willllliiillli EXCURSIONS IN CANADA C. L . JOHN 3 rojv E THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES \&SA\lWt***jl v'/J iJ&J3 :V<^V-4^- ^AX/\ \13^ V '- / - > ~-3l XiS S^&^sf^MsiStes^ WINTER AND SUMMER EXCURSIONS IN CANADA ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY PRESS. WINTER AND SUMMER EXCURSIONS IN CANADA BY C. L. JOHNSTONE AUTHOR OF " HISTORICAL FAMILIES OF DUMFRIESSHIRE," ETC. LONDON DIGBY, LONG, & CO., PUBLISHERS 18 BOUVERIE STREET, FLEET STREET, E.C. J (0*0 to COLONEL SIR JAMES JOHNSTONE, K.C.S.I., WHOSE ZEAL IN PROMOTING EDUCATION AND PEACEFUL PROSPERITY IN REMOTE DISTRICTS OF HER MAJESTY'S EASTERN EMPIRE MUST LEAD HIM TO TAKE AN INTEREST IN THE SETTLERS AND NATIVES OF THE FURTHEST QUARTERS OF HER MAJESTY'S WESTERN DOMINION. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION, xiii CHAPTER I. The Canadian Pacific Railway Winnipeg Station Qu'Appelle St. John's College Brotherhood Collegeand School Bishop Anson Deserted Farms Indians, ...... i CHAPTER II. Young Farmers in the Qu'Appelle Valley Fashion- able Arrivals from London Abernethy Some Experiences of Gentlemen Settlers in Manitoba and the North-west Icelanders Want of Clergy Church Statistics English Church Workers A Prairie Fire, 19 CHAPTER III. Canadian Hospitality Storm Winter Casualties Amusements Newspapers Vegetation Statistics of Cold Archbishop Tache's Opinion Real Progress The Census Booming, . 43 CHAPTER IV. Prince Albert Regina Saskatoon Duck Lake A Winter's Drive- The Bush Hotel Carlton Snake Plain The Indian Reserves Indian Agency Prince Albert-- Projected Railway to Hudson Bay, ....... 59 Vlll CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. % PACK The Iroquois Squatters Emigrants Yankee Settlers Hard Times Winter Extraordi- naryMarriages Early Immigrants Unsuitable Occupations Successes, ..... 80 CHAPTER VI. Indians and Half-breeds Theories concerning the Origin of the Indian Tribes Early Discoverers of America before Columbus Red River Settlement Iroquois Colonists in the Rockies Discovery and Colonisation of Rupertsland Jacques Cartier, and Eastern Canada or New France Wars Indians in British Columbia Indian Honesty St. John's College, . . 97 CHAPTER VII. Further Experiences of English Settlers Mr. Andrew Mackay's Advice Autumn The Harvest Festival French Exaggeration of the Cold in Russia Real Cold in Canada Okanayan District in British Columbia, .... 124 CHAPTER VIII. Mission Work in the Colonies Bishop Anson's Address to the Clergy Advantages of the North- west The Tariff Lord Brassey's Settlement Marriage Ups and Downs Winter Algoma, 143 CHAPTER IX. Funerals English Orphans Children of the North- westThe Curried Chicken Hired Helps Bishop Anson's last Visitation Tour, . . 161 CONTENTS. IX CHAPTER X. t PAGE Yankees in Canada North Dakota Loyalty in the North-west Alaska Gradual Ascent towards the Rockies Paving Vancouver Regina Canadian North-west Schools Patriotic Societies, ........ 174 CHAPTER XI. Leaving the North-West for Manitoba Minnedosa Typhoid Fever Winnipeg The Memnonites Ottawa Red River District Grand Forks St. Paul and Minneapolis Niagara Through the Lakes, 196 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE St. Peter's Pro-Cathedral, Qu'Appelle Station- Chapter I., ii The Self-binder Chapter IV., 71 Winnipeg in 1871 Chapter V.,. .... 81 A Manitoba Farm Chapter VII., .... 128 Junction of St. Lawrence and Ottawa Chapter VIII., ! 57 In the Rockies Chapter X., 179 INTRODUCTION. "Of all gainful possessions, nothing is better, nothing more pleasing, nothing more delightful, nothing better be- comes a well-bred man, than agriculture." CICERO. I HAVE been assured that the British public do not care much about Canada, except as a refuge for the superfluous population. It is quite satisfied, say my informants, with the pamphlets on the subject distributed by the Canadian Pacific Railway Com- pany and other emigration agents. This is doubtless true of a large class. The pamphlets in question record only the successes of the British settlers in Canada. It is no business of theirs to give the many heavy losses, their cause, and how to avoid them. A boy is backward at school he cannot pass an examination for a profession ; why trouble, says a sanguine friend, to work up for a second attempt? Why don't you go and make your fortune in Canada? How this fortune is to be made, or even how the small capital which the boy perhaps takes out with him is to be safely invested and kept from melting away, does not seem to occur to his adviser. So an inexperienced sanguine XIV INTRODUCTION. youth sets forth from his home credulous because he has lived among honest people, unacquainted with any species of labour except cricket and football, but confident in his own judgment to fall an easy prey to those unscrupulous gentry who in every colony are prepared to welcome the novice and dispose of unprofitable land, unsaleable machinery, worn-out cattle, and anything else they want to get rid of at his expense. This is the commonest way in which fortunes are made and lost in Canada. But the boy who goes out with little but a strong pair of hands and a knowledge of agricultural work attracts no sharpers and readily finds employment. He may not make a fortune ; but in time he may acquire a competence and live a happy life amid educated people in an exhilarating climate, and even aspire to become a member of the Canadian Parliament, or a provincial governor. It is certainly most extraordinary, if the British people who trouble themselves a good deal about the social and political affairs of foreign countries in Europe, do care nothing about the colony to which so many of their sons and brothers annually migrate, and which will probably become our most valuable ally. We can hardly believe it, so we venture to offer the following experiences of a residence in the north-west. These experiences are not only those of summer tourists, but of a INTRODUCTION. XV visitor and participator in the work of an establish- ment on the prairie during the dreary winter months, when even the sparrows had fled to warmer regions, and the wolf and the snowbird seemed to be the only wild creatures left. The bear is not found except where there is plenty of cover ; but he had also betaken himself to some snug hiding- place, probably selected during his summer rambles, and with his paws covering the tip of his nose he was indulging in his long annual snooze. All nature shrinks from the icy blasts which periodically sweep over the north-west, and from the blizzards of snow which have buried many a fine young fellow, rash in his inexperience, long before the expected fortune or even competence has begun to be made. Yet we have heard men, who have started a son with ^500 or 1000, speak as con- fidently of a certain interest on that sum within a year or two, as if it had been invested in British consols. If farming is hazardous and slow to bring a profit in England, it is far more hazardous and experimental in the most uncertain climate of the north-west; but then many of us cannot afford to indulge in farming at all in England, and it can be enjoyed by every one for a comparative trifle in Canada, if a man farms on Canadian soil in the Canadian way. This may seem paradoxical, but the following pages are intended to explain it. EXCURSIONS IN CANADA CHAPTER I. The Canadian Pacific Railway The Winnipeg Station Qii ' Appelle St. Johns College The Brotherhood College and School Bishop Anson Deserted Farms Indians. WHEN the Canadian Pacific Railway was first completed from Quebec and Montreal to Vancouver, there were fatigues and inconveniences attending the journey across the Dominion which have lessened and are lessening every year. The com- petition is keen with the Yankee lines ; and con- sidering the large numbers conveyed across during the season, and the wild desolate country through which a great part of the Canadian Pacific Railway runs, the officials of the company certainly deserve the greatest credit for their civility and efficiency and the general good management for which it is indeed noted. Passengers must not expect to find much in the I 2 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. way of refreshments outside the train after leaving Quebec and Montreal. Here and there biscuits, stale cakes, and tea of a very inferior description could be had at a station, which was little but a wooden shed, during the 1424 miles between Quebec and Winnipeg ; but a quite disproportionate price was charged for even a piece of bread, and, as there are not refreshment cars attached to every train (and the provisions are apt to fall short even in them), persons who, as emigrants generally do, go straight through from the port of landing to the railway station, would do wisely to supply themselves with comforts for the land journey before they leave England, otherwise they are likely to suffer from real starvation. There are plenty of provisions sold at the Quebec station ; but, when 1300 passengers pounce upon them, those at the back of the crowd come badly off. The first and second class passengers, only touring in Canada, who go on to Montreal in the Allan and Dominion steamers, and there take the regular express with its Pullman's sleeping and refreshment cars, are in a better position in this respect than the emigrant, loaded with luggage, and the steerage passenger who is conveyed no farther by steamer than to Quebec, and there mounts the " excursion train from the old country for the north-west," as the railway employe's call THE WINNIPEG STATION. 3 the special boat train from that port. Fir trees, splendid waterfalls, gigantic lakes, wood-cutters' huts, a region of granite, and the towers of Ottawa, vary the landscape till we reach Winnipeg, the Queen of the Prairie, and a hundred miles from the lake. If Canada remains united for many more years this youngest of her chief cities will probably become her official capital. It grows like a London suburb ; and as old Montreal with all its claims was rejected because it was too French, and upstart self-sufficient Toronto because it was too Yankee, Winnipeg is certain sooner or later to put in a claim for the dignity. In the fine hall which serves as a general waiting-room at the Winnipeg station something like an old-world statute fair was going on. Hotel-keepers and Government agents, householders and clergy, had come to inspect the new arrivals and to engage the likely ones for various occupations. Of course, the unattached of both sexes had the first chance. It was amusing to see a tall handsome girl, dressed in the last English fashion, which had not been seen before in Winnipeg, peering down through her eye- glasses on a tall elderly clergyman, who was, rather shyly it appeared, questioning her as to her qualifications for some educational post he had to offer her. She, like many others of different social grades, had come out in the first ship of the season 4 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. under the charge of a well-known clerical emigra- tion agent, who seemed to have his hands full with the boys of eleven years old and over, whom he was settling with farmers or citizens as hired helps all the way we went along. Rather unwarily, he had given them the whole of the food which was to last for five days on leaving Quebec, and it was of course all eaten, if only to pass away the time, long before they reached their destination. A bread riot ensued, which was happily appeased by the appearance of a baker, who sold twopenny loaves at tenpence each, a short distance before we arrived at this chief or only resting-place on our way. At one end of the waiting-room forty-five China- men were standing or sitting over their baggage, refugees from the United States, waiting for the express to convey them to Vancouver. I afterwards saw several more, standing, as if in an ecstasy, round a barrel of apples in front of a fruiterer's shop in Main Street, Winnipeg. Their costume, which was exactly alike, was a Yankee modification of the Chinese labourer's dress ; and they seemed well supplied with dollars. Canada will not have them, except in British Columbia, where they are admitted on a payment of about 50 a head, so they are passed on, in bond as it were, from the United States, whence they have been expelled, simply QU'APPELLE. 5 because they are Asiatics. There are many reasons given for the law which prevents them from settling in the north-west of Canada : one, that they would mix with the Indians and soon fill up the country with an inferior race, probably hostile to European settlers or their descendants. It seems that they are flocking into Siberia to an extent which gives the Europeans some alarm. But they would un- doubtedly tend to lower the price of labour and manufactures, if they were allowed freely to settle in Canada ; and as so much of the revenue is raised by duties on manufactured goods from the United States and Europe in the present rudimentary con- dition of mechanical arts in the Dominion, this probably has something to do with the prohibition. English labourers also cease to emigrate to those colonies where they are under-sold by Chinese. The train runs through the streets in Winnipeg much as it does in some towns in the United States. " All aboard ! " cry the conductors ; and we are again n route, with only the prairie and a series of villages before us, for another 1000 miles. Qu'Appelle station, our immediate destination, lies nearly 400 miles beyond Winnipeg, and the run was made in fourteen hours, the approach being rather pretty for this district, among bushes and groups of trees. We had seen ice thickly covering Lake Superior on our road, and here again we saw it when at 6 A.M. 6 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. we dismounted from a much over-heated carriage into the chilly morning air. Being Sunday, there were absolutely no spectators. Generally speaking,. Canadians collect to see the one train in the day pass through, as they do all the world over where the railway is still rather a novelty. The principal hotel seemed to be open, and we stepped into it with our handbags, leaving the heavier baggage on the platform, where we were assured it was quite safe. A porter was roused, and rooms were found for us, although in the brilliant sun of a May morning we felt disinclined for more sleep. A bath seemed the greatest necessity : as for food, I subsequently discovered that this hotel was not singular in that none of our party succeeded in convincing the owners that we were exceedingly hungry, having had nothing to eat to speak of since the middle of the previous day, arid should be glad of a meal, however simple, before the regular breakfast hour. But a little before eight the church bell began to ring ; and how pleasant was the sound after so much tossing about and shaking up, on ship and train. It proclaimed that we had arrived in a civilised and law-abiding community, where our national faith had not been left behind. In a town of wooden houses, and with wooden side walks, i.e., pavement,, the church and its internal decorations did great credit to the inhabitants, or perhaps more to their QU'APPELLE. 7 friends and sympathisers in England. 1 The chancel was a gift of a sister as a memorial of her brother, and the handsome cover to the font was also be- stowed by an English friend. The two large stoves and broad stove pipe all the length of the nave, not yet removed for the summer, showed the intense cold for which we must be prepared, and we did have a heavy snow-storm before the day was out. There are two hotels close to the railway at Qu'Appelle station, where people can board and lodge at a dollar and a half and two dollars a day. As in the United States, there is no distinction between plain breakfasts and breakfasts with meat or eggs, or dinners of two courses and more ; for the meals are all on the table d'hote system, only that each guest has his separate arrangement of little dishes, with porridge, potatoes, ham or bacon, butter, etc., before him ; and I am told that it is not usual to ask for a second cup of coffee or tea. However, they give it, if wanted. At second-class hotels in the north-west the beds are only supplied with one sheet ; and as washing is very expensive, travellers would do wisely to take their own sheets and blankets. The diocese of Qu'Appelle is coterminous with 1 The diocese of Qu'Appelle lost two warm friends in January, 1894, the Dean of Lincoln, and the Duchess of Argyll, sister-in-law to the first bishop. 8 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. the province of Assiniboia, and is in the arch- bishopric of Rupertsland. Its settlement was due to the Canadian Pacific Railway being marked out ; but after it had been boomed, as the Canadians call it, by land speculators, rather above its merits perhaps, the colony stagnated for a length of time, though some brick buildings put up in Qu'Appelle station this summer look as if another tide of pros- perity were setting in. St. John's College, which contains the diocesan library and the residence of the bishop, within two miles of Qu'Appelle station, is a great feature of the district. The trail, as they call roads here, winds across the prairie among bushes, and past ponds, through an open space dotted with Indian tents, and among the horses and cattle of the natives feeding on the long thick grass. Then we come in sight of a white gate and the college grounds with the three houses which comprise the establishment standing on a slight elevation, the chapel in the rear of the middle house inhabited by the bishop. There is a bell on the top of the largest building, which can be heard miles away. The prairie seems to stretch interminably on all sides ; and in very clear weather, Fort Qu'Appelle, twenty miles distant, has been seen. The little town of Qu'Appelle station is a pretty object, with its metallic church spire, from the college front. ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE. 9 That Qu'Appelle was most fortunate in its first bishop x goes without saying, when we look at the churches and the vicarages which were built during the eight years of his ministry, and the high respect in which he is universally regarded there, both as a theologian, an organiser, and a kind and wise adviser and friend. His writings in various Canadian Church publications, and his sermons delivered in many parts of Canada, have, I am assured, done much to keep up a high standard among the clergy of the Episcopal Church through- out the Dominion. The large sums he has expended in different schemes for the good of the diocese in connection with St. John's College should also be recorded. It has been and is still a theological school, to train young men, free of expense to themselves, to take holy orders in the diocese. It is an agricultural college, where young Englishmen who wish to settle in the north-west learn the kind of farming best suited to the country more efficiently than they can in England ; and the J The Hon. and Right Rev. A. J. R. Anson, youngest son of the first Earl of Lichfield, was consecrated in Lambeth Palace at the same time with the late Bishop Hannington in 1884. He retired in 1892, and his successor, the Right Rev. W. J. Burn, formerly Vicar of Conniscliff, diocese Durham, was con- secrated at Westminster Abbey on Lady Day, 1893. We understand that the new bishop, like his predecessor, is extremely popular among the Church people of Qu'Appelle. IO EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. payment, .60 a year, cannot leave much room for profit, as they enjoy in return a comfortable colonial home. Besides this, the building, now standing empty, was once occupied by a school, where the sons of colonists able to pay .35 a year (if boarders, much less if day scholars) received a classical and commercial education on a foundation of Church principles. But though this sum, when it includes washing and every extra, sounds little enough to pay in England, it is a good deal in the north-west. Boys are useful at home, and their parents have to hire others to replace them if they go away to school. Then there are Government free schools giving a purely secular education all over the country, and children in remote places are boarded with friends in the towns, that they may attend them. To plant a Church school on the system of our public ones in the north-west, and to give the boys cricket and football in their leisure hours, instead of the useful occupations to which many of them are accustomed, to keep hired people to wait upon them, is introducing an old- world institution into a new colony hardly yet ripe for it. At least, so it appeared ; for the numbers were never large enough to make it self-supporting, and after having, it is said, provoked much jealousy in other centres, it was closed subsequent to the departure of Bishop Anson, who used to make up THE BROTHERHOOD. II the deficit. The Rev. W. Nicolls and the Rev. Thos. Greene, successively head-masters, will long be affectionately remembered by their pupils for their kindness and efficiency. The boys, a high- spirited set of young fellows, used to form a choir for the church of St. Peter at Qu'Appelle ; and the school was certainly a great advantage to the St. Peter's Pro-Cathedral, Qu'Appelle Station. neighbourhood, where it formed a very lively element. When Bishop Anson first went out, this district could not have been much more advanced than the part of Scotland in the days of St. Columba where the Celtic apostle first settled with his brotherhood, who acted as missionaries, and maintained them- 12 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. selves by their labour at the same time. Perhaps this was a precedent which suggested itself to the late Bishop of Qu'Appelle, when he established the Brotherhood of Labour at St. John's College. It was intended to work harmoniously the brothers being fed and clothed gratis with the young Eng- lish agricultural students; and for a time did so, although several who offered themselves did not seem to understand the labour part of the contract, and their work was hardly an equivalent for their maintenance. It was also hardly possible to keep up such an establishment with the simplicity and economy which might be maintained in a purely savage district. The accompaniments of civilisation follow fast in the wake of the colonists in Canada. Stores or shops are set up, where groceries, tinned provisions, jams, pickles, and fruits are sold, but at a very high price. This is one cause of the expense of farm pupils in Canada. They expect to have the luxuries they were accustomed to have in Eng- land, when they can be had ; no matter if a three- pound pot of marmalade costs six shillings and fourpence ; and a fourpenny-halfpenny bottle of sauce costs two and a penny. The brothers also preferred to give the agricultural pupils the dis- agreeable jobs to do about a farm, and keep the pleasant ones for themselves, at least, so some of the pupils thought. Anyway, it was a complicated BISHOP ANSON. 13 establishment to work in union, being also a home for the clergy requiring a holiday or to consult the bishop, as well as when preparing for holy orders ; and as the brothers dispersed one by one to take up lay missionary work, a Government school, or to seek ordination in the Qu'Appelle, and other dioceses, the gaps were not filled up ; but they have done good work elsewhere, for they were all young men, and certainly prepared for their useful careers in St. John's College. The brother superior, the last who remained, is now acting as lay missioner in the lonely settlement at Fort Felly. He was organist in the college chapel as well as in St. Peter's Church, Qu'Appelle station ; and manager of the work on the college farm. In an appendix to his recently published pamphlet on the need of brotherhoods for the mission work of the Church, Bishop Anson points out that his colonial experi- ment made clear that the primary want is " a home in England for the testing and training of men . . . before they are sent forth on an uncertainty to dis- tant countries ". Also, as the bishop explains in another place, to receive them when they have ceased to be really fit for their work, or are incapa- citated through illness. The bishop's wooden residence at St. John's College is in appearance and size like one of the lodges which generally stand at the entrance of an 14 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. English park, the buildings on each side of it being of larger dimensions. The founder, Bishop Anson, visited Canada very soon after this district was first settled. He was then Rector of Woolwich ; and, perceiving the scarcity, if not entire absence, of clergy and churches among the new townships, which were being marked out along the line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, he offered himself as a missionary priest, temporarily, to fill a pressing need, and was, we believe, earnestly requested by the Arch- bishop of Canterbury to allow himself to be conse- crated its first bishop. He was able to take the office without a stipend, which, during his episcopate, he succeeded in raising for his successor, and he spent his private income on the diocese ; for an English curate of five-and-twenty could not have lived with less ostentation or with less of the comforts of life. His friends and relations have also been very liberal in their donations to St. John's College and to the churches, so that this diocese seemed to be looked upon with a good deal of envy by English church- men in some other parts of Canada. The chapel bell rings for prayers twice a day at St. John's College, whether the bishop is at home or not. He necessarily spends much time away from his residence, visiting the different parts of his diocese, which is nearly as large as Great Britain. Bishop Burn, like his predecessor, is a good pedes- BISHOP ANSON. IS trian, and goes about in no comfortable carriage. The episcopal conveyance is what we should call a gig, with the high wheels necessary to prevent it from being overturned where there are no roads, and which just holds the bishop and his driver, usually a student, with a place for a bag behind. The steed is a spirited horse or pony, bred on the place. The diocese is not entirely divided into parishes ; but the scattered churches are served by the bishop and the sixteen priests in the diocese, with the assistance of three deacons and two or three lay readers. A thirty-mile drive on a Sun- day is not thought too much. In winter they have had many hazardous escapes, wandering about in blinding snow-storms throughout a night, unable to regain the track, or to find a habitation. The accommodation in the settlers' shanties, hospi- tably as it is offered, is often extremely rough from the English point of view ; and, indeed, can hardly be otherwise. Sometimes they have camped out on long journeys, being unable to find any night shelter at all. It stands to reason that when the bishops and clergy in the north-west territory have no longer the vigour of youth, they have no course left but to retire, for certainly the bishop cannot rest himself out there. Neither are comforts to be found for invalids in the north-west or on the long land journey home to the old country, as Great 1 6 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Britain is affectionately called throughout the new world. The full use of his limbs and faculties is, we should imagine, one of the most necessary qualifications for a successful emigrant ; yet, to judge from those often sent out, it seems to be a common belief in England that young fellows dis- qualified from entering a profession at home, by want of sight, or health, or some accidental injury, are just the very men likely to make their fortunes in Canada. If they are supplied with a small income these may live comfortably ; but hardly without. The Canadians, like Thackeray's Lord Magnus Charters, can afford to be liberal in a non-political sense ; for there are few of the oldest or noblest families in England and France who are not represented more or less in the Dominion. Quebec boasts that her cemeteries contain the bones of more Waterloo heroes than perhaps any other out of the neighbourhood of the battlefield. St. John's College at Qu'Appelle has sent out many brave young fellows educated at English public schools, and some of them from Oxford and Cambridge, who have taken up land, and are doing their best to prove if this country is capable of supporting a prosperous branch of the English race. A sad fact was elicited from a Government official in 1891, that he had passed between thirty and forty deserted settlers' huts within a space of about thirty-five DESERTED FARMS. I/ miles, and about the same distance to the north- west of Qu'Appelle. Most of the owners are supposed to have migrated to British Columbia, hoping to gain a fortune rather more speedily in some other line of life. 1 Two years of drought drove them away. As in ancient Egypt, years of rain and plenty succeeded those dry summers, and the ponds and lakes are returning to the same condition in which they were found by the first settlers from Eastern Canada and Europe. 2 The ruinous drought suggested to a few of the most conscientious of the settlers that the English were being punished for taking possession of the birthright of the Indian. This idea seems a very unnecessary source of disquiet ; and how well the Government fulfils its treaty with the Indians will be shown later on. The Indian in his savage state and without the protection of English law suffered frequently from famine, and from the unprovoked 1 In the Marquis of Lome's Canadian Pictures, he gives the opinion that there is abundant scope for gentle- men's sons having modest fortunes, as 200 to 500 a year, for leading a life of comfort and enjoyment, riding, shooting, etc. Also, that " a settler who has 500 on his arrival in Manitoba is an independent man, and cannot fail to succeed with ordinary care and energy. Many settlers on arrival have not a tenth part of that sum, and yet they succeed." 2 For "North-west Canadian Schools," see chap. x. Manitoba possesses a diocesan school at St. John's College, Winnipeg. 2 1 8 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. attacks of hostile or starving tribes. He sometimes wandered hundreds of miles in one year in search of subsistence. Now he can obtain a sale for his wares, wages for his labour, medicine in sickness, and as he is gradually imbued with faith in a Heavenly Protector, he is relinquishing the fear of unseen horrors, evil eyes, witchcraft, and the like, which have been always the bane of un- civilised and heathen people. Hunters from the United States and from Eastern Canada are chiefly responsible for driving away the buffalo and larger game ; and it really appears as if the European settlers had been sent to the north-west for his preservation. The clothing forwarded by charit- able societies is most acceptable, in place of the buffalo hide which he can no longer afford ; but the useful rabbit is still left to him ; and its close thick fur, when arrayed in its winter coat, keeps out the cold as well as anything. The only good industrial boarding schools in Canada seem to be those for the Indians. The illustrations in Frank- lin's Voyage to tJu Arctic Sea in 1823, representing the Indians round Carlton, are a great contrast to the civilised hard-working natives and half-breeds whom we see at the present day in that part of Saskatchewan. They now meet with high-minded Europeans, who set them a good example, instead of the outlaws and declasse individuals, who were formerly a great proportion of the white residents. CHAPTER II. Young Farmers in the QrfAppelle Valley Fashionable Arrivals from London Abernethy Some Experi- ences of Gentlemen Settlers in Manitoba and the North-west Icelanders Want of Clergy Church Statistics English Church Workers A Prairie Fire. THE earliest pioneers in Assiniboia knew how to choose their land ; and Pheasant Plains in the Valley of the Qu'Appelle River contains successful farmers who arrived there from England, with little but stout hearts and active hands. Of course, they have had their vicissitudes ; but one of them, having been recouped by his harvests for all he had laid out, was able in three years to pay a visit to Eng- land, and has now let his farm, of which he still retains the freehold. All his life he had wished to be a clergyman ; so, enabled by this success, he came to study for holy orders at St. John's College, Qu'Appelle, and was ordained by Bishop Anson not long before the bishop left the diocese. An- other settler owns a farm three and a half miles from Chickney post-office, and three from Christ 2O EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Church, Abernethy. This young man was born in India, being the son of an Anglo-Indian official. When only eighteen, he left London in the spring of 1883, as soon as he had finished his school career,, knowing nothing whatever of farming and not a soul in the new world. He soon found work with a farmer on the Red River, and ten months of hard labour gave him sufficient experience and enough money in hand to take up a free grant of land, and begin to farm on his own account. He chose the Qu'Appelle Valley for this purpose, and, like most prudent people who do not start with much capital,, he continued for three months to work for a neigh- bouring farmer, and in the meantime sent for a younger brother from England. In June, 1884, the two brothers pitched their tent on the open prairie, having borrowed a yoke of oxen and a waggon to- bring their possessions to this spot ; and they began to farm with a yoke of oxen, waggon, and breaking plough. The first summer they broke five acres, and built a log house and stables, and stacked a considerable amount of hay. In 1885, the year of the French half-breed and Indian rebellion, the younger brother took the yoke of oxen to serve with the transport, which is always a profitable occupation in time of war ; and having no other team, the elder brother spent that time as a hired labourer. This year they had thirteen acres under YOUNG FARMERS IN THE QU'APPELLE VALLEY. 21 crop. In 1886 they broke only twenty-four acres more, for they could not afford hired labour, but occasionally exchanged it ; and by this means they were enabled to build a larger house and another stable. This autumn their parents and five sisters came out to stay with them ; but a year and a half later the new-comers moved into the town of Qu'- Appelle. The place began now to look more like a farm, and received the addition of a blacksmith's shop. The elder brother married soon after his parents and sisters had left; but the year 1888 was disastrous throughout the north-west, and the brothers had a bad crop, as seventy-five acres of their wheat were frozen. In 1889 they broke 100 acres, and had about thirty head of cattle. In 1890 the total yield of grain was over 3000 bushels. In the autumn they sold almost all their cattle, and invested the money in heavy draught horses. In 1891 they broke another seventy-five acres, and the total grain yield was nearly 6000 bushels, for they now possessed 640 acres, having taken up a second homestead. The farm is all of log buildings, and the house lined inside with wood, which adds to the warmth. The farm is supplied with modern implements, three teams of draught horses, cows sufficient to supply the family, and thirty pigs. There is a large pasture field fenced with barbed wire. The acreage under cultivation is over 300 22 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. acres ; and the proprietor with the proceeds of his labour, having bought a house nearer the railway, is now offering this for sale at a very moderate price. When the parents and sisters of the young settlers just described joined them, they knew little of the inner life of a Canadian settlement. Their sons had written home that they were getting on, and had refrained from troubling their relatives with details of their difficulties ; but they did suggest that there would be no room for a governess. The party of seven arrived unexpectedly ; for they did not know that telegrams and letters waited at post- offices till they were called for, at intervals of two- or three weeks ; and at that time the young set- tlers had no post-office nearer than Indian Head, twenty miles away. The family arrived in what they imagined would have been genial weather, but it was really freezing hard as well as blowing and snowing. Seeing no hotel (there is one now) at Indian Head, and little but treeless prairie, they hired an open waggon to take them to Abernethy ; and, each provided with an umbrella and an india- rubber foot-warmer, set off for their long drive. The wind soon disposed of their umbrellas, and by the time they reached Abernethy the foot-warmers were lumps of ice. They expected that the door of their son's house would be opened by a neat servant, and that they should find dinner awaiting FASHIONABLE ARRIVALS FROM LONDON. 23 them, laid English fashion on a white cloth. But as they approached the wooden house, with four rooms and a little watch-tower at the top from which to look after the cattle and sheep, the younger brother came out of the stable with a lantern, in his working clothes ; for they found no announcement of their departure from their home in London had yet reached the young men. Then how to find provisions ? There was pork, and potatoes, and tea, and porridge, but no tablecloth to lay it on ; and the brothers turned out and slept in the granary, to give up all the house for bedrooms. In time the new-comers shook down into place, and the young ladies were the life of the little settle- ment, even giving a dance in this farm-house, till their father bought a residence at Qu'Appelle station, thirty miles away, and they removed there. But after ten years' experience they all allow that they never enjoyed better health than they do in Canada, although the frosts in winter, and the fierce sun and mosquitoes during the short summers, are a serious drawback. Those who wish to take up free homesteads at the present moment cannot expect to be near a station, unless it is in a very remote place. Land companies soon monopolise all they can along a new line ; and the price paid by young Englishmen is often much above the real value, as shown by 24 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. what they have subsequently obtained for the same when improved by years of hard labour. The pioneers of Pheasant Plains took up their free lands about twenty miles north of Indian Head, hardly realising that the growth of population by immigra- tion would be less rapid than nearer the railway line. No human beings but Indians lived in that valley till 1 88 1. Now, a mail cart runs twice a week from Wolseley station on the Canadian Pacific Railway to Chickney post-office on the plain ; and the pretty little church at Abernethy was built by these settlers with their own hands, assisted with money from the English friends of the diocese. It was consecrated by Bishop Anson in the autumn of 1886. It has now even got a surpliced choir. On the north the plain is bounded by the Pheasant Hills, and on the south by the Qu'Appelle River, whence the Pheasant Creek, lined with poplars, meanders, rather lazily it must be owned, and in the very dry summer of 1883 presented little but a dry bed with holes of deep water. The valley through which the creek runs is about 300 feet deep and half a mile wide ; and fossil shells are found on the banks, showing that it was once a much more powerful stream. Here the settlers grow beautiful English vegetables, and have raised good-sized gooseberries and currants from culti- vating the wild fruits of the prairie. EXPERIENCES IN MANITOBA AND NORTH-WEST. 25 It is a common cause of failure in Canada that Englishmen have been in too great a hurry to make a fortune. They have staked their all at once on land recommended to them by some one interested in settling that part, and borrowed money at a very high interest to go on with till they could sell their first crops ; and then when they had grown corn, the price of wheat fell so low that they were not repaid the heavy cost of hired labour, or the hire of the harvesting machinery. Money is lent at eleven and even twenty and twenty-four per cent. No one can live a year and three-quarters in the north-west territory, or in Manitoba, without seeing and hearing of many failures ; one man came out with ^2000, and at the end of two years when he sold everything there was hardly enough to pay his debts. Another in the same period contrived to lose ^500. l In both cases they were perhaps 1 The author of a book describing several years' residence in Australia assures me that, except as regards the climate, all I have said can be paralleled in that colony. The following, from the Daily Telegraph, gives the opinion of one of our consuls in the United States : " The roving young English gentleman's notion of Cali- fornia as a delightful country where a little pleasant work in fruit-farming may be supplemented with a good deal of lawn tennis, shooting, and fishing is, we are assured by Consul Donohoe, purely imaginary. The business of fruit- farming is highly speculative, hired labour is expensive, and 26 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. tempted to speculate, for it is nothing else, by having well-to-do parents who could receive them when they returned to England penniless. One young man, of gentle birth and education, now the owner of a large quantity of cattle and horses and several miles of grazing land, came out with only ten of the small capitalists those only are successful who do their own work, and work unremittingly. Speaking generally, this gentleman affirms that the American farmer has infinitely less comfort than the tenant farmer in Eng- land. The very fondness of young Englishmen for an out-door life militates, we are told, against their success. Mr. Donohoe cites the case of two English lads, well educated and well connected in London, who came to his. district recently because they did not like office life. They are now employed as dock labourers, and, as the employ- ment is not steady, do not make sufficient for their bare support, and rely on remittances from home. This, we are assured, is no isolated instance. Englishmen who intend to send their sons to the colonies or to the United States, should, Mr. Donohoe thinks, send them at twelve or thirteen years of age, so that they may finish their education in the country in which they are to live. " Looking to the fact that last winter there were large numbers of unemployed persons in San Francisco, Consul Donohoe strongly dissuades any skilled artisan or labouring man from coming to San Francisco, or, in fact, the Pacific Coast, in the hope of finding employment. There are more men there now than can obtain steady work; and the only good opening is for competent female domestic servants, who would have no difficulty in obtaining places at from 4 to 6 per month. They are expected to perform more work, however, than in similar places at home." EXPERIENCES IN MANITOBA AND NORTH-WEST. 2/ pounds, and with orders not to return to England for seven years. He began by working as a navvy on the Canadian Pacific Railway line, then in course of construction ; living on the rough food provided by the contractors, and at one point being without water for three days. By this work he saved about twelve pounds, and started with it. A farmer born in Toronto, now farming six miles from Qu'Appelle station, assured me that a hard- working sensible young fellow could make his fortune there in ten years ; and his own red brick house, rich sheaves, and splendid cattle, corrobo- rated his statement that this year he should clear 2000 dollars, and be able to take his wife into a town for a holiday during the winter months. The railways offer cheap return tickets to Toronto and Montreal in the winter for this purpose. A gentle- man's son from Worcestershire, in the same neigh- bourhood, was, I was assured, in process of making his fortune. He was a fine athletic young fellow not twenty, but had taken up a free homestead (for which a two-pound registration fee is required) ; he had got in hay for other farmers on the agreement that a certain proportion was kept for himself as payment ; built his house with assistance, paid back by his own work ; and collected quite a herd of cows. Last winter he was joined by a younger brother and his sister who learned cooking (a very 28 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. necessary art) and baking before she left England ; and she has probably made a great difference to the comfort of this bachelor establishment. But that in many cases the successful farmer has increased his income by usurious money lending, and has risen on the wreck of the unsuccessful English youth, is an established fact ; and that the Manitoba and north-west papers have filled large sheets with the list of farms advertised for sale for the arrears of taxes and payments is only one of many proofs of it. That Canada is a heavily taxed country, accumulating for its resources a large national debt, with paper money of as low a value as 25 cents, and with a territory as huge, and reaching further south than any part of Russia in Europe, has under five millions of population, while Russia in Europe has over ninety millions, does not seem to be generally known. I compare the two States because Russia is the only country with which Canada has any analogy, and both of them are continents rather than States. To have a popu- lation in comparison with her extent is the great ambition of the Canadians ; yet, if they had, she would undoubtedly be subject to the same vicissi- tudes of famine as Russia. Their emigrant agents traverse the United States, Australia, and Europe ; one has been expelled from Roumania, two have been imprisoned in Austrian Galicia ; they have ICELANDERS. 29 been ordered out of Russia and Germany. The poor peasantry whom they allure by describing an El Dorado in comparison to what they are leaving behind, sell up everything to go, and many of them strand in London on the way. Those who do arrive are almost invariably discontented and dis- appointed at first; but after a time settle down, and their children perhaps find an advantage in the change. At any rate, there is no conscription in Canada, although every man capable of bearing arms, and not exempted by clerical, medical, or the higher legal duties, is liable to be called upon to serve in the army if the country requires it. Oddly enough, the Russians and Poles, either Jews or Christians, seem the most dissatisfied of the emi- grants. The Icelanders form an exception to the general rule of disappointment. They have a Lutheran church of their own in Winnipeg, and are settling about the lakes in Manitoba. I was told they found themselves so much better off than in their own volcanic island that they are trying to induce the 22,000 inhabitants left there to follow them to the new world. 1 The United States 1 1 find the winter of 1892-3 has been too much for even the Icelanders. The above statement, given positively by a Government official, is the subject of some jibes recently on the part of a Canadian Icelandic literary organ, which asks how much the Canadian Government has paid to its 3O EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Government wanted to attract them to settle in Alaska ; but being a well-informed literary people, who knew all about that district by report, they wisely declined the offer with thanks. The Canadians divide the English gentlemen settlers into "farmers who work, remittance 1 far- mers, and buckboard farmers," buckboard being the north-west term for a vehicle called a waggon in East Canada, holding two people and baggage behind. The buckboard farmer either employs hired labour entirely, or does nothing but drive about either to see his friends or to the nearest town. This sort of man is a great hindrance to industrious people. No one in Canada ever grudges a meal to an acquaintance ; but he sits and smokes in the agent in Iceland for the stories circulated about his immense success there. 1 People who send money to their sons to buy land would be wise to take the title-deed into their own custody. The deed is not handed over to the purchaser till he has paid off all arrears with the accumulated six per cent, interest ; and the Canadian lender requires the title-deed as a security, owing to the difficulties of suing a man for debt. Last year a third of the land taken up on deferred payments by the first settlers in a Manitoban town was still unregistered, because the payments had never been completed. Some young men have put up at the first hotel they came to, and lived on their capital as far as it would go. They have then gone back to England, and amused their relatives with truly "traveller's stories," as to the impossibility of making a living in the north-west. ICELANDERS. 31 little kitchen much in the way of cooking operations, and encouraging others about the place to come and smoke with him and be idle too. The remit- tance farmer never troubles himself to make his farm self-supporting, but can afford to speculate and gamble a little, and lives on an allowance from home. Why should he work ? For as soon as he sent a good report of his crops, and represented himself to be in flourishing circumstances, the allow- ance would probably stop ! Butter and eggs are generally cheap ; but though wheat was ruinously low in 1891, bread sold by weight was dearer at Qu'Appelle and in Minnedosa, than in London, on account of the expense of the miller and baker's wages. Frozen wheat is often sold mixed up with good flour, and the result is heavy sodden bread ; but as a rule the Canadian bread is as light as the Italian or Viennese. The millers seem to hold the smaller farmers quite at their mercy. Young muni- cipalities are often extravagant ; and in many places they tax themselves to subsidise a miller to make it worth his while to settle in their vicinity. The ratepayers of those places ought decidedly to have a prior right over outsiders to have their wheat ground, but I could not find that this stipulation was in force anywhere; and the millers, if they have quarrelled with their immediate neighbour, will decline to grind his wheat altogether, and in many 32 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. cases will only buy wheat to sell again as flour, and will not grind wheat for the farmers themselves. So as wheat is bought up very cheaply and flour is sold dear, a Canadian miller's trade is a very paying one. It is this mill tax, as well as the school rate, and sending people to hospitals, asylums,, prison, or even back to England, which runs up the municipal rates, in addition to expensive town halls,, and borough improvements an old-country griev- ance imported by Canada. One very touching sight are the pretty little churches built by young settlers,who give their labour,. or what they could afford, in the full expectation that as soon as they had got a church some clergyman would be found to serve it ; and none has come- Then years go by, the church having an occasional service, or even perhaps as much as once a fortnight in the afternoon ; but the fear is, that when the settlers, growing into middle-aged men, have got out of the habit of dressing themselves on Sunday,, and setting aside their work for the sake of going to church, they will no longer care about it. It will stand there for marriages, baptisms, and funerals ; and that is enough. Now and then, there is an educated layman who reads the Church service, and several lay readers have been nomi- nated in the diocese of Qu'Appelle, chiefly for churches on the Indian reserves. Some of the WANT OF CLERGY. 33 clergy eke out their income by taking a Govern- ment school. The number taught must not be less than six, and the lowest salary given is 40. There is a dearth of schoolmasters ; so their place is often filled by women. An English certificate is of no use, but any educated English youth could pass third class in Canada, and it is sufficient to take the country schools, which close part of the year. Many who have lost their money in farming turn to that, and add to their income in harvest time by manual labour; others go into the north- west police, a fine mounted force of about a thousand men who maintain order in the territories, and are drilled and dressed like English soldiers. More than one young man who had wished from childhood to be ordained, but was unable to afford the expensive education of a theological student in England, has come out to Canada to farm or make his living in some other way ; and finding that he could obtain admission at St. John's College, Qu'Appelle, has read for holy orders, and passed a good examination, for Bishop Anson tried to keep up the standard of the clergy. This was so well known among his episcopal brethren in Canada and the States that several he ordained, who became ambitious of larger con- gregations, were warmly welcomed both in America and other parts of Canada, where they obtained 3 34 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. preferment The very nature of cattle-farming and horse-ranching, which is perhaps the most remunerative to settlers, obliges many to live far away from villages, with very rare opportunities at the best of times of entering a church ; and for these " sheep without a shepherd " a prayer is daily offered up in St. John's College Chapel, " that they may continue holy in their lives," and that pastors may be found to minister to them. Every anxious parent sending out a boy to Canada probably thinks a little of the religious atmosphere among which he is or is not likely to be thrown. The statistics given by Bishop Anson in his speech at the Lichfield Diocesan Conference show that the Anglican Church numbers 644,000 members out of the nearly five millions of people in Canada, and that in Manitoba there are only 31,000 Church people in a population of 152,000. The Canadian Almanack for 1891 puts down no Sunday schools for Anglicans ; but this we know to be a mistake, though they are far from numerous. The Romanists number two millions, including Indians, throughout the Dominion, and the Presby- terians stand next ; the Methodists come third, and the Church of England fourth ; we have heard even a leading Swedenborgian in the United States assert that if the Church of England would but call herself the Catholic Church, or by some ENGLISH CHURCH WORKERS. 35 name that meant cosmopolitan, not national and local, many more Americans would be found to rally round her standard. Yet, even with this national and local name, she is extremely well represented in the United States ; and the American statistics show that throughout the English-speak- ing communities of the globe (they say about 118,300,000) she stands first among Christian forms of belief in the number of her adherents. The Canadians send missionaries to Japan and India ; but when we look at the spiritual needs of the north-west it seems strange that few Eastern Canadians can be found to serve in that territory, so that it is mainly dependent on men from Eng- land. Taking it altogether, Canada is a moral and religious country, with laws to regulate the ob- servance of Sunday, when shooting is forbidden, and no train starts from a terminus. As the trains which otherwise would have left Montreal and Vancouver on Sunday must have respectively reached Qu'Appelle station on Thursday, no train ran through on that day, so that there was only the local post. We have seen herd-boys come seven miles on foot, with only a chance of a lift part of the way back, to an afternoon or evening service ; a young man walk thirty miles through the snow to church on Easter Sunday ; a couple bring a baby to be 36 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. baptised over forty miles ; and people arriving in time for the morning service wrapped up like Esquimaux, having driven eight miles in a sledge when the thermometer was 10 below zero. It is all very well to say that they expect to meet their friends and have a gossip ; that it is the only opportunity some of the out-lying farmers have of seeing another civilised being, and so forth. The young Englishman of modern times is better brought up as regards his religious education at our public schools than were his forefathers in the days when the poet Cowper pointed out that while boys were taught the Roman and Greek Pantheon, they were left ignorant of the fundamental truths of Christianity. Even when thrown on the prairie to gain his livelihood, and with nothing more swift than an ox-waggon, not even a bicycle, he will find his way occasionally to church, however distant it may be. Many grateful thanks are due to the English friends of the Canadian dioceses, particu- larly ladies, who have supplied these distant churches with beautiful embroidery, and other accessories of Divine worship in costly materials, which the colonists themselves have neither money nor time to procure. We could imagine that the Roman ladies in ancient days devoted time and means in the same way to the decoration of the early English churches ; and it is to be hoped that A PRAIRIE FIRE. 37 the colonists in Canada will preserve their ecclesias- tical art-treasures for the benefit of future genera- tions with the sacred care that they were preserved in Britain. The banner in the church of St. Peter at Qu'Appelle station is really second to none in the mother country for beautiful design and work- manship. Medicine Hat, Moosomin, and several other churches might be envied in many parts of England. But fire is a terrible enemy to wooden churches in wooden towns ; and it is greatly to be hoped that the settlers will replace most of the unsubstantial edifices with brick or stone, when they have had a few more good harvests. There are still settlements in the north-west, where the kitchen or parlour of a farm, larger than the rest, has to be used for the Church services ; and where, to quote Bishop Selwyn, old settlers are ready to weep on hearing the hymns their mothers once sang to them, played on a cracked old harmonium, which has been carried miles up the country on a missionary waggon. If these services are not so well attended as might be expected, it is generally owing to the difficulty of letting the outlying farmers, fifteen and twenty miles away, know exactly where or when they are to take place. The grass of the prairie burns so easily in dry weather that a fire lighte i carelessly for camping out at night, and even lighted matches thrown 38 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. about, have destroyed miles of corn and pasture, and endangered the safety of many homesteads and stacks. Far beyond the sight of the flames, the heavy murky sky and stifling atmosphere proclaim a fire in the neighbourhood, perhaps only seven or eight miles off; and then, if a farm is not provided with a fire-guard, all hands run out to make one. This is done by ploughing up a piece of ground several yards wide all round the homestead, so as to destroy the herbage. If the wind is high, the flames literally race along the parched grass, and the fire-guard stops them. One of the clergy leaving Fort Pelly for his short summer holiday to be spent at St. John's College, accompanied by a lay reader, had a most narrow escape in 1891. The journey lies through a wide lonely district, and one night is generally spent " camping out ". The spot chosen is regulated by the neighbourhood of water, which is rather scarce in this part. By the second night Fort Qu'Appelle is generally reached, and it con- tains several hospitable families. The travellers were proceeding, surrounded with thick smoke, when they saw the flames of a prairie fire fast gaining upon them on both sides. The horse ap- preciated the situation, for it required no whip, but galloped desperately forward ; and the dog following them was pulled up on to the vehicle, when its hair was already singed. When by great exertion they A PRAIRIE FIRE. 39 had gained some distance beyond the fire they looked back, and saw the trail they had just passed enveloped in flames. They arrived at St. John's College with part of their conveyance smoked and charred, and the horse slightly scorched, giving evidence that they had had a race for their lives. Possibly some Canadians may think that the relation of these incidents will deter Englishmen from coming to Canada. On the contrary, dangers and hairbreadth escapes are an attraction rather than otherwise to the spirited British youth, tired of what he looks upon as jogtrot life in the old country; and the experienced British agriculturist will only reflect that he must lose no time in in- suring his house when he arrives in the north-west. A farmer in Manitoba, only lately from England with his family, had his house, stables, and stacks entirely destroyed by one of the children lighting a lantern in the evening, and throwing the lighted match behind the wood box, where it ignited some shavings. Yet the insurance office nobly paid for the damage. Boys accustomed to brick and stone houses are very apt to be careless of fire in a wooden one ; and a farm boy, ordered to burn some rubbish in the yard, quietly lighted it up at the side of a hay rick to prevent the wind from blowing it out ; and in a few minutes the rick was in a blaze. The danger of fire in these log and frame houses is 40 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. perhaps lessened by the impossibility of having a fire in the summer in any room but the kitchen, as the other stoves and pipes are removed when the spring begins, and are not generally put back again till October, the holes in the walls through which the pipes run making a comfortable ventilator during the heat of summer. The first year I was in Canada there were slight falls of snow at inter- vals till the end of June, and all May was wet and cold. The house at which I stayed was for the north-west rather a large one, with spacious rooms, plenty of draughts, and no means of warmth but in the kitchen. Petroleum stoves had not reached this colony, and methylated spirits were not obtain- able for an English Etna. As the kitchen was already over-full with four hired indoor people, and two very rough outdoor working men, and three working boys, as well as casual visitors, who collected there in the evening and in the rainy weather with their books and newspapers, I was often glad to go into a neighbour's house and warm my hands by his kitchen stove, where there was generally no one but the cook, and now and then a passing traveller who came in for the same purpose. No wonder a cook is a popular functionary when she commands the only fire in the establishment, and the thermometer May though it is is at freezing- point ! I stayed at a friend's house just before I A PRAIRIE FIRE. 41 left Canada ; it contained a large family of daughters, and was a very comfortable residence. But every hand outside was employed in trying to get in the harvest before it was spoilt by the frost. One night the thermometer stood at 24 Fahr.; nobody could be spared to put up stoves and pipes, so the kitchen, which would not have held all the family at once, was our resort ; and one night when I went to bed, my towels hung over a chair by the little window, were frozen tight to the glass. And yet a sojourn in the north-west is very beneficial in some cases of consumption and delicate lungs. The winter is as varied in its temperature as the summer. The thermometer sometimes rises above freezing-point in December, and there are even very occasional soft muggy winter days. Alberta, and even Medicine Hat, are influenced by the chinook, a warm wind which blows from the Pacific; and the average of winter cold is not so low as in the most central districts, though they are even higher above the level of the sea. CHAPTER III. Canadian Hospitality Storm Winter Casualties Amusements Newspapers Vegetation Statistics of Cold Archbishop Tache's Opinion Real Progress The Census Booming. HOSPITALITY is most truly understood in the north-west of Canada. No guest ever seems to be found de trop. Householders leave the outside door unlocked at night, so that a wayfarer may be able to shelter himself till morning ; and a sudden storm coming on, perhaps on Sunday evening, will add seven or eight people to the ordinary number on an outlying farm. A wild storm of rain or snow is seen to be rising, and, as in a prairie fire, it is a scamper for bare life. The preparatory driving wind is blowing the light soil, like brown snow, over trees and crops ; and the animals are excitedly rushing about, looking for a hiding-place. A house seems to become common property on such occasions, and all travellers make for the nearest. Here come a lady and gentleman on horseback, some of the aristocracy of the district, riding a mile out of their way, as they had WINTER CASUALTIES. 43 five miles to get home, to take advantage of the only dwelling on the road. Then a humble pony cart containing a Presbyterian minister, his wife and child lately arrived from Scotland, and alarmed by the extraordinary blackness of the heavens. At last the rain begins, sweeping down and forming rapid brooks and waterfalls in a few minutes ; and some herd-boys, struggling against it, reach the friendly shelter soaked to the skin. A few more appear in the same condition ; and the resources of the house are taxed to find dry clothes, supper, and accommodation for the night. The Presbyterian minister and his wife insist on returning seven miles home, and set off in the first break in the storm ; they have left three little children behind them, with only a herd-boy of thirteen, and are afraid to pass the night away from them. The wife gratefully accepts the loan of a felt hat instead of her Sunday bonnet ; and blankets and waterproofs to wrap up the baby in case the storm comes on again ; and off the brave souls go. Many fatalities occurred the first winter I was there, and take place every year from people being unable to find a dwelling ; for an uninhabited house, like an Eastern khan, without a fire, would be of little use. The Romanist priest at Regina was returning home in a covered waggon which contained a stove, a very unusual luxury in a con- 44 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. veyance. Twenty- five miles from home his horses could get no further, and, anxious to arrive in time for his Sunday services, he got out to walk ; he proceeded eighteen miles, and then sat down and died. A farmer was taking his corn to be ground ; he had only oxen, and oxen cannot be hurried ; and he became numbed with cold. The first hut he passed was deserted, and he could not undo the door. He plodded on through the snow, and saw another, where the people had gone to bed, but he roused them up to help him. His legs were frost-bitten, and, following the Spartan treatment in use in Switzerland, they were plunged into icy water ; but it was too late, and a day or two after- wards he was taken to the hospital at Winnipeg, where they were amputated. I have heard that among the Esquimaux they treat a frost-bitten part by holding it in their warm skin-gloved hands till sensation returns, which seems like a common- sense method. Canadians make a distinction be- tween frost-bitten and frozen. The last is only what a very cold winter's day will cause in Eng- land, if the hands grow numb with cold, and feel as though they were being pricked with pins and needles, when sensation returns. It is curious, when the thermometer is below zero, to see liquids freezing before your eyes, and plates being washed in almost boiling water, with the WINTER CASUALTIES. 45 steam rising up, and freezing on the wall and window. The breath freezes in festoons round the room. Every drop of water for every purpose has to be thawed ; and it chills the kitchen so much when pans and kettles of ice and snow are thawing on the top of the stove, that cooking becomes a dif- ficulty. With all the drawbacks to baths and washing clothes, when water has to be thawed for animals as well as man, young and poor settlers are apt to dispense with both till warmer weather. This is supposed to bring on a complaint called prairie scurvy ; but it often looks like gouty eczema, and is possibly quite as much caused by want of vegetables and fruit, as it was particularly prevalent one year when the potato crop failed. It is imagined to be infectious. The calves on the prairie are sometimes afflicted with a kind of ringworm, which the herd-boys are apt to catch, and that is cer- tainly infectious. This, and the insects, which are difficult to keep out of wooden houses, is an ob- jection to lodging in doubtful quarters in out-of-the- way parts of Canada ; and it is the same in the United States. Deserted huts should be avoided, even if it entails camping out. We have known a couple who passed a night wrapped up in their sleigh outside in mid-winter, rather than accept the proffered hospitality of a French Canadian. Canadians, like the Yankees, call all flies and 46 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. insects by the original name for a Norfolk Howard. A child told me in church that I had one on my sleeve, and looking for it with some dismay, I saw nothing but a harmless spider. The Canadians, like all northern nations, are extremely fond of dancing, and a series of socials are held through the winter in most of the north- west towns. The town hall is generally built for this purpose, and a shilling or sixpence admits any one who likes to go. Young men who want to explore other districts, and cannot afford the expense, will now and then organise an amateur play or concert which they perform at most of the towns on the railway as they go along, and thereby pay their way. Horse-racing, steeple-chasing, cricket matches, cattle shows, choir meetings, and other festivities, secular and religious, have all been imported by Canada with special entertainments of her own. She has some well-edited newspapers, among which are the Manitoba Free Press, printed at Winnipeg ; the Canadian Church Magazine, the Canadian Churchman, and the Week, published at Toronto ; the Regina Leader, the Qu ' Appelle Pro- gress ; while Prince Albert supports three weekly papers ; also the Fort Qu'Appelle Vidette, the Moose- faw Times, the Medicine Hat Times, and so on ; besides the older publications in Eastern Canada. The Illustrated Dominion is a splendid paper. The VEGETATION. 47 country is by no means in a state of mental stagna- tion ; and scarcity in Europe and the United States would make an enormous difference to its pros- perity. The spring of 1893 found 6,560,000 bushels of wheat waiting for transport at Fort William and other points of the Manitoban and north-west territory. The Canadian lakes produce most excellent fish, the white fish especially ; and the wild birds, such as the prairie chicken, often have fat upon them like that sometimes seen on tame pheasants reared round an English house. The wild saskatoon is a very luscious fruit, like a black currant and bilberry combined, and some years is most plentiful. Straw- berries and raspberries, wild hops and wild goose- berries, are also found in great quantities in many places ; but real apple trees will not grow in Assiniboia or Manitoba, not even the Siberian crab. In summer, the prairie is carpeted with wild flowers of beautiful colours, many of them the uncultivated original of common English garden plants. But in the prairie country there are no earthworms, slugs, or toads. The frog makes its voice heard very loudly in the ponds, or " sleughs," as they are called out here ; and there is a repulsive- looking fleshy green snake very commonly found. I measured one which was two feet eight and a half inches. It is quite harmless, and possibly performs 48 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. the duty of refertilising the land, as the earthworm does elsewhere. As summer tourists to the north-west are very apt to go away with the impression that the fierce heat they feel in July can only be followed by a mild winter, and the land companies' agents are willing to foster that delusion, I append some observations made in 1893 by the Manitoba Free Press, and supported by every newspaper through- out the north-west. " The coldest in ten years. "Elkhorn, Feb. 8. During the past fortnight the temperature has ranged from 49 to 60 below zero. The weather has now moderated. " Little Pat Gordon was found dead in bed this morning from cold. He had been unwell on the previous day. " The coal supply ran short last week ; but a quantity arrived for the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was distributed around. "Napinka snow-bound. " Napinka, Feb. 7. Every person here is snow- bound. The longest and most severe storm ever known by the oldest settlers is still raging, though it is moderating this evening. For a full week the temperature has registered daily from 40 to 53 STATISTICS OF COLD. 49 below zero, with the wind west and south. The first train for a week passed from here over the Glenboro road. The regular train for Estevan has been a full week getting to Oxbow, about sixty miles. Two trains are west fighting snow. To-day Supt. Murray, with a gang of about fifty men, left Napinka for the west. After working all day on about three miles of road they returned to Napinka. They hope to go as far as Melita, eight miles, to- morrow. The snow is from two to twelve feet deep in the cuts. There has been no mail from Estevan for ten days. W. Scott, who keeps a first- class house, is very busily engaged in looking after the comfort of the many travellers storm-bound here. The town is alive with men, but farmers cannot get out from their homes. Business men are in the dumps, business being at a stand-still. " Moosomin, Feb. 8. On Saturday last, Robert Thompson, who lives about sixteen miles north of here, brought into town a young man very badly frozen in the face, ears, hands, and feet. Thomp- son took him in and cared for him as best he could, and on Saturday brought him into town. On arrival here, comfortable clothing was provided for the sufferer, and he was carefully attended to at the Lake house until Sunday, when the Town Council, having taken the matter up, sent him in charge of A. Bell, town constable, to the Brandon 4 50 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. hospital for treatment. The young man is appar- ently about twenty years of age, and claims to be a native of the West Indies. " The cold at Port Arthur. " Port Arthur, Feb. cS. The weather has moderated considerably. Since ist February the average minimum temperature has been twenty-five and a fraction below zero. For the month of January the average was thirteen and a fraction below zero. From 2nd January to the /th the average was thirteen below; from the 24th to the 3ist fifteen and a half below. Six weeks of such incessant cold with wind storms and snow were never known here before. Thirty-five below zero is the lowest point that the thermometer has fallen. The pro- spects for an early opening of navigation are poor, as the ice on the Thunder Bay is fully three feet thick. " Ward's terrible fate. " A correspondent of the Free Press forwards a report of the death of Ward near Swift Current : * A most heartrending and fearful case of death from exposure occurred here early this morning. W. G. Ward, an employe of the Canadian Pacific Railway, whose duty it was to act as signalman, STATISTICS OF COLD. 51 while engaged with a gang of men, who with an engine and snow plough were clearing the track at Leven, some eight miles west of this place, returned east towards Swift Current at about half-past one this morning, to protect the gang from the Pacific express then overdue. The temperature was be- tween thirty and forty below zero, and a heavy wind storm and snow drifts came on. His body was found about half a mile west of the railway station.' " Last night's mail from the west brought letters and papers several days old, extracts from which show that Manitoba was not the only province that experienced bitterly cold weather last week. " The Golden New Era says : ' This week, as appears to be the case everywhere in the mountains, severe weather has prevailed, and up to date of writing (Thursday) is still prevailing. Wind has been accompanied by sleet at times, and when these two evils subside the thermometer is found to regulate very low. Thirty-six degrees below .zero has been the record to date. Frost bites have been at a premium, but with the average man it is once bitten twice shy, and consequently those who can remain at home do so.' " The Calgary Herald gives the thermometer for the week ending Thursday, all below zero Fahr. : 52 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. MAX. MIN. Friday, Jan. 27 .. . 2 22 Saturday, Jan. 28 . . . . 19 26 Sunday, Jan. 29 .... 24 30 Monday, Jan. 30 . . . . 41 45 Tuesday, Jan. 31 . . . . 38 48 Wednesday, Feb. i 26 43 Thursday, Feb. 2 ... . 34 42 Barometer, 26-660. " One day's temperature, reading at points in British Columbia, was as follows : Victoria ..... 9 above zero. Vancouver 5 Westminster .... 5 below zero. Nanaimo ..... 4 Mount Pleasant 15 ,, Clinton 32 ,, Ashcroft 16 ,. Bridge Creek 35 134 Mile House . . . 39 150 Mile House 38 ,, Soda Creek 32 ,, Quenelle 32 Barkerville . . . . . 41 " Sixty-one at Battleford, and sixty-five at Henri- etta, sixty miles further east, yesterday morning, says the Edmonton Bulletin of Thursday. " A painter named George Griffin, who went hunting from Deep Bay, has been found near Comox, British Columbia, paralysed and half frozen. He is supposed to have had a stroke, STATISTICS OK COLD. 53 fallen, and afterwards become half frozen, the stroke itself being possibly due to cold and ex- posure. He lies in a precarious state. " Monday, the 3Oth inst, was the coldest day ever recorded in Victoria, British Columbia, up to then. The official thermometer at Esquimalt showed a minimum of one and a half degrees below zero, and in the city itself it is stated that five degrees below zero was registered. The next severest cold snaps known to Victoria were on 2Oth December, 1879, when zero was recorded; and 5th February, 1887, when the minimum register of temperature stood at '06 above zero. " The trains. " The delayed Canadian Pacific Railway trains from the coast arrived last evening at 5 '30, and this morning at 2'i5. Not many passengers were on board, but their experiences with cold are very interesting, and go to show that nothing equal to the severity of the weather of the last week has been known. At Calgary, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, and Regina, no thermometer registered lower than forty-eight to fifty-five degrees below zero. The railway company had considerable trouble attending to the wants of the passengers, and dining cars were kept on the move looking after the numerous trains. Last night a chinook wind 54 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. was blowing at Medicine Hat and vicinity, and the snow of several days was rapidly melting away. " Great Falls, Mont., March 27. Last Thursday six Englishmen, four Austrians, and one German, all labourers, left Maple Creek station, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, to walk to Havre, on the Great Northern Railway, a distance of 125 miles. When near the boundary line they encountered so- much snow and suffered so severely from cold weather, that the Englishmen weakened and turned back. The others kept on, and reached Havre last night in such a deplorable condition that they could hardly walk. Two of the Austrians had badly frozen feet, while all of the party were suffering from snow blindness. They came here to-day for medical treatment, and are in the county hospital. It is feared some of them may die from the effects of exposure." The Romanist Archbishop Tache, of St. Boniface,, near Winnipeg, who has worked for over thirty-six years in Manitoba and the north-west, said four- teen years ago that he was not surprised at the impression " produced on the tourist while he experiences the real delights of a summer excursion over these plains. . . . But here comes the end of August. Already cold is threatening ; severe frosts prevent the ripening of cereals, and expose them to complete destruction. At other times a REAL PROGRESS. 55 similar result may follow drought. Winter has arrived in the beginning of November, and con- tinues more or less in April; and, bon del! what winter ! Often mercury is frozen during entire weeks." Even a Canadian writer, who, in 1880, speaks most enthusiastically of the prospects of the north- west, and of Manitoba, how they will outdo the United States, and so on, adds: "Of course there are drawbacks ; and Winnipeg, like every other western town, is filled with disappointed emigrants, who would be glad to get home again. There is not a state or province in all America where this has not been the experience of thousands. They went in and remained because they could not get out. At the best the ordinary emigrant's lot for the first few years is a hard one. No sensible man will ' go west,' who is fairly well off east ; and should he go to Manitoba, he need not expect a fool's paradise." And the Vicar of Stoneycroft, Liverpool, while recommending emigration to the discontented, or to those in debt and difficulty, says : " Don't imagine that you will find things made easier for you in the new world than they are here. Nothing of the sort. Indeed, as I have warned you, it is quite otherwise. Don't ' chuck up ' a good thing here with the notion that a fellow will fall on his feet somehow out yonder. Don't 56 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. let the lazy fellow who is always trying to shirk work at home, who loves to hang about the street corners and the village ale-house, delude himself with the notion that there is a welcome awaiting him in a land where all men are at work, busy, eager, hopeful in carrying on the God-assigned task of conquering the earth and subduing it." And what real progress the north-west has made since 1880, when the eastern mail came on dog sleighs, and the only way of getting about with luggage was in a Red River cart ! This is a primitive conveyance made entirely without iron, which, by taking the wheels off and putting it on a buffalo hide, could be turned into a boat or coracle, wherewith to cross a river. Undoubtedly, if emi- grants lived as economically now as they did then, they would sooner acquire a competence ; but making money is not after all the only considera- tion, and many of them live much too poorly as it is. I heard from a clergyman who had a church in Manitoba, that it was no use handing round the offertory bag, for the congregation had not a five- cent piece (the smallest coin taken except at the post-offices in the north-west) among them, and did everything by barter. It is well known that in the United States autho- rised figures are not always reliable, and that for years the city of St. Paul gave a false return of its THE CENSUS. 57 population, to appear bigger than its neighbour and rival Minneapolis. 1 This kind of thing has been imitated in Canada. There was rather an amusing debate in her Parliament with regard to her last census. Provincial people knew that names were put down of settlers who had returned to England, and others visiting another part of Canada appeared twice ; but they were hardly prepared for the facts that came out in this debate. A member cast doubts upon the reliability of the returns by showing that in villages with which he was acquainted, sewing girls, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and other individual workers, must have been set down as manufacturing industries, in order to make up the number given. The Government advocate said all the details of the census were confidential ; that the enumerators were bound by oath not to reveal them ; but further discussion showed that in another vil- lage a blacksmith with a solitary forge, a carpenter who did odd jobs here and there and could make rolling pins and bread trays, and an old Indian living in a tent who weaved grass mats and baskets, were three out of six manufacturing industries with which the town was accredited in the returns. "Canadians who will hear no more of their boodling politicians," headed the obituary one day in the principal organ of Manitoba and the north-west. 1 Vide Wisconsin Press, 1890. 58 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Canadian officialdom seems very sensitive about the climate; and many a poor fellow has left the country again with his health permanently damaged because he had believed when he read that the cold in Canada is not felt so much as in England, and that ordinary English clothes are quite sufficient. The manager of a weather record office was threat- ened to be deprived of it because he gave the returns lower than the land company's agents in the neigh- bourhood liked. He did his best to bring up the thermometer, for he put it on the part of the wooden wall where the kitchen chimney pipe ran up just outside, and it had a wooden cover over it as well. A few days after I arrived in Canada I was paying a morning visit when a land company's agent came in. Seeing I was a stranger he began to talk of a new line that had just been surveyed > and there was not a doubt would be completed in the coming summer. He added, " the land was consequently being bought up at a high price along the road, and would go up a good deal higher". When he was gone, my friend told me there was no more prospect of this line being made than five years before (and it has never been made yet) ; but the land agent saw I was fresh from the old country, and thought I might take the land at his estimate, which no old resident would. This is one way in which fortunes are made in the new world. CHAPTER IV. Prince Albert Regina Saskatoon Duck Lake A Winter's Drive The Bush Hotel Carlton Snake Plain The Indian Resents Indian Agency Prince Albert Projected Railway to Hudson Bay. PRINCE ALBERT is the most northerly town in the world. So, in 1891, wrote the widow of a Canadian premier, and a member of the peerage. Prince Albert is latitudinally situated 250 miles north of Folkestone, about the same as a York- shire town ; but the true Canadian ignores every- thing beyond Canada and the States Edinburgh, Christiania, Stockholm, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Moscow, Copenhagen, and all the minor towns between Yorkshire and the North Pole, are nothing to him. The chief point about Great Britain taught in the schools is a justification of the policy of the United States when she separated herself from the mother country. The English armies, which added New France to the British Empire, are described by Canadians as if they were auxili- aries of a native Canadian force which had resolved to expel the French. 6O EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Many years ago, going over the field of Waterloo, an American of the party asked the guide if the Prince of Orange, in whose honour the Lion Mount was erected, was a son of the King of England. I should not have wondered at this question if I had then known Canada. The Roman, the Saxon, the Norman invasion of England, or any allusion to them, conveys nothing at all to the educated Canadian, unless he has read something about them in a novel. But are we, as a rule, any wiser about Canada? George III. was the first King of England with whom Eastern Canada had anything to do ; so her knowledge of English history begins and would end with him, if it had not been for the visits of some of our present royal family to Canada, and the extreme popularity of her gracious Majesty in the north-west. Her birthday is one of the national holidays. The first place of worship erected in Prince Albert was a Presbyterian chapel in 1886, about which time it dropped its old Indian name. The Hudson Bay Company subsequently removed their chief establishment from Carl ton, and opened a store there ; and, in spite of having no railway near it till 1890, it has improved and increased more rapidly than many of the towns further south. I left Qu'Appelle station for Regina by the one SASKATOON. 6 1 train in the day going west, which is timed to arrive at Qu'Appelle at a quarter to four A.M., but on this occasion did not arrive till six. The new branch line from Regina to Prince Albert had not been opened for passenger traffic more than three months, and two trains a week run each way. They professed then to leave Regina at eight A.M., and to arrive at Prince Albert at nine P.M. ; but they never seemed to keep those hours, and now run at night. Railway boards in this country are quite irresponsible ; and to Canadians, except when eating their meals, time does not seem to be of much consequence. I reached Regina at seven A.M., in cold November weather, the thermometer scarcely above zero, and waited an hour and three- quarters till the Prince Albert train was ready to start. Regina was a poor station to wait in, but a larger one is being erected. We were under cover, with a stove to keep us warm, and that was all ; but at Saskatoon, a little town on the South Saskatchewan, the train stayed more than an hour to give the passengers time to dine, which they could do very fairly for half a dollar. The Saskatchewan, in consequence of several dry seasons, had been so low the previous year that a steamer could not reach this point from Prince Albert, a great loss to the 120 inhabitants, who constitute, what the guide books call, this 62 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. rising and flourishing town. The prairie stretches wide on each side, and was covered with snow, and there were about forty piles of whitened buffalo bones standing by the line, waiting till a train could convey them away to a sugar refinery in the United States. Half-past nine P.M., and no hotel to be found at Duck Lake. It is Saturday night, and the train goes on to Prince Albert, forty miles distant, and there will be no more trains either way till it returns on Monday morning on its road back to Regina. But the kind hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Pozer, who had a spare bedroom in their house, relieved me of any difficulty in finding a shelter for the night. Mr. Pozer is agent to Messrs. Stobart, the "universal provider" of Duck Lake; but his house is separate from the store. The whole town consisted of about two dozen wooden houses, which had been moved a few months before, three-quarters of a mile, to place it contiguous to the new station on the line from Regina to Prince Albert. The Canadian wooden houses are moved about on rollers or wheels like caravans, when required. The train is still a new sight, a never-ceasing wonder to the Indians and half-breeds in the vicinity, and there was a crowd of them at the station, who had waited for hours, only to see it come in. They are supposed to have a partiality for the large nails which pin down CARLTON. 63 the rails to the sleepers, as they are of use in making cart wheels ; so the contractors, very considerately, had a number strewed about the line to let them all have enough, and to spare, that they might not risk the lives of the passengers by meddling with the new rails. The post at that time still came by mail cart from Qu'Appelle station across the Touchwood Hills, to Duck Lake, en route for Prince Albert ; and a man on horseback carried the Carlton bag to its destination, whence an Indian fetched the letters from Snake Plain, forty-five miles distant from Duck Lake. In the autumn and spring there was sometimes a delay of weeks on the road, owing to the post having to cross both the north and the south branches of the Saskatchewan, and the un- settled condition of the ice. Business men began to complain when the railway was opened which would bring letters from Winnipeg in thirty-two hours, and they found the mail still conveyed by a system that always kept letters six days on the road, so it was altered about two months later ; but on that occasion my letters announcing my visit to Snake Plain had waited two extra weeks, unable to cross the South Saskatchewan at Batoche, and I saw them handed over to the Indian mounted postman at Carlton as I was continuing my journey. 64 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. I stayed with the Pozers over Sunday. There was then no Episcopal church, nor as far as I know any place of worship within some miles ; and as the inhabitants of Duck Lake have not yet become blue ribbon ists, Sunday appeared to be passed in a continuance of Saturday night revels, with the result that there were several broken heads and other catastrophes. The most serious was the broken leg of a mounted policeman ; and the doctor, who had been summoned to attend a lady at a distance, was still waiting to cross the river till it should either entirely freeze or thaw. However, a bitterly cold day enabled him to pass it, and relieve the sufferer, who was impatiently awaiting him, stretched on the barrack floor, with a gun- stock fastened tight to his fractured limb. Finding no one going in the direction of Snake Plain I hired a "rig," or "buckboard," for three dollars to take me as far as Carlton. I fancy the Siberian convicts are carried to their destination in the same kind of springless vehicle as these rigs. They are like old-fashioned gigs, stuck upon a five- barred gate on wheels ; and the draught coming up between the rails in cold weather is very chilling to the feet. As the thermometer was some degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), we required to be attired almost like Esquimaux to travel safely in this conveyance ; but the Canadians do not dress as SNAKE PLAIN. 65 warmly as in North-eastern Europe. We read of Carlton in Sir Wm. Butler's Great Lone Land, and Lord Milton's North-west Passage by Land, and it is marked on maps as a Hudson Bay Com- pany's settlement 200 years old. I had heard there was a hotel, known as the Bush hotel, where I could be put up comfortably. But everything is comparative ; and since Sir Wm. Butler and Dr. Cheadle wrote their books, the French half-breed rebellion has turned Carlton into an almost deserted ruin. One store and the Bush hotel are all that remain of the once flourishing little wooden town ; but there are other houses, and a Romanist chapel and school, at some distance. The Bush hotel is a wooden farm-house, consist- ing of two rooms : the kitchen, and a dormitory above it. Toussaint Lucier, an old French half- breed, and his Indian wife, are the proprietors, and a fine stalwart row of tall sons and daughters, and a few grandchildren, still live under the family roof. The walls of the kitchen were adorned with some Roman Catholic pictures, and it had the general appearance of a peasant's house in France ; but the French Canadians, mixed with Indian blood, are a much stronger-looking, handsomer race than any class in France ; for they lead a healthy, out door life, fishing and shooting ; and as timber can be had for the cutting, they need never suffer 5 66 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. from cold indoors. The Indian wife had fallen into the French style, except that in the evening she consoled herself furtively in a corner with a pipe ; and she, like all the family, spoke very good French. I asked her age, as her husband had asked mine, which seems the custom in these parts. She was sixty-two, and had not a white hair among her thick black tresses. One married daughter was living there because her husband was in the Winni- peg lunatic asylum. Her youngest child, little Toussaint, was the pet of the family ; but the elder, who was about six years old, seemed to have in- herited her father's malady. She would sit down and suddenly burst out crying for no apparent reason, and this continued sometimes ten minutes. At first I checked these paroxysms with apples and candies which I had brought with me for some children at Snake Plain ; but I heard from the rest of the family that it was her constant habit, and it was probably a not uncommon instance of a melan- choly temperament in the child of an insane parent. His complaint was possibly brought on by spirit drinking, for no one of Indian descent can take spirits with impunity. These two children were as fair as any English ones. I had expected that the man, an old Scotchman, who drove me from Duck Lake, would have taken me on to Snake Plain ; but he pleaded another engagement, and went home SNAKE PLAIN. 67 the same afternoon. I was indebted to the kind- ness of Mr. Sissoms, the storekeeper at Carlton, for a share in his rig, as he was driving the next day through Snake Plain on business. He also most politely offered to let me have a room in his house for the night ; but as this would have entailed himself and his son sleeping on the shop counters, I could not think of accepting it ; so arranged with the Luciers to have their kitchen to myself, having brought sufficient wraps to make up a bed. I had also brought tea, and enough provisions for my own supper ; and as the family happened to be a little short of provisions that afternoon they had a share of them. Such was the Bush hotel. The airlessness and heat of the stove-heated kitchen at first prevented me from sleeping. Then as the wood was burnt out, it became very cold, and the cat and kittens claimed a share of my wraps. The dogs also howled and rattled at the kitchen door till I let them in ; so altogether I was rather glad when the night came to an end. The northern branch of the mighty Saskatchewan river rises 300 miles north of the southern branch, and it is therefore some weeks earlier passable on the ice. It runs through a deep narrow gorge near Carlton, where the Lucier family own a ferry boat in summer. In winter the drifting ice soon ac- cumulates in this gorge, and forms a natural bridge 68 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. perfectly easy to cross, while the river is still running in other parts. This we had to pass on the way to Snake Plain. The country, then covered with snow, is beautifully wooded, and contains rich pasture. We stopped about half-way to rest the horse, and, sheltered from the icy wind in a little wood, lighted a fire to warm ourselves and to boil some tea. The sticks were dry enough to burn, but the wind blew them out, till we made screens of our railway rugs by pinning them up between the trees. Then how to find water ! Mr. Sissoms had brought a pickaxe with him, and attempted to procure some from a neighbouring lake. But he chopped in vain for more than a yard. It seemed frozen all through. So he put pieces of ice into the kettle and melted enough to water the horse, and to make us some tea. We had not hitherto met a human being ; but had passed the remains of an Indian encampment with the sort of substitute the Indians have for a steam bath, and into which they place invalids, having a great idea of its curative powers. Here we entered a great Indian reserve. To those not familiar with Canadian arrange- ments I must explain that the Canadian Govern- ment has behaved particularly well to the Indians. Certain districts of fertile well-wooded lands are set apart for the Indian tribes ; and as long as they remain within these reserves, they receive a pound INDIAN AGENCY. 6p a head annually from the Government, with rations, distributed more frequently, of pork, meal, clothes, etc. They are given medicines ; and are generally superintended by Government officials, known as Indian agents, who live on the reserves. The money encourages them to take care of their chil- dren, as they are paid a pound annually for each as soon as it is born ; and only one wife is recognised as such, so a duplicate and her children would receive nothing. Yet every year, men and women leave the reserves to settle elsewhere, and there is much more intermarriage between the Indians and Europeans than is generally known out of Canada. As in the United States, the Indian features and character permeate the national life of Canada. The last census showed that three millions out of a population under five millions were of Indian descent. Therefore the Indian cannot be said to be dying out. He is simply being civilised and merging into the Canadian. The loss of buffalo meat and the introduction of wheat and a variety of food have altered his disposition, of which ferocity is no longer a prominent feature. A farm instructor on the reserves gives him some idea of agriculture ; but sheep, 1 that great source of profit on almost 1 Also in some parts of Canada there is a thistle which spoils the wool, and in others a speargrass which ultimately kills the sheep. On thickly-peopled districts the herding 7O EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. unlimited pasture like this, cannot be fed on or near the reserves on account of the number of half- starved dogs that the Indians keep for hunting. It stands to reason that when he has been taught a civilised pursuit, his innate wandering instincts lead him to stray off to seek employment among more highly civilised men. There is no money to be made on the reserves. The law forbids trading with Indians so long as they accept subsidies or treaty money, and if they work they are only paid in goods. They can always get wages elsewhere during harvest time ; and the women are in request as charwomen, washerwomen, etc., in the towns. Beyond Snake Plain, which is under the charge of a Presbyterian minister, there are three more Indian reserves ; Sandy Lake under Episcopalian auspices, and Muskegg Lake under Romanist priests. The Muskegg Lake Indians joined the last half-breed rebellion, and their allowance was cut off in consequence for several years. They law causes expense, as the farmer has to fence entirely. We remember a bailiff finding six milch cows trespassing , and he at once drove them off to the nearest pound. The unhappy owner met them on the way, and implored for their release, but it was no use ; and early the next morning he and his wife called on the bailiff's employer to represent their impoverished case. The employer, a first-class Eng- lish gentleman, at once paid the fine to release them ; but the farmer was a loser by the evening's milk. INDIAN AGENCY. /I have been in favour again, since the governor of the north-west was a Romanist. The chiefs of Snake Plain and Sandy Lake kept their people loyal, and were granted small Government pensions as a reward. To the north of these reserves lies a third, which has hitherto rejected any form of Christianity and its accompaniment civilisation ; but the new railway is bringing a tide of emi- gration northward, before which this heathenism will probably soon disappear. Under the Rev. John Hines, for a long time missionary at Sandy Lake, the people there made great advance in education. He has now nobly undertaken a still more remote post at Cumberland House, where, with his devoted wife, he is exercising the same humanising influence in a large district watered by the North Saskatchewan, of which he is rural dean. A small steamer enables him to go about in summer to the various settlements under his charge ; and in winter he uses a regular Esqui- maux sledge. The Indians, or Crees as they are called within fifty miles of Carlton, are much fairer than those further south and north, and are probably all more or less mixed with French blood. They all have French names. The sons of Gaul planted colonies in Canada as early as their King Henry IV., who was a contemporary of our Queen Elizabeth ; but 72 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. their colonies were exclusively of men. As time went on the impoverished French nobles sent their younger sons to Canada, but not their daughters ; and descendants of the most noble blood in France are found among the half-breeds. They fished and hunted, but scarcely scratched the soil ; so, when Eastern Canada was conquered, and partially re- settled either from England or the United States, many of the French Canadians moved on, keeping by the sides of the rivers, till they reached Carlton, and other distant districts. Scottish names are also prevalent on some of the reserves. Young men came from the British Isles 200 years ago, and ever since, as officials of the Hudson Bay Com- pany, and the rules of the company obliged them to marry. British women were not adventurous in those days, and seldom wandered to a primitive country : life was rougher on board ship, and the passage longer, than at the present day. Except when sent as convicts, workhouse waifs, or kid- napped, their friends would not have permitted them to encounter the hardships of a colonial life. The young men had no resource but to marry Indian women ; so a half-breed race has sprung up in Canada, as it has done in India, bearing British names. That these half-breeds are capable of being highly educated is shown by the fact that they are found in all the professions and in every PRINCE ALBERT. 73 department of public life. Not long ago an Indian child of twelve took a prize for writing offered by the Educational Board at Regina, outdistancing all of European descent. It was growing dusk by the time we reached the Indian agent's house at Snake Plain. He is a Scotchman ; and Mrs. Finlayson, his hospitable wife, and his daughters, kindly pressed me to put up at their house for the night, and complete the object of my journey the next day. I was thankful to do so, as I was nearly frozen ; and during the next two days acquired a good deal of information about the Indians. Mrs. Finlayson, the daughter of a Scottish official, was born in the most northerly of the Hudson Bay Company's forts, and had tra- velled much in this province of Saskatchewan and its neighbour Assiniboia. Theirs was a house in the wilderness, but a very comfortable one for a stranger. As in most outlying districts, the ladies managed the house entirely, but assisted by a Norwegian half-breed boy, whom I observed showed the careful economical spirit of the Scan- dinavian race, which makes them excellent colo- nists wherever they go. The Misses Finlayson were well educated and well informed, and the youngest was still at a convent school in Prince Albert, about seventy miles away. An elder sister had learned Cree, and for a short time 74 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. had taught the Government school on Snake Plain. 1 The Presbyterian church of Snake Plain contains a harmonium, which one of the Miss Finlaysons played, and the service on Sundays was held in Cree. The Indians about here all keep their hair closely cut, and dress like French peasants, with a little extra clothing for winter. I called on the chief, whose house had an open fireplace and chim- ney like a French cotter's ; and he looked himself like an old Scottish labouring man. If their parti- ality for vapour baths, and the tumuli in Manitoba just like the tumuli or Scythian tombs in Southern Russia point to the Tartar descent of the Indians in West Canada, a rudimentary medical appliance which nearly every family possesses shows that they are overlaid with French civilisation. The scarcity of surgeons is very obvious when travelling among the Indians, for distorted limbs' brought on by neglected fractures are most common. They are a sociable people, fond of music and dancing, 1 Sir John Franklin, who explored these regions in 1823, and calls his narrative A Journey on the Shores of the Polar Sea, describes Carlton as a good wheat-growing dis- trict, though only five acres was grown at that period. He gives portraits of the Indians of that part, and describes them as better-looking than the tribes further west. He considers that they were still uncivilised, because the whites who intermarried with them descended to their level, in- stead of trying to raise them to the European standard. PRINCE ALBERT. 75 and sharing any benefits they receive with all their neighbours. The savage sun-dances intermingled with tortures, which are still seen among the heathen tribes, are really in the hope of propitiating the deity, whom they imagine they have offended in times of famine or domestic affliction. On my return journey to Carlton, though late in November, a rapid thaw had set in. The Saskat- chewan looked dangerous ; and the horse certainly thought it was so, and at first declined to set foot on it, for there were seven inches of water above a thick stratum of ice. I went northward from Duck Lake to Prince Albert for two nights. It is a "city" 1 with a handsome training college, and a Romanist convent, and is prettily situated on the Saskatchewan, with a belt of fir and larch trees beyond ; rather resembling a small town on the lower Danube. But the thermometer has been known to go down to 70 below zero (Fahrenheit), and even last winter was for a few hours at 60 below, 2 so it can hardly be recommended for 1 The train being late I did not arrive till two A.M. I went to the best hotel in its omnibus ; and, though the fourth week in November, there was not a stove lighted throughout the building, and no double windows. There is no over luxury in the north-west. 2 Although the spirit thermometer actually indicates this excessive depression, it is generally supposed it cannot be very accurate, and that a certain amount of the contents must adhere frozen to the side of the tube. 76 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. farming purposes. Also the excellent rifles brought by sporting men from England are fast clearing away the game. A Roumanian minister had lately been to look at it with a view to establish a Rou- manian colony ; and, as far as I have seen of Wallack peasantry, they might learn something in cleanliness from the Indians in those parts. 1 Prince Albert is a principal station for the mounted police, a fine body of men, who seem made up of settlers, often of the upper class, from all parts of Europe. As it would be otherwise an idle life, each man is obliged to ride or walk a certain number of miles a week, but not more than is required to keep a vigorous individual in good health ; and they all drove in to church and chapel on Sunday, though it was a beautiful day, and the barracks are in full view of the three places of worship. A large number were set down at the Episcopal church, rather less at the Presbyterian, and still fewer at the Romanist. Those responsible for laying out Prince Albert certainly expect a 1 The Canadian Indians swaddle their babies tightly in the fashion that once prevailed in England, and is still seen in Eastern Europe. They probably learnt it from Europeans ; for a British medical treatise in 1752 recommends its abo- lition, on the ground that the American Indians allowed their infants the free use of their arms and legs in their cradles, and were a remarkably well-grown, straight-limbed race. PROJECTED RAILWAY TO HUDSON BAY. 77 large population in time; for it is in three divisions, and covers a great deal of ground. There is an endeavour being made to " boom " it, as the Cana- dians say, by the project of a new railway, between 600 and 700 miles long, to Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay. The object of this railway would be to bring the produce of Saskatchewan and Assiniboia, by a nearer route than Winnipeg and Montreal, to England ; for the north branch of the Saskatchewan, like the south, when it is unfrozen, is often too low in dry seasons to carry steamers ; and a few years ago luggage being conveyed from Winnipeg to Carlton was known to be two years on the way. The disadvantages of the railway, which, like others in Canada, would be built with English money, are, that Fort Churchill, the ter- minus, and the route across Hudson Bay, is only open to vessels about three or four months in the year, and that the 600 and odd miles from Prince Albert runs through a district only fit for trappers and Esquimaux, with a few Hudson Bay officials to buy their wares, and could never be made a profitable district for settlers ; and it is by selling the railway lands to settlers, and attracting them to come and live along the line, that other railway companies in Canada have been made to pay their way hitherto. The system of a grant of land all along a new 78 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. line of railway, as well as the right of way, is bor- rowed from the United States, where, at the present moment, a number of old settlers on the Red River are being requested to move away, as their lands are within a grant to a railway company. It is the only mode in which railways in these thinly-popu- lated countries could be made to pay ; and as the companies are not obliged to give compensation for risks, and crops burned by stray coals from their engines, or for horses and cows killed when stray- ing on to an unprotected line, they ought to have a better time of it than our railway companies in Great Britain. An almost desert track, with a salt plain and brackish water, is shortly to be tra- versed by an extension of the line from Yorkton to Prince Albert, and it will doubtless be advertised as first-class ranching or wheat-growing soil, unen- cumbered with timber. But between Duck Lake and Prince Albert, and between Duck Lake and Snake Plain, there are still splendid timber trees and fine grass. English critics have often asserted that the Russians were mistaken in ploughing up their grass-covered steppes, and trying to lay them all down in wheat, instead of continuing to feed nothing but cattle and horses from them ; yet this is just the course which Britons are repeating in Canada. The Monday morning train professed to leave PROJECTED RAILWAY TO HUDSON BAY. 79 Prince Albert at 7*30 ; and I breakfasted at one table with the members of several different nation- alities, who had come to look out for something to do. The railway staff lived at the hotel ; and the omnibus, driven by a young English gentleman, took them first to the station and then returned for the passengers. One of these was a young man from St. Petersburg, who expressed himself dis- appointed with the climate, and said he meant to try Mashonaland instead. A sudden rise in the temperature continuing for several days in mid- winter seems common enough in Canada ; but the North Saskatchewan was never known to thaw en- tirely when it had been once ice-bound. For no apparent reason, the train was not started till 8'3O, and we did not reach Regina till 10 P.M. CHAPTER V. The Iroquois Squatters Emigrants Yankee Settlers Hard Times - Winter Extraordinary Marriages Early Immigrants Unsuitable Occupations Suc- cesses. ALL the world over there seems to be an idea that the rivers are not as deep or as rapid as they used to he; but if the Northern Saskatchewan, which connects Prince Albert with Lake Winnipeg, was ever much deeper or more reliable for summer traffic than it is now, it seems strange that Prince Albert should not have been earlier selected as a European settlement, unless it was formerly a swamp or lake. The Hudson Bay Company built Fort Carlton also on the river, forty-five miles to the south-west, in 1690: but there the stream runs in a deep cutting, while it is very little below the level of Prince Albert. Almost every one in this neighbourhood looks as if he had Indian blood in him ; but I saw no Indians except the chief at Snake Plain with long hair, nor do any wear the feathers and other adornments supposed to characterise. Indians. A colony of Iroquois, one of the finest of the Indian THE IROQUOIS. 8 1 tribes, left Eastern Canada many years ago, and settled in the Rocky Mountains ; but as they were all men (Romanist converts), they married with the French half-breeds and Crees round Battleford, and further north. Battleford is the old capital of the north-west, and has lost in population since it had to abdicate in favour of Regina. The first English settlers in any number who came to Prince Albert arrived chiefly from Ontario in 1880 and three subsequent years, with the idea that the railway would be continued from Winnipeg to the Pacific Coast by that route. How many isolated settlements there are in the north-west founded under the idea of a railway being made, when probably those who spread the report by way of "booming" that district, knew perfectly well that such an event was not contemplated ! A trail, as the Canadians call the tracks which do instead of roads, went by Humboldt to Winnipeg ; and when the railway had advanced to Regina, a shorter trail of 250 miles connected Prince Albert with Qu'Appelle station on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Canadians say that the first French conquerors and the Indians always got on well together. They soon intermarried. The French gave fair prices for their furs and other wares ; so looking upon the French as their friends, they were easily stirred up into the hostility against the Eng- 82 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. lish, which bore fruit even as late as 1883. But from the way in which the Canadian Government are now treating English squatters, it might be inferred that the French half-breeds who joined with the Indians in that war may have had griev- ances. Some of the pioneers in the north-west who have acted as civilising agencies among the Indian tribes got permission from their Indian neighbours to plant a farm on unoccupied land ; and there they have married, and brought up a strong family, built houses, and lived in a Christian fashion on the products of their industry. Yet if these people are found living within a certain dis- tance of a new railway, or on a twelve-mile area marked out for a new town plot, they are compelled to move away, and their improved land sold without any compensation. They have aided in making the Indian regard an Englishman with friendly eyes, and are the very quality whom a young country should encourage to remain. While so- journers in gaols, asylums, orphanages, and work- houses are allured to the north-west by the cheap rates issued in the colonists' tickets when bought in Europe, the French East Canadians are immigrat- ing in large numbers to the United States, as easier of access from Montreal, and Eastern Canada ; for once within the bounds of the Dominion, you have to pay first-class fare to the north-west. Between EMIGRANTS. 83 Quebec and Qu'Appelle it makes the difference of more than 7, besides which the cheap colonist cars have sleeping accommodation and the first class has not, so the occupants are expected to pay extra to have a bed in a Pullman. The French Canadians leave their native country to make a living ; for in Eastern Canada, and Ontario, they are becoming, to use the Canadian expression, " rather crowded ". Every six months or less, large numbers of emi- grants were reported to have arrived, or to be immediately expected at different points of the north-west. I collected some information on this subject when the census was taken in 1891. The papers were filled up minutely. People were asked to state not only when and where they were born, but also the age and place of birth of their parents. I ascertained that in that year the only English- men who had arrived at Qu'Appelle station to settle in this part of Assiniboia, had come through St. John's College ; but eighteen people had come from Ontario, and foreigners of several nationalities in other parts of the province. Assiniboia has gained a little over 8000 in six years, and now possesses 30,470 ; Saskatchewan, a larger district than Assiniboia, has only acquired 504, and is now 1 1,150 ; while Alberta, the great ranching province, has 25,277, against 15,533 m 1885. The two last 84 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. are united in one bishopric ; and the present bishop, Dr. Pinkham, who has been thirty years in Canada, and was for some time vicar of St. Andrew's, Win- nipeg, is making great efforts to collect sufficient funds to enable each province to support its own bishop. As is usual every spring, the officials are sanguine about the immigration for the season ; and one of the emigration agents, who has been busy in the United States, is responsible for the following : " Alberta and other favoured spots will receive an immense influx this spring. People are leaving Washington because taxation is too high ; interest is exorbitant, and their crops are not what they used to be. They are also dissatisfied with the administration of their own laws : a man can get married to-day, divorced to-morrow, and married to some one else the day after. Other laws are equally bad. Those coming are mostly Canadians, who left their native land several years ago, have made some money, and are now desirous of returning. They will settle in most cases on the Canadian Pacific Railway lands, bring in good implements, great stores of cattle, and other stock for farms. In all cases the emigrants will have money." This anticipation is partly explained by a para- graph in the Industrial World, published in Wash- ington county, United States : " We are in receipt HARD TIMES. 85 of a copy of the Dominion's Land Act, which com- prises the land policy of the Dominion Govern- ment. The Government is co-operating with the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company to induce immigration to the Canadian north-west. The United States Government is co-operating also by making it undesirable to live on the American side of the line. The Dominion Government profits by our mistakes, and has pursued a liberal policy to induce immigration and protect the settler. The rates of interest for money are lower there than here. The primitive honesty of the people, to which all travellers testify, indicates that this part of the Queen's dominions may yet become the citadel of American liberty." As to low rates of interest, we know of more than one young Canadian farmer who is paying twenty- four per cent, on money borrowed from the bank. There has been " a bitter cry " from the farmers in Manitoba and the north-west throughout the last winter, and it must in time be heard, and lead to an alteration in the tariff which imitates that of the United States, in a country with less resources, and where manufacture is practically in its infancy. One young man finds a remedy in demanding that the implement dealer should have no power to re- cover his debts. But it is the little power that the dealer has now which makes him put on such a 86 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. heavy interest till his bill is paid ; and the farmer's remedy is to mow his hay and reap his corn by hand, till he has saved enough money to purchase a binder straight off, and not pay by degrees. It is this system in buying his land, cattle and every- thing, with interest on the unpaid money running up, and soon doubling it, that is the ruin of young men. Let them, as the Canadians do, buy nothing which they cannot pay for, and hire out their labour, and exchange work with one another, till their first crop is sold ; and not be at the mercy of any dealer, obliging themselves to traffic exclusively with him by taking goods on credit. Young men are ambitious to be landowners, and have a vote, and become personages in a colony, at an age when if they were in England they would still be sub- alterns, clerks, or underlings. Some men will not learn to milk because it en- tails early rising ; and the milker is expected to light the kitchen stove. The August or autumn calves keep with their mothers and monopolise the milk as the only hope of rearing them so late in the year, and a cow in Canada does not give the amount that is expected from a stall-fed English cow ; so the milking is not invariably required in winter when frozen milk supplies the household. But the inclination to shirk anything does not fore- shadow a successful farmer ; and early rising is a WINTER. 87 great point, as in summer some rest is required in the heat of the day. Churning is a man or boy's work. The wife, particularly if she has a baby, has quite enough to do without it. The farmer him- self should be able to turn his hand to any- thing. For what are the hired men ? We have seen thirty dollars a month, besides his keep, given to a farm labourer, who was selling coal in London before he went out to Canada, but imposed on his young employer with a very fluent tongue. Complicated machinery like a binder should never be bought till a man has a covered shed for it ; yet it is often one of the first purchases. Then the house. I have seen a large farm-house built after an English plan ; and the stove, standing in the middle of the kitchen, was in the draught of three doors, two leading on to the open air. The dinner was constantly under-done, from all the heat going up the flue, and the fuel (wood) burning as fast as tinder. In the wooden houses in Zimoney (on the Danube) and Belgrade, there are double doors to the merest cottage ; and this is required in Canada to break the intensity of the cold air. In these scantily built Canadian houses I have seen a tub of water frozen hard within two feet of the kitchen stove, which had been lighted several hours. An egg was dropped on the floor in the dining-room at breakfast time, and breaking froze to the floor 88 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. before we had finished. After breakfast I told a hired boy to fetch a wet cloth out of the kitchen to get it off. But the cloths were all frozen. At twelve o'clock, when it was almost time to set the dinner, the egg was still there, and I fetched a kettle of boiling water out of the kitchen which led into the dining- room, and poured' it on the egg. The water was frozen on the floor before the egg was thawed. The employed has quite as good a time of it in Canada, if not better, than the employer, who, while paying heavy wages, frequently has to wake his lazy servitors, and if he wants his breakfast in time to get it himself. No engagement made in England can be enforced in Canada ; and people sometimes go to great expense in bringing out hired men and women, who either will not stay, or are worse than useless when they arrive. At the busy time of the year all the resources of the house are required to feed the labourers, no matter how the rest of the household fare. The growing boys sent out from English orphanages will often eat half a pound of butter each at a meal if they can get it, besides other things ; so unless they are good workers they are not worth their keep. I saw a farming man at breakfast one day, his employer paying the bills. He was sitting down to porridge, coffee, eggs, beefsteak, buttered toast, and stewed apples. He would be ready for EXTRAORDINARY MARRIAGES. 89 his dinner at twelve, for his tea at five, and his supper at eight. That a man is too hungry to be honest, is a common Canadian expression. This incident was related by the clergyman who tied the marriage knot. A young man, tired of living alone in his settler's hut, with his Gladstone bag as a pillow, and subsisting on biscuits and tinned meats, asked his neighbour to come and perform the marriage ceremony between him and his intended bride. The clergyman arrived at the farm-house indicated, where he found a handsome girl of eighteen, whom he supposed was to be the bride, and several other children, who, in an awed way, retreated for want of other cover into the bed places (Scottish fashion) round the kitchen, while he put on his cassock and surplice for the service. There was only one room besides the kitchen, and out of this the bride appeared. To his astonish- ment he saw she was the mother of the household. He drew the young man outside the house for a moment, and said to him : " What on earth can you be thinking off? Why don't you marry the girl instead ?" " Oh that would never do for me," answered the bridegroom. " Don't you see if I took her, I should not have all these children to work for me?" The couple were consequently married ; but the young ones were in a rebellious frame of mind, and although the clergyman before 90 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. he left tried to say a few words to them recom- mending resignation and obedience for their mother's sake, he left them much disposed to go off and set up for themselves. This incident was not more strange than what occurred on a ranch in the United States, where two young men were partners. The sister of one of them came to visit him with an older friend, who was her chaperon. The young men had to build a wall of empty meat tins to make a partition in their one-roomed hut for the ladies till they could construct an extra room : but the female element made life so much pleasanter to the ranchers that they were both soon engaged to be married, the sister to her brother's partner, and the friend and chaperon to the brother himself, though he was seventeen years her junior. These were people who, in England, had moved in the upper class. The sister of a bachelor settler who is known to be a good housekeeper is regularly competed for by his bachelor acquaintance. We knew one who combined household duties with dancing, and en- joyed herself nearly all the winter. Before she went from home, she cooked enough to last her brother and his herd-boy in her absence, and froze it all, even to the loaves of bread. The settler thawed them as he wanted them. It is a novelty to a man fresh from England to see the water EARLY IMMIGRANTS. 9 1 brought in for household purposes in sacks, and the milk wrapped up in a cloth. To Canadians all these incidents and details will seem too common to relate ; but the English, when they hear of a "nice farm," a "good house," a " popu- lous district," etc., are apt to imagine it to be one from the English point of view, and not the Canadian. This makes a very great difference. I have met with people sending sons to Canada, who have not the least idea of the country they are going to. 1 I met a lady in the Canadian train preparing to join a clerical brother in the north-west. We passed an ordinary wooden house, and I observed : "That is the sort of house you will find your brother living in ". She laughed incredulously, thinking I was 1 Not long ago I went to a lecture in London on Canada, where limelight views were given of a few north-west towns. The audience seemed most disappointed even with a view of Vancouver. It is this different point of view that gives us such varied aspects of the state of the crofter emigrants; and the advisability of sending boys to agricultural colleges in Canada before setting up for themselves. The High Commissioner for Canada, who has spoken on these two subjects, probably knows absolutely nothing of the inner life of a Canadian farm in the north-west, in winter; and if he took the English view, he would not be High Com- missioner long. A condition which to the Canadians might seem very good, considering the short time they have been in Canada, might not seem to those responsible for sending the crofters out sufficiently good to make it worth while to send out any more. 92 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. joking ; when a clergyman in the carriage, over- hearing her name, said, " Oh, I know your brother very well ; that is more what you will find," and pointed out another wooden house a little smaller. How crestfallen she looked ! She had imagined only cows and horses would be put into such a house as that. In the same train there were two little boys, of eleven and thirteen, in Eton jackets and large collars, the sons of a rector ; coming out alone to the charge of a brother only seventeen himself, who had not a farm of his own, and was still but a hired labourer. They were landed at a station at twelve o'clock at night. They did not know their brother's address, except that it was seven miles off. He had not heard that they were coming, and they had very few clothes as an outfit. This seemed little better than the old German couple who sent out Tom Thumb and his brothers to lose them in the wood. But whatever hard experiences the man has now who plants himself in an already settled situation in Canada, they are small compared to what the pioneers of all our colonies endured. The railway now brings fish, oysters, barrels of apples, and other fruits into Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba, both from Ontario and British Columbia, and the apples by the barrel are sold at a very reasonable price. Thirty years ago, even at Cook- UNSUITABLE OCCUPATIONS. 93 shire in the province of Quebec, lemons were a shilling each ; and when the railway was opened in 1890 between Regina and Prince Albert, there were the sons of English settlers in that direction who had never seen coffee, coal, or an orange, an apple, or a lemon in their lives. Coal from the Estevan and Lethbridge mines can now be bought at Winnipeg, Regina, and Qu'Appelle, for 255. a ton and less. Cloth clothes and boots are growing cheaper, though furs are dearer ; and the iron American stoves seen throughout the country keep the wooden houses much hotter than was possible with an open fireplace. The Memnonite settlers introduced brick stoves from Russia. The oldest settlers were thankful to protect themselves from the weather in wigwams made of skin, and eat Indian corn roasted on the shovel, or bannocks. We heard of a family, even fifteen years ago, the father being an English professional man, who, for the first year in Manitoba, lived on porridge, molasses, and fried pork, yet had never enjoyed better health ; and a still earlier settler then returned to England thought they were very fortunate to get even that. The East Canada m?ils were brought by dog sleighs in winter to Winnipeg. Now pro- visions are sent about by parcels post to outlying places in the north-west. Lord Mount Stephen is said to have begun his career as a grocer's errand 7 94 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. boy in Montreal ; and more fortunes appear to have been made by men who began as mechanics, black- smiths, etc., or with nothing at all, than by those who started with a moderate sum in their pockets. But colonies change fast ; and probably every year there will be fewer openings for young men without money in the towns. Already there has been great difficulty in finding work in Toronto, Brandon, Hamilton, Regina, and Moosejaw for unskilled hands ; and I have heard that there is not much opening now for even mechanics in the towns along the principal railway lines. I have met with an Oxford M.A. who was teaching seven children in a third-class school for ,60 a year, and the only lodging he could get in the neighbourhood was a shake-down on a kitchen floor. A young man who had made a little in England by writing for newspapers and magazines, was acting as herd-boy on a farm. A German teacher of music and languages did odd jobs about a farm for only his keep ; and all over the country we may meet with university men working on their own farms like ordinary labourers, men who have failed in their examinations for the army, or failed to pass the medical part of it ; young doctors, sick of the subject as soon as they had qualified for practice, turning their lancets into ploughshares ; or theological students, who have changed their minds about SUCCESSES. 95 taking holy orders. One of these educated farmers will sometimes take a young fellow for nothing to help him during the winter, for the sake of having an intellectual companion. Some young men give themselves titles, discovering that the Canadians have a great deference for an hereditary peerage. I have met with three who had assumed a handle to their names which was certainly not to be found in either Burke, Lodge, or Debrett ; and no doubt, as in the instance already quoted, they derived a pecuniary advantage from it. Yet I never found one Canadian who did not object to the creation of Canadian peers. The general idea seems to be that in a country with no resident sovereign hereditary honours are quite out of place. Strange stories are told by the older generation of emigrants of what the north-west was when they first came out ; and happy are those who then took up land at Winnipeg. In some places the Indians were still formidable, and the country had also long been made a refuge for white and negro outlaws and adventurers. The first trains were liable to be pillaged by whites and the station- masters lived behind bolt and bar in peril of their lives. Now, in isolated places, the station-master goes with the train, so no money or article of value is to be found in the station huts. Here and there settlers have been victimised by a bogus land 96 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. company, which has sold them utterly unprofitable land ; but in the United States this has been a very frequent complaint. There, whole districts have been deserted ; notably, the real village where Abraham Lincoln was born, and where his parents were buried. CHAPTER VI. Indians and Half-breeds Theories concerning the Origin of the Indian Tribes Early Discoverers of America before Columbus Red River Settlement Iroquois Colonists in the Rockies Discovery and Colonisation of Rupertsland Jacques Cartierandthe First Colonists in Eastern Canada, or New France Iroquois Rupertsland Annexation Wars Indians in British Columbia Indian Honesty Other Traits. LIKE the hares in a field where a reaping machine is at work, the uncivilised Indian has been driven to- wards the Rockies and other corners of the Dominion, where he must conform to civilisation or become extinct. A great deal has been written by the Americans and others, with whom the wish is father to the thought, about the Indians being a dying-out race, and so forth. An article in an influential London paper asserted, not long ago, that the Indian in the United States had already died out, and that his Canadian brother was fast following him. I think Sir John Lubbock was the first scientific man to point out that even in New England the Indian could not be said to have died 98 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. out ; inasmuch as the true Yankee in physiognomy and temperament showed that he had an admixture of Indian blood. As for some generations no pure Indians have been left to marry within that dis- trict, so the stronger European type is asserting itself, and we now have to go further south or west for the typical Yankee, with his long, straight, coarse hair, short beard on the tip of his chin, small eyes, and high cheek bones ; while the quadroon and octoroon have come in on the northern, western, and southern frontier to further improve the standard of beauty in the United States. The octoroon, with her large, soft, dark eyes ; small, well-shaped infantile hands ; light or brown, short curly hair ; aquiline nose, and little head, might be a Spanish, Italian, or Grecian belle ; while the men are often like the figures on the Egyptian monuments in the time of the Pharaohs. Yet the Indian seems to amalgamate more readily with the white man ; for all trace of him, except perhaps the black eyes, is often lost in the second generation. There are half-breeds in Canada so much like Welshmen and the Breton peasant that it almost gives support to the Welsh tradition that a ship full of Taffies and Ap-Rhys's first discovered the new world. To condemn half-breeds in the sweeping manner in which they are often condemned by people who have never been among them, is to disparage the INDIANS AND HALF-BREEDS. 99 antecedents of 3,000,000 of the 4,800,000 who now inhabit Canada. These 3,000,000 are increasing at a much faster rate than those of pure English descent, whose numbers are only kept up by immigration. It is, therefore, worth while to in- quire into the origin and characteristics of the Canadian Indian and half-breed, who has shown himself so capable of education that boys whose mothers were pure uneducated Indians have taken prizes in composition, geography, spelling and arithmetic, when their fellow-competitors were the sons of professional men, and of educated English mothers. Probably Behring Strait was once crossed by an isthmus ; at any rate it is passable on the ice in winter. A year or two ago, fifty- two Chinese and Japanese junks, some containing crews, were driven ashore in one winter and spring on the coast of British Columbia. We have no need to look further for the means by which America was peopled. In the famines and de- struction caused at different times by barbarous conquerors in China and Japan, it is very likely that large numbers of people voluntarily sought shelter in a new country. The smooth Pacific is crossed in nine days from Yokohama to Vancouver ; and there can be little doubt that the Chinese and Japanese were early acquainted with the existence of the huge continent that lay in the eastern 100 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. direction from their coasts. In the history of Kublai Khan, this Tartar Emperor of China is stated to have twice sent an expedition to conquer Japan, about 1270; but that each time his fleet was lost, and 100,000 Monguls perished or were un- accounted for. In Ranking's historical researches on the conquests of Peru and Mexico, the author imagines that these fleets were driven on the shores of America, and were the invaders known in Peru- vian history as the founders of the religion and dynasty of the Incas. He believes that Manco Capac, of the Mexican annals, was the son of Kublai (whose brother and predecessor was called Mangou), and commanded the expedition. The yellow com- plexion of the Mongolian would burn red in the sun of the tropics ; but any one looking at the Mexican antiquities in the British Museum must observe the great resemblance in colour between the ancient Egyptian, the modern Abyssinian, and the Mexican ; so that a nearer relationship with these ancient races seems more probable. The term "red man" for the Canadian Indian is rather a misnomer, as the want of red in his com- plexion, except when painted for a sun-dance or some other festivity, is the great difference between him and the sun-burnt European trapper. The squaws are very fond of plastering their cheeks with red paint, to make themselves look like CONCERNING ORIGIN OF INDIAN TRIBES. IOI Europeans. Travellers who have been among the Tchutcki in Siberia see a strong resemblance between them and the yellow bronzed Indian of north-west Canada. The Sioux, who are refugees from the United States, are darker than the natives of Canada. During centuries it is likely that they have been recruited by runaway negroes ; but a lady who can speak Hindustani told me she could make them understand in that language ; and certainly a half- breed Sioux is very much like an Eurasian. In 1891, there was a disturbance going on in the United States between the Government and the Sioux on one of the reserves. The aggressive conduct of which the Sioux were accused on that occasion was disbelieved by experienced people in Canada, who imagined the difficulties had been brought on in order to make a pretext for depriving the Sioux of what has now become valuable land. Some of the Sioux about Qu'Appelle station were asked if they meant to rise against the Canadian Government; and they all laughed at the very notion of it, and said they should be very foolish if they did. Only twenty-one years ago, a band of Indians, with twenty-two teepees, or tents, crossed the United States frontier for the winter. The local governor, with Republican irresponsibility, sent troops to destroy the little encampment. They lighted fires 102 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. round it, and burnt or suffocated every living soul, driving them back if they tried to escape ; and including women and children, nearly 200 perished. They were British subjects, so no wonder a Canadian wrote at the time of the Zulu War: " Why trouble ourselves about the Kaffir women being carried off, as they probably wanted to go ; when we could quietly put up with this far greater atrocity on the part of the United States ? " This was the version of a reliable English gentleman who was near the spot. The Crees in the reserves in Assiniboia are a plainer race in appearance than their half-brothers about Prince Albert and Battleford, who have all adopted French names. Those in Assiniboia have taken Scottish names, so we find Bruces, Gordons, Macnabs, Macdonalds, Scotts, Leslies, etc., very plentiful ; for next to the French, the largest number of European emigrants in the last generation came from Scotland. As regards the Western derivation of the American and Canadian Indian, the Nor- wegian Icelanders as well as the Welsh are supposed to have sent out expeditions to find unoccupied ground for some of their young men who could not make a living at home, and to have planted colonies in Nova Scotia and about New York. The natives they found seemed to have resembled the Esquimaux. Probably these colonies in search DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS. IO3 of food went westward along the rivers ; certainly they lost all connection with the mother countries. In the history of Virginia by Captain Smith, one of its earliest governors, who wrote in the reign of James I., the author describes an expedition from ancient Carthage, under Prince Hanno, to form a colony in the new world, as Carthage had already done in Spain. He states that Prince Hanno's discoveries, as well as those of the Norwegians, were known to Columbus, and a Punic inscription is said to have been found at Monte Video. Carthage itself had been built by Phoenicians, a race from ancient Egypt, the parent of both Phoenician and Carthaginian civilisation ; so that Prince Hanno's people were more likely to have introduced the arts and sciences, which have perplexed antiquarians, into South America, than the Monguls. The de- struction of Carthage would easily account for all connection having ceased with her colonies across the Atlantic ; while the Monguls, who would have followed about 1300 years later, probably carried their wandering propensities to the new world, and, after a time, advanced northward, driving the an- cestors of the Esquimaux to their present haunts. Still, any race, in the course of centuries, might become, like the Esquimaux, subjected to the same conditions of life. It was a favourite idea in the last century that the American Indians were the 104 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. lost tribes of Israel. Any way, they seem to have come of a noted ancestry, and need not be regarded as the scum and refuse of humanity. Whoever looks at one of the old atlases published in the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I. will see that the world lost a great deal of geographical knowledge, which it is picking up again in the present century. Mercator and Speed fill up Africa nearly as much as our most recent maps, even placing two lakes not very far away from the Albert and Victoria Nyanza. Many who have described the habits of both Indians and half-breeds seem to be unacquainted with the characteristics of the uneducated poor in Europe. Certain vices and virtues seem to belong to half-starved uneducated people in the same condition of life in most parts of the world : and better living and work is their salvation ; rich living without the work, their ruin. At present the Canadian Indians on the reserves suffer from the loss of buffalo meat, and buffalo hides to keep them warm ; yet, like the Russian Tartars, they are said to be healthier in their draughty tents than in wooden stove-heated huts. The Indian never kills animals for sport, only for food or the fur. But the British sportsman, more than the trapper or settler, is fast driving the game of all sorts into still unoccupied parts of the country, or exter- RED RIVER SETTLEMENT. 105 minating it altogether ; while the prairie wolf is greatly increasing in Alberta. When the game is all gone, and the woods are cut down, then, perhaps, statesmen will begin to think of some way of arresting the wholesale destruction of both. Those who have crossed the Russian steppes between Moscow and the Crimea, or Tiraspol and Odessa, will remember the mounds or tumuli placed at intervals, and which, when opened, have been found to contain tombs with some of the para- phernalia that the Scythian warriors were accus- tomed to bury with their chiefs or kings. Similar mounds are seen in Manitoba, and have been found to contain mortuary relics of a poorer description. The Monguls, or Moguls, appear to have left off scalping when they conquered Asia and half Europe in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries ; but one of their Scythian ancestors is re- presented on an ancient Roman bas-relief with two scalps fastened to his horse, and it was a well-known practice among the Indians of former days. An old Indian woman is still living, who, for a trifle, will pull off her headgear and show her scalped head. The festivities at the new year among the Indians, and kissing each other all round, may be of either Chinese or French origin, as both follow this fashion, and think much of the new year. An old official of Scottish parentage, whose duties 106 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. take him into all parts of the United States and into the Red River Settlement, observed, " a half- breed inherits the characteristics of the white parent. If that parent is a rascal, he is one ; but if the white parent is honest and industrious, the half-breed will be so too." Perhaps there is a little national pre- judice in the common assertion that the Scottish half-breed is always very superior to the French half-breed. The reverse is the case in some parts of Canada, looking generally at large districts; and we fancy the idea is a little based on the public re- monstrances of the French priests, who call a spade a spade in their periodical warnings to their flocks, chiefly in the larger towns, and which appear in the newspapers ; but these strictures dealing with urban populations probably hardly apply to the indus- trious fishing and trapping families between Battle- ford and Prince Albert. I have been informed by a resident among them, that the French Indians and half-breeds never omit a morning and evening prayer. In fact, it is the amount of Christian influence they have been under, more than race, that affects their lives. They have not the go- ahead spirit of some of the Scottish half-breeds ; but they may be equally useful members of the State, as missionaries and priests, and in the humble fields of labour. It is rare, indeed, among the English-speaking communities of the new world IROQUOIS COLONISTS IN THE ROCKIES. IO? to find a man who has lived half a life-time in the same district. An advertisement in a shop in Prince Albert has the following : " ' England expects every man to do his duty'. This may be all very well for the old country, but it does not do for us. Our motto is : ' We go ahead all the time '." Here is a Romanist priest's account of the Iroquois migration west the Rev. Father Lacombe, a venerable missionary : " When the celebrated John Rowand was in charge of the trading post of Edmonton, or Fort des Prairies, the great emporium for the Hudson Bay Company, that company engaged some forty young Iroquois at Sault St. Louis, near Montreal. These men were selected for energy, strength, good conduct, and skill in hunting. The party left Montreal and Lachine in the spring, with the regular outfit of the Hudson Bay Company, and came by canoes, through Lakes Superior and Winnipeg and the north branch of the Saskatchewan, to Edmonton, and, equipped with everything necessary, were sent into the great prairies to hunt the beaver along Battle River, Red Deer, and many little streams then swarming with this precious animal. At that time the beaver skin demanded a high price on the market. After two or three years, having piled for the company a great quantity of furs, the Iroquois were free and asked to be paid what was promised to them. Then they 108 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. bought a large outfit of ammunition, traps, knives, axes, blankets, etc., and left Edmonton to go and hunt for themselves in the direction of the Rocky Mountains, at the head of the Athabasca River, where was established afterwards Jasper House, facing Mount Millet. " These Iroquois were living together like brothers, sharing their good and bad luck. Being Catholics, they determined, though far from church and priest, not to neglect their religious duties. In that country at the time the Sikanals and Shouswab Indians were camping and hunting, and they made acquaintance with them. Not having been married in their own country, the young Iroquois took the Indian maidens for their wives, intending to marry them before the Church as soon as they met with a minister of their faith. " In a little time large families came from these unions. The women and children spoke their own dialect, and learned the language of their husbands and fathers. They were taught to say prayers in Iroquois. By-and-by some Cree half-breeds joined them, and so formed a band ; and the Cree dialect became predominant, especially among the young people. Then there were plenty of moose, beaver, mountain sheep, deer, bears, etc. It was a glorious time for hunting when that part of the Rockies was the home of these wild animals. COLONISATION OF RUPERTSLAND. 109 "In 1845 Rev. Father de Smet, coming from the Missouri, passed the winter at Edmonton, receiving the kind hospitality of Mr. Rowand and of the Rev. Mr. Thibault at Lac Ste Anne. In the next spring, with two faithful half-breeds and dog sledges, he decided to cross the mountains and reach the Columbia River, where he intended to establish missions among the Indians. On his way to Fort Jasper he had the good fortune and great pleasure to meet with some of the mixed Iroquois families. He baptised and married a few of those whom he could prepare. " Ten years later, in 1852, after sending word to the Iroquois of the mountains for a guide and three horses, in the month of June I left our then only mission, Lac Ste Anne, to go and visit the Jasper hunters. After nine days of incredible difficulties, through the swamp, the thick forest, rivers and creeks overflowing, I arrived exhausted, but soon forgot my difficulties by the warm welcome given me by the whole population who had been waiting for the priest. I passed fifteen days with them, teaching day and night, and baptising, marrying, and giving the sacraments to the happy people of the mountain. In my life as a missionary I never felt more spiritual consolation than with that popu- lation, whom I found so well disposed to receive the Gospel. I met some of the old Iroquois, the IIO EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. founders of the colony. The last who survived, and died not long ago, was named Joachim. He had yet with him, as precious relics, his prayer- book in Iroquois, and other articles of piety he brought with him from Montreal. After I was there these people were visited regularly by a priest. Finally, they abandoned their hunting ground, where they had no church and no school, and came to join with their fellow half-breeds of Lac Ste Anne, fifty miles north of Edmonton. Now they are scattered everywhere, at Lac Ste Anne, St. Albert, on the Athabasca and Peace rivers and mountains. " The Iroquois dialect is nearly extinct among them, excepting the old people, and the French and the Cree are predominant. They are so scat- tered and mixed that it is difficult to recognise much trace of the Iroquois, but I do not think their numbers are decreasing." Some good people are not satisfied that the Anglican Church has any right to set its foot in Canada, because the Romanists, they say, were there first. This theory, logically carried out, would keep us away from India, and most parts of the globe. In fact, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel might shut up its books. But, in point of fact, an English ship, manned and equipped from England, though commanded by Sebastian Cabot, JACQUES CARTIER AND FIRST COLONISTS. Ill first discovered Hudson Bay in 1512, and an- nexed as much of the shore as they could see for Henry VIII. If the Romanists by landing first in Eastern Canada would thereby have acquired the monopoly of this enormous district, England, by her prior discovery of the central part, would have already secured that monopoly for her own Church. But such a theory either way is too ridiculous to be entertained for a moment, when it applies not to merely temporal sovereignty, but to the right to assist in carrying out the commands of the Saviour towards a heathen population scattered over five thousand miles. Neither Church has yet suc- ceeded in evangelising the whole of this continent. There are reserves where the Indians have all been baptised by Romanist priests, who have then abandoned them for want of means and mission- aries ; and heathen Indians who have not yet been taught at all. There is surely room for the exer- tions of both. Jacques Cartier, a native of St. Malo, was the first Frenchman who landed in Canada. In 1541 he was trying to find the East Indies, and entered the St. Lawrence. He received a kind reception from the Indians in the villages round the hill on which now stands Quebec ; but he waited too long, till the apparently endless winter came on, and his men were decimated by scurvy. The reports he 112 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. carried back to France of black forests, deep snow, enormous blocks of ice, and poor food, while he brought home nothing worth the cost of the outfit, did not encourage the French to pursue their re- searches in that direction with much zeal. Still another expedition went out before the end of the century, under the command of the Marquis de la Roche who wished to Christianise the country and make it a convict establishment. He took with him forty convicts to begin with, and set them ashore on Sable Island, a sandy ridge on the coast of Nova Scotia, where for a century or two before this date fishermen from the north of France had been accustomed to resort in search of cod and seal. Perhaps those from Ireland and Wales did so too, knowing little about geography, but only where their prey was to be found. The marquis meant to find a site for his colony, and then fetch the convicts to it ; but a storm drove him back across the Atlantic, where he was taken prisoner, so the men remained on Sable Island for seven years without assistance. Cold and want reduced their number to seven, who were ultimately found by the marquis's pilot, sent out by the Parliament of Rouen to ascertain their fate. He claimed the furs, their only possessions, as the price of conveying them back to France ; but they stated their case to Henry IV., who wished to see them and hear their JACQUES CARTIER AND FIRST COLONISTS. 113 adventures. The king ordered half the furs to be returned to them, and gave them a free pardon for former offences, as well as fifty crowns each. Early in the seventeenth century several attempts were made to establish colonies in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by members of the French nobility, who brought both men and women convicts as labourers ; and in 1608, Champlain, the most emi- nent of these pioneers, founded Quebec. Two years later Captain Hudson rediscovered Hudson Bay for England. Probably settlements for the sake of the fur trade were soon planted about the south of the bay ; but the charter of the Hudson Bay Company was not granted till 1670, when, after the revolu- tionary war and the Commonwealth Protectorate, a king (Charles II.) was again on the English throne. Under James I. the English had already made a settlement in Nova Scotia. General Champlain did more than any other Frenchman to consolidate New France. He personally explored the country to the shores of Lake Huron ; and, far from wishing to drive out or exterminate the Indians, his idea was to unite the tribes in a friendly league, under the banner of France, and convert them to Christianity by means of the Jesuits. The country would be more than a self-supporting colony ; for great wealth in furs and other natural produce would be exchanged against 114 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. French goods. But, finding that all the weaker Indian tribes dreaded the Iroquois, the strongest and most intelligent of them all, General Champlain acted much as the English did with regard to the Zulus and the Ashantees, and, nominally as a pro- tector of the weaker races, assumed a hostile attitude to the Iroquois. If he had sought their alliance instead, it might have changed the fortunes of the American continent. If he had done the same as with their northern neighbours, offered them presents, sent Jesuit priests among them, and advanced his forts along the Hudson River, he might have kept at bay or driven off the little Dutch colony which settled at Manhattan in 1613, and became the nucleus of New York ; and the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed at New Plymouth in 1620, would most likely have been soon forced to decamp. But Europeans had no experience of the climate at that time ; and he could not tell how far more productive than the province of Quebec he would have found the district further south, with its open sea in winter. Neither could he have foretold that the Dutch would venture to sell good firearms to the Iroquois, who extended down to the coast opposite Manhattan, and teach them how to use them. Consequently, when Champlain had explored to the sources of the St. Lawrence, and wished to proceed south, his way was blocked by a race of RUPERTSLAND. 115 warriors armed to the teeth, whom he had not forces enough to defeat. He then saw the dis- advantage of the isolated position in which he had built Quebec. It suffered terribly from scurvy and even from famine during the long winters, for the Iroquois had been accustomed to supply that part. Montreal, founded a few years later, seems honestly to have been intended as an outpost of Christianity, and to protect the native converts from the Iroquois; not as a commercial depot. It under- went many years of tribulation at the hands of these formidable foes, who are said to have been paid by the Dutch and English settlers further south to molest the French ; and this is likely enough, when a war was being carried on between the same nations in Europe. Meantime, Rupertsland and the great north- west belonged to the Hudson Bay Company, who did little to develop it, and next to nothing for the Indians who inhabited it. Geography books at the beginning of this century describe it as unfit for the habitation of civilised man ; but it was dotted over with forts, containing three or four strongly built houses, behind a stone wall or pali- sade ; and there were a few good trails marked out across the prairies, and through the forests, which were traversed periodically by broad-wheeled wag- gons, loaded with goods to exchange for costly furs. Il6 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Baggage was sent up and down the rivers between Fort William and Quebec, and by the lake of Winnipeg up the Saskatchewan to Fort Carlton, and Battleford. Lord Selkirk brought out a colony of Scotchmen, and planted them on lands in Manitoba in 1812; and these are still regarded as the finest body of colonists that ever came out. They are described by Franklin with expressions of pity in 1822. The Anglican Church did not do much in the north-west in those days, though there were a few Romanist and Presbyterian missionaries ; but in 1849 the diocese of Rupertsland was founded, and the Rev. David Anderson became the first bishop. He resigned in 1865, when the present eminent scholar, the Rev. Robt. Machray, was consecrated. Her Majesty has lately pleased the Canadians by bestowing upon him the vacant office of Prelate of the Order of SS. Michael and George. At the meeting of the Canadian Synod in 1893, the last step was taken in the consolidation of the Anglican Church in Canada, by electing him to be Primate of all Canada, with the title of Archbishop. The Metropolitan of Ontario was also promoted to be an archbishop. The Primate of all Canada lives at Bishop's Court in Winnipeg. In 1869 the ancient charter of the Hudson Bay Company expired ; and Earl Granville, at that time ANNEXATION. 117 Colonial Secretary, recommended that the chief part of the company's territory should be trans- ferred to the Dominion of Canada. The price paid was 300,000, with a right to claim a certain portion of land within fifty years, and some other privileges. A portion of the inhabitants of the north-west terri- tory, chiefly the French half-breeds, resisted the annexation ; and General Louis Kiel proclaimed independence, and seized the company's treasury at Fort Garry, now Winnipeg, January I, 1870. The English had occupied New France, or Eastern Canada, since 1758 ; and the treaty, by which Old France finally ceded it to her rival, was signed in 1763. To Rupertsland and the north-west this acquisition of territory was what the conquests of Peter the Great were to old Muscovy: it connected them with civilised regions. The first effect in Canada was the migration of many Indians and half-breeds to the more distant territory. They were Romanists, and strongly attached to France, with no sympathy for Great Britain ; but long be- fore the Canadian Pacific Railway was begun, in 1883, English settlers had also found their way to Manitoba by the Grand Trunk, up the St. Law- rence, and through Ontario, as well as by the United States. Upper Canada, as Southern Ontario used to be called, was thereby settled in the begin- ning of the century. Il8 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. In 1870, when Riel proclaimed independence, Manitoba was most easily reached by the United States route, where the St. Cloud station, north of the present city of St. Paul, was the nearest to the Canadian frontier. An old-fashioned conveyance, something like Buffalo Bill's coach, brought tra- vellers across the international boundary to Winni- peg, then Fort Garry, in summer ; and in winter, dog sledges were used. Any one who wanted to go further north or west had to hire a Red River cart, and join himself on to some Hudson Bay official, who was going towards Fort Carlton, Cumberland House, Fort Pelly or Battleford. The Indians were then rather formidable in Manitoba, and in the valley of the Little Saskatchewan, where Minnedosa now lies. The half-breeds foresaw truly enough that the annexation was only a pre- lude to increased immigration ; that the land would become valuable, and that squatters would be ejected, and their source of wealth, the fur-bearing animals and buffaloes, would be cleared away. They clamoured for compensation in money or land. They had been contented with the Hudson Bay Company, and had a right to choose their own government. So Riel argued ; and the opposition seemed so formidable that General Wolseley was summoned to the scene of action with a strong force. He proclaimed that he had come with a WARS. Up message of peace ; and, although there had been some loss of life, a compromise was effected, and Riel obtained a pardon. Fifteen years later, in 1885, Riel headed another rising, but gathered no support except among the Romanist half-breeds and Indians about Carlton and Battleford. Carlton was burnt as well as Batoche, Riel's native place, where the gallant Colonel French was killed, and several wooden villages were recaptured from the rebels with little difficulty. Riel was taken prisoner and hanged. There was no seeding or harvest that year in the seat of war, so it was followed by great scarcity ; but since that time there has been no further trouble with the Canadian Indians. Of course, a war a few miles away is a great advantage to farmers who have provisions to sell, and carts to hire out ; and from this outbreak of 1885 dates the prosperity of many settlers. A short time ago, Bishop Sillitoe, of New West- minster, British Columbia, gave an address at Mon- treal on the work of the Church among the Indians in his diocese. He said that these were undoubtedly from Japan, and differed from the tribes in the north-west. They had never been subsidised by the Government ; but perhaps owing to the mild climate in which they live, they are self-reliant and industrious, and the bishop declared were equal to 120 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. whites in their aptitude for work. He said the same of their mental capacity, as was shown in an English school that had been set up for them, and he hoped soon to procure from the Government educational grants for Indians. To conclude with an extract from the journal of Alexander Henry, a Hudson Bay Company's official, in 1768: "On May 20, the Indians came in from their winter's hunt. Out of 2000 skins, the amount of my outstanding debts, not thirty remained un- paid ; and even the trivial loss I did suffer was caused by the death of one of the Indians, for whom his family brought all the skins of which he died possessed, and offered to pay the rest among them- selves. His spirit, they said, would not be able to enjoy peace while his name remained in my books, and his debts were left unsatisfied." A Canadian writing in 1880 adds: "The same remains to this day. In remote parts on the Mackenzie River, and wherever it does not pay the Hudson Bay Company to keep an agent all the time, the Indian enters the store, deposits his furs, takes the exact equivalent in goods from the shelves and departs, leaving the door securely fastened against wild beasts. During the last eight years, the Canada Pacific surveyors and engineers have lived among and employed men, women, and children, from twenty or thirty tribes, between the Ottawa River INDIANS IN QU'APPELLE. 121 and the Pacific Ocean, and the chief engineer says that he has yet to hear of the first quarrel, or of an ounce of pork stolen by an Indian." This entirely accords with my own observation. St. John's College near Qu'Appelle station lay on the way between a large reserve and the town. I have gone into the kitchen, when the cook was out of it, and found Indians sitting there to rest and warm themselves. The cook assured me they never helped themselves to anything, nor asked for food, though undoubtedly it was most accept- able, as I have seen them even in summer pick crusts out of the pig-wash tub for their " papooses ". They would bring things to sell, and quietly sit on the kitchen floor all day till they could get the price they asked. They are regular Arabs at driving a bargain. Some of the women in European clothes, cheerful and smiling, might be Belgian, Welsh, Irish, or French peasants. There is quite a village of Indian teepees or tents scattered among the bushes, and over the rich pasturage between Qu'Appelle station and St. John's College. I have often walked through the otherwise lonely two miles between these places, late in the evening, and even at midnight, accom- panied, and by myself, and never saw anything but quiet and good order among those tents. On a beautifully clear winter's night, when we can read 122 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. without a candle by the light of the aurora or the vivid stars, assisted by the glare of the snow, even when the moon has not risen, not a sound proceeded from any of the Indian habitations. On a darker or cloudy night (though clouds are only seen when there is going to be rain or snow at Qu'Appelle), the tents glowed with the fires inside them and helped to light the way, where you might have stumbled in the darkness over a sleeping horse or cow. I went inside one of these tents one morning. The fire was on the floor in the middle, like some of the Highland cots, with an aperture to let out the smoke, and mats were laid round it for the people to sit or sleep upon, and their outer coats and various implements hung round. A woman showed me with great pride a litter of young puppies, which, with their mother, were in a kind of hammock covered with skins to keep them warm. In the spring, when the snows are melting, these tents are very damp and uncom- fortable, and the Indians in this way often contract consumption or chronic bronchitis. Civilised people, whose wages fluctuate, are apt to live from hand to mouth, and give an expensive entertainment one week, though they may be considerably pinched the next. In the same way the Indians on the reserves have yet to be taught not to waste their food or make themselves ill with eating too much OTHER TRAITS. 123 when they receive the Government allowance. A cynical official is said to have recommended that the Indian population should be exterminated by giving them the yearly portion all at once, and they would die off of indigestion. Such a fate did happen to one Indian I heard of, who consumed thirty pounds of white fish in the course of an after- noon ; about a fortnight later he was found dead in his canoe, having just gone through a similar excess, which produced failure of the heart. An Indian papoose still in arms, with its brilliant black eyes and black hair, is quite a pretty little thing ; but there is a very large infant mortality among Europeans and natives. On one occasion when I was passing through the Indian tents,a woman came out to show me a very nice tailor-made female jacket, which she had picked up on the prairie, and she wanted to find the owner. She did not at all expect any gratuity for restoring it ; but it had evidently never entered her head to appropriate it. CHAPTER VII. Further Experience of English Settlers Mr. Andrew Mackafs Advice Autumn The Harvest Festival French Exaggeration of the Cold in Russia Real Cold in Canada Okanayan. IT seems to be still a question as to whether land mixed with wood, hill, and water, as about Minne- dosa and Prince Albert, or the flat, open prairie, where the eye ranges over twelve and twenty miles of grass and corn, only spotted occasionally by- clumps of trees, is the most liable to early frosts. In 1891 the prairie country had the best of it. The farms on the prairies, being generally larger, are usually only partially enclosed, and herd-boys are required for the summer months. It is an idle occupation, and if a young fellow begins with it sometimes leads to permanent idleness ; but an educated youth will get through a good deal of reading while watching the flocks, and, if a delicate boy, may become acclimatised in this easy post before beginning harder work. On the larger cattle and sheep ranches it is a very lonely life ; and some cannot stand it and have attempted suicide, for FURTHER EXPERIENCE OF ENGLISH SETTLERS. 12$ which the penalty is two months in gaol. Herding out of doors only lasts through the summer months. For several years before 1891 the generality of English farmers in Canada had been working at a loss ; but in that uncertain climate a man must be prepared to set the losses of several seasons against the gains of several more. In many places the young English gentleman settler began by carrying on his work on an experimental basis, refusing to follow Canadian notions as to the management of land or stock. Frequently an English public school man, or a former undergraduate at Oxford or Cambridge, he had never learned to wash up plates or dishes, clean his own boots, mend his clothes, or attend to a horse, before he set foot in the country. Perhaps he had been sent as a farm pupil to an Englishman of the same calibre, and they smoked together over the stove most of the winter. Experienced English people say that if men discontinue outdoor employment throughout a winter, but only smoke and read indoors, the climate very soon affects them. The houses, it must be recollected, are too small for anything like exercise. Porridge, soda biscuits, and pre- served meats and jams, with a little whisky for a relish, form the chief diet of this kind of farmer. The pupil sets up for himself, and asks his relations to help him. He buys a quarter section, 9 126 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. builds or buys a house, and collects a little stock, and then lives much in the same way as his instructor. In a climate where our domestic animals are exotics, and the native birds' legs are clothed with feathers down to their claws, and the animals are provided with the thickest fur or with down to supplement the hair ; his English stock bought at high prices dies off from not being kept warm and dry enough, his half-starved pigs are unsaleable, and his unfed fowls cannot get enough off the ground to live, even during the summer. A shower of cold Canadian summer rain kills them. He has not prepared in the autumn for the spring sowing, and a late spring does not give him time enough to plough as well as sow, before the grain ought to be fairly advanced to pass the critical stage by the last week in August. Then comes a night when the thermometer runs suddenly down to 24 degrees, and his wheat is reduced in quality till it is unsaleable. He lays it all on the climate ; but in reality, if he started as a squatter in the middle of England, he would never be anything more. Take the case of another young man in a much advertised quarter, who was really a good worker, and had been well instructed by a practical Canadian farmer for two years in agricultural farming, but not in the management of cattle. He FURTHER EXPERIENCE OF ENGLISH SETTLERS. I2/ started with 300 and a partner long before he was twenty ; and his father, perhaps not knowing how essential it is to plough in the autumn and sow in the spring, allowed him to come to England at an important season on a visit. He v/as robbed at Montreal of his purse, or dropped it ; and had to borrow money to come home. He returned to Canada to find his partner had done little or nothing towards a future crop ; so that year they had none, but parted company in the autumn, and he had to pay heavily for his means for breaking his contract. He invested in cattle on the faith of a neighbour being able to give him fodder for the winter ; but when winter came the neighbour had only enough for himself, so the cattle were both starved and cold, and were totally unproductive the next summer. Not satisfied with one quarter section he took up two (320 acres), and tried to work it with the help of two expensive hired labourers. He bought all the usual farming implements, including a binder, which generally costs 170 dollars at the least (33), having paid by instalments four dollars an acre for his land, and paying six per cent, on those sums that he was unable to pay up at once. No wonder he had to come on his parents for another ,200. His crop failed the first year, and the second did not defray its expenses ; as through the winter he was giving his hired men ,2 is. 8d. a 128 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. month ; and the board of an English labourer in Canada certainly costs as much as that in addition to the wages. In the summer he had to pay 5 and 4 a month or more to each of his labourers, and was too young to get the amount of work out of them that an older man would have done. 1 Very young fellows often damage their health by smoking too much and sitting up late at night ; and if they come back to England to recruit it, some one else has to be paid to look after their farms ; so it can easily be calculated how much profit there is likely to be. Mr. Andrew Mackay, the head of the Government Experimental Farm at Indian Head, wrote March 19, 1892, to the Manitoba Free Press : " I have for some time been prescribing a cure for frost, which, if rightly taken, will go a long way in saving loss to the farmers, that is, for every farmer to sow less wheat. Frost, I am afraid, is native to the country ; and notwithstanding frost in former years visited Ontario, and then for ever left it [he must mean only the extreme south of Ontario, and even there it returned in 1892-3], we may make up our minds that we are not in Ontario ; but about September i may expect the unwelcome visitor, and our object should be to leave as little at his mercy 1 Being afraid to give orders to hired men twice his own age, seems a common difficulty with very young employers. MR. ANDREW MACKAY'S ADVICE. 129 then as possible. So long as every settler sows twice as much grain as he should do, or is able to put in quickly, so long will frost claim half; and only when the fact is realised, that early-sown grain alone nine out of ten years escapes frost, will farmers take heed. A man with a yoke of oxen, and no help but his wife, thinks nothing less than 100 or 150 acres of wheat sufficient. May is well over before he is through seeding ; and there is no- thing in this country more certain than that before he and his oxen and the wife can have the crop cut, one half or more will be frozen. Were he content with fifty or seventy acres the chances are that all would be safely in stalk before danger came. " When we consider the expense of harvesting, threshing, and marketing frozen grain, and the small price obtained for it, the wonder is that so much wheat is sown ; but hope ever animates the north-west farmer, and so long as seed and land hold out, he will run the risk. " In the north-west of this province (Assiniboia) there is a district where so far frost has done little harm. Frost visits there the same as other places ; but up to the present time railway facilities have been such that no inducement has been offered the farmer to sow much wheat, and, consequently, they have only sown to satisfy their own wants. This is quickly put in and as quickly harvested ; and 130 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. when other districts are slowly and sorrowfully cutting frozen grain this one rejoices in a harvest completed." At the Qu'Appelle agricultural dinner, January, 1894, Mr. Mackay further advised the farmers to sow more barley and oats, and less wheat ; but, in 1890-1-2, wheat was considered the only thing that paid the expense of the labour. Another farmer writes from Manitoba much to the same effect, adding : " We all see now that it was a great mistake for Canada to overstep her boundary and annex the north-west of Manitoba. She should have left them as a fur-bearing animal and buffalo reserve. But having done so, and driven all the animals away, we must now make the best of it." There has been a good deal said of late against the system of farm pupils ; and it has been sug- gested that a boy should be given ,5 and thrown upon the prairie to make his own way. Undoubt- edly, people have taken farm pupils who knew nothing about Canadian farming themselves, and have no proper accommodation for them ; and the other plan may be all very well for a labourer, or English working farmer's son who has learned to work, and the employers see it by his hands and general air, and are glad to take him ; but to a youth who knows nothing, and looks as if he ex- AUTUMN. 131 pected comfortable quarters and easy work, this may involve much hardship and temptation, un- less he is well over twenty, or has friends to go to at once. Except for two months in the year it is not easy for a totally inexperienced young man to find work ; and the fact of being an English gentleman is against him in the eyes of a Canadian. I did hear of a nobleman's son being engaged by a farmer at fifteen dollars a week ; but it was simply to give his employer the pleasure of telling everybody that he had Lord in his pay. On the larger farms a young fellow who has not been taught how to manage horses, oxen, or agricultural machinery, and can neither milk nor chop wood, may cost a good deal in damages while he is learning, if he does not incur a long doctor's bill for a broken, maimed, or dislocated limb. He can often not get a place on these farms even for a premium. Travelling is expensive, and distances great ; and the friendless boy may have to sell his clothes at a great loss, to keep himself, before he finds a situation. Then what and where is it? I have listened to many of these experiences. One young man, for a week, had only a dollar for board and lodging ; and then he took a railway job, doing navvy's work, sleeping twelve in a tent, twelve feet square, his companions having chiefly left England for England's good. A contractor fed them for 132 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. l6s. 8d. a week each, and they had no other means of obtaining food. Boiled, over-sweetened tea with- out milk, tinned meat, soda biscuits with a rare loaf of bread, and occasional apples, but no butter, was their food from June to October. Then the work was stopped, and he had to go to a farm-house for the winter, and cut wood, milk, thaw snow for water, and do other things about the premises for his board. This farm-house consisted of one room for kitchen, and bedroom, and besides himself con- tained the farmer and his wife, and their son and two daughters. The food was salt pork, molasses, and porridge, with sometimes bread or potatoes, but not both at once. Another young fellow, still less fortunate, paid two and a half dollars a week for similar accommodation, though he almost kept the family with his gun. A boy coming from a well- fed English house loses energy and physique after a few months in a situation like this, and is less fitted to stand the climate than when he came out. Also, at an age when he ought still to be learning, he is absolutely cut off from intellectual companion- ship, and may grow so ragged and dirty that if there is an English clergyman, or anything like culti- vated people in the neighbourhood, he avoids coming across them. I must admit that these two young men have since done well as farmers. Another young Scotsman took the first occupation he was AUTUMN. 133 offered, which was in a store at Winnipeg ; but he gradually moved west ; taking a schoolmaster's situation next, and is now ranching, and able to support an English wife of gentle birth. Manitoba from its earliest settlement has had the reputation of being a spirit-drinking place, a vice which thinned the early settlers in Ontario ; but the prohibition laws are still enforced in the north-west, and these, though not actually pre- venting the sale of spirits, makes them bad and dear, and acts as a great check. There is a 200 dollar fine imposed for selling intoxicating liquor to any of Indian parentage. The Manitoba Free Press of Winnipeg, in a well- timed article of advice to settlers, says : " Without an industrious spirit, fortified with frugality, the raw hand from the old country had better leave farming alone. It is attention to the little details that makes a successful settler ; for with them well in hand, and their importance realised, the bigger things of the farm present no difficulties. The great mistake is supposing that any one knows enough to farm : and under this notion many young men are sent out with capital enough to make a fairly good start ; but by taking it easy, and allowing matters to run themselves, their capital yields no fruit, and the experiment ends in miserable failure. No one need hope to get on in the north-west 134 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. without hard work, intelligently applied. The stock must be well fed, the implements cared for, and all domestic jobs (' chores ' is the Canadian word) of whatever nature diligently attended to. The autumn ploughing will be one of the first and greatest of the settler's anxieties, for on it will depend that early seeding so essential in Canada. Not a day in spring must be lost, but advantage taken of the earliest moment when the snow is off the ground to put in the seed. This work will not be scamped ; and the utmost care taken to have everything in readiness to begin the harvest at the first sign of ripening. Farming is not a perpetual holiday, but requires the same intelligent application as is neces- sary to the merchant or manufacturer." I may as well describe the habits of a successful" Scottish farmer, at whose house I visited in Assin- iboia. He had engaged his labourers for the harvest in the spring, and at half-past four they were at their breakfast. The mistress of the house had a young child to look after, so did not appear quite so early ; but one of the hired men got up sooner than the rest, lighted the stove and warmed the breakfast, which had been got ready the day before. The porridge is always put on over night. All the energies of the household are directed to getting in the harvest ; for girls as well as boys can assist in the "stouping," i.e., following the binder, AUTUMN. 135 and propping up the sheaves, as they are thrown out by the machine already tied up. The men generally take their dinners to the field, and if it is distant their tea as well ; for when fine they work till it is dark, as the next day rain or even snow may stop them, and give them an undesired holi- day. A threshing machine goes the round of the neighbourhood ; and those who can hire it first, get their corn threshed out, and then sell it off at once, generally do best. Ploughing has probably gone on at intervals all the summer ; but if not, it is done in any open weather there may be before the great frosts begin, and wood is stacked under cover if possible, and as close to the house as space admits. The stables should be rendered warmer by haystacks, or manure heaps close against them ; and the fowls are con- signed to a half-underground abode, and there they remain through the winter. The sheep have to be folded, and the lambing season begins before they are released. The cattle are put up. Opinions differ about the colts, who through the summer have run beside their mothers when in harness. Some stable them ; others let those that are natives of the country run loose. Potatoes, everything likely to be wanted during the winter, are brought into the house, and those who possess milking cows freeze a quantity of milk and butter to last through the 136 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. winter. Eggs are often accidentally frozen ; and they do for puddings, but not for boiling or poach- ing. Winter is heralded by the departure of living creatures. Mosquitoes have been a scourge since April, but at the end of August have no spirit left to sting ; and the flies come into the house, cluster- ing round the stove pipe and swarming in the kitchen to avoid the cold outside. The swallows are all gone when August sets in, in spite of the ingenious way in which they have built their nests packed together, and with very small round en- trance holes, only just wide enough for one bird to squeeze through at a time. The rooks, crows, and prairie chickens hawks, kites, owls, and ravens fly away. A herd of moose deer is reported as having been seen going south, and the Indians bring some proofs of it in excellent venison. The gophers, the farmer's "little tyrant," have dis- appeared into their holes with a good store of grain ; the sparrows, robins, cross-bills, and wild pigeons go somewhere ; and at last nothing is left outside but the little white and yellow snow-bird, which hops about on the snow, and feeds itself in some invisible way. After the first autumn frost there is often a thaw again at the end of October, and a little mild weather before the great severity of winter sets in. The farmer may be thankful if this is postponed till all the grain he wants to sell THE HARVEST FESTIVAL. 137 has reached the mill. Then he has a little time to turn round and to enjoy himself before the spring sowing begins. The second year I was in Assiniboia, where I kept a record of the weather ; the thermometer rose on April 23 (St. George's Day, and a national holiday) to 84 in the shade, Fahr., and continued so all day. On April 3 it was 6 below zero, Fahr., as well as on previous nights, and had never risen above 28. The sudden change caused a rapid thaw ; the snow streamed off the roofs and off the ground, and before April 30, when snow fell again, a great deal of seed had been put in throughout the country. In the high prairie lands, water is collected in tanks in default of wells, and frozen snow was brought out of them as late as the end of July, whenever the bucket was put down. But that year was a glorious harvest. There was no frost to speak of till the night of the I2th Sep- tember, when eight degrees of it killed everything ; but the corn had passed the stage when it could be spoilt. It was fully ripe, and most of it cut. The harvest festival took place at St. Peter's Church, Qu'Appelle station, on Michaelmas Day ; and was so crowded with the grateful parishioners, even some Nonconformists, that many had to stand outside. It was touching to see how heartily the oldest farmer joined in the chorus : 138 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. For His mercies still endure, Ever faithful, ever sure. The previous year, 1890, five degrees of frost on 4th August spoiled the corn. On the 2Oth there was another frost. On the 4th September it snowed all day long, and the snow lay over the corn-fields, and covering the leaves on the trees for four days. It was a curious sight to see the green leaves with the boughs much broken by the weight ; and the green corn alas ! too green reappearing from under the melting snow. Why do our histories go on repeating French exaggerations about the cold having destroyed Napoleon's forces in Russia, when our countrymen endure twenty or thirty degrees of frost more than was experienced by the French army in the winter of 1812, and when that army would have been none the worse for what they did experience if they had been clothed and fed like the north-west mounted police? In February, 1893, the thermometer for a fortnight ranged from 30 to 40 below zero, Fahr., and in January there were many days re- corded when it never got above 10 below zero, and one day sank to 50 in an exposed place. The line extending for 247 miles from Regina to Prince Albert was blocked for more than two months with snow. Mails and other traffic were suspended; and it was at last cleared by a rotatory snow-plough FRENCH EXAGGERATION OF COLD IN RUSSIA. 139 with three engines attached. There was an excep- tionally fine open autumn ; yet the Edmonton and Calgary train was stopped by snowdrifts in October. Blizzards come in Canada even when the ther- mometer is at zero ; and this means many people being lost in the snow. Every town along the Canadian and Pacific line had some sad tale to record, and more in the remoter districts ; yet all this is not thought worth mentioning when it occurs in Canada by the English press, although telegrams are inserted about people being frozen to death in Russia. Can we wonder that an indignant English- man who had lived in Canada should write the following to one of the Canadian papers ? " As if with the famine in Madras, and poverty knocking at the door in thousands of homes in our overcrowded towns, the British philanthropist had not enough scope for his money, a society lately set up in England is appealing to him for funds to help prisoners in Siberia to escape. When listening to one of these escaped prisoners, I could not help reflecting that what he was set to do as a punish- ment i.e., make his living by his hands, if in no other way in any trade, or in any part of Siberia he chose, the sons of many of the oldest families in England are doing by choice in Canada. Why should not a Russian hot-brained student, who tries to stir up an ignorant peasantry to set fire to 10 140 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. libraries and towns in Russia and has thereby incurred exile, not among foreigners but among his own countrymen, be left to work at a handicraft, as thousands of more honest men are doing else- where, instead of being helped to settle in over- crowded England to make his living by literature as more befitting his rank ? Why this peculiar tenderness for the delicacy of Russian hands ; when the so-called political exile is frequently a criminal who has bribed the gaoler to put him among the politicals ; or has purposely incurred his penalty by writing a scurrilous pamphlet to escape a criminal process for fraudulent practices ? Old Dr. Giles Fletcher wrote in 1591, that 'the Russe neither believeth what another man saith nor saith himself anything worthy to be believed '. This charac- teristic sticks to him still ; yet so-called political exiles are taken at exactly what they represent themselves to be. A generation ago, English singers, dancers, and artists used to adopt foreign names in order to be patronised by their own fellow-countryman. Even now, if a man is without money, interest or occupation, he has a better chance of making a living with a foreign name in England than if he bears a British patronymic, in which case he may go and dig in another Siberia without even the allowance these political convicts received from the Czar." REAL COLD IN CANADA. 14! Very different from the prairie is the Okanayan district within British Columbia, and two days' journey from Qu'Appelle station by train and steamer ; the last plies on Lake Okanayan, and is a Canadian Pacific Railroad boat. The lake is sixty miles long, and not more than two wide at its broadest. It is a hollow between two ranges of hills, clad with timber down to the water's edge. The Fairview gold mines are in the neighbour- hood, and, worked by an English company, bid fair to be productive. It is the opinion of an engineering English expert that the country is full of gold, not in nuggets but in the quartz rock. Game is plentiful here ; bears, mountain sheep and goats, deer, ducks, geese, prairie chickens, and grouse. In the Okanayan valley anything belonging to a temperate climate seems to thrive ; and after a shower the air is perfumed like Rim- mel's shop. Truly Canada possesses a variety of climates. It is perhaps in its minerals that the future wealth of Canada lies, and when they are generally worked, farming will pay well. We have heard of gold workers in the district bordering on Alaska, who paid in gold the worth of three dollars for a cab- bage (a huge Canadian one), having been living for months on only dried meat and fish ; and potatoes, fruits, and other vegetables sell at remunerative 142 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. prices there, when a dealer can get them safely to that remote spot. I picked up on the grounds of St. John's College,. Ou'Appelle station, a piece of sparkling stone, and shook the gold dust from it. I showed it to an- Australian mining engineer in England, who told: me it was not true gold ore, but was often found in the vicinity of gold ore. CHAPTER VIII. Mission Work in the Colonies Bishop Anson's Address to the Clergy Advantages of the North-west The Tariff Lord Brassey" s Settlement Marriage Ups and Downs Winter Algoma. " THE first want of our mission work is knowledge," said Dean Vaughan ; " the Church at home does not know the Church abroad. In the Christian home it should be more disgraceful that children should know nothing of the planters and waterers of Christ's vineyard in India, in Africa, in Australia, than that they should be ignorant of the exploits by which Switzerland was made free, or the battle- fields on which Germany was made one." This ignorance seems to extend to the secular affairs and geographical situation of our colonies ; so that any advertisements framed in the interest of a land company's speculations will go down. In the case of young men or of the uneducated classes it is natural ; but their parents and advisers have had the opportunity of reading personal narratives on the subject of emigration to Canada since the last century. Mrs. Jamieson graphically described the 144 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. portion with the best climate, and now the most thickly peopled, in 1837, and the inevitable priva- tions of the first colonists. She also showed how the ignorance of the British commissioners, who marked out the boundary, treated as of no account the beautiful districts south of the lakes, and quietly handed over regions then unpeopled except by Indians to the United States. Many a settler in East Canada, only thirty years ago, has come home to relate his hard experiences ; and the for- tunes and misfortunes of adventurers further west. All have been much the same, varied according to the means and common-sense of the settler, or the special characteristics of his place of abode ; for all show that continued hard work, and the most care- ful management, is the only way to gain even a comfortable livelihood. At different times there have been rich men like Lord Brassey who can afford to have a hobby, and who have taken up large tracts of land, and farmed them through an agent, with no expectation of any immediate return for the money they are expending; and philanthro- pists like Bishop Anson, who are aware that many young men must leave England for a maintenance, and give them facilities of knowing something of the country, before they settle down (although there is now every hope that the agricultural college he founded may become self-supporting). These do BISHOP ANSON'S ADDRESS TO THE CLERGY. 14$ more for a new colony than any hired emigration agents, such as the Canadian Government employs. But the ordinary intending settler when he reads of the great crops which can be raised on the virgin soil in the north-west, might also comprehend that all the large crops thus raised cannot be required for home consumption, and that the great distance from a seaport, and the low price of wheat in Europe, must greatly reduce his profit. The West United States requires no grain from the Canadian north-west. He would also see in the Government pamphlets the high rate of wages, so that young farmers can seldom afford to employ hired labour ; and he might understand, without reading it, that all manufactured articles, tools, clothes, and even articles of food which require labour to produce, or have to be brought 1400 miles, would be dear too ; so that besides hard work, he must expect to do without much which in England he has considered essential. Bishop Anson, as high an authority as any one on the subject of the English settlements in Canada, when addressing a clerical meeting on the mission work of the Church, said : " Even among our own people in the colonies, we must remember that much that seems to their friends at home self-denial and self-sacrifice on the part of clergy who go out to the further parts of the colonies, does not appear at all in the same light to those to 146 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. whom they minister there. These settlers have gone there, and are content to live a hard life for their own profit. The clergy live the same life, only generally a little more comfortably than the majority of their parishioners. It is no act of self- denial in itself, in the eyes of the settlers, that the clergy should be there. Indeed, one of the greatest difficulties I had, was to persuade the people that it was no easy matter to procure clergy at least for the chief places in the diocese. The people could not understand why, even from a worldly point of view, there should not be a large number ready and anxious to obtain the 160 to 200 that is usually given there, rather than starve, as they considered many curates were doing in England on ;i2o." Yet, with all its drawbacks, the climate of the north-west is remarkably exhilarating, and many young men like the life extremely. Horses are procured and kept at less expense than in England. No licence is required to keep a dog or carry a gun. A man can become a landowner ; and in time may bequeath his name to a town, and he or his chil- dren may some day take a prominent part in the government of the Dominion. Education is very cheap, and young men study at the universities and pay the fees by their work in the vacation. There are openings in other callings than farming ; and in these men may gain a living, and become THE TARIFF. 147 important and useful people when they would not have the opportunity in England. There is still an old-fashioned, wholesome feeling of horror at cruelty or crimes of violence, which makes the Canadian Legislature able to enforce the lash when it is desirable, and no fear of being ousted by their constituents. Also, a love for law and order 1 which they brought away with them from England, and a respect for authorities, including European sovereigns. The people are extremely hospitable and sociable ; and in the towns winter is a very lively time. The young settler in a few years may be able to leave his farm in winter under the charge of a junior partner or bailiff, and go and enjoy himself in England or elsewhere ; but the mistake made is to put the cart before the horse, and to take these trips before he has paid off his early liabilities, or seen his way to become assured of a competence. There can be no doubt that the tariff is a draw- back to the prosperity of the north-west, and deters many settlers from coming to that part, when they have realised all the inconveniences it entails. A 1 A law has just been passed in Ontario ordering the church bells to be daily rung at nine P.M. ; and any one under seventeen found after that in the street may be arrested by the police. Women of bad character are very summarily expelled from Winnipeg. 148 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. young man settles in a remote district for the sake of a free grant. Agricultural work and the climate are most destructive to clothes. He has no acquaint- ance in a Canadian town to choose them for him > and he naturally writes home to his mother or sister, and asks her to send him out some woollen socks and shirts. They arrive, all home made, and marked with his name to show they are not in- tended for sale; but they are detained at Winnipeg or Regina till he has paid the duty, which some- times amounts to more than their English value. The same with books. The Canadian censors seem to be very ignorant on this subject, for I have seen a new copy, just after it came out, of the Earl of Iddesleigh's Life, allowed to come duty free ; while an old copy of Coleridge and Southey's poems, printed at least forty years ago, and published very much longer, was taxed. The rule that an article must be of the value of a dollar or more, and new, to make it liable to duty, does not seem to be strictly kept. It involves trouble and inconvenience for a man living at a distance from a post-office ; and in a district where there is little or no money to be had, the settler is sometimes unable to remit the duty at all. In a manufacturing country these duties would be reasonable enough ; but authors, publishers, and manufacturers, are conspicuous by their absence in the north-west. A shilling's worth LORD BRASSEY'S SETTLEMENT. 149 of toys sent by post from England to the children on an isolated farm among Indian reserves in Saskatchewan, was taxed thirty cents. Conse- quently, cheap American reprints is the literature chiefly current ; and if anything eventually makes the north-west join itself on to the United States, it is this tariff; as such a union would lower the price of machinery and raw and manufactured goods, now heavily taxed. Among several attempts to settle a large tract of country in the north-west, Lord Brassey's has been the most important, and through his able manager, Mr. Sheppard, he has turned a howling wilderness into a well-cultivated district, dotted with houses, an hotel, and a street of shops. Some agricultural labourers with their families were imported in a body from England, besides a large number of gentleman settlers. Quite a luxurious boarding- house, with a concrete outside and hot-water pipes throughout, was established for the bachelors under a housekeeper ; and the furniture and fittings were a pleasing novelty in the north-west. I went there on an occasion when a Church of England service was held in the largest room ; and so far from home it was quite a treat to see the\3hropshire and Staf- fordshire labouring families, just such as we might meet any market-day at Stafford, Market Drayton, or Shrewsbury, who came to take part in it. A ISO EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. lay brother from St. John's College officiated. There was a Presbyterian chapel on the estate, but not a church ; though, when I left Canada, it was rumoured that Lord Brassey is going to erect one. Indian Head, the site of the Brassey farm, is also near the Government Experimental Farm. At Edgeley, about seven miles from Qu'Appelle and rather more from Indian Head, Mr. Cameron farms twelve square miles, with all the latest im- provements in agricultural machinery. The post- office is attached to his house ; and during the summer a service is held by one of the Qu'Appelle clergy in his dining-hall for the benefit of the dis- trict. A little beyond is a Methodist colony. The winter of 1892-3 was a terrible one for cattle in the great grazing districts, and about fifty per cent, are said to have perished. With such losses neither the north-west nor Manitoba was in a position to offer additional stipends to the clergy, so that the failure of the noble effort to establish a brotherhood at St. John's College is at the present moment a special subject of regret. Visiting England again before he is fairly planted often upsets a young settler's plans. He con- trasts the comfort in which his friends live with the hard work he has to do ; and some of his relations laugh at him, or pity him, when they hear that he blacks his own boots, and cooks his own LORD BRASSEY'S SETTLEMENT. 151 food. Those who send out young men to the colonies must expect them to do all kinds of things, falsely called menial in this country, otherwise they will never succeed in Canada. There we have seen an earl's son cleaning his own boots ; and indeed it is generally the third-class men, more than those of the upper class, who cannot do anything in the house for themselves ; and when they are off out- door work expect to be waited on hand and foot, even when all this falls upon a wife. A man who has never learnt to put things into their proper places when he has used them, and who is radically careless and untidy, is an uncomfortable settler. He loses his tools, keeps his small rooms like a rag-shop, and gives his wife much unnecessary trouble, besides losing his animals by letting them have damp beds which get frozen. Waste, which in England may not be of much consequence, is more serious where a five-cent piece (2^d.) repre- sents a penny, and a dollar often goes no further than a shilling ; and if you throw away even string, you cannot buy it again at once. This a boy learns as a farm pupil ; particularly if he is far away from a shop. I have seen very happy Canadian farms where the husband was a man of neat habits, and ready to take his share of the domestic duties when not otherwise employed. The "washing up" is of course a heavy business when the house is filled 152 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. with volunteer guests, or after an entertainment ; and some of the young men visitors offer to assist the ladies of the family in this work ; so there is as merry a party in the kitchen as in the parlour, where the elders have adjourned to pipes or to play at cards. Nothing is more unpopular in America than to say anything against marriage being most desir- able at all times and all seasons. The United States Government even exercised its censorial rights on a novel solely for that reason, and forbade it to be sent by post. Canada is keener in the matter than the States. Still, in our humble opinion, a young settler should think more than twice before he asks a girl who has a comfortable home in England, and the means of remaining there, to come out and share his work. To begin with, she has no idea what it is. If he has a small income independent of his farm, it is a different matter, or when he has got a nice home, and secured the prospect of a competence. But when he is only living on loans, marriage, except with a woman brought up to work, is too apt to lead to an unhappy menage, and life-long disappointment. The husband ought to be able to keep a servant exclusively for his wife, unless he helps her in the house himself. Canadian boys are brought up to cook or do anything in domestic service ; so it is UPS AND DOWNS. 153 not absolutely necessary for her to have a female servant, often very difficult to obtain. Even the girls among the Hungarians, Germans, and half- breeds, ask high wages compared to what they can get in England. But if a delicately nurtured woman has to cook, wash, keep the house in order, and pass days entirely alone, fetching in wood and water when her husband is engaged out of doors, it tells sooner or later on her health in this extreme climate ; and if she has a child, she is unable to look properly after it, and after her husband too. A baby, though charming in theory, is not equally pleasant to the hard-worked farmer when it shrieks throughout the night in a litlle wooden house, suffering from its teeth or from having been mismanaged by an inexperienced young mother, and no soothing syrup at hand. In all the colonies there has been great mortality among the children of the first settlers, particularly in Canada. It is most unfortunate for the husband, if the wife, from broken health, is obliged to return to her friends in England ; yet this is a better alternative than becoming an invalid out there. Cooking over the stove in a little wooden Canadian house, on which the sun has been playing since dawn, and when the thermometer indoors without the stove is at 89, is extremely trying. I have seen a kitchen with the thermometer over 100 in 154 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. the summer, when simply a small ordinary dinner was being cooked. Yet when the haying time and harvest comes, there are sure to be mowers, threshers, and other men employed, who require to be fed as well as the husband, and whose appetites are sharpened by having been up since four A.M., and perhaps not in bed till ten, the previous night. Cooks' wages are always higher for those months ; and even though the men may get their own break- fast, the cooking day after day for all these hungry people's dinner and supper is too much for the wife. They are satisfied with less when they have to cook for themselves, and there is no woman about the place. Tea, cold pork, and bread is then enough for their supper as well as dinner ; but in such a case the farmer often offers higher wages to- induce the men 'to work for him. We remember one young fellow just out from England, and only fourteen, who was appointed cook because he was too small to be of much use in any other way to a party camping out to get in hay. How the rest upbraided him when they came in tired and hungry from their work, and found he had poured away the tea that was left in the morning, let the fire out,, and allowed the only box of matches to get damp in a heavy shower of rain ! The Government and the railway companies allow hay to be taken off unallotted land ; so that where there is much still UPS AND DOWNS. 155 unsettled, farmers procure hay and most nutritious hay it is, grown on the rich prairie from this source; and can lay down all their own estates in crops. Several young men assured me that they had never known what it was to enjoy really good health till they came out to the Canadian prairie. There, with the air blowing straight from the North Pole, without a hill of any height to inter- cept it, a man must be braced up if anywhere. I was once indebted to a Scotsman for a ten-miles' drive. Born on the Solway, he had been sent in his youth to a merchant's office in Liverpool. His constitution would not stand the sedentary town life : but his health had been excellent out here, where he had been seven years.. He was the second Annandale man whom I met in Assiniboia. Others came out who have been consumptive in England, or been overworked at school or college, or have even suffered from asthma ; and these think it well worth while to forego some English comforts for the sake of health. One young fellow, the scion of a good county family educated at an English public school, was glad to take a place in livery stables ; but then his " boss," or employer, was also an English gentleman. He played the organ, and read the lessons in church, and used to dine with the clergyman every Sunday. 1 1 156 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Another man, the son of a county magistrate, took a place as a waiter at a restaurant in Toronto, while he was looking about for something better to do. A third, the son of a deceased high English official, who might have taken precedence before everybody, except perhaps half a dozen, in the north-west, hired himself out on a farm where he was expected to dine in the kitchen with the cook. He did not mind this, as it saved him the trouble of brushing himself up when he came in from his work. Then the farmer's wife requested he would address her as " ma'am ". This he did not mind. But he left at last because he found he was doing more than other hired men about the place, and was only being paid half as much. All these " stooped to conquer," and did conquer adversity at last, gain- ing far more experience of life than if they had settled down at once on their own land, and made all their inevitable mistakes at their own cost. Most of the young men who went out on the same ship with myself were talking of places as cowboys ; and it seemed to be the height of their ambition ; but I soon found that in the north-west it was considered anything but a desirable life for a youth fit for anything else. I deeply insulted the son of a professional man by saying he would make a good cowboy because he rode so well. WINTKR. 157 This youth entered the mounted police, which his friends thought a far better opening. In the spring of 1893 the ice did not begin to move on the Red River at Winnipeg till April 26, and the thermometer sank to 18 on the 28th. Before the rivers are affected by the milder weather, the sun thaws the snow many times on the surface, and it freezes again at night till it finally disappears. One fine April day the sun for some hours had been thawing the ice on the roof, and this pouring down on to the snow below melted it for about a square yard. The bared patch covered a gopher hole, and, for the first time since September, its owner came out, peeped round in the cautious way the gopher commonly does, sat on its tail and folded its fore paws, and then looked about for something green, which it did not find. But its appearance was like the olive branch in the dove's mouth at the time of the flood. It showed that the winter was going. During April of 1893, the warmest day was only 49 and the coldest 12 above zero ; but the emigrants had begun to arrive a month before. A party of Polish Jews were so disgusted at finding snow still on the ground that they gave a great deal of trouble on the railway, and some of them were consequently lodged in prison directly they arrived at the settlement, which had prepared to receive them most cordially. 158 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. They had probably read in the guide-books that the Canadian winter only lasts four months. On January 24, 1 894, the thermometer was 46 below zero. The Rev. William Crompton, who is a travelling- Church of England clergyman in Algoma, takes a few farm pupils into his family to instruct in farm- ing ; and some time back in the Guardian gave curious reminiscences of one or two of those he had from England. His sons apparently act as farm instructors. Algoma is neither in Manitoba nor the north-west, but is reached by a branch line from Sudbury, on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and lies on Lake Huron, a region of fir trees and timber, but not much depth of vegetable soil. This district is probably milder than the north-west, but not so exhilarating nor fit for ranching. Another success- ful farmer, a mile and a half from Qu'Appelle station, Mr. Herbert Boyce, offers a comfortable colonial home to two farm pupils at the rate of $o a year ; but they are not obliged to stay or pay for more than a month if they dislike the country. He is married, and assists them in their choice of land when they wish to set up for themselves, and also meets them at the station in his own convey- ance, if they let him know when they are going to- arrive. He is still a young man ; but having come out at eighteen, and made his own way, he has much experience. His father, who lives near to- ALGOMA. 159 him, is a justice of the peace. Mr. Herbert Boyce owns a threshing machine, a blacksmith's forge, and other requisites for instruction. Having mentioned Algoma it is only fair to give a letter about it which appeared in the Manitoba Free Press, as I do not know it myself. As far as I am aware, no one contradicted this letter. SIR, I notice in one of our local papers that a few unsuccessful farmers in Manitoba think of moving to Algoma this year. Poor deluded souls 1 Such a change would be worse, to use a homely phrase, than jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Manitoba, like every other country, has its drawbacks ; but to compare Algoma with Manitoba for farming purposes would require an imagination superior to all the facts of the case. There is considerable land fit for cultivation on Manitoulin and other islands in the Georgian Bay, and a few patches here and there on the north shore ; but the rest of the dis- trict at this end is mostly a barren wilderness of rocks and swamps, unfit for settlement, except by the inhabitants, who work in the lumber camps during the winter, and thus earn enough money to keep the wolf from the door. But such farms as they have merely for homes, and not to make a living out of would be curiosities anywhere else in the world. The largest area of fairly good farming lands I know of in Algoma is on the Rainy River, just east of the Manitoba line. If the Ontario Government would adopt the American Homestead Act and give the settler in Algoma the timber, minerals, and everything on and under the ground, as in Northern Michigan, which is a similar country, there would be some inducement for settlers to come here, as they could get enough for the timber on the land to give them a start. But as it is now, the timber is sold to the lumber kings, the 160 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. minerals are reserved, and the poor settler gets nothing but a chance to starve but he gets lots of that, the Government being very liberal with him in this way if in no other. Mr. James Stolice, who has been farming near the Bruce mines for over twenty years, wrote a long letter to the Sudbury Journal last week on the grievances of the miners and settlers in Algoma, in which he said among other things: " A farmer in this township who never heard of the direct tax on all patented lands here, was very much alarmed one day while at work, when one of his neighbours told him his farm was advertised for sale and to be sold in Toronto with- out ever having given him notice. He had no remedy but to pay, and being short of cash he had to sell his only cow to pay this tax. In the next township a settler wanted the lumber- man to leave two pine trees which he wanted for shingles ; but the poor request went unheeded, the pine trees were taken, and the settler will have to find shingles elsewhere." The last and almost the only settler we had on this range sold out and left for Manitoba last fall glad to be able to get away and is now located north of Virden. Many of the settlements on the north shore were started over thirty years ago, but all the flour and most of the beef used in the district come from Manitoba and Eastern Ontario. They expected at one time that the mining industry was going to give this section of Algoma a big lift and help the settlers on the north shore in various ways, but the short-sighted mining policy lately adopted by the Ontario Government has knocked all such prospects into infinite space. A great many young men and others who come here to settle down find it hard work now to settle up and get the wherewithal to take them away. No, there will have to be another glacial period to grind down the rocks before Algoma can be compared with Mani- toba as a farming country. A. McCHARLES. Sudbury, March 5. CHAPTER IX. Funerals English Orphans Children of the North- west The Curried Chicken Hired People Bishop Ansorfs Last Tour. THE only cheerful funerals I ever saw were of an Austrian official in Austrian Slavonia, and of a Jew in the valley of Jehoshaphat : a large crowd followed both, laughing and talking, giving the idea that the first had been a hard taskmaster, and the second perhaps some old miser who had left no one cause to grieve over him. Melancholy as a funeral must always be, with those exceptions, that of an emigrant in a new country, particularly if he is the father of a family who have looked to him for their support, seems the most melancholy of all. It is on these occasions that the sympathy of those English colonists and Canadians who have seen much trouble and difficulty themselves, comes out in its most practical and warmest aspect. Who has not known several of these tragedies when " the voice of the mourners wailed manhood in glory," and how all the outsiders joined in it ? The whole town followed the funeral procession as it wended 162 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. its way, amidst brushwood and pasture, to the little corner of the prairie, railed off as a cemetery, and backed by a wood of low birches. There, far from his native land, the body of the settler was com- mitted to the ground with our beautiful English service by the chief pastor of the diocese ; while the sun shone out with the fierce heat of the north- west on the melting snow. " Everything that hath breath " was wakening up to welcome the approach of spring ; and never did the words, " in the midst of life we are in death," seem more appropriate. Where are his kinsfolk and acquaintance ? They stand upon another shore. Lord, vouchsafe his soul to keep In Thy peaceful blessed sleep. Another settler elsewhere had brought his family of twelve children from England, and had not com- pleted the purchase of a farm when he died of a cold he had caught in the railway carriage, and which turned to inflammation of the lungs only a fortnight after he arrived. His widow took the farm on herself; her eldest daughter at once applied for the school of the township, and obtained it ; a second daughter was engaged to be married almost immediately to an English gentleman in the neighbourhood, and all the children old enough were at once hired by different employers round. Another widow took up the Government post ENGLISH ORPHANS. 163 which her late husband had held, and of which she had done the work during his long illness ; with it she educated and brought up her four children, and yet found time to teach in the Sunday School, and assist in parochial affairs. A third took her six children, the youngest only three years old, and settled with them on a ranch near a railway station in Western Assiniboia, where they will probably become the chief men of a new city, which will bear their name. A born Canadian soon begins to work, and feels it no grievance ; for it is the object of existence in the north-west. There was a child of seven who cleaned seven pairs of boots every morning before he went to school, while his brother of six cleaned the stove ; a sister of nine scrubbed the floors. And a wooden house, with people coming in and out from the fields, requires a good deal of keeping clean. Canadian children soon pay for their keep ; and this makes them very independent of their parents ; for they know if they run away from home they can obtain wages elsewhere, and that their parents really will be the losers. Last winter a farmer went to look for his cows driven away by a snow-storm, and he was found dead in the snow, twenty-two miles from home, his sleigh overturned and broken. It was a subject for general mourning in the district. He had gone 164 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. out alone, refusing to take his sons or hired boys on account of the danger ; and it was they and the neighbours, who, after a long search, found him. Another farmer the same week was arrested for having caused the death of an orphan boy who worked for him, by sending him out after the cows; and when the boy said " his clothes were not warm enough to go outside," he pushed him out, and fastened the door behind him. There is always some kindly person or a magistrate in the neigh- bourhood to look after the welfare of the young boys who are sent out in large numbers from English charitable institutions ; otherwise, the fact of there being a home for them to go to, about 300 miles from the farm where they are working, would not avail them much. The farmers engage, as a rule, to keep them the whole year, in consideration of their work in the summer being worth more than their wages. When winter comes, the farmer often finds the boy troublesome, and is glad to get rid of him. One case I knew of a Kilburn orphan whose parents had lived in Shore- ditch. He sold his warm clothes to spend the money in a chain not worth a tenth what he paid. He could not chop wood or go out of doors without getting frost-bitten ; and the farmer, who had only one room for kitchen and bedroom, took advantage of the boy saying he wanted to go, by sending him ENGLISH ORPHANS. 165 off. He was kindly treated by one or two people at whose houses he called, who let him warm him- self at the stove and gave him food ; but he was in a very dirty condition, and they could not take him in for a night. At last a clergyman found him, with his nose, feet, and fingers frost-bitten, on the road leading to that refuge for the destitute, St. John's College, Qu'Appelle station, and there he was taken in, washed, and re-clothed, and kept very comfortably for another year, when a good place was found for him. Other orphan boys have been returned more than once to that beneficent establishment as not worth their wages ; but long- suffering householders from England, rather than turn an orphan boy out in winter to go down hill most effectually in an inferior situation, have long put up with idleness, thieving propensities, and falsehood. The born Canadian farmer, with no special sympathy for Britons, not unnaturally ex- pects his money's worth ; and with him the boys find their wages stopped, and themselves fined for damage to or caused by cattle under their care. At the end of a twelvemonth even a steady in- dustrious boy is sometimes paid with only a lean good-for-nothing animal, or sent off without any- thing, because his employer says he cannot afford to pay him. All over Canada, English orphan boys and girls are frequently adopted by couples 1 66 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. who have no children, and want some one to look after them in their old age; and these children have a very happy time of it. I heard of one instance where the couple afterwards had children of their own ; yet the adopted daughter never seemed to lose her first place in their affection. The indis- criminate sending of workhouse and reformatory children, or born members of the criminal class, to Canada, is hardly fair to the Canadian rising generation, as from their superior knowledge of the world they are likely to influence the simple chil- dren of the backwoods ; but it is too well known a fact to need repetition, that carefully selected boys and girls are very acceptable, and as a rule improve their prospects by going out. 1 It is very desirable that all boys intended for Canada should be specially taught to be kind to animals. We knew one who lost his place because whenever he saw a cow looking towards him he would seize a pitchfork to attack her with. Brought up in a London home for waifs, he evidently thought that a cow's only mission was to toss people. On another farm, where a trough had been purposely constructed to water the cattle after a day in dry pasture before they were folded for the night, the 1 The Rev. F. A. G. Eichbaum, Warden of St. Edward's, West Malvern, periodically takes out orphans to Canada, but carefully selects boys with good antecedents. CHILDREN OF THE NORTH-WEST. l6/ herd-boy would amuse himself by whipping them off directly they got near the trough, and not allowing them to have a drop. No wonder milk was so scarce on that farm that it had to be bought elsewhere. I might multiply instances. One boy sent to work for a friend of mine told him he hated farm work ; but if he could get into a town he could soon make a living by picking pockets. There are many farms in the north-west where a high Christian standard is maintained, and on which if a boy, gentle or simple, obtained a situa- tion, he would have every chance of doing well ; farmers who in the busiest season find time to have daily family prayers, and if too far from a church to attend its services regularly, read the whole service at home to the household on Sunday, and allow no work but what is absolutely necessary to be done. The want of books which the children in these remote farms can understand is often felt. Their vocabulary is so limited that they do not know the meaning of numerous words in common use in English children's books ; and unless they keep up the habit of reading it is soon forgotten. Mrs. Barbauld and old-fashioned books of her date seem more easily read by the children of the north- west than those which please their contemporaries in England. It is into these primitive households that a youth who has graduated in crime on the 1 68 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. London streets, and well versed in the base litera- ture allowed to circulate in our large cities, is liable to be introduced. The children listen in amaze- ment to his description of steam-boats, and marvels that neither they nor their parents ever saw ; and he soon gets an influence over them. The half- breeds educated at the Roman mission at Fort Qu'Appelle and at some of the Government schools are far preferable as companions to the children to such a boy as this. Employers and employed share the same meals very generally in north-west farms. The labourers will give warning at a busy moment if, owing to the arrival of a stranger, they are set to have their meals at a different table. The bishop of the diocese may arrive with his driver, and ask to be put up for the night, and he sits down at the same board with the hired boys in their working clothes. On one of these occasions the only dish cooked consisted of a very high prairie fowl. It was bad keeping weather; and the mistress of the house, having no other meat, curried it, thinking curry would conceal the flavour, which it quite failed to do. She hoped that the bishop was too hungry to notice it, as he courteously partook of it without remark. The custom of paying a hired man or woman's fare from England, binding them to remain a HIRED PEOPLE. 169 certain number of years on special wages, does not seem to be much adopted now. The English farm servant, accustomed to do everything for herself, is most suitable for Canada, or what is known as a general servant ; but those who have been parlour maids, cooks, or servants in good town situations, find a reverse of fortune in north-west establish- ments. The situations there are not what they are used to ; and they are likely to be attracted by the high wages offered at hotels, or for the summer on some other farm. They also soon marry. As to men, there are so many looking about for work, who would be glad to perform domestic service for their board, and the wages which would be equally given to servants straight from England, that it is hardly worth while to bring out people from England, who may dislike the country, and refuse to remain or to work when they arrive. We have known instances of people being engaged in England by the friends of those who want them in Canada, and the arrangement made has been to pay their journey there and back after a certain term of service. One of these would do absolutely nothing when she arrived; and as she was simply an expense in food, washing, and stove, her employers assented to her proposal to leave them after a few weeks. She declined to take the payment for the short time she had been there ; but a few days later 12 I/O EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. returned with a lawyer, to claim wages for the longer term agreed upon in England, and the fare for her passage home ; and it was given to her ! An uneducated person often comes out in quite a different light in a new country, and also never quite takes in the novel situation she must expect. The narrative of Bishop Anson's last visitation tour, given in the diocesan magazine two months later, shows a little of the difficulties which beset the traveller whose journey takes him beyond rail- ways in Canada. The bishop had visited the Indian reserves in the Touchwood Hills, thirty miles north of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and thence drove another ninety miles to Fort Pelly, in the north- western extremity of his diocese. His carriage was an open conveyance, differing from the ordinary buckboard by having two seats, like an uncovered char-a-banc, such as we find in some parts of Europe. It was drawn by two horses ; and Mr. Dee, lay reader at Fort Pelly, accompanied the bishop and his driver, but in his own buckboard. They de- cided to halt for the night in a ravine which con- tained water, about thirty-five miles on their way, at the edge of a new settlement of farmers from Dakota. " It proved to be a delightful place, ex- cept that it was infested with myriads of most ravenous mosquitoes." This, it must be observed, is the common drawback to summer journeys. BISHOP ANSON'S LAST TOUR. 171 Even in an ordinary house the plaster is often stained towards August with red and black patches, the remains of slaughtered insects. The bishop and his two companions pitched their tent, and proceeded to eat the supper they had brought with them ; and then taking all the precautions which they thought would prevent the mosquitoes from sharing their tent, retired, but not to rest. A "'smudge" lit inside the tent almost drove them out, but did not seem to have half so much effect on the mosquitoes. In the middle of the night an experiment was tried, which probably caused an unlooked-for disaster. Torches of paper were lighted to drive out the tormentors. A commotion was heard among the tethered horses ; but as, on looking out, they were seen to be all there, no more was thought of it till the little party rose at half- past three A.M. to continue the journey. But the bishop's horses had disappeared ; one of them with his tether rope and pin, so that there was fear he would get entangled in the brushwood. One of the party went in search of some of the Dakota settlers, from whom they might borrow a horse, and go and hunt for the runaways ; and, this obtained, Mr. Dee drove the bishop on in his buckboard, as the bishop was expected to officiate at Pelly the next day. After driving hard till four A.M., with a brief halt, the buckboard came to pieces, and Mr. Dee began 172 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. also to doubt as to whether he had got on to the right trail ; for in these lonely parts a day may pass without meeting any one to ask. After the bishop had walked some distance, they came upon a young tr^e sufficiently strong to substitute for the broken portion of the buckboard, and a little further on the refreshing sight of a house or wooden hut. It was tenantless, and fastened up. Travellers in the north-west are permitted to shelter themselves how they best can when a heavy storm is coming on as at present ; and these very soon extracted the staple which held the padlock on the door, and took temporary possession. A letter in the house showed them that the nearest post-office was Yorkton, a railway station about thirty-five miles from Fort Telly. After a few hours' rest they resumed their journey ; but, for the last hour and a half of it, drove through pelting rain the quite tropical rain of the north-west, which no overcoat will keep out with lightning playing round them. Such are the ac- companiments of episcopal visitations in the Qu'- Appelle diocese ! In summer the provisions for a journey must be chosen of a sort not likely to turn sour with the excessive heat ; and in the winter the traveller has to stow them away carefully wrapped up, lest they should freeze as hard as rocks. A smudge is the Canadian name for rubbish BISHOP ANSON'S LAST TOUR. 173 burned to drive away the mosquitoes. It should be slightly damp to smoulder more than blaze ; and horses and cattle will come as close to it as they can without getting burnt, to have some relief from these pests. In the summer of 1891, the mosqui- toes were particularly bad. When a plough and horses drew near bushes, a cloud flew out, and settled on man and beast, till the oxen or horses became so restive that the work had to stop. The luxury of mosquito nets round beds, which are used even in Germany, did not seem to have reached the north-west ; but men working out of doors put on gauze veils round their hats, and humane people began to cover their horses with netting when they took them out. Old and young, Europeans and half-breeds, are alike victimised ; but there are some skins, occasionally the softest and whitest, which, for reasons of their own, they will not touch. They flourish most in wooded districts, and near water, or in rainy summers ; and are consequently much less troublesome in the towns or when there is a drought. CHAPTER X. Yankees in Canada North Dakota Alaska Loyalty in the North-west Gradual Ascent towards the Rockies Paving Vancouver Schools Regina Patriotic Societies. FROM the very first year in which the tide of emigration turned towards the north-west, the British settler has had a powerful rival in the Yankee. He has been reared from birth to the extremes of the climate, and knows how to be prepared for them ; and he is so much nearer that he can at once drop upon a good thing when he hears of it. The unfortunate farmer buys taxed twine for his " binder," and a Yankee combination controls the price of the twine. In different parts of the north-west we find hotels kept by Yankees,. and educated Englishmen acting as waiters and omnibus drivers ; Yankee station-masters, and English porters ; in fact, the Yankee somehow getting the uppermost, and Englishmen taking a subordinate place. The Canadians generally as- sure English people that, except as farmers, there are no openings for Englishmen with only small YANKEES IN CANADA. 1/5 means in Canada, for that other places are filled up by natives ; but it would be more correct to say, natives of the new world, than specially Canadian- born, for the Yankee seems everywhere to be ad- mitted on the same footing as the born Canadian. This feeling extends to the postal arrangements, which treat the United States as already part of the Dominion. Three cents, the Canadian internal postage, will carry a letter from Fort Churchill or Labrador to Florida and Arizona. Mr. Greenway, the President of Manitoba, has lately asserted that he looks upon the States as the great source from which immigration will in future proceed to Canada ; and it is indeed no wonder if people settled in North Dakota (United States) should be thankful to transfer their homes to the Dominion. I met a family of German farmers in the large station at St. Paul's in the United States. There were the parents, the old grandmother, treated by the rugged farmer with filial deference, children of all ages, and a herd-boy, with their cows, and a little of their furniture. They were going to try a new place, for they could not make a living in Dakota. I was told by another settler there that the bishop travelled up and down the railway, crossing the province with a carriage fitted up for services, halting at different points where there was a popu- lation, on account of the want of churches and the EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. great poverty of that district, which like Minnesota is apt to be scorched by south winds. A heart- rending story came from Dakota in the spring of 1891. A traveller, wishing to put up for the night, entered a farmhouse, containing only a woman and two little girls. The woman was insane, and the children almost starving. They said a little sister had died, and they .had been obliged to eat her for want of food ; and then their mother fell into the condition in which the traveller found her. Their father had disappeared early in the winter. He had taken the horse and sleigh to the nearest town, but never returned. The un- happy woman was at once cared for, and ultimately transferred to an asylum, and the children placed in one of the many orphanages in which America abounds. It was supposed that the man had been eaten by wolves, possibly when lying on the snow, as it appeared he had left the town rather the worse for liquor. As soon as the snow melted, the remains of his sleigh was found overturned, as well as his clothing and most of the horse's bones. The horse had probably got entangled with the shafts and harness, and could not free itself till it was overpowered. The Canadian wolf used to have the credit of not attacking men ; but of late years it has got mixed with English dogs, who were imported on purpose to keep it down ALASKA. 177 in Alberta ; and a much fiercer race is the result. If Eastern Canada ever separates herself from Great Britain there is no reason why the north- west should do the same. That extensive territory only sends two members to Parliament, so it has not much voice ; but it is extremely loyal, and could subsist alone just as easily as it did when it belonged to England, while Canada belonged to France. The polling district of Snake Plain only contains eight voters, because all the rest are subsidised half-breeds ; and as long as they are subsidised they have no vote, but those eight all voted at the last election for the candidate pledged to support the Empire. The sons of the only Englishman not an official in that district could sing " God save the Queen " as soon as they could read. Probably British Columbia would equally vote against separation ; but even alone with the railway communication with the United States and two ocean ports, on three sides, the north-west would be in quite as good a geographical position as Russia, for trade and progress. The United States, like the ancient builders of Babel, seems determined to set all natural difficulties at defiance. Some of her merchants, two years ago, supplied money to survey Alaska for railway purposes, and they are said to be meditating at some future 1/8 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. time a junction of their railway system with that of Siberia and Russia. Alaska is a favourite excursion from Canada and the United States ; so much so that it has been thought worth while to publish a guide-book about it. One great sight there is an enormous glacier, projecting to the sea ; another, the town of Sitka, with its Russian church and warmly built log- houses, more like those of Norway than of Canada. This territory, formerly known as Russian America, was sold by the Russian Government to the United States, when English emigrants began to pour into the north-west and British Columbia, on account of the cost and probable impossibility of defending it in time of war. Yet I have the authority of an eminent diplomatist for the statement, that re- membering the horrors of Indian warfare in the American struggle for independence, the Russian and British Governments agreed during the Crimean war that neutrality should be observed between their respective trans- Atlantic possessions. The prairie district begins a short distance before reaching Winnipeg, which is about a hundred miles from the lake of that name. This district extends over 1000 miles to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, gradually rising from an altitude of 700 feet above the sea at Winnipeg to 800 at Portage la Prairie, where a branch line runs up to Minnedosa In the Rocky Mountains. GRADUAL ASCENT TOWARDS THE ROCKIES. 179 and Yorkton. Further on along the line, Brandon is 1150 feet high, Qu'Appelle station 2050, St. John's College 2100, Maclean 150 feet higher than the college, and then it descends. Regina is 1875 feet, Moosejaw 1725; but at Swift Current another elevation begins. This station is 2400 feet high ; Medicine Hat in the South Saskatchewan River valley is 2150 feet high ; but here we come into the neighbourhood of coal. Calgary, 1 80 miles further on, is 3388 feet high ; and Morley, 148 miles be- yond, is 4000 feet high. At this place the Rocky Mountains are in full view, and are entered at a station called the Gap, 4200 feet high a point which is said to resemble the Bolan Pass in the Himalayas. The Rockies are the retreat for the animals driven from the prairie. Here the bear still holds its own ; and the buffalo might be there too if it were not for the wasteful slaughter of that useful beast. Taking advantage of the timidity of its nature, whole herds are said to have been destroyed by driving them along roads leading to precipices, where they leaped down and were killed, simply that these pseudo-sportsmen might carry home trophies of hides and horns. Still there could not have been much farming carried on if a herd of wild buffaloes were still in the neighbourhood. I heard a rumour of a herd being seen in Assiniboia l8o EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. as late as 1889. From Medicine Hat westward the prairie is influenced by the chinook, a warm wind which blows through the valleys of the Rockies from the Pacific ; and I was informed that the weather was generally less intensely cold in those parts than further east, and that rapid thaws were apt to occur in mid-winter. It is supposed to be a district more suitable for ranching than for extensive crops. In 1892 a young Englishman was working nine- teen miles from Vancouver with an enormously powerful crushing machine, which was turned by a grand waterfall running down between snow-capped hills. Vancouver has suffered much from fire, like most of the wood towns in the Dominion ; and 1 50 tons of this granite was being sent down every day to the city to replace the old wooden pavement. The machine crushes up large rocks in a few seconds, and empties the fragments in a barge below. Vancouver is a damp climate, and Cana- dians frequently cannot stand it, as it makes them very rheumatic. Nineteen pouring days last Novem- ber was a large proportion, but the fine days between are most beautiful. A friend of mine paid ^30 a year to the charwoman who came every day for two hours to do her two rooms. The Chinese cook at the camp of the granite quarry is paid ,100 a year ; but besides the overseer he has thirty men to PAVING VANCOUVER. l8l cook for, as well as a doctor, who is kept there in case of accidents. The excessive and unusual cold in British Columbia in the winter of 1893 seems to have induced some of the animals to go further east again, and herds of antelopes were seen from the railway in the vicinity of Medicine Hat, the most westerly town of the Qu'Appelle diocese. It requires some years of residence for the Eng- lish settler to become really interested in colonial politics, unless he does work for Government in any way. As a rule, he seems profoundly indif- ferent to them. The late lieutenant-governor of the north-west, Mr. Royal, was of French origin and a Romanist ; yet in very Protestant circles I never heard the smallest objections made to the appoint- ment. Regina is a slowly-increasing town, with a very comfortable hotel, the Lansdowne, well managed by its excellent proprietress, Mrs. Arnold, which charges two dollars a day ; and some of the ministers reside there. The smaller hotels seemed full of young men from England, looking about for something to do. I went into a little shop to buy some apples ; for a settler had come 260 miles to meet me there, and he had not seen an apple since he entered the north-west twenty-three years ago. The young man who served me was evi- dently an educated Englishman, and looked so 1 82 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. dreadfully ill that I asked him how he was getting on. He had been only out from Eng- land five months, and had been laid up with typhoid fever, and its consequences, almost ever since. He said a friend with whom he had come out also caught it. The shadows of the wooden houses falling on the stagnant ponds in Regina give this town a Dutch look ; but the ponds are possibly responsible for much fever. It is the headquarters of the lieutenant-governor and of the north-west mounted police, whose barracks are in a healthy spot, about two miles distant. The citizens are very proud of the large school for boys and girls. These Canadian public schools are on the system of our Board schools. No religion is taught in them ; but the Methodists and Presby- terians provide Sunday schools for those belonging to their own denominations. The scarcity of clergy and the scattered population make this a difficulty in the Anglican Church. " I can't afford bread for my own children," was the answer of an English farmer to a churchwarden who asked him to subscribe to the vicar's stipend. It is this poverty of the settlers after such winters as that of 1892-3, that is the difficulty in providing much that is considered essential in England. Some energetic churchwomen have supplied the want of Sunday schools in a parish or two in Qu'Appelle, SCHOOLS. 183 and the Church school was founded at St. John's College l by Bishop Anson, in view of the difficulties in the way of the religious education of the youth of the diocese. The drawbacks and expense attending large es- tablishments of non-workers in the north-west are not always realised in England, or without experi- ence. In the dry air produced by intense frost, fuel of any description burns like tinder ; yet warmth is the first necessity when the thermometer is 30 or 40 below zero. Wood is growing dearer and more scarce; and the price of coal is still high, and far from the railway it cannot be obtained at all. To warm the establishment is, to begin with, a most formidable expense. If born Canadians form part of it, they are certain to be more chilly than Englishmen : they are accustomed to small houses much heated, and where the whole family (when living in a small way) will encamp in the kitchen for the night, if they cannot otherwise keep warm. Hot air after the European system is perfectly inadequate without stoves in the room in addition. Even the cost of living is more expensive than with us. The commissariat which would be considered good and sufficient for an English school does not always please Canadian boys, though, as one of them once said, if he did not like a thing he made 1 See chapter i. 13 1 84 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. up for it by eating more. They have been accus- tomed to tea or coffee at every meal, as well as potatoes ; and, as a rule, cakes, eggs, and jams with " candies " are much preferred by them to beef or mutton. What meat they have had has been generally pork, white fish, birds, and even venison ; but they take kindly to English school puddings. A farmer's children, too young to do much besides, can pick saskatoons, which make excellent jam ; and the north-west Canadian grows enough vege- tables for his own family, but not much to sell ; and as a rule lives on his own produce. Taken from an active life and set down at a school desk, with, at the same time, a larger proportion of animal food in his diet, the Canadian school boy naturally acquires a superabundant amount of physical energy, which has never been trained like an English boy's ; and the instructors have a hard time of it. The parents cannot control their chil- dren except by sending them out to work. I heard of a schoolmistress at a Government school in Saskatchewan who was kicked and beaten by a strong boy of eight, and when she spoke to the boy's father he said he should be most thankful if she would flog his son, for he could not manage him in the least. Then good domestic servants are very rare, and very expensive. For a school they ought to be most specially and carefully chosen, SCHOOLS. 185 in a country where there is practically no choice. Able and judicious instructors are also difficult to obtain ; for if capable of teaching, able to stand the climate, good disciplinarians, and conversant with the Canadian character, they are certain to be offered more attractive posts elsewhere. They may combine all these qualities and yet the es- tablishment may be run into most inconvenient expenses with very little to show for them, from the fluctuating and sometimes almost prohibitive prices of quite necessary commodities. Carelessness in leaving a little water in tin cans and basins and crockery jugs, will spoil them all in one frosty night. I recollect one house where the pupils, two English boys who had been at school in England before they came out, and two Canadians, sons of English parents, were supplied with crockery basins, tin ones not having yet reached that part of the north-west. The boys broke five basins by throwing them at each other in a fortnight, and with jugs (for they could not be bought separately) they cost sixteen shillings each. A mischievous slide at the dining-hall entrance destroyed a whole set of tea-things. Hardly a window was left unbroken in that establishment from hard balls being shied at them ; and although a man on the place could put in the panes, each large pane of glass cost two shillings. A boy who has been at school in England is certain I 86 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. to be the leader among Canadian boys who have never been to school before. The first thing taught is that it is good form to ask regularly for a third " helping, " in order to leave it on the plate. 1 Two of these boys killed two sheep by riding upon them, and with great ingenuity pulled to pieces and broke a forty-dollar stove, so that it could be sold for nothing but old iron ; yet the principal of the school did not correct them, for he said discipline could not be enforced in Canada as in England, and the offenders would run away. When this sort of treatment extended to the other expensive fittings of the school, as well as to the books, it is obvious that a large amount must be scored off for damages. The parents would remove the boys if those damages were inserted in their bills. Yet except in mischief, what is there to amuse the boys, who will not read, at a north-west school during their long leisure hours? What with bliz- zards, snow, severe frosts, and excessive heat, so little of the year seems fitted for outdoor sports, and the Canadian clothes and boots still less. The Canadian boy, if he consulted his own pleasure, would spend his spare time in gambling or in 1 The poor Indians in the neighbourhood benefited much by this English school practice ; but some of the Canadian parents objected when it was continued in the holidays, and said their children learnt to be wasteful at school. SCHOOLS. 1 87 making himself look like a (Canadian) masher, and standing about with a pipe in his mouth on the side-walks of the nearest town, and in the principal store, to see the world, as far as it can be seen in a wooden north-west settlement. The Canadian parent expects his son to learn everything in an incredibly short time, as if at an army cram- mer's. The rarefied air is against hard study or sedentary occupations, except when the pulse is lowered by excessive smoking, which can hardly be permitted even in a north-west school. So that considering the few who can afford to send their boys to boarding schools, it seems too evident that with all these obstacles they cannot at present be self-supporting. The day-school system, universal in the United States, seems to be the one most suited to the present conditions of the north-west. The fairly prosperous people living at a distance from the towns are glad to send their children for a year or two to board with an acquaintance, not only for the sake of what they learn at school, but to enable them to see a little of the world a rail- way train, a row of shops, a possible menagerie, and other spectacles, which they have no chance of meeting with in the backwoods. In the chief attempt I know of to start a boarding school on the English system, the parents were not pleased Avhen they heard that their children were not taken 1 88 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. to see every entertainment in the neighbourhood. A magic lantern, showing a tour round the world with an admirable clerical exponent, was being ex- hibited to wipe off a church debt ; but the head- master declined to let the boys go and see it, on the ground that they had been out to a choir practice the previous evening. The exhibition would have been better than a dozen geography lessons, with its views of elephant catching in Africa, Buddhist temples, the streets of London, the Pyramids, Paris, etc., to boys who had seen nothing but the prairie, and had never been by railway. But how should an English master, who had never lived in the backwoods, or been away from the Illustrated London News, realise this and the depths of his pupils' want of knowledge of the commonest things in Europe ? Shut up within the bounds of a square mile of garden and playground was like being in a cage to them ; while the boys who attend the day schools in the town can employ their leisure in assisting their relatives, and many of the boarders living in the towns for the sake of the schools give their work instead of payment. It is therefore to be feared that, as this plan works to the satisfac- tion of most colonists, a boarding school founded with English money might only be turned into a kind of reformatory for troublesome or insubordinate youths. SCHOOLS. 189 That education, and religious education 1 espe- cially, is a crying need in the remote districts is, unfortunately, too true; but so are churches and clergy, and the one is likely to remedy the other. The Canadian boy has none of the false pride which prevents him from coming to a Sunday school because there are younger boys there, or girls ; and, indeed, girls would make it an attraction. Time was when it was thought all England would bscome heathen because religious teaching was banished from Board schools. But one result has been the re-introduction of catechising in the churches, and the adoption of children's services, especially for the uneducated. Then, all over the country the clergy have given up some of their little spare time to the task of instructing the chil- dren of their parishioners apart from the Govern- ment hours, till the youth of the working class of the present day is growing up far more thoroughly taught with regard to Church matters than when it was left to the lay schoolmaster and schoolmistress. In those days, in the curriculum of many a village 1 The educational law, which provides the free schools, enacts that no pupil is to be required to attend any reading or study or to join in any religious exercises objected to by the parent ; but they may receive any religious instruction that the guardian or parent approves, only no book is allowed to be used except such as is authorised by the Department. 190 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. school, there was a catechism of questions and answers, dealing with the holiest mysteries, which the children learned by heart, and regarded only as the driest and most uninteresting of their tasks. Bible history was learnt in the same way among the other lessons, with no explanations ; and the preceptors might be sceptics or most ill fitted to impress these subjects favourably on the youthful mind. It must be allowed that good has come out of evil in this respect ; and we may hope that it will be so in Canada. The Wesleyans and Presby- terians contrive to have Sunday schools, and their youth attend them, even grown-up men. When our clergy are numerous enough to serve the churches in the dioceses, then they will be able, if not in the Government school-house, in their own dwellings or in a church-room, to hold classes for instructing the children of their parishioners. Already children's services are frequently held. As the population increases, Sunday schools will be more general, and new-comers who have taught classes in Sunday schools in England will teach them in Canada. But it seems quite useless to have Sunday schools or boarding schools if order and discipline are not maintained in them. The teacher unable to keep even a decent appearance of respect and obedience towards himself might gracefully retire, before he allows an insubordinate SCHOOLS. ipl tone and licence to become the tradition of the school ; but, probably, no better man would be found to fill his place. There have been one or two projects for boarding schools in the north-west for girls born in the Anglican Communion ; as at present, if anything more is required than can be obtained in the mixed day schools, they are sent to one of the Romanist convent schools : of these there is one at Prince Albert, to which two Presbyterian girls I was acquainted with went. They were not expected to attend any of the Sunday services there, but on that day accompanied friends in the town to their own place of worship. In many ways a girls' school would not be so expensive to keep up as a boys' ; and in educating girls we educate two generations. It would seem a splendid opening for a branch of one of our Anglican sisterhoods ; as I hardly believe in the prejudice said to exist against them in the north-west. Emanuel College at Prince Albert, founded by the late Bishop of Saskatchewan, is said to be self- supporting. There, the boys and young men wait upon themselves, and grow their own vegetables ; and a large proportion are half-breeds. The Romanists have supported for many years an industrial school for Indian boys and girls at Fort Qu'Appelle, which sends out many excellent young IQ2 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. servants. Fort Qu'Appelle is twenty miles from the station, and reached by a daily mail waggon. The echo in the valley of the river is supposed to have given rise to the name of the province ; and the Marquis of Lome has written a very pretty poem on both. The name has also been attributed to the challenge of the French sentry, in the days when the old fort was occupied by a French garrison. But if the Canadian schools are imbued with a distinct national tone, there are many patriotic associations intended to keep up the filial sentiment with Great Britain. The " Sons of England," who must have all been born in England, is partly a philanthropic society, and has branches throughout Canada. Their chief festival is St. George's day, which is a public holiday, and on the last occasion this verse was sung : Loud in exultation England's sons to-day, Fain to England's patron Praise and honour pay. Praising him they render Worship to his Lord, Whence alone all virtue On His saints is poured. Bishop Cleveland Coxe's hymn was also sung : The chimes, the chimes of Motherland, Of England, green and old, That from grey spire or ivied tower, A thousand years have tolled ; PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES. IQ3 How glorious must their music be, As breaks the hallowed day, And calleth with a seraph's voice A nation up to pray ! I love you, chimes of Motherland, With all this soul of mine, And bless the Lord that I am sprung Of good old English line ; And like a son I sing the lay That England's glory tells, For she is lovely to the Lord, For you, ye Christian bells. These lines were chiefly inspired by a visit the American prelate paid to the midland counties of England. He stayed at Northfield Rectory, Worcestershire, which faces a grand old church possessing an ancient tower and peal of bells, within sound of the chimes of King's Norton and Hales Owen, where there are old and very elevated spires. The spires of Bromsgrove, Hampton-in- Arden, and Solihull, are within a drive ; and the two cathedral towns of Lichfield and Coventry, with their three spires each, are within easy reach. No wonder that Bishop Coxe went back to America deeply impressed with the towers and spires of the old home. Of course, the Scots, wherever they can gather together in Canada, take a holiday on St. Andrew's day; and the sons of St. Patrick have only too 194 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. many societies, for they perpetuate the rivalries which destroy the prosperity of old Ireland, in the new world. As poetry is still in its infancy on the other side of the Atlantic, we give a hymn for St. Andrew's day which appeared in the Manitoba Free Press last year. i. First of the chosen band, whose vision clear Could recognise the light of Jacob's Star, Foretold far back by many an ancient seer, And at whose dawn the Gentiles came from far, Yet still unknown by men in that fair land, Till " Follow Me " came forth as His command. Unknown by all but the strong-hearted one, Who dared to brave the tyrant in his lair, The saintly priest's inspred saintlier son Who pointed out his Lord to ears that hear. Andrew, prepared by what the Baptist taught, Believed at once the Christ he humbly sought. 3- " Fishers of men," this promise was fulfilled With those two lowly brothers, till their fame Exceeds all conquerors or in art most skilled, For through them myriads learnt the sacred Name. From east to west the word which Peter spread Bore fruit a thousand-fold and still endures, While nations by the holy Andrew led, Extend from Asia to the Atlantic shores, Till in the Mystic City's glorious zone, They both are found inscribed, beside the Corner Stone. PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES. 195 Yet, with the born Canadian, sentiment will never outrival pecuniary interest. The exigencies of a young and poor country have to be considered ; though at present it gets every advantage from being connected with Great Britain, and no draw- back. The test will be, if ever the mother country again embarks in a long expensive war. The north-west would feel secure in its isolation ; but the patient British taxpayer might not see the justice of defraying the cost of defending the colonies as well as himself. CHAPTER XI. Leaving the North-west for Manitoba Minnedosa Typhoid Fever Winnipeg The Memnonites Ottawa Red River District Grand Forks St. Pauland Minneapolis Niagara Through the Lakes. IT was at a quarter to four in the early morning by the only train in the day going east, that I started on my way homeward. There was a severe frost, and the stars shone out from the sky with the brilliancy seen in northern climates. A young relative helped me to pack all my impedimenta into the railway carriage ; a sackload of furs, chiefly bought from Indians, and birds' skins ; and some blankets, sheets, and other useful things brought from England and Regina, destined for a young farmer and his wife whom I was going to visit near Minnedosa. My heavy baggage was checked for Winnipeg, where I found it a week later in the luggage office. The Manitoba and north-west line, on which Minnedosa (the valley of water) stands, branches off from the Canadian Pacific Railway at Portage la Prairie, about seventy miles west of Winnipeg. LEAVING THE NORTH-WEST FOR MANITOBA. 197 Apparently for the benefit of the hotels, of which there are several at Portage, the Manitoba line trains are timed just to miss those on the Canadian Pacific Railway, so that, coming from the west, passengers for Minnedosa must sleep at Portage. The trains only go up that line three times a week, and are usually full ; but the company could not pay their dividend in the spring of 1893. It is a pretty country, the more striking as we pass through very bare districts on each side before we reach it. The Little Saskatchewan winds along it, bordered by trees, and in some parts running in a deep cutting. This part of Manitoba (the Indian for " the Great Spirit speaks ") is cried up through- out Canada ; and the Hudson Bay Company, which owns a large proportion of it, puts on a heavier price in consequence. The little town of Gladstone, with 378 people on twelve square miles, as seen from the station, might be an English or Welsh village. Further on we come to Minnedosa, lying in a valley, with two hotels, each giving comfortable accommodation for a dollar a day. This settlement seems to have gained the credit it enjoys from its being well watered ; so that it did not suffer like the prairie during the years of drought between 1884 and 1891. A branch line was being made to Rapid City and Brandon on the Canadian Pacific Railway, which 198 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. would considerably shorten the journey to the capital of the north-west. The Minnedosa line continues to Yorkton, where it enters the province of Assiniboia and diocese of Qu'Appelle. In the neighbourhood of Saltcoats there is a Hungarian settlement, and the Vicar of Saltcoats (the Rev. T. W. Teitelbaum), who is of Hungarian parentage, is able to give them the Church services in their own language. About fifteen miles from Minnedosa there is a Swedish settlement. These foreigners at first kept to themselves, and mixed little with the other inhabitants ; but now they are gradually monopolising the hired man department. The census shows that in six years Minnedosa has increased from 549 to 611; the township of Clanwilliam, adjoining it, from 349 to 569 ; Glad- stone added 79 to its population in the same time ; and Rapid City mounted from 258 to 543. All these townships are twelve miles square. Russell, swelled by Dr. Barnardo's Home, now reaches, with Silver Creek, 1407. The places nearer Winnipeg naturally increase faster ; and if the line is ever finished to Prince Albert it will benefit this pro- vince. The old Hudson Bay Company's trails, where we came across them, are, like the Roman roads in England, now intersected by railways and other lines, but still showing that they were well chosen TYPHOID FEVER. 199 and substantially marked out. Some wooded hills lie to the north-east of Minnedosa, and give it a milder climate than Churchbridge and Yorkton on the other side of the hills ; but we missed here the invigorating dry air of the prairie. The farmers of Manitoba, with a common-sense which puts our halting legislation on the subject of habitual drunk- enness to shame, have petitioned for the prohibitive system of the north-west to be extended to their province. The want of it caused great havoc among the early settlers in Ontario, and more than decimated the Indian population. In fact, doctors assert that spirits are simply poison to young men or women in this stimulating climate, and that everybody is really better without them. The ex- cuse is the difficulty in getting good water. Typhoid fever is a very common complaint, partly from drinking unfiltered water, and also from careless- ness in throwing offal and other rubbish away near the houses ; and when the thaw begins the odours are pestiferous, and the water supply gets con- taminated. The Canadians are not accustomed to send for doctors except for broken bones or some very serious matter. When they are not well they take a patent medicine. Chlorodyne is a very favourite one ; but if they would keep a bottle of castor oil, and at the first symptom of enteric malady of any description, take a dose (supposing H 2OO EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. it is unnecessary, it does no harm and helps to nourish them), then if they have swallowed any un- wholesome substance or germ, serious consequences will probably be averted. Also washing soda and chloride of lime, when they can be had, should not be spared about the premises. Winnipeg, the queen of the prairie, had increased greatly during a year and a half between my first and second visits. Restaurants, new hotels, banks, pawnbrokers' shops, and detective agenciesthe advantages and disadvantages of civilisation had been added ; and the number of places of worship being improved or enlarged seemed to show that the recent exhibition, of which north-west Canada was so proud, had brought money into the country, and that some of it at least was being spent in a right spirit. Canon Pentreath's church was entirely re- built ; the old materials being used for the new foundation. The primate had lately introduced the office of canon into the Church of the north- west, and Mr. Pentreath was one of the first ap- pointed to it. The re-opening of this church and the consecration of the new Bishop of Athabascow were events to occur at the end of that month. English aristocratic names, that of a German, a Pole, a Swede, a Scotsman, an Irishman, and a Chinese laundryman of long standing, were all close to each other in one of the streets of Winni- WINNIPEG. 201 peg. A tram-car traverses the city, and takes no one a yard under twopence half-penny. The electric light arrived in Manitoba before gas, and most of the shops and hotels are lighted with it. There is a child of four sitting on a chair outside a shop, and ringing a bell at intervals to call attention to the goods. I heard another boy ask the child how old he was, and how much he got for sitting there. It was five cents an hour. " O you ought to get more than that," said the boy ; " I would not do it for so little if I were you." When he attains manhood, this boy will be a leader of strikes. Everybody is busy in Winnipeg, no loiterers. There are some very curious carts laden with still more curious folk come out of the country to sell their wares. There are also a group of Memnonites in sheep skins, looking like Russian peasants ; but they loudly assert their German nationality, and speak German. They hold Quaker principles, and in 1818 left Prussia and Germany for Russia to avoid the conscription. The Canadian guide-books say they came to Canada to escape Russian perse- cution ; but their burgomaster will tell you that they were induced to come by the exaggerated representations of a Canadian emigration agent, and that they find the climate more severe than the part of Russia where they were formerly settled. When universal conscription was introduced into 2O2 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. Russia, they were exempted from the combatant part of the army, even if they drew "the bad lot," as it is called in France ; but they did object to a law obliging Russian to be taught in the schools ; and they are now leaving Canada for the United States, or for more remote districts where such legis- lation is not enforced, lest the Canadian law should be brought to bear on them, obliging every child to be taught the English language, whereby they say the next generation would be Canadians instead of Germans. A little further on there are two brothers from St. Boniface, the earliest Romanist ecclesi- astical outpost in this part of Canada. One hotel employs entirely Norwegians. It is the same story with them as with everybody else. The Canadian guide-books brought them out. " They seemed to show that every one must make his fortune at once." Most of the Norwegians had suffered from typhoid fever since they came ; and all I spoke to said they did not feel so strong as when they left Norway. Still, all the girls were engaged to be married, and I have no doubt will make excellent wives. Ice is a cheap luxury in Canada ; and even in May when the Red River had not thoroughly thawed, a block of ice was placed every morning on the wooden pavement in front of the provision shops, melting in the hot sun, and keeping them cooL WINNIPEG. 203 There are some fine public buildings, and a monu- ment raised to the memory of the heroes of Batoche, and the last half-breed war. There is a Young Men's Christian Association, and, if I mistake not, a Young Women's Christian Association also. To judge by the convictions there seems to be a very small amount of crime in even this, the largest centre of population in the north-west, and everything gives the idea of a well- ordered and prosperous place. We hear of no such doings in the university as occurred in the Ohio Wesleyan Girls' College not long ago, when some of the students deliberately held down several new girls, while others rubbed their faces and necks with caustic, disfiguring them for life. The courtesy of Canadians towards strangers is proverbial. There are not a few who look forward to Winni- peg being the future capital of the Dominion if it remains united. Ottawa was only selected because Toronto was too near the American frontier, and Montreal was too French and Romanist ; but the handsome parliamentary buildings erected at Ottawa would be, it is suggested, a difficulty. The Canadian legislators are more carefully considered than at Westminster ; for each has a desk before him with writing materials, instead of having to take notes in pencil on the back of old envelopes on the top of his hat. 204 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. The country between Winnipeg and the United States boundary town of Gretna is very different to the rest of Canada. The railway runs in the valley of the Red River, through a cultivated district, with neat little villages. The Romanist priests and nuns, whom we noticed on the way, showed that Romanism chiefly prevails there ; and a Government inspector in the carriage gave me its history. In 1871 it was inhabited by Indians, Hudson Bay Company officials and other whites, and a population of half-breeds, who all remained loyal. The parents of the last had simply not been married because there were no legal or ecclesiastical functionaries, and no places of worship. The Government passed a bill, legitimatising them all, and gave them the lands on which they lived, and a Roman mission soon planted themselves among them. It was thought desirable to encourage a loyal population on the borders of the States ; and that they should be Romanists was deemed another advantage, because the United States in that quarter is chiefly Wesleyan. Grand Forks, the first large town we came to outside Canada, is the junction for another railway joining the Canadian Pacific Railway at Medicine Hat. We were leaving winter behind us, and coming back to beautiful autumn weather ; and how leafy all this district seemed compared to the bare Red River plains ! The twin ST. PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS. 205 cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis ("city of water") begin the series of rich manufacturing towns in the States. Only Montreal and Toronto in Canada can in any degree compete with them in size, and in Minneapolis there are the largest grain mills in the world, throwing out 9000 sacks of meal every day. How different this from the little provincial mills, where the weary Canadian farmer, after some- times two days of trudging beside a team of oxen loaded with his corn, has to sell it at what price the miller chooses to give ! The want of law and order in the Southern States is not felt to the same extent in these colder blooded northern provinces ; and crimes against property seem to be more severely punished than in Canada. A man is liable to 1000 dollars fine, or three years' imprison- ment, who extracts a letter from a pillar box with a bit of wire. " The People v. the Criminal " is the phrase used legally in the States for " Regina v. the Criminal," which appears on the records of our law courts. Chicago and Detroit are two more of these overgrown cities with colossal brick manu- factories and rich dwellings and hundreds of log and frame houses and huts. We see no such sharp contrasts in the north-west of Canada. There is more crying destitution in these new American cities than even in our European towns ; but old men and women, as in Canada, are very rare. 206 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. When a septuagenarian does appear, he or she seems to be treated with kindness and respect ; but the States, like Canada, are essentially for active people. To quote a favourite Canadian expression, "they have no use for the aged or infirm ". I refrain from describing Chicago and the ex- hibition building, as by this time the British public must be weary of both. The American railways are much over-praised. The Pullman car was suffocating, and the first-class less comfortable than the third-class almost anywhere in Europe. The travellers, a very mixed set, including negroes, were on a par with the carriages. Only a fortnight afterwards this train was stopped and pillaged. I availed myself of the privilege of a first-class through ticket to stop the train at Niagara Falls in order to pass Sunday there. The moisture thrown up by the huge mass of water in its descent fer- tilises all the neighbourhood ; and Victoria Park, on the Canadian side of the falls, is the most beautiful of any of the numerous pleasure grounds which I have seen throughout the Empire bearing her Majesty's name. There are old inhabitants who can recollect the 3ist March, 1848, when the Niagara Falls were almost dry. The winds had been blowing down Lake Erie, which is only about eighty feet deep, and there had been an immense flow over the falls. Suddenly the wind changed NIAGARA. 207 and blew the little water left in the lake in the contrary direction. The ice, which was breaking up, got jammed like a dam between Buffalo and the Canadian shore, keeping back the waters from Lake Erie for about a day. One man rode out into the bed of the river, and so on outside Cedar Island to Table Rock. In a channel fed by the falls, another recollected seeing a number of old gun barrels supposed to have been thrown in during the war of 1812. Below the falls the water was so shallow that immense jagged rocks appeared and people shuddered at the idea of having frequently passed over them in the little " Maid of the Mist". The line from Detroit to Niagara runs through that portion of Ontario including London which is rightly called the garden of Canada, and produces the apples and peaches that form so tempting a portion of the Canadian products at European exhibitions. But the young man who reads on emigration bills that there are free homesteads to be had in Ontario must not for a moment suppose the advertiser means this part of it. Ontario is a very large province extending to Hudson Bay, and if he buys a plot or takes up a homestead without looking at it first, he may find himself expected to plough up a half-frozen soil, with only Esquimaux to help him, or digging away at a '08 EXCURSIONS IN CANADA. granite rock on the north of Lake Superior, where there is hardly depth enough of soil for the roots of the fir trees. Stories are told of men who have bought land, and been unable to find it, because it was actually allotted to them in the centre of a lake, and the sites along the shore were already taken up. The pleasantest of three routes from Winnipeg to the Atlantic is through the lakes from Port Arthur, along the famous canal of the Sault Ste Marie to the port of Toronto, and thence either by way of Niagara and Buffalo to New York, or keeping within Canadian territory along the Grand Trunk Railway to Montreal. But the navigation closes in November, and seldom reopens before June, and at the time I left Winnipeg was tempo- rarily closed by a wreck in the canal. But by coming that way I should have missed the spectacle of three American towns in flames ; and the really beautiful scenery of Wisconsin, with the picturesque and flourishing cities of Ann Arbour, Jacksonville, Sparta, and a variety of others bearing names alternately classical and commonplace. At beauti- ful Detroit we re-enter her Majesty's dominions ; but at Niagara again bid adieu to them, to make the rest of the land journey through the States and then home by the splendid S.S. " New York ". INDEX. INDEX. Abernethy, 20, 24. Alaska, 141, 178. Alberta, 41, 83, 177. Albert, Prince, 59, et seq., 191. St., no. Algoma, 158-9. Anderson, Bishop, 116. Andrew's, St., Day, 193. Anson, Bishop, 9, 19, 24, 33. Anticosti, Isle of, 144-70. Assinaboia, 8, 19, 47, 73, 83, 102, 129, 137. Barnardo, Dr., 198. Batoche, 63. Battleford, 52, 106. Bishop's Court, 116. Brandon, 49, 94, 197. Brassey, Lord, 144, 149-50. British Columbia, 17, 51-2. Brotherhood, 12. Burn, Bishop, 9. Bush Hotel, 65. Cabot, Sebastian, no. Calgary, 51. Canadian Agents, 28, 58. Pacific Railroad, 27, 197. Parliament, 57. Carlton, 60, 64, 74, Carthage, Prince Hanno of, 103. Cartier, Jacques, in. Champlain, General, 114. Chicago, 205. Chinese, 4. Churchill, Fort, 77. Church, Anglican, 34, 70, 116, 182. Romanist, 34, 43, 70, 117. Churchbridge, 199. Cleveland Coxe, Bishop, 192. Columbia, British, 17, 51-2, 92, 141. Columbus, 103. Cumberland House, 71. Dakota, 175. Duck Lake, 62, 78. Dutch, The, 114. Earnscliffe, Lady, 59. Edgeley, 150. Edmonton, 107, no, 139. England, New, 114. Estevan, 93. Farm Pupils, 130. France, New, or Canada, 59, 7*> 113-17- French in Canada, 71. Funerals, 161. Garry, Fort, 117. George's, St., Day, 137, 192. Gladstone, 197. Granville, Earl, 116. Greenway, President, 175. 212 INDEX. Half-breeds, 71, et seq., 98, 106, 119. Hamilton, 94. Herding, 124. Hired Men, 88. Women, 169. Hospitality, Canadian, 42. Hudson's Bay, 77, in. Bay Company, 65, 72, 107, 116. Captain, 113. Icelanders, 29. Indian Head, 22, 150. Indians, 17, 68, 81, 119. Iroquois, 108. Japanese, 119. Jesuits, 113. Kublai Khan, 100. Lansdowne Hotel, 181. Lawrence, St., 111-4. Lethbridge, 93. Lome, Marquis of, 17, 192. Lubbock, Sir John, 97. Machray, Bishop, 116. Mackay, Andrew, 128. Manhattan, or New York, 114. Manitoba, 17, 25, 39, 55, 85, 130. Medicine Hat, 37, 41, 53, 179. Memnonites, 93. Methodists, 34, 82. Mexico, 100. Millers, 31. Minneapolis, 57, 204. Minnedosa, 31, 198. Monguls, 100-3-5. Montreal, 2, 3, 82, 107, 127. Moosejaw, 93, 179. Moosomin, 37, 49. Muskegg Lake, 70. Napoleon's Expedition, 138. Natural Products, 47. New York, 102-14. Niagara, 207. North-west Police, 33, 76. Okanayan District, 141. Ontario, 81, 116, 128, 147. Orphans, English, 164. Ottawa, 3, 203. Paul, St., 175, 204. Pelly, Fort, 13, 38, 170. Pheasant Plains, 19, et seq. Pinkham, Bishop, 84. Portage le Prairie, 178-97. Pozer, Mr., 62. Presbyterians, 34, 74, 182. Qu'Appelle, Fort, 38, 191. Station, 5, et seq., 37, 61, 142. Quebec, 16. Red River, 78, 157, 204. Regina, 53, 61, 73, 79. Rockies, The, 108, 179. Royal, President, 181. Rupertsland, 8, 115. Russell, 198. Sable Island, 112. Saltcoats, 198. Sandy Lake, 70. Saskatchewan, 61, 77. River, Little, 197. River, North, 67, 75, 80. River,South, 61,67, 179. Saskatoon, 61. Sillitoe, Bishop, 119. Sissoms, Mr., 67. Snake Plain, 63, et seq., 177. INDEX. 213 Spring, 126, 157. Sunday Observance, 35. Schools, 34, 189. Swift Current, 50, 179. Tache, Archbishop, 54. Tariff, Canadian, 147. Tchuktshi, The, 101. Touchwood Hills, 63, 170. Tumuli, 74, 105. United States, 5, 26, 56, 69, 84, 90, 96, 101-44-52, 208. Vancouver, 52, 180. Victoria, 52. Park, 206. Queen, 60. Wales, Prince of, 60. Weather, 124, 136. Winnipeg, 4, 46, 93, 178. Lake, 178. Winter, 48, et seq. Wisconsin, 208. Wolseley, Lord, 118. Yokohama, 99. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. ' . FormL9-42m-8,'49(B5573)444 \* j