarter of a century ; that I lived
nearly ten years in her commercial metropolis ;
that my work as a journalist gave me oppor-
tunities of seeing many parts not commonly
visited ; and that since my return to England
I have kept in close touch with Canadian affairs
and repeatedly revisited the Dominion to witness
the development of later years. This book does
not profess to give categorical answers to the
questions that are constantly asked, even about
the particular part of Canada it describes. But
if the writer's hope is fulfilled, the inquiring
reader will find a good deal here that he wants
to know.

The people of the mother-country as a whole
are at last beginning to realize that Canada's

MAKING HISTORY 15

existence is more than a dry geographical fact,
— that it is a phenomenon which, if they do not
take a short-sighted view of their own interest,
will greatly and perhaps even vitally help to
maintain the future prosperity of the mother-
country itself.

New Canada, the country I am now to describe,
is commonly known as the North-West. It is
really the South-West of Canada ; and it is
coming to be known simply as the West. It is
one of the great events of history that has just
begun, the peopling of the West. Historians
will one day rank it with other great migrations,
— with the Aryan flood that laid the foundations
of modern Europe ; with the taking of England
by the Angles and Saxons.

The opening up and settlement of the Western
United States gave new homes and new life,
prosperity and independence, to millions of the
struggling poor of Europe ; it revealed and
developed a vast new source of food supply for
Europe and Asia ; and, with its stimulating
effect on the older States, it involved the rapid
rise of the United States to their present com-
manding position in the politics of the globe.
To-day the world stands witness to the first
scenes of a national drama exactly similar in
kind and almost certainly destined to have similar
economical and political results ; with this differ-

16 MAKING HISTORY

ence, that to-day's event is unrolling itself with
all its happy possibilities under the British flag.

If Canada still consisted of the Eastern Provinces
which alone bore that name at confederation,
she would be a great and rich country ; but her
enlargement to the Pacific in the west and the
Arctic Ocean in the north has made her greater
than all Europe, and opened before her a growth
of population and power to which the coldest
critic, in view of the facts already ascertained,
hardly dares, to put a limit. It is, in fact, New
Canada that lifts Old Canada from respectability
to eminence.

To appreciate the present we must be able to
contrast it with the past. It was my fortune
many years ago to see the new West not only
in its infancy but struggling with the dogs of
war ; and now I have seen it aglow with the
life of a young giant. Side by side, then, I set
the two scenes, — the West as I saw it on my first
journey, as war correspondent of the Montreal
Daily Witness, and the West as I saw it on my
last journey, as special correspondent of The
Times.

For kind permission to reprint my recent
articles in The Times I take this opportunity of
thanking the proprietors. These articles I have
carefully revised and largely re-written ; adding
to them a hundred per cent., and giving the

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION 17

latest information received from many private
and official sources.

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The Second Edition of this book has been called
for so soon after the first that revision would be
difficult if it were necessary. Happily, it does
not seem to be necessary. The critics, many of
whom have dealt with " New Canada " at con-
siderable length, have been unanimously kind.
One mistake, of a single word, has been pointed
out to me, and has been corrected. One omission,
too, has been brought to my notice. From the
tale of the wild inhabitants of the prairie primeval,
it seems, a most important member was left out.
"lam surprised and gratified," an old Manitoban
says, " to see that a writer has such a good grasp
of his subject as you have in your most interesting
book ; but I must rate you soundly for leaving
out our friend the Jack Rabbit. I think he is
the only one of the denizens of the plains you
neglected." I apologize to Mr Jack Rabbit, and
assure him that I could not possibly underrate
his importance in the economy of the West, —
if only because the skins of his brethren have
kept me warm o' nights when buffalo robes were
scarce. (Between ourselves, he is more popular
dead than alive.)

B

1 8 NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The effect of the abnormally hard and long
winter of 1906-07, to which reference is made
in the book, has been, as was only to be expected,
a reduction in the wheat yield for the year. The
late spring prevented farmers not only from sowing
as large an acreage as they had intended, but
from reaping early enough to escape damage by
frost. The flood-tide of Canadian prosperity,
however, has set in too strongly to be affected
by a momentary back- wash. In spite of grossly
exaggerated reports of the severe winter, 216,865
immigrants arrived in the first eight months of
this year, — or 50,066 more than arrived in the
corresponding period of last year. But for the
extraordinary weather, which is unlikely to be
soon repeated, the West should have raised this
year over 100,000,000 bushels of wheat ; and with
average weather the Westerners hope that the
wheat harvest of 1908 will reach 150,000,000
bushels. The prospects of Western Canada are
not an atom less bright now than when I first
took this book in hand. Meanwhile, — unfortun-
ately for those parts of the world that have to
buy wheat instead of growing it, — the price has
so risen that the Canadian farmers are likely
to make as much money by this year's poor crop
as they did by last year's good one.

H. A. K.
London, October 1907.

THE WEST IN TIME OF WAR

The New West is one of the oldest possessions of
the British race. The flag of England waved over
the shores ol Hudson's Bay for generations before
it took the place of the French flag in " Canada." 1
It was an Englishman of Queen Elizabeth's time,
Martin Frobisher, who in 1576 sailed out of the
Thames in a little ship of twenty tons to find the
North- West passage to Asia, and who, on a third
attempt, discovered the inlet now known as
Hudson's Strait. The great explorer Hudson,
however, did not appear on the scene till 1610,
when, passing through the strait and turning
southward, he sailed out on the inland sea which
still bears the modest name of Hudson's Bay. The
country round the Bay was rich in furs ; and there
were men in England who saw in Hudson's Strait
and Hudson's Bay a way by which the wealth of
the West might be won in spite of the French
monopolists who held the keys of the St Lawrence
route. In 1670, Charles the Second gave to his

1 I ask forgiveness for plagiarizing from myself in the
first part of this chapter having given the early history of
the West in practically the same words, though more of
them, in " The Story of Canada."

*9

20 THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY

cousin, Prince Rupert, and a few others, forming
" The Governor and Company of Adventurers of
England trading into Hudson's Bay," the whole
vast empire of forest and prairie stretching west-
ward to the Rocky Mountains. As rent for
2,500,000 square miles — though the extent of the
territory was then unknown — the company was
to pay his Majesty " two elks and two black
beavers " per annum. " Forts " were set up on
the shores of Hudson's Bay, and in later times
along the river highways of the interior, to which
the Indians brought their annual catch of furs.
Every summer a single London ship sailed into the
Bay, discharged her cargo of provisions for the
white men and merchandise for the red, filled her
hold with the precious " peltries," and sped away
home before the winter barred the straits with ice.
The vast distances to be travelled, and the
primitive means of communication, canoe or
dog-sleigh inland and sailing ship at sea, left
the Hudson's Bay Company's men cut off from
nearly all intercourse with their fellow-whites.
Many of the fur-traders, therefore, married Indian
wives, and their descendants are the half-breeds
of the West to-day. The name half-breed conveys
to the English mind the picture of a degenerate,
with the faults of both ancestors and the virtues
of neither. There are half-breeds of this kind ;
but I know others who have no cause to shrink

THE FIRST WHITE SETTLEMENT 21

from comparison with pure-blooded white men.
Many of the Scottish and English half-breeds are
scarcely to be distinguished from other Scotsmen
and Englishmen except by their complexion.
Their paternal ancestors were men of some
education — the company's officers — while the
French half-breeds sprang as a rule from the
humbler coureurs de bois in the Company's
employ — men of little or no education, who fell
more easily to the level of the red-skin community
with which they allied themselves.

For two centuries Western Canada was treated
as a gigantic game preserve, and jealously guarded
against the intrusion of settlers. In 181 1, it is
true, the Earl of Selkirk, one of the chief pro-
prietors of the Hudson's Bay Company, overcame
for a time his partners' objection to an independent
white population, and planted in what is now
Manitoba a little colony of Scottish Highlanders.
They had to come in by Hudson's Bay, and up
the Nelson River. In fact, long after that time
the West was so difficult of access from the East,
that a stove made in Quebec had to be shipped
home to England and thence out to Hudson's
Bay before it could be delivered in Manitoba.

For half a century and more, Lord Selkirk's
colony lay forgotten in the heart of the con-
tinent. Some of the settlers, disheartened by
isolation, made their way down to Ontario. The

22 "A PARADISE OF FERTILITY"

others throve on what they grew, but production
for the market was, of course, out of the question.
The market might as well have been in the moon.
And the rulers of the empire might also have been
in the moon, for all they knew or cared about the
richest land in their possession.

Governments were actually persuaded that
the West was an irreclaimable wilderness, in-
capable of supporting a white population. But
the wealth of the western soil, hidden only
by a crop of grass, and revealed by the first
touch of a plough, was bound to become
famous. It was only a question of sooner or
later. And as long ago as 1857, Mr S. J.
Dawson, of the Canadian Geological Survey,
wrote : "Of the valley of Red River I find it
impossible to speak in any other terms than those
which may express astonishment and admiration.
I entirely concur in the brief but expressive de-
scription given to me by an English settler on the
Assiniboine, that the valley of Red River, includ-
ing a large portion belonging to its great affluent,
is a ' Paradise of fertility.' . . . Indian corn, if
properly cultivated, and an early variety selected,
may always be relied on. The melon grows with
the utmost luxuriance without any artificial aid,
and ripens perfectly before the end of August.
Potatoes, cauliflowers, and onions, I have not seen
surpassed at any of our provincial fairs. . . . The

ANNEXATION TO CANADA 23

character of the soil in Assiniboia [now Manitoba],
within the limits of the ancient [Lake Agassiz]
lake ridges, cannot be surpassed. It is a rich
black mould, ten to twenty inches deep, reposing
on a lightish coloured alluvial clay about four feet
deep, which again rests on lacustrine or drift clay
to the level of the water, in all the rivers and
creeks inspected. As an agricultural country,
I have no hesitation in expressing the strongest
conviction that it will one day rank amongst the
most distinguished."

" A paradise of fertility." That judgment is
now known to apply not only to the Red River
Valley but to practically the whole prairie
stretching away to the Rocky Mountains.

In 1869 the Imperial Government transferred
this territory to the two-year-old Canadian Con-
federation, having bought out the company's
monopoly for £300,000, 50,000 acres of land in
blocks round the company's stations, and one-
twentieth of what was then alone called the
"fertile belt," lying between the United States
frontier and the North Saskatchewan River,
and stretching from the Lake of the Woods
to the Mountains. The company was left
with its charter, and with full liberty to go
on trading in competition with others — which
it continues to do, with handsome profits, to the
present day. The chief officer of the company,

24 THE RED RIVER RISING

who held sway over a territory almost as large as
Europe, and continued to administer its affairs
till the first Canadian governor arrived, was no
other than " the grand old man of Canada "
to-day — the generous patriot honoured by the
whole British Empire under the name of Lord
Strathcona.

When the Company's domain passed into the
hands of the Canadian Government, and the
surveyors sent up to map out the land in town-
ships began to " run lines " of scientific precision
through the country-side, the French Red River
half-breeds thought their ill-defined farms were
going to be taken from them. Friction be-
tween the squatters and the authorities was
followed by open insurrection, and a young half-
breed named Louis Riel set himself up as " Pre-
sident " of a " provisional government." A
number of loyal settlers were imprisoned, and in
the spring of 1870 a plain-spoken young loyalist
was murdered under the authority of a rebel
court-martial. A storm of helpless indignation
swept over Canada — helpless because the rebels
were separated from the seat of power and popula-
tion in the East by more than a thousand miles of
lake and river. An officer then known only as
Colonel Wolseley was put in command of a boat
expedition, which, after a three months' journey,

Interior of Fort Garry, the Winnipeg of 1870

The figure with outstretched arm is that of the Governor, Mr Donald Smith,

now Lord Strathcona

* i* » WmMr <m,w

Street Scene in Modern Winnipeg

TROUBLE ON THE SASKATCHEWAN 25

arrived — to find the rebellion extinct. The
government then recognized the rights of the
half-breeds to the land they lived on.

The Red River district was organized as the
Province of Manitoba, and the white settlers
swarming in to cultivate its marvellously fertile
soil soon placed the half-breeds in the position of
an insignificant minority. The wilder spirits sold
their land and flitted to the banks of the Sas-
katchewan, four or five hundred miles away to the
north-west ; but even there the stream of white
immigration followed, and the land-surveyors
began to map out the country with ruthless
regularity. In the autumn of 1884, it was plain
that a storm was brewing. Louis Riel, after many
years of exile, returned from the United States
on his kinsmen's invitation, and put himself at
the head of their agitation for the redress of
grievances. Such grievances as actually existed
might have been remedied, and the agitation
easily allayed, if the central government had given
a little attention to the matter. But in fourteen
years, while the half-breeds had learnt nothing the
authorities had forgotten everything. Two alter-
natives seemed open to them — conciliation and
repression. They might have, and should have,
as their subsequent action confessed, paid atten-
tion to the petitions and resolutions passed quite
legitimately by the half-breeds in meetings over

26 THE DUCK LAKE DEFEAT

which Riel presided ; or they might have taken
strong measures to prevent the rising which was
otherwise threatened. They did neither ; they
did nothing. Agitation was allowed to flame up
in revolt, and Louis Riel was " President of the
Saskatchewan " before the government machine
began to stir. The half-breeds began, in the
spring of 1885, by possessing themselves of the
persons and property of their white neighbours at
Duck Lake. A detachment of the Mounted
Police — the soldiers of the north-west — went to the
rescue, accompanied by some volunteers from the
neighbouring town of Prince Albert, but were
driven back, leaving eleven of their number dead
or wounded on the snow.

The rebels had beaten the white men. Imagine
what that meant, in a country where the little
white population of peaceful farmers lay thinly
scattered among strong tribes of warlike Indians.
The half-breeds were a mere handful compared
to the pure-blooded red-skins, who numbered
(omitting the tribes of the distant north) about
25,000. Riel did his best, by threats and cajolery,
to rally them under his flag. Adopting the name
David, he claimed to be a new Messiah sent to
drive out the white men and restore the land to the
red. It says much for the sense of the Indians,
for the fairness with which as a rule they had been
treated by the Canadian Government and the

THE FROG LAKE MASSACRE 27

Hudson's Bay Company, and for the influence of
missionaries in their councils, that the strongest
tribes decided to sit still and mind their own
business. The half-breed " Messiah's " persua-
sions, however, were not without result. Two
hundred miles north-west of Prince Albert, a
particularly wild band of red-skins under Chief
Big Bear swooped down upon the infant settlement
of Frog Lake. It was the Wednesday of Holy
Week, and two Roman Catholic priests were pre-
paring to celebrate Mass. The Indians, there-
fore, began by marching the whole white popula-
tion, a dozen or so, to church. Never, perhaps,
had such a service been held before. The savages,
with muskets in their hands and yellow war-paint
daubed over their faces, stood guard at the porch
and occasionally knelt in the aisle : their prisoners,
the clergy and congregation, expecting at any
moment to be butchered in their prayers. The
service ended, the people were taken back to their
homes ; but in the afternoon they were ordered off
to the neighbouring Indian camp, and nearly
every man was shot down in cold blood before the
camp could be reached. The bodies of the priests
were thrown into the cellar of their church, which
was then burnt down over them ; and the other
victims were disposed of in the same way. There
were two white women among the prisoners, but
they were ransomed, at a cost of three dollars and

28 SURRENDER OF FORT PITT

four native ponies, by some generous half-breeds
who for their own safety had joined the Indian
camp.

After gorging on stolen victuals for a fortnight,
and keeping up their excitement by frenzied
dancing, the Indians thought they would fly at
higher game. Thirty miles south, on the banks
of the North Saskatchewan, stood an old Hudson's
Bay post called Fort Pitt, garrisoned by a score
of Mounted Police, and now crowded with six and
twenty white refugees. Before this fort, one
spring morning, Big Bear appeared with his
savage horde, and sent in his ultimatum : let the
police go off down the river, and the civilians come
into the Indian camp. There was no lack of
courage in the fort ; even the girls, the daughters
of the Hudson's Bay factor, themselves with
Indian blood in their veins, shouldered rifles and
" manned " loop-holes with the rest. But the
besiegers were getting fire-arrows ready, and in a
few hours the fort and its garrison might be a heap
of ashes. The factor, trusting to his own popu-
larity and that of the company among the
Indians, decided that on the whole the balance
of safety lay on the side of surrender. So the
police reluctantly embarked in an old ferry scow
for a journey of a hundred miles down the river to
Battleford. The miseries of that inland voyage
could only be matched by the sufferings of a

THE CREES BESIEGE BATTLEFORD 29

ship- wrecked crew in mid-ocean. The weather
was bitterly cold, snowing and blowing hard, and
the river was still blocked with floating slabs of
ice. The scow leaked so fast that six men had to
be constantly baling to keep her afloat. And
when they got to Battleford at last, they had only
exchanged one siege for another.

The famous Cree Chief Poundmaker, when he
heard magnified reports of Riel's first success,
had gone on the war-path — probably against his
inclination, but compelled by the traditions of his
race to put himself at the head of his braves when
they were resolved to fight. At the head of a
combination of tribes he laid desultory siege to
the little town of Battleford, where the whole white
population for many miles round had fled for
refuge. For weeks these unhappy settlers re-
mained crowded within the stockade of the
Mounted Police barracks, watching the columns
of smoke that rose from their burning homes. It
was all very well to be assured that the Indians
would never come to close quarters ; but the
farmers, and even more the farmers' wives, their
nerves unhinged by the sudden ruin that had
come upon them, might well be excused if they
dreamt of a horde of painted savages swarming
over the old stockade with murder in their eyes
and scalping knives in their hands.

To stand helpless on the shore while a ship is

30 VOLUNTEERS TO THE RESCUE

going down before your eyes — that was practically
our position in Eastern Canada in the spring
of 1885, as we listened to the cries for help that
came over the telegraph wire (when the wire was
not cut by the rebels) from our friends in deadly
peril 1500 miles away. Our problem was a
serious one indeed. We had no regular army,
beyond a few companies at the Infantry
Schools and an occasional battery of artillery.
The rescue must be effected by volunteers, who
were certainly keen enough but varied greatly in
efficiency, and were utterly inexperienced in war.
Worst of all, the only railway to the West was not
yet finished ; and, even if it had been finished, it
only passed within 200 miles of the scene of opera-
tions. But there was no time to be wasted in
regrets ; and within a few days of the Duck Lake
defeat the volunteers were steaming away to the
West. When they had gone as far as the railway
could take them, they had to disembark and march
across the frozen surface of Lake Superior to a
point where an isolated section of the rails had
been laid, and where the only rolling stock was a
lot of open flat ballast trucks. On these exposed
platforms the men had to huddle together and
protect themselves by the natural heat of their
bodies from the bitter cold. They were relieved,
in fact, when the rails again came to an end, and
they could restore their circulation by another

SWIFT CURRENT 31

march across the frozen lake. By the time they
reached Winnipeg they looked as if they had gone
through a campaign already, with ears and noses
frost-bitten, and some of them snow-blind as
well.

It was this campaign that gave me an oppor-
tunity of seeing the West, as it will never be seen
again. The prairie section of the Canadian
Pacific had been finished the year before, and one
fine April morning I landed on the turf at a place
called Swift Current, whence a flying column
under Colonel Otter was to set out for the relief
of Battleford, while another force, under General
Middleton, was marching from a more easterly
point against the half-breeds. Swift Current at
that time was just a group of half a dozen little
houses, near a beautiful lake with a flock of wild
swans floating on its surface. A little snow still
lay in sheltered nooks here and there — it was the
9th of April — but otherwise the ground was dry
and the weather magnificent. To reach the
beleaguered town we knew we should have to cross
180 miles of sheer desert ; not a desert of sand, to
be sure, but a desert of thin dry grass without a
human habitation. We had, therefore, to accumu-
late a train of farm waggons to carry not only food
for the troops, hay and oats for the horses, and
wood for our camp fires, but the very troops
themselves, who were nearly all infantry and

32 THE CAYUSE

were in far too great a hurry to walk. Many
pioneer farmers of Manitoba and the Territories
let their land lie fallow that year and spent the
summer teaming at $10 A (about £2, is. 8d.) a day
for the government.

While the soldiers waited impatiently for their
mounts, the war correspondent had to hunt for
his. I had made a flying start, with no more
baggage than I could carry on my horse ; but
there was not a horse to be had. There were
thousands of unbroken cayuses, or Indian ponies,
roaming over the prairie, but the prairie was a
thousand miles wide. The march had actually
begun, and the flying column was out of sight,
when at last I got astride of a bag-of-bones,
paying about ten times what would have been its
price in time of peace, and galloped off after the
troops.

A sturdy and intelligent beast is the cayuse,
and patient up to a certain point, but undeniably
lazy, so you have to keep your feet swinging
against his sides, Indian fashion, to keep him
awake. I could sympathize with my specimen,
however, for I often went to sleep on his back
myself, after writing a column or two as I jogged
along in the sun. He is brave, too, or at any rate
indifferent to what would send a common horse

1 One dollar ($1) may be reckoned as roughly 4s., or, more
correctly, 4s. 2d.

COLD NIGHTS 33

bolting to the horizon. You may fire a rifle
between his ears and they will not twitch ; but if
he sees a scrap of paper on the grass he will jump
sideways half-way across the trail in fright. His
gait is a comfortable lope, or canter, by which he
keeps up with a bronco's trot, and so easy that you
can ride bare-back without any serious risk of
disablement. Not that I tried such an experiment
with that first cayuse of mine ; his back-bone
was like a sierra. As for bit and bridle, he needs
neither — as I was happy to find when my own
were stolen in the course of the campaign. All
you have to do is to pat him on the right side of
the neck if you want him to go to the left, and on
the left side if you want him to go to the right.
Let him alone and he will go straight on, never
putting his foot in a hole, though the prairie is
a-gape with the front doors of gophers and badgers
and foxes.

A prairie march in early spring is no picnic.
For the first night I accepted the hospitality of
the colonel and major in command of the Queen's
Own Rifles of Toronto. While they snored away
peacefully under mountains of buffalo robes, the
unfortunate war correspondent lay on the ground
wrapped up in a pair of military blankets, and by
sunrise was almost in the state of a jug of water
that had stood at his head at night and was a
solid lump of ice before morning. That day, I

34 HOT DAYS, AND HARD TACK

got a volunteer, who in time of peace was a tailor,
to sew up one of my blankets into a sleeping sack,
and the next night I chipped in with a dozen
privates of the Queen's Own. With our twenty-
six feet hob-nobbing round the tent-pole, and all
the clothes in our possession on our bodies, we
made a warm and happy company.

If the nights were cold, the days made up for
them. The sloughs we passed in the morning
were frozen almost hard enough to skate on ;
but if there was a slough handy when we made
our midday halt it made a very comfortable
bath — for the rank and file, who had time for a
dip before throwing themselves down for a nap in
the shade of the waggons. For your war corres-
pondent there was no such rest. Letters and
telegrams, begun on horse-back, had to be
finished and sent off by evening, and the horse
had to be filled, even if its owner was still empty
when the troops got under way again. To be sure,
the regulation meal of fat salt pork or Chicago
canned beef, washed down with stewed tea, and
occasionally varied by stewed dried apples, could
be forgone without much grief, so long as I could
be sure of a pocketful of hard-tack — otherwise
ship biscuit — to munch on the trail. Our biscuits
were apparently what Noah had left over when he
came out of the Ark. Split open and fried with the
fat pork, they became palatable and almost tender.

RELIEF OF BATTLEFORD 35

Thirty miles north of Swift Current we en-
countered another infuriating delay, for we came
to the South Saskatchewan river and could not
get across till a steamer arrived from Medicine
Hat — one of those marvellous flat-bottomed
stern- wheelers1 that " will float in a heavy dew."
She carried our waggons over twenty-five at a
time, and at last we were on the march again,
having taken five days to cover thirty miles.
Hour after hour, day after day, the thin line of
waggons and horsemen, four miles long from van to
rear, rolled northwards up the trail. Not a human
being did we see, nor sign of one. The plain was
a broad brown desolation. Five days north of
the river, however, we came to the edge of a wood,
and closed our ranks, for we were in the enemy's
country. Here we spied a little village of rough log
huts which the Stoney Indians had been taught
to build on their reserve. Even here there was no
sign of life ; but behind one of the houses lay the
murdered body of the Farm Instructor who had
been trying to civilize the inhabitants.

A few miles more, and we stood on the bank of
the Battle River — and there, before our eyes,
thank God, was the old Battleford stockade still
sheltering the refugees we had come to save.

The Indians vanished on our approach, and

1 There is a picture of one in the chapter "Edmonton,
and the Far North."

36 ALL NIGHT ON THE TRAIL

pitched their camp on Poundmaker's reserve,
forty miles away in the west. So in the after-
noon of the first of May, leaving half our little
force to guard the town, but taking with us a
company of the beleaguered white men who had
organized themselves as a " Battleford Home
Guard," we crossed back to the south shore and
set out on the enemy's track, carrying five days'
rations and little else. The westward trail ran
at first through a charming bit of park-like
country, of mingled woodland and prairie ;
charming, but deadly if the Indians had lain in
wait for us behind the trees. Now and then we
had to cross a deep gully, which was a little hard
on the artillery — two little brass seven-pounders,
and a Gatling — but by all hands on the ropes we
managed to drag them through. Halting at
sunset in a beautiful meadow, we spent an idyllic
evening round the camp fires, munching our hard-
tack, and singing the songs of the East. That
would be the last evening some of us would spend
on earth, we knew pretty well ; but the know-
ledge was not quite definite enough to take away
our appetites. About midnight, when the moon
was well up in the sky, we saddled up and pressed
on to the west. On and on we rode, all through
the night ; and the sun was sending its first rays
up behind us when we saw at our feet a little
valley where Cutknife Creek wound in and out

CAUGHT ON CUTKNIFE HILL 37

among bushes through a sandy bottom. From
the other side of the creek rose a gentle slope of
bare turf, flanked on either side by a gully. This
was Cutknife Hill, where Poundmaker and his
Crees had defeated Chief Cutknife and his Sarcees,
many years before. A few hundred yards beyond
the crest of the hill we knew that Poundmaker
was now encamped, and we hoped he and all his
men were still sound asleep. They were — all but
one.

The creek was deep enough to make fording
awkward for the waggons ; and we were still
negotiating the ford when the police scouts dashed
back from the head of our line with the cry, " The
Nichis are on us ! " We dashed up the hill ; but
the Indians were dashing up from the other side,
and our vanguard of Mounted Police reached the
top only just in time to win the race. The guns
were close on their heels, and in another minute
were dropping shells wherever the enemy were
supposed to be hiding ; for after the first onset,
when blood was drawn on both sides at the top
of the hill, most of the Indians spread down out
of sight into the gullies to left and right of us.
With the coast clear in front, some of our men
rushed forward to storm the enemy's camp.
That was our one move that gave the Indians a
moment's alarm ; but our men were recalled,
and Poundmaker breathed freely again. Mean-

38 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE

while a party of the enemy had crept round to
our rear, lining the valley we had just crossed.
We were surrounded. For five hours the soldiers
lay in skirmishing order around the hill, firing
down into the bushes whenever they saw anything
to fire at, and exposed to a hail of bullets whistling
up the slope from every side. There was no cover
even on the middle of the hill, where the waggons
had been hastily clustered ; and a ring-rampart
built of full oat-sacks among the wheels was the
only protection available even for the wounded.

It would be interesting to analyze the sensa-
tions of those 300 men on finding themselves for
the first time under fire. Some, no doubt, were
afraid ; others, exhilarated by the joy of fight.
Still others, and perhaps the majority, felt little
but anxiety to do what they had to do as well as
they could. But no man can really analyze any
feelings but his own. I cannot say that fear was
among mine. Nor was I affected by the sight of
the killed and wounded, though some of them
looked ghastly enough ; for my calling had
hardened me to sights like that in time of peace.
Though I realized perfectly that the whizzing
bullets were brutally undiscriminating, and would
kill a spectator as easily as a combatant, the
feeling uppermost in my mind was simply a
desire to understand what was going on, to gather
up all the incidents and experiences of the field

HOW VOLUNTEERS CAN FIGHT 39

into an accurate and comprehensible description,
so that others could realize what I had witnessed.
I remember hoping that if I did get shot my
wound would not be bad enough to keep me from
writing an account of the battle ; and even
feeling that to be wounded in moderation would
add a rather interesting flavour to my report.

The volunteers, whatever they felt, seemed in
action to be as cool as veterans ; cool of nerve,
that is, for the sun beat down upon them with all
its western might. And there were brave deeds
done among them that day ; deeds of positive
as well as negative courage. Let me only instance
one. Three of the Battleford Home Guard who
had been trying to clear out the enemy from the
creek bed in our rear were cut off by a bunch of
Indians, and their only way of escape was by
reaching and climbing a perpendicular earthen
cut-bank. Two of the Queen's Own, theological
students from Toronto, named Atcheson and
Lloyd, who had themselves got separated from
their company, caught sight of the Battleford
men from the top of the bank and recognized their
desperate strait. Atcheson stretched himself over
the edge and hauled up the refugees by main
force as soon as they reached the foot of the cut-
bank, while Lloyd took aim in turn at every
Indian that rose to fire at the rescuer — took aim,
but dared not let fly, for he had only one cartridge

40 HEROISM AND HUMOUR

left. So hot was the Indian fire that every one
of the three Battleford men was shot dead as
soon as he reached the top of the bank. One of
them got a second bullet in him while Atcheson
was carrying him back, and they rolled over
together. Atcheson was picking the man up
again, when a half-breed scrambled up out of the
gully and levelled his musket at the rescuer's
back. Lloyd fired his last cartridge and knocked
over the half-breed, whose body carried down
with it half a dozen Indians who were scrambling
up behind him. A moment after, a bullet pierced
Lloyd's side, took off a piece of a vertebra, and
stretched him paralyzed on the turf. Atcheson,
all his ammunition gone, sprang to Lloyd's defence,
and stood over him with clubbed rifle ; but
neither of them would have lived another minute
if a handful of their comrades had not come up in
the nick of time and driven back their assailants.

It is that same Lloyd, now Archdeacon of
Saskatchewan, who is so well-known and grate-
fully remembered in England for his indefatigable
efforts to supply the spiritual needs of the new
settlers, and whose name is immortalized by the
town of Lloydminster.

Grave as the situation was, it had its moments
of humour. A bullet ripped open Major Short's
cap, while he was directing the artillery, — a brave
officer he was, and lost his life afterwards fighting

THOSE GUNS 41

a fire at Quebec. " It was a new cap, too," was
his only remark as he mournfully held up the
remains. Another bullet scraped the skin off
Sergeant McKelTs temple. " Another good Irish-
man gone ! " he cried as he fell — to pick himself
up next minute on discovering that he was not
killed. " What on earth have you been wearing
that red tuque for ? " a rifleman asked as he
met one of the Battleford men at the end of the
fight : "I heard there was a half-breed with a
red tuque on, and I've been firing at you all the
morning." The guns were the grimmest joke of
all. The Gating sprayed the prairie with a vast
quantity of lead, with a noise that gave the
Indians a bit of a scare at first ; but they soon
got used to that. A Gatling may be all very well
when your enen^ stands in front of it in a crowd ;
but that is not the Indians' way. They had a
wholesome respect for the seven-pounders, —
which was more than the gunners had, for the
wooden trails were rotten and gave way under the
recoil, so that one of the guns fell to the ground
after every shot and the other had to be tied to
its carriage with a rope.

Though we had planned to take the Indians
by surprise, we were ourselves so surprised by
their onset that scarcely a man had a biscuit in
his pocket or a drop of water in his can when he
sprang from his waggon and flung himself down

42 OUR RETREAT

in the firing line. Exhausted by the all-night
ride and the hunger and thirst and heat of the
day, many a man went to sleep under fire, while
a comrade kept up the fight, — to take a nap in
his turn later on. It was weary as well as bloody
work. But at last, having charged the Indians out
of the flanking coulees and the valley in our
rear, we took advantage of the lull — to saddle
up and go back the way we had come. The
Indians, when driven out of the coulees, had
fallen back, discouraged by the white men's
bravery, and prepared to defend their camp,
which in fact our men were eager to attack.
Great was their surprise and joy when they
found we were actually in full retreat, and they
poured down that hill-side after us like a swarm
of angry ants before half of us had recrossed the
creek. Now, however, they were in the open,
and a well-planted shell from our rope-swathed
seven pounder — its companion had been put
to bed in a waggon, — with the cool musketry
of our rear-guard, held the pursuers in check
till the last of our waggons had struggled through
the creek.

We halted for half an hour when we had got
out of sight of the fatal hill, but as soon as we had
swallowed a hasty meal we pressed on, the
wounded men suffering horribly in their jolty
waggons and all of us chafing under a sense of

POUNDM AKER'S SURRENDER 43

defeat. The Indians might have turned our
defeat into disaster if they had circled round
and caught us in the woods ; and that, as my
enemy-friend Piacutch explains in another
chapter, is exactly what they would have done
if their chief had let them. As it was, we rode
into Battleford at nine o'clock that night. In
a day and a quarter we had ridden eighty miles
and fought a six-hour fight.

We had, it is true, taught the Indians a lesson ;
but it was not exactly the lesson we had meant
to teach them. Up to that time Poundmaker
had resisted all Riel's persuasions to bring the
tribes down and join forces with the half-breeds
fighting further east, but now he could no longer
resist the war spirit of his elated braves. The
first notice we had of this was when he captured
a train of waggons bringing supplies up from
Swift Current. The relieving force and the town
they had relieved were now alike cut off from the
outside world. Happily for us, about this time
Riel and his half-breeds were crushed at Batoche
by the eastern wing of our army, and on hearing
the news Poundmaker took the only course of
surrendering. It was a solemn cavalcade of chiefs
and head men, all the war-paint washed off their
faces, that rode into Battleford that bright May
morning for a pow-wow with the white com-
mander. Two of the braves came forward and

44 CONFESSIONS

squatted at the general's feet to confess with
perfect calmness that they had murdered white
men. One, a gnarled old fellow with a ragged
blanket and a wounded head, told how he had
killed Mr Payne, the farm instructor whose body
we had found in a pig-stye, — a plausible tale
of a quarrel because Payne had refused him
food : a tussle, when the white man tried to take
away the red man's gun : and an accidental
explosion. The other was an Indian dandy,
gay with beads and feathers ; and he made no
bones about it. He had come on a farmer greasing
his waggon wheels and shot him down like a
rabbit. Poundmaker, and a few other chiefs
or head men, and the "first and second murderers,"
were ordered into custody ; and the rest of the
Indians were sent back to repent on their bare
reserves. Great was the joy of another Cree
chief, Moosomin, who, having a little matter
of $600 in the white men's bank, had left his
reserve and taken his whole tribe flitting hither
and thither among the northern wilds to avoid
the insurgents' persistent demands for his aid.
When I met him loafing happily on the outskirts
of Battleford a few days after the pow-wow, he still
wore the " very respectable top hat " of which
he was tremendously proud ; but he and his men,
having run short of gunpowder, had been reduced
to a diet of gophers shot with bows and arrows.

IN CHASE OF BIG BEAR 45

The war was not over yet ; for Big Bear and
his murderous men were still at large among
those northern wilds, dragging about with them
all the prisoners they had taken at Fort Pitt.
To rescue these white folk the whole of our forces
were split up into flying columns to search the
maze of wood and river and lake and swamp that
lay to the north of us. It seemed an almost
hopeless enterprise ; but it gave promise of fresh
adventures in a mysterious country very different
from the scene of all the previous operations, and
I attached myself to a troop of Mounted Police
and scouts that seemed more likely than the rest
to catch up with the runaways. Fortunately
I had found a new cayuse by this time ; a hand-
some well-fed beast to start with, and fat as butter
before the end of a hard-riding campaign ; strong
as an ox, too, though never an oat did he get, —
the rich summer grass was all he wanted.

Our experiences on that wild chase were varied
and even entertaining ; it required a spice of
the Mark Tapley in our dispositions to make them
altogether satisfactory. At one time we were
soaked in a good whole-hearted downpour of
summer rain, and had to dry ourselves at night
by huge bonfires of poplar and birch. At another,
we had not too much water but too little, and,
after riding about as far as our beasts could
carry us, bivouacked at last beside a slough of

46 FOREST AND SWAMP

black liquid alive with crawling things, — too
foul even to make tea with, especially as there
was not an ounce of sugar left in the outfit.

Fort Pitt we found nearly all burnt down ;
but we soon left the ruins behind and struck away
northward towards Beaver River. Sometimes we
cantered over a fine open stretch of rolling prairie,
no longer brown and dry, but soft and green with
the rich new summer grass and ablaze with
crimson patches of wild flowers. Sometimes
we wound in and out among the poplar bluffs of a
bit of beautiful park land : and it was in such a
setting that we came upon the black burnt site of
the Frog Lake settlement. We excavated from
the mass of charred timber such remains as we
could recognize as human, gave them a hurried
Christian burial, and pressed on after the
murderers.

Leaving the sunlit prairie behind, we plunged
into a forest broken only by innumerable lakes
and sloughs and muskegs — a muskeg being a
slough of exaggerated treachery, where if you
once get in you may never get out. If a lake was
shallow and had a reasonably firm bottom, we
waded through it ; if not, we squeezed our way
along the boggy edge between wood and water.
One day, we covered only twelve miles. The
only enemies we encountered were the insatiable
tireless mosquito and the blood-letting bull-dog

THE MOSQUITO 47

fly. The bull-dog is a butcher, or rather a skilful
surgeon, who drives his lancet in and takes his
little fill of blood but leaves no sting behind. He
attacked me now and then as I lay on the turf for
a mid-day nap ; but he seemed to prefer the
cayuse. In justice to the Canadian mosquito,
I must say that he is quite free from the per-
nicious habit of his southerly cousin who poisons
you with malaria, — a disease unknown in Canada.
In justice to the country I must add that the
mosquito enjoys a short season, if a busy one ;
and, much as he loves the white man, he retires
by slow degrees as the white man settles up the
country.

All this time the prisoners ahead of us were
being hurried on and on, leaving surreptitious
scraps of paper stuck on bushes to show us which
way their captors were travelling, and miserably
disappointed as each day passed without a sound
of our guns. The whites were quartered for the
most part in the tents of some friendly Chip-
pewayans, whom the Crees had forced to go
along with them ; but more than once the Crees
plotted to steal the white girls, who had to be
smuggled from tent to tent under Indian blankets.
Once a party of scouts came up with the red men's
rear-guard crossing a swampy lake, and attacked
them ; but by the time the rest of the white force
arrived the Indians were far away on the other

48 THE PRISONERS SET FREE

side, and their ponies' hoofs had so broken up the
frozen mud that the troopers could not go through
after them. Spurred on by the hot pursuit, the
Indians fled faster and faster, till they reached the
Beaver River, which they crossed in hastily built
cobles of hide stretched on willow frames. We,
too, reached the Beaver River, a fine stream
flowing through a deep valley between steep
hillsides thickly wooded from the water to the
sky-line ; and this northern forest was no longer
a monotony of poplar, but richly mingled with
pines. Some of us got over the river in a derelict
canoe, and struck away north as far as Cold Lake,
almost on the borders of Athabasca Territory,
without finding any trace of an Indian. Big
Bear had clearly given us the slip. As it turned
out, soon after crossing the river the friendly
Chippewayans plucked up courage, and, lagging
behind one day on pretence of mending their
harness, they set the prisoners free. With a
couple of Indian guides, the white folk made a
perilous passage of the river and began their
hard tramp back through wood and swamp to
Fort Pitt, with about four pounds of food among
them. Next morning they trapped four small
rabbits, which had to make a meal for thirty men
and women and children. Happily, two of the
men had secured guns, and managed to bring in a
little game ; but the joy was great when an ox

STERN- WHEELER AND SANDBANKS 49

was found straying down the trail, and the party
halted for a day while they dried its flesh for
future use. At last they drew near the end of
their pilgrimage, but in such a forlorn condition
that the ladies, using the forest for a dressing-
room, had to change their rags for clothes sent out
to them before they could go on unabashed to
meet their friends at Fort Pitt, — nearly ten weeks
after they had marched out as prisoners to the
Indian camp.

Then at last the war was over, Big Bear being of
no consequence without his captives. Parting
reluctantly with my sturdy cayuse, I embarked
in an old stern-wheeler at Battleford for a voyage
to Prince Albert. This was an experience as
curious as any the West had yet afforded. It
was certainly the strangest bit of navigation,
except running the St Lawrence rapids on a raft,
that I have ever had. Anything less like the
deep swift green St Lawrence than the Saskatche-
wan, by the way, could hardly be imagined.
The river was full of sand-banks, and though the
ship drew only 20 inches of water she was con-
stantly running aground. At one point we
struggled for eight hours to get past a single
island. When we stuck on the first shoal, we
made the ship walk off on her wooden legs, —
driving two poles into the bed of the river, and
then, by pulleys and tackle fastened to their tops,

50 BIG BEAR SURRENDERS

hoisting the vessel a few inches into the air and
driving her full steam ahead into deep water — or
on to the next sand-bank, as the case might be.
Another time, we fastened a hawser to a tree on
the island and pulled for all our engines were
worth, so that something had got to go, — the tree
or the rope if not the ship. And all the time who
was looking on from that very island but Big
Bear, the chief whom all the Queen's horses and
all the Queen's men had failed to catch. He told
me about it himself when I interviewed him a few
days later at Prince Albert ; for he had come in
to give himself up, rejecting the dismal alternative
of a fugitive old age in the great north wilderness.
Big Bear and Poundmaker were sent to prison for
a year or two ; while Riel was hanged, and so
were the murderers. The principal demands of
the half-breeds were granted, on the time-
honoured principle of locking your stable-door as
soon as you are sure the horse is stolen. Even
before this redress, the rebels had settled down,
quite as glad as we were to be done fighting. I
wandered about among them, alone, while the
troops went home to the East, and discovered no
trace of ill-will to the white men. The earth was
still fresh in the rifle pits of Batoche, and the
bullet-scars raw on the trees of Duck Lake, but
the rebellion was dead as a camp-fire after a
rain-storm.

THE RUSH TO THE WEST

Not all statistics are bewildering. In even the
dullest mind the emigration statistics of Canada
conjure up a living vision of men, women, and
children pouring out of old Europe, crowding into
the ships and spreading over the prairies. For a
quarter of a century Canada called in vain to the
men of the old world — jostling each other in the
fight for bread, and dropping by thousands into
the ranks of the hungry and hopeless — called
them to come and be filled. Some went, of course,
but an insignificant number compared either to
those who might have gone, or to the hundreds of
thousands who passed by Canada on their way to
the United States. It was only as the nineteenth
century closed that the tide began fairly to set in
the direction of Canada. In 1899, the total
emigration had been 44,543, and in 1900, only
23>895 . But in the fiscal year ending on June 30,
1902, the arrivals numbered 67,379. In 1903,
the figure went up to 128,364 ; in 1904, to 130,331 ;
and in 1905, to 146,266. Then came a leap to
189,064, which was the total for the fiscal year
1905-06 ; and in the calendar year of January to

5«

52 ORGANIZED EMIGRATION

December 1906 the arrivals numbered 215,912,
or 71, 294 more than in the previous twelvemonth.
Of the 189,064, the last total of which a complete
analysis is available, 86,796 came from the
United Kingdom, or 21,437 more than in the
previous fiscal year, the proportions for the year
1905-06 being 65,135 English, 797 Welsh, 15,846
Scots, and 5018 Irish, while 44,349 arrived from
other parts of Europe and 57,919 from the United
States. Between the beginning of 1899 and the
middle of 1906 there arrived 289,191 people from
the United Kingdom, 261,136 from the United
States, and 228,664 from continental Europe and
other parts, making a total of 778,991. Adding
82,326 who arrived in the latter half of 1906
(57,463 by sea and 24,863 from the United
States) we have altogether an immigration of
861,317 in eight years.

The Self-Help, the East London, the British
Women's, and other emigration societies, have
long done much to make easy the way for the
workless man in the old country to the manless
work in the new. In the last few years, the
Salvation Army has organized emigration on an
unprecedented scale, and with a method combin-
ing the advantages of enthusiasm and common-
sense. Thanks to the wide-spread organization
of the Salvation Army in Canada, the emigrant
who goes out under its flag is practically sure not

EMIGRANT FARES 53

only of a job as soon as he lands, but of another
job if he loses the first through no fault of his own.
The Church Army also has become a large emi-
gration agency in recent years.

A large proportion of the emigrants from the
mother country cannot afford, even with the help
of loans from the Salvation Army and other
societies, to go all the way to the West. A third-
class ticket from London to Quebec or Toronto
only costs £5, 10s. or £7, 3s. o,d. But from London
to Winnipeg the cost is £9, 5s. As practically none
of the American emigrants settle in Eastern
Canada, the proportion of Americans in the new
population of the West is much larger than the
immigration statistics show. But a great number
of the old-country folk, who take what work they
can get in the East to begin with, go on to the West
when they have saved enough money for the
railway ticket. A great many also take advantage
of the special harvester excursions, by which, on
agreeing to do not less than four weeks' reaping
or threshing wherever they may be sent from
Winnipeg, they are taken all the way from
London to that city for £6.

It is somewhat surprising to learn that the
Canadian Government carries on an emigration
campaign in the United States almost as vigor-
ously as it does in the United Kingdom. The
great republic, while it still attracts more immi-

54 EMIGRATION FROM THE STATES

grants than any other country, contains hundreds
of thousands ready to leave it.

To persuade these Americans that they will be
better off in Canada than in the country of their
birth or adoption, the Canadian Government has
for years been distributing emigration literature,
delivering lectures, exhibiting Canadian products
at State and county fairs, and inserting pictorial
advertizements in nearly 7000 American papers —
chiefly rural weeklies and agricultural journals.
One of these now before me catches the eye
with : " Twenty-five bushels of wheat to the acre
means a productive capacity in dollars of over
sixteen dollars per acre. This, on land which has
cost the farmer nothing but the price of tilling it,
tells its own story. The Canadian Government
gives absolutely free to every settler 160 acres of
such land. Lands adjoining can be purchased at
from $6 to $10 per acre, from railroads and other
corporations. Already 175,000 farmers from the
United States have made their homes in Canada.' '
In another I read : " Magnificent climate. Farmers
ploughing in their shirt-sleeves in the middle of
November. Coal, wood, water, hay in abundance.
Schools, churches, markets convenient." Special
efforts are made among the French Canadians,
Scandinavians and Germans living in the States,
agents able to speak their respective languages
being employed. According to the Canadian

COUNTER-ATTRACTIONS 55

officer in charge of this propaganda in the United
States, " advertising has been the keynote of the
increasing success that we have been able to
chronicle year after year." But the American,
unless he is a very fresh immigrant indeed, does
not take for granted all he reads in an advertise-
ment. In many States the people have clubbed
together, and sent delegates to spy out the pro-
missory land and verify or otherwise the glowing
accounts of the emigration agents. The satis-
factory result of this independent investigation
is evident from the enormous number of American
citizens actually making their homes under the
British flag. The Canadian propagandists are
not allowed to work without opposition. Their
chief reports : " Various State organizations
have been brought into existence for the purpose
of retaining their people ; newspapers have been
subsidized to publish articles detrimental to
Canada ; holders of large tracts of land in different
parts of the States, especially in the south and
west, have at their back the combined influences
of railroads. They carry on a propaganda of
advertizing. The opening up of large tracts of
land suitable for irrigation has the assistance of
the United States Government. In addition to
this there are the Indian reservations which are
being opened up from time to time .... In one
day of last week, one thousand homeseekers

$6 "YOU COULDN'T KEEP THEM OUT"

passed through Sioux City, South Dakota, on their
way to the vacant lands in that State. It is stated
that one million acres of government land will be
opened up there, very shortly. . . . Thus it will be
seen that everything is not coming Canada- wards."
The fact that in spite of all these counter-attrac-
tions the Americans are flowing over the frontier
in such a mighty stream is the highest possible
testimony to the reality of the advantages that
Canada has to offer. As an observer in Chicago
says, " You couldn't keep them out with a club."
It is not only Canadians who tempt Americans
to Canada. Americans take a hand in the
business themselves, There was a parcel of
American speculators, for instance, who came into
south-western Manitoba and bought about 160,000
acres at $3 (12s. 6d.) an acre. Then they went
back, and by judicious advertizing persuaded
their fellow-countrymen to rush in and buy the
same land from them in farm lots at $10 (£2,
is. 8d.) an acre. The land is worth much more
now, and I suppose not one of the buyers repents
his bargain. I hear of a Polish Committee in
Chicago who contemplate transplanting 50,000
families of their fellow-countrymen to Canada.
The object in this case is presumably philan-
thropic rather than commercial. If the scheme
is carried out, I hope the Poles will be well
scattered over the prairie, where the fresh air of ^

NO HOMESTEADS FOR ALIENS $7

heaven can blow every taint of Chicago out of
them.

It is well known by this time that any man may
choose from the wild land of Western Canada a
free " homestead " of 160 acres, on paying a
registration fee of $10, or £2 ; and that at the end
of three years he is given the ownership of his
homestead if he has in each of those years lived
there for at least six months, and brought five
acres under cultivation. There is, however,
another condition ; he must become a British
subject if he is not one already. Now a great
many of the American immigrants have capital,
and can afford to buy land, which they can then
hold without giving up their American citizenship.
But most of them take free homesteads, even if
they add to their acreage by purchase. In the
year 1905-06 the number of free 160-acre home-
steads granted was 41,869, of which 12,370 were
taken up by Canadians, 47 by other British
colonists, 8097 by men from the United Kingdom,
and 12,485 by " Americans." These last must
necessarily swear allegiance to the British Crown ;
and most of those who are under no such obligation
will probably do so of their own choice.

The country to which all these Americans and
many eastern Canadians and old-country folk
are flocking is the great oblong lying between the
Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, bounded

58 THE COUNTRY SUMMED UP

on the south by the United States and on the
north by the ever-retreating edge of an almost
uninhabited but not uninhabitable wilderness.
This oblong, which has for administrative pur-
poses been divided into the three Provinces of
Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, is a great
plain, sloping quite imperceptibly up towards the
west, till it reaches a height of 3000 feet above
sea-level, though, so far as the eye can tell, it is
no higher in the west than in the east. Parts of
this plain are flat, especially in the south ; the
rest is gently undulating. It is crossed by
several great rivers, and, except in the south-west,
is watered also by numberless streams, and lakes,
and ponds — known locally as sloughs. Its land
surface is covered by thin but most nourishing
grass in the south, and by a happy alternation of
grass and woods elsewhere. Its soil is almost all
good, and the greater part is amazingly fertile.
It grows practically anything produced by the
temperate zone, and many things, such as the
tomato, which England is too " temperate M to
ripen. Its southern prairie yields the finest wheat
in the world ; its cattle-ranches are famous, and
deserve their fame ; and its dairy-farming is no
less successful. It already sends vast quantities
of meat and bread-stuffs over the Atlantic to the
United Kingdom ; and in its shipments of wheat
and butter to Japan there are the beginnings of

THE RAILWAYS 59

what should become an enormous trade across the
Pacific. Its air is cold in winter, hot in summer,
pure, dry, and invigorating.

As only a few of its rivers are navigable, and
then only by little flat-bottomed stern-wheel
steamers, the country has had to be opened up
entirely by railways, which are spreading fast in
all directions. The Canadian Pacific came first,
with a line right across the southern section of the
plain, and, instead of resting on its oars while the
younger lines go ahead, it has only been stirred up
by their competition to more strenuous efforts to
capture the trade of the new settlements springing
up daily all over the West. " The Canadian
Pacific never stops," as Sir Thomas Shaughnessy
says. Then, about 200 miles further north, the
plain is crossed by the Canadian Northern, a new
line created by the enterprise of Messrs Mackenzie
& Mann. Between the two the Grand Trunk
Pacific is crossing the same plain on its way to the
Pacific Ocean ; and finally we have Mr J. J. Hill
promising (or threatening, as his competitors
would say) to over-run the plain with a fourth
line to connect with his Great Northern system in
the United States. Trains in the West are few
and slow, if judged by English standards ; and the
Westerner has a yearly recurring grievance
against his railways because their capacity is
unequal to the gigantic task of carrying his

60 RAILWAY GRIEVANCES

bumper crops away to the East. It is the same
grievance in another form that Londoners have
against their suburban railways for incapacity to
provide for the abnormal rush of passengers into
and out of the City at certain times of the day.
Then a complaint is sometimes heard that a com-
pany spends on extending its mileage, energy and
money which might be spent in perfecting its
equipment ; but as long as there are vast blank
spaces on the railway map of the "fertile belt," with
settlers rushing in to live on them, there is much
to be said for the policy of rapid extension. Once
a railway is built and working, people can afford
to wait a while for its improvement ; but the
difference between the absence and presence of
any railway is all the difference between stagna-
tion and life. It is to be hoped that if ever the
West is visited by such another snowing-up as
that of the winter of 1906-07, when certain
sections of line were practically non-existent for
weeks, the railway companies will be better pre-
pared for the emergency.

The extension of railways is not so rapid as it
should be, or as it would be if the railway com-
panies could get the men to carry out their plans.
Capital they can get in plenty ; and the wages
offered for navvy ing are good, as navvies' wages go.
The man employed on railway construction in the
West commonly gets $2 a day, or 50s. a week, and

NAVVIES WANTED 6\

can reckon on six months' continuous work during
the season. He pays 18s. a week for his keep, and
if he starts with a good outfit of stout clothing he
can save as much of the remainder as he likes.
But the men are simply not to be had in anything
like the numbers required. In 1906, about 500
miles of line which should have been under con-
struction were not touched, for this reason. At
the beginning of 1907, plans had been laid for the
construction of 1500 miles during the year,
which would give constant employment to 60,000
men ; yet the men actually offering themselves
were not expected even to approach that number,
in spite of the expectation that 250,000 emigrants
or more would arrive in the country.

While Westerners often complain of high
railway rates, there is no agitation in Canada
comparable to that which excites the people of the
United States for drastic legislation against
railway companies. The people of Canada have
already in their hands a very efficient instrument
of self-defence in the Federal Railway Commission.
Any line which comes under the Dominion
Railway Acts must obtain the Commission's
approval for its route, its plans, its very curves and
gradients ; and its rates may be lowered if the
Commission considers them unreasonable. Ac-
cording to the learned judge who presides over the
Commission, though certain provisions in the

62 THE LAND TAKEN UP

Canadian Pacific's charter give that line excep-
tional freedom and may lead to some litigation, on
the whole, Canada is likely to escape the great
amount of litigation which has arisen in the United
States. A corporation may have no soul, but it
has a great deal of human nature, and is not likely
to press its advantages so hardly as to discourage
the settlement on which its own increased pro-
sperity depends.

" With all those land-hungry thousands rushing
in," the question is sometimes asked, " is not the
supply of land being fast exhausted ? " Now
the estimates of the land originally available vary
greatly ; but I see no reason seriously to question
the deliberate judgment formed in 1904 by Dr
Saunders, the Director of the Federal Government's
Experimental Farms, that there were in Manitoba,
Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, and Alberta about
171,000,000 acres suitable for profitable farming,
out of a total (after deducting water areas) of
232,000,000 acres. About 30,000,000 acres have
been granted to settlers and 29,000,000 acres to
railway companies ; while 4,200,000 acres re-
main in the hands of the Hudson's Bay Com-
pany, 5,000,000 acres were reserved as " school
lands," and 7,620,000 acres have been alienated
for special schemes of colonization and irrigation,
or for other purposes.

THE LAND STILL AVAILABLE 63

Deducting this total of 75,820,000, there would
still remain 95,180,000 acres in the government's
hands, or more than enough for three times as
many people as have taken homesteads since the
system was started in 1874. At the rate recorded
in 1905-06, when 6, 699,040 acres were taken up by
41,869 homesteaders, the free land would be
exhausted by the year 1920. However, a good
deal of the land not classified by Dr Saunders as
" suitable for profitable farming " will probably
be taken up, and even found profitable, by the
less exacting settlers from Europe. Thousands
of the early Scottish emigrants to Eastern Canada
made good farms for themselves on land which
would not be reckoned profitable in the West
to-day. Then it must also be remembered that
the lands held by companies are open for settle-
ment by purchase, though not for free home-
steading.

In the middle of 1906, the Canadian Pacific
still held 9,840,975 acres in the three prairie pro-
vinces— having in the year then ending sold
1,012,322 acres at an average price of $5.84
(24s. 4d.), and in the previous year 411,451 acres
at $4.80 {£1). The price will doubtless be raised
year by year, but not to a prohibitive degree.
The Dominion Government also puts up certain
of the school lands to auction from time to time ;
in the year 1905-06 over 155,000 acres were sold,

64 IRRIGATION

the price averaging $12.14 (50s. yd.). Of the
land companies, some have been selling for years
but have a large area left ; and two have only just
started, — the Western Canada Land Company,
which took over 500,000 acres of Canadian Pacific
land in the Edmonton district and has barely
begun operations, having sold, up to April 30, 1907,
38,752 acres (at an average of about $8.70, or 36s.);
and the Southern Alberta Land Company, a still
younger concern, which has an estate of 390,000
acres in the Medicine Hat region, and is putting
a large part of it under irrigation previous to sale.
This process of irrigation is itself largely increasing
the supply of " suitable " land. In Alberta,
already 832 miles of canals and ditches have been
constructed to irrigate 2,880,056 acres, and in
Saskatchewan 189 miles, for 39,916 acres. Finally,
I should add that the present Provinces of Alberta
and Saskatchewan include not only the old
Territories called by those names, and the Ter-
ritory of Assiniboia, but about 135,000,000 acres
formerly comprised in the Territory of Athabasca.
It is quite uncertain how much of this northern
area will be found " suitable for profitable farm-
ing M ; but some of it is being successfully farmed
already, and profits will come when railways do.

The Surveyor-General of Canada states that
about 124,800,000 acres in Manitoba, Saskatchewan
and Alberta have hitherto been surveyed, and

FOOD FOR THE OLD COUNTRY 65

roughly estimates that in the two latter Provinces
there are 185,600,000 acres of unsurveyed lands
fit for settlement. The total land area of these
two Provinces, after deducting 30,080,000 acres
for water, is about 324,125,440 acres ; of which
the Surveyor-General believes that 106,240,000
are suitable for growing grain, while 46,720,000
require irrigation ; and the remaining 141,085,440
acres are suitable for ranches or other kinds of
farming.

When we think of the millions in the old
country who have to be fed with imported wheat,
it is good to know that this one Canadian plain
could easily supply every ounce of bread we want.
Dr Saunders points out that our imports of wheat
and flour in 1902 were equivalent to about
200,000,000 bushels of wheat. If only one fourth
of the land which he considers " suitable " in
Manitoba, and the southern parts of the two other
Provinces, were annually under wheat, he shows
that the total crop, at the Manitoba ten-years'
average of 19 bushels an acre, would be over
812,000,000 bushels. If Canada's population had
risen to 30,000,000, this " would be ample to
supply the home demand, and meet the present
requirements of Great Britain three times over."
As he has left out of count the wheat production
of Eastern Canada, he concludes : "It would
seem to be quite possible that Canada may be in a

66 ALL WE WANT, AND MORE

position within comparatively few years, after
supplying all home demands, to furnish Great
Britain with all the wheat and flour she re-
quires, and leave a surplus for export to other
countries."

Note on Population. — The population of
Manitoba in 1906 was 365,688. Its growth and
composition are described in the next chapter.
The population of Saskatchewan and Alberta in
1906 numbered 257,763 and 185,412, making
808,863 for the three prairie Provinces. The
census of 1901 showed a population of 158,940
(against 66,799 m I^9I and 56,446 in 1881) for
the area now practically represented by Saskat-
chewan and Alberta, besides 52,709 in Yukon,
Mackenzie, and other northerly parts. The
158,940 of 1901 included 91,535 natives of
Canada, 17,612 of other British countries, 13,877
of the United States, 14,585 of Russia, 13,407
of Austria-Hungary, 2093 of Norway and
Sweden, 2170 of Germany, and 1023 of France.

MODERN MANITOBA

Manitoba is not so very juvenile as the new-born
Provinces just beyond, yet she can hardly be
ignored simply because she has reached the
venerable age of thirty-seven. Her settlement
really dates back, as we have seen, nearly sixty
years before she attained the dignity of a Province.
In 1870, when the Red River settlement
became a Province, with the village round Fort
Garry as its capital, there was still a population
of only 18,995, Indians and half-breeds included,
to occupy the whole region. But then came the
first rush of homeseekers, and by 1881 the
population had risen to 62,260. That was the
year of the great " boom," when the price of land
in Winnipeg went up like a rocket — and the higher
the price, the more eager were men to buy — till it
came down like a stick, and ruined those who had
bought last. Winnipeg took many years to get
over the exhaustion that followed its fever ; but
even the unnatural boom prices of '81 have now
been reached and passed in the natural course of
events. The muddy little village of 1870 is

67

68 WINNIPEG TO-DAY

to-day a city of about 100,000 inhabitants, who
ride in electric cars, do business in sky-scraping
offices, buy all they want at reasonable prices in
metropolitan stores, and are altogether urban and
up-to-date.

That in a purely agricultural province nearly
a third of the population should be found con-
centrated in one city is a remarkable fact. But it
must be remembered that Winnipeg is not only
the capital of a Province, but the metropolis of the
West. It is the distributing centre of men and
merchandise for Saskatchewan and Alberta as
well as Manitoba ; and practically all the grain of
three Provinces pours through the city on its way
to the East. It is here that the invading army of
eastern immigration concentrates before spreading
over the plains. It is here, too, that the army of
harvesters, brought in from the East every autumn
at low excursion rates, is organized in battalions
and companies to reap and thresh the grain in
every part of the West. In the fall of 1906 about
23,000 such men arrived, 6515 more than the year
before, yet far too few to supply the demand ;
and, though most of them were not new-comers to
Canada, about a third of them remained to swell
the flowing tide of population in the West. Winni-
peg calls itself the Chicago of Canada ; and the
single fact that the clearing-house total of its
banks in a single week has exceeded $10,000,000

MANITOBAN POPULATION 69

is enough to check the smile which such a bold
comparison might provoke.

This Province, having had a thirty years' start
of its western neighbours, naturally contains a
larger proportion of families living in really good
houses and possessing accumulated wealth. The
average farm has a higher percentage of its acres
under actual cultivation. The disproportion of
males to females in the population is not so
tremendous, the census of 1906 showing 205,183
of the former to 160,505 of the latter, while
Saskatchewan has 152,793 males to 104,970
females, and Alberta 108,281 males to 77,131
females. Nor, of course, can you expect so rapid
a rate of increase as in Provinces where a vastly
greater proportion of the land is still to be had for
little or nothing. Yet Manitoba, though neces-
sarily showing a smaller percentage of growth, is
still far ahead of either of the other two Provinces,
her population having increased from 152,506 in
1891 and 255,211 in 1901 to 365,688 in 1906.
Among the towns, the population of Winnipeg
increased between 1901 and 1906 from 42,340 to
90,204, and that of its suburb across the river,
St Boniface, from 2019 to 5 119 ; while Brandon
went up from 5620 to 10,411, and Portage la
Prairie from 3901 to 4985.

The census takers of 1906 numbered the total
population in every part of the three prairie

70 BRITISH AND FOREIGN

Provinces, but made no attempt to classify the
people except by sex . The regular decennial census
of 1901, however, gives the origins of the people ;
and the figures are very instructive. Of the whole
number in Manitoba, 70.87 per cent, or 180,859 were
Canadians, 67,566 coming from Ontario and 99,806
being natives of Manitoba itself ; 33,517, or 13.14
per cent., came from other British lands, England
contributing 20,036, Scotland 8099, and Ireland
4537 ; and 6922, or 2.71 per cent., were natives of
the United States. Of the 8492 natives of the
Province of Quebec an uncertain number were
French-Canadians. Roughly, 85 or 86 per cent,
of the whole were English speaking people.

There remain, however, 33,915 " foreigners,"
speaking among them at least a score of tongues.
The largest single section, 11,570, came from
Austria-Hungary ; being mostly Ruthenes from
Galicia and Bukowina. Russia takes second
place on the foreign list, with 8854, mostly from
the districts just over the frontier from Galicia.
These two groups, indeed, are commonly lumped
together in the West as Galicians. The domestic
service of Winnipeg, or at any rate what corres-
ponds to domestic service in hotels and restaurants
— for the real homes find it hard to get servants of
any sort — is largely done by daughters of the
foreigners, of whom we shall see something
further west.

BLESSING THE CANADIAN NEVA 71

The Greek Church is strong enough to keep up a
bishop, who repays the hospitality of the city with
a yearly benediction of its Red River, when the
Tsar performs the blessing of the Neva. The way
in which this strikes the western mind may be
gathered from the brief report of a local journalist
last January : " The bishop, with 300 followers,
assembled at the 'Scrap-iron Cathedral.' A pro-
cession was formed, led by four men carrying an
immense cross of ice, elaborately covered with
silver. The bishop followed in his robes of office,
and he was surrounded by the adherents of his
church and throngs of spectators. The weird
ceremony took place at the foot of Selkirk Avenue.
By means of incantation and prayer, the depths of
the Red River became holy water." Winnipeg
should really be grateful to Bishop Seraphin, or
any one else who adds a touch of colour and
romance to the life of a city otherwise somewhat
lacking in the picturesque.

The Icelanders also, you might think, would help
to break the commonplace level of an Anglo-
Saxon community, especially as there are — or
were, when the census was taken — 5403 of them
in the Province. They do, it is true, form an
interesting group of fisher-folk on the western
shore of Lake Winnipeg, where you come across
places called Hecla and Gimli, and whence they
send great quantities of white-fish, pickerel and

72 THE ICELANDERS

sturgeon in ice to Winnipeg and other towns.
But even here they can hardly be called primitive.
Most of the young folk can speak English, and like
to. In the city of Winnipeg alone there are now
over 3000 Icelanders, and you could scarcely pick
them out from the rest of the population. Now
and then they let the world know who they are.
Their annual festival in August commemorates
the granting of a constitution to Iceland by the
Danish King in 1874 ; but the festival consists
largely of the athletic sports familiar to us all.
To be sure, there are speeches and choruses in
Icelandic ; but these chant the praises of the new
land, the " foster-home," as well as the old. The
people are more than satisfied with their trans-
plantation ; and with good reason. The winter
is colder in Manitoba than in Iceland — which
causes some surprise — but the summer is so much
warmer and brighter as to put all comparison
out of the question. Indeed, the race already
shows signs of distinct physical improvement in
the bracing West. A Winnipeg minister declares
that he has seen distinct mental improvement too.
In the house where he first lived, there was a little
tow-headed Icelandic servant-girl, so stupid that
she was only put up with because no one better
could be found. Some years afterwards he met a
handsome, stylish woman, bright and capable, blest
with a good husband and beautiful children, and

THE ICELANDERS 73

taking a prominent part in the work of her church.
It was the stupid little tow-headed slavey,
mellowed by the warmth and toned up by the
keenness of the western air.

The Icelanders are a sober, industrious, intelli-
gent, and progressive people. They are living up
to the splendid reputation that Scandinavians
generally enjoy, as among the most reliable and
valuable elements of the western population. The
Commissioner of Immigration at Winnipeg, in his
last report, which deals with the settlement not
only of Manitoba but of the other prairie pro-
vinces, says : " Icelanders continue to come to us
direct from Iceland and from the United States.
Those from the States bring with them more or
less means, live stock, farming implements, and
household effects. The Icelandic people are
maintaining their excellent reputation for working
hard and saving, which enables them to settle on
a homestead at an early date. Some engage in
business, and their success in educational achieve-
ments is very marked. The settlers in the
Icelandic colony at Thingvalla, Saskatchewan,
arrived about eighteen years ago with little means.
They are now to be found in comfortable circum-
stances, many of them having acquired a whole
section (640 acres). The country is well adapted
for stock raising, and considerable dairying is
carried on, there being a first-class creamery at

74 A BOUNDLESS WHEATFIELD

Churchbridge Station. Three of the settlers have
in partnership purchased a first-class threshing
outfit.' ' Of the new Scandinavian immigrants as
a whole he says : " It is estimated that 75 per
cent, have settled on land ; the balance have
readily found work as labourers and domestic
servants, at good wages. This class of settler is
generally prosperous all over Western Canada, and
thousands more could be immediately placed at
remunerative labour on railway construction or
other works, if they could be obtained."

The country around the capital, and indeed
Southern Manitoba as a whole, is almost as poor
to the casual eye as it is rich to the informed
understanding. And that is saying a great deal.
I have gone a whole day, which means about
200 miles, by one of the innumerable railways
that radiate from Winnipeg, seeing nothing but
wheat. The land seemed one great flat harvest-
field. My companions, who were business men,
talked about the view with the enthusiasm of an
artist enraptured by an ineffable sunset or an
Alpine range. Well, they must not be charged
with lack of imagination on that account. On
the contrary, any one can be impressed by a
flaming sky or a snow-capped sierra. It takes
more imagination to see the glory in a dead level
two hundred miles' monotony of " No. 1 hard."

Now wheat is after all the most essential item

WHEAT AND ITS ENEMIES 75

in the white man's bill of fare ; and Manitoba's
" No. 1 hard " is the very finest wheat the world
has yet succeeded in growing. It is satisfactory
to know, therefore, that the Manitoban farmer
finds wheat so profitable that he is largely in-
creasing its cultivation year by year. Wheat
growing in that region used to be spoken of as a
solemn sort of gambling. But the risk of serious
damage by autumn frosts, which gave rise to that
opinion, is a thing of the past. There is a charm-
ing belief that the breaking up of millions of acres
of hard prairie has caused a perceptible increase
of the warmth radiating from the soil, so that
autumn lingers, staving off the advent of frost.
Prosaic folk hold that farmers have learnt to put
in the seed earher, and so avoid late ripening —
that is all.

The wheat has still its dangers. In the autumn
of 1905, there was such a scarcity of workers at
harvest that in some districts the grain could not
be got in before much of it had fallen out of the
ears ; on many farms the army of weeds — wild
oats, stinkweed and thistles — threatens to get the
upper hand because the farmer has so small a
force to take the field against it. Really good
experienced Canadian farm-workers coming west
are hard to get, and impossible to keep, as they
want to take farms of their own and can do so
with very little capital. When they are obtain-

76 FARM WAGES

able, they command from $25 to $35 (£5 to £y)
a month, for a season of six or seven months, with
board, lodging and washing. A harvester gets
$2 or $2.50 (8s. or 10s.) a day, and all found. A
farmer of long experience, Mr John Dale of
Glenborough, says he has partially solved the
difficulty for himself and some of his neighbours
by getting ploughmen out from Scotland.
But then he guarantees them a full year's work,
instead of hiring them for six months only. It is
one advantage of mixed farming over mere wheat-
growing, that it gives men more steady and
regular work and justifies their engagement for a
year at a time. It is also better for the land.
Dogmatic assertions that you can go on taking
heavy wheat crops off the land year after year
without exhausting the soil are not convincing,
extraordinarily rich though that soil is. Many of
the farmers themselves are becoming healthily
sceptical on this point, and either alternate their
wheat with timothy and other grasses or allow
the land to recuperate in summer fallow every
year or two, with the best possible results. One
of the most experienced, the owner of a thousand-
acre farm, tells me that he has reaped 40 bushels
per acre on land thus rested, while an adjoining
field, where the grain had simply been sown on
the ploughed-up stubble, only yielded half that
quantity.

THE YIELD OF WHEAT 77

In spite of everything, the garnered yield of
wheat in 1905 was 47,565,707 bushels, from
2,718,888 acres ; which was nothing to complain
of, remembering that as lately as 1900 the total
was only 18,350,893 bushels. In 1906, there was
trouble of another sort, intense heat and dry
winds having checked the filling of the ears. Yet
when we turn to the actual net yield, we find that
after all it was 61,250,413 bushels, or 13,684,706
bushels more than the year before. The acreage
had risen to 3,141,537, and the average wheat
yield for the province was 19.49 bushels per acre,
as compared with 21.07 bushels in 1905. The
lowest average wheat yields on record are 8.9
bushels in 1900 and 12.4 in 1889 ; the highest is
27.86 in 1895 ; and the average for twenty-three
years is nearly 18.90 bushels.

Forgive the statistics. They mean so much
when read with imagination. If they cannot be
forgiven, I may as well " be hanged for a sheep
as for a rabbit " and give more of them ; and
shamelessly, in the text, not in a furtive footnote.

I have said that wheat-growing is profitable.
An official pamphlet puts the cost of ploughing,
seeding, harvesting and marketing, at $7.50 or
$8 an acre — say 33s. — and this is a fair estimate.
In fact, a careful farmer, reckoning every cent,
gives me his expenditure as $7.33 on an acre not
of 19, but 29 bushels. At 60 cents. (2s. 6d.) a bushel,

78 THE PROFITS OF WHEAT

the average of 19 bushels would fetch $11.40, or
47s. 6d. ; leaving a margin of $3.90 or $3.40
(16s. 3d. or 14s. 4d.) per acre. My friend who
harvested 29 bushels of wheat for $7.33 sold it at
63 cents a bushel, and thus made a profit of $10.94
or 45s. 7d. an acre. In this district, one of the
best in the Province, farms have been sold for
$40 (£8) an acre ; but even there the average is
only $25 (£5). Deducting $2 an acre, being 8
per cent, on $25, as interest on invested capital,
there still remains a profit of $8.94 or 37s. 3d. an
acre. At the lower yield of 19 bushels, but with
the higher cost of $7.50 an acre, and only allowing
60 cents a bushel as the price of wheat, a man who
gives $25 for his land can pay 8 per cent, interest
on the purchase money, and still be $1.90 or
7s. 1 id. an acre to the good ; while every year his
land is increasing in value.

As a matter of fact, many of these Manitoban
farmers came in when the land was going a-
begging, and got it for nothing, so their present
earnings for a single year are many times more
than the whole capital they had to invest.

Here is a man whose experience has been
quoted by some of the advertising pamphlets,
but is not less remarkable on that account. " I
came from Iowa," he says, "where the ague got
into my bones." That was in 1882. His capital
amounted only to £15, and the first steps in

OLD-TIMERS' EVIDENCE 79

Manitoba were hard enough. To market his
wheat in the early days he had to haul it 60 miles,
and he was glad to take 45 cents (is. io£d), a
bushel. But he had left the ague where it
belonged, in the States, and work was no longer
a pain. That was the greatest gain of all ; but
the financial profit was great enough, and can be
more easily represented in words. " Since then,"
he says, " I have sold wheat as high as $1.30
(5s. 5d.), and the biggest yield I ever got was 50
bushels to the acre. The average yield, year in
year out, gives 25 bushels to the acre." Besides
320 acres which he rents for pasture and hay, he
has 200 acres, freehold of course, under actual
cultivation, with plenty of horses, cattle, swine
and poultry. Well may he say, " My 75 dollars
proved a good investment ! "

One need not be an " old-timer " to have a
wonderful story of progress to tell. Mr John Dale,
whom I have quoted already, has been over twenty
years in the country, but, as he says, there has
been more advance in the last five years than in
the previous fifteen. Land which he bought
seven years ago at 14s. 6d. an acre is worth £4,
while land that he gave 32s. an acre for three
years ago has now a market value of £5. On one
section of land that he bought for £600 he has
netted 50 per cent, on the purchase price, the
returns on it having been £300, and there are still

80 THE ELEVATORS

200 acres to break up. He owns two and three-
quarter sections, and he has gained, in the in-
creased value of the land alone, £5000. " You
can see," he says, " that we are doing pretty well
in the West."

If you have to haul your wheat 60 miles, like
the man from Iowa, or 100 miles, like many
another then — well, it does not pay. But now,
thanks to the spread of railways, the average
wheat-grower in this Province has a station and
elevator within five miles of his door. The
elevator is the most conspicuous feature in the
landscape — and an ugly thing it is. Its hulking
dark-red mass towers above the plain like a
deformed light-house in a sea of grass and grain.
But it is a blessing in disguise. Wheat-farming
would be practically impossible without it. The
farmer can either sell his grain outright, to the
elevator company, at a figure regulated by the
price of the day at Winnipeg, or deal direct with
buyers at a distance. In the latter case, he simply
pays the elevator company at the rate of ij cent
per bushel for taking in and cleaning the grain,
storing it for 15 or 20 days, and putting it on
board the train. All he has to do then is to send
the elevator company's receipt by mail to the
buyer or agent of his choice. The railway
company is bound to allot grain cars to farmers
in the order in which they have made application ;

MIXED FARMING 81

and any station-master who allots a car to any
customer, no matter how influential, out of his
proper turn, is liable to a heavy fine.

The whole grain crop of Manitoba for 1906,
including 50,692,978 bushels of oats, 17,532,554
of barley, and sundries like rye, peas, corn (that
is, maize) and flax, came to 129,918,256 bushels,
on 14,054,895 more than in the previous year.

Superlatively good as his grain may be, the
Manitoban farmer by no means confines himself
to cereal crops — as witness these following
figures. The census shows that in 1906 the people
of this Province owned 215,819 horses, 170,543
milch cows and 350,969 other cattle, 28,975
sheep, and 200,509 pigs. The Province raised
that year as many as 4,702,595 bushels of potatoes,
being nearly 188 bushels to the acre, and 3,446,432
bushels of roots, being 265 to the acre. Nor is
the Manitoban content with the nourishing but
thin prairie hay ; for he mowed that year 133,510
tons of cultivated grasses. Still more striking is
the way he has branched out into dairying, and
the success of this comparatively recent enter-
prise. He marketed, in the same season, 4,698,882
pounds of butter, at an average price of 17.8
cents, or ninepence, a pound. Add to this
1,552,812 pounds of creamery butter at 22 cents
(nd.), and 1,501,729 pounds of factory cheese at
13 cents (6Jd.), and you find that a single year's

F

82 THE FARMER'S CUSTOMERS

dairying has brought him in $1,377,746, or about
£276,000. One effect of the high prices obtain-
able for butter and cheese was a scarcity of milk
in the cities. The town-dwellers make their
living, directly or indirectly, out of the country-
folk's prosperity, but the advantage is not all
on one side ; the farmers already find an appreci-
able source of income in the town consumption of
country produce such as turkeys, geese, and
chickens. They have even taken to bee-keeping.
The bees thrive in the dry western air, if well
protected during hibernation ; and there is no
lack of demand for their honey.

" There is a splendid demand for the products
of mixed farming," says a man who has tried it.
" We get men coming to our very door and buying
everything we can raise, at good prices. There is
a good demand for all kinds of live stock, and
particularly for heavy draught horses, of which
we can't raise anything like enough. They sell
now, the good ones, for an average of $225 each "
—or £47.

Whether the money comes from far or near —
it comes. The Manitoban farmers were able to
spend in 1905 nearly £800,000 on new farm
buildings, and another £900,000 in 1906 — a year,
by the way, in which as many as 2648 steam
threshing outfits were at work in the province.

So much has been said — and boasted — of the

CLIMATE AND SURFACE 83

dryness of the western climate that Manitoba's
success in dairying and root-growing comes as a
surprise to many people. Well, her climate is
dry compared with England's, and the Manitoban
farmer thanks heaven it is ; but drought is as
rare there as here. So far is this M dry " province
from aridity that even in the south, the great
wheat plain of the south, wide areas are found so
swampy as to be almost useless. Here, therefore,
the provincial Government has been constructing
a network of main and lateral surface drains, each
district concerned paying the interest and sinking
fund by an assessment on the farming population.
Then the swamp becomes a wheatfield.

It is a great mistake to imagine that all Manitoba
is like the great flat treeless plain, that the cursory
visitor sees from a Canadian Pacific railway car.
If you strike north from Winnipeg, you soon
escape from the bareness of the " bald-headed
prairie " ; and as far as you like to go you will
find the Province well wooded and well watered.
There are even a number of gently sloping hills,
which neighbourly affection honours with the
name of mountains. Nature here is not sensa-
tional. For cliffs and cataracts you sigh in vain.
Yet the current of the Winnipeg River already
supplies electricity to work the tramways of the
capital, 60 miles away, and is capable of gener-
ating a million horsepower whenever it is wanted.

84 NORTH TO HUDSON'S BAY

Before you have gone 200 miles north from
Winnipeg, however, you are out of the Province
altogether. Manitoba's great grievance is that
she is " a postage-stamp Province." If she is
really a postage-stamp she would do credit to any
collection, as she covers 73,732 square miles, and
is nearly five times as large as Switzerland. But
she declines to compare herself with Switzerland.
What rankles in her breast is that when her
two new neighbours, Saskatchewan and Alberta,
were each created and endowed with a territory
about as large as France or Germany, she pled in
vain to be made their equal. What she wants is
to extend herself northward, over the unorganized
territory of Keewatin, to Hudson's Bay. The
Director of the Geological Survey of Canada, Mr
A. P. Low, says that " much of this land, where
hunters and fur-traders roam in solitude to-day,
as they have since the days of Prince Rupert,
is fit for agricultural settlement." Another
authority, Professor Tyrrell, says that north of
Lake Winnipeg, and west of Nelson River, there
is a tract of magnificent agricultural land about
200 miles wide, and 600 miles from east to west —
crossing the whole of northern Saskatchewan, in
fact — and endowed with a fine climate.

Manitoba covets the country, however, not
only for its own sake, but because it would give
her access to the sea, at Fort Churchill on Hudson's

THE HUDSON'S BAY ROUTE 85

Bay. The Dominion Government is likely
before long to build or to get built a railway
connecting the present north-western lines with
Hudson's Bay ; and for the three or four months
a year during which Hudson Straits are generally
clear of ice Churchill should be a most valu-
able sea-port. The distance from Winnipeg to
Liverpool by Hudson's Bay is only about 3576
miles, or 848 miles less than the distance
between the same points by Ontario and
the St Lawrence. Saskatchewan and Alberta,
at any rate the central and northern parts of those
Provinces, would gain even more than Manitoba
would by the opening of the Hudson's Bay route.
Saskatchewan claims, indeed, that she herself
should be extended to the mouth of the Churchill
River.

MIDDLE SASKATCHEWAN ; AND THE
ENGLISHMEN

The charms of Manitoba are great, but without
any depreciation of her buxom maturity I turned
my face to the west in search of her younger
sisters. To the north-west I should say, at first,
for on this occasion I took the new route opened
up by the Canadian Northern Railway Company.
For the first 250 miles the railway is still in the
" Premier Prairie Province/ ' with Lake Manitoba,
Lake Dauphin and Lake Winnipegosis far away
on the right, and the slopes of Riding Mountain
on the left. The land is practically all good, but
a large part of it is covered with scrubby poplar,
and as long as there is plenty of open prairie to be
had the new settler naturally lets the scrub land
severely alone — unless, that is, he is a Galician.
The Galician may be a poor farmer when he first
comes to the country, but the country owes him
no little gratitude for the contented way in which
he makes his home on the scrub-land that better
farmers despise. Nor is the better farmer at all
uncommon in this region, and the prosperity of

M

SALVATION ARMY AND CO-OPERATION 87

the ten-year-old town of Dauphin only reflects the
prosperity of the country around.

Here the railway forks. If you take the right
hand line, to the north-west, you reach the very
corner of Manitoba before turning west into
Saskatchewan. This line goes on to Prince
Albert, close to the rebel headquarters of 1885,
and about 540 miles from Winnipeg. This Prince
Albert branch has opened up a vast amount of
fine country in the Carrot River Valley and
elsewhere, and the old-timers who have been
waiting fifteen years for a railway, raising cattle
till it was worth their while to raise crops, now
see their solitude invaded by thousands of
homesteading neighbours. It is on this line,
at Tisdale, about 100 miles west of Manitoba, that
the Canadian Order of Foresters own a tract of
land which they have asked the Salvation Army
to people with carefully selected families, to whom
farms are being sold at from $7 to $10 (29s. 2d.
to 41s. 8d.), an acre. By organizing their forces
in co-operative gangs, and jointly hiring a steam
plough, the Salvation Army settlers have made
as much progress at the end of their first year as
many of their neighbours have at the end of their
third. Instead of spending several years in rough
log shacks, they find themselves installed in four
or five-roomed cottages before beginning their
first winter in the country.

88 PRINCE ALBERT

Prince Albert, the western terminus of this line,
about 30 miles west of where the North and
South Saskatchewan rivers join, is one of the very
few towns or villages off the line of the Canadian
Pacific that already had something more than a
fur-trading history when I went through the
country in 1885. White men had already been
farming in that district for a dozen years, and
though they were more than 200 miles north of
the latitude of Winnipeg one of them assured me
that his grain had never been touched by autumn
frost. After a long period of slow growth the
district is going ahead fast. Agriculture is not
the only industry here, though it is the chief,
and a very prosperous one. The forests lying
north of the rivers give employment in winter to
a large number of " lumber-jacks," who come
down into the settlements for farm-work in
summer.

The main line of the Canadian Northern, how-
ever, strikes west from Dauphin. The last station
before we leave Manitoba is called Makaroff, and
the first station in Saskatchewan is Togo, by
which the future historian may fix the dates
of their foundation without much trouble. The
railway godfather who gave them those names
had no malevolent intention. The maiden
triumphs of Saskatchewan are not being won at
the expense of matronly Manitoba^

t/3

SASKATCHEWAN ENTERED 89

There is no change in the landscape to impress
you with the fact that you have left one Province
for another. By degrees, to be sure, you notice
that the cultivated land is a smaller proportion
of the whole than it was a few hours ago, but the
wheat and the oats that you see are as good as
anything you have seen. At Canora, about 50
miles over the border, there has been so large an
immigration of " well-heeled " American farmers,
that the acreage under crop doubled in the single
year 1905-6. " Fifty car-loads of effects," the im-
migration officer says, " accompanied 800 settlers
arriving at this point during the year, and most
of them were able to commence farming operations
without being obliged to hire out beforehand."
The next railway divisional point, called Hum-
boldt, is in the heart of a district largely settled
by German- Americans, who in their second or
third year have each from 80 to 100 acres under
crop. South of Humboldt there is a settlement
of Mennonites, who may be described as German-
Quakers from Russia ; and some of these people
at the end of two years' work have 100 to 150
acres under crop.

Nearly 500 miles from Winnipeg the train
comes to a great river, the south branch of the
Saskatchewan. Instead of the wooden trestle
which the earlier railway builders threw across
the streams that came in their path, the

90 AN INFANT TOWN

Canadian Northern crosses the valley on a
magnificent steel bridge. The first town beyond
the river, Warman, was but an infant of three
months when I stepped into its hotel ; but
already the owner found that the business had
outgrown his accommodation, and a new wing
was going up with prairie speed. The tables in
the big dining-room were embellished with
flowers — a delicate hint that Warman was within
the limits of civilization, — and the charge for board
and lodging, $1.50 (6s. 3d.) a day, could hardly
be called a pioneer price. Meat, ducks, and
geese I found were plentiful, and eggs only cost
10 or 15 cents a dozen. As for supplies that were
not produced on the spot, their prices had come
down with a run when the first train arrived.
Salt, for instance, which in the spring had cost
$7.50 (31s. 3d.) a barrel, had promptly fallen to
$2.95 (12s. 3d.). Another great steel bridge crosses
the north branch of the Saskatchewan. A burly
American who boarded the train at the next
stopping place assured me that the country south
of this point was the best he had seen. He, by
the way, is a commerical traveller, taking orders
for school books — a fact which " speaks volumes,"
considering that hereabouts you see, or did see
then, few adults and no children.

At the 573rd mile, I found myself at North
Battleford. The " Lucknow of Canada " is three

NORTH BATTLEFORD & LLOYDMINSTER 91

or four miles away on the left, across the river,
and rather grudges the importance conferred on
its upstart neighbour ; for North Battleford is a
divisional centre with railway work-shops, and
will presently no doubt be calling itself a city.
At the age of three months, though most of the
houses were still of unpainted yellow plank, and
some of the inhabitants were living in tents, real
estate was changing hands at an enormous ad-
vance. One gentleman who had bought a town
site for $600 (£120), turned up his nose at an
offer of $1200 for the same. I am not particular
about the figures ; if I have made a mistake I
have put the profit too low.

A few miles further on the railway got back to
the south side of the river, and presently I became
aware, having a map in my hand — I certainly
should not have known it otherwise — that the
train was crossing the Indian Reserves of Mooso-
min and Thunderchild ; Moosomin, whose pos-
session of $600 in the bank kept him prudently
loyal when his neighbour Poundmaker went on
the war-path. It was almost impossible to
realize that I was rolling along in a comfortable
railway car through " the enemy's country."
The impossibility was intensified when the train
pulled up at Lloydminster, the chief town of the
all-British colony associated with the name of
Barr. With the unadulterated English accent

92 THE ALL-BRITISH COLONY

of the townsfolk in my ears, with a bank manager
telling me of the hundred thousand dollars he had
on deposit, and the residence of an archdeacon
before my eyes, I had to make a great effort to
realize that just over the prairie was the deserted
site of Fort Pitt, and but a step further north
the scene of the Frog Lake massacre.

More has been heard of Lloydminster in this
country, for obvious reasons, than of any other
place of its size in the West. I hope it is un-
necessary now to say that the all-British colony is
prosperous. It is really very prosperous indeed.
To be sure, it is no longer all-British. Whatever
Mr Barr's mistakes may have been, the choice of
a site for his colony was certainly not one of them.
Americans, Scandinavians, and Canadians, are
flocking in — and not empty-handed. A single
party of Norwegians from the State of Minnesota,
for instance, arrived in the summer of 1906 with
six big railway car-loads of effects, with which
they struck out to the south and formed a little
colony of their own about 30 miles from the
town.

The arrival of American and Canadian neigh-
bours has been in most respects an advantage to
the first-comers, most of whom began with a
rather hazy idea of the ways of the country.
Happily, the disadvantage of inexperience was so
impressed upon the Englishmen by their early

ISOLATION GONE 93

trials that they were willing to learn ; which
cannot always be said for our countrymen in
Canada.

The great difficulty that checked the progress
of the colony for the first two or three years was
its distance from the source of supply, and also
therefore from the market. Saskatoon, on the
Regina and Prince Albert Railway, was the
nearest railway station, and freighting by carts
over 200 miles of trail is terribly expensive. When
I visited the town, however, it had had a railway
station for three weeks, and the colonists already
felt that the old era was far behind them. " You
can't buy a bit of land round my homestead,"
said an old-timer of 1903, " for less than $10 an
acre. Yes, we did have a hard time at first, but,
after all, we didn't come out here for beer and
skittles. We were misled in one thing. If a man
had £5, they told us, that would be enough to
start with ; but the man who only had £5 had to
go off and get work somewhere else to keep himself,
and to raise what was really necessary for im-
plements and so on, so his homestead had to be
neglected. However, that's all over now, and
before long we shan't have any fear of comparison
with any American or Canadian in the country."
Several of the colonists carry on little shops in the
town as well as their homesteads in the country —
such as the man from Birkenhead who has started

94 THE COLD

a butcher's shop on the strength of an acquaint
ance with Canadian cattle formed in the lairages.

As for the severity of the climate, the English
men laugh at it. They have certainly felt the
worst it can do. The winter of 1906-07 was
exceptionally hard all over the West. The cold
was intense, and what upset the new-comers most
of all was the extraordinary fall of snow. Any
man living out on a treeless part of the plains,
without even a poplar bluff or a wooded valley
at hand, who had not had the foresight to lay in a
proper supply of wood, was bound to suffer for
lack of fuel. But on the whole there is no doubt
that a hard winter in England causes much more
suffering than a hard winter in the West, where
scarcely any one lacks the necessary clothing and
fuel and shelter on account of poverty, and where
a dry zero is more tolerable by far than a damp
English freezing-point. A Lloydminster man
assured me that he had never worn an overcoat,
even at 40 below zero ; and though in that detail
he was a little eccentric, the fact is very significant.
Another Englishman, who, however, does not
despise a jacket lined with sheepskin, declares
that 40 below zero is not so cold as 10 degrees
of frost in England.

The Englishmen have not merely learnt such
western ways as were better than their own.
They have refused to unlearn certain English

A COMPLIMENT TO ENGLISHMEN 95

ways that are better than the ways of the West.
Life at first was reduced to its primitive elements ;
but since the pioneer strain has been relieved the
little refinements of an older world are beginning
to bloom again. A western observer speaks
more strongly on this point than I should have
dared to. " There are very few corners of this
western land that I have not penetrated," he
says, " and there is none where kindliness, good-
breeding, and honourable instincts prevail to a
greater degree in Canada. Many of the men who
have most to say, and say it loudest, by way of
criticism of these people would be vastly profited
by a sojourn among them. Lloydminster might
well lay claim to the honour of being the most
aesthetic town in Western Canada. It is the home
of good taste, and a conservatory of the fine arts."

There is one English institution, by the way,
which does not seem to flourish at Lloydminster,
in spite of the efforts of enthusiasts, and that is
cricket. It takes too long. Football is more
reasonable in its demands on a busy Westerner's
time.

The Englishman in Canada, it has often been
remarked, is neither so popular nor so successful
as the Scot. So far as popularity is concerned,
it is partly due to the greater reticence of the Scot.
He is on the whole more cosmopolitan than the
Englishman ; and even when he feels just as

96 EFFECT OF THE NEW HABITAT

strongly that his ways are better than Canadian
ways, he more often keeps that opinion to himself
— till he changes it. As for success, the average
Scot is better educated, more accustomed to
discipline, and fonder of work.

We have unhappily sent out to Canada a great
many Englishmen, and even some Scotsmen, of the
wrong sort. By an emigrant of the right sort I do
not mean simply a man who is used to work on
the land. Experience in agriculture and the care
of live stock gives an emigrant a start of his in-
experienced companion ; but experience can soon
be gained — by " emigrants of the right sort."
The man who emigrates need not be either brilliant
in mind or over the average in bodily strength ;
though, of course, Canada would like the pick of
our home population in both respects. Canadian
air, and especially the air of the West, with food
and work in plenty, has a marvellous effect in
toning up the health of those who do not counter-
act it by the wretched drinking habit and other
avoidable influences ; and the effect of the
energetic life on sluggish intellects is sometimes
equally marked. The essential quality, the first
of the essential qualities, in an emigrant is moral
courage ; the spirit that will resolutely learn the
ways and perseveringly do the work of his new
home, undaunted either by strangeness or by
hardship. The new country makes a large draft

THE WRONG SORT OF EMIGRANTS 97

on a man's store of character ; but, if he meets her
demand, she repays him generously, with in-
dependence and prosperity and the promise of
still greater bounty for his children. We must all
be sorry for the man who fails, or " just manages
to scrape along," owing to local and exceptional
circumstances that might beat the bravest ; but
long experience has convinced me that nearly all
the failures are due to the emigrant's own defects ;
his indisposition to learn, his helplessness when
called on to do for himself what others always did
for him in England, his incapacity or unwilling-
ness to work hard and steadily for long at a time,
and his craving for the mental stimulants of noise
and glitter, if not for the physical stimulant of
alcohol. Many weak ones have been crushed
simply by the disappointment of finding the
country below the level of their quite unreason-
able expectations. Now, however, Englishmen
know a vast deal more about Canada than they
did even a couple of years ago, and you meet in
Canadian cities comparatively few of the people
who (I quote from the Montreal Daily Witness,
but I know the species very well myself) " seem to
expect to be met at the landing wharf by a
carriage and pair and to be driven around till they
have picked out the job that suits them, at their
own price." There are two classes of Englishmen
in Canada, the same writer says, " which are very

G

98 EMIGRANTS IMPROVING

sharply defined. The one is sterling, adaptable,
modest, able, sober, enterprising ; the other —
well, the other is an infliction." In view of the
bad name these " inflictions " give to Canada when
they get back to England, and the equally bad
impression of England that they give while in
Canada, it is good to know that their number is
being greatly reduced. It is actually stated that
the Englishmen who arrived in the West for the
last harvest were considered equal, if not superior,
to the men who came up from Eastern Canada.

Whatever part of the kingdom he comes from,
the emigrant of to-day is a more industrious, a
better educated and a more sober man, than the
emigrant of yesterday. This is partly due no
doubt to the greater strictness of the Canadian
Government in shutting out undesirables, who are
accordingly refused assistance by the emigration
organizations at home. But, whatever the cause,
the percentage of failures now is extraordinarily
small.

Neither lack of experience nor lack of capital
is more than a temporary handicap if a man is
resolved to earn both. Many a young fellow with
neither has been able to take a homestead of his
own and farm it successfully, after a couple of
years' work for a farmer of the country. I have
come across some very striking cases of success
won by men for whom failure had been con-

TOWN BOYS' SUCCESS 99

fidently foretold. There were three young
Englishmen, for instance, who went out together,
— one raised on a farm, the others factory boys,
whose occupation in England had been entirely
sedentary and non-muscular. One of these did as
his upbringing would lead you to expect. He
found his first job on a farm too hard, and threw
it up ; drifted into another job, and threw that up
too ; and at last accounts was still drifting. His
agricultural comrade naturally did well enough ;
but factory -boy No. 2 did best of all. He
simply resolved to succeed and threw himself into
his work. His first year as a homesteader saw him
the proud possessor of a house of his own building
and nine or ten acres under crop. Another young
Englishman of poor physique, used only to indoor
work, made up his mind to go farming in Canada
for the sake of his health. The remedy was a
drastic one, for he had no money and had to hire
himself out as a farm labourer ; but it succeeded.
" I worked harder than I should ever have
thought possible," he says. " I went to bed every
night with all my limbs aching, and they were still
aching when I got up in the morning ; but I just
went out and worked it off, and by the end of the
year, I was able to work with the best of them."
The next season, he and three comrades took a
farm of their own. One of their two cows fell
sick, and their only horse died, which was a heavy

ioo NO "CLASSES"

blow ; but to make good the loss the young
Englishman went off to a lumber camp for the
winter, to work as time-keeper and clerk at $9
(37s. 6d.), a week and all found ; and when spring
came he was a capitalist on a small scale and start-
ing to work his farm again with every prospect of
success.

The men of whom I have been speaking would
be described in England as " working class," or
in some cases " lower middle class." There is only
one class on the plains, and that is the working
class. Here and there you meet a gentleman of
leisure, but he is called a tramp.

Social distinctions as we know them in England
and in the older cities of Canada have no existence
on the plains. The farmer may have belonged
to " the classes " and his man to " the masses,"
but they do the same work and eat at the same
table. Or it may be the other way round, and the
public school boy may find himself earning his
experience and his wages from his father's ex-
coachman.

Unhappily there are certain members of the
English leisured class who find themselves in
Canada without either the necessity or the in-
clination to work for their living. I remember
twenty years ago visiting the home, if home it
must be called, of an Englishman of this class.
Outwardly it resembled an over-grown packing

THE MISERY OF BACHING 101

case, rather knocked about on its travels. In-
wardly it was a nest of disorder and discomfort.
A tumbled heap of blankets on a home-made
bedstead, a greasy plate on a dirty table, miscel-
laneous provisions scattered over the unswept
floor, and a cinder-path from the door to the little
sheet-iron stove, — these were the surroundings
of the " baching " life to which the owner had
come from an English public school. Skipping a
few years, I might tell of another interior — a big
room with a little bed which was never made ;
a table loaded with a mixture of pipes, tools, and
sundries ; a hunk of " sure-death," which is the
bach's apology for bread ; a cup yellow with tea,
having never been washed ; plates coated with
the bacon-fat of a long succession of monotonous
meals ; on the floor, in one corner onions, in
another clothes, in a third potatoes. Yet the
walls were covered with a valuable library, and the
owner always turned up in faultless evening dress
at every dance in the nearest town. Here and
there you can find something like this in the West
at the present day ; but my fortune has led me
for the most part into homes civilized by wives
or mothers or sisters — who are certainly doing
more for their race and empire, and probably
more for themselves, than if they had devoted
their lives to the enjoyment of ready-made com-
fort and luxury in England.

102 THE REMITTANCE MAN

It is generally admitted that the educated and
athletic old-countryman, if he will adapt himself
to the nature and needs of the country, and if he
throws himself whole-heartedly into his work,
makes as fine a settler as there is in the West.
But these two " ifs " are very large. Many of
these young Englishmen fail simply because they
are not compelled to succeed. Born with the
curse of money upon them, they know they can
live whether they work or not, and the knowledge
numbs their energy. Describing a time when the
English-born formed a larger proportion of the
western pioneers than they do now, a friend says :
" It makes one blush, as an Englishman, the
things done by fellows sent out often because they
are unmanageable in England. The most useless
men I ever saw were young fellows who were said
to have had ' the best education ' but were
positive fools. They were so bull-headed, they
would not learn ; they would not buckle down
to work, but lived out among themselves on their
ranches in filthy shacks, and came into town to
drink. They really got lower than any other
class in the country." Yet there was a great deal
of good in these black sheep ; and many of them,
after flinging away their money, were dragged
out of the mire by the stern grip of necessity and
driven along the road of hard work, to a goal of
brilliant success. Happy for them if their money

THE REMITTANCE MAN 103

could be lost, instead of clinging to them like the
chain of cash-boxes on Marley's ghost. There
are exceptions ; but the average " remittance
man," who knows that his allowance will come as
surely as one month follows another, and expects
that one of these days the capital producing this
allowance will fall into his hands, is by universal
testimony a failure.

THE PARK LANDS ; AND THE
AMERICANS

" If you'd seen this road before it was made
You'd lift up your hands and bless General Wade."

I was fortunate enough to see and to travel over
the Canadian Northern Railway before it was
made. The rails were laid to a point about forty
miles west of Lloydminster, and over that section
no passenger or freight train was yet supposed to
run, but our train did ; that is to say, it began by
running, then it dropped to a walk, and long before
we came to the " head of steel " we were creeping
along at six or seven miles an hour, and rolling as
if it was sixty. Having come to the jumping off
place, we jumped off. Just ahead of us was
a construction train of open platform cars from
which the rails were being dragged by a swarm of
navvies, to be pinned down on the ties at the rate
of three miles a day.

We were still over 160 miles from the terminus
at Edmonton, and we had to cover the distance in
two days, for the third day was to be the greatest
in Edmonton's history. The Province of Alberta
was about to be born, and proclamation of the

TRAVELLING BY TRAIL 105

fact was to be made by the Governor-General.
A hundred and sixty miles in two days over a
road varying from middling to villainous would
seem to the European a feat somewhat doubtful of
accomplishment. But we did it. The middling
part of the road consisted of two fairly smooth,
broad, black ruts across the rolling prairie, and
there our spring-waggons made capital speed
behind fresh horses. Sometimes the trail was a
sort of switchback, where we soon discovered the
urgent importance of coming down straight after
being shot up into the air. Occasionally the
road-bed consisted of mud-holes, and that was the
worst of all, because no pair of horses will draw a
waggon through mud-holes at a trot.

The country we were now rolling through was a
typical specimen of the " park lands " which
compose nearly the whole central area of both
Saskatchewan and Alberta, and which in my
humble judgment are on the whole the best parts
of the West to live in. The country has plenty of
wood and water, and the water is good. The
country is not monotonously flat, and the hills
while pleasant to the eye offer no hindrance to
cultivation. The winter climate as you go west
becomes steadily milder, till in Alberta it is in
striking contrast with that of Manitoba.

Twenty miles from the head of steel we came to
a little place named Mannville, after the vice-

io6 DISCONTENTED

president of the railway that was to come. It
had commenced existence three months before in
the shape of a small tent. By the end of August
it might be considered a village, consisting of a
post-office, blacksmith's shop, and two other
stores, with a travelling land agent's office,
bearing the inscription " Snaps in Farm Land "
on its waggon-cover. A snap, I may say, is a
bargain ; but there were no bargains in land to
be had thereabouts. As for free land, every
homestead for ten miles on either side of the line
where the railway was to run had been taken up
already.

The " Americans " form a large proportion of
the new-comers here, though not so large a pro-
portion as in the drier and less wooded prairie
further south. In fact, the only discontented
immigrant whom I met in the West was an
American in this very district. I asked him what
was the matter. He reflected a little, and then
said : " Well, I was raised on the prairie, and I
guess I can't be happy anywhere else." He
meant the " bald-headed prairie," where not a
tree breaks the monotony of the sky-line, and you
can plough a furrow for a hundred miles or more in
any direction, for all that nature does to hinder you.

Of the 779,991 immigrants to Canada whose
arrival was recorded from the beginning of 1899
to the middle of 1906, as many as 261,136, or more

ORIGIN OF THE "AMERICANS" 107

than one-third, have come in from the United
States, and most of these technically have been
citizens of that republic ; but when you come to
close quarters with them you find that about half
of them are not really American born, and that
a great proportion even of the other half are
the children of non-American parents. A very
large number of the so-called Americans are
natives of the United Kingdom, Eastern Canada,
Germany, Norway, and Sweden, who have
migrated in earlier days to the United States to
better themselves, just as now they have left the
United States for the same reason. Some of
them have lived practically all their lives under
the Stars and Stripes, quite long enough to become
permeated — if receptive and adaptable by nature
—with the sentiment of American nationality ;
and I have taken particular trouble to discover if
this sentiment exists among the new Canadians
in a degree likely to prevent their whole-hearted
adoption of British citizenship ; but I have
found nothing of the kind. Once, indeed, I
thought I had succeeded. On the prairie section
of the Canadian Pacific Railway, I dropped into a
car full of men who had evidently been travelling
to see whether they would like the country. A
Canadian from Ontario having boasted at large
of the Dominion's superiority over her southern
neighbour, a goatee-bearded American took the

108 "THE POOR MAN'S FRIEND"

floor, and sang the praises of Uncle Sam with all
the enthusiasm of a devotee. " I take off my
hat whenever I mention Uncle Sam/' said he,
suiting the action to the word, " for there's no
country under heaven has given the poor man a
chance like Uncle Sam ! " In private conversa-
tion with this gentleman afterwards, I discovered
that he had the heartiest contempt for the men —
a quite insignificant minority in his part of the
country, by the way — who suffered from Anglo-
phobia, or even spoke of the British form of
government as less free than the American. He
frankly admitted the superiority of certain
features of Canadian life, especially the com-
paratively thorough and impartial administration
of the law ; and under all his admiration for
Uncle Sam as the " poor man's friend " lay a
conviction that this honour was passing from the
United States to Canada. In fact, he had just
decided, as a result of his inspection of the
Canadian West, to become a British citizen himself !
There is a hope cherished in some quarters of
the United States that these American emigrants
to Canada, if lost for a while to the Republic, will
by-and-by use their power to bring the Dominion
under the Stars and Stripes. Well, the future is a
free field for the prophets. So far as my ex-
perience goes, the Americans in Western Canada
are perfectly content with the political institutions

GOOD AMERICANS MAKE GOOD BRITONS 109

they have adopted, and certainly not inclined to
act as missionaries of the annexation doctrine.
They have personally annexed as much of the
country as they want. Those Americans who are
afflicted by the thought that the whole continent
is not ruled from Washington appear to have
stayed at home, and their emigrant kinsmen seem
rather glad of it. " How are you going to vote ? "
one of the new-comers was asked. " I don't care
which side," said he with brutal candour. " What
I want to vote for is to keep them darned Yankees
out ! "

With the vast majority of these folk American-
ism is not a skin they have inherited and cannot
get out of, but a garment which they are perfectly
ready and able to change. An Englishman who
settled at Melfort, in central Saskatchewan, as far
back as 1883, and whose first neighbours were
Americans, tells me that at first they not only did
what Canadians criticize Englishmen for doing —
constantly saying " We do so-and-so on the other
side," but were always waving the Stars and
Stripes, and celebrated the " glorious Fourth "
with ostentatious devotion. But " now they
keep the 1st of July, Dominion Day, and the 24th
of May, Queen's Birthday, and their flag is never
seen. Not one of them shows any wish to return
to the United States." It is largely owing to the
early arrival of these Americans, who " set the

no TWO SORTS OF AMERICAN

pace " to the later comers, that the Melfort
district is ahead of others that were settled before
it. They brought in better and quicker methods
of farming ; they were most untiring workers ;
most of them were men of high character, hardly
one of them drank or even smoked, and they have
all prospered exceedingly.

An old Scottish-Canadian, who has watched the
Americans closely ever since their invasion of the
West began, says : u You'll find exceptions, of
course ; but taking them all round they're as
well-behaved a lot as any of us, and they're a
great people for a new country like this, — far
ahead of our old-country folk. They come right
in with a tent, and plough up a big slice of land
before they bother about putting up even a shack
to live in. You can always tell an American
settler by the way he begins. Yes, sir, they're
a great people ! "

A very deplorable creature is the " exception "
whose existence is here admitted. His power of
screwing the last ounce of wheat out of his land
and the last cent out of his wheat is undoubted ;
but there his life begins and ends. He may not
be a rowdy ; but his moral qualities are merely
negative. He is a human farming-machine ;
an automatic money-maker. He talks wheat
and dollars, dollars and wheat, with expectoral
punctuation ; and that is all. He has no interests

WHY THE AMERICANS COME in

on earth, and certainly none in heaven, beyond his
crop and what it will fetch. To his British neigh-
bours he seems a mere animal. It is pleasant to
turn from such a specimen to the God-fearing,
wide-minded, thinking and reading man who
comes in by the same train from the same country.
It is generally known that many of the American
farmers now coming over into British territory are
doing so because the land which they got for little
or nothing many years ago in the Western States
can now be sold for high prices. They sell, not
merely as a speculator sells shares which he has
been holding for a rise, but because with the price
of their land alone they can buy in Canada much
larger farms, of richer soil, with cattle and horses
to boot. Many of them make this exchange
because it enables them to establish their sons on
farms close by their own at a net cost of nothing ;
but the motive of others is simply to get more
elbow room for themselves. They have been
used to spaciousness, and as settlement grows
thick around them they feel uncomfortably
crowded, though we in England should feel lonely
enough. I am not speaking now of the hardened
and incorrigible pioneers — the men who pull up
stakes whenever civilization comes within shouting
distance, who must always have the rest of the
human race behind them and the untouched
wilderness in front. These are the men whom the

U2 A FARMING SPECULATOR

Mounted Police patrol and the Hudson's Bay fur-
trader discover building log huts beside the lakes
and rivers of the distant north. I speak of the
ordinary farmer from Minnesota or Kansas, who
loves space, but only endures solitude — endures
it with cheerful indifference, knowing that it
will soon be mitigated by neighbours, and hoping
for its ultimate abolition by a railway.

The American immigrants, as a whole, come in
simply to make homes for themselves and their
children. Some of them, however, while they come
in as farmers and do their duty by the land, do
so with the deliberate intention of selling out as
soon as they can do so at a high enough profit.
One of these men took a free quarter-section, and
bought a whole adjoining section from the
Hudson's Bay Company for $2624, or $4.10 per
acre. Three years later, in 1905, he sold this
purchased section, including a $1200 house,
perhaps $400 worth of fences, and 200 acres under
fall wheat, for $14,400, or $22.50 per acre. He
then bought back the standing crop for a lump
sum of $2500, and threshed 7000 bushels out of
it, adding largely to his profit on the original sale.
At last accounts he was ready to sell his 160 acres
of homestead. Having " made his pile " in this
easy way he will either try to double it by similar
operations further afield or return to a life of
modest but comfortable retirement in the United

A "STOPPING-PLACE" 113

States. There is still another class of Americans,
as may be imagined, who simply use Canadian soil
as an article to speculate in, buying it only to sell
again when the market price of land has been
increased by the peopling of neighbouring sections
or by the advent of a railway.

An admirable example of the best class of
American settler was our host at the " stopping-
place " where we dined, about 40 miles after
leaving the head of steel. He was not an inn-
keeper— far from it — but, as he found himself on
the main trail between Battleford and Edmonton,
he had laid himself out to put up travellers.
This is a common practice among farmers on
trails where inns are lacking ; nor do they take
advantage of their position to charge exorbitant
rates. Fifteen cents for a " noon " and 25
cents for a full meal seem the regular tariff. A
dinner of meat, bread, and vegetables, pie, stewed
fruit, and tea, with the host's daughter fanning
away the flies — if you grumble at that you are
not fit for a traveller.

The migrations of that man and his ancestors
form a strange story to the ears of an Englishman
who lives and dies in the village where his Saxon
forebears settled a thousand years ago ; but in
America, far from being strange, his experience is
familiar and even typical. It is the story of
thousands of families and individuals who settle

H

U4 AN EMIGRANT FROM OKLAHOMA

on the Atlantic seaboard, pull up stakes and
strike inland, pull them up again and settle in
one of the central States, and so on indefinitely —
in some cases halting for a generation or more, in
others for a year or two, but always moving on at
last, and always to the west. Our host on the
Edmonton trail had a French name, and his first
American ancestor was probably a Huguenot,
who settled in the Carolinas. He himself was
brought up in Tennessee ; moved north-west to
Illinois, where he married ; west again to Kansas,
where his children were born ; south-west into
Oklahoma ; and north-west at last to Alberta,
where he was so much better satisfied than in any
of his former homes that he was ready to sing
" Here all my wanderings cease." He had no
very high opinion of Oklahoma, though when
that territory was thrown open there was such a
rush for land that you would have thought its soil
was gold. " The average yield of wheat," he
said, " was about ten bushels an acre ; and
sometimes the drought was dreadful. Last year
one of my neighbours only got 200 bushels off
his whole farm, and another didn't think it worth
while to reap at all. I had no land of my own,
so I took a bit of the ' school lands ' ; but in the
see-saw of Democratic and Republican administra-
tions a new governor changed all the officials and
they raised my rent— after I had put up a nice

A WESTERN HOME 115

two-storey house and fenced the whole place.
So one night I said to my wife, ' Let's try to get
a place of our own.' I'd heard of a lot of people
finding good land in Canada, so I came over the
border, and as I was driving through the country,
I hit on this place and liked it. That was in the
middle of June. I didn't dare to go back and
fetch the family ; I had to squat on the place to
keep somebody else from picking it up. I lived
in a little tent till I could get a bit of prairie
broken and a house built ; and I just held on till
the rest of us came in December." He was
clearly a man of taste. The quarter-section he had
chosen sloped down to a lake in the north and up to
a wooded hill in the south. His children and
grand-children had already found time, in the
intervals of household chores and attendance on
hungry travellers, to lay out a garden, where
asters, poppies and mignonette bloomed in a
setting of wapiti horns and buffalo skulls ; and
in the parlour of his comfortable log house was a
well-used eclectic library of about a hundred
volumes, including Dickens, Kipling, E. P. Roe,
and a strong contingent of religious authors.

The navvies had " graded " the railway line
past his front door, and a town had begun to rise.
That is to say, there was one house beside his own
— a store and post office, kept by a pair of Irish-
Canadian brothers. All supplies had to be

Ii6 VERMILION

freighted in waggons from Edmonton, 120 miles
away, and it was interesting to note the prices of
goods on which 4s. 2d. per 100 lbs. weight had
been paid for this service in addition to the charge
for railway freight all the way from Manitoba,
British Columbia, or even far Ontario. Flour
stood at S3. 60 to $4 (15s. to 16s. 8d.) per 100 lbs. ;
molasses, 25 cents for a 3-lb. tin ; apples, 20 cents
a pound. A " hand ■' of tobacco, the plant dried
whole on the French-Canadian farm where it was
grown, could be got at the rate of 30 cents a pound.
Having seen a road before it was made, I was
not altogether unprepared to visit a town before
it was built. Imagine a miraculous plant that
springs up in a night like a mushroom with all the
vigour of an oak, and you have grasped the
characteristics of a town in New Canada. When
I passed Vermilion, it was not there. It was on
the railway-builders' map, though, and that was
enough. Vermilion in posse was like a word
written in invisible ink. Only a touch of steel,
and it became Vermilion in esse. A month after
my visit the town became visible to the naked
eye, standing erect with its face to the shining
rail wand that had conjured it out of the void,
and its back to the river from which it had taken
its brilliant name. Two months after that, I
read in a Winnipeg paper a casual statement from
its Vermilion correspondent that " the town lots

AN INFANT TOWN 117

have been on the market for sale for the past six
weeks, and fully $80,000 worth of property has
been disposed of. The building at this point has
been most phenomenal, there being fully 100
substantial buildings erected in this short time.
Many settlers are going into this well-known
Vermilion Valley country, and the town of
Vermilion is unquestionably destined to become
one of the Ten Towns of Western Canada.' '

That was in the beginning of winter. Before
Vermilion entered its first summer its citizens had
organized a Board of Trade, with President,
Secretary, Treasurer, and all complete, and the
Board of Trade had published a description of
the town which is enough to take away your
breath. By this time it possessed a Methodist
Church (with Anglicans and Presbyterians about
to build), a public school, a bank, a newspaper,
three hotels, three restaurants, three lumber
yards, a drug store, a furniture store, two hard-
ware stores, four implement warehouses, a jewelry
store, two butcher's shops, a flour and feed store,
a steam laundry, two livery stables, a liquor store,
a stationer's, a bakery, a boot and shoe shop,
three barbers, four real estate offices, two doctors,
a lawyer, a dentist, an auctioneer, four contractors,
a tinsmith, a plasterer, a photographer, two
pool-rooms, and a bowling alley. Vermilion, we
learn, is " a coming railway centre," being

n8 THE VERMILION VALLEY

already a divisional point on the Canadian
Northern ; is " a future county seat " ; polled
more votes at the Dominion by-election on April
5 than any other town in the constituency except
Strathcona ; and, in brief, is " the bull's-eye of
the best territory on earth."

The remarkable thing about this is that there is
no reason to doubt its truth — though of course
there are many other " best territories on earth M
in Canada !

In its description of this particular " best
territory on earth/' the Board of Trade says :
" The crop statistics of the Canadian Northern
Railway for last year give the palm for yield to
the Vermilion valley, with 50 bushels of wheat
and 100 bushels of oats to the acre. Growth is
very rapid, wheat ripening in from 90 to 100
days. The winters are not severe, though there
are brief periods of cold. Snowfall is light. The
summers are delightful. The days are long and
warm, with abundant sunshine, and the nights
pleasantly cool. The warm weather lasts until
October. Streams are common, and lakes and
ponds abound. Springs which never freeze are
found in many places along the valleys. Vege-
tables of all kinds are successfully raised, in-
cluding potatoes, turnips, carrots, beets, parsnips,
cabbage, celery, peas, pumpkins, and tomatoes.
Small fruits grow wild in abundance, and include

VEGREVILLE 119

strawberries, currants, cranberries, plums,
cherries, saskatoon berries, and numerous other
varieties. Experiments in the growing of apples
have been attended with such encouraging results
that it is believed to be only a question of time
until thriving orchards are found scattered over
the country. There is no undesirable or un-
progressive element among the population, and
English is the only language heard on the streets.
Feathered game, including wild geese, ducks,
prairie chickens and partridges, is abundant, while
deer, moose, and bear may be frequently met with
in certain districts. Rabbits are everywhere
plentiful. White fish and pike swarm in the
larger lakes." In the first year of Vermilion's
existence, according to a government report, 800
settlers arrived — " all first-class in every respect,
with sufficient means to enable them to settle on
land almost immediately/'

Vegreville is venerable beside Vermilion ; yet
Vegreville, when I made its acquaintance in its
twelfth year, was but a feeble infant compared to
Vermilion at the age of six months. Vegreville
had been brought into existence, by French-
Canadian settlers, before there was a railway —
and had languished. The advent of the railway
pioneers, " grading " for the new line with horse-
drawn shovels, had created a good market for
oats, at 60 cents a bushel ; but there was a fly

1 20 FRENCH-CANADIANS

in the Mackenzie-and-Mann ointment, for the line
was to pass the town at a distance of 3 \ miles.
" There's some talk of moving the town to the
railway, as the railway won't come to the town,"
said the oldest inhabitant ; " but my son has got
a store here, and he won't move." A new Vegre-
ville has now sprung up, on the railway, but
whether the old Vegreville concluded to stay
where it was I cannot say. Some of us would
be thankful if a railway never came within 3 J
miles of us ; but then we do not " keep store."
The French origin of the town is still recalled
by the names of many of its citizens and the
language you hear now and then on the streets ;
but the French-Canadian pioneers, for lack of
sufficent reinforcements from Quebec, are being
surrounded by a rising tide of the English-speak-
ing race. Here, for example, is a tall young
American. That is to say, he was born in the
States, and so were his parents ; but he is a
Norwegian all the same. He has been up here for
three years, and his enthusiasm for the country is
unabated. He could have got as much land as he
wanted on the paternal domain. He deliberately
preferred Canada as offering better land, and at a
price which gave a far surer prospect of future
wealth. " My father had lots of land in Iowa,"
he says, " but instead of taking my share of it I
took its value in cash, $40 an acre, and came up

In the Park Lands

American Settler bringing in his Famtly

THE PROCESSION OF INCOMERS 121

here with my wife. I picked out a free homestead
of 160 acres, and bought 1280 acres at $3." That
is, by investing £770 he acquired a freehold
estate of 1440 acres in one of the most productive
areas of the earth's surface. And his hunger for
land was evidently no keener than his appetite
for work. Before he had been three years on the
soil he had got 100 acres of it under cultivation,
and he was bent on doubling that acreage before
another twelvemonth went by.

On that ride through to Edmonton we by no
means had the trail to ourselves. At one point
we met a lady from Oregon driving in state, her
little boy beside her in the buggy, while her
husband brought up the rear with a waggon-load
of household stuff. The sheet-iron stove pro-
jecting from the rear of the waggon showed that
even on the march they were resolved to have a
little home comfort in their nightly camp. A few
miles further on, a less luxurious party came in
sight — a single waggon, a rolled-up tent crowning
the load, with the homesteader driving in
front, and his wife and baby sitting behind him
on a bundle, while a foal trotted in front of its
harnessed mother, and a spare team followed close
in the rear. Round the next bluff rolled a
genuine old prairie schooner, cart and tabernacle
combined, the family chattering invisibly within,
while its head trudged along chewing a straw

122 BRINGING IN THE FAMILY

beside the cattle. These parties, however, were
not home-seekers. In each case the man had come
in to find a home, and now, after getting it into
shape by a summer of lonely toil, he had been
down to the States to bring in his family.

MIDDLE ALBERTA ; AND THE GALICIANS

Autumn is not the best time to see the country,
if it is beauty you seek. The grass is no longer
green, but yellowish-brown ; it is, in fact, a
standing crop of hay ; and as such it will remain
for the horses and cattle to graze on all winter.
The trees may be still green, or they may be
turning yellow ; but the poplar and birch are poor
and homely compared with the maple and sumach
whose gorgeous autumn robes make the woods
of Eastern Canada a blaze of colour. A belated
dwarf wild rose may still be in bloom ; the
" autumn flower," or Michaelmas daisy, is common
enough, and so is the tall pink fox-tail ; but these
are almost all that strike the eye.

Of human interest, however, there is no lack ;
and foreign settlements in this district, east and
north-east of Edmonton, have in them an element
of the picturesque which you miss among the men
of your own race. It was only in 1894 that the
first Galicians arrived, nine families in all. They
sent home such good reports of the country that
to-day there are about 75,000 of them thriving
there.

123

124 A GALICIAN BOTHY

The Norwegians and Germans are not discover-
able at a glance by the traveller, for their dwellings
are generally log or frame-houses built on the
pattern set by the English-speaking inhabitants.
The Galicians, however, put their own architectural
mark on the landscape. The typical Galician
house is a little one-storey affair, rough or tidy
according to the individuality of the owner ; its
walls of poplar trunks, filled in and outwardly
faced with smooth white-washed mud, and
thickly thatched, the high-pitched roof often
rising in a series of steps at the corners. In the
little field surrounding one of these dwellings,
I found the owner, with a red fez on his head,
reaping his oats with the primitive device of a
" cradle/' a scythe with three or four sticks pro-
jecting at as many points from the handle and
catching the stalks as they fall. Another of these
primitive folk I found inhabiting a long low hovel,
not unlike the dwellings you may still see in
backward parts of Ireland or in the Scottish
Highlands. One end was built of poplar logs
roughly plastered over with brown mud ; the
other and longer portion was simply built of sods,
with tufts of grass sprouting from every joint, as
well as growing freely all over the roof. The
master of the house, a tall, unkempt but good-
humoured Galician, came out to meet me, having
to stoop considerably in doing so. He was a

AN INTERIOR 125

bachelor, and was occupied just then in spinning
linen thread, with the distaff under his arm. He
could only speak a word or two of English, but he
made me heartily welcome to his dwelling. The
only door led into the stable, one side of which
was fenced off by a sort of hurdle of plaited willow
to make a manger. Turning sharp to the right,
we stepped into the dwelling-room, an apartment
about 10 feet square, almost the only furniture
being a home-made bedstead of round poplar
logs, covered with a few scraps of blanket. The
under side of the roof was formed of young poplars
laid close together, plastered with mud, and
supported in the middle by a single log of the
same kind, the central ridge-pole resting on its
forked top.

A little Russian church stands beside the trail,
with a tiny cemetery, each grave enclosed in its
own fence and bearing its own solid cross of
unpainted wood. For the bulk of the Galician
population, however, you must go further afield,
to districts where practically all the land was
free. Here the free sections were chess-boarded
among those held for sale by railway companies.
Galicians can afford no land that is not free, when
they first arrive. The village of Star, about 30
miles north-east of Edmonton, is a good starting
point for excursions among these people, of whom
about 20,000 live together in the district.

126 BEGINNING ON NOTHING .

The Galician first arrives in the country with
about as few worldly possessions as when he first
arrived in this planet ; but poverty, combined —
as in his case it generally is — with industry as well
as patience, is no serious drawback. The man
of the family puts up a house, or hovel if you like
to call it so, installs his wife and children, and then
goes off to work, probably as a navvy on a railway
line. During his absence his wife and such of his
children as are not mere infants set to work to
make the farm. Having neither horse, ox, nor
plough, they do the best they can with the humble
spade, and raise a little crop of rye, oats, or
potatoes. The frugal father returns in the fall
of the year with every cent he has been able to
save out of his earnings, and the ox and plough
that he is thus able to buy mean a vast increase
of cultivation and production in the second year.
Many a Galician farmer to-day has from 20 to
200 acres under crop, and from 10 to 100 head
of live stock. The farm may be many miles from
any town or railway station, but the Galician
does not say it is no use trying to grow grain for
sale. In the winter he loads his produce on a
rough sleigh, and sets out for the nearest market,
no matter what the distance may be. At night
he saves hotel or " stopping-place " charges by
sleeping on the snow beside his sleigh. I have
heard of men who thought nothing of a fortnight's

GALICIAN CUSTOMS AND HEALTH 127

journey under these conditions. It can easily be
imagined that in three or four years such a man
is poor no longer. These people necessarily eat
little meat. They live largely on the vegetables
that they raise, diversified by eggs and even
chickens when they have reached the poultry-
raising stage. They are fond of garlic ; also of
sour milk ; and a favourite dish is a vegetable
soup kept till it has fermented. Their require-
ments in the way of clothing are few and simple.
They go bare-foot all summer, and in winter they
only wear shoes out of doors — sometimes not
then. Their raiment, to tell the truth, consists
chiefly of a loose cotton shirt, with skirt or
trousers according to sex. As in their native
land, they construct large clay ovens with flat
tops on which they sleep. Of ventilation they
know nothing except as something cold to be shut
out. In spite of this, and no doubt because of
their hard out-door work, the women as a rule are
very healthy. They have plenty of children —
whose arrival gives them little trouble. A
Galician matron who has had an addition to her
family in the morning may often be seen out and
about by evening, though more commonly she
will take two or three days' rest, The men are
decidedly less healthy than the women. They are
heavy smokers, and they suffer a good deal from
rheumatism ; which is only to be expected if

128 THE CLIMATE

they sleep at one time in a hot and totally un-
ventilated room, and at another time out on the
snow; their lack of woollen under-clothes being
no doubt a contributory cause. As for the
climate, the winter is not nearly so severe as that
of Manitoba, and is sometimes broken into by
spells of extraordinarily mild weather. A doctor
at Star, pointing to a hammock slung from his
verandah, said to me : "My wife was sitting out
here, sewing in the sun, in February ; and the
snow had not come till December. That, of
course, was exceptional ; but the winter before,
when the snow stayed till late in March, was
exceptional too." The climate is less rheumatic
in tendency than that of the East, and it is de-
cidedly good for lung troubles and catarrh. In
this respect it resembles the climate of Southern
Alberta, but so far as the total amount of moisture
is concerned the two regions differ widely. In
this northern section, in fact, I have heard com-
plaints of rather too much rain in spring and early
summer. This condition is naturally adverse
to wheat growing, and other cereal crops could
sometimes do with less moisture than they get,
for the straw continues to grow when the grain
ought to be ripening. Stalks of rye have been
measured over 7 feet 7 inches high, and oats nearly
6 feet. The evidence of this abundant rainfall
is patent in the comparative luxuriance of

Railways are spreading on every
hand over the prairie, as fast as
men can be got to lay them ; but
until the railway comes everything
has to be freighted in over the trail.
The ox team, which covers about
three miles an hour, is much used
both for transport and for ploughing.

NEW NORWAY 129

vegetation, and in the large number of sloughs
and little lakes. But this is a draw-back that can
be remedied by surface drainage works, as it has
been remedied in Manitoba. Such works are
already in progress in Central Alberta, and even
without their aid crops of oats and barley have
been reaped which thresh out 56 and 63 bushels
to the acre respectively.

One of the most interesting and progressive
of the special groups to whom Central Alberta
is indebted for its new population is that of
the Scandinavians in " New Norway " ; but
that is sixty-five miles south of Star, in the
Hinterland of Wetaskiwin, on the Canadian
Pacific line running south from Edmonton.
You would hardly suppose from a pure Indian
name like Wetaskiwin that you had arrived in a
settlement of Norwegians. Yet the names over
the stores, the complexions and voices of the
people you meet in the street, leave you in no
doubt as to the fact, and a short excursion into
the Hinterland carries you into New Norway
itself. Most of these people when they first left
their native land settled in the Western States,
and are, therefore, classified in the Canadian
emigration returns as American. They are
genuine Norwegians ; and a fine lot of people
they are, and a fine piece of land they have chosen
for their home. " I believe it is the garden spot

130 SANCTUARY FOR WILD LIFE

of Alberta,' ' a leading member of the community
said to me. Roughly speaking, the settlement
covers about four townships, or 144 square miles.
It is a rolling park-like land, lightly wooded here
and there, dotted with a moderate number of
sloughs, and traversed by the Battle River. The
country is well suited for both grain and cattle,
and the Norwegians take large advantage of its
capacity in both directions. Oats, which were
at first the favourite crop, give a yield of from
30 to 75 and occasionally even 100 bushels to the
acre, while barley runs from 30 to 40 bushels.
Both the winter and spring varieties of wheat are
grown, producing from 20 to 40 bushels an acre.
The wild animals are not to be swept off the
face of the West by the human flood. Like their
Indian brothers, they are to have their sanctuaries.
The first of these, the Banff National Park in the
Rocky Mountains, is well known. Now the
Federal and Alberta Governments are establishing
" Elk Park " in the Beaver Hills, south of Star.
At Banff, a little remnant of the bison tribe —
commonly known as buffalo — that once thundered
over the plain in its millions, is thriving and
increasing in semi-captivity. Far away in the
north-west, another bunch of bison roam wild.
It is to be hoped that they can be saved from
extinction and brought down to multiply either
at Banff or in the Beaver Hills.

EDMONTON, AND THE FAR NORTH

Crossing the river at Fort Saskatchewan, after
supping under the guidance of a decorative menu
card in an ambitious hotel, we turned south and
drove through a well-wooded and little inhabited
country — the land being largely held by specu-
lators " for the rise " — towards what seemed to
be an aurora borealis in the wrong quarter of the
heavens. The aurora proved to be the lights of
Edmonton, for the morrow was Alberta's natal
day, and the capital city was brilliantly
illuminated.

It seems really absurd to think of Edmonton as
a city — the fur-trading outpost in the wilderness.
But in 1901 the town had 2626 inhabitants, and
five years later that figure had risen to 11,167 ;
while Strathcona, on the south side of the river,
contained another 2921. To this day, furs to
the value of a million dollars (£200,000) every
year pour into Edmonton from a multitude of
outposts in the north, to be sorted and packed for
the markets of the civilized world ; but there is
nothing furry or wild in the city's appearance.

131

132 A CAPITAL CITY

The Hudson's Bay Company itself is represented
to the outward eye not by a log fort but by a
large department store, with the wares of Regent
Street or Westbourne Grove displayed in plate-
glass windows. There are about a dozen banks,
some of them very creditable to their architects,
and doing such an amount of business that they
have had to establish a clearing house. There are
at least half-a-dozen churches — Methodist, Pres-
byterian, Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Roman
Catholic — and probably more. There are good
schools, one of which would hardly be criticized —
unless by extreme economists — if reared in
London, and is at present used, after school hours,
as a Parliament House by the Provincial Legis-
lature. There is positively a municipal electric
tramway at Edmonton — or will be, before this
book is many months old, as the contract for its
construction has been signed. The roads — well,
the less said about roads the better, when you
write about a Canadian town ; but Edmonton is
now paving its streets with wood blocks from
British Columbia. There are other points on
which western townsmen generally preserve a dis-
creet silence ; but the Edmontonians are so bent
on avoiding the common ailments of municipal
infancy that before long I expect to see perfect
drainage and water supply figuring in large type
in the municipal advertisements.

THE COW-BOY A CURIOSITY 133

The city is ideally placed, on high but level
ground along the edge of the winding and beauti-
fully wooded valley of the Saskatchewan. Better
still, the people are resolved that their city's
beauty shall not be spoiled. Down in the valley,
for nine miles along each side of the river, a drive
is to be laid out in accordance with the plans of
a landscape gardener from the east ; and where
the valley widens a Parliament House is being
built on the flats at a cost of a million or even two
million dollars.

The scene on those flats on the 1st of September
1905 was quite extraordinary. The occasion was
remarkable enough — the proclamation by the
Viceroy that a new star had been kindled in the
federal constellation — but the crowd was more
remarkable still. Among all those twelve or
fifteen thousand people you would look in vain
for a beaded Indian or shaggy fur-hunter. I
saw just one cow-boy, got up for the occasion, in
the regulation buckskin jacket and fringed leather
trousers ; but he was unique, like an old-world
figure in long drab coat and knee breeches in
an assembly of modern Quakers. And side by
side with the cowboy's bronco stood — a motor
car ! If there was any difference between that
crowd in the far west of Canada and the crowd
which any pageant gathers in an English town,
the advantage would lie on the side of the " wild

134 CITY LAND PRICES

and woolly West." The people were not less
intelligent looking, or less well behaved, or even
less well dressed.

I am told that town lots, bought in 1903 for
$300 or $400 (£60 or £80) a-piece, were selling in
1906 for $15,000 or $20,000 (£3000 or £4000).
Some people shake their heads and wonder when
the bottom will fall out of the " boom." Edmon-
tonians would probably disclaim the idea that a
boom, in the censurable sense of unreasonably
inflated prices, has yet arrived, though they
boast that everything is " booming." Edmonton
is going to be a far more important place than it is
now. It is the centre of a peculiarly rich district,
a paradise of the " mixed " farmer. The number
of immigrants who make this the end of their
pilgrimage is exceptionally large, and most of the
recent arrivals have been men with experience
and capital — including 50 families attracted
even from " golden California " by the glowing
reports of a single family settled north-west of
the city ; many good Dutch farmers from
Pennsylvania ; a quantity of prairie folk from
Kansas and Oklahoma, settling north-east of
the city ; and a greatly increased number of
immigrants from Germany, France, Belgium and
Austria. At St Albert, a few miles to the north-
west, there has been a settlement of French half-
breeds for more than sixty years. A good many

COST OF FARM IMPLEMENTS 135

of their pure-blooded French cousins from Quebec
have come up to join them, and a Roman Catholic
cathedral is rising in their little town. A young
English farmer who went out exploring in this
direction for a homestead says that "as far as
the country is surveyed, 80 miles out of town, it
is good land, but all taken up except the heavy
bush. In fact, settlers are squatting 20 miles
beyond the survey. The Government guarantee
nothing, but usually let the squatter file his claim
as soon as the land is surveyed. This seems the
only way to get a good one now, unless you hear
of one being abandoned."

Here, by way of parenthesis, let me give an
idea of what a man beginning to farm on his own
account would spend on the implements of his
trade. A waggon would cost from $75 to $85
(£15 to £17) ; harness, $32 to $40 (£6, 10s. to
£8) ; sleigh, $25 to $32 (£5 to £6, 10s.) ; plough,
$20 to $28 (£4 to £5, 15s.) ; set of harrows,
$16 to $20 (£3, 5s. to £4) ; disc harrow, $25 to
S32 (£5 to £6, 10s.) ; miscellaneous tools, etc.,
$50 (£10). A seeder would cost from $85 to
$115 (£iy to £23), but is hardly necessary for
the first year. A mower and rake would cost
about $95 (£19) ; but two neighbours will some-
times own these jointly, or else one buy a mower
and the other a rake. A reaper and binder
is another expensive article ($135 to $155, or

136 A GREAT RAILWAY CENTRE

£27 to £31) which can very well be shared with
a neighbour, for it cuts twelve acres a day ;
and it can be dispensed with till the young farmer
has more land under crop than he is likely to
have before his second year. Credit is commonly
given for all these articles, except perhaps the
waggon. As for live stock, a team of horses
would cost from $250 to $400 (£50 to £80) ;
cows, $35 to $40 each (£y to £8) ; pigs, $15
(£3) ; and sheep $5 (£1).

Edmonton, too, is becoming the centre of a
great web of railways stretching over the con-
tinent in all directions. The Canadian Pacific,
the Canadian Northern, and the Grand Trunk
Pacific, from the south, the east, and the south-
east, all come together at Edmonton ; from this
point the third of these lines, and possibly the
second, will start on the final stage of their
westward course to the Pacific Ocean ; and in
the course of time a railway will almost certainly
be built from Edmonton to the Far North.

The Far North ! If there is a spark of the
adventurous in your nature, it flames up when
you turn your back on Edmonton and look away
to the north. What you see with your mortal
eyes is merely a beautiful picture of river and
meadow and woodland, but if you look beyond
the visible you see an illimitable expanse of
country where you might travel week after week,

w

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< w

w w

w
w
H

ON THE PEACE RIVER 137

month after month, even year after year, always
exploring and always discovering something new.
There is a distant sound even about Athabasca
Landing, but that is only the first little step of
100 miles on the northward trail. You would have
to go another 400 miles as the crow flies before
quitting the Province of Alberta and launching
out on the unorganized wilderness of Mackenzie
Territory. On the Peace River, about 400 miles
north of Edmonton, you would find a fair sprink-
ling of settlers. Some, no doubt, have taken land
there as a speculation, and look year by year for
the railway that is sure to follow, sooner or later.
Others are men saturated with the pioneer spirit,
who would probably migrate to another planet,
if they could get it all to themselves. A great
part of this region is not merely habitable, but
habitable with comfort, and as fertile as any
farmer could wish. The influence of the Pacific
Ocean is so powerful in the far west that in winter
Northern Alberta is no colder than Southern
Manitoba. Still more remarkable is the fact
that the average summer temperature at Dun-
vegan, on the Peace River, and nearly as far north
as Athabasca Lake, is as high as that of Paris or
south Germany. Indeed, as far north as the
Great Slave Lake, and Fort Simpson on Mackenzie
River, the average summer temperature is nearly
as high as in Dublin, and higher than it is in

138 WHEAT IN THE FAR NORTH

Edinburgh. At Fort Vermilion, on the Peace
River, 650 miles north of the United States, the
Hudson's Bay Company has for years had a flour
mill, grinding wheat grown on the spot. If
time is no object you may wander on, in a north-
westerly direction, down the Mackenzie River and
into Yukon Territory. When the gold discoveries
of the Klondike first brought this region to the
notice of the world, the miners who went in were
classed with the explorers of the Arctic regions,
and it is an undeniable fact that the Arctic Circle
cuts right across Yukon Territory. It is equally
undeniable, however, and a good deal more
upsetting to current beliefs as to the climate of
Northern Canada, that in this very Territory, on
the 63rd parallel of latitude, or about as far north
as Iceland and Archangel, wheat of the finest
quality ripens without difficulty. I have heard
of an Englishman who complains that Canadians
do a day and a half's work in the day. They are
only following the example of the sun, who knows
that the farming season is short, and makes the
most of it. Up there, in Yukon, the days are
so long and the sun rays so powerful that wheat
sown in May is ready for reaping in July.

The Canadian Government, however, wisely
discourages any large movement of population
into the north while the settlement of the south
is still only beginning. For in spite of the flood

ONLY A BEGINNING 139

of men and women spreading out over the prairies
and park-lands of Southern and Central Sas-
katchewan and Alberta, the whole population of
this area — as large as the German Empire — is only
about half a million.

REGINA TO BATTLEFORD ; AND THE
DUKHOBORS

When I first went to Canada, in 1881, there was

a little spot on the desert face of the central plain

known as Pile-of-Bones. A quarter of a century

later, I alighted from a Canadian Pacific train at

a handsome garden-girt station in the city of

Regina ; and it was the same spot. In that short

interval Pile-of-Bones had become the seat of

government of the three provisional territories,

Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and the

headquarters of the North- West Mounted Police ;

and had finally blossomed out as the capital of the

self-governing Province of Saskatchewan, in which

three-fourths of Assiniboia had been merged.

It is a city plentifully endowed with schools,

churches, banks, hotels, telephones, electric light,

and other commonplaces of civilized life.

As a capital city, Regina, like Edmonton and

Winnipeg, has a political importance ; but the

Westerner is too busy establishing himself on his

new farm to trouble his head much about politics.

Each of the three Provincial Legislatures is

divided into two parties ; and in Manitoba the
140

PROVINCIAL RIGHTS 141

ministerial majority is called Conservative, while
in Alberta and Saskatchewan it is Liberal. But
to the American or Galician immigrant these
names mean little or nothing, and to the old-
countryman they mean something quite different
from what they mean to the man from Eastern
Canada. The opposition in Saskatchewan, by
the way, has decided to drop the name Conser-
vative altogether, and to call itself the Provincial
Rights party, its chief demand being that the
Provincial instead of the Federal Government
shall control the public lands, timber, minerals
and water supply, as in the Provinces of the East.
This question will become acute when the people
of the West are numbered by the million instead
of the hundred thousand, — unless, as may happen,
the demand is agreed to before. At present, the
Federal Government argues that its credit is
pledged for the financing of the Grand Trunk
Pacific railway scheme, which is largely for the
benefit of the West, and that until this scheme
is carried out the national land-asset should
remain in federal hands.

The country east and south-east of Regina has
the same characteristics as the adjoining or
south-western section of Manitoba, and the most
important of these is a reliable rain-fall. Here,
accordingly, you find many well-established settle-
ments, and comparatively few free homesteads for

142 MOOSE JAW AND INDIAN HEAD

new comers. The new comers are still flocking in,
but they are mostly Americans who can afford to
pay for land. At Moosomin, for instance, not far
from the Manitoban border, wild lands are reported
as selling at from $8 to $14 an acre, and partly
improved farms at $15 to $27. Moose Jaw, a
city of 6249 inhabitants in 1906, or rather more
than Regina, is about 40 miles west of that city,
and on the verge of the " semi-arid " region ;
but the aridity has not been seriously felt for
several years, and settlers have been coming in
at such a rate that few good homesteads are
left within 25 miles of the town.

Indian Head, about as far east of Regina as
Moose Jaw is west, prides itself on turning out
more grain than any other primary grain-shipping
centre in the world. At its railway station stand
at least a dozen elevators, with capacity for
350,000 bushels. The five years' average wheat
yield in this district is 26.4 bushels per acre ; and
on the experimental farm, under the best system
of fallow and rotation of crops, the average is as
high as 46.12 bushels.

Probably no other branch of government
activity has conferred such immense and direct
benefits on the population of any country, as the
experimental farm system of Canada. There at
Ottawa, at Brandon in Manitoba, at Indian Head
in Saskatchewan, experiments are constantly

EXPERIMENTAL FARM RESULTS 143

being made by men of the highest skill to discover,
and even to produce, such varieties of plant life
as can be grown with the greatest success and the
highest profit in all the various climates and soils
with which Canadian farmers have to grapple.
Not only is the information thus obtained put
freely at the disposal of every farmer in the
Dominion, but the seeds and plants raised and
tested at the experimental farms can be obtained
by any farmer who is willing regularly to report
the results he gets from them. Perhaps the most
difficult task yet presented to the authorities of
these experimental farms is to produce trees, and
especially fruit trees, hardy enough to live, and in
the case of fruit to yield profitable crops, on the
great treeless plain I am now describing. Yet
this task has been undertaken, and the degree of
success already achieved in the production of
marketable apples, by grafting on a Siberian crab-
apple stock, gives solid ground for hope that
treelessness and fruitlessness will not be per-
manent features of the prairie. The West is con-
stantly surprising even those who know it best.
At Strassburg, about 50 miles north of Regina,
on a Canadian Pacific branch line, is a settlement
formed almost exclusively of Germans direct from
the Fatherland. This, like the rest of the German
settlements, is making excellent progress. On
the same line, a little further east, in the Lipton

144 JEWS AND HUNGARIANS

district, is rather a curiosity in the shape of a
Jewish agricultural colony. " Very few of the
Hebrew immigrants of the past year," says the
chief emigration commissioner at Winnipeg,
" have settled on land permanently, but persist
in remaining in towns or peddling goods about the
country. For this reason they cannot be classed
as likely homesteaders or extensive producers
in an agricultural country like Western Canada."
The Jewish farmers about Lipton, however, are
doing very well by their land, and raised over
40,000 bushels of grain in 1906. A little north
of Lipton is one of a number of settlements formed
in the last few years by Hungarians. Most of the
Hungarians now arriving have come through the
United States, where they worked and saved
money to set themselves up as independent
farmers. These people, the commissioner says,
come to farm, and are unhappy when obliged by
poverty to stay in towns till they can earn money
enough to take up land. The colony of Esterhazy,
the first-born Hungarian settlement, is very
prosperous, with large herds of cattle, and the
original settlers are now hiring help and enlarging
their operations.

Regina was my starting point for a sort of
circular tour over the great prairie of South-
western Saskatchewan. For the first 160 miles,
as far as Saskatoon, I took advantage of a

7i'iin»-8rA ,,*■.£.■.

Urban Infancy. Milestone, Saskatchewan, two Years old

Urban Adolescence. Portage la Prairie, Manitoba

NORTHWARD FROM REGINA 145

railway that runs 90 miles beyond that to Prince
Albert. The land was now prairie pure and simple,
covered with short dry grass and as yet appar-
ently almost uninhabited. The appearance was
deceitful. The land beside the line was held by
speculators, and the settlers were out of sight on
either hand. There were about a score of stopping
places between Regina and Saskatoon, but at
some the only building in sight was the railway
station, and at least one possessed not even that.
Here and there a beginning of settlement was to be
seen — a farmhouse of logs or raw planks, with a
lonely ploughman furrowing up the turf primeval,
— while now and then we passed a man setting fire
to the dry grass on the windward side of the track,
to prevent those larger fires which if unchecked
sweep over many square miles, and destroy the
winter pasture of cattle and horses. But the only
living creatures at all common along the greater
part of the way were the gophers, sitting bolt
upright beside their holes to watch the train go by,
and sometimes crouching on the sleepers and
letting the cars pass over their heads.

Fifty-six miles up the track was the town, or the
germ of a town, of Chamberlain, consisting of a
fit tie group of cottages and a railway station.
At the 123rd mile we came to Hanley, a com-
paratively old town ; that is to say, it was founded
in 1902, and already has several hundred citizens,

146 NORTHWARD FROM REGINA

living for the most part in little shacks, but some
of them putting up good frame houses. The
first settlers here came from North Dakota and
Minnesota, and included many half-Americanized
Norwegians ; but in the last year or two a good
many Eastern Canadians have arrived, as well as
Old-Country folk. The next station, 14 miles
further north, is the village of Dundurn, as youthful
as Hanley. The line from the one to the other
goes through wide stretches of cultivated land,
producing heavy crops of wheat and oats. Here
at Dundurn lives a German who a few years ago
was not only an American citizen but a Senator
of the State of Minnesota. He only came over
the border in 1901 ; but in 1905 he reaped
45,000 bushels of wheat off his new Canadian
estate ; and one of his neighbours, another
German who has been a legislator in Minnesota,
is a farmer of equally large ideas, having broken
5000 acres of prairie in his first two years. The
country so far has been almost level, and wide
flat stretches are still frequent ; but north of this
the prairie has a rolling and humpy appearance,
with patches large and small of willow copse, and
many young poplars. The town of Haultain,
next to Dundurn but ten miles further on, is named
after the ex-premier of the Territories under the
old regime, who now leads the opposition in
Saskatchewan Province.

SASKATOON 147

Saskatoon, a couple of years ago, was the
jumping-off place where settlers bound for the
western parts of the Province left the track for the
trail. The opening of the Canadian Northern
Railway, which crosses this Prince Albert line a
little further north on its way west to Edmonton,
has changed all that, and Saskatoon has lost some
of its trade. It is still, however, a town of im-
portance, with a population (in 1906) of 3031,
against only 113 five years before, and growing
fast. It is the supply centre for a large district,
and the point of departure for many parties bound
for points in the south-west, where railways exist
only on paper or in the embryonic form of sur-
veyors' trails through the grass.

It was from Saskatoon that the Barr colony of
Englishmen and Englishwomen set out, three or
four years ago, on that long, miserable, muddy
drive which gave them so unpleasant a first im-
pression of their adopted colony. The home-
hunters whom I came across in the Saskatoon
district, however, were chiefly Americans. Here,
for instance, was a native of Iowa — though his
mother, by the way, was Scotch-Irish. He was
brought up on a farm, but took to brick-laying
in a city because of the wages. When he married,
he determined that rather than bring his
children up in a town he would become a farmer
again. This was more easily said than done,

148 ON THE WESTWARD TRAIL

in Iowa. At the prices asked for agricultural
land in that State the best he could hope was
to become a tenant, and dependence on the will
of a landlord was a condition he could never
abide. So away he came to Canada, where
he and his sons could get farms of their own.
His travelling companion was a more independent
gentleman, the possessor of a good ranch in
the State of Washington ; but " it won't be
twelve months before he is in Canada, you'll
see," said the Iowan ; and the Washingtonian
did not deny it.

A drive of 90 or 100 miles westward from
Saskatoon across the prairie enabled me to visit
an unusual variety of settlers. Most of them had
begun to fence in their land ; and the result, to
a traveller, was to say the least inconvenient.
Again and again the old trail led us charging into
a wire fence, and we had to turn aside and make
a circuit of the farm. While the old winding trail
had been thus cut off, the new straight trail, on
the " road allowance " marked out by the govern-
ment's land surveyors, was not yet made.

Turning out of our way at one of these obstruc-
tions, we found nestling in a poplar bluff a little
log shack, measuring about 10ft. by 12 ft. — the
first year's home — with a slightly larger frame-
house built on at one end in the second year. The
lady of the house, who was scraping potatoes for

THE DUKHOBORS 149

dinner, could speak no English, but the eldest of
her five children knew enough to tell me that they
were a German family who had come north to
Canada after spending three years in Dakota.

About 30 miles along the trail we came upon a
village of Dukhobors. There is a general im-
pression that the " Dooks," as their neighbours
call them, are a troublesome lot ; that, in addition
to the outlandish ways you would expect to find
among foreigners, they take crazy fits of starting
out on pilgrimages to nowhere in particular, with-
out any clothes on. This has certainly happened ;
and on one occasion fourteen men who had led the
march, and had therefore been arrested, adopted
the policy of the hunger-strike. As they refused
to eat, the police simply stretched them on the
ground while a doctor pumped liquid food down
their throats. It is only an insignificant minority
of the Dukhobors, however, that has made the
community notorious ; and this village on the
Battleford trail has been entirely free from centri-
fugal eccentricities.

The western settlers as a rule do not congregate
in villages but live each on his own farm ; and an
ordinary western village, when it does come into
existence, is a mere collection of separate units,
no one house being built with any thought of
general harmony. The Dukhobor ideal is com-
munistic, and shows itself in the style and arrange-

150 PRACTISING SOCIALISTS

merit of the village as much as in the life of the
inhabitants. The houses are symmetrically
arranged in two long rows with a broad avenue
between. Each house, standing in its own
ground, comprises a but and a ben, as we say in
Scotland. The gable of the better end faces the
street, while the doors open sideways into the
yard. The walls, substantially built of logs,
present to the eye a neatly smoothed surface of
white-washed mud. The roofs are also of mud,
but even they are tidy. A raised ledge of earth
runs along the foot of the wall, and forms, with
the widely overhanging eaves, a sort of verandah-
seat. A little pattern over each window, done in
red and green, adds a pleasant dash of colour
without gaudiness to the whole. Every house I
visited was as neat within as without ; so
marvellously clean, in fact, that you might eat
your dinner off the floor. A spotless wooden
bench ran round the room, and jutting out from
one corner was the great clay oven, opening into
the next apartment, with sleeping accommodation
on the top.

These people are, as a rule, honest, inoffensive,
and industrious. Most of them carry into practice
their communistic ideal, with common ownership
of the means of production, including work oxen
and milch kine, and of the proceeds of their labour.
Some, however, prefer to farm entirely on their

FLAX ; FOOD ; DRESS 1 5 1

own account, and are not excommunicated for
their individualism. The Dukhobors grow grain,
but flax is one of their principal crops. Just
outside the village is a great ring of hard smooth
earth, with a mound in the middle ; and this is
the flax-breaking floor, the flax being broken by
dragging over it a big wooden roller with smaller
logs nailed lengthwise on its surface like cogs on
a wheel. This breaking is done by a horse, but
the grain is threshed by steam. The Dukhobors
are strict vegetarians ; or rather they are strict
abstainers from anything killed, for in other
respects their diet resembles that of their neigh-
bours, including milk as well as tea and coffee and
oatmeal and flour. A few of them speak good
English. Large numbers of the men have worked
on railway construction and have had other
opportunities of learning the language of the
country. Such instruction as the children get in
the village seems to be entirely conveyed in
Russian.

The Dukhobors are already losing most of their
distinctive features, so far as dress is concerned.
I saw just one elderly woman wearing the great
sheepskin coat, with the wool outside. Even on
a Sunday only a very few of the boys and young
men whom you meet strolling about the village
and eating pea-nuts or sunflower seeds have a
little red and green flower pattern embroidered

152 A DUKHOBOR PARLIAMENT

on their waistcoats to distinguish them from the
Tom, Dick, and Harry of the commonplace world
outside. The girls, however — whose Sabbath
amusement seems identical with that of their
brothers — look very pleasant and comfortable in
soft white dresses, perfectly plain and evidently
concealing nothing in the shape of a corset, with
white kerchiefs over their heads. The girls as a
rule are decidedly good-looking, and the same in a
less degree may be said of the men, though these
are rather more spare in habit. They all take a
Saturday night bath of the Russian variety, and
there is no doubt that, from whatever cause, they
are a healthy community. On Sunday morning
at seven o'clock they assemble in a large room for
a service that lasts about two hours and consists
of singing, prayer, and addresses from the older
men. There are 44 of these Dukhobor villages
scattered over the eastern part of the plain, and
every year their delegates come together to hold
a little parliament of their own. At the last
annual meeting quite remarkable progress was
reported. During the year, for instance, nearly
$60,000 (£12,000) had been spent on implements
and machinery of the most modern type, and a
banker's loan of $50,000 had been paid off. These
people are naturally inclined to use machinery
because they have doubts as to their right to
impose compulsory labour on horses. This point

One of Poundmaker's Braves, now a Peaceable Farmer
(See page 164)

A Group of Dukhobors

CO-OPERATION 153

was considered by the conclave, which resolved
that at any rate horses should not be worked
when the temperature was below 13 degrees. The
meeting decided on the community's behalf to
take a number of contracts for railway con-
struction— this having been one of the chief
sources of the prosperity already achieved. The
Dukhobors have by their co-operative system
saved about $150,000 (£30,000) in three years
on purchases amounting to something over
$600,000 (£120,000). They make their own
bricks and cement blocks ; they have built their
own flour mill ; and they now propose to instal
electric light, to connect their villages by a
communal telephone system, and to build in every
centre a school where the children will get an
English education. Unfortunately, while the
Dukhobors have been away earning money for
the better equipment of their farms, many of
these homesteads have not had the minimum of
cultivation required by the law. In one of their
settlements, also, their failure to pay taxes brought
down on them a bailiff, who seized a quantity of
cattle. The Dukhobors took up pitchforks,
recaptured their cattle, and put the bailiff and his
deputies to flight. The incident has its humorous
side, considering that these militant non-taxpayers
underwent much persecution in Russia, and finally
went into exile, rather than take up arms.

154 THE EAGLE CREEK

The country we are now passing through
somewhat resembles that which I have described
in Central Alberta, but is rather more open, and
the sloughs, if not the patches of woodland, are
perhaps less frequent. Running water is ex-
tremely scarce ; in fact only one stream is crossed
in the hundred miles. This Eagle Creek, accord-
ingly, has an importance out of all proportion to
its size, which to tell the truth is insignificant.
It is a mere trickle in comparison with those three
noble rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan
and the Battle, which, rising in the Rocky
Mountains, cross the whole width of the two
Provinces, and, having joined, finally discharge
their muddy waters into Hudson's Bay. Even
the Eagle Creek, however, has cut out for itself a
quite respectable valley, in whose shelter the
poplar, cottonwood, willow, and birch attain a
growth far larger than any you meet with on the
plains above. The spot where the trail crosses the
creek has been chosen for the site of a post office
and store, kept by a Scotch-Canadian from Ontario.
He migrated to Manitoba six years ago, and his
experience is instructive. In Manitoba he could
find no good land available for free homesteads
within reasonable distance of a railway, and, after
working a farm on shares, he pulled up stakes
once more and finally settled on the banks of the
distant Eagle Creek. In a couple of years, he

POSTMASTER, AND BLACKSMITH 155

has seen a considerable change — not all for the
better, from one point of view. The first year,
the trail was alive with freighters going to and
from Battleford. Now, the Canadian Northern
Railway has put the freighters out of business,
and they have either taken up homesteads and
settled down to the more prosaic occupation of
growing wheat or have struck out new routes for
themselves further west and north. Still, a mail
waggon passes four times a week each way ; and
the table of times and fares has quite the flavour
of an old coaching advertisement in Dickens's
England. The postmaster and his two sons have
between them five quarter-sections, or 800 acres,
and at the end of two years 80 acres were actually
under crop.

In a log hut close by, the only other human
habitation to be seen, I found a very different
type of settler ; or rather a settler at a very
different stage of his career. A neatly painted
sign on the rough log wall of a smithy proclaimed
his trade — " Horse-shoer and General Black-
smith." He was a sturdy and swarthy Scot from
Kirkcudbright, and he had only taken his home-
stead in November — it was now September. He
and his family had come in as poor as Galicians,
and endowed with the same patient persevering
industry that lifts them out of poverty — when
they get the Canadian chance. Being Scots, they

156 NO GOING BACK

were endowed also with some education ; and
my first thought as I talked with them was that
education and its offspring refinement must have
made them feel their hardships more keenly.
I presently came to the conclusion, however, that
this effect was more than neutralized by its very
cause ; that the possession of mental resources
enabled them to rise above their material
hardships.

Having no capital or reserve fund, this man had
had to work at his trade — there had been a fair
amount of it, while the freighters were thick on the
trail — to earn a little ready money, so he could not
put in as much work as he should on his farm.
Three acres under oats and potatoes, that was all
he had to show for his first season. But he had
spent the winter working as blacksmith at a
lumber camp in the forest north of the Sas-
katchewan, and he was going to spend another
winter in the same way, earning $50 (£10) a
month. When he came back in the spring he
would " make things hum " on that homestead —
as he would have said had he been an American.

I asked him if, speaking frankly, he would
rather go back to Scotland. No, not he ! I put
the same question to his wife, who sat rocking her
child to sleep. It is the woman who generally
keeps a man back when he talks of emigrating ;
and it is the woman who most feels the solitude

HOMESTEAD RIGHTS CANCELLED 157

of the pioneer life and most often wants to go
back. Here was a woman who had spent a whole
winter husbandless, alone with her infants in a
one-roomed prairie hut, with another lonely
winter ahead of her. Did she not wish herself
back in Scotland ? Never ! She was even more
emphatic than her husband. They were all so
much better out there, as well as bound to be better
off before long. " And as for that lassie," she
said, brightening up and pointing to a delicate
little girl on the bed, " she'd have been dead if we'd
stayed at home, and now she's nearly strong."

There is indeed no such medicine in all the
pharmacies as the air of the Canadian plains.

A paper, fastened to the wall of the post office,
giving notice that at the end of 60 days the home-
stead rights granted to Mr So-and-so will be
cancelled, is a reminder that this, though a land
of promise, is a land where the promise has to be
kept on both sides. The country gives the settler
his 160 acres ; but, as I have already said,
before he can have the decree made absolute, he
must have lived on his farm at least six months
out of the twelve for three years, and must have
put five acres a year under cultivation. The
conditions are not enforced too rigidly. If, for
instance, a young man is living with his father
on a neighbouring homestead, cultivation without
residence is allowed to suffice ; and even the

158 KEEPING OPEN HOUSE

minimum of cultivation is not insisted on, if the
new-comer can show good reason for its non-
fulfilment. It is to be feared, however, that the
homestead inspectors, whose duty it is to travel
up and down the country seeing that the settlers
keep their bargain, are sometimes lax without
legitimate reason ; and, without endorsing the
charge, I feel bound to report a suspicion prevalent
among some of the bona fide settlers that settlers
of another description, or rather non-settlers, are
allowed to keep land to which they have no right,
thus shutting out men who are ready not only to
take up land but to live on it and cultivate it in
earnest. It is only fair to say, at the same time,
that the officials in the land department at
Ottawa profess readiness to investigate and
remedy this and other abuses of the country's
hospitality by lazy homesteaders and by certain
land agents and their dummy representatives.

There was no one to receive us when we came
to the " stopping-place,' * kept by an ex-trooper
of the Mounted Police, where we were to pass the
night. But this matters little in the West. You
stable your horses, find the key of the house in
its usual place over the door, walk in, and make
yourself at home, foraging on shelves and in
cupboards and making delightful discoveries of
scones and potatoes and berries, not to speak of
mere bread and bacon and tea. You make a

BATTLEFORD ONCE MORE 159

fire in the stove, splitting up a log for the purpose
if there is no pile of firewood handy, and it is
your own fault or misfortune if with all this you
cannot produce a good meal, before the lady and
gentleman of the house return from their toils or
their travels. As for sleeping room, it is astonish-
ing how much there is in what seems from the
outside to be only a little log-house. On occasion
you may even find a spring bed to sleep on ;
though after a day's ride through Canadian air
you must be delicate indeed if you could not
sleep on the soft side of a plank.

We were still a good many miles from Battle-
ford when we first caught sight of the Saskatche-
wan River away on the right. From this point
the trail not only follows the river but remains on
what may be called its southern bank — a strip,
sometimes a mile or two wide, of rough, often
sandy, and generally wooded land, sloping in
irregular and broken terraces from the prairie
on the left down to the river. Then, on a height
far ahead, we caught sight of Battleford itself :
the fort, or the remains of the fort, on the point of
a high plateau between the Battle and the North
Saskatchewan, where these two rivers join. At
last we plunged down the valley side, drove right
through the Battle River, and climbed the steep
ascent to the fort, as I had climbed it twenty years
before with the relieving army.

A BATTLEFIELD REVISITED

The Lucknow of Canada has been almost totally
transformed since the famous siege in the Rebellion
of '85. The old stockade and bastions, the only
protection of the beleaguered population, have
vanished, and even the line where the stockade
ran can only be guessed at. The only easily
recognizable ante-bellum structure is the officers'
house, on the point of the promontory that juts
out in front of the town — looking eastward down
the valleys of the Battle River and North Sas-
katchewan, on the right and left, to the point
where they join, a mile or so below. Of the town
itself as it stood when our column came to its
relief not a trace remains visible, though I believe
one or two fragments of the old buildings are
built into the new. The town has certainly grown
since 1885, but not remarkably.

A few hours after my arrival I again took the
trail for Cutknife Hill, at about the same hour
in the afternoon, when on May 2, 1885, our little
force, having raised the siege, set out for the same
destination — to find the besiegers, who had
pitched their camp on Poundmaker's reserve,
160

LOADED FOR THE TRAIL 161

40 miles away to the west. My comrades now,
as then, were Mounted Police — a couple of them
— but they had been infants when I took that
trail before with Herchmer's men and the volun-
teers. Not even now were we merely on pleasure
bent. The battlefield was only to end the first
stage of a long trek over country that was still
a Great Lone Land, and we loaded our waggons
with a fortnight's rations for man and beast;
a shot-gun and rifle — not for defence, by any
means, but for aggression upon such feathered
and four-footed inhabitants as might enrich our
bill of fare ; a military tent ; and wolf-skin
" robes " to wrap ourselves in on the cold
autumnal nights.

There was no need of secrecy now, no call for
an all-night march ; and we camped as darkness
fell, in one of the gullies that gave our artillery so
much trouble in '85. There was good drinking
water in the creek : very different from the slough
liquid which we should have to put up with at
later stages in the Bad Lands. We were well
supplied with bread, at any rate for the first few
days, as well as with hard tack ; but the " soft
tack" brought back painful recollections of the
comrade, an Ottawa Civil Service man, who shared
his bread with me — a delightful relief after the
stony biscuit to which we were accustomed — on
that weary night march before the battle. It was

L

1 62 THE SOUNDS OF NIGHT

the last thing he ate. When I saw him next
he lay on Cutknife Hill with an Indian ball
through his head ; and the flying bullets sang his
requiem.

The night was dark, and it was hard to find a
spot moderately level and free from dog-rose
bushes to sleep on ; dark till the Northern Lights
began to play. It was also quiet — at intervals.
Now and then our broncos, having finished their
oats, came nuzzling among our tins and rations,
or even turning up the corners of our robes to
see if we had any hidden edibles about us, before
they settled down to their regular night's work
on the standing prairie hay. As we dozed off
again, the silence of the wood was pierced and
torn by the long-drawn scream of a coyote, the
prairie wolf. Another answered him, with a
ghastly yell as of a woman in torment ; and then
the whole pack gave tongue in chorus, like an
orchestra of steam sirens and fog-horns pitched
in many keys. The horses went on munching, for
the coyote is a coward despised by all his brother
beasts above the rank of a sheep or a sickly calf.
The screaming ended as suddenly as it began.
Presently the wind rose, and for half an hour or
more a rushing blast whistled through the wood
and hissed along the grass. This, too, died
suddenly away, and a dead calm followed, broken
only by spasmodic outbursts from despairing

NEW-COMER AND OLD-TIMER 163

wolves, till daylight roused us to breakfast and
the road.

A lovely country this, sloping down to the
Battle River, with many a lake and stream among
its meadow glades and wooded hills. Several
considerable tracts are held by the Indians under
treaty — it was on the Yellow-grass reserve we had
pitched our camp — but the rest of the land is fast
being taken up by settlers. Here, for instance,
we came on a Lancashire man, an ex-official from
the Manchester Post Office. He had been out
three or four years, and though he had found the
unaccustomed work hard at first he would not
think of going back. He had 20 acres under
grain, besides garden stuff. And here by way of
contrast was an old-timer who had joined the
Mounted Police more than 30 years ago and had
now been farming 25 years. His experience,
therefore, was worth having. On one field he had
been growing wheat from the beginning, and its
yield now averaged 25 to 30 bushels an acre. So
far as grain was concerned, or such vegetables as
potatoes and beans, he had rarely had trouble
from frost. He bore a French name — his great
grandfather fought under Napoleon — but spelt
it in an English way to accommodate his English-
speaking neighbours.

When we crossed this reserve before dawn on
that fatal May morning in 1885, Poundmaker

164 THE CREE BRAVE AS FARMER

and his men were a horde of hostile savages with
yellow war-paint on their faces. To-day these
warriors and huntsmen are a peaceful community
of farmers ; and the first of them I met was a
pleasant-looking gentleman, in what we have the
conceit to call civilized clothing, driving a farm
waggon with a good team of horses, and apparently
differing only in complexion from any of his
European neighbours. On the edge of a poplar
bluff I met another Cree brave, who came
forward with a smile to have his photograph
taken as soon as he had put up his horses in their
log stable. His summer dwelling stood close by
— a genuine old tepee, but made of canvas instead
of buffalo-skin, — and in front of the door were a
couple of factory chairs, and, mirabile dictu, a
wash-tub. The wash-tub stage of civilization is
not a low or contemptible one. Still more remark-
able, when interpreted, was the steady whir of
machinery that fell upon the ear. A little
further on we looked over a log fence and saw
in the middle of a wide stubble-field a modern
steam threshing outfit, with a great stack of
wheat going in at one end, and a fountain of straw
spouting out at the other. The whole outfit,
engine and all, had been bought by the tribe with
their own earnings, and the whole of the work was
being done by the Indians themselves. The land
is held in common by the tribe ; but any Indian

CUTKNIFE HILL 165

who wants to fence off part of it for a farm is free
to do so. The average yield of these Indians' wheat
crop in a good season is at least 35 bushels per
acre, and they have often had more ; though in
1904, after rather a cold and wet season, the
average was only about 22 bushels. Oats run
as high as 80 bushels to the acre. The two
hundred Indians on this reserve have about 500
head of cattle, owned individually, not tribally.
The government, in fulfilment of its treaty with
the Indians, pays them a yearly subsidy of $5
a head. It also distributes a little food, as a
matter of policy, to encourage them while at work,
and, as a matter of charity, helps those who are
old and infirm ; but the tribe as a whole may
claim to be self-supporting and prosperous.
There are two missions, Roman Catholic on
Poundmaker's and Anglican on Little Pine's
reserve, each with a day-school attached. The
health of the Indians is pretty good, and their
number is steadily though slowly increasing.

Just now, however, our interest perforce was
less in the wheat-fields of to-day than in the
battlefield of twenty years ago — and there it was,
sloping up to the west from the other side of
Cut knife Creek. The creek itself was now
invisible from the plain, its valley having been
almost filled up since the year of the rising by a
thick growth of poplar and willow — one of many

166 ONE OF THE VICTORS

indications that the forest, where not artificially
checked, tends to spread over the prairie from
north to south. On the turfy wind-swept slope
where we had been caught by the rebels we now
met Colonel MacDonnell of the Mounted Police,
who had ridden over on the previous afternoon,
(a forty-mile canter is nothing out there), to hunt
up some old Indian who had been in the fight.
With him was Mr Warden, the Indian agent, and
his son, who talked Cree like a native, and, last
but not least, a swarthy, good-humoured tribes-
man with long black hair and a blanket suit.
This was Piacutch, one of Poundmaker's men who
had done his best or his worst to defeat us, and
who now quietly chuckled whenever he recalled
their victory over " the Police." But, I explained,
there were only a handful of police in the outfit ;
most of us were not even regular soldiers, but just
clerks and working men and such like who had
never fought before. Piacutch did not contradict
me, though it is one of the cherished traditions of
the tribe that they " beat the police.* ' He just
smiled and said, " No matter ; if you had all been
police we would have beaten you just the same."
Plainly, however, his feeling in the matter was
purely academical ; he bore no sort of a grudge
against either white men in general or the
police in particular ; and we went over the
field together comparing notes and correcting

REMINISCENCES OF THE FIGHT 167

each other's recollections, in the friendliest
fashion.

There, in the middle of the slope, I mentioned
that some of our horses had been bunched together,
and one of them was killed. " Yes," said
Piacutch, " its bones were there a long time ; and
down there " — pointing into one of the flanking
coulees — " we found a dead policeman." He was
not a policeman at all, by the way, but that was a
detail. At the top of the slope we identified the
spot where the guns were planted — the poor little
brass 7-pounders, whose carriages collapsed early
in the fray, and the Gatling, bravely handled by
Captain Howard (who afterwards fought for us
in South Africa), but as good as useless when the
Indians had taken cover. The Indians did not
all take cover, Piacutch was careful to explain.
Walking westward a piece along the almost level
plateau which had separated the guns from the
Indian camp, he suddenly stopped and said,
u There was an Indian here, sitting up, not lying
down, and firing at the police all the time ; and
the police couldn't hit him " But close by he
paused at a little hollow in the ground and said,
" There was a Stoney hit here, and buried here."
Unhappily the Stoney was not allowed to rest in
peace. By whom the thing was done I know not,
nor why ; but the body had been removed : only
Piacutch, poking in the ground with his foot,

168 HOW NAPATEKISIK WAS KILLED

unearthed a broken piece of skull. The Crees, I
should observe, have no affection for the Stoney
Indians, dead or alive, though they were glad
enough of their help in time of battle.

" And where were you ? " I asked. Piacutch
led me down the hillside into the coulee on the
south of our position, turned round, and began
stealing slowly up the slope, stooping low and
pointing an imaginary gun at about the point
from which I well remembered watching the
progress of events. " Poundmaker was down
here," he says, " with the biggest band, and it
was here that old Napatekisik (Man-with-one-eye)
was killed. He was Coming-day's father, and
he was an old man. All the Indians were going to
show their heads, and he said ' Don't show till
I see.' He put his head up, and a bullet went into
his chest."

My new friend and old enemy insisted that he
and his comrades did not take shelter in the
bushes lining the trough of the little valley ; their
only cover was the curve of the hill ; nor had they,
as we believed, prepared for our reception by
digging rifle-pits in the coulees, half-breed fashion.
After the fight, he admitted, the women dug holes
there, in case of another attack.

Pointing to the hill crest on the far side of the
coulee, I said I remembered having seen Indians
firing at us from that exposed position. " Yes,"

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 169

said Piacutch, after thinking a little, " that's
true ; they were trying to hit the police who were
going for our camp. When a man came from
the tents telling Poundmaker that the camp was
in danger, Poundmaker brought most of us up the
coulee to save it." That, in fact, was the critical
moment of the whole affair, as the Indians
evidently recognized. And Piacutch, for all his
certainty that we were bound to be defeated, con-
firmed what was the strong belief of the force at
the time, that if we had pressed on, instead of
halting cooped up on the hill, not only should we
have got out of a most unpleasant situation our-
selves, but we could have captured the enemy's
camp and compelled the Indians, if they wanted
to defend it, to come up into the open. " If the
police had stayed on their horses," Piacutch
confessed, " they could have got through to the
camp, for the Indians could only have fired one
shot as they passed." But the chance was thrown
away, and there was nothing for us left but
retreat as soon as the enemy could be turned out
of the valley in our rear. When asked how the
Indians knew we were coming that morning,
Piacutch said : " There was an old Indian
named Jacob-with-long-hair who always got up
before everybody else. He went out over the
hill, and his horse put up its ears, and then he
listened and heard waggons coming ; so he galloped

I/O POUNDMAKER'S WHIP

back and told us, and we strung out as quick as
we could, one by one."

" And when we went away," I asked, " were
you one of the lot that followed us ? " Well,
all he was willing to admit was that when we were
going down the hill they went down after us to
gather up the biscuits and cartridges " and rifles."
In one spot, it appeared, they found quite a pile of
biscuits— I only wish I had known where to get one
or two that day — and cartridges were thick on the
ground as wild strawberries. As for empty
cartridge cases and Canada Militia buttons, there
are plenty of them on the hill to this day.

" So you did not really mean to pursue us ? "
" The young men wanted to," answered Piacutch,
" to catch you as you went home through the
woods, but Poundmaker held them back out of
pity for you." In describing this incident
another old Indian asserts that Poundmaker
brandished his whip and threatened to flog any
Indian who dared to go after the white man.

So the enemies of twenty years ago sat down
and took pot-luck together on the battlefield, —
pot-luck being a couple of prairie chicken
brought down from a tree-top beside the trail, —
and while the red man went back to his farm the
white man set out on a long ride of 250 miles
southward across the great central plain of
Southern Saskatchewan.

THE FIRST STAGE OF SETTLEMENT 171

The country round Cut-knife Hill is probably
as fertile as any in the West. Travelling south
across the prairie from the battlefield, how-
ever, the impression conveyed to the eye, which is
incapable of analyzing soils, is simply that of
immense and solitary space. For many miles
at a stretch the plain is almost perfectly flat, and
often we found it most inconveniently dry, yet
it was rapidly being taken up by settlers. Now,
the process of settlement was here to be seen in
its very first stage, but it was all the more interest-
ing on that account. The trail, or rather the
track which we struck out for ourselves across the
prairie, — for regular trails had not yet come into
existence, — led us every now and then to a patch
of newly broken ground. The turf had just been
turned over by a first ploughing ; and sometimes
on the edge of this brown patch stood a brand new
little box of a house, of yellow planks ; but the
owners, after doing as much as this in compliance
with the homestead law, had gone home to the
States for the winter, intending doubtless to come
back for good in the spring. This was a little
awkward when we wanted to camp for the night,
or even for our nooning, as surface water was
scarce and most of these beginners had not yet
taken the trouble to dig wells. On the first
afternoon after leaving Cut-knife we rode for
hour after hour looking for at least a slough with

1/2 WATER AT LAST

a puddle in it to give our horses their nightly
drink. Sloughs there were in plenty, but all
utterly dry, and even the grass which had over-
grown their beds was rapidly losing its greenness.

Ahead of us in the south-east rose a little
square dot on the horizon, — evidently a house,
for nothing rose from that horizon in the shape
of a tree or other natural landmark. When we
got up to it we found the windows boarded over,
and not even the beginnings of a well outside.
Half a mile across the prairie to the north there
was another house, and beside it we could just
distinguish a few moving figures. Wheeling to
the left, we raced over the turf, only to find that
dwelling also shut up for the winter. The men
we had seen were probably the owner and his son,
who after finishing their day's work had gone off
to spend the night on a farm still farther north.
The worst of it was that though they had begun
to dig a well they had only got seven or eight feet
down, and had found no water. It was nearly
dark, and, rather than go on in our right direction
with the chance of finding no water all night, we
turned round and pelted back the way we had
come : for there, rising from the chimney of a
little log house we had passed some while before,
a column of blue smoke cut the red sunset sky in
two.

Here, at any rate, was a man, ploughing with a

THE FRENCH-CANADIAN EXODUS 173

yoke of oxen ; and he had a well, but there was
little left in it, and his cattle had to drink. In
fact, he said, every few days he had to hitch up
and haul a couple of barrels from the nearest
creek, three miles away ; still, we were welcome
to what we needed. With intense relief we
pitched our camp within the charmed circle — the
ploughed strip ten or twelve feet wide — which
every careful settler draws round his home as a
guard against possible prairie fires.

That log house and its humble inhabitants form
as pleasant a picture as anything I witnessed in
the whole journey. The man and his wife were
both French-Canadians, and their presence on
that far northern plain was a hopefully significant
fact. One of the most painful features in the
history of Canada for the last 30 years has
been the exodus of French-Canadians from the
Province of Quebec. It is believed that at least
half a million of the two million French-Canadians
are now to be found under the Stars and Stripes,
though you might find it hard to identify a Jean
Baptiste Lajeunesse and Dominique Lafortune
under their new names of John Young and
Washington Lucky. The greater number of these
expatriated French-Canadians are to be found in
the New England States, where they have supplied
the labour for the cotton mills and shoe factories
of many a Massachusetts town. There was also,

174 AMERICANIZED FRENCH-CANADIANS

however, a large French-Canadian emigration,
less permanent in intention, to the American
North- West, and especially to Illinois andMichigan.
Thousands of the habitants were, and still are,
expert lumbermen, spending their winters, even
when they have farms of their own in the St
Lawrence valley, cutting and drawing timber
from the northern forests. Such men as these
found a great and profitable market for their
labour in Michigan, a State which indeed may be
said to have-been transformed from forest to farm-
land by French-Canadian hands and axes. A
large proportion of these French-Canadians,
whatever their intentions were, settled down in
the State they had cleared. Hundreds, if not
thousands, of them are now being brought back
into Canada, though not chiefly into their native
Province, by the same economic force that is
drawing northward hundreds of thousands of
English-speaking Americans. These American-
ized Frenchmen speak English perfectly, though
most, if not all, of them speak French as well,
and their names are generally spelt in the old
French way, though pronounced in English
fashion.

The typical pair of French-Canadians who now
came to our rescue had only returned to their
native land a few months before, and though
they had got twenty acres of prairie broken they

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 175

had not had time to get any of it under crop. In
the Province of Quebec a good deal of the field
work is still done by the women ; but madame
had been brought up more in the American style,
and found her hands pretty well occupied by the
care of her house and her children, in addition to
such trifles as making the butter and looking after
the poultry. The house was a perfect model of
cleanliness and good order. It consisted of one
room only, but it was well if plainly furnished,
and every kitchen utensil, bright as a new pin,
hung from its proper hook on the neatly plastered
log-wall, which was otherwise decorated with
conventional coloured prints of the Holy Family.
The husband had made that house, from door-step
to chimney top, with his own hands, after drawing
every stick of timber from the Cut-knife valley.
He confessed that he had had to pay $30 (£6) for
the window sashes and the planed wood forming
the floor and the door, but otherwise the whole
edifice had cost him in cash only the 25 cents
charged by the Government for permission to
cut logs. He had brought in a year's rations for
his family from the United States, besides his
eight oxen, his milch cow, and his farm imple-
ments, so he was well able to wait till the second
year for his wheat crop. Up here a team of work
oxen would have cost him $200 (£40). Madame
was thriftily packing all the eggs and butter she

176 GOOD SPIRITS

could gather and make, for winter use, but she
was quite willing to sell us some of each, as well as
a little sugar, at an extremely low price. Mon-
sieur's habit was to rise about three, and put in at
least six hours' work on the land before 10 a.m.,
returning to the plough or harrow in the afternoon
and sticking hard at it till dark. Hard work
seemed not only to agree with him physically but
to leave him plenty of spirit for a tune and a chat
in the evening. Between them, moreover, they
found time to read three weekly papers, — one
French, and the others English of the Canadian
and American varieties respectively.

" I suppose you are a little lonely out here as
yet," I remarked.

" Lonely ? " said our host, " O, dear no ; we
had a couple of dances last summer in my father's
house, and all the girls came to it from 20 miles
round."

It turned out that his father had taken the next
homestead, that his brother was settling over
there, his cousin over yonder, and sundry other
Americanized French-Canadians close by, so that
in a few months there would be a very respectable
little French colony in that township. " There's
a store opened five miles west," he added, " and
a man says he's going to open one right here in a
few weeks, and keep everything."

Not very far south of the French-Canadian

NO TRAIL 177

homestead a colony of Germans has sprung up,
beside Tramping Lake. Leaving this away on our
right, we struck out in a south-easterly direction,
hoping to pick up the old Swift Current trail by
which we had marched north to the relief of
Battleford more than 20 years before. Our
task, however, was far from easy. Not one of the
settlers could tell us the way, having come in by
the trail from Battleford and knowing no other.
There was, as we soon discovered, no other to
know. Here and there a pair of parallel lines ran
faintly through the grass, where some settler's
waggon had passed, a week or maybe a month
before ; but it generally ended on the edge of
some deep and wooded coulee where the settler
had merely gone to cut logs for his house-building.
All we could do was to steer by compass across
the sea of grass a course which must ultimately
strike the old historic trail : and now and then
we were able to verify our bearings by an iron
stake, projecting from a little mound, and stamped
with the number of the range and township. Our
progress was not rapid in these circumstances,
but, as we made a point of inquiring at every
house we saw, we were rewarded by a good deal
of information bearing on the chief object of our
voyage.

Here, for instance, on a little rise, which in that
immensity of flatness might almost be called a

178 A PARSONAGE

hill, lived a man from Ontario. Like the French-
Canadian, he was evidently one of those whom
diligence maketh rich. Though he had bought
his logs from the Indians, he had not only built
the house himself but had made the very lime for
its foundations, by burning the stones that
drifting ice-bergs in some remote geological epoch
had scattered thinly over the plain. His next
neighbour, whom we found harrowing with three
oxen abreast, was so bent on getting every possible
acre under cultivation that he had only put up
for his own habitation a tiny sod shack. The
walls were of turf piled on turf, and the roof of
the same primitive material supported by the
trunks of young poplar trees. A few miles
further on was a more comfortable looking
establishment surrounded by a fine garden full of
carrots, swedes, and other homely vegetables.
The proprietor, hard at work among his roots,
dashed into the house and out again with a letter
which he begged us to post at the nearest post
office ; but, as we were not likely to light on a
post office for a week or so, he thought he would
wait for a better opportunity. He, by the way,
was nominally an American, but really a native
of the Isle of Man. His next neighbour was a
Methodist minister, one of the large number —
large absolutely, but ridiculously small in pro-
portion to the territory they have to serve —

A PICTURESQUE HOMESTEAD 179

of clergymen, chiefly Methodist, Presbyterian,
and Anglican, who by incessant journeying in
the saddle, the waggon or the sleigh, attempt to
keep alive the habit of public worship and the
spirit of religion among their vastly scattered
parishioners. We found the reverend gentleman
and his wife living in what can only be called a
box, of rough planks covered with black felt paper
inside to keep out the wind, and not very much
larger than the packing case outside in which their
piano had come up from Ontario. They had
been so busy with the care of others that little
time had been left for their own affairs, and,
though they had some faint hope of being able to
build a real house in the fall, they would most
likely have to pass the whole of the western
winter in that box.

After a long morning's ride we found our path
barred by a hill, a real hill, which had gradually
been rising from the horizon ahead. Swerving
to the north we plunged steeply down from the
plain into a lovely valley, here chock-full of a
jungle growth, poplar and willow and birch, but
soon widening out and giving room for a pleasant
meadow cut in two by a clear and rapid stream
called the Bull-dog. High up on the eastern bank
an old Ontario farmer and his sons, with an eye
for the picturesque as well as the profitable, had
built their primitive mansion. Between them

i8o THE SWIFT CURRENT TRAIL

they had taken up a whole section, 640 acres, and
the eldest son was hard at work ploughing with a
team of four oxen. They, at any rate, would have
no lack of wood and water, and the soil they were
ploughing was at least as good as that of the bare
and monotonous dry plain. And now for a while
we traversed a country which, if not flowing with
milk and honey, at any rate left less of its richness
to the imagination : a stretch of parkland, dotted
by lakes and sloughs, divided by streams which
if small had the great merit of being always wet,
and plentifully endowed with timber.

At last our long search was rewarded, and we
camped for the night by the side of the Swift
Current trail. In the morning, after laying in a
supply of rarities such as sugar and eggs at the
house of a French-Canadian from Minnesota, we
set our faces to the south, and started on our last
long ride of 180 miles to the nearest point on the
Canadian Pacific Railway.

THE DRY PATCH

When I first knew it, the Swift Current trail was
a sort of grand trunk road over which all supplies
for the Battleford region had to be freighted. Its
life and glory departed on the opening of the rail-
way from Regina to Saskatoon ; but by that time
the two parallel ruts forming the trail had been
worn deep and smooth in the black prairie soil,
and, judging by the survival of buffalo tracks
meandering across the prairie in every direction
30 years after the disappearance of the buffalo, the
trail might remain both visible and passable for an
indefinite period, so gently does the weather touch
the landscape hereabouts, even if the settlement
of the great plain between the South Saskatchewan
and the Battle River were indefinitely postponed
and the trail left traffickless.

That settlement had already begun, we soon had
evidence, but very little of it. Only once, and that
while we were still in the Battleford district,
a sapling laid across the trail warned us that land
had been taken up and fenced in just ahead, and
forced us to make a circuit by a new and rough
track through the grass for half a mile or so. We

181

1 82 THE PRAIRIE PRIMEVAL

were still among the park lands when we met a
couple of waggons lumbering northward behind
yokes of sleepy brown oxen. The owners, it
appeared, had taken up land at a place still
destitute of a name but lying about a score of
miles south of Sixty-mile Bush, and they were
going into Battleford — a four days' journey, if
they made 20 miles a day — for household belong-
ings that had come up from the States by rail.

We entered now a land where no man dwelt ;
the prairie primeval, untouched and unchanged,
sleeping on as it had slept when the first silent red
man stole out of the woods and shaded his eyes to
scan its sunlit sea of grass.

As we left the valley of the Battle River further
and further behind, the bluffs of willow and poplar
became smaller and thinner, and their trees
dwindled to shrubby insignificance, while longer
and longer intervals passed between the sloughs.
The prairie chicken, plentiful enough at first,
gradually disappeared, and even the wild duck,
which had risen in scores from every patch
of water as we rode by, grew more and more
scarce. Very soon the park lands of the north
were all behind us, and the rolling, dry, illimitable
plain stretched out to the horizon in front. The
slender stunted stalks of the wild rose and the
stubborn whip-like stems of the grey-leaved
buck-brush scarcely relieved the monotony of the

ANIMAL LIFE 183

smooth brown turf, and after a while even the
sloughs lost their accustomed fringe of willow
bushes. High over head flew steadily southward
a flock of wavies, or cranes, in perfect arrowhead
formation of two long lines converging on their
leader, or an irregular bunch of wild duck travel-
ling from slough to slough, while the little greyish
shore lark hopped about everywhere. The
ubiquitous gopher sat bolt upright on the edge of
its hole, vanishing downward like a shot when it
thought audacity had reached the point of fool-
hardiness. Twenty yards ahead, beside the
trail, a fountain of earth spouted up where a
big striped badger was digging himself a new
home or enlarging his old one. He turned and
stared at us, motionless, till a rifle was aimed at
him, — then vanished. Now and then a snake
slipped across the trail, — Twining's garter-snake,
the zoologists call it, a greenish-yellow animal
with a black stripe along the back. It is a harm-
less creature. There are said to be rattle-snakes
here and there in Canada, but in many years and
much travel I have never come across one.

The sun set and the coyotes began to howl as
the trail ran down a rough and stony slope
towards the middle of a charming little lake. The
blue water was daintily edged with ring within
ring of snowy white alkali and vivid red weeds.
Alas, it was only charming to the eye, and we held

1 84 "STINKING LAKE"

our nostrils tight as we passed across the middle
of the lake by a stony natural causeway. A
large proportion of the sloughs and lakes on this
prairie are alkaline, though in varying degrees, —
some being quite drinkable ; others drinkable in
small quantities, and with a risk of internal
consequences ; others, like this " Stinking Lake/'
abominable beyond words. Happily, before the
twilight died away the smooth sky-line ahead
began to wear a slightly serrated look, and as
darkness fell we entered Sixty-mile Bush. This
is a curious stretch of rather thickly if not heavily
wooded land suddenly occurring in the midst of
the bare plain, and interspersed, like the park
lands of the north, with many sloughs, some of
them perfectly fresh.

The bush is inhabited, so far as human beings
go, only by two French half-breed families.
Beside one of these we camped for the night, and
I had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance,
now more than 20 years old, with a race that has
played a not unimportant and often a useful, if
sometimes an unhappy, part in the history of
the West. These isolated denizens of Sixty-mile
Bush seemed prosperous enough, with herds of
cattle, good log farm buildings, and large stacks
of rich natural hay from the prairies and sloughs.
In the log house beside which we camped, compar-
ing favourably with the shacks that satisfy many

HALF-BREEDS OF SIXTY-MILE BUSH 185

white settlers for their first few years in the
country, we found two married sisters. One of
them could only speak the Cree Indian language,
and a French patois ; the other had been educated
in a convent and spoke English pretty well. Their
eight little children, black-eyed, swarthy, and
very Indian-looking, rolled and tumbled over
each other on the floor, — active and jolly, though
remarkably quiet in their play. The good women
were as kind and hospitable as travellers could
wish. Did we want wood for our camp fire ? We
might have as much as we wanted from their log
pile. Were we tired of sleeping on the prairie ?
Their stable was dry, and not in use till winter,
and there was plenty of hay in the stacks. Had
we had enough (and we certainly had) of slough
water ? Here was a pailful of the best from their
well. To be sure, they had no bread, but we could
have for a reasonable consideration one of their
mighty bannocks, — great oval slabs, measuring
about 18 inches by 12, and an inch thick — with
a big lump of butter and a jug of milk.

Presently arrived the father-in-law of the
English-speaking dame : a pleasant-faced man,
as dark as any Indian, but wearing a considerable
beard ; a man of seventy, but without a white
hair in his head. Not a word of English could he
speak, though 40 years ago he had gone with an
English hunter as guide all through the Rocky

186 A MAN OF 1885

Mountains. More interesting still, he had been at
" Batoche/' — the three days' fight which broke
the back of the rebellion in 1885. It was not,
however, about Batoche that he was most inclined
to speak, but rather of his share in the proceedings
at an earlier and less tragic stage. He had been
well acquainted with Louis Riel, the leader of the
Red River rebellion in 1870, as well as of the
Saskatchewan rising 15 years later. When the
Saskatchewan half-breeds, tired of petitioning the
Government in vain to recognize their right to
their own farms, invited Riel to come back and
put himself at their head, our friend of the Sixty-
mile Bush was one of those who opposed the
invitation. M I got up in meeting," said he,
" and told them that in 1870 Riel had the country
in the hollow of his hand, and what did he do ?
He ran away like a coward." The invitation was
sent nevertheless, and was accepted. You know
the result.

We had a visit from a skunk, in that farmyard.
It was only a flying visit, but it was enough. The
air was full of him long after he left. Gordon
Cumming says that skunk meat is delicious, when
skilfully dressed. If the dressing and the eating
took place in the same township, Gordon Cumming
must have had an impregnable appetite.

For 20 miles after leaving the Sixty-mile Bush
we saw no sign of man. Our trail lay as before

A BEGINNING OF SETTLEMENT 187

over a bleak and hilly, or rather hillocky, plain,
with here and there a little slough, or more
commonly a hollow where a slough had been,
now filled with dry, rustling, cream-coloured
grass ; and from one or two heights we saw
in the middle distance the blue waters of a lake
many miles in length. At last we came upon
the only settlement between the park lands of
the Battle River Valley and the South Saskatche-
wan. Here we found a hovel built of sods, —
next to the bark shelter of an aboriginal Aus-
tralian, the most primitive habitation in the world.
It was the first western home of a farmer from
Ontario, whose wife and children were not coming
up from the East till spring. On the next home-
stead, however, stood a good frame-house of sawn
planks ; merely an unpainted and unfurnished
shell so far, but giving promise of genuine comfort,
and indicating taste and means which would not
take shelter even for a time within sod walls. This
also belonged to a born Briton from Ontario. A
third settler whose acquaintance we made was a
Perthshire Highlander. He had spent twelve
years in Manitoba, but gained little except
experience, having given too much for his farm.
Too much, that is, at the time. Now, prices had
risen so far that he had sold out at a profit ; and
he had come far afield for a free homestead. The
result of his Manitoban apprenticeship was

1 88 A HIGHLANDER'S ENERGY

evident all round. In this first season in the new
Province, he had got 50 acres broken and ready
for the next year's crop. He had planted a sack
of potatoes, but had only got a pailful in return
for his labour. " That," he said, " was the
gophers' doing ; but we will settle them next
year." He had dug three wells, to a depth of 40
or 50 feet, but they were as dry at the bottom as
they were at the top. At present, therefore,
he was hauling five barrels of water every second
day for his eight horses from a slough a mile and a
half away ; " but," he said, M my neighbours
here have only had to dig from 24 to 40 feet deep,
and they have 8 or 10 feet of water in their wells."
A most cheery and hopeful man, this Highlander.
In addition to his own work he had acted as baker
for all the settlers coming in ; and although what
we saw appeared to be simply an isolated knot of
farmhouses, it was really part of a long thin line.
These settlers had come off the railway at
Saskatoon, and, finding the land about there all
taken up, they had come on and on in a south-
westerly direction, till, after driving 85 miles,
they had at last found land without an owner.
Others following them had gone on in the same
direction, until at the time of our visit the thread
of settlement stretched out to a length of 100
miles from the nearest station. Of course these
people were confident that railways would come

ANTELOPE IN THE BAD HILLS 189

in after them ; and before long the Grand Trunk
Pacific will have opened up a great part of that
untouched plain.

We halted for dinner that day beside the Eagle
Creek, the only stream of any account which the
traveller sees in the whole 160 miles from the
Battle River to the South Saskatchewan. It is
here an easily fordable little stream, from 10 to
20 feet wide and a couple of feet deep, and the
only trees discoverable in its valley are scarcely
more than bushes. Here we passed a stack or
two of prairie hay, guarded from fire by ploughed-
up circles of brown soil ; but there was no other
sign of human beings, the haymakers being pro-
bably the immigrants whose line of settlement we
had crossed earlier in the day. Ascending from
the Eagle Valley to a narrow table-land, we
dipped almost at once into another and similar
valley, threaded by a mere rivulet ; and then,
after a long and gentle ascent, we entered upon
the Bad Hills, a vast rolling dry plain to which
there seemed no end.

On the crest of a hillock, silhouetted against the
sky, a great buzzard sat watching us till we came
near, and then soared away on the other side. A
coyote stole swiftly over the plain, stopping
occasionally to have a good look at the invaders.
Every now and then as we swung round a hillock
we disturbed a bunch of antelope, who flew off,

IQO A WATERLESS WASTE

stepping along in a leisurely way to all appear-
ance, but really getting out of range with some-
thing like the speed of an express train. From
one or two points as we mounted the crest of an
earth wave we caught a distant glimpse of a large
alkali lake, with an unpleasant reputation, but
when the sun set — in a gorgeous heaven-wide
illumination of purple and red and gold — we had
not seen a drop of water near the trail since three in
the afternoon ; and that had been only the last
surviving puddle in the middle of an old slough.
As the twilight died away we were cheered by the
watery gleam in a hollow half a mile away on our
left ; but when we got down to the spot the
gleaming surface turned out to be merely whitish
yellow grass rooted in hard baked mud. We
threw cartridges from the shore — as there were no
stones, and the prairie soil was too hard to yield a
clod without a spade, — but no splash followed,
nothing but the dullest of dull thuds. On we
went, repeating this experiment over and over
again, but always finding we had been deceived,
until long after dark, we resolved to put up with
a " dry camp " for the night. We tied up all our
horses, lest they should wander off in search of
the water their masters could not find, and after
a scratch supper we rolled ourselves up in wolf-
skins and went to sleep under the stars. Happily
the grass was covered with hoar frost before the

GUMBO, AND WHITE BEAR "LAKE" 191

night was old, and the horses got moisture enough
with their food to keep them from suffering from
thirst. It was just as well, for we had to travel
ten or twelve miles more in the morning before
we saw a drop of water ; and a mere drop it was,
trickling out of a stony gorge known as Devil's
Gully.

Again and again we startled bunches of antelope,
which scampered off at our approach ; and for
eight or nine miles a wild horse, with a broken
lasso round its neck, led our procession in mockery
along the trail. The prairie soil was now com-
posed of " gumbo," so dry that the surface of the
ground was cracked in all directions, but so sticky
that it made a hard lumpy ridge all round the
tires of our waggon wheels. It is rich stuff, this
gumbo, and if the rain could only be depended upon
the region would be one of the most productive
in the West. As it is, the only purpose for which
it can be confidently recommended is the grazing
of cattle and horses.

After travelling about three and a half hours, —
that is to say about twenty five miles, for the
gradients are sometimes fairly steep — we arrived
at what the maps call White Bear Lake — a sheet
of water, according to the surveyors, about 12
miles long and perhaps a mile wide, with the trail
making a circuit round its western end — in reality
a dried-up waste with the trail running right across

192 "WERE CANUCKS NOW"

it through weeds and grass. We now ascended
a little winding gully, through which a stream
once ran to feed the lake, and still adorned with
one or two genuine trees, — genuine, if only ten
feet high. It was well on in the afternoon before
we reached water again and were able to camp for
dinner. This little creek is known as Fifteen-mile
Springs, — fifteen miles, that is, coming north from
the South Saskatchewan River, — and here we
met the first human beings we had seen since
crossing the line of settlement north of Eagle
Creek, 50 miles back. The new-comers were a
couple of farmers from Minnesota, genuine
Americans from birth ; wise men, with a keg of
good water in their waggon.

" And don't you want to be Americans any
longer ? " I asked. " No," said they most
emphatically, " we're Canucks now." They,
it appeared, had first come in by way of Hanley,
on the railway south of Saskatoon. Thence they
had struck west across the prairie to a point
somewhat east of Sixty-mile Bush, where they
and twenty one others from the same State had
founded a little Minnesotan colony. When I
asked them about their prospects they admitted
the land was rather dry ; but it was good, they
affirmed ; and as for drinking water, so long as
they could get it at a depth of a hundred feet,
they would be satisfied, if only they could grow

to

THE SOUTH SASKATCHEWAN 193

crops. There was a lot of land in Minnesota
where the people had had to go much deeper.

" If we can grow crops." That seems a pretty
large "if." Even supposing that for some years
to come enough rain falls to make agriculture
profitable, the record of rainfall in that region
is so poor that to attempt farming here must
be a rather risky speculation.

Two hours more of gumbo and we drew a long
breath of relief as the grand valley of the South
Saskatchewan lay at our feet, the broad river
flowing between strips of meadow. The sight of
the river, however, recalled associations not of the
pleasant est, for here, in 1885, our march to the
relief of Battleford had suffered a most intolerable
delay. At that time the only dwelling in the
valley was a ferryman's hut, and the ferryman
had fled from the Indians ; but now there stands
on the south shore amid lawns and flowerbeds
a large and handsome house, comparing favour-
ably not merely with the common frame dwelling
of the west, but with the more ambitious farm-
house of the old-established east. This, in fact,
is more than a farmhouse. It was put up by a
well-to-do rancher a few years ago, when there
was any quantity of free range for his cattle ; but
so many settlers have come in, and, wisely or
unwisely, taken up homesteads on the free
range, that the proprietor has turned his house

194 FROM RIVER TO RAILWAY

into an hotel, and has also established a little
store.

The climb from the valley up to the high prairie
south of the Saskatchewan is a stiff one, through
scenery which might almost be described as
mountainous ; and the gorges running down
through this rugged escarpment are full of trees
that really deserve the name.

Once the prairie level is reached, however, the
country is bare and monotonous to a degree, and
the soil is the stiff est gumbo. For the whole 30
miles forming the last stage of our southward
journey, from the river to the railway, the trail
runs through land which has been " homesteaded,"
mostly by English-speaking immigrants of a very
good class from the United States, who take the
land at its face value and ignore its somewhat
droughty record. At the time of my visit, how-
ever, few of these settlers had yet taken up
residence ; in fact, there was no building of any
sort to be seen till we had covered 15 miles, and
then only a rough " half-way shack " put up as a
shelter for the mail carrier in case of need. Be-
yond that again the untouched wilderness con-
tinued to within a couple of miles of Swift Current,
where our roughing it came to an end.

When, in the first year of the Canadian Pacific
Railway's existence, we disembarked at this
point for our long northward march to the relief

THE CYPRESS HILLS 195

of Battleford, Swift Current consisted of three or
four boxes — it would be flattery to call them
houses. One or two of these still stand, but they
are in the middle of a substantial little town.
Until the last few years little use had been made
of the country lying south of this, between the
railway and the United States frontier, except
for cattle ranching ; and that industry still
flourishes in the Cypress Hills, a narrow range
about 100 miles long and bearing timber enough
to supply a local sawmill. Thirty miles east of
Swift Current, too, there is a big ranch stocked
with perhaps 15,000 head of cattle, established
four or five years ago by a pair of Americans —
one, by the way, of Canadian birth.

In the latter years of the nineteenth century
many settlers who came into this region went out
again, ruined or disheartened by the drought.
Nevertheless, for several years now the tide of
population has been flowing in again, stronger and
stronger ; and there seems no part of the " semi-
arid area " that the home-seekers despise. Old-
timers shake their heads at the rashness of the
new-comers, saying, " Wait till the dry years
come ! " It is greatly to be hoped, but hardly
to be expected, that the old-timers will prove false
prophets, and that the new-comers' persistent
belief that rainfall increases with the spread of
cultivation will prove in the course of years to have

196 THE DIMINUTION OF DROUGHT

some foundation which scientists profess them-
themselves unable to discern. I should like to
quote here a recent expression of opinion, based
on twenty years' experience at the other end of
this dry region, in South-western Alberta. The
Rev. Dr Gaetz, who settled at Red Deer as far
back as 1884, made this statement when visiting
Montreal in 1906 : —

" I certainly used to think years ago that there
were considerable areas of inferior land, but of late
years I have so frequently been compelled to
change my opinion, on witnessing the result of
cultivation on these same areas, that my mental
condition may be described as one of chronic
optimism regarding almost all the land I once
thought inferior. For example, there is a section
of country lying between Olds and Calgary that,
when driving over in my buckboard years ago, I
found scorched as brown as a berry in July and
August. I made up my mind that that section
of country was a good place for grain-growers to
stay away from. And when settlers began to
pour in there in the rainy seasons in 1900 and two
following years I wasted a good deal of very
generous sympathy upon them. I frequently
heard it said, ' Wait till the dry years come, and
you will see these poor fellows pull out/ Well,
we have just had a pretty dry summer following a
snowless winter, and on my way here last week I

MENNONITES FROM MANITOBA 197

saw in some of those very sections some of the
grandest wheat fields I ever saw in any part of
Eastern or Western Canada. The only reasonable
theory to my mind is that this bald prairie, for
centuries tramped by buffalo and annually swept
by fire, became so parched and hard that very
little moisture ever penetrated the surface ; the
melting snow and falling rain alike fell quickly
down in the low places, forming the sloughs
everywhere to be seen in the earlier years. To-day
these have almost entirely disappeared, for no
other reason that I can conceive than that the
wide area of well cultivated soil absorbs the
moisture and retains it foi; the production of the
splendid crops that are to be seen there to-day.
I think there is good ground for believing that as
these broad and apparently barren plains, which
as yet are barely touched by the plough, are more
widely and thoroughly cultivated, we shall see
results we have not yet dreamed of."

Whatever the risk may be, thousands of men
are taking it who are not new to western con-
ditions. A remarkable feature of the immigration
to the Swift Current district in the last year or
two has been the predominance of Mennonites,
who have deliberately given up their farms in
Manitoba to settle in this drier region. The
immigration officer at Herbert, 28 miles east of
Swift Current, says that this district until a year

198 ARTESIAN AND OTHER IRRIGATION

or two ago was considered within the semi-dry
belt, but now it contains a large and rapidly
increasing settlement of Mennonites. The first
year very little grain was sown, but in 1905,
2000 acres were in crop, and in 1906 the acreage
leapt up to 8000, while the price of wild land
increased from $6.50 to $10 (27s. to 41s. 8d.) an
acre, and timber merchants could not keep up
with the demand for building material. Among
the old-country folk planting themselves near
Swift Current, by the way, I heard of a Scot who
had bought 1000 acres out of hand.

If another cycle of dry years comes upon the
new settlements, it is proposed by some to try
irrigation from artesian wells ; but there is no
evidence as yet that under this dry plain any
water supply exists comparable to that which has
been tapped by artesian boring in Kansas ; and,
even if water were thus found in sufficient
quantity, the question arises whether in quality it
would not be too alkaline to do the land any good.

I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that
the speculative region of which I am now speaking
is, though absolutely large, small in comparison
with the vast well-watered regions encircling it
in Manitoba, Eastern and Central Saskatchewan
and Northern Alberta, not to speak of the great
plains of Southern Alberta where natural irriga-
tion from the mountains is easy.

SOUTHERN ALBERTA ; THE CATTLE AND
HORSE RANCHERS

Twenty years ago Southern Alberta was a wilder-
ness. The population consisted chiefly of Indians,
little removed in time or temper from their scalping
and tomahawking days ; of strong detachments
of the North- West Mounted Police, to control as
much as to protect the Indians ; and of a sprink-
ling of pioneers engaged in, or dependent on,
cattle ranching. As for agriculture, few had any
idea that crops would grow upon these arid plains.
The cattle-kings to whom great ranges had been
leased by the Federal Government on easy terms
were the undisputed and unenvied monarchs of
the prairie. To-day the uninhabited prairie is
dotted with homesteads, villages, and towns. The
arid immensities of brown bunch-grass and grey
sage-bush are chequered with yellow fields of
wheat. The cowboy is a curiosity. The cattle-
king has abdicated, and the farmer reigns in his
stead.

Twenty years ago Calgary, the starting point of
my journey through this part of the country,
was a little village which the Canadian Pacific

'99

200 SOUTH FROM CALGARY

Railway, then only just completed, had taken as
its westernmost divisional centre before entering
the Rocky Mountains. To-day it is a city, with
handsome stone stores, banks, and hotels, and the
population (in 1906) of 11,967 growing fast. The
branch line to the south, until a very few years
ago, passed through only two or three little
villages in its whole course of 108 miles. To-day
there are nine towns and villages between the
terminal points, and each of them serves a con-
siderable and rapidly increasing population. A
mere glance at the quantity and variety of the
goods discharged on to the railway platforms was
enough to show this, had I known nothing more.
Cases of clothing, dozens of stoves, and expensive
agricultural implements, from the factories of
Eastern Canada ; fruit from British Columbia and
California ; preserved provisions, generally from
Ontario but including well-known English brands ;
and so on, through a long list. At one station, I
noticed a great case clearly containing a cottage
piano. It was the twenty-fifth piano delivered
at the village that summer, and two years before
the village had not begun to exist !

I have said that few dreamed twenty years ago
of what has come to pass ; but the few existed,
and they did more than dream. They were not
merely voices crying in the wilderness, — they
were too hopeful to cry, and too busy turning the

WHEAT FOR JAPAN 201

wilderness into a garden. I know a man in
Southern Alberta who has been growing wheat
near Macleod for a quarter of a century. His
experience is most instructive. He has known
dry seasons ; but only once, in 1892, did the
drought cause an almost total failure of crops.
In 1896, the wheat yield was again very light ;
but that was both preceded and followed by
enormous crops. Another " old-timer " occupy-
ing a responsible position further south confirms
this declaration that, taking a series of five and
twenty years, the moisture available in Southern
Alberta, though small, is sufficient.

It is Japan that a good many South Albert ans
expect to provide the great future market for
their wheat. The Japanese are taking to wheat
instead of rice ; and the Americans have been
supplying what they want in enormous quantities.
Owing to the treatment of their fellow-countrymen
in California, and to their cordial relations with
the United Kingdom, the Japanese would natur-
ally prefer to get their supplies from Canada.
Unfortunately, the only Canadian wheat growers
near enough to the Pacific sea-board to compete
with the Americans have barely begun to develop
their land, and their trans-Pacific trade is still
but trifling in amount. The crop record for 1906
shows that the winter wheat in which the dry
South trusts was only sown on 43,661 acres in the

202 THE MACLEOD POLICE

whole Province, and produced 907,421 bushels,
or nearly 21 bushels per acre ; and even the spring
wheat, with its handsome average of about 34
bushels an acre from 97,760 acres, could only
produce 3,332,292 bushels. (The other grain
crops of the year were 13,192,150 bushels of oats,
from 322,923 acres, or 40 bushels an acre, and
2,201,179 bushels of barley, from 75,678 acres,
or 29 bushels an acre. The whole area under
grain in Alberta was expected to increase from
540,022 acres in 1906, to 830,000 acres in 1907.)

When I first visited Macleod it was little more
than a stronghold of the semi-military North- West
Mounted Police ; a " fort," consisting of a
quadrangle of barracks and stables and officers'
dwellings. The force had to keep order among
the war-like Indians of the Blackfoot nation, and
to guard a long stretch of invisible frontier
against smugglers and horse-thieves. This they
did most effectively. The protection of their own
flag, by the way, was quite beyond their powers.
Macleod may be called the capital of Windland.
The west wind blows almost continuously a long
and not too gentle blast from January to December.
A new Union Jack was no sooner hoisted than its
unravelment and disintegration began, and the
flag had to be renewed about 30 times in the year.

To-day Macleod is a town of some importance, —
at the junction of the Canadian Pacific branch

COW-CATCHER AND BRONCO 203

railway coming south from Edmonton and
Calgary with the same company's Crow's Nest
line, which forks off the main line near Medicine
Hat and strikes almost due west till it crosses the
Rocky Mountains by the Crow's Nest Pass and
descends into the Kootenay mining district of
Biitish Columbia.

By the time I reached Macleod, I had made use
of almost every conceivable conveyance in my
western wanderings, — waggons on the trail, and
anything on the track, from a railway president's
private car to a cow-catcher. The cow-catcher
is perhaps the most exciting means of transit,
especially when it starts catching cows, — or rocks.
It also gives the finest view and the freshest air.
How many hundreds of exhilarating miles I have
covered on a cow-catcher I should hardly like to
guess. But even the airiest of cow-catchers,
thundering along the dizziest precipices and flying
over the deepest gorges, cannot compare for sheer
enjoyment with the back of a fresh bronco. It
was on such a mount, with a constable and some-
times an Indian scout as guide, that I roamed
over the ranching plains of Southern Alberta.

On the borders of the Blood Indian Reserve,
in a little wayside store about 25 miles south of
Macleod, I met a rancher whose experience is
worth telling. A Lincolnshire boy, he came out
early in life to the United States and was brought

204 TWO MEN FROM THE STATES

up on a western farm. After five or six years of
copper and gold mining, he took to stock-raising
in South Dakota, at a time when " free range "
for cattle was unlimited and the owning or leasing
of land was unnecessary. In 1899, the conditions
were changed by the arrival of sheep, and owing
to the conflict — which seems to have been
sufficiently violent — between the cattle men and
the sheep men, he " cleared up and walked out."
In Southern Alberta he bought a large tract of
land for $3.10 an acre ; land now worth $12 to $15
an acre. When I met him, he had on his 3000
acres about 50 horses and 600 head of cattle. His
wheat crop for the year averaged 55 or 56 bushels
per acre, and his oats 60 bushels ; while he also
grew, on irrigated land, large crops of timothy and
other grass for winter feed. The wheat yield, I
should observe, was unusually high, his previous
averages having run from 20 to 40 bushels ; but,
even so, he was more than satisfied, and declared
that he knew of no State in the Union with fewer
crop failures to its debit. A neighbour of his,
on slightly higher and drier land, had just threshed
an average of 50 bushels of wheat per acre.

The name of another American in this region
occurs to me whose experience varies in certain
respects from the ordinary fine. He came in
from Iowa in 1900 ; and he acts on the principle
of doing nothing himself that he can get others

COMING BACK TO KING EDWARD 205

to do for him. He bought a considerable amount
of land, but there his capital expenditure ceased.
Four years later he had 800 acres under crop ;
but his ploughing and seeding and threshing, as
well as the hauling of his grain to the railway,
were done by hired labour and hired machinery.
After paying for all this, he banked a sum equal
to $9 or $10 (37s. 6d. to 41s. 8d.) per acre. As the
result of a single season's work, — or, rather, a
single season's sitting still and looking on, —
he cleared a good deal more than the capital
he had invested in the business.

As the sun set we came on a tall grizzled good-
natured old fellow getting ready to camp. His
long heavy waggon was covered with a low
canvas awning stretched over a central ridge-
pole. Built up on the back of the waggon was
his store-cupboard, which he opened to show us
a freighter's kitchen, displaying a tidy assortment
of big tins and jars full of everything that a hardy
traveller could want. He carried no furniture or
stove ; a few blazing sticks on the ground would
fry his pork and boil his tea ; and, for the rest,
he was a nomadic patriarch whose possessions
consisted of the herd of ponies munching the dry
grass around him. " No," said he, when I asked
if he was an American, " I'm a true-blue Canuck,
born in Ontario. I've spent my life freighting,
over the border ; but I'm coming back to King

206 END OF A GREAT RANCH

Edward at last ! " I met the same old gentleman
more than once circling round on that trip. He
was looking for a homestead, but was in no hurry,
and clearly meant to see a good deal of the
country before choosing a home for himself ; and
I daresay the old nomad was a little reluctant to
settle down at all,

But — revenons a nos bceufs.

From the mention of the ex-Dakotan's herds
of cattle and horses it may be gathered that
Albertan stock-ranching, though shorn of its
glory, is far from extinct. The livestock census
of 1906 showed that there were 375,686 head of
cattle in the Province, besides 93,001 horses,
80,055 sheep and 46,163 pigs. As a matter of
fact, while the cattle industry is now carried on in
a smaller way, its total output is larger than ever.
The famous Cochrane ranch near Macleod, with
its lordly domain of 66,000 acres, has been bought
by a Mormon syndicate for subdivision into farms
at a price ($6, or 25s., per acre) five times what
Senator Cochrane paid for the land 20 years ago ;
and when I visited the place I met the two gentle-
men, one English and the other Irish, who had
just bought the remaining live-stock, about
10,000 head, for a matter of $250,000 (£50,000).
This big herd, it is interesting to know, was to
be not dispersed but transferred bodily to a range
of land let by the Government for this purpose,

RANCHING IN THE FOOTHILLS 207

as being at present unlikely to be coveted for any
other, many miles away to the north, near Gleichen
and the Blackfoot Reserve. There remain in
Southern Alberta a few ranches of considerable
size, though much smaller than the Cochrane ;
but the fact remains that, while the yearly ship-
ments of beef-cattle from this district tend to
increase rather than diminish, they are the output
not of a few patriarchal herds, but of a great many
" bunches " numbering from 150 to 600 head. In
1906, about 130,000 head of cattle reached
Winnipeg from the west ; and 85,000 of these,
or 26,000 more than in the previous year, were
exported to the United Kingdom. The average
price received by the ranchers for these export
cattle was estimated at over $47, or nearly £10,
a head. The value of a whole herd, however,
taking young and old together, would be between
$20 and $25 a head.

The picturesque impressiveness of cattle-ranch-
ing has certainly somewhat faded in the transfer
of that industry from the few big capitalists and
companies to the many small individuals. And
yet the working of a small stock ranch is full of
interest. A good many young educated English-
men have embarked in this business in South-
western Alberta, up among the foot-hills of the
Rocky Mountains. Much of this region, though
hilly, is as bare and dry looking as the " bald-head

208 HIGH AND HEALTHY

prairie" below; but among those hills I have
visited as charming a home, in as beautiful a
situation, as an Englishman could wish to rest in.
From the flower-fringed verandah we looked out
over a rich valley, with its little river winding
among the willow-brush, to a magnificent back-
ground of pine-capped hills on the western side.
The house itself, outwardly, was an old and grey
one-storey log building ; but in the great drawing-
room, with its pictures and books, its artistic
furniture, its piano and pianola, and a hundred
little signs of taste and refinement, to realize that
we were not in an English town, but 6000 miles
away in a Canadian wilderness, was almost
impossible. The master of the house, an Oxonian,
had a nice little estate of about 1500 acres, of
which 160 acres were under grain, though his
principal source of income was a herd of 300 or
400 head of cattle. Curiously enough, the
exceptional severity of the past winter all over the
plain was not felt up here among the foot-hills at
a height of 4000 feet above sea-level.

The climate of Southern Alberta, I may here
observe, is one of the healthiest and most invigor-
ating in the world. It is dry and it is high, even
Macleod down on the plain being over 3000 feet
above sea-level. Many consumptives who would
simply die in the East live very comfortably
here, — though, on the other hand, the high

The south-western plain of Sas-
katchewan and Alberta has for many
years been the great cattle-ranching
country. The big ranches are now
being cut up for ordinary farming,
and some of the ranchers are re-
placing their herds by horses. The
picture is from a photograph of a
horse ranch in the Cypress Hills.

THE MIRACLE OF THE CHINOOK 209

altitude and almost constant wind are not good
for nervous patients. Malaria is unknown, and
so should typhoid be, but, with new towns spring-
ing up and inhabited long before they are furnished
with drainage, typhoid claims and will claim its
victims in the healthy West.

The winter is not nearly so cold as that of
Manitoba, the " chinook " wind from over the
mountains having a remarkable lifting power on
the temperature. A Calgary correspondent some
years ago, describing the extraordinary effect of
a sudden chinook one January night, wrote :
" The day was an ordinary winter day, clear,
bright, and frosty. About 8 p.m., without sign
or warning, a gale sprang up in an instant. Those
inside rushed outside to see a blizzard ; but instead
they were met by a clear sky and a hot soft wind.
In a few minutes the thermometer jumped from a
few degrees above zero to 48. The wind was from
a point or two north of west. A change so sudden,
though unusual, has occurred before. But what
seems strange is that all this time the thermometer
was 40 degrees below zero at Laggan, a little over
100 miles west of here and in the mountains. Yet
the wind, which was blowing a gale and at times
almost a hurricane, was blowing directly from
Laggan. The wind and the heat were maintained
during the greater part of the night, and the cold
was intense at the other point for all that time.'*
o

210 THE "FREE RANGE"

In the middle of February, 1907, when we in
England were sympathetically shivering at the
tales of arctic rigour telegraphed from the
Canadian West, a Macleod correspondent was
writing: " Everybody in Alberta rejoices in the
magnificent weather. At the time of sending this
dispatch, football and baseball matches are in
progress on the town's square. The fair sex, clad
in light spring clothing, turned out in force to
attend the matches and to applaud the victors.
The thermometer at this hour registers 49 degrees
above zero. The air is clear and balmy, and
farmers are only waiting the drying up of the fields
to begin their spring work. Men are employed on
five large public buildings in town, and the sounds
made by the hammer and saw are heard in all
directions."

On the ranches among the foot-hills good
springs that never freeze are fairly common, and
the comparatively high temperature of the water
is a great boon to the cattle and their owners ;
while the grass, brown as it is, makes fine pasture.
Most of the ranchers own a certain amount of
land ; but, as cattle need about 15 acres a head
if they have to forage for themselves all the year
round, the freehold has to be supplemented by
" free range " on the public land. A good deal of
this is still available on the steep slopes and hill-
tops, and some of it is never likely to be wanted

FROM CATTLE TO HORSES 211

for agriculture ; but astonishingly unlikely spots
are sometimes chosen for homesteads by rash new-
comers. The rancher may awake any day to find
a fenced farm cutting his herd off from their
accustomed range on the hills unless he has
managed to get a cattle lease from the Government,
and such a lease, though nominally for 21 years,
is not likely to be granted without a proviso that
it is terminable at perhaps two years notice.
Failing a lease, the rancher can only protect
himself by buying more land from a railway
company or by growing or buying hay for winter
feed so as to accommodate his herd on a diminished
area. A prudent rancher, it may be said, lays in
a supply of prairie hay, no matter how large a
range he has for his cattle ; for if the snow lies
deep they starve, lacking the horses' sense to paw
their food from under cover.

Some ranchers, I find, are inclined to sell
most of their cattle and go in for breeding horses,
a far smaller number of which bring in an equal
return. There is no doubt that a horse, besides
appealing to the sentimental side of the average
Englishman, is a very profitable creature when
successfully raised. Let me quote the experience
of an Irish gentleman whom I visited in a beauti-
fully wooded river valley a day's ride from
Macleod. His 51 " general purpose " mares
presented him with 50 foals the first season, 46

212 THE HORSE MARKET

the second, and 45 the third ; and in the three
years he only lost one mare. He was offered
$40 (£8), a piece for his sucking foals, but wisely
resolved not to sell till they were of an age to bring
the full price of farm-horses. An independent
authority valued the brood mares at $80 (£16), a
head, the young stock at an average of $75 (£15),
the shire stallion at $850 (£170), and the land at
$14 (58s.), an acre. This rancher, I should say,
was no stranger either to the land or to the
animal ; and not every herd would show such a
rate of increase. Still, his experience shows what
can be done in an ideal country for horse-breeding.
If he should lose the free range behind his ranch,
he could replace his mares by half their number of
a heavier breed, whose offspring would be twice as
valuable.

The cattle rancher's difficulty is the horse
rancher's opportunity. The settlers who annex
the free range for their homesteads want horses
to work the homesteads with, and are willing to
give $350 (£70), for a satisfactory team, while
higher grades fetch $400 (£80) and even $500
(£100) a pair. Incidentally, I may say that the
Albertans see no money in thorough-breds, nor
are they tempted to breed cavalry horses on the
chance of a remount buyer accepting one or two in
a season. It is, of course, a question how far the
future development of automobiles, steam ploughs,

MEAT-PACKING 213

and so forth may affect the situation ; but just
now the horse market is decidedly good. On the
other hand, the cattle market is depressed, and to
change from cattle to horses means selling cheap
and buying dear. Besides, to tell the truth, the
demand for beef seems to have some elements of
permanence which are not so plain in the case of
horseflesh. The establishment of first-class meat-
packing houses, such as are now projected at con-
venient centres, may yet restore the prosperity,
if they can not maintain the pre-eminence, of what
is still one of the most important industries in
Alberta.

BLACKFOOT INDIANS, AND LATTER-
DAY SAINTS

The Indians can hardly be classed as New
Canadians ; but it is not unimportant to know
in what position they stand, with the tide of new
life surging in around them. On the map, other-
wise covered with a neat little chess-board pattern
of townships six miles square — each of these
forming a miniature chess-board of 36 " sections "
— are about 40 undivided blocks of varying size
showing the reserves held under treaty by Indian
tribes. The largest tribe, known collectively as
the Blackfoot nation, and speaking one language,
occupies three reserves, the Blood and the Peigan,
south of Macleod, and the Blackfoot reserve propei
60 miles further north near Gleichen. In 1885,
when some of the Cree and Stoney tribes in the
north went on the war-path against us and harried
the country at the bidding of the half-breed leader,
men held their breath for fear lest the warrior
bands of the Blackfeet might plunge into the fray.
If they had, the suppression of the Riel Rebellion
would have been ten times bloodier than it was.
The Blackfeet resisted every temptation, and

INDIAN RIGHTS 215

kept the peace, thereby laying the Canadian
people under an incalculable debt of gratitude.
In spite — let us hope in ignorance — of this, the
suggestion has been made that the Indians who
occupy land now thought desirable by white
men should be " persuaded " to give up the last
fragments of their ancestral plains and allow
themselves to be transplanted to some uncoveted
region in the far north. At present, I trust, this
idea is not cherished by any serious politician ;
but the greed inspiring it is likely to increase as
the good lands round the reserves are taken up,
and the guardians of the nation's honour should
be on the watch to prevent the first steps towards
a repetition — with variations and aggravations —
of the story of Naboth's vineyard.

Inasmuch as 30 years ago these Indians were
still in a state of primitive barbarism, and relieved
by the abundance of buffalo from the slightest
necessity for work, the extent to which they have
adapted themselves to new conditions is really
to their credit. A constant effort is made to bring
over to the self-supporting list those who have
been living on Government rations — a pauperizing
process made necessary when the buffalo vanished.
When I splashed through the Belly River and
rode up on to the Blood reserve, I found them in
possession of about 5000 head of cattle. They
mow and stack a large amount of prairie hay, not

216 INDUSTRY

only for their own winter use, but for the neigh-
bouring ranchers. A good many of them own
waggons, which they buy from the Government at
$71 (over £14, 10s.) a-piece and pay for in cattle,
which the Government agent needs in order to
feed the poorer members of the tribe, or in wages
earned by freighting and haymaking. Cultiva-
tion of the soil is almost unknown among them,
as it was almost unknown till lately among their
white neighbours ; but now there is talk of an
irrigation scheme, involving the construction of a
50-mile ditch through the reserve from the Belly
River. This would be a big business ; but most
of the cost would be defrayed from the tribal fund
held in trust by the Government — a fund now
being largely increased by the dollar a head per
annum received from a ranching company for the
grazing of a large herd of cattle on the reserve.
If this scheme is carried out, the industrial pro-
gress of these Indians, already satisfactory, should
become much more rapid. Of their moral state
it is less pleasant to speak. A large majority of
the children are sent to one or other of the board-
ing and industrial schools maintained by Anglican
and Roman Catholic missions, the Government
making a yearly grant of $72 per scholar ; and
these scholars are kept more or less continuously
under Christian influence till the age of 18. But
those who afterwards prove more than nominal

BLOOD CUSTOMS 217

adherents of Christianity are few ; and these
Indians as a whole are in the loose condition of
transition from the old system they have outgrown
to the new system, which they have not assimi-
lated. However, so far as offences against the
country's law are concerned, the Indians can
challenge comparison with their white fellow-
citizens. Drunkenness, to be sure, tends to
increase. It is naturally easier for Indians to
get liquor now that short hair and white men's
clothing make them almost indistinguishable
from the half-breeds, to whom prohibitory laws
do not apply. To check this evil a few constables
have been appointed from among the Indians
themselves, a step which the chiefs have long been
urging.

The Bloods still keep up some of their most
notable customs, such as the great yearly sun-
dance, and the dog-feast, when a dog is cere-
moniously boiled and eaten. They have their
secret society, with its proper initiation and
degrees. They have even their medicine-man,
who has some knowledge of herbs, but still uses
noise as a remedy, and who gets magnificent
prices (in currency of horseflesh) for his medicinal
charms when he retires from business. Even a
church-going Indian will sometimes call in the
medicine-man in case of illness, though a qualified
physician is maintained on the reserve by the

218 DISEASE

Government. In knowledge of or respect for the
laws of health the tribesmen have made little
enough progress. If a child is hot with fever,
the parents let it run naked in the snow. Many
a patient who could be easily cured at the mission
hospital is doomed if kept at home. A few years
ago an epidemic of measles caused 90 deaths on this
one reserve. The total population is over 1200, —
females being in the majority, as on most of the
reserves. Tuberculosis is the great cause of
mortality, however, beginning as a skin or bone
disease and finally fastening on the lungs. The
power of such a scourge over these people is
naturally increased by their modern habit of
living in crowded loghouses all winter.

The primitive tent is still the habitation of the
Blood Indian in summer. It is a convenient
edifice. I was fortunate enough to be present
one day when practically all the Bloods and
Peigans rode in to Macleod, bringing their houses
with them rolled up in waggons or on the ancient
travoy — two poles crossed over a pony's back,
and trailing wide apart on the ground behind, with
cross-sticks to carry the load. The next morning
Macleod awoke to find itself neighboured by a
large canvas suburb. The cause of this sudden
migration was an announcement that Governor-
General and a circus were to visit the town that
day.

A WAR DANCE 219

When his Excellency had been received in the
formal and commonplace white way, with silk
hats and bouquets and addresses, the Indians
rode into the square and, dismounting, entertained
him much more picturesquely with a dance.
This might be more accurately described as a
prance. The motion was a little monotonous,
prancing round and round and in and out, with
a single step ; and the music still more so, being
the shrill shout of the dancers and the dull
thump-thump of half a dozen Indians squatting
round a drum in the middle of the dancing-ring.
The dancers' costumes, on the other hand, were
bewildering in variety. The basis was generally
a suit of leather coat (or gaudy calico shirt),
leggings and moccasins ; but the material was
often hidden under masses of bead- work, blue
and white and red, and the form disguised by
flowing fringes of black-tipped white weasel-skins,
or by miscellaneous attachments of feather and
ribbon ; while the head-dress might be a pair
of buffalo-horns gay with coloured streamers,
on a proud structure of erect eagle-feathers
with a feather tailpiece streaming down to the
heels behind. One particularly gleeful redskin
sported the national flag, cloak fashion, and his
face was painted red with blue spots. Another
wore one red stripe across the nose and cheeks
and three down his chin, the facial ground- work

220 THE WOMEN'S DANCE

being yellow ; but a commoner countenance
consisted of round red spots on the natural brown.
One brave had clothed his lower limbs in red
paint as an airier substitute for leggings, his
companions being rather over than under-clad.

At last the performers fell back and their
places were taken by women, the musicians
rising to their feet and drumming on in that
respectful position. The women's dance had
even less variety than the men's, for they simply
made a ring facing inwards to the drummers,
shoulder to shoulder, and danced round sideways.
Some of them wore nothing more picturesque
than a perfunctory bunch of ribbon stitched on
to plain black skirt and bodice ; but other
dresses, though modern enough in shape and
material, were of the gorgeous tints and patterns
commonly manufactured in England for the ladies
of Central Africa. Their smooth black hair
was generally uncovered, but in one or two cases
hidden by a handsome feather head-dress.

In the afternoon, — having gloated over the
circus, — some of the Bloods gave a musical ride,
which was effective enough, though little more
than a horse-back repetition of the morning's
dance. Then the chiefs, " Crop-eared Wolf,"
" Thunder Chief," and lesser potentates, gathered
round the Governor-General for a pow-wow, or
a heckling. They, for the most part, wore sober

POW-WOW WITH THE VICEROY 221

suits of black or navy-blue. They wanted more
food distributed among their people. Lord Grey
advised them to encourage their people to earn
food by working. Then there was the question
of the rent paid by the ranching company for the
right to graze its cattle on the reserve. This the
chiefs wanted distributed regularly among the
tribe, like the yearly $5 per head paid by the
Government under the treaty, instead of being
capitalized in the " Indian Fund " for use in an
indefinite future. Lord Grey could only reply
that this was a matter for his Ministers. The
chiefs next begged for the release of an Indian
then in prison — that is, in the Mounted Police
guard-room — for horse-stealing : but the
Governor-General assured them that the culprit
had only received half the sentence a white man
would have got for a similar crime. As the answers
were interpreted to them the chiefs showed no
sign of impatience or discontent ; but I met four
of them a few weeks later in a Canadian Pacific
train — paying their first visit to Eastern Canada,
by the way, and two of them enjoying their
first experience of a railway journey — and they
were bent on laying their demands before any
official who might have power to grant them.
I should add that the Macleod pow-wow festivities
ended gloriously, from a Blood's point of view,
with the shooting down on the prairie of half a

222 THE MOUNTED POLICE

dozen steers, which were skinned, cut up, dis-
tributed, cooked and eaten with the utmost
promptitude. Also that the Governor-General
supplemented this provision with a largesse of
tea and real tobacco, — what the Indians commonly
smoke being " kinikinik," the dried inner bark
of the willow.

It is doing no injustice to the good qualities
of the Indians to say that the absence of serious
crime among them is partly due to their respect
for the North-West Mounted Police. Let me
give an illustration. About ten years ago, a
hundred or more Indians who had fled to the
United States after the suppression of the Riel
Rebellion were returning to their native Canada.
They were carefully escorted by a whole troop
of American cavalry to the frontier. There
stood a corporal of police, one private constable,
and an interpreter. The American officer looked
round in bewilderment. " Who is in command ? "
said he. " Myself," said the corporal. " But
where is your troop ? " asked the officer. " Here
they are," replied the corporal, pointing to his
two comrades. The officer presently found breath
to ask what the corporal proposed to do if the
Indians turned sulky. " They won't," said the
corporal decisively ; "we shall have no trouble
with them." Nor had they ; the tribesmen going
quietly back to their reserves as a matter of course.

THE MOUNTED POLICE 223

The chief authority on a reserve is the Indian
Agent, who not only exercises the authority of
two ordinary magistrates, but is constantly
appealed to by tribesmen for the settlement
of private differences, matrimonial and other.
If, however, a police sergeant or corporal is nearer,
the Indians will often confidently bring their
troubles to him instead. Twenty years ago the
police had to protect the white man from the
Indian. To-day, they have to protect the Indian
from the white man. This they do perhaps as
well as their numbers allow, but in at least one
respect — more easily imagined than described —
the protection is inadequate, and the danger
naturally tends to increase with the growth of
the surrounding white population. The same
growth of white settlement has made necessary
a vast change in the police force itself. Instead
of being concentrated in large numbers at Battle-
ford, Macleod, and a few other posts, they are
scattered over the country in a multitude of
small detachments. At this town you will find
a commissioned officer, a constable, and a scout ;
at that, a corporal and one other. Their military
character survives in the rifle and the uniform,
but their duties, in the region lately organized into
the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, are
becoming more and more those of civilian police-
men. In the course of time the greater part

224 THE MORMONS

of the force, as such, will possibly move out to
the still unorganized territories in the north;
but many of its present members are likely to
stay where they are, transferring themselves
to the new police which will have to keep order
in the new Provinces. It is devoutly to be hoped
that the new force will take over the spirit as
well as the duties of the magnificent corps now
under Commissioner Perry's command. Mean-
while, for five years, an agreement has been made
by which the Federal Government continues to
maintain the force, reduced from a strength
of 600 to 500, in the two new Provinces, each
provincial Government paying $75,000 (£15,000)
a year for their services.

The police, old or new, will not be unaided
in case of need. A corps of dragoons is now
being raised by the Federal Government, under
Colonel MacDonnelTs command, and will form
not only an addition to the little standing army
of Canada, but a nucleus and training school
for a great mounted volunteer force, which should
be easily raised among the young plainsmen of
the West.

The name of Mormon has an almost Blue-
beardish horror for the general ear ; and yet
what struck me most in going about among the
Mormons of Southern Alberta was their extra-

Ploughing a Prairie VVheatfield

A Blood Indian Dance. {See page 219)

POLYGAMY 225

ordinary ordinariness. I imagine it would be
hard to find among them either great heights
of intellect or great depths of depravity. Some
of their Gentile neighbours express a strong
conviction that the Mormons practise polygamy
in Canada, as they do, or did, in the United
States ; but the evidence seems of the slightest,
and the accusation, if true at all, is probably
true in a very small number of cases. To be sure,
these are " orthodox " Mormons — not like the
94 sectarians " who accept the primal revelation
of Joseph Smith but reject the polygamous
teaching of Brigham Young as an innovation.
Some of them thought, when they crossed the
Canadian frontier, that by so doing they would
escape the tyrannous decree of the United States
Government forbidding them to have more than
one wife a-piece. They were, however, promptly
undeceived ; and any one possessing a second
family had to make arrangements for its support
in Utah while he brought the wife he preferred
to Canada. Apart from the expense of keeping
up two establishments, many a Mormon husband
must have been considerably relieved when his
better two-thirds were separated from each other
by several hundred miles. A staunch defender
of polygamy, at any rate in principle, said to me
" My father and my wife's father were both
polygamous children " — meaning, doubtless,

226 MORMON BEGINNERS

children of polygamous parents — " but I saw
there was so much trouble with a second wife
that I only married one." Another Mormon
more pungently observed, — " A neighbour of
mine had five or six wives, and they fit like
hell ! "

It was about twenty years ago that the first
half dozen Mormon families settled in Canada.
Since then they have been coming in by the
thousand, and they are still coming in, not only
from Utah, but from Illinois, Arizona, New
Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, and Idaho.
Their motive, whatever some of the first-comers
may have expected in the way of freedom from
law, is just that which brings Gentile Americans
north — a hope of bettering their material con-
dition. A few had land round Salt Lake City
which they could sell at high prices. Others,
however, were stranded in high and frosty
valleys or in the domain of drought. Few of
the early arrivals had any money to speak of ;
and few, even to-day, come in " well-heeled."
The poor Mormon would leave his family in a
tent or " shack " and go off to earn a little money
by hauling logs from the mountains or freighting
goods from Lethbridge till his first crop was ripe.
If he could not get a free homestead near his
brother saints, he would buy land on the ten-year
plan, paying six or seven per cent, interest on

MOISTURE 227

the unpaid instalments. These land payments
are still a burden on the community, and a
good many of the debtors have had to ask an
extension of time. Yet it would be a great
mistake to think the Mormons an exception to
the general rule of Albertan prosperity. Till
recently their farming was on a small scale, but
now farms of five or six hundred acres are common
enough. The agriculture is not always of the
thriftiest kind, but the wiser members of the
community see the need of giving their land
a summer fallow at regular intervals.

The two chief Mormon colonies or " stakes "
have as their centres the towns of Cardston and
Raymond, both in the south-western corner of
the province and within a few miles of the inter-
national frontier. Mrs Card, by the way, who
came in with her husband in 1887, was one of
Brigham Young's daughters. In the more
westerly colony, named after her, the settlers
declare that they can grow fine crops of fall, or
winter, wheat without irrigation. Some, indeed,
appear to have left their American farms and come
to Canada partly to escape the extra labour
which irrigation entails. Two of the earliest
pioneers, not Mormons, who have lived in the
district over twenty years, assert that in that
time only one season has been marked by in-
sufficient moisture. When I rode down from

228 CARDSTON STAKE

the plateau of the Blood Reserve, and found myself
at once in the town of Cardston, I learnt that
a couple of hailstorms on two consecutive days
in July had cut a lane of devastation through the
settlement, breaking every northern or western
window in Cardston and wiping every trace of
harvest clean out of their path ; but the last
recorded hail-storm had been 16 years before,
and the people were inclined to take the chance
of another coming within the next 16 years
rather than subscribe to the government's hail
insurance fund. One farmer, whose whole crop
had been destroyed, told me he could easily
afford it, having had bumper crops several years
running.

The Mormons who planned the town site of
Cardston did so apparently in a belief that it
would become a Canadian rival to the parent
Salt Lake City. The main street is an avenue
of lordly breadth, and on the average " lot " a
Brigham Young might build a house to accom-
modate his whole family. If the plan is not
spoiled by sub-division, Cardston may in time
become a beautiful garden city ; but in its infancy,
with its little houses standing forlorn on great
squares of land, it rather reminds you of a small
boy in his father's clothes.

The Mormons are a clannish folk, as is natural
with any peculiar people who know that their

MORMON ORGANIZATION 229

peculiarity is not admired by the rest of the
world. The kind of freemasonry that runs
through their whole system tends certainly to
exclusiveness. Their members are " advised " —
and this may mean a great deal — not to join
such Gentile friendly societies as the Foresters
or Oddfellows, on the ground that their church
is itself an efficient friendly society. Yet their
intercourse with their neighbours is friendly
and free enough ; they unite with Gentiles in
political organization, though they would probably
not vote for a Gentile if any Mormon candidate
aspired to represent their district in the Provincial
Legislature ; and their leaders warmly resent the
charge of inhospitality brought against Mormon
farmers by some of their Gentile neighbours.
I have even heard of an old ex-Mormon who,
far from being persecuted for his apostasy, not
only continued to live at peace with his Mormon
friends in the States, but followed them to Canada
and settled among them near Cardston.

Apostasy, it seems, the Mormon Church does
not greatly fear. At any rate, one powerful
safeguard against it exists in the fact that a very
large proportion of the men hold some sort of
ecclesiastical office. As expounded to me at
length by the president (a storekeeper) and the
bishop (a farmer) of the " stake," only intemper-
ance or some other moral defect should debar

230 MORMON SERVICES

any male Mormon from the priesthood, and he
can attain the dignity of deacon at the age of
twelve. It is the duty of " teachers " to keep
iniquity out of the brotherhood. A Gentile
will tell you indeed that Mormons try to shield
each other from the law of the land, so long as
the offender satisfies the law of the church. This
the President emphatically denies. " I myself,"
he says, " have reported a Mormon criminal
to the police. We do try to settle quarrels without
going to law ; and an offender has to make re-
paration before the church ; but we don't shield
him from the law." Even Gentiles in search
of justice, it is claimed, have sometimes applied
to the Mormon Church courts.

The beginnings of a tabernacle to seat 1600
had been made, and the building was to cost
$30,000 (£6000), which had been already sub-
scribed. Meanwhile public worship was con-
ducted in an assembly room which was also
used for " mutual improvement " meetings,
theatricals, and other entertainments, includ-
ing a dance every Friday night in winter. A
Sabbath school is held from ten to twelve every
Sunday morning ; and the regular service (with
the sacrament) from two to four in the afternoon.
At the latter the bishop presides, but he does
not necessarily give the address. There is no
" temple " in Canada yet ; so any Mormon

MISSIONS AND SCHOOLING 231

wanting to get married with the rites of his
church must journey to Salt Lake City or one
of the three other temples in the United States.
There is a " tithing house," and any Mormon
who fails to bring the bishop one-tenth of his
produce or income can neither enter a temple
nor receive any promotion in the church. The
bishop — who, like the rest, is an unpaid official
— has to send the whole produce of the tithe,
amounting to more than $12,000 (£2400), in
Cardston " stake " in 1905, to the presiding
bishop of the church at Salt Lake. A certain
amount may be sent back for local purposes,
but in this matter the colony is entirely at the
mercy of headquarters. Whether the Canadian
Mormons can afford to export a tenth of their
income every year is a matter for themselves
to decide ; but the country from which the money
is sent has also a little interest in the matter. I
may say that the Mormon community, which
numbers in all about 420,000, spends a large
amount in attempts to win over the world ;
and that the Cardston " stake " alone sends
out annually 15 or 20 amateur missionaries for
campaigns of two or three years.

The school at Cardston has about 500 children
on the roll. It is a public school, but the children
are nearly all Mormons, there is a Mormon
principal, and the church supplements the taxes

232 DIET, IDEAL AND REAL

by a subscription. The religious teaching is
confined to the last half -hour, from 3.30 to 4, and
some at any rate of the Gentiles appear to find
it quite unobjectionable. The Mormon Church
has its own " religion class organization," with
special teachers, who, however, only take the
children in hand once a week. According to
the president and bishop, politeness is one of the
virtues most insistently taught to the little
Mormons, — I hope with more success than attends
the spelling lesson, if a certain shop sign at Card-
ston is a fair test : " Kandy and fruit ; Kand
goods ; plain and fancy biskits." I am also
assured that plain and healthy living is not only
urged as a duty, but enforced as an ecclesiastical
obligation. Tobacco, alcohol, and even such
stimulants as tea and coffee are forbidden to the
pious Mormon. The rule, however, is not of
cast iron, allowances being made for the elderly
and feeble ; and the community as a whole
scarcely lives up to its ideal. There is much
dyspepsia among the Mormons as among the other
immigrants from the Western States, where the
rudiments of healthy feeding are even less under-
stood than in the dyspeptic East. Coffee, black
enough to write with ; tea, thoroughly stewed ;
hot " biscuit," the very opposite of " twice-
cooked " ; and a constant succession of fried
beef-steaks, — these are some of the favourite

BEET-SUGAR AND IRRIGATION 233

scourges of the West. The deadly frying-pan is
always at hand, and easily used. You will find
Americans, otherwise sane, frying the dough
instead of baking it, and calling the result bread.

The orthodox Mormon, when ill, calls for
the elders of his church, who come and pray and
lay their hands on him and anoint him with holy
oil ; but there are not many now who refuse to
call in a doctor besides ; and there is a doctor of
their own religious persuasion in Cardston, as
well as a Gentile physician to whom a good many
Mormons have now independence enough to
resort.

The Mormon colony at Raymond has, as I have
said, risen like Cardston to the dignity of a
" stake." The town is about half as large again
as Cardston, which has a population of 1000.
Raymond is chiefly distinguished by its possession
of a beet-sugar factory, the beets being cultivated
under irrigation with great success.

There is a large number of Mormons near
Claresholm also ; and, as I have said, on the
old Cochrane ranch still another colony is springing
up. Claresholm is a station on the Canadian
Pacific running north from Macleod ; and Card-
ston and Raymond have a railway to Lethbridge,
on the Canadian Pacific further east. As to the
future of these people, there seems no reason
to doubt they that will contribute a very fair

234 FUTURE OF MORMONISM

share to the trade of the country, as they are
already doing much to increase its agricultural
productiveness. They will also mingle more and
more with their fellow-Canadians, in spite of their
isolating system of mass settlement ; and this
will almost certainly have a loosening effect on
the mass, both socially and ecclesiastically, in
spite of all the elaborate church harness in which
they are held. Like the Jews, they were welded
together by persecution ; but the comparative
brevity of the welding period, and the lack of
roots in a heroic past, make the analogy of very
little value, so far as encouragement to hope for
permanence is concerned. Joseph Smith's plates
of gold are sadly handicapped in a durability
competition with Moses and his tables of stone.
However, I do not suggest that the dissolution
of Mormonism is near at hand ; and meanwhile the
Mormons may find some delicate internal problems
coming up for solution, one of these being the
question whether the Canadian branch shall
continue taking orders from and paying tribute
to the parent organization in another country.

A WEST BEYOND THE WEST

Beyond the foot-hills, the mountains. For
Alberta, though a prairie province, runs up to
the summit and watershed of the Rockies to find
her western limit. One glimpse, and only one,
may I give of this rugged edge of the New West.
A drive of 60 miles west from Macleod, over
the plain and up through the foot-hills, brought
me to the mouth of the Crow's Nest Pass, a
narrow opening where the Old Man River rushed
out between two mountains which resembled a
lion and turtle. Gushing out of a rock in the
turtle's hind foot came a milky-white sulphur
stream. The beavers had used this spot as a
sanatorium ; their dam still obstructed the
stream a few yards from its source, and the
stumps of the trees they had felled stood all
along the banks. Plunging through the sulphur-
ous gorge, I found the pass widening into a
valley, with a comparatively level bottom, shut
in by mountains on every side. The turtle
rose in the rear, shutting out the sunrise ; on
the left, a dense pine forest sloped up from the
southern bank of the river, clothing with green

235

236 IN THE CROW'S NEST PASS

the foot-hills of a snow-streaked sierra. Another
sharp-toothed ridge, grey but dashed with
glistening white, seemed to bar the way to the
west. Far off on the right, looking over the
heads of all the intervening heights, the Crow's
Nest towered in stony solitude, — a huge dome
of naked rock, holding proudly aloof from clusters
of peaks around.

The road was bad beyond the reach of ad-
jectives. In ten miles it forded the Old Man's
River six times and smaller streams as many
more. Then there was a brief interval of passable
travelling. The woods retreated, and an enter-
prising Scot had found the strath just wide
enough to establish himself in a tent as the first
and only settler in the Crow's Nest Pass. But a
couple of miles further west the waggon trail came
to a sudden end on the shores of a lake, which
stretched from side to side of the pass. There
was a bunch of horses roaming about the valley,
and coming up to their owner's tent every night
for a lick at a lump of rock salt ; but they had
not yet learnt a horse's duty to a man, and after
a wild experience on the backs of two of them
I judged them hardly fit for the delicate work of
negotiating precipices. I therefore went on up
the pass on foot.

The scene now became exquisitely beautiful.
A gentle breeze came wandering down the pass,

LAKE AND MOUNTAIN 237

and the ripples plashing on the eastern beach
made harmony with the tapping of the wood-
peckers. Other sound there was none, nor sign
of man's existence. A rocky bridle path struck
off to the right, but, narrow as it was, it found no
room to pass along the shore, and had to climb
over a shoulder of the mountain. Up and
down it went, at most impracticable angles, now
overtopping the fir trees that sprang from the
edge of the lake, then dipping almost into the
clear green water beside their roots. Here the
footing was of solid rock, and there it lay among
sharp loose fragments brought down with the
winter avalanches. As the trail came round
a mountain spur and fell once more to the level
of the lake, a vague and distant murmur broke
into a deafening roar, and a torrent crossed the
path. A single tree- trunk carried me safely
over. Pouring out of a cave in the overhanging
cliff the little river thundered down in a waterfall.
The path now rose, steeper and rockier than
ever, till I was glad to climb with hands as well
as feet, marvelling that a fingerless pony with
500 lb. of freight on his back should be able to make
the ascent at all. Now and then, even a sure-
footed Indian cayuse had failed in the attempt,
and toppled over into the lake. After another
sharp descent the trail lost itself in a jungle.
Mountains, lake, sky, all were hidden by the

238 BURNT FOREST

dense brush that threatened to put out the
traveller's eyes and made it hard to distinguish
the path under his feet. On this path, or close
to it, an Indian hunter not long before had come
upon his quarry before he could aim his gun,
and perished in the embrace of a grizzly bear.

The bushes drew back and the trail passed out
into a desolate stretch of burnt forest, where the
click of a grasshopper and the momentary gleam
of his yellow wings alone enlivened the scene of
death. The mountains on the other side of the
pass reappeared, so close and so high that they
seemed ready to fall upon the invading mortal.
The climbing sun peeped over the jagged edge
and illuminated the snow he could not melt ; but
the beautiful vision was marred by the rake of
blackened stems through which it appeared.
Unhappily, such devastation as this is not rare
in Canada, east or west. A few miles further
south I had seen a mountain of valuable timber
on fire for a week, and I left it burning.

The grimy desert was left behind, and the land
lived again. A rivulet babbled down the trail,
careless of passengers' rights. Streams innumer-
able crossed the path, of water most temptingly
cold and exquisitely pure. Grouse fluttered up
in disgust from under my feet. Squirrels and
chipmunks chattered protests against the intru-
sion. Another lake appeared, exquisitely beautiful

COAL MINES 239

like the first, with an eagle soaring overhead and
a flock of wild duck breaking the reflection of the
mountains on the shining surface. A few miles
beyond this point rose the sources of the Old
Man's River, and the next little stream was
flowing west — to the Pacific instead of the
Atlantic. Behind lay Alberta ; ahead, British
Columbia. It was the top of the Crow's Nest Pass.

That is what the pass looked like when I went
up into it first, as lately as 1893. When I went
next it was by railway, a Canadian Pacific line
running right over into the Kootenay mining
region of British Columbia. The mountains were
still there, and the lakes, and the waterfall — you
can see its picture in a guide-book — but through
the pass runs a string of mining towns, coking
ovens, sidings, stations, and other unfortunate
necessities of civilization. The Crow's Nest Pass,
in fact, is one of the richest sources of coal supply
in Canada. People who must have their mountain
scenery unalloyed have after all a tremendous
field to choose from in the West. They can spare
the Crow's Nest to the utilitarian coal-burning
world.

I should like to take my readers over the
" great divide " and down into British Columbia.
That Province, when not summarily sentenced
asa" sea of mountains," is commonly supposed
to produce little but minerals and timber. Never-

240 FRUIT RANCHING

theless, west of the mountains, and even in the
midst of them, there is a vast amount of first-rate
farming land. Lord Aberdeen has a great ranch
in the Okanagan Valley where apples and plums
are grown to perfection, under irrigation, and he
is cutting up part of the estate into small holdings.
Further down the valley, but still in the " sea of
mountains," peaches are the favourite crop.
These and many other successes and experiments
promise to make British Columbia a rival of
California.

British Columbia, however, demands a book
to itself. It is a Province apart, unique, magni-
ficent, and will not be crushed into the same
pair of covers with the prairie home of the New
Canadians.

m - - 1 ^^^^^

n

,

e
e
e
d

r
r
s
e

r*~>

The ranching country of Souther
Alberta slopes up through the fool
hills to the Rocky Mountains. Ther
as the traveller goes west by th
Canadian Pacific Railway, rang
follows range, of indescribabl
variety and grandeur, intersperse
with fertile and beautiful valleys
This is a scene in the Fraser Rive
Valley, in the far south-west corne
of the Dominion, only forty mile
from the Pacific Ocean, and on th
frontier of the United States.

HOW THE NEW CANADIANS LIVE

The Westerner " lives well." That is to say,
he has plenty of good food ; but he does not always
make the best use of it, and in feeding if in little
else I should not advise old-country folk to adopt
the new-country ways in a hurry. The American,
and the Canadian also, generally take too much
meat, made as indigestible as possible in the frying
pan ; and they scarcely draw that distinction
between summer and winter diet which the climate
suggests. They also take too much tea. I have
travelled over the prairie with an old freighter
who fed himself — and me, as I remember with pain
— at every halt, making five times a day, on fried
salt pork, bread, and boiled tea. The western
farmer is not a primitive barbarian like that,
but he still boils his tea, and the copper-bottomed
tea-pot is left simmering indefinitely on the stove
for casual use.

As a rule, however, there is plenty of variety
in the farmer's bill of fare. He takes porridge
and milk for breakfast as well as his fried pork
or beef -steak, salt pork being chiefly used in
summer and fresh frozen beef in winter. Many

Q 34»

242 FOOD AND DRINK

of the Americans come in with a habit of taking
coffee, but soon fall in with the ways of the country
and give it up for tea. Bread making is not as
common an art as it should be, and thick bannocks
or scones are commonly used when there is no
baker within reach. For dinner, besides the
regulation meat and potatoes, and bread and
butter and tea, the Canadians, and of course
the Americans, will have their round flat pies,
containing fruit sandwiched between the upper
and under crust, — an article known distinctively
as American, but exactly similar to the pies I
have seen exposed for sale by market women
in the old country. There will also be plenty of
stewed fruit; either the fresh barrelled apples
bought by the well-to-do farmer, or dried apples
and apricots, or the small fruits that grow wild
almost all over the West, such as strawberries,
raspberries, black and red currants, gooseberries,
choke-cherries, huckleberries, and cranberries.
The supper, taken as soon as the day's work is
done, is practically a repetition of the breakfast
or dinner, with the porridge perhaps left out.
Alcoholic drinks are very seldom used or even
kept in the house ; and, though many a Westerner
who abstains at home will not refuse a nip when
he goes to town, total abstinence is much more
common out there than in the old country. Many
Englishmen develop into abstainers when they

VENTILATION AND BATHING 243

emigrate ; which is just as well, as alcohol has
an even speedier and worse effect in the dry
western air than it has in the moister atmosphere
of the United Kingdom. In the matter of ventila-
tion, the Canadian is behind even the Englishman,
— which is saying a good deal. I know a western
farmer who always sleeps with his window
slightly open even in the depth of winter ; but
on the whole, the people think of fresh air simply
as something cold to be kept out, and with this
object a vast number of them go the length of
pasting up every crack. Increase of knowledge
as to the bad effect of second-hand air on the
health is leading to some improvement ; scientific
systems of ventilation will be adopted by and by ;
and meanwhile some of the better-informed old-
timers are advising new-comers to build all
living and sleeping rooms with high ceilings.
As for bathing, which the Englishman — thanks
to a small minority of his race — is supposed to
make a daily religious practice, it is customary
in varying degrees. One Westerner assures me
that it is " practically unknown except among
the British settlers " ; another, that there is
" not enough of it among average settlers " ;
while others declare that the weekly " tub " is
common, and nearly all agree that if there is a
lake or river near, the young fellows go in either
daily or at any rate very often, in summer.

244 HARD WORK

There is a ridiculous legend, started by the
" slacker " and spread by the credulous, that the
Canadian farmer is a sort of slave-driver or sweater.
Such a man is to be found here and there ; and
the Salvation Army is compiling a black list of
rascals who will hire a man " on trial " for a month,
pick a quarrel with him just before the month is
out, send him off without a dollar of wages, and
repeat the operation on the next new-comer.
But there is no country where all the rascals
are behind bars ; and in Canada, where there is
keen competition for farm hands, the average
farmer would treat his men well from selfish
motives even if he was not, as he is, an honest
man. It is just as well, to be sure, that an
emigrant should be warned not to expect too
easy a life. The season for work on the land is
comparatively short, so that you have to take
advantage of every hour and be ready to work
from early in the morning till late at night. But
in England I know many farmers, not to speak of
farm labourers, who seem to work nearly as long
and nearly as hard, not only in summer but almost
all the year. You will find men here and there,
even in the West, who take life easily. Content, I
suppose, with a very moderate return, they spend
their toil at a very moderate rate. The average
farmer, however, is neither a sweater nor a
sluggard. A good farmer, a man of prairie

SUNDAY 245

experience, will get up about five, feed the horses,
have his breakfast, and be at work on the land
with his team by seven. He will dine at noon,
get to work again at half-past one, and knock off
for the night about six. Many a farmer, however,
perfers to rise earlier, start on the land about six,
take a long rest in the heat of the day, — say
from eleven to three or even four, — and then
go back to his work and keep it up till twilight
fades into darkness. Whichever his plan, the
master expects his man to do as he does. After
such a full day of hard out-door work, neither
of them wants to stay long out of bed when
supper is despatched, and there is little thought
of recreation beyond the evening pipe. Sunday,
apart from necessary attention to live stock, is
kept as a day of rest. There is, in fact, a strong
sentiment throughout the West against Sunday
labour ; and even railway construction, urgent
as it is, has to pause from Saturday to Monday.
Some farmers spend at any rate part of the day
doing petty repairs, while their wives go to church ;
but many men, quite unused to church-going
in the old home where there is a church at every
man's door, adopt the habit in a half-settled
country where churches are few and far between
and a religious service is an event of some rarity.
In some localities it is remarked that nearly all
the settlers attend service whenever one is

246 RECREATION

announced, and whatever the denomination may
be that gives them the opportunity. Some of
them, at any rate, whether they would subscribe
to any creed or none, are grateful for the influence
that lifts them every now and then from the
rut of material interests and ambitions ; and the
rest at any rate appreciate the variety that a
weekly or fortnightly or monthly service brings
into their lives, not to speak of the oppor-
tunity of meeting their often distant neighbours.
When no service is held, or when, as is common
there is only one service because the minister
has to visit two or three centres every Sunday,
a part of the day is given up to social intercourse,
a recreation all the more enjoyed when every
visit means a drive of several miles. Visiting
and reading, in fact, are the staple recreations
of the West, all the year round. Few have any
large store of literature ; but the books are being
constantly lent. In summer and autumn, except
in the very busiest seasons, there is always a
certain amount of baseball, football, and more
rarely cricket, wherever settlement has grown
out of its earliest and sparsest stage. I find that
next to the climate the loneliness of prairie life
is what the English emigrant most dreads. To
a townsman or towns woman, of course, life in
the country is always lonely, and even the English
farm labourer will find less company on his

WINTER OCCUPATIONS 247

Canadian homestead than in his native home ;
but in the districts now being settled up the
isolation is steadily lessening. It is true that the
English and Canadian farmers live on their own
farms, and not in villages like the Dukhobors ;
but unless the settler has gone particularly far
afield, he is not likely to be many months without
neighbours, and neighbours out there are neigh-
bourly.

In winter, though there is always a certain
amount of work to be done, — and appreciably
more where there are cattle than on a purely
grain-growing farm, — there is plenty of time for
recreation. The boys make a skating rink on the
nearest slough ; and their elders make up moon-
light sleighing parties. With the pure white
country snow covering the ground, the moon
and stars shining down through the clearest
atmosphere in the world, and a frequent display
of aurora, the night is often so light that you can
shoot a coyote at a range of a quarter of a mile.
Dances and card parties are common in farm-
houses,— gambling, by the way, being rare either
then or at any other time. In a village, the
churches are centres of communal life ; as in other
parts of the English-speaking world, the church
" social " or concert is a most popular institution,
and in many places these are supplemented by
debating societies and reading circles. The

248 SCHOOLS

Sunday School, of course, must have its annual
picnic ; and picnics are also a common way of
celebrating " Queen's Birthday " and Dominion
Day. The yearly visit of a circus attracts the
whole population from a radius of many miles ;
and a theatrical company sometimes goes the
round of the larger towns. Some of the English
ranchers hunt the coyote with dogs ; but hunting,
even in its western sense of shooting, is not a very
common form of sport, though a farmer may
now and then take his gun and bring home a
few prairie chicken or wild duck.

As cheerful a sight as meets your eye as you
travel through the West is the little prairie school
house. Wherever there are twelve children in
an area five miles square the Government forms
a school district. The school is managed by
three local trustees. The Government pays a
large part of the cost, the remainder being raised
by a school tax, which varies from $4 to $15 (16s.
8d. to 62s. 6d.) a year on a farm of 160 acres,
the average being perhaps $6 (25s.). Attendance
at school is compulsory, but in many districts
so far the enforcement of this law has been rather
lax, and, as generally happens elsewhere, the
children from homes where education is most
needed are most likely to be irregular in attend-
ance. This, however, is but a passing phase.
Even the most ignorant Gajicians are coming

SCHOOL AND OTHER RATES 249

to see the value of schooling, and such is the
spirit of the West that the educational interests of
New Canada are in no danger whatever of being
neglected either by the Governments or by the
people at large. By the end of 1906 there had
been organized 1399 school districts in Manitoba,
1190 in Saskatchewan, and 742 in Alberta, and
the Saskatchewan Legislature has already made
provision for a Provincial University.

The only direct tax levied on the settler, in
addition to the education rate, is a local improve-
ment tax, for the up-keep of roads, bridges being
generally built and maintained by the Government.
The local improvement tax in a new district
amounts to about $4 (16s. 8d.) a year on the
quarter section ; two days' personal work on the
road, or one day if a man brings his team, being
taken as equivalent to the cash.

THE FUTURE

The future of the great territory I have attempted
to describe should be made a subject of earnest, if
not anxious, thought by all who desire the welfare
of our Empire and our race. So far as material
things go, there is no cause for anxiety about
the future of the country in general. Here and
there, now and then, damage may be caused
by drought and other accidents of weather, or
by disease among live stock and crops ; but
Canada is less subject to these scourges than
most other countries, and it is unlikely in the
extreme that the districts affected will at any
time be more than a small fraction of the whole
Dominion. Over-speculation may cause a tem-
porary set-back in commerce ; but the natural
resources of the country are so varied and so
vast that speedy recovery is as certain as any-
thing in human affairs can be. Land may be
" boomed " up to a point above its value ; but
that point is still far out of sight. The choice
land in possession of the Western Canada Com-
pany, to give only one instance, has fetched

during the past season an average of about $9

250

THE NEED OF THE FUTURE 251

an acre ; but the land — probably inferior, and
certainly not superior — in the Western States of
the neighbouring republic, from which many of
the purchasers come, is fetching $40, $50, or
even more. It is not, however, of material
prosperity that I am chiefly thinking.

Amid all the exhilaration and satisfaction caused
by a sight of hundreds of thousands of human
beings transforming a wilderness into a garden
under the British flag, the question constantly
arises, and with growing insistency, " What are
the British people going to do about it ? "
Children now at school may live to see a time
when the Canadian part of our Empire will contain
a larger population than the Motherland itself.
How can we in the United Kingdom and the
Dominion to-day, the present guardians of the
Imperial destiny, help to ensure that the future
population of Canada, with its fast increasing
influence in our councils, and possibly destined
to be the predominant partner, shall grow not
only in material and moral prosperity, but in
solidarity and brotherhood with the Motherland
and all other lands now joined together under
the British flag ? It is not enough to put aside
with a smile the extravagant visions of certain
American prophets who think that the American
farmers, to-day deserting the United States for
Canada, will to-morrow insist on Canada's be-

252 GOVERNMENT AND FARMER

coming a part of the United States ; or of those
who imagine that the western half of the Dominion
will at any rate secede from the eastern half, and
set up a separate commonwealth of its own. The
question is, how to strengthen those feelings and
those interests which tend to keep such extrava-
gant dreams from ever becoming the ideal of any
appreciable section of the Canadian people.

Obviously, the Canadian people and Govern-
ments can do far more to ensure a satisfactory
solution to this problem than the people and
Government of the Motherland, especially in the
direction of material prosperity. They have done
much already. The western farmer enjoys, it
is true, great advantages in the shape of virgin
soil, freedom from rent, and very low direct taxa-
tion ; he is, moreover, an enterprising person,
capable of making the most of his advantages ;
yet the federal and provincial authorities have not
allowed this consideration to make them fold their
arms and let the farmer paddle his own canoe.
The experimental farm system, which I have
already described, is one of the most effective
means yet devised by the Federal Government
for helping the farmer. The provincial Govern-
ments also are entering into partnerships with
their farming constituents in a way to which we
in England are unaccustomed. The Albertan
Department of Agriculture, for instance, en-

THE TARIFF 253

courages the dairy industry by marketing the
butter which it produces. The direction, how-
ever, in which Government, the Federal Govern-
ment in this case, may find it hard to satisfy
the farmers' demands is indicated by the word
tariff. In framing any national Customs tariff
the Canadian Government is confronted by the
obvious fact that such protection as the manu-
facturing East would like would be far from
agreeable to the agricultural West. But this
conflict of interests occurs in almost every
country, and there is no serious reason to suppose
that a compromise which the two interests will
accept cannot be arrived at. Of the greater
tariff question, that concerning a preferential or
reciprocal trade arrangement between the different
countries of the Empire, I shall venture to say
no more than that the increase of Canadian
population, and especially of that section of it
which produces what we want and consumes what
we can supply, must strengthen the argument in
favour of safeguarding and increasing by every
practicable means the trade between the Mother
Country and the Dominion.

Vastly important as such material considera-
tions are, there are moral — sentimental if you
like — considerations which are hardly less urgent.
The people who emigrate to Canada from the
United Kingdom, even when they know they

254 KNOWLEDGE OF THE EMPIRE

are driven to do so because the United Kingdom
has not given them a chance of work for them-
selves or prospect of work for their children,
have naturally a feeling of affection for the
Mother Country which you cannot expect to find
among immigrants of other races. It is in the
power of the Canadian Governments, by just laws
and their just enforcement, greatly to foster the
devotion of all new-comers to the institutions of
their adopted land, and indirectly, of course, to
the Empire of which that land forms a more and
more valued part. A great deal might be done,
however, and perhaps more by individual than
Government means, to create and foster among
these new-comers a knowledge of the Empire to
which they have come, and especially of the Old
Country, which for many years must hold the
headship of the great British Confederacy — a
knowledge which ought to produce appreciation,
and perhaps a feeling even stronger than that.
The Government of Manitoba, as is well known,
has set an admirable example — which we in
England would follow, if our authorities were
not so fearful of being thought " demonstrative "
— by decreeing that the country's flag shall be
flown over every school. Whether a similar
law has yet been passed in the newer Provinces
I am not aware ; but I know that the flag is
flying over many of their schools, law or no law,

CHEAP POSTAGE TO BE USED 255

and that in still more of these schools, if not in
all, the children are being taught what the
privileges and the duties of British citizenship
mean to them and to the world's life in which
this Empire should always be a beneficent factor.
One of the most hopeful methods yet invented
with the object of fostering brotherhood among
the British nations is the system of inter-com-
munication between schools in different parts of
the British world, initiated by the League of the
Empire. But it has to be remembered that people
nowadays, and this to a greater extent through-
out the North American continent than even in
Europe, depend for their information, and un-
consciously for their opinions, largely on the
newspaper press. The reduction of postage
rates on newspapers and other forms of litera-
ture from this country to the Dominion is there-
fore a step of no little consequence ; and even
now that this reform has been secured, there
is need of an organized effort to make full use of
its advantage. Many people in this country,
I know well enough, send newspapers regularly
to their friends who have gone to Canada ; but
the great majority of immigrants find themselves
dependent for their news entirely on the local
Press, which is necessarily most concerned with
local affairs and gets most of its news of Old
Country matters filtered through American

256 OPEN COMMUNICATION

agencies. I should like to commend to such
organizations as I have already mentioned, and to
individuals throughout the land, the Imperial
advantage and the imperious need of seeing as far
as possible that every one who leaves these
shores is kept in regular communication with
those who remain. To establish such communica-
tion with people who have gone into Canada from
the United States or from Continental Europe
would be more difficult, but, being also even more
desirable, should be carried out in spite of the
difficulty.

The task of preserving, strengthening, and,
where it does not yet exist, creating a sense of
brotherhood between the inhabitants of the Old
Country and the new is one that must surely
commend itself as an imperative duty to the
Churches, whose very foundation is brotherhood.
The authorities of the Church of England, and
especially of such organizations as the Society
for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the
Colonial and Continental Church Society, have
shown that they realize the need, and are doing
much, though little in proportion to the wealth
of their communion — endeavouring chiefly to
establish churches and provide clergymen and
lay workers among the settlers who have gone
out from England. The Nonconformists are

EMIGRATION 257

also doing something in this direction, though
they might do much more. They probably
feel that most of the settlers coming into Canada
from the United States have been connected
with Methodist, Presbyterian, and other non-
Episcopal Churches — Nonconformist is happily
an unmeaning and obsolete word in America —
and that they are better off financially than
the emigrants who leave these shores. But
this very fact, though rendering the need of
church-building less urgent, offers British Non-
conformists a magnificent opportunity for opening
fraternal communication with the American
element in the New West. Nor should it be
forgotten that in the aggregate a very large
number of the immigrants from this side have
been more or less closely connected with Noncon-
forming or, in Scotland, Presbyterian Churches.

If it is said that any of these suggestions
involve a new departure of perhaps an uncon-
ventional kind, the reply is simply that the
situation to be dealt with is novel, and con-
ventionality is not going to solve the problem.

The subject of emigration I have already
dealt with ; but, as it is most closely connected
with that of racial and Imperial unity, I am com-
pelled to emphasize, in closing, the desirability,
in the interest of this country and the Empire
as a whole, of encouraging would-be emigrants

R

258 FOREIGNERS WANTED

of the right sort to make new homes for themselves
within the borders of the Empire. If, however,
both the quality and the number of British emi-
grants go on rising as they are rising now, while
our birth-rate goes on falling, the most doggedly
conservative of our people, whether they call
themselves Liberal or Tory, will demand that
" something must be done " to make the Old
Country's life more attractive and her industries
more lucrative. " We cannot lose all our best
blood," people are saying already ; and, though
it is emphatically true that emigration is simply
a movement from one part of " our country " to
another, it is also true that defective social condi-
tions or short-sighted fiscal policy may drive our
able-bodied and able-minded men across the sea to
an extent positively injurious to that part of the
Empire which they leave. And, even if no check
is put on the emigration movement, it is quite
evident that these islands alone cannot supply
anything like the amount of humanity that the
vast spaces of Canada are waiting and thirsting
for. I should not fear a considerable influx even
of Japanese and other Asiatics, though I am well
aware of the special arguments against such a
movement, and therefore I do not press the point.
As to the Continental races of Europe, even the
most backward of them, it would be the height
of folly to discourage their emigration to Canada.

FINANCE 259

With any rational and patriotic system of educa-
tion in their new home, these people will in a
generation or less be intelligent English-speaking
citizens ; and they will reinforce the stock from
which the future British race must be produced.
In emigrationfrom the United Kingdom to Canada,
though the new country gains more than the old
loses, the local loss must be taken into account.
The immigration of foreigners — of course not those
of the undesirable and unimprovable type — is
a clear gain to the Empire.

One word more. Canada, as the High Com-
missioner has said in the preface, needs money as
well as men for her development. Mr Courtney,
till lately the Deputy Minister of Finance at
Ottawa, warned us some time ago against " wild-
cat " schemes ; and every honest Canadian
emphatically echoes his words. Unfortunately,
however, people over here, in their comparative
ignorance of conditions over there, may be
tempted to shun all Canadian schemes, for fear
they should find themselves unawares in a " wild-
cat's " claws. Here, then, is an occupation ready
made for some trustworthy financial authority,
with no suspicion of having an axe to grind,
who will help British investors to discriminate
clearly between Canadian schemes which are
hopeless and insane and those which are at
any rate sane and hopeful ; or between purely

260 A LAST WORD

speculative projects and those which, being
based on the fertile land itself, are " as good as
the bank." It is a pity that, through fear born
of ignorance, the British investor keeps out of
Canadian fields into which the American investor
pours his money with confidence ; and I say this
knowing very well that many millions of British
money are invested in Canadian Government
stocks and other gilt-edged securities. It is a pity
also that a great representative Canadian con-
cern like the Canadian Pacific Railway, with its
almost fabulous possessions in land, should be
treated on the New York and even on the London
Stock Exchange as if it were merely one of the
bunch of " American rails M that seem to exist
for speculators to juggle with. The moral of
which is, like the moral of everything I have
attempted to say in these pages, that the
people of this old centre of the British State
should seriously study the problems of Greater
Britain ; and, in the power of knowledge, should,
while there is time, take such individual and
collective action as will preserve, develop, and
unify the King's whole realm.

INDEX

Aberdeen, Earl of, 240

Alberta Province, 104, 133 ; cli-
mate, 105, 118, 128, 137, 208 ;
population, 66, 69; produce,
129, 130; water question, 196,
201, 227

American immigrants, 53, 89, 92,
194, 195 ; statistics, 54, 70, 106 ;
origins, 107, 129, 134; character,
no; Americanism and British
citizenship, 57, 107, 109 ; specu-
lation, 112 ; Iowans, 78, 120,
147, 204 ; a stopping - place
keeper, 1135a dissatisfied plains-
man, 106 ; bringing in the family,
12X ; Californians, 134 ; Minne-
sotans, 146, 192 ; Manxman,
178 ; Mormons, 224

Animals, wild, 119, 182, 189 ;
mosquito and bull-dog fly, 46,
47; coyote, 162, 183, 189, 248;
skunk, 186 ; birds, 170, 182, 183,
189, 239; gopher, badger, fox,
33, 145, 183 ; snake, 183 ; ante-
lope, 189, 191 ; bear, 238

Asiatics, 258

Assiniboia, 64

Athabasca, 48, 64 ; Landing, 137 ;
River, 137

"Baching," 100

Bad Hills, 189

Bathing, 34, 243

Batoche, 43, 50

Battlefield : Cutknife Hill in 1885,

36; to-day, 91, 160
Battleford in 1885, 29, 35 ; to-day,

160
Battleford, North, 90
Battle River, 35, 130, 159
Beaver dam, 235
Beaver Hills, 130
Beaver River, 46, 48
Bee-keeping, 82
Beet sugar, 233
Brandon, 69

British Columbia, 203, 239
Buffalo (bison), 10, 130

Bull-dog Creek, 179

Calgary, 199, 209

Canora, 89

Capital, need of, xi, 259

Cardston, 227

Carrot River, 86

Cattle and horses : in Manitoba,
81, 82 ; Saskatchewan, 195 ;
Alberta, 199, 204, 206 ; ranch
leases, 206, 211 ; Cochrane
ranch, 206 ; prices, 207 ; free
range, 210 ; horse-breeding,
211 ; horses in Crow's Nest
Pass, 236

Cayuse and bronco, 32, 45, 203

Chamberlain, 145

Church Army, 53

Churches, work of, 117, 132, 178,
245, 256; foreign, 71, 125; a
parsonage, 179

Churchill, 84

Claresholm, 233

Climate, 33, 45. 54, 7». 75. 83, 105,
118, 137, 138; winter, 60, 94,
128, 210; and health, 47, 127,
157, 208 ; long days, 138 ; rain-
fall question, 195 ; wind, 202,
209 ; hail, 228

Coal, 239

Cold Lake, 48

Communication and travel : early
ways, 9, 20, 21 ; stern- wheel
steamboat, 35, 49, 59 ; by trail
to Edmonton, 105 ; rail from
Regina to Saskatoon, 144 ; trail
to Battleford, 148 ; to Cutknife,
162; across country, 171, 177;
Swift Current trail, 181 ; dry
camp, 190; the cow-catcher,
203 ; freighter's waggon, 205 ;
cost of freighting, 116

Co-operation among settlers, 87,

135, 153
Country, character of: soil and
capacity, 22, 23, 62, 76, 118 ;
general summary, 57; treeless
prairie, 31, 83, 182, 199; park
361

262

INDEX

lands, 36, 46, 104, 163, 182 ;
valleys, 48, 154, 159, 193 ; water,

45, 171, 191, 195 ; alkali lakes,
183, 190 ; forest and swamp,

46, 48 ; the prairie in autumn,
123 ; the Far North, 137 ; prairie,
primeval, 182 ; semi-arid area,
181, 190 ; wells, 172, 173, 188 ;
gumbo, 191 ; mountains, 235

Cow-boy, the, 133

Crow's Nest Pass, 203, 235

Cypress Hills, 195

Dairy produce, 81, 253
Dragoons, new force, 224
Drainage works, 83, 129
Drink, 242
Duck Lake, 26, 50
Dukhobors, 149
Dundurn, 146
Dun vegan, 137
Dutch settlers, 134

Eagle Creek, 154, 189

Edmonton : Alberta's capital,
104, 130 ; Proclamation Day,
133 ; as a railway centre, 136

Education: 248,249; school lands,
62, 63 ; school-book traveller, 90

Elevators, 80

Elk Park, 130

Emigrants : questions of, 13 ; right
and wrong sort, 96, 257 ; emi-
gration societies, 52 ; fares, 53.
See also Immigration

English people, 91, 163, 203 ;
the all-British colony, 91 ; and
climate, 94 ; town boys' success,
98 ; Alberta ranchers, 207

Esterhazy, 144

Expansion of Canada, 16

Farm implements, prices of, 135

Farm speculation, 112

Farmers and Government, 142,

252
Farmers and their men, 244
Farming, mixed, 81
Farms, experimental, 142
" Fertile Belt," 23
Fires, precautions against, 145,

I73» 189 ; burnt forest, 238
Fish, 71
Flag, the, 254
Flowers, wild, 46

Food: 34, 113, 158, 241;

Galicians', 127 ; Mormons', 232
Foresters, Order of, 87
Fort Garry, 9, 67
Fort Pitt in 1885, 28, 46 ; to-day,

92
Fort Saskatchewan, 131
Fort Simpson, 137
Fort Vermilion, 138
Freighting, cost, 116, 155 ; an old

freighter, 205
French Canadians, 54, 119, 135,

173, 180
Frog Lake massacre, 27, 46, 92
Fruit, 119, 143, 240, 242
Fur trade, 20, 131
Future of the West, 10, 65, 250

Galicians : in Manitoba, 70,
86; in Alberta, 123; a bothy,
124

Geological Survey, 22, 84

Germans, 54, 89, 143, 149, 177

Gimli, 71

Great Slave Lake, 137

Grey, Earl, at Edmonton, 133;
at Macleod, 219

Hal f-b reeds: ancestry and
character, 20 ; Riel's rebellions,
24, 25, 185; St Albert, 134;
Sixty-mile Bush, 184. See also
Risings

Hanley, 145

Haultain, 146

Hecla, 71

Herbert, 197

Holidays, 109, 248

Horses. See Cattle, and Cayuse

Hotels, 90; and "stopping-
places," 113, 158

Houses of settlers : log house, 175,
187 ; sod house, 178, 187 ; plank
shack, 179 ; a rancher's home
208 ; Galicians', 124 ; Duk-
hobors', 150 ; ventilation, 243

Hudson's Bay Company: early
history of territory, 19 ; terms
of annexation to Canada, 23 ;
Company's land holding, 62 ;
Edmonton store, 132 ; Fort
Vermilion flour mill, 138

Hudson's Bay Route, 84

Humboldt, 89

Hungarians, 144

INDEX

263

Icelanders, 71

Immigrants: statistics, 51 ;
harvesters, 68 ; effect of the
West on new-comers, 72

Imperial questions, 251, 254

Indian Head, 142

Indians: early trade with, 20;
treatment of, 26 ; Big Bear, 27 ;
Poundmaker, 29, 170; Mooso-
min, 44, 91 ; Chippewayans,
47 ; Cree farmers, 164, 199 ;
Blackfoot, Blood, and Peigan,
214 ; coveted reserves, 215 ; self-
support, 215; education and
morality, 216; Blood customs,
217 ; disease, 218 ; war-dance
at Macleod, 219 ; and Mounted
Police, 222

Irish horse-rancher, 211

Irrigation : in U.S., 55, 198, 227 ;
in Western Canada, 64, 198

Japan, trade with, 58, 201
Jews, 144

Keewatin Territory, 84

Labour : nawying, 60 ; farm
work, 68, 75, 244

Lake Dauphin, 86

Lake Manitoba, 86

Lake Winnipeg, 71

Lake Winnipegosis, 86

Land available for cultivation,
estimate of, 63, 84

Land, for sale, 54, 63, 64, 87, 142;
land companies, 64

Land, free, 54, 106, 135; home-
stead conditions, 57, 157 ;
abuses, 158 ; homestead statis-
tics, 57, 62

Land, division of, 214

Land booms, 67

Lands, school, 62, 63

Lipton, 143

Literature, 115, 246, 255

Lloyd, Archdeacon, 39, 40

Lloydminster, 91

MacDonnell, Col., 224
Mackenzie Territory and River, 137
Macleod, 202
Makaroff, 88

Manitoba : first settlement, 21,
67; Province formed, 25; the

Province to-day, 67; popula-
tion, 69 ; farming, 74 ; surface,
83 ; extension of boundaries
wanted, 84 ; Dauphin region,
86 ; the flag, 254

Mannville, 105

Melfort, 109

Mennonites, 89, 197

Migrations, the great, 15

Money : Dollars and £ s. d., 32

Moose Jaw, 142

Moosomin, 142

Mormons in Alberta, 224 ; poly-
gamy, 225; organization, 229;
education, 231 ; diet and health,
232 ; future, 234

Newspapers, 117, 176, 255
North, the Far, 136
Norwegians, 9a

Old Man River, 235
Ontarians, 178, 179, 187, 205
Otter, Col., 31

Park lands, 36, 46, 104, 163,
182

Past and present, 16

Peace River, 137

Perry, Commissioner, 224

Pianos, 200

Pioneers, 137

Poles, 56

Police, N.W. Mounted : in war
time, 26, 28, 37 ; headquarters,
140; Macleod, 202 ; and Indians,
222 ; present duties, 223

Politics, Provincial, 140

Population : need of, 11 ; statis-
tics, 66, 69

Portage la Prairie, 69

Postage, 255

Prince Albert, 26, 87, 88

Provisions, prices of, 90, 116

Railways: ii, 12; Canadian
Pacific in 1885, 30, 31 ; and
to-day, 59, 136, 140, 199, 202,
233, 239, 260 ; Canadian North-
ern, 59, 86, 89, X04, 136, 147;
Grand Trunk Pacific, 59, 136, 189;
Mr Hill's plans, 59 ; grievances,
59 ; navvies wanted, 60 ; Federal
Railway Commission, 61 ; grain
cars, 80 ; Southern Alberta, 233

264

INDEX

Raymond, 233

Recreations, 95, 176, 246

Red Deer, 196

Red River Valley: first settle-
ment, 21 ; fertility, 22 ; blessing
the river, 71

Regina, capital of Saskatchewan,
140

Remittance man, 100

Riding Mountain, 86

Risings, the : Red River Rebel-
lion of 1870, 24 ; Saskatchewan
Rising of 1885, 25 ; rebel success
at Duck Lake, 26 ; Indians
on war-path, 27; Frog Lake
massacre, 27 ; Fort Pitt sur-
rendered, 28 ; siege of Battle-
ford, 29 ; Relief Expedition, 30 ;
cold and heat on the prairie, 33 ;
siege raised, 35 ; Cutknife Hill
fight, 36 ; feelings under fire, 38 ;
volunteers' bravery, 39 ; rising
suppressed, 43 ; Poundmaker's
surrender, 43 ; pursuit of Big
Bear, 45 ; escape of his prisoners,
48

Rocky Mountains, 203, 235 ; foot-
hills, 207

St Albert, 134
Salvation Army, 52, 87
Saskatchewan Province: Central,

88, 147 ; Southern, 141 ; popula-
tion, 66, 69

Saskatchewan River, North, 49,

I3L 159
Saskatchewan River, South, 35,

89. 193
Saskatoon, 93, 147
Saunders, Dr, 62
Scandinavians, 54, 71, 74, 92, 129
Scotsmen, 95, 154, 187, 198
Selkirk, Lord, 21
Settlement, the first, 21
Sixty-mile Bush, 184

Social distinctions, 100

Soil, nature and capacity of, 22,

33

Sports, 95, 246, 248
Squatters, 135
Star, 125
Strassburg, 143

Strathcona, 118

Strathcona, Lord, Preface by, 9 ;

position in 1870, 24
Sunday, 245
Swift Current in 1885, 31 ; to-day,

195

Tariff, 253

Taxation, 248, 249

Thingvalla, 73

Tisdale, 87

Togo, 88

Towns and villages : rapid growth

of, 91, 117, 200 ; land prices, 91,

131 ; a Dukhobor village, 149 ; a

Mormon town, 227
Trade, external, 12 ; with Japan,

58, 201

United Kingdom, food for, 10,
65

United States: settlement of the
West, 15 ; Canadian emigration
campaign, 53 ; counter-attrac-
tions, 55 ; causes of emigration,
in; westward migrations, 113;
experience in Oklahoma, 114 ;
French-Canadians in, 173. See
also Americans

Vegreville, 119
Vermilion, 116

War correspondent's experiences,
17, 32, 38

War man, 90

Water-power, 83

Wetaskiwin, 129

Wheat : possible production, 65;
average crops, 65, 77 ; quality
and cultivation, 75 ; profit, 77,
205 ; in the Far North, 138 ; in
Saskatchewan, 142, 146, 163 ; in
Alberta, 114, 128, 201, 204, 205,
227 ; and other grain, 81, 128,
202

White Bear " Lake," 191

Winnipeg in 1870, 67 ; to-day, 68,
69

Wolseley, Lord, 24

Yukon and Klondike, 138

TURNBULL AND SPEAR*, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH

I