'tyy'/////''//// 6 ERKEILEyN LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF J CAUFOftNIA / ^ NEW CANADA AND THE NEW CANADIANS First Edition, May igoy Second Edition, October igoy V- * V &* :■-•-,'■■/. ?> '"'* '■■ * <> ■ v-'-- Many thousands of people from the east of the Austrian Empire and the adjoining districts of Russia and Rumania, all known in Canada as Galicians, have settled in the Prairie Provinces. They are often too poor to buy even a plough, and this Russian is reaping with a "cradle"; but prosperity comes to them by leaps and bounds. new cana: AND THE NEW CANADIANS HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY AUTHOR OP THE STORY OP CANADA," * THE NEW WORLD PAIRY BOOK," ETC. PREFACE BY LORD STRATHCONA COLOURED AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAP HORACE MARSHALL & SON LONDON DEDICATED TO ALL WHO LOVE THEIR COUNTRY AND WHOSE COUNTRY IS THE BRITISH EMPIRE CONTENTS PAGE Preface, by Lord Strathcona ... 9 Author's Foreword . . . .13 The West in Time of War— ... 19 The Hudson's Bay Company— The West taken over by Canada— The Red River Rebellion of 1870— The Saskatche- wan Rising of 1883 — Frog Lake Massacre— Siege and Relief of Battleford— Battle of Cutknife Hill— Pursuit of Big Bear to Beaver River. The Rush to the West— . . • 51 Immigration Statistics— Emigration from the United States— What the West is— Railways—The Land Available — Wheat Possibilities. Modern Manitoba— .... 67 Winnipeg — Icelanders — Wheat Cultivation — Mixed Farming— The Hudson's Bay Route. Middle Saskatchewan ; and the English- men— ...... 86 Salvation Army and Foresters — Canadian Northern Railway— Prince Albert— The ''All-British" Colony — English Immigrants. The Park Lands; and the Americans— . 104 Original and Adopted Nationality — Americanism and British Citizenship— Farm Speculation— The "Best Terri- tory on Earth." Middle Alberta ; and the Galicians— . 123 How the Galicians live — Mild Winters — A Norwegian Colony — A Sanctuary for Big Game. 332 6 CONTENTS Edmonton, and the Far North— . . 131 The Capital of Alberta — Urban Land Prices — Squatters — A great Railway Centre — Peace River — Wheat in Yukon. REGINA TO BATTLEFORD ; AND THE DUKHOBORS— 140 The Capital of Saskatchewan — Provincial Rights— South- east Saskatchewan — Experimental Farm System — Germans, Jews, and Hungarians — North to Saskatoon — Dukhobor Life. A Battlefield Revisited— . . . 160 Transformation ofBattleford—Nighton the Trail— Indian Warriors farming— Cutknife Hill twenty years after- Americanized French-Canadians — Religious Work. The Dry Patch— ..... 181 The Prairie Primeval— Alkali and Antelope— Half-breeds of Sixty-mile Bush — A Waterless Waste— The South Sas- katchewan—Swift Current— Cypress Hills— The Drought Problem. Southern Alberta; The Cattle and Horse Ranchers — ..... 199 The success of Wheat— Macleod — Big Ranches broken up — The Foot-hills — The Chinook Wind— Demand for Horses. Blackfoot Indians, and Latter-Day Saints— 214 Condition of the Tribesmen— Viceroy and War-dance— The Mounted Police — Mormon Ways. A West Beyond the West— . . .235 The Crow's Nest Pass, yesterday and to-day— A Glimpse of British Columbia. How the New Canadians Live— . . 241 Food, Drink, Air, and Water — Religion and Recreation — Schooling and Taxes. The Future— . . . . .250 More Knowledge wanted — More Communication — The use of cheap Postage — Emigration — Finance. Index .....•• 261 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A Very New Canadian . Map of the Prairie Provinces The Fort Garry of 1870 The Winnipeg of To-day Harvesting Threshing A Salvation Army Colonist In the Park Lands Coming in from the States Travelling by Ox-Team A Stern-Wheel Steamer on a River Urban Infancy : Milestone Urban Adolescence: Portage An Indian Brave as Farmer Dukhobors An Irrigation Canal in Alberta . Cattle and Horses at the Hay-stacks A Horse Ranch .... Ploughing a Prairie Wheat-field . A Blood Indian Dance Highland and Lowland in the Farthest West Frontispiece Opposite page 9 24 24 64 n 80 88 120 120 128 Northern la Prairie 136 144 144 152 152 192 200 208 224 224 240 PREFACE I have been asked to write a few introductory remarks to Mr Kennedy's new volume, and I do so with much pleasure. Mr Kennedy knows Canada well, and, although he has now resided in England for some years, has kept up his connection with the Dominion by frequent visits. His book is especially interesting from his contrasts of the position of the country at different times and under different circumstances. My experience of the North-West goes back farther than Mr Kennedy's. When I first went there it was very difficult of access, and indeed could only be approached with any comfort, and not much of that, through the United States, or by canoes by the Ottawa River, Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and the rivers and lakes, with portages between, through what were then the wilds of Rupert's Land, on to Lake Winnipeg. At that time Winnipeg did not exist. Its present site was occupied by Fort Garry, a principal post of the Hudson's Bay Company, and the inhabitants were few in number. Between Fort Garry and the Rocky Mountains there was no 10 THE DAYS OF THE BUFFALO settlement on the great prairies, except here and there another Hudson's Bay Post, or an Indian encampment. In those days the buffalo still roamed over the plains, although in de- creasing numbers. Like many other things, this picturesque animal, so valuable to the Indians, had eventually to go, first because of the value of its hide, and second because its existence was incompatible with the march of civilization and progress. The position of Western Canada to-day is very different. Now there are railways in every direction, and further lines are being built each year to accommodate the immense numbers of settlers who are making their homes on the prairies. The Territories are divided into the Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, besides other districts. The population is rapidly increasing, but only the fringes of the fertile plains are occupied, and there are still less than a million people between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains. They are, however, producing nearly two hundred million bushels of grain of all kinds annually at the present time, and will in the course of another five or ten years, if all goes well, raise a sufficient quantity to make the Motherland independent of foreign countries for her food supply. But this is not all. Large numbers of cattle are MEN AND MONEY n exported, as well as dairy produce, and the trade of the country generally is advancing by leaps and bounds. There is no reason why Western Canada should not become as important and as well populated as the western territories of the United States. And the fact that people are flocking across the boundary from the latter country is evidence of the advantages which are offered under the British flag. Western Canada, like other portions of the Dominion, wants two things badly — men and money. There are millions of acres of fertile land still unoccupied capable of providing happy homes for a very large population ; and the immigration is rapidly becoming a great move- ment. An immense amount of capital is being spent in providing new railways, in opening up the country and its many resources, and this will serve to make any slight depression in business, if it should come in the next few years, less felt than it would be under normal circum- stances. The increase in the population of Canada, and especially in the western portion, is a factor of strength in the Canadian situation, and will also tend to increase the wealth and power of the whole Empire. Canadians think Canada a great country now, — and so it is, and none of us can properly estimate what its position is going to be in the future. 12 THE FUTURE It has an immense coast line on the Atlantic as well as on the Pacific. It is in close touch with the markets of South America on both oceans. The Canadian Pacific Railway provides a rapid alternative route between the United Kingdom, China, Japan and Australia, and two other trans-continental roads are being constructed. All these are indications of the rapid manner in which Canada must grow and develop, and of the opportunities that are at her doors for the expansion of her trade. Canada also furnishes a very favourable market for many of the staple manufactures of Great Britain, the imports of which, by the way, have rapidly increased since the preferential tariff came into force. As regards not only internal development and inter-provincial trade but external commerce, the prospects are of the brightest kind. This applies to every part of the country ; and I confidently refer those who wish to know some- thing of the great West, at first hand, from one who is very competent to give accurate and reliable information, to Mr Kennedy's volume. STRATHCONA. 1st May 1907. AUTHOR'S FOREWORD Shall I go to Canada ? This question comes to me from every part of the country. Sometimes it is " Shall I send my son ? " — never, I am sorry to say, " my daughter," though the scarcity of women in Canada is more marked than their preponderance in the mother-country. Often it is not care for kindred, but philanthropic anxiety that asks, — " Do you think poor Smith should emigrate ? He's out of work and on his beam ends." Or " would you advise young Brown to go ? There's no future for him here." By way of variety, come the questions of those who have made up their minds. "I am going to Canada. What part of the country do you think I ought to make for ? What sort of a place is it ? What are my chances ? " And so on, to the end of a long chapter. Then there are people who think of investing money in Canada, and want to be assured of the lasting grounds for her prosperity. And, finally, there are the innumerable folk who have a relation out there already and want to hear more than he tells them of his new home. »3 14 CANADA REDISCOVERED It is useless to say, u Ask the Canadian Govern- ment's emigration officials." The rejoinder is prompt, — " Yes, I have read their pamphlets, and I daresay they are all right. But you are not an official, and not even a Canadian, so you can give an independent opinion ; and you have lived a long while out there, so you ought to know all about it." I do not. Indeed, there is no man living who does. Canada is too huge, too varied, most of it too inaccessible. You might spend a life-time wandering over it without seeing it all. It is true, however, that I have known Canada for more than a quarter of a century ; that I lived nearly ten years in her commercial metropolis ; that my work as a journalist gave me oppor- tunities of seeing many parts not commonly visited ; and that since my return to England I have kept in close touch with Canadian affairs and repeatedly revisited the Dominion to witness the development of later years. This book does not profess to give categorical answers to the questions that are constantly asked, even about the particular part of Canada it describes. But if the writer's hope is fulfilled, the inquiring reader will find a good deal here that he wants to know. The people of the mother-country as a whole are at last beginning to realize that Canada's MAKING HISTORY 15 existence is more than a dry geographical fact, — that it is a phenomenon which, if they do not take a short-sighted view of their own interest, will greatly and perhaps even vitally help to maintain the future prosperity of the mother- country itself. New Canada, the country I am now to describe, is commonly known as the North-West. It is really the South-West of Canada ; and it is coming to be known simply as the West. It is one of the great events of history that has just begun, the peopling of the West. Historians will one day rank it with other great migrations, — with the Aryan flood that laid the foundations of modern Europe ; with the taking of England by the Angles and Saxons. The opening up and settlement of the Western United States gave new homes and new life, prosperity and independence, to millions of the struggling poor of Europe ; it revealed and developed a vast new source of food supply for Europe and Asia ; and, with its stimulating effect on the older States, it involved the rapid rise of the United States to their present com- manding position in the politics of the globe. To-day the world stands witness to the first scenes of a national drama exactly similar in kind and almost certainly destined to have similar economical and political results ; with this differ- 16 MAKING HISTORY ence, that to-day's event is unrolling itself with all its happy possibilities under the British flag. If Canada still consisted of the Eastern Provinces which alone bore that name at confederation, she would be a great and rich country ; but her enlargement to the Pacific in the west and the Arctic Ocean in the north has made her greater than all Europe, and opened before her a growth of population and power to which the coldest critic, in view of the facts already ascertained, hardly dares, to put a limit. It is, in fact, New Canada that lifts Old Canada from respectability to eminence. To appreciate the present we must be able to contrast it with the past. It was my fortune many years ago to see the new West not only in its infancy but struggling with the dogs of war ; and now I have seen it aglow with the life of a young giant. Side by side, then, I set the two scenes, — the West as I saw it on my first journey, as war correspondent of the Montreal Daily Witness, and the West as I saw it on my last journey, as special correspondent of The Times. For kind permission to reprint my recent articles in The Times I take this opportunity of thanking the proprietors. These articles I have carefully revised and largely re-written ; adding to them a hundred per cent., and giving the NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION 17 latest information received from many private and official sources. NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION The Second Edition of this book has been called for so soon after the first that revision would be difficult if it were necessary. Happily, it does not seem to be necessary. The critics, many of whom have dealt with " New Canada " at con- siderable length, have been unanimously kind. One mistake, of a single word, has been pointed out to me, and has been corrected. One omission, too, has been brought to my notice. From the tale of the wild inhabitants of the prairie primeval, it seems, a most important member was left out. "lam surprised and gratified," an old Manitoban says, " to see that a writer has such a good grasp of his subject as you have in your most interesting book ; but I must rate you soundly for leaving out our friend the Jack Rabbit. I think he is the only one of the denizens of the plains you neglected." I apologize to Mr Jack Rabbit, and assure him that I could not possibly underrate his importance in the economy of the West, — if only because the skins of his brethren have kept me warm o' nights when buffalo robes were scarce. (Between ourselves, he is more popular dead than alive.) B 1 8 NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION The effect of the abnormally hard and long winter of 1906-07, to which reference is made in the book, has been, as was only to be expected, a reduction in the wheat yield for the year. The late spring prevented farmers not only from sowing as large an acreage as they had intended, but from reaping early enough to escape damage by frost. The flood-tide of Canadian prosperity, however, has set in too strongly to be affected by a momentary back- wash. In spite of grossly exaggerated reports of the severe winter, 216,865 immigrants arrived in the first eight months of this year, — or 50,066 more than arrived in the corresponding period of last year. But for the extraordinary weather, which is unlikely to be soon repeated, the West should have raised this year over 100,000,000 bushels of wheat ; and with average weather the Westerners hope that the wheat harvest of 1908 will reach 150,000,000 bushels. The prospects of Western Canada are not an atom less bright now than when I first took this book in hand. Meanwhile, — unfortun- ately for those parts of the world that have to buy wheat instead of growing it, — the price has so risen that the Canadian farmers are likely to make as much money by this year's poor crop as they did by last year's good one. H. A. K. London, October 1907. THE WEST IN TIME OF WAR The New West is one of the oldest possessions of the British race. The flag of England waved over the shores ol Hudson's Bay for generations before it took the place of the French flag in " Canada." 1 It was an Englishman of Queen Elizabeth's time, Martin Frobisher, who in 1576 sailed out of the Thames in a little ship of twenty tons to find the North- West passage to Asia, and who, on a third attempt, discovered the inlet now known as Hudson's Strait. The great explorer Hudson, however, did not appear on the scene till 1610, when, passing through the strait and turning southward, he sailed out on the inland sea which still bears the modest name of Hudson's Bay. The country round the Bay was rich in furs ; and there were men in England who saw in Hudson's Strait and Hudson's Bay a way by which the wealth of the West might be won in spite of the French monopolists who held the keys of the St Lawrence route. In 1670, Charles the Second gave to his 1 I ask forgiveness for plagiarizing from myself in the first part of this chapter having given the early history of the West in practically the same words, though more of them, in " The Story of Canada." *9 20 THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY cousin, Prince Rupert, and a few others, forming " The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay," the whole vast empire of forest and prairie stretching west- ward to the Rocky Mountains. As rent for 2,500,000 square miles — though the extent of the territory was then unknown — the company was to pay his Majesty " two elks and two black beavers " per annum. " Forts " were set up on the shores of Hudson's Bay, and in later times along the river highways of the interior, to which the Indians brought their annual catch of furs. Every summer a single London ship sailed into the Bay, discharged her cargo of provisions for the white men and merchandise for the red, filled her hold with the precious " peltries," and sped away home before the winter barred the straits with ice. The vast distances to be travelled, and the primitive means of communication, canoe or dog-sleigh inland and sailing ship at sea, left the Hudson's Bay Company's men cut off from nearly all intercourse with their fellow-whites. Many of the fur-traders, therefore, married Indian wives, and their descendants are the half-breeds of the West to-day. The name half-breed conveys to the English mind the picture of a degenerate, with the faults of both ancestors and the virtues of neither. There are half-breeds of this kind ; but I know others who have no cause to shrink THE FIRST WHITE SETTLEMENT 21 from comparison with pure-blooded white men. Many of the Scottish and English half-breeds are scarcely to be distinguished from other Scotsmen and Englishmen except by their complexion. Their paternal ancestors were men of some education — the company's officers — while the French half-breeds sprang as a rule from the humbler coureurs de bois in the Company's employ — men of little or no education, who fell more easily to the level of the red-skin community with which they allied themselves. For two centuries Western Canada was treated as a gigantic game preserve, and jealously guarded against the intrusion of settlers. In 181 1, it is true, the Earl of Selkirk, one of the chief pro- prietors of the Hudson's Bay Company, overcame for a time his partners' objection to an independent white population, and planted in what is now Manitoba a little colony of Scottish Highlanders. They had to come in by Hudson's Bay, and up the Nelson River. In fact, long after that time the West was so difficult of access from the East, that a stove made in Quebec had to be shipped home to England and thence out to Hudson's Bay before it could be delivered in Manitoba. For half a century and more, Lord Selkirk's colony lay forgotten in the heart of the con- tinent. Some of the settlers, disheartened by isolation, made their way down to Ontario. The 22 "A PARADISE OF FERTILITY" others throve on what they grew, but production for the market was, of course, out of the question. The market might as well have been in the moon. And the rulers of the empire might also have been in the moon, for all they knew or cared about the richest land in their possession. Governments were actually persuaded that the West was an irreclaimable wilderness, in- capable of supporting a white population. But the wealth of the western soil, hidden only by a crop of grass, and revealed by the first touch of a plough, was bound to become famous. It was only a question of sooner or later. And as long ago as 1857, Mr S. J. Dawson, of the Canadian Geological Survey, wrote : "Of the valley of Red River I find it impossible to speak in any other terms than those which may express astonishment and admiration. I entirely concur in the brief but expressive de- scription given to me by an English settler on the Assiniboine, that the valley of Red River, includ- ing a large portion belonging to its great affluent, is a ' Paradise of fertility.' . . . Indian corn, if properly cultivated, and an early variety selected, may always be relied on. The melon grows with the utmost luxuriance without any artificial aid, and ripens perfectly before the end of August. Potatoes, cauliflowers, and onions, I have not seen surpassed at any of our provincial fairs. . . . The ANNEXATION TO CANADA 23 character of the soil in Assiniboia [now Manitoba], within the limits of the ancient [Lake Agassiz] lake ridges, cannot be surpassed. It is a rich black mould, ten to twenty inches deep, reposing on a lightish coloured alluvial clay about four feet deep, which again rests on lacustrine or drift clay to the level of the water, in all the rivers and creeks inspected. As an agricultural country, I have no hesitation in expressing the strongest conviction that it will one day rank amongst the most distinguished." " A paradise of fertility." That judgment is now known to apply not only to the Red River Valley but to practically the whole prairie stretching away to the Rocky Mountains. In 1869 the Imperial Government transferred this territory to the two-year-old Canadian Con- federation, having bought out the company's monopoly for £300,000, 50,000 acres of land in blocks round the company's stations, and one- twentieth of what was then alone called the "fertile belt," lying between the United States frontier and the North Saskatchewan River, and stretching from the Lake of the Woods to the Mountains. The company was left with its charter, and with full liberty to go on trading in competition with others — which it continues to do, with handsome profits, to the present day. The chief officer of the company, 24 THE RED RIVER RISING who held sway over a territory almost as large as Europe, and continued to administer its affairs till the first Canadian governor arrived, was no other than " the grand old man of Canada " to-day — the generous patriot honoured by the whole British Empire under the name of Lord Strathcona. When the Company's domain passed into the hands of the Canadian Government, and the surveyors sent up to map out the land in town- ships began to " run lines " of scientific precision through the country-side, the French Red River half-breeds thought their ill-defined farms were going to be taken from them. Friction be- tween the squatters and the authorities was followed by open insurrection, and a young half- breed named Louis Riel set himself up as " Pre- sident " of a " provisional government." A number of loyal settlers were imprisoned, and in the spring of 1870 a plain-spoken young loyalist was murdered under the authority of a rebel court-martial. A storm of helpless indignation swept over Canada — helpless because the rebels were separated from the seat of power and popula- tion in the East by more than a thousand miles of lake and river. An officer then known only as Colonel Wolseley was put in command of a boat expedition, which, after a three months' journey, Interior of Fort Garry, the Winnipeg of 1870 The figure with outstretched arm is that of the Governor, Mr Donald Smith, now Lord Strathcona * i* » WmMr 895 . But in the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1902, the arrivals numbered 67,379. In 1903, the figure went up to 128,364 ; in 1904, to 130,331 ; and in 1905, to 146,266. Then came a leap to 189,064, which was the total for the fiscal year 1905-06 ; and in the calendar year of January to 5« 52 ORGANIZED EMIGRATION December 1906 the arrivals numbered 215,912, or 71, 294 more than in the previous twelvemonth. Of the 189,064, the last total of which a complete analysis is available, 86,796 came from the United Kingdom, or 21,437 more than in the previous fiscal year, the proportions for the year 1905-06 being 65,135 English, 797 Welsh, 15,846 Scots, and 5018 Irish, while 44,349 arrived from other parts of Europe and 57,919 from the United States. Between the beginning of 1899 and the middle of 1906 there arrived 289,191 people from the United Kingdom, 261,136 from the United States, and 228,664 from continental Europe and other parts, making a total of 778,991. Adding 82,326 who arrived in the latter half of 1906 (57,463 by sea and 24,863 from the United States) we have altogether an immigration of 861,317 in eight years. The Self-Help, the East London, the British Women's, and other emigration societies, have long done much to make easy the way for the workless man in the old country to the manless work in the new. In the last few years, the Salvation Army has organized emigration on an unprecedented scale, and with a method combin- ing the advantages of enthusiasm and common- sense. Thanks to the wide-spread organization of the Salvation Army in Canada, the emigrant who goes out under its flag is practically sure not EMIGRANT FARES 53 only of a job as soon as he lands, but of another job if he loses the first through no fault of his own. The Church Army also has become a large emi- gration agency in recent years. A large proportion of the emigrants from the mother country cannot afford, even with the help of loans from the Salvation Army and other societies, to go all the way to the West. A third- class ticket from London to Quebec or Toronto only costs £5, 10s. or £7, 3s. o,d. But from London to Winnipeg the cost is £9, 5s. As practically none of the American emigrants settle in Eastern Canada, the proportion of Americans in the new population of the West is much larger than the immigration statistics show. But a great number of the old-country folk, who take what work they can get in the East to begin with, go on to the West when they have saved enough money for the railway ticket. A great many also take advantage of the special harvester excursions, by which, on agreeing to do not less than four weeks' reaping or threshing wherever they may be sent from Winnipeg, they are taken all the way from London to that city for £6. It is somewhat surprising to learn that the Canadian Government carries on an emigration campaign in the United States almost as vigor- ously as it does in the United Kingdom. The great republic, while it still attracts more immi- 54 EMIGRATION FROM THE STATES grants than any other country, contains hundreds of thousands ready to leave it. To persuade these Americans that they will be better off in Canada than in the country of their birth or adoption, the Canadian Government has for years been distributing emigration literature, delivering lectures, exhibiting Canadian products at State and county fairs, and inserting pictorial advertizements in nearly 7000 American papers — chiefly rural weeklies and agricultural journals. One of these now before me catches the eye with : " Twenty-five bushels of wheat to the acre means a productive capacity in dollars of over sixteen dollars per acre. This, on land which has cost the farmer nothing but the price of tilling it, tells its own story. The Canadian Government gives absolutely free to every settler 160 acres of such land. Lands adjoining can be purchased at from $6 to $10 per acre, from railroads and other corporations. Already 175,000 farmers from the United States have made their homes in Canada.' ' In another I read : " Magnificent climate. Farmers ploughing in their shirt-sleeves in the middle of November. Coal, wood, water, hay in abundance. Schools, churches, markets convenient." Special efforts are made among the French Canadians, Scandinavians and Germans living in the States, agents able to speak their respective languages being employed. According to the Canadian COUNTER-ATTRACTIONS 55 officer in charge of this propaganda in the United States, " advertising has been the keynote of the increasing success that we have been able to chronicle year after year." But the American, unless he is a very fresh immigrant indeed, does not take for granted all he reads in an advertise- ment. In many States the people have clubbed together, and sent delegates to spy out the pro- missory land and verify or otherwise the glowing accounts of the emigration agents. The satis- factory result of this independent investigation is evident from the enormous number of American citizens actually making their homes under the British flag. The Canadian propagandists are not allowed to work without opposition. Their chief reports : " Various State organizations have been brought into existence for the purpose of retaining their people ; newspapers have been subsidized to publish articles detrimental to Canada ; holders of large tracts of land in different parts of the States, especially in the south and west, have at their back the combined influences of railroads. They carry on a propaganda of advertizing. The opening up of large tracts of land suitable for irrigation has the assistance of the United States Government. In addition to this there are the Indian reservations which are being opened up from time to time .... In one day of last week, one thousand homeseekers $6 "YOU COULDN'T KEEP THEM OUT" passed through Sioux City, South Dakota, on their way to the vacant lands in that State. It is stated that one million acres of government land will be opened up there, very shortly. . . . Thus it will be seen that everything is not coming Canada- wards." The fact that in spite of all these counter-attrac- tions the Americans are flowing over the frontier in such a mighty stream is the highest possible testimony to the reality of the advantages that Canada has to offer. As an observer in Chicago says, " You couldn't keep them out with a club." It is not only Canadians who tempt Americans to Canada. Americans take a hand in the business themselves, There was a parcel of American speculators, for instance, who came into south-western Manitoba and bought about 160,000 acres at $3 (12s. 6d.) an acre. Then they went back, and by judicious advertizing persuaded their fellow-countrymen to rush in and buy the same land from them in farm lots at $10 (£2, is. 8d.) an acre. The land is worth much more now, and I suppose not one of the buyers repents his bargain. I hear of a Polish Committee in Chicago who contemplate transplanting 50,000 families of their fellow-countrymen to Canada. The object in this case is presumably philan- thropic rather than commercial. If the scheme is carried out, I hope the Poles will be well scattered over the prairie, where the fresh air of ^ NO HOMESTEADS FOR ALIENS $7 heaven can blow every taint of Chicago out of them. It is well known by this time that any man may choose from the wild land of Western Canada a free " homestead " of 160 acres, on paying a registration fee of $10, or £2 ; and that at the end of three years he is given the ownership of his homestead if he has in each of those years lived there for at least six months, and brought five acres under cultivation. There is, however, another condition ; he must become a British subject if he is not one already. Now a great many of the American immigrants have capital, and can afford to buy land, which they can then hold without giving up their American citizenship. But most of them take free homesteads, even if they add to their acreage by purchase. In the year 1905-06 the number of free 160-acre home- steads granted was 41,869, of which 12,370 were taken up by Canadians, 47 by other British colonists, 8097 by men from the United Kingdom, and 12,485 by " Americans." These last must necessarily swear allegiance to the British Crown ; and most of those who are under no such obligation will probably do so of their own choice. The country to which all these Americans and many eastern Canadians and old-country folk are flocking is the great oblong lying between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, bounded 58 THE COUNTRY SUMMED UP on the south by the United States and on the north by the ever-retreating edge of an almost uninhabited but not uninhabitable wilderness. This oblong, which has for administrative pur- poses been divided into the three Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, is a great plain, sloping quite imperceptibly up towards the west, till it reaches a height of 3000 feet above sea-level, though, so far as the eye can tell, it is no higher in the west than in the east. Parts of this plain are flat, especially in the south ; the rest is gently undulating. It is crossed by several great rivers, and, except in the south-west, is watered also by numberless streams, and lakes, and ponds — known locally as sloughs. Its land surface is covered by thin but most nourishing grass in the south, and by a happy alternation of grass and woods elsewhere. Its soil is almost all good, and the greater part is amazingly fertile. It grows practically anything produced by the temperate zone, and many things, such as the tomato, which England is too " temperate M to ripen. Its southern prairie yields the finest wheat in the world ; its cattle-ranches are famous, and deserve their fame ; and its dairy-farming is no less successful. It already sends vast quantities of meat and bread-stuffs over the Atlantic to the United Kingdom ; and in its shipments of wheat and butter to Japan there are the beginnings of THE RAILWAYS 59 what should become an enormous trade across the Pacific. Its air is cold in winter, hot in summer, pure, dry, and invigorating. As only a few of its rivers are navigable, and then only by little flat-bottomed stern-wheel steamers, the country has had to be opened up entirely by railways, which are spreading fast in all directions. The Canadian Pacific came first, with a line right across the southern section of the plain, and, instead of resting on its oars while the younger lines go ahead, it has only been stirred up by their competition to more strenuous efforts to capture the trade of the new settlements springing up daily all over the West. " The Canadian Pacific never stops," as Sir Thomas Shaughnessy says. Then, about 200 miles further north, the plain is crossed by the Canadian Northern, a new line created by the enterprise of Messrs Mackenzie & Mann. Between the two the Grand Trunk Pacific is crossing the same plain on its way to the Pacific Ocean ; and finally we have Mr J. J. Hill promising (or threatening, as his competitors would say) to over-run the plain with a fourth line to connect with his Great Northern system in the United States. Trains in the West are few and slow, if judged by English standards ; and the Westerner has a yearly recurring grievance against his railways because their capacity is unequal to the gigantic task of carrying his 60 RAILWAY GRIEVANCES bumper crops away to the East. It is the same grievance in another form that Londoners have against their suburban railways for incapacity to provide for the abnormal rush of passengers into and out of the City at certain times of the day. Then a complaint is sometimes heard that a com- pany spends on extending its mileage, energy and money which might be spent in perfecting its equipment ; but as long as there are vast blank spaces on the railway map of the "fertile belt," with settlers rushing in to live on them, there is much to be said for the policy of rapid extension. Once a railway is built and working, people can afford to wait a while for its improvement ; but the difference between the absence and presence of any railway is all the difference between stagna- tion and life. It is to be hoped that if ever the West is visited by such another snowing-up as that of the winter of 1906-07, when certain sections of line were practically non-existent for weeks, the railway companies will be better pre- pared for the emergency. The extension of railways is not so rapid as it should be, or as it would be if the railway com- panies could get the men to carry out their plans. Capital they can get in plenty ; and the wages offered for navvy ing are good, as navvies' wages go. The man employed on railway construction in the West commonly gets $2 a day, or 50s. a week, and NAVVIES WANTED 6\ can reckon on six months' continuous work during the season. He pays 18s. a week for his keep, and if he starts with a good outfit of stout clothing he can save as much of the remainder as he likes. But the men are simply not to be had in anything like the numbers required. In 1906, about 500 miles of line which should have been under con- struction were not touched, for this reason. At the beginning of 1907, plans had been laid for the construction of 1500 miles during the year, which would give constant employment to 60,000 men ; yet the men actually offering themselves were not expected even to approach that number, in spite of the expectation that 250,000 emigrants or more would arrive in the country. While Westerners often complain of high railway rates, there is no agitation in Canada comparable to that which excites the people of the United States for drastic legislation against railway companies. The people of Canada have already in their hands a very efficient instrument of self-defence in the Federal Railway Commission. Any line which comes under the Dominion Railway Acts must obtain the Commission's approval for its route, its plans, its very curves and gradients ; and its rates may be lowered if the Commission considers them unreasonable. Ac- cording to the learned judge who presides over the Commission, though certain provisions in the 62 THE LAND TAKEN UP Canadian Pacific's charter give that line excep- tional freedom and may lead to some litigation, on the whole, Canada is likely to escape the great amount of litigation which has arisen in the United States. A corporation may have no soul, but it has a great deal of human nature, and is not likely to press its advantages so hardly as to discourage the settlement on which its own increased pro- sperity depends. " With all those land-hungry thousands rushing in," the question is sometimes asked, " is not the supply of land being fast exhausted ? " Now the estimates of the land originally available vary greatly ; but I see no reason seriously to question the deliberate judgment formed in 1904 by Dr Saunders, the Director of the Federal Government's Experimental Farms, that there were in Manitoba, Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, and Alberta about 171,000,000 acres suitable for profitable farming, out of a total (after deducting water areas) of 232,000,000 acres. About 30,000,000 acres have been granted to settlers and 29,000,000 acres to railway companies ; while 4,200,000 acres re- main in the hands of the Hudson's Bay Com- pany, 5,000,000 acres were reserved as " school lands," and 7,620,000 acres have been alienated for special schemes of colonization and irrigation, or for other purposes. THE LAND STILL AVAILABLE 63 Deducting this total of 75,820,000, there would still remain 95,180,000 acres in the government's hands, or more than enough for three times as many people as have taken homesteads since the system was started in 1874. At the rate recorded in 1905-06, when 6, 699,040 acres were taken up by 41,869 homesteaders, the free land would be exhausted by the year 1920. However, a good deal of the land not classified by Dr Saunders as " suitable for profitable farming " will probably be taken up, and even found profitable, by the less exacting settlers from Europe. Thousands of the early Scottish emigrants to Eastern Canada made good farms for themselves on land which would not be reckoned profitable in the West to-day. Then it must also be remembered that the lands held by companies are open for settle- ment by purchase, though not for free home- steading. In the middle of 1906, the Canadian Pacific still held 9,840,975 acres in the three prairie pro- vinces — having in the year then ending sold 1,012,322 acres at an average price of $5.84 (24s. 4d.), and in the previous year 411,451 acres at $4.80 {£1). The price will doubtless be raised year by year, but not to a prohibitive degree. The Dominion Government also puts up certain of the school lands to auction from time to time ; in the year 1905-06 over 155,000 acres were sold, 64 IRRIGATION the price averaging $12.14 (50s. yd.). Of the land companies, some have been selling for years but have a large area left ; and two have only just started, — the Western Canada Land Company, which took over 500,000 acres of Canadian Pacific land in the Edmonton district and has barely begun operations, having sold, up to April 30, 1907, 38,752 acres (at an average of about $8.70, or 36s.); and the Southern Alberta Land Company, a still younger concern, which has an estate of 390,000 acres in the Medicine Hat region, and is putting a large part of it under irrigation previous to sale. This process of irrigation is itself largely increasing the supply of " suitable " land. In Alberta, already 832 miles of canals and ditches have been constructed to irrigate 2,880,056 acres, and in Saskatchewan 189 miles, for 39,916 acres. Finally, I should add that the present Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan include not only the old Territories called by those names, and the Ter- ritory of Assiniboia, but about 135,000,000 acres formerly comprised in the Territory of Athabasca. It is quite uncertain how much of this northern area will be found " suitable for profitable farm- ing M ; but some of it is being successfully farmed already, and profits will come when railways do. The Surveyor-General of Canada states that about 124,800,000 acres in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have hitherto been surveyed, and FOOD FOR THE OLD COUNTRY 65 roughly estimates that in the two latter Provinces there are 185,600,000 acres of unsurveyed lands fit for settlement. The total land area of these two Provinces, after deducting 30,080,000 acres for water, is about 324,125,440 acres ; of which the Surveyor-General believes that 106,240,000 are suitable for growing grain, while 46,720,000 require irrigation ; and the remaining 141,085,440 acres are suitable for ranches or other kinds of farming. When we think of the millions in the old country who have to be fed with imported wheat, it is good to know that this one Canadian plain could easily supply every ounce of bread we want. Dr Saunders points out that our imports of wheat and flour in 1902 were equivalent to about 200,000,000 bushels of wheat. If only one fourth of the land which he considers " suitable " in Manitoba, and the southern parts of the two other Provinces, were annually under wheat, he shows that the total crop, at the Manitoba ten-years' average of 19 bushels an acre, would be over 812,000,000 bushels. If Canada's population had risen to 30,000,000, this " would be ample to supply the home demand, and meet the present requirements of Great Britain three times over." As he has left out of count the wheat production of Eastern Canada, he concludes : "It would seem to be quite possible that Canada may be in a 66 ALL WE WANT, AND MORE position within comparatively few years, after supplying all home demands, to furnish Great Britain with all the wheat and flour she re- quires, and leave a surplus for export to other countries." Note on Population. — The population of Manitoba in 1906 was 365,688. Its growth and composition are described in the next chapter. The population of Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1906 numbered 257,763 and 185,412, making 808,863 for the three prairie Provinces. The census of 1901 showed a population of 158,940 (against 66,799 m I ^9 I an d 56,446 in 1881) for the area now practically represented by Saskat- chewan and Alberta, besides 52,709 in Yukon, Mackenzie, and other northerly parts. The 158,940 of 1901 included 91,535 natives of Canada, 17,612 of other British countries, 13,877 of the United States, 14,585 of Russia, 13,407 of Austria-Hungary, 2093 of Norway and Sweden, 2170 of Germany, and 1023 of France. MODERN MANITOBA Manitoba is not so very juvenile as the new-born Provinces just beyond, yet she can hardly be ignored simply because she has reached the venerable age of thirty-seven. Her settlement really dates back, as we have seen, nearly sixty years before she attained the dignity of a Province. In 1870, when the Red River settlement became a Province, with the village round Fort Garry as its capital, there was still a population of only 18,995, Indians and half-breeds included, to occupy the whole region. But then came the first rush of homeseekers, and by 1881 the population had risen to 62,260. That was the year of the great " boom," when the price of land in Winnipeg went up like a rocket — and the higher the price, the more eager were men to buy — till it came down like a stick, and ruined those who had bought last. Winnipeg took many years to get over the exhaustion that followed its fever ; but even the unnatural boom prices of '81 have now been reached and passed in the natural course of events. The muddy little village of 1870 is 67 68 WINNIPEG TO-DAY to-day a city of about 100,000 inhabitants, who ride in electric cars, do business in sky-scraping offices, buy all they want at reasonable prices in metropolitan stores, and are altogether urban and up-to-date. That in a purely agricultural province nearly a third of the population should be found con- centrated in one city is a remarkable fact. But it must be remembered that Winnipeg is not only the capital of a Province, but the metropolis of the West. It is the distributing centre of men and merchandise for Saskatchewan and Alberta as well as Manitoba ; and practically all the grain of three Provinces pours through the city on its way to the East. It is here that the invading army of eastern immigration concentrates before spreading over the plains. It is here, too, that the army of harvesters, brought in from the East every autumn at low excursion rates, is organized in battalions and companies to reap and thresh the grain in every part of the West. In the fall of 1906 about 23,000 such men arrived, 6515 more than the year before, yet far too few to supply the demand ; and, though most of them were not new-comers to Canada, about a third of them remained to swell the flowing tide of population in the West. Winni- peg calls itself the Chicago of Canada ; and the single fact that the clearing-house total of its banks in a single week has exceeded $10,000,000 MANITOBAN POPULATION 69 is enough to check the smile which such a bold comparison might provoke. This Province, having had a thirty years' start of its western neighbours, naturally contains a larger proportion of families living in really good houses and possessing accumulated wealth. The average farm has a higher percentage of its acres under actual cultivation. The disproportion of males to females in the population is not so tremendous, the census of 1906 showing 205,183 of the former to 160,505 of the latter, while Saskatchewan has 152,793 males to 104,970 females, and Alberta 108,281 males to 77,131 females. Nor, of course, can you expect so rapid a rate of increase as in Provinces where a vastly greater proportion of the land is still to be had for little or nothing. Yet Manitoba, though neces- sarily showing a smaller percentage of growth, is still far ahead of either of the other two Provinces, her population having increased from 152,506 in 1891 and 255,211 in 1901 to 365,688 in 1906. Among the towns, the population of Winnipeg increased between 1901 and 1906 from 42,340 to 90,204, and that of its suburb across the river, St Boniface, from 2019 to 5 119 ; while Brandon went up from 5620 to 10,411, and Portage la Prairie from 3901 to 4985. The census takers of 1906 numbered the total population in every part of the three prairie 70 BRITISH AND FOREIGN Provinces, but made no attempt to classify the people except by sex . The regular decennial census of 1901, however, gives the origins of the people ; and the figures are very instructive. Of the whole number in Manitoba, 70.87 per cent, or 180,859 were Canadians, 67,566 coming from Ontario and 99,806 being natives of Manitoba itself ; 33,517, or 13.14 per cent., came from other British lands, England contributing 20,036, Scotland 8099, and Ireland 4537 ; and 6922, or 2.71 per cent., were natives of the United States. Of the 8492 natives of the Province of Quebec an uncertain number were French-Canadians. Roughly, 85 or 86 per cent, of the whole were English speaking people. There remain, however, 33,915 " foreigners," speaking among them at least a score of tongues. The largest single section, 11,570, came from Austria-Hungary ; being mostly Ruthenes from Galicia and Bukowina. Russia takes second place on the foreign list, with 8854, mostly from the districts just over the frontier from Galicia. These two groups, indeed, are commonly lumped together in the West as Galicians. The domestic service of Winnipeg, or at any rate what corres- ponds to domestic service in hotels and restaurants — for the real homes find it hard to get servants of any sort — is largely done by daughters of the foreigners, of whom we shall see something further west. BLESSING THE CANADIAN NEVA 71 The Greek Church is strong enough to keep up a bishop, who repays the hospitality of the city with a yearly benediction of its Red River, when the Tsar performs the blessing of the Neva. The way in which this strikes the western mind may be gathered from the brief report of a local journalist last January : " The bishop, with 300 followers, assembled at the 'Scrap-iron Cathedral.' A pro- cession was formed, led by four men carrying an immense cross of ice, elaborately covered with silver. The bishop followed in his robes of office, and he was surrounded by the adherents of his church and throngs of spectators. The weird ceremony took place at the foot of Selkirk Avenue. By means of incantation and prayer, the depths of the Red River became holy water." Winnipeg should really be grateful to Bishop Seraphin, or any one else who adds a touch of colour and romance to the life of a city otherwise somewhat lacking in the picturesque. The Icelanders also, you might think, would help to break the commonplace level of an Anglo- Saxon community, especially as there are — or were, when the census was taken — 5403 of them in the Province. They do, it is true, form an interesting group of fisher-folk on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg, where you come across places called Hecla and Gimli, and whence they send great quantities of white-fish, pickerel and 72 THE ICELANDERS sturgeon in ice to Winnipeg and other towns. But even here they can hardly be called primitive. Most of the young folk can speak English, and like to. In the city of Winnipeg alone there are now over 3000 Icelanders, and you could scarcely pick them out from the rest of the population. Now and then they let the world know who they are. Their annual festival in August commemorates the granting of a constitution to Iceland by the Danish King in 1874 ; but the festival consists largely of the athletic sports familiar to us all. To be sure, there are speeches and choruses in Icelandic ; but these chant the praises of the new land, the " foster-home," as well as the old. The people are more than satisfied with their trans- plantation ; and with good reason. The winter is colder in Manitoba than in Iceland — which causes some surprise — but the summer is so much warmer and brighter as to put all comparison out of the question. Indeed, the race already shows signs of distinct physical improvement in the bracing West. A Winnipeg minister declares that he has seen distinct mental improvement too. In the house where he first lived, there was a little tow-headed Icelandic servant-girl, so stupid that she was only put up with because no one better could be found. Some years afterwards he met a handsome, stylish woman, bright and capable, blest with a good husband and beautiful children, and THE ICELANDERS 73 taking a prominent part in the work of her church. It was the stupid little tow-headed slavey, mellowed by the warmth and toned up by the keenness of the western air. The Icelanders are a sober, industrious, intelli- gent, and progressive people. They are living up to the splendid reputation that Scandinavians generally enjoy, as among the most reliable and valuable elements of the western population. The Commissioner of Immigration at Winnipeg, in his last report, which deals with the settlement not only of Manitoba but of the other prairie pro- vinces, says : " Icelanders continue to come to us direct from Iceland and from the United States. Those from the States bring with them more or less means, live stock, farming implements, and household effects. The Icelandic people are maintaining their excellent reputation for working hard and saving, which enables them to settle on a homestead at an early date. Some engage in business, and their success in educational achieve- ments is very marked. The settlers in the Icelandic colony at Thingvalla, Saskatchewan, arrived about eighteen years ago with little means. They are now to be found in comfortable circum- stances, many of them having acquired a whole section (640 acres). The country is well adapted for stock raising, and considerable dairying is carried on, there being a first-class creamery at 74 A BOUNDLESS WHEATFIELD Churchbridge Station. Three of the settlers have in partnership purchased a first-class threshing outfit.' ' Of the new Scandinavian immigrants as a whole he says : " It is estimated that 75 per cent, have settled on land ; the balance have readily found work as labourers and domestic servants, at good wages. This class of settler is generally prosperous all over Western Canada, and thousands more could be immediately placed at remunerative labour on railway construction or other works, if they could be obtained." The country around the capital, and indeed Southern Manitoba as a whole, is almost as poor to the casual eye as it is rich to the informed understanding. And that is saying a great deal. I have gone a whole day, which means about 200 miles, by one of the innumerable railways that radiate from Winnipeg, seeing nothing but wheat. The land seemed one great flat harvest- field. My companions, who were business men, talked about the view with the enthusiasm of an artist enraptured by an ineffable sunset or an Alpine range. Well, they must not be charged with lack of imagination on that account. On the contrary, any one can be impressed by a flaming sky or a snow-capped sierra. It takes more imagination to see the glory in a dead level two hundred miles' monotony of " No. 1 hard." Now wheat is after all the most essential item WHEAT AND ITS ENEMIES 75 in the white man's bill of fare ; and Manitoba's " No. 1 hard " is the very finest wheat the world has yet succeeded in growing. It is satisfactory to know, therefore, that the Manitoban farmer finds wheat so profitable that he is largely in- creasing its cultivation year by year. Wheat growing in that region used to be spoken of as a solemn sort of gambling. But the risk of serious damage by autumn frosts, which gave rise to that opinion, is a thing of the past. There is a charm- ing belief that the breaking up of millions of acres of hard prairie has caused a perceptible increase of the warmth radiating from the soil, so that autumn lingers, staving off the advent of frost. Prosaic folk hold that farmers have learnt to put in the seed earher, and so avoid late ripening — that is all. The wheat has still its dangers. In the autumn of 1905, there was such a scarcity of workers at harvest that in some districts the grain could not be got in before much of it had fallen out of the ears ; on many farms the army of weeds — wild oats, stinkweed and thistles — threatens to get the upper hand because the farmer has so small a force to take the field against it. Really good experienced Canadian farm-workers coming west are hard to get, and impossible to keep, as they want to take farms of their own and can do so with very little capital. When they are obtain- 76 FARM WAGES able, they command from $25 to $35 (£5 to £y) a month, for a season of six or seven months, with board, lodging and washing. A harvester gets $2 or $2.50 (8s. or 10s.) a day, and all found. A farmer of long experience, Mr John Dale of Glenborough, says he has partially solved the difficulty for himself and some of his neighbours by getting ploughmen out from Scotland. But then he guarantees them a full year's work, instead of hiring them for six months only. It is one advantage of mixed farming over mere wheat- growing, that it gives men more steady and regular work and justifies their engagement for a year at a time. It is also better for the land. Dogmatic assertions that you can go on taking heavy wheat crops off the land year after year without exhausting the soil are not convincing, extraordinarily rich though that soil is. Many of the farmers themselves are becoming healthily sceptical on this point, and either alternate their wheat with timothy and other grasses or allow the land to recuperate in summer fallow every year or two, with the best possible results. One of the most experienced, the owner of a thousand- acre farm, tells me that he has reaped 40 bushels per acre on land thus rested, while an adjoining field, where the grain had simply been sown on the ploughed-up stubble, only yielded half that quantity. THE YIELD OF WHEAT 77 In spite of everything, the garnered yield of wheat in 1905 was 47,565,707 bushels, from 2,718,888 acres ; which was nothing to complain of, remembering that as lately as 1900 the total was only 18,350,893 bushels. In 1906, there was trouble of another sort, intense heat and dry winds having checked the filling of the ears. Yet when we turn to the actual net yield, we find that after all it was 61,250,413 bushels, or 13,684,706 bushels more than the year before. The acreage had risen to 3,141,537, and the average wheat yield for the province was 19.49 bushels per acre, as compared with 21.07 bushels in 1905. The lowest average wheat yields on record are 8.9 bushels in 1900 and 12.4 in 1889 ; the highest is 27.86 in 1895 ; and the average for twenty-three years is nearly 18.90 bushels. Forgive the statistics. They mean so much when read with imagination. If they cannot be forgiven, I may as well " be hanged for a sheep as for a rabbit " and give more of them ; and shamelessly, in the text, not in a furtive footnote. I have said that wheat-growing is profitable. An official pamphlet puts the cost of ploughing, seeding, harvesting and marketing, at $7.50 or $8 an acre — say 33s. — and this is a fair estimate. In fact, a careful farmer, reckoning every cent, gives me his expenditure as $7.33 on an acre not of 19, but 29 bushels. At 60 cents. (2s. 6d.) a bushel, 78 THE PROFITS OF WHEAT the average of 19 bushels would fetch $11.40, or 47s. 6d. ; leaving a margin of $3.90 or $3.40 (16s. 3d. or 14s. 4d.) per acre. My friend who harvested 29 bushels of wheat for $7.33 sold it at 63 cents a bushel, and thus made a profit of $10.94 or 45s. 7d. an acre. In this district, one of the best in the Province, farms have been sold for $40 (£8) an acre ; but even there the average is only $25 (£5). Deducting $2 an acre, being 8 per cent, on $25, as interest on invested capital, there still remains a profit of $8.94 or 37s. 3d. an acre. At the lower yield of 19 bushels, but with the higher cost of $7.50 an acre, and only allowing 60 cents a bushel as the price of wheat, a man who gives $25 for his land can pay 8 per cent, interest on the purchase money, and still be $1.90 or 7s. 1 id. an acre to the good ; while every year his land is increasing in value. As a matter of fact, many of these Manitoban farmers came in when the land was going a- begging, and got it for nothing, so their present earnings for a single year are many times more than the whole capital they had to invest. Here is a man whose experience has been quoted by some of the advertising pamphlets, but is not less remarkable on that account. " I came from Iowa," he says, "where the ague got into my bones." That was in 1882. His capital amounted only to £15, and the first steps in OLD-TIMERS' EVIDENCE 79 Manitoba were hard enough. To market his wheat in the early days he had to haul it 60 miles, and he was glad to take 45 cents (is. io£d), a bushel. But he had left the ague where it belonged, in the States, and work was no longer a pain. That was the greatest gain of all ; but the financial profit was great enough, and can be more easily represented in words. " Since then," he says, " I have sold wheat as high as $1.30 (5s. 5d.), and the biggest yield I ever got was 50 bushels to the acre. The average yield, year in year out, gives 25 bushels to the acre." Besides 320 acres which he rents for pasture and hay, he has 200 acres, freehold of course, under actual cultivation, with plenty of horses, cattle, swine and poultry. Well may he say, " My 75 dollars proved a good investment ! " One need not be an " old-timer " to have a wonderful story of progress to tell. Mr John Dale, whom I have quoted already, has been over twenty years in the country, but, as he says, there has been more advance in the last five years than in the previous fifteen. Land which he bought seven years ago at 14s. 6d. an acre is worth £4, while land that he gave 32s. an acre for three years ago has now a market value of £5. On one section of land that he bought for £600 he has netted 50 per cent, on the purchase price, the returns on it having been £300, and there are still 80 THE ELEVATORS 200 acres to break up. He owns two and three- quarter sections, and he has gained, in the in- creased value of the land alone, £5000. " You can see," he says, " that we are doing pretty well in the West." If you have to haul your wheat 60 miles, like the man from Iowa, or 100 miles, like many another then — well, it does not pay. But now, thanks to the spread of railways, the average wheat-grower in this Province has a station and elevator within five miles of his door. The elevator is the most conspicuous feature in the landscape — and an ugly thing it is. Its hulking dark-red mass towers above the plain like a deformed light-house in a sea of grass and grain. But it is a blessing in disguise. Wheat-farming would be practically impossible without it. The farmer can either sell his grain outright, to the elevator company, at a figure regulated by the price of the day at Winnipeg, or deal direct with buyers at a distance. In the latter case, he simply pays the elevator company at the rate of ij cent per bushel for taking in and cleaning the grain, storing it for 15 or 20 days, and putting it on board the train. All he has to do then is to send the elevator company's receipt by mail to the buyer or agent of his choice. The railway company is bound to allot grain cars to farmers in the order in which they have made application ; MIXED FARMING 81 and any station-master who allots a car to any customer, no matter how influential, out of his proper turn, is liable to a heavy fine. The whole grain crop of Manitoba for 1906, including 50,692,978 bushels of oats, 17,532,554 of barley, and sundries like rye, peas, corn (that is, maize) and flax, came to 129,918,256 bushels, on 14,054,895 more than in the previous year. Superlatively good as his grain may be, the Manitoban farmer by no means confines himself to cereal crops — as witness these following figures. The census shows that in 1906 the people of this Province owned 215,819 horses, 170,543 milch cows and 350,969 other cattle, 28,975 sheep, and 200,509 pigs. The Province raised that year as many as 4,702,595 bushels of potatoes, being nearly 188 bushels to the acre, and 3,446,432 bushels of roots, being 265 to the acre. Nor is the Manitoban content with the nourishing but thin prairie hay ; for he mowed that year 133,510 tons of cultivated grasses. Still more striking is the way he has branched out into dairying, and the success of this comparatively recent enter- prise. He marketed, in the same season, 4,698,882 pounds of butter, at an average price of 17.8 cents, or ninepence, a pound. Add to this 1,552,812 pounds of creamery butter at 22 cents (nd.), and 1,501,729 pounds of factory cheese at 13 cents (6Jd.), and you find that a single year's F 82 THE FARMER'S CUSTOMERS dairying has brought him in $1,377,746, or about £276,000. One effect of the high prices obtain- able for butter and cheese was a scarcity of milk in the cities. The town-dwellers make their living, directly or indirectly, out of the country- folk's prosperity, but the advantage is not all on one side ; the farmers already find an appreci- able source of income in the town consumption of country produce such as turkeys, geese, and chickens. They have even taken to bee-keeping. The bees thrive in the dry western air, if well protected during hibernation ; and there is no lack of demand for their honey. " There is a splendid demand for the products of mixed farming," says a man who has tried it. " We get men coming to our very door and buying everything we can raise, at good prices. There is a good demand for all kinds of live stock, and particularly for heavy draught horses, of which we can't raise anything like enough. They sell now, the good ones, for an average of $225 each " —or £47. Whether the money comes from far or near — it comes. The Manitoban farmers were able to spend in 1905 nearly £800,000 on new farm buildings, and another £900,000 in 1906 — a year, by the way, in which as many as 2648 steam threshing outfits were at work in the province. So much has been said — and boasted — of the CLIMATE AND SURFACE 83 dryness of the western climate that Manitoba's success in dairying and root-growing comes as a surprise to many people. Well, her climate is dry compared with England's, and the Manitoban farmer thanks heaven it is ; but drought is as rare there as here. So far is this M dry " province from aridity that even in the south, the great wheat plain of the south, wide areas are found so swampy as to be almost useless. Here, therefore, the provincial Government has been constructing a network of main and lateral surface drains, each district concerned paying the interest and sinking fund by an assessment on the farming population. Then the swamp becomes a wheatfield. It is a great mistake to imagine that all Manitoba is like the great flat treeless plain, that the cursory visitor sees from a Canadian Pacific railway car. If you strike north from Winnipeg, you soon escape from the bareness of the " bald-headed prairie " ; and as far as you like to go you will find the Province well wooded and well watered. There are even a number of gently sloping hills, which neighbourly affection honours with the name of mountains. Nature here is not sensa- tional. For cliffs and cataracts you sigh in vain. Yet the current of the Winnipeg River already supplies electricity to work the tramways of the capital, 60 miles away, and is capable of gener- ating a million horsepower whenever it is wanted. 84 NORTH TO HUDSON'S BAY Before you have gone 200 miles north from Winnipeg, however, you are out of the Province altogether. Manitoba's great grievance is that she is " a postage-stamp Province." If she is really a postage-stamp she would do credit to any collection, as she covers 73,732 square miles, and is nearly five times as large as Switzerland. But she declines to compare herself with Switzerland. What rankles in her breast is that when her two new neighbours, Saskatchewan and Alberta, were each created and endowed with a territory about as large as France or Germany, she pled in vain to be made their equal. What she wants is to extend herself northward, over the unorganized territory of Keewatin, to Hudson's Bay. The Director of the Geological Survey of Canada, Mr A. P. Low, says that " much of this land, where hunters and fur-traders roam in solitude to-day, as they have since the days of Prince Rupert, is fit for agricultural settlement." Another authority, Professor Tyrrell, says that north of Lake Winnipeg, and west of Nelson River, there is a tract of magnificent agricultural land about 200 miles wide, and 600 miles from east to west — crossing the whole of northern Saskatchewan, in fact — and endowed with a fine climate. Manitoba covets the country, however, not only for its own sake, but because it would give her access to the sea, at Fort Churchill on Hudson's THE HUDSON'S BAY ROUTE 85 Bay. The Dominion Government is likely before long to build or to get built a railway connecting the present north-western lines with Hudson's Bay ; and for the three or four months a year during which Hudson Straits are generally clear of ice Churchill should be a most valu- able sea-port. The distance from Winnipeg to Liverpool by Hudson's Bay is only about 3576 miles, or 848 miles less than the distance between the same points by Ontario and the St Lawrence. Saskatchewan and Alberta, at any rate the central and northern parts of those Provinces, would gain even more than Manitoba would by the opening of the Hudson's Bay route. Saskatchewan claims, indeed, that she herself should be extended to the mouth of the Churchill River. MIDDLE SASKATCHEWAN ; AND THE ENGLISHMEN The charms of Manitoba are great, but without any depreciation of her buxom maturity I turned my face to the west in search of her younger sisters. To the north-west I should say, at first, for on this occasion I took the new route opened up by the Canadian Northern Railway Company. For the first 250 miles the railway is still in the " Premier Prairie Province/ ' with Lake Manitoba, Lake Dauphin and Lake Winnipegosis far away on the right, and the slopes of Riding Mountain on the left. The land is practically all good, but a large part of it is covered with scrubby poplar, and as long as there is plenty of open prairie to be had the new settler naturally lets the scrub land severely alone — unless, that is, he is a Galician. The Galician may be a poor farmer when he first comes to the country, but the country owes him no little gratitude for the contented way in which he makes his home on the scrub-land that better farmers despise. Nor is the better farmer at all uncommon in this region, and the prosperity of M SALVATION ARMY AND CO-OPERATION 87 the ten-year-old town of Dauphin only reflects the prosperity of the country around. Here the railway forks. If you take the right hand line, to the north-west, you reach the very corner of Manitoba before turning west into Saskatchewan. This line goes on to Prince Albert, close to the rebel headquarters of 1885, and about 540 miles from Winnipeg. This Prince Albert branch has opened up a vast amount of fine country in the Carrot River Valley and elsewhere, and the old-timers who have been waiting fifteen years for a railway, raising cattle till it was worth their while to raise crops, now see their solitude invaded by thousands of homesteading neighbours. It is on this line, at Tisdale, about 100 miles west of Manitoba, that the Canadian Order of Foresters own a tract of land which they have asked the Salvation Army to people with carefully selected families, to whom farms are being sold at from $7 to $10 (29s. 2d. to 41s. 8d.), an acre. By organizing their forces in co-operative gangs, and jointly hiring a steam plough, the Salvation Army settlers have made as much progress at the end of their first year as many of their neighbours have at the end of their third. Instead of spending several years in rough log shacks, they find themselves installed in four or five-roomed cottages before beginning their first winter in the country. 88 PRINCE ALBERT Prince Albert, the western terminus of this line, about 30 miles west of where the North and South Saskatchewan rivers join, is one of the very few towns or villages off the line of the Canadian Pacific that already had something more than a fur-trading history when I went through the country in 1885. White men had already been farming in that district for a dozen years, and though they were more than 200 miles north of the latitude of Winnipeg one of them assured me that his grain had never been touched by autumn frost. After a long period of slow growth the district is going ahead fast. Agriculture is not the only industry here, though it is the chief, and a very prosperous one. The forests lying north of the rivers give employment in winter to a large number of " lumber-jacks," who come down into the settlements for farm-work in summer. The main line of the Canadian Northern, how- ever, strikes west from Dauphin. The last station before we leave Manitoba is called Makaroff, and the first station in Saskatchewan is Togo, by which the future historian may fix the dates of their foundation without much trouble. The railway godfather who gave them those names had no malevolent intention. The maiden triumphs of Saskatchewan are not being won at the expense of matronly Manitoba^ t/3 SASKATCHEWAN ENTERED 89 There is no change in the landscape to impress you with the fact that you have left one Province for another. By degrees, to be sure, you notice that the cultivated land is a smaller proportion of the whole than it was a few hours ago, but the wheat and the oats that you see are as good as anything you have seen. At Canora, about 50 miles over the border, there has been so large an immigration of " well-heeled " American farmers, that the acreage under crop doubled in the single year 1905-6. " Fifty car-loads of effects," the im- migration officer says, " accompanied 800 settlers arriving at this point during the year, and most of them were able to commence farming operations without being obliged to hire out beforehand." The next railway divisional point, called Hum- boldt, is in the heart of a district largely settled by German- Americans, who in their second or third year have each from 80 to 100 acres under crop. South of Humboldt there is a settlement of Mennonites, who may be described as German- Quakers from Russia ; and some of these people at the end of two years' work have 100 to 150 acres under crop. Nearly 500 miles from Winnipeg the train comes to a great river, the south branch of the Saskatchewan. Instead of the wooden trestle which the earlier railway builders threw across the streams that came in their path, the 90 AN INFANT TOWN Canadian Northern crosses the valley on a magnificent steel bridge. The first town beyond the river, Warman, was but an infant of three months when I stepped into its hotel ; but already the owner found that the business had outgrown his accommodation, and a new wing was going up with prairie speed. The tables in the big dining-room were embellished with flowers — a delicate hint that Warman was within the limits of civilization, — and the charge for board and lodging, $1.50 (6s. 3d.) a day, could hardly be called a pioneer price. Meat, ducks, and geese I found were plentiful, and eggs only cost 10 or 15 cents a dozen. As for supplies that were not produced on the spot, their prices had come down with a run when the first train arrived. Salt, for instance, which in the spring had cost $7.50 (31s. 3d.) a barrel, had promptly fallen to $2.95 (12s. 3d.). Another great steel bridge crosses the north branch of the Saskatchewan. A burly American who boarded the train at the next stopping place assured me that the country south of this point was the best he had seen. He, by the way, is a commerical traveller, taking orders for school books — a fact which " speaks volumes," considering that hereabouts you see, or did see then, few adults and no children. At the 573rd mile, I found myself at North Battleford. The " Lucknow of Canada " is three NORTH BATTLEFORD & LLOYDMINSTER 91 or four miles away on the left, across the river, and rather grudges the importance conferred on its upstart neighbour ; for North Battleford is a divisional centre with railway work-shops, and will presently no doubt be calling itself a city. At the age of three months, though most of the houses were still of unpainted yellow plank, and some of the inhabitants were living in tents, real estate was changing hands at an enormous ad- vance. One gentleman who had bought a town site for $600 (£120), turned up his nose at an offer of $1200 for the same. I am not particular about the figures ; if I have made a mistake I have put the profit too low. A few miles further on the railway got back to the south side of the river, and presently I became aware, having a map in my hand — I certainly should not have known it otherwise — that the train was crossing the Indian Reserves of Mooso- min and Thunderchild ; Moosomin, whose pos- session of $600 in the bank kept him prudently loyal when his neighbour Poundmaker went on the war-path. It was almost impossible to realize that I was rolling along in a comfortable railway car through " the enemy's country." The impossibility was intensified when the train pulled up at Lloydminster, the chief town of the all-British colony associated with the name of Barr. With the unadulterated English accent 92 THE ALL-BRITISH COLONY of the townsfolk in my ears, with a bank manager telling me of the hundred thousand dollars he had on deposit, and the residence of an archdeacon before my eyes, I had to make a great effort to realize that just over the prairie was the deserted site of Fort Pitt, and but a step further north the scene of the Frog Lake massacre. More has been heard of Lloydminster in this country, for obvious reasons, than of any other place of its size in the West. I hope it is un- necessary now to say that the all-British colony is prosperous. It is really very prosperous indeed. To be sure, it is no longer all-British. Whatever Mr Barr's mistakes may have been, the choice of a site for his colony was certainly not one of them. Americans, Scandinavians, and Canadians, are flocking in — and not empty-handed. A single party of Norwegians from the State of Minnesota, for instance, arrived in the summer of 1906 with six big railway car-loads of effects, with which they struck out to the south and formed a little colony of their own about 30 miles from the town. The arrival of American and Canadian neigh- bours has been in most respects an advantage to the first-comers, most of whom began with a rather hazy idea of the ways of the country. Happily, the disadvantage of inexperience was so impressed upon the Englishmen by their early ISOLATION GONE 93 trials that they were willing to learn ; which cannot always be said for our countrymen in Canada. The great difficulty that checked the progress of the colony for the first two or three years was its distance from the source of supply, and also therefore from the market. Saskatoon, on the Regina and Prince Albert Railway, was the nearest railway station, and freighting by carts over 200 miles of trail is terribly expensive. When I visited the town, however, it had had a railway station for three weeks, and the colonists already felt that the old era was far behind them. " You can't buy a bit of land round my homestead," said an old-timer of 1903, " for less than $10 an acre. Yes, we did have a hard time at first, but, after all, we didn't come out here for beer and skittles. We were misled in one thing. If a man had £5, they told us, that would be enough to start with ; but the man who only had £5 had to go off and get work somewhere else to keep himself, and to raise what was really necessary for im- plements and so on, so his homestead had to be neglected. However, that's all over now, and before long we shan't have any fear of comparison with any American or Canadian in the country." Several of the colonists carry on little shops in the town as well as their homesteads in the country — such as the man from Birkenhead who has started 94 THE COLD a butcher's shop on the strength of an acquaint ance with Canadian cattle formed in the lairages. As for the severity of the climate, the English men laugh at it. They have certainly felt the worst it can do. The winter of 1906-07 was exceptionally hard all over the West. The cold was intense, and what upset the new-comers most of all was the extraordinary fall of snow. Any man living out on a treeless part of the plains, without even a poplar bluff or a wooded valley at hand, who had not had the foresight to lay in a proper supply of wood, was bound to suffer for lack of fuel. But on the whole there is no doubt that a hard winter in England causes much more suffering than a hard winter in the West, where scarcely any one lacks the necessary clothing and fuel and shelter on account of poverty, and where a dry zero is more tolerable by far than a damp English freezing-point. A Lloydminster man assured me that he had never worn an overcoat, even at 40 below zero ; and though in that detail he was a little eccentric, the fact is very significant. Another Englishman, who, however, does not despise a jacket lined with sheepskin, declares that 40 below zero is not so cold as 10 degrees of frost in England. The Englishmen have not merely learnt such western ways as were better than their own. They have refused to unlearn certain English A COMPLIMENT TO ENGLISHMEN 95 ways that are better than the ways of the West. Life at first was reduced to its primitive elements ; but since the pioneer strain has been relieved the little refinements of an older world are beginning to bloom again. A western observer speaks more strongly on this point than I should have dared to. " There are very few corners of this western land that I have not penetrated," he says, " and there is none where kindliness, good- breeding, and honourable instincts prevail to a greater degree in Canada. Many of the men who have most to say, and say it loudest, by way of criticism of these people would be vastly profited by a sojourn among them. Lloydminster might well lay claim to the honour of being the most aesthetic town in Western Canada. It is the home of good taste, and a conservatory of the fine arts." There is one English institution, by the way, which does not seem to flourish at Lloydminster, in spite of the efforts of enthusiasts, and that is cricket. It takes too long. Football is more reasonable in its demands on a busy Westerner's time. The Englishman in Canada, it has often been remarked, is neither so popular nor so successful as the Scot. So far as popularity is concerned, it is partly due to the greater reticence of the Scot. He is on the whole more cosmopolitan than the Englishman ; and even when he feels just as 96 EFFECT OF THE NEW HABITAT strongly that his ways are better than Canadian ways, he more often keeps that opinion to himself — till he changes it. As for success, the average Scot is better educated, more accustomed to discipline, and fonder of work. We have unhappily sent out to Canada a great many Englishmen, and even some Scotsmen, of the wrong sort. By an emigrant of the right sort I do not mean simply a man who is used to work on the land. Experience in agriculture and the care of live stock gives an emigrant a start of his in- experienced companion ; but experience can soon be gained — by " emigrants of the right sort." The man who emigrates need not be either brilliant in mind or over the average in bodily strength ; though, of course, Canada would like the pick of our home population in both respects. Canadian air, and especially the air of the West, with food and work in plenty, has a marvellous effect in toning up the health of those who do not counter- act it by the wretched drinking habit and other avoidable influences ; and the effect of the energetic life on sluggish intellects is sometimes equally marked. The essential quality, the first of the essential qualities, in an emigrant is moral courage ; the spirit that will resolutely learn the ways and perseveringly do the work of his new home, undaunted either by strangeness or by hardship. The new country makes a large draft THE WRONG SORT OF EMIGRANTS 97 on a man's store of character ; but, if he meets her demand, she repays him generously, with in- dependence and prosperity and the promise of still greater bounty for his children. We must all be sorry for the man who fails, or " just manages to scrape along," owing to local and exceptional circumstances that might beat the bravest ; but long experience has convinced me that nearly all the failures are due to the emigrant's own defects ; his indisposition to learn, his helplessness when called on to do for himself what others always did for him in England, his incapacity or unwilling- ness to work hard and steadily for long at a time, and his craving for the mental stimulants of noise and glitter, if not for the physical stimulant of alcohol. Many weak ones have been crushed simply by the disappointment of finding the country below the level of their quite unreason- able expectations. Now, however, Englishmen know a vast deal more about Canada than they did even a couple of years ago, and you meet in Canadian cities comparatively few of the people who (I quote from the Montreal Daily Witness, but I know the species very well myself) " seem to expect to be met at the landing wharf by a carriage and pair and to be driven around till they have picked out the job that suits them, at their own price." There are two classes of Englishmen in Canada, the same writer says, " which are very G 98 EMIGRANTS IMPROVING sharply defined. The one is sterling, adaptable, modest, able, sober, enterprising ; the other — well, the other is an infliction." In view of the bad name these " inflictions " give to Canada when they get back to England, and the equally bad impression of England that they give while in Canada, it is good to know that their number is being greatly reduced. It is actually stated that the Englishmen who arrived in the West for the last harvest were considered equal, if not superior, to the men who came up from Eastern Canada. Whatever part of the kingdom he comes from, the emigrant of to-day is a more industrious, a better educated and a more sober man, than the emigrant of yesterday. This is partly due no doubt to the greater strictness of the Canadian Government in shutting out undesirables, who are accordingly refused assistance by the emigration organizations at home. But, whatever the cause, the percentage of failures now is extraordinarily small. Neither lack of experience nor lack of capital is more than a temporary handicap if a man is resolved to earn both. Many a young fellow with neither has been able to take a homestead of his own and farm it successfully, after a couple of years' work for a farmer of the country. I have come across some very striking cases of success won by men for whom failure had been con- TOWN BOYS' SUCCESS 99 fidently foretold. There were three young Englishmen, for instance, who went out together, — one raised on a farm, the others factory boys, whose occupation in England had been entirely sedentary and non-muscular. One of these did as his upbringing would lead you to expect. He found his first job on a farm too hard, and threw it up ; drifted into another job, and threw that up too ; and at last accounts was still drifting. His agricultural comrade naturally did well enough ; but factory -boy No. 2 did best of all. He simply resolved to succeed and threw himself into his work. His first year as a homesteader saw him the proud possessor of a house of his own building and nine or ten acres under crop. Another young Englishman of poor physique, used only to indoor work, made up his mind to go farming in Canada for the sake of his health. The remedy was a drastic one, for he had no money and had to hire himself out as a farm labourer ; but it succeeded. " I worked harder than I should ever have thought possible," he says. " I went to bed every night with all my limbs aching, and they were still aching when I got up in the morning ; but I just went out and worked it off, and by the end of the year, I was able to work with the best of them." The next season, he and three comrades took a farm of their own. One of their two cows fell sick, and their only horse died, which was a heavy ioo NO "CLASSES" blow ; but to make good the loss the young Englishman went off to a lumber camp for the winter, to work as time-keeper and clerk at $9 (37s. 6d.), a week and all found ; and when spring came he was a capitalist on a small scale and start- ing to work his farm again with every prospect of success. The men of whom I have been speaking would be described in England as " working class," or in some cases " lower middle class." There is only one class on the plains, and that is the working class. Here and there you meet a gentleman of leisure, but he is called a tramp. Social distinctions as we know them in England and in the older cities of Canada have no existence on the plains. The farmer may have belonged to " the classes " and his man to " the masses," but they do the same work and eat at the same table. Or it may be the other way round, and the public school boy may find himself earning his experience and his wages from his father's ex- coachman. Unhappily there are certain members of the English leisured class who find themselves in Canada without either the necessity or the in- clination to work for their living. I remember twenty years ago visiting the home, if home it must be called, of an Englishman of this class. Outwardly it resembled an over-grown packing THE MISERY OF BACHING 101 case, rather knocked about on its travels. In- wardly it was a nest of disorder and discomfort. A tumbled heap of blankets on a home-made bedstead, a greasy plate on a dirty table, miscel- laneous provisions scattered over the unswept floor, and a cinder-path from the door to the little sheet-iron stove, — these were the surroundings of the " baching " life to which the owner had come from an English public school. Skipping a few years, I might tell of another interior — a big room with a little bed which was never made ; a table loaded with a mixture of pipes, tools, and sundries ; a hunk of " sure-death," which is the bach's apology for bread ; a cup yellow with tea, having never been washed ; plates coated with the bacon-fat of a long succession of monotonous meals ; on the floor, in one corner onions, in another clothes, in a third potatoes. Yet the walls were covered with a valuable library, and the owner always turned up in faultless evening dress at every dance in the nearest town. Here and there you can find something like this in the West at the present day ; but my fortune has led me for the most part into homes civilized by wives or mothers or sisters — who are certainly doing more for their race and empire, and probably more for themselves, than if they had devoted their lives to the enjoyment of ready-made com- fort and luxury in England. 102 THE REMITTANCE MAN It is generally admitted that the educated and athletic old-countryman, if he will adapt himself to the nature and needs of the country, and if he throws himself whole-heartedly into his work, makes as fine a settler as there is in the West. But these two " ifs " are very large. Many of these young Englishmen fail simply because they are not compelled to succeed. Born with the curse of money upon them, they know they can live whether they work or not, and the knowledge numbs their energy. Describing a time when the English-born formed a larger proportion of the western pioneers than they do now, a friend says : " It makes one blush, as an Englishman, the things done by fellows sent out often because they are unmanageable in England. The most useless men I ever saw were young fellows who were said to have had ' the best education ' but were positive fools. They were so bull-headed, they would not learn ; they would not buckle down to work, but lived out among themselves on their ranches in filthy shacks, and came into town to drink. They really got lower than any other class in the country." Yet there was a great deal of good in these black sheep ; and many of them, after flinging away their money, were dragged out of the mire by the stern grip of necessity and driven along the road of hard work, to a goal of brilliant success. Happy for them if their money THE REMITTANCE MAN 103 could be lost, instead of clinging to them like the chain of cash-boxes on Marley's ghost. There are exceptions ; but the average " remittance man," who knows that his allowance will come as surely as one month follows another, and expects that one of these days the capital producing this allowance will fall into his hands, is by universal testimony a failure. THE PARK LANDS ; AND THE AMERICANS " If you'd seen this road before it was made You'd lift up your hands and bless General Wade." I was fortunate enough to see and to travel over the Canadian Northern Railway before it was made. The rails were laid to a point about forty miles west of Lloydminster, and over that section no passenger or freight train was yet supposed to run, but our train did ; that is to say, it began by running, then it dropped to a walk, and long before we came to the " head of steel " we were creeping along at six or seven miles an hour, and rolling as if it was sixty. Having come to the jumping off place, we jumped off. Just ahead of us was a construction train of open platform cars from which the rails were being dragged by a swarm of navvies, to be pinned down on the ties at the rate of three miles a day. We were still over 160 miles from the terminus at Edmonton, and we had to cover the distance in two days, for the third day was to be the greatest in Edmonton's history. The Province of Alberta was about to be born, and proclamation of the TRAVELLING BY TRAIL 105 fact was to be made by the Governor-General. A hundred and sixty miles in two days over a road varying from middling to villainous would seem to the European a feat somewhat doubtful of accomplishment. But we did it. The middling part of the road consisted of two fairly smooth, broad, black ruts across the rolling prairie, and there our spring-waggons made capital speed behind fresh horses. Sometimes the trail was a sort of switchback, where we soon discovered the urgent importance of coming down straight after being shot up into the air. Occasionally the road-bed consisted of mud-holes, and that was the worst of all, because no pair of horses will draw a waggon through mud-holes at a trot. The country we were now rolling through was a typical specimen of the " park lands " which compose nearly the whole central area of both Saskatchewan and Alberta, and which in my humble judgment are on the whole the best parts of the West to live in. The country has plenty of wood and water, and the water is good. The country is not monotonously flat, and the hills while pleasant to the eye offer no hindrance to cultivation. The winter climate as you go west becomes steadily milder, till in Alberta it is in striking contrast with that of Manitoba. Twenty miles from the head of steel we came to a little place named Mannville, after the vice- io6 DISCONTENTED president of the railway that was to come. It had commenced existence three months before in the shape of a small tent. By the end of August it might be considered a village, consisting of a post-office, blacksmith's shop, and two other stores, with a travelling land agent's office, bearing the inscription " Snaps in Farm Land " on its waggon-cover. A snap, I may say, is a bargain ; but there were no bargains in land to be had thereabouts. As for free land, every homestead for ten miles on either side of the line where the railway was to run had been taken up already. The " Americans " form a large proportion of the new-comers here, though not so large a pro- portion as in the drier and less wooded prairie further south. In fact, the only discontented immigrant whom I met in the West was an American in this very district. I asked him what was the matter. He reflected a little, and then said : " Well, I was raised on the prairie, and I guess I can't be happy anywhere else." He meant the " bald-headed prairie," where not a tree breaks the monotony of the sky-line, and you can plough a furrow for a hundred miles or more in any direction, for all that nature does to hinder you. Of the 779,991 immigrants to Canada whose arrival was recorded from the beginning of 1899 to the middle of 1906, as many as 261,136, or more ORIGIN OF THE "AMERICANS" 107 than one-third, have come in from the United States, and most of these technically have been citizens of that republic ; but when you come to close quarters with them you find that about half of them are not really American born, and that a great proportion even of the other half are the children of non-American parents. A very large number of the so-called Americans are natives of the United Kingdom, Eastern Canada, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, who have migrated in earlier days to the United States to better themselves, just as now they have left the United States for the same reason. Some of them have lived practically all their lives under the Stars and Stripes, quite long enough to become permeated — if receptive and adaptable by nature —with the sentiment of American nationality ; and I have taken particular trouble to discover if this sentiment exists among the new Canadians in a degree likely to prevent their whole-hearted adoption of British citizenship ; but I have found nothing of the kind. Once, indeed, I thought I had succeeded. On the prairie section of the Canadian Pacific Railway, I dropped into a car full of men who had evidently been travelling to see whether they would like the country. A Canadian from Ontario having boasted at large of the Dominion's superiority over her southern neighbour, a goatee-bearded American took the 108 "THE POOR MAN'S FRIEND" floor, and sang the praises of Uncle Sam with all the enthusiasm of a devotee. " I take off my hat whenever I mention Uncle Sam/' said he, suiting the action to the word, " for there's no country under heaven has given the poor man a chance like Uncle Sam ! " In private conversa- tion with this gentleman afterwards, I discovered that he had the heartiest contempt for the men — a quite insignificant minority in his part of the country, by the way — who suffered from Anglo- phobia, or even spoke of the British form of government as less free than the American. He frankly admitted the superiority of certain features of Canadian life, especially the com- paratively thorough and impartial administration of the law ; and under all his admiration for Uncle Sam as the " poor man's friend " lay a conviction that this honour was passing from the United States to Canada. In fact, he had just decided, as a result of his inspection of the Canadian West, to become a British citizen himself ! There is a hope cherished in some quarters of the United States that these American emigrants to Canada, if lost for a while to the Republic, will by-and-by use their power to bring the Dominion under the Stars and Stripes. Well, the future is a free field for the prophets. So far as my ex- perience goes, the Americans in Western Canada are perfectly content with the political institutions GOOD AMERICANS MAKE GOOD BRITONS 109 they have adopted, and certainly not inclined to act as missionaries of the annexation doctrine. They have personally annexed as much of the country as they want. Those Americans who are afflicted by the thought that the whole continent is not ruled from Washington appear to have stayed at home, and their emigrant kinsmen seem rather glad of it. " How are you going to vote ? " one of the new-comers was asked. " I don't care which side," said he with brutal candour. " What I want to vote for is to keep them darned Yankees out ! " With the vast majority of these folk American- ism is not a skin they have inherited and cannot get out of, but a garment which they are perfectly ready and able to change. An Englishman who settled at Melfort, in central Saskatchewan, as far back as 1883, and whose first neighbours were Americans, tells me that at first they not only did what Canadians criticize Englishmen for doing — constantly saying " We do so-and-so on the other side," but were always waving the Stars and Stripes, and celebrated the " glorious Fourth " with ostentatious devotion. But " now they keep the 1st of July, Dominion Day, and the 24th of May, Queen's Birthday, and their flag is never seen. Not one of them shows any wish to return to the United States." It is largely owing to the early arrival of these Americans, who " set the no TWO SORTS OF AMERICAN pace " to the later comers, that the Melfort district is ahead of others that were settled before it. They brought in better and quicker methods of farming ; they were most untiring workers ; most of them were men of high character, hardly one of them drank or even smoked, and they have all prospered exceedingly. An old Scottish-Canadian, who has watched the Americans closely ever since their invasion of the West began, says : u You'll find exceptions, of course ; but taking them all round they're as well-behaved a lot as any of us, and they're a great people for a new country like this, — far ahead of our old-country folk. They come right in with a tent, and plough up a big slice of land before they bother about putting up even a shack to live in. You can always tell an American settler by the way he begins. Yes, sir, they're a great people ! " A very deplorable creature is the " exception " whose existence is here admitted. His power of screwing the last ounce of wheat out of his land and the last cent out of his wheat is undoubted ; but there his life begins and ends. He may not be a rowdy ; but his moral qualities are merely negative. He is a human farming-machine ; an automatic money-maker. He talks wheat and dollars, dollars and wheat, with expectoral punctuation ; and that is all. He has no interests WHY THE AMERICANS COME in on earth, and certainly none in heaven, beyond his crop and what it will fetch. To his British neigh- bours he seems a mere animal. It is pleasant to turn from such a specimen to the God-fearing, wide-minded, thinking and reading man who comes in by the same train from the same country. It is generally known that many of the American farmers now coming over into British territory are doing so because the land which they got for little or nothing many years ago in the Western States can now be sold for high prices. They sell, not merely as a speculator sells shares which he has been holding for a rise, but because with the price of their land alone they can buy in Canada much larger farms, of richer soil, with cattle and horses to boot. Many of them make this exchange because it enables them to establish their sons on farms close by their own at a net cost of nothing ; but the motive of others is simply to get more elbow room for themselves. They have been used to spaciousness, and as settlement grows thick around them they feel uncomfortably crowded, though we in England should feel lonely enough. I am not speaking now of the hardened and incorrigible pioneers — the men who pull up stakes whenever civilization comes within shouting distance, who must always have the rest of the human race behind them and the untouched wilderness in front. These are the men whom the U2 A FARMING SPECULATOR Mounted Police patrol and the Hudson's Bay fur- trader discover building log huts beside the lakes and rivers of the distant north. I speak of the ordinary farmer from Minnesota or Kansas, who loves space, but only endures solitude — endures it with cheerful indifference, knowing that it will soon be mitigated by neighbours, and hoping for its ultimate abolition by a railway. The American immigrants, as a whole, come in simply to make homes for themselves and their children. Some of them, however, while they come in as farmers and do their duty by the land, do so with the deliberate intention of selling out as soon as they can do so at a high enough profit. One of these men took a free quarter-section, and bought a whole adjoining section from the Hudson's Bay Company for $2624, or $4.10 per acre. Three years later, in 1905, he sold this purchased section, including a $1200 house, perhaps $400 worth of fences, and 200 acres under fall wheat, for $14,400, or $22.50 per acre. He then bought back the standing crop for a lump sum of $2500, and threshed 7000 bushels out of it, adding largely to his profit on the original sale. At last accounts he was ready to sell his 160 acres of homestead. Having " made his pile " in this easy way he will either try to double it by similar operations further afield or return to a life of modest but comfortable retirement in the United A "STOPPING-PLACE" 113 States. There is still another class of Americans, as may be imagined, who simply use Canadian soil as an article to speculate in, buying it only to sell again when the market price of land has been increased by the peopling of neighbouring sections or by the advent of a railway. An admirable example of the best class of American settler was our host at the " stopping- place " where we dined, about 40 miles after leaving the head of steel. He was not an inn- keeper — far from it — but, as he found himself on the main trail between Battleford and Edmonton, he had laid himself out to put up travellers. This is a common practice among farmers on trails where inns are lacking ; nor do they take advantage of their position to charge exorbitant rates. Fifteen cents for a " noon " and 25 cents for a full meal seem the regular tariff. A dinner of meat, bread, and vegetables, pie, stewed fruit, and tea, with the host's daughter fanning away the flies — if you grumble at that you are not fit for a traveller. The migrations of that man and his ancestors form a strange story to the ears of an Englishman who lives and dies in the village where his Saxon forebears settled a thousand years ago ; but in America, far from being strange, his experience is familiar and even typical. It is the story of thousands of families and individuals who settle H U4 AN EMIGRANT FROM OKLAHOMA on the Atlantic seaboard, pull up stakes and strike inland, pull them up again and settle in one of the central States, and so on indefinitely — in some cases halting for a generation or more, in others for a year or two, but always moving on at last, and always to the west. Our host on the Edmonton trail had a French name, and his first American ancestor was probably a Huguenot, who settled in the Carolinas. He himself was brought up in Tennessee ; moved north-west to Illinois, where he married ; west again to Kansas, where his children were born ; south-west into Oklahoma ; and north-west at last to Alberta, where he was so much better satisfied than in any of his former homes that he was ready to sing " Here all my wanderings cease." He had no very high opinion of Oklahoma, though when that territory was thrown open there was such a rush for land that you would have thought its soil was gold. " The average yield of wheat," he said, " was about ten bushels an acre ; and sometimes the drought was dreadful. Last year one of my neighbours only got 200 bushels off his whole farm, and another didn't think it worth while to reap at all. I had no land of my own, so I took a bit of the ' school lands ' ; but in the see-saw of Democratic and Republican administra- tions a new governor changed all the officials and they raised my rent— after I had put up a nice A WESTERN HOME 115 two-storey house and fenced the whole place. So one night I said to my wife, ' Let's try to get a place of our own.' I'd heard of a lot of people finding good land in Canada, so I came over the border, and as I was driving through the country, I hit on this place and liked it. That was in the middle of June. I didn't dare to go back and fetch the family ; I had to squat on the place to keep somebody else from picking it up. I lived in a little tent till I could get a bit of prairie broken and a house built ; and I just held on till the rest of us came in December." He was clearly a man of taste. The quarter-section he had chosen sloped down to a lake in the north and up to a wooded hill in the south. His children and grand-children had already found time, in the intervals of household chores and attendance on hungry travellers, to lay out a garden, where asters, poppies and mignonette bloomed in a setting of wapiti horns and buffalo skulls ; and in the parlour of his comfortable log house was a well-used eclectic library of about a hundred volumes, including Dickens, Kipling, E. P. Roe, and a strong contingent of religious authors. The navvies had " graded " the railway line past his front door, and a town had begun to rise. That is to say, there was one house beside his own — a store and post office, kept by a pair of Irish- Canadian brothers. All supplies had to be Ii6 VERMILION freighted in waggons from Edmonton, 120 miles away, and it was interesting to note the prices of goods on which 4s. 2d. per 100 lbs. weight had been paid for this service in addition to the charge for railway freight all the way from Manitoba, British Columbia, or even far Ontario. Flour stood at S3. 60 to $4 (15s. to 16s. 8d.) per 100 lbs. ; molasses, 25 cents for a 3-lb. tin ; apples, 20 cents a pound. A " hand ■' of tobacco, the plant dried whole on the French-Canadian farm where it was grown, could be got at the rate of 30 cents a pound. Having seen a road before it was made, I was not altogether unprepared to visit a town before it was built. Imagine a miraculous plant that springs up in a night like a mushroom with all the vigour of an oak, and you have grasped the characteristics of a town in New Canada. When I passed Vermilion, it was not there. It was on the railway-builders' map, though, and that was enough. Vermilion in posse was like a word written in invisible ink. Only a touch of steel, and it became Vermilion in esse. A month after my visit the town became visible to the naked eye, standing erect with its face to the shining rail wand that had conjured it out of the void, and its back to the river from which it had taken its brilliant name. Two months after that, I read in a Winnipeg paper a casual statement from its Vermilion correspondent that " the town lots AN INFANT TOWN 117 have been on the market for sale for the past six weeks, and fully $80,000 worth of property has been disposed of. The building at this point has been most phenomenal, there being fully 100 substantial buildings erected in this short time. Many settlers are going into this well-known Vermilion Valley country, and the town of Vermilion is unquestionably destined to become one of the Ten Towns of Western Canada.' ' That was in the beginning of winter. Before Vermilion entered its first summer its citizens had organized a Board of Trade, with President, Secretary, Treasurer, and all complete, and the Board of Trade had published a description of the town which is enough to take away your breath. By this time it possessed a Methodist Church (with Anglicans and Presbyterians about to build), a public school, a bank, a newspaper, three hotels, three restaurants, three lumber yards, a drug store, a furniture store, two hard- ware stores, four implement warehouses, a jewelry store, two butcher's shops, a flour and feed store, a steam laundry, two livery stables, a liquor store, a stationer's, a bakery, a boot and shoe shop, three barbers, four real estate offices, two doctors, a lawyer, a dentist, an auctioneer, four contractors, a tinsmith, a plasterer, a photographer, two pool-rooms, and a bowling alley. Vermilion, we learn, is " a coming railway centre," being n8 THE VERMILION VALLEY already a divisional point on the Canadian Northern ; is " a future county seat " ; polled more votes at the Dominion by-election on April 5 than any other town in the constituency except Strathcona ; and, in brief, is " the bull's-eye of the best territory on earth." The remarkable thing about this is that there is no reason to doubt its truth — though of course there are many other " best territories on earth M in Canada ! In its description of this particular " best territory on earth/' the Board of Trade says : " The crop statistics of the Canadian Northern Railway for last year give the palm for yield to the Vermilion valley, with 50 bushels of wheat and 100 bushels of oats to the acre. Growth is very rapid, wheat ripening in from 90 to 100 days. The winters are not severe, though there are brief periods of cold. Snowfall is light. The summers are delightful. The days are long and warm, with abundant sunshine, and the nights pleasantly cool. The warm weather lasts until October. Streams are common, and lakes and ponds abound. Springs which never freeze are found in many places along the valleys. Vege- tables of all kinds are successfully raised, in- cluding potatoes, turnips, carrots, beets, parsnips, cabbage, celery, peas, pumpkins, and tomatoes. Small fruits grow wild in abundance, and include VEGREVILLE 119 strawberries, currants, cranberries, plums, cherries, saskatoon berries, and numerous other varieties. Experiments in the growing of apples have been attended with such encouraging results that it is believed to be only a question of time until thriving orchards are found scattered over the country. There is no undesirable or un- progressive element among the population, and English is the only language heard on the streets. Feathered game, including wild geese, ducks, prairie chickens and partridges, is abundant, while deer, moose, and bear may be frequently met with in certain districts. Rabbits are everywhere plentiful. White fish and pike swarm in the larger lakes." In the first year of Vermilion's existence, according to a government report, 800 settlers arrived — " all first-class in every respect, with sufficient means to enable them to settle on land almost immediately/' Vegreville is venerable beside Vermilion ; yet Vegreville, when I made its acquaintance in its twelfth year, was but a feeble infant compared to Vermilion at the age of six months. Vegreville had been brought into existence, by French- Canadian settlers, before there was a railway — and had languished. The advent of the railway pioneers, " grading " for the new line with horse- drawn shovels, had created a good market for oats, at 60 cents a bushel ; but there was a fly 1 20 FRENCH-CANADIANS in the Mackenzie-and-Mann ointment, for the line was to pass the town at a distance of 3 \ miles. " There's some talk of moving the town to the railway, as the railway won't come to the town," said the oldest inhabitant ; " but my son has got a store here, and he won't move." A new Vegre- ville has now sprung up, on the railway, but whether the old Vegreville concluded to stay where it was I cannot say. Some of us would be thankful if a railway never came within 3 J miles of us ; but then we do not " keep store." The French origin of the town is still recalled by the names of many of its citizens and the language you hear now and then on the streets ; but the French-Canadian pioneers, for lack of sufficent reinforcements from Quebec, are being surrounded by a rising tide of the English-speak- ing race. Here, for example, is a tall young American. That is to say, he was born in the States, and so were his parents ; but he is a Norwegian all the same. He has been up here for three years, and his enthusiasm for the country is unabated. He could have got as much land as he wanted on the paternal domain. He deliberately preferred Canada as offering better land, and at a price which gave a far surer prospect of future wealth. " My father had lots of land in Iowa," he says, " but instead of taking my share of it I took its value in cash, $40 an acre, and came up In the Park Lands American Settler bringing in his Famtly THE PROCESSION OF INCOMERS 121 here with my wife. I picked out a free homestead of 160 acres, and bought 1280 acres at $3." That is, by investing £770 he acquired a freehold estate of 1440 acres in one of the most productive areas of the earth's surface. And his hunger for land was evidently no keener than his appetite for work. Before he had been three years on the soil he had got 100 acres of it under cultivation, and he was bent on doubling that acreage before another twelvemonth went by. On that ride through to Edmonton we by no means had the trail to ourselves. At one point we met a lady from Oregon driving in state, her little boy beside her in the buggy, while her husband brought up the rear with a waggon-load of household stuff. The sheet-iron stove pro- jecting from the rear of the waggon showed that even on the march they were resolved to have a little home comfort in their nightly camp. A few miles further on, a less luxurious party came in sight — a single waggon, a rolled-up tent crowning the load, with the homesteader driving in front, and his wife and baby sitting behind him on a bundle, while a foal trotted in front of its harnessed mother, and a spare team followed close in the rear. Round the next bluff rolled a genuine old prairie schooner, cart and tabernacle combined, the family chattering invisibly within, while its head trudged along chewing a straw 122 BRINGING IN THE FAMILY beside the cattle. These parties, however, were not home-seekers. In each case the man had come in to find a home, and now, after getting it into shape by a summer of lonely toil, he had been down to the States to bring in his family. MIDDLE ALBERTA ; AND THE GALICIANS Autumn is not the best time to see the country, if it is beauty you seek. The grass is no longer green, but yellowish-brown ; it is, in fact, a standing crop of hay ; and as such it will remain for the horses and cattle to graze on all winter. The trees may be still green, or they may be turning yellow ; but the poplar and birch are poor and homely compared with the maple and sumach whose gorgeous autumn robes make the woods of Eastern Canada a blaze of colour. A belated dwarf wild rose may still be in bloom ; the " autumn flower," or Michaelmas daisy, is common enough, and so is the tall pink fox-tail ; but these are almost all that strike the eye. Of human interest, however, there is no lack ; and foreign settlements in this district, east and north-east of Edmonton, have in them an element of the picturesque which you miss among the men of your own race. It was only in 1894 that the first Galicians arrived, nine families in all. They sent home such good reports of the country that to-day there are about 75,000 of them thriving there. 123 124 A GALICIAN BOTHY The Norwegians and Germans are not discover- able at a glance by the traveller, for their dwellings are generally log or frame-houses built on the pattern set by the English-speaking inhabitants. The Galicians, however, put their own architectural mark on the landscape. The typical Galician house is a little one-storey affair, rough or tidy according to the individuality of the owner ; its walls of poplar trunks, filled in and outwardly faced with smooth white-washed mud, and thickly thatched, the high-pitched roof often rising in a series of steps at the corners. In the little field surrounding one of these dwellings, I found the owner, with a red fez on his head, reaping his oats with the primitive device of a " cradle/' a scythe with three or four sticks pro- jecting at as many points from the handle and catching the stalks as they fall. Another of these primitive folk I found inhabiting a long low hovel, not unlike the dwellings you may still see in backward parts of Ireland or in the Scottish Highlands. One end was built of poplar logs roughly plastered over with brown mud ; the other and longer portion was simply built of sods, with tufts of grass sprouting from every joint, as well as growing freely all over the roof. The master of the house, a tall, unkempt but good- humoured Galician, came out to meet me, having to stoop considerably in doing so. He was a AN INTERIOR 125 bachelor, and was occupied just then in spinning linen thread, with the distaff under his arm. He could only speak a word or two of English, but he made me heartily welcome to his dwelling. The only door led into the stable, one side of which was fenced off by a sort of hurdle of plaited willow to make a manger. Turning sharp to the right, we stepped into the dwelling-room, an apartment about 10 feet square, almost the only furniture being a home-made bedstead of round poplar logs, covered with a few scraps of blanket. The under side of the roof was formed of young poplars laid close together, plastered with mud, and supported in the middle by a single log of the same kind, the central ridge-pole resting on its forked top. A little Russian church stands beside the trail, with a tiny cemetery, each grave enclosed in its own fence and bearing its own solid cross of unpainted wood. For the bulk of the Galician population, however, you must go further afield, to districts where practically all the land was free. Here the free sections were chess-boarded among those held for sale by railway companies. Galicians can afford no land that is not free, when they first arrive. The village of Star, about 30 miles north-east of Edmonton, is a good starting point for excursions among these people, of whom about 20,000 live together in the district. 126 BEGINNING ON NOTHING . The Galician first arrives in the country with about as few worldly possessions as when he first arrived in this planet ; but poverty, combined — as in his case it generally is — with industry as well as patience, is no serious drawback. The man of the family puts up a house, or hovel if you like to call it so, installs his wife and children, and then goes off to work, probably as a navvy on a railway line. During his absence his wife and such of his children as are not mere infants set to work to make the farm. Having neither horse, ox, nor plough, they do the best they can with the humble spade, and raise a little crop of rye, oats, or potatoes. The frugal father returns in the fall of the year with every cent he has been able to save out of his earnings, and the ox and plough that he is thus able to buy mean a vast increase of cultivation and production in the second year. Many a Galician farmer to-day has from 20 to 200 acres under crop, and from 10 to 100 head of live stock. The farm may be many miles from any town or railway station, but the Galician does not say it is no use trying to grow grain for sale. In the winter he loads his produce on a rough sleigh, and sets out for the nearest market, no matter what the distance may be. At night he saves hotel or " stopping-place " charges by sleeping on the snow beside his sleigh. I have heard of men who thought nothing of a fortnight's GALICIAN CUSTOMS AND HEALTH 127 journey under these conditions. It can easily be imagined that in three or four years such a man is poor no longer. These people necessarily eat little meat. They live largely on the vegetables that they raise, diversified by eggs and even chickens when they have reached the poultry- raising stage. They are fond of garlic ; also of sour milk ; and a favourite dish is a vegetable soup kept till it has fermented. Their require- ments in the way of clothing are few and simple. They go bare-foot all summer, and in winter they only wear shoes out of doors — sometimes not then. Their raiment, to tell the truth, consists chiefly of a loose cotton shirt, with skirt or trousers according to sex. As in their native land, they construct large clay ovens with flat tops on which they sleep. Of ventilation they know nothing except as something cold to be shut out. In spite of this, and no doubt because of their hard out-door work, the women as a rule are very healthy. They have plenty of children — whose arrival gives them little trouble. A Galician matron who has had an addition to her family in the morning may often be seen out and about by evening, though more commonly she will take two or three days' rest, The men are decidedly less healthy than the women. They are heavy smokers, and they suffer a good deal from rheumatism ; which is only to be expected if 128 THE CLIMATE they sleep at one time in a hot and totally un- ventilated room, and at another time out on the snow; their lack of woollen under-clothes being no doubt a contributory cause. As for the climate, the winter is not nearly so severe as that of Manitoba, and is sometimes broken into by spells of extraordinarily mild weather. A doctor at Star, pointing to a hammock slung from his verandah, said to me : "My wife was sitting out here, sewing in the sun, in February ; and the snow had not come till December. That, of course, was exceptional ; but the winter before, when the snow stayed till late in March, was exceptional too." The climate is less rheumatic in tendency than that of the East, and it is de- cidedly good for lung troubles and catarrh. In this respect it resembles the climate of Southern Alberta, but so far as the total amount of moisture is concerned the two regions differ widely. In this northern section, in fact, I have heard com- plaints of rather too much rain in spring and early summer. This condition is naturally adverse to wheat growing, and other cereal crops could sometimes do with less moisture than they get, for the straw continues to grow when the grain ought to be ripening. Stalks of rye have been measured over 7 feet 7 inches high, and oats nearly 6 feet. The evidence of this abundant rainfall is patent in the comparative luxuriance of Railways are spreading on every hand over the prairie, as fast as men can be got to lay them ; but until the railway comes everything has to be freighted in over the trail. The ox team, which covers about three miles an hour, is much used both for transport and for ploughing. NEW NORWAY 129 vegetation, and in the large number of sloughs and little lakes. But this is a draw-back that can be remedied by surface drainage works, as it has been remedied in Manitoba. Such works are already in progress in Central Alberta, and even without their aid crops of oats and barley have been reaped which thresh out 56 and 63 bushels to the acre respectively. One of the most interesting and progressive of the special groups to whom Central Alberta is indebted for its new population is that of the Scandinavians in " New Norway " ; but that is sixty-five miles south of Star, in the Hinterland of Wetaskiwin, on the Canadian Pacific line running south from Edmonton. You would hardly suppose from a pure Indian name like Wetaskiwin that you had arrived in a settlement of Norwegians. Yet the names over the stores, the complexions and voices of the people you meet in the street, leave you in no doubt as to the fact, and a short excursion into the Hinterland carries you into New Norway itself. Most of these people when they first left their native land settled in the Western States, and are, therefore, classified in the Canadian emigration returns as American. They are genuine Norwegians ; and a fine lot of people they are, and a fine piece of land they have chosen for their home. " I believe it is the garden spot 130 SANCTUARY FOR WILD LIFE of Alberta,' ' a leading member of the community said to me. Roughly speaking, the settlement covers about four townships, or 144 square miles. It is a rolling park-like land, lightly wooded here and there, dotted with a moderate number of sloughs, and traversed by the Battle River. The country is well suited for both grain and cattle, and the Norwegians take large advantage of its capacity in both directions. Oats, which were at first the favourite crop, give a yield of from 30 to 75 and occasionally even 100 bushels to the acre, while barley runs from 30 to 40 bushels. Both the winter and spring varieties of wheat are grown, producing from 20 to 40 bushels an acre. The wild animals are not to be swept off the face of the West by the human flood. Like their Indian brothers, they are to have their sanctuaries. The first of these, the Banff National Park in the Rocky Mountains, is well known. Now the Federal and Alberta Governments are establishing " Elk Park " in the Beaver Hills, south of Star. At Banff, a little remnant of the bison tribe — commonly known as buffalo — that once thundered over the plain in its millions, is thriving and increasing in semi-captivity. Far away in the north-west, another bunch of bison roam wild. It is to be hoped that they can be saved from extinction and brought down to multiply either at Banff or in the Beaver Hills. EDMONTON, AND THE FAR NORTH Crossing the river at Fort Saskatchewan, after supping under the guidance of a decorative menu card in an ambitious hotel, we turned south and drove through a well-wooded and little inhabited country — the land being largely held by specu- lators " for the rise " — towards what seemed to be an aurora borealis in the wrong quarter of the heavens. The aurora proved to be the lights of Edmonton, for the morrow was Alberta's natal day, and the capital city was brilliantly illuminated. It seems really absurd to think of Edmonton as a city — the fur-trading outpost in the wilderness. But in 1901 the town had 2626 inhabitants, and five years later that figure had risen to 11,167 ; while Strathcona, on the south side of the river, contained another 2921. To this day, furs to the value of a million dollars (£200,000) every year pour into Edmonton from a multitude of outposts in the north, to be sorted and packed for the markets of the civilized world ; but there is nothing furry or wild in the city's appearance. 131 132 A CAPITAL CITY The Hudson's Bay Company itself is represented to the outward eye not by a log fort but by a large department store, with the wares of Regent Street or Westbourne Grove displayed in plate- glass windows. There are about a dozen banks, some of them very creditable to their architects, and doing such an amount of business that they have had to establish a clearing house. There are at least half-a-dozen churches — Methodist, Pres- byterian, Anglican, Baptist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic — and probably more. There are good schools, one of which would hardly be criticized — unless by extreme economists — if reared in London, and is at present used, after school hours, as a Parliament House by the Provincial Legis- lature. There is positively a municipal electric tramway at Edmonton — or will be, before this book is many months old, as the contract for its construction has been signed. The roads — well, the less said about roads the better, when you write about a Canadian town ; but Edmonton is now paving its streets with wood blocks from British Columbia. There are other points on which western townsmen generally preserve a dis- creet silence ; but the Edmontonians are so bent on avoiding the common ailments of municipal infancy that before long I expect to see perfect drainage and water supply figuring in large type in the municipal advertisements. THE COW-BOY A CURIOSITY 133 The city is ideally placed, on high but level ground along the edge of the winding and beauti- fully wooded valley of the Saskatchewan. Better still, the people are resolved that their city's beauty shall not be spoiled. Down in the valley, for nine miles along each side of the river, a drive is to be laid out in accordance with the plans of a landscape gardener from the east ; and where the valley widens a Parliament House is being built on the flats at a cost of a million or even two million dollars. The scene on those flats on the 1st of September 1905 was quite extraordinary. The occasion was remarkable enough — the proclamation by the Viceroy that a new star had been kindled in the federal constellation — but the crowd was more remarkable still. Among all those twelve or fifteen thousand people you would look in vain for a beaded Indian or shaggy fur-hunter. I saw just one cow-boy, got up for the occasion, in the regulation buckskin jacket and fringed leather trousers ; but he was unique, like an old-world figure in long drab coat and knee breeches in an assembly of modern Quakers. And side by side with the cowboy's bronco stood — a motor car ! If there was any difference between that crowd in the far west of Canada and the crowd which any pageant gathers in an English town, the advantage would lie on the side of the " wild 134 CITY LAND PRICES and woolly West." The people were not less intelligent looking, or less well behaved, or even less well dressed. I am told that town lots, bought in 1903 for $300 or $400 (£60 or £80) a-piece, were selling in 1906 for $15,000 or $20,000 (£3000 or £4000). Some people shake their heads and wonder when the bottom will fall out of the " boom." Edmon- tonians would probably disclaim the idea that a boom, in the censurable sense of unreasonably inflated prices, has yet arrived, though they boast that everything is " booming." Edmonton is going to be a far more important place than it is now. It is the centre of a peculiarly rich district, a paradise of the " mixed " farmer. The number of immigrants who make this the end of their pilgrimage is exceptionally large, and most of the recent arrivals have been men with experience and capital — including 50 families attracted even from " golden California " by the glowing reports of a single family settled north-west of the city ; many good Dutch farmers from Pennsylvania ; a quantity of prairie folk from Kansas and Oklahoma, settling north-east of the city ; and a greatly increased number of immigrants from Germany, France, Belgium and Austria. At St Albert, a few miles to the north- west, there has been a settlement of French half- breeds for more than sixty years. A good many COST OF FARM IMPLEMENTS 135 of their pure-blooded French cousins from Quebec have come up to join them, and a Roman Catholic cathedral is rising in their little town. A young English farmer who went out exploring in this direction for a homestead says that "as far as the country is surveyed, 80 miles out of town, it is good land, but all taken up except the heavy bush. In fact, settlers are squatting 20 miles beyond the survey. The Government guarantee nothing, but usually let the squatter file his claim as soon as the land is surveyed. This seems the only way to get a good one now, unless you hear of one being abandoned." Here, by way of parenthesis, let me give an idea of what a man beginning to farm on his own account would spend on the implements of his trade. A waggon would cost from $75 to $85 (£15 to £17) ; harness, $32 to $40 (£6, 10s. to £8) ; sleigh, $25 to $32 (£5 to £6, 10s.) ; plough, $20 to $28 (£4 to £5, 15s.) ; set of harrows, $16 to $20 (£3, 5s. to £4) ; disc harrow, $25 to S32 (£5 to £6, 10s.) ; miscellaneous tools, etc., $50 (£10). A seeder would cost from $85 to $115 (£iy to £23), but is hardly necessary for the first year. A mower and rake would cost about $95 (£19) ; but two neighbours will some- times own these jointly, or else one buy a mower and the other a rake. A reaper and binder is another expensive article ($135 to $155, or 136 A GREAT RAILWAY CENTRE £27 to £31) which can very well be shared with a neighbour, for it cuts twelve acres a day ; and it can be dispensed with till the young farmer has more land under crop than he is likely to have before his second year. Credit is commonly given for all these articles, except perhaps the waggon. As for live stock, a team of horses would cost from $250 to $400 (£50 to £80) ; cows, $35 to $40 each (£y to £8) ; pigs, $15 (£3) ; and sheep $5 (£1). Edmonton, too, is becoming the centre of a great web of railways stretching over the con- tinent in all directions. The Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the Grand Trunk Pacific, from the south, the east, and the south- east, all come together at Edmonton ; from this point the third of these lines, and possibly the second, will start on the final stage of their westward course to the Pacific Ocean ; and in the course of time a railway will almost certainly be built from Edmonton to the Far North. The Far North ! If there is a spark of the adventurous in your nature, it flames up when you turn your back on Edmonton and look away to the north. What you see with your mortal eyes is merely a beautiful picture of river and meadow and woodland, but if you look beyond the visible you see an illimitable expanse of country where you might travel week after week, w S fc < w w w w w H ON THE PEACE RIVER 137 month after month, even year after year, always exploring and always discovering something new. There is a distant sound even about Athabasca Landing, but that is only the first little step of 100 miles on the northward trail. You would have to go another 400 miles as the crow flies before quitting the Province of Alberta and launching out on the unorganized wilderness of Mackenzie Territory. On the Peace River, about 400 miles north of Edmonton, you would find a fair sprink- ling of settlers. Some, no doubt, have taken land there as a speculation, and look year by year for the railway that is sure to follow, sooner or later. Others are men saturated with the pioneer spirit, who would probably migrate to another planet, if they could get it all to themselves. A great part of this region is not merely habitable, but habitable with comfort, and as fertile as any farmer could wish. The influence of the Pacific Ocean is so powerful in the far west that in winter Northern Alberta is no colder than Southern Manitoba. Still more remarkable is the fact that the average summer temperature at Dun- vegan, on the Peace River, and nearly as far north as Athabasca Lake, is as high as that of Paris or south Germany. Indeed, as far north as the Great Slave Lake, and Fort Simpson on Mackenzie River, the average summer temperature is nearly as high as in Dublin, and higher than it is in 138 WHEAT IN THE FAR NORTH Edinburgh. At Fort Vermilion, on the Peace River, 650 miles north of the United States, the Hudson's Bay Company has for years had a flour mill, grinding wheat grown on the spot. If time is no object you may wander on, in a north- westerly direction, down the Mackenzie River and into Yukon Territory. When the gold discoveries of the Klondike first brought this region to the notice of the world, the miners who went in were classed with the explorers of the Arctic regions, and it is an undeniable fact that the Arctic Circle cuts right across Yukon Territory. It is equally undeniable, however, and a good deal more upsetting to current beliefs as to the climate of Northern Canada, that in this very Territory, on the 63rd parallel of latitude, or about as far north as Iceland and Archangel, wheat of the finest quality ripens without difficulty. I have heard of an Englishman who complains that Canadians do a day and a half's work in the day. They are only following the example of the sun, who knows that the farming season is short, and makes the most of it. Up there, in Yukon, the days are so long and the sun rays so powerful that wheat sown in May is ready for reaping in July. The Canadian Government, however, wisely discourages any large movement of population into the north while the settlement of the south is still only beginning. For in spite of the flood ONLY A BEGINNING 139 of men and women spreading out over the prairies and park-lands of Southern and Central Sas- katchewan and Alberta, the whole population of this area — as large as the German Empire — is only about half a million. REGINA TO BATTLEFORD ; AND THE DUKHOBORS When I first went to Canada, in 1881, there was a little spot on the desert face of the central plain known as Pile-of-Bones. A quarter of a century later, I alighted from a Canadian Pacific train at a handsome garden-girt station in the city of Regina ; and it was the same spot. In that short interval Pile-of-Bones had become the seat of government of the three provisional territories, Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and the headquarters of the North- West Mounted Police ; and had finally blossomed out as the capital of the self-governing Province of Saskatchewan, in which three-fourths of Assiniboia had been merged. It is a city plentifully endowed with schools, churches, banks, hotels, telephones, electric light, and other commonplaces of civilized life. As a capital city, Regina, like Edmonton and Winnipeg, has a political importance ; but the Westerner is too busy establishing himself on his new farm to trouble his head much about politics. Each of the three Provincial Legislatures is divided into two parties ; and in Manitoba the 140 PROVINCIAL RIGHTS 141 ministerial majority is called Conservative, while in Alberta and Saskatchewan it is Liberal. But to the American or Galician immigrant these names mean little or nothing, and to the old- countryman they mean something quite different from what they mean to the man from Eastern Canada. The opposition in Saskatchewan, by the way, has decided to drop the name Conser- vative altogether, and to call itself the Provincial Rights party, its chief demand being that the Provincial instead of the Federal Government shall control the public lands, timber, minerals and water supply, as in the Provinces of the East. This question will become acute when the people of the West are numbered by the million instead of the hundred thousand, — unless, as may happen, the demand is agreed to before. At present, the Federal Government argues that its credit is pledged for the financing of the Grand Trunk Pacific railway scheme, which is largely for the benefit of the West, and that until this scheme is carried out the national land-asset should remain in federal hands. The country east and south-east of Regina has the same characteristics as the adjoining or south-western section of Manitoba, and the most important of these is a reliable rain-fall. Here, accordingly, you find many well-established settle- ments, and comparatively few free homesteads for 142 MOOSE JAW AND INDIAN HEAD new comers. The new comers are still flocking in, but they are mostly Americans who can afford to pay for land. At Moosomin, for instance, not far from the Manitoban border, wild lands are reported as selling at from $8 to $14 an acre, and partly improved farms at $15 to $27. Moose Jaw, a city of 6249 inhabitants in 1906, or rather more than Regina, is about 40 miles west of that city, and on the verge of the " semi-arid " region ; but the aridity has not been seriously felt for several years, and settlers have been coming in at such a rate that few good homesteads are left within 25 miles of the town. Indian Head, about as far east of Regina as Moose Jaw is west, prides itself on turning out more grain than any other primary grain-shipping centre in the world. At its railway station stand at least a dozen elevators, with capacity for 350,000 bushels. The five years' average wheat yield in this district is 26.4 bushels per acre ; and on the experimental farm, under the best system of fallow and rotation of crops, the average is as high as 46.12 bushels. Probably no other branch of government activity has conferred such immense and direct benefits on the population of any country, as the experimental farm system of Canada. There at Ottawa, at Brandon in Manitoba, at Indian Head in Saskatchewan, experiments are constantly EXPERIMENTAL FARM RESULTS 143 being made by men of the highest skill to discover, and even to produce, such varieties of plant life as can be grown with the greatest success and the highest profit in all the various climates and soils with which Canadian farmers have to grapple. Not only is the information thus obtained put freely at the disposal of every farmer in the Dominion, but the seeds and plants raised and tested at the experimental farms can be obtained by any farmer who is willing regularly to report the results he gets from them. Perhaps the most difficult task yet presented to the authorities of these experimental farms is to produce trees, and especially fruit trees, hardy enough to live, and in the case of fruit to yield profitable crops, on the great treeless plain I am now describing. Yet this task has been undertaken, and the degree of success already achieved in the production of marketable apples, by grafting on a Siberian crab- apple stock, gives solid ground for hope that treelessness and fruitlessness will not be per- manent features of the prairie. The West is con- stantly surprising even those who know it best. At Strassburg, about 50 miles north of Regina, on a Canadian Pacific branch line, is a settlement formed almost exclusively of Germans direct from the Fatherland. This, like the rest of the German settlements, is making excellent progress. On the same line, a little further east, in the Lipton 144 JEWS AND HUNGARIANS district, is rather a curiosity in the shape of a Jewish agricultural colony. " Very few of the Hebrew immigrants of the past year," says the chief emigration commissioner at Winnipeg, " have settled on land permanently, but persist in remaining in towns or peddling goods about the country. For this reason they cannot be classed as likely homesteaders or extensive producers in an agricultural country like Western Canada." The Jewish farmers about Lipton, however, are doing very well by their land, and raised over 40,000 bushels of grain in 1906. A little north of Lipton is one of a number of settlements formed in the last few years by Hungarians. Most of the Hungarians now arriving have come through the United States, where they worked and saved money to set themselves up as independent farmers. These people, the commissioner says, come to farm, and are unhappy when obliged by poverty to stay in towns till they can earn money enough to take up land. The colony of Esterhazy, the first-born Hungarian settlement, is very prosperous, with large herds of cattle, and the original settlers are now hiring help and enlarging their operations. Regina was my starting point for a sort of circular tour over the great prairie of South- western Saskatchewan. For the first 160 miles, as far as Saskatoon, I took advantage of a 7i'iin»- 8 rA ,,*■.£.■. Urban Infancy. Milestone, Saskatchewan, two Years old Urban Adolescence. Portage la Prairie, Manitoba NORTHWARD FROM REGINA 145 railway that runs 90 miles beyond that to Prince Albert. The land was now prairie pure and simple, covered with short dry grass and as yet appar- ently almost uninhabited. The appearance was deceitful. The land beside the line was held by speculators, and the settlers were out of sight on either hand. There were about a score of stopping places between Regina and Saskatoon, but at some the only building in sight was the railway station, and at least one possessed not even that. Here and there a beginning of settlement was to be seen — a farmhouse of logs or raw planks, with a lonely ploughman furrowing up the turf primeval, — while now and then we passed a man setting fire to the dry grass on the windward side of the track, to prevent those larger fires which if unchecked sweep over many square miles, and destroy the winter pasture of cattle and horses. But the only living creatures at all common along the greater part of the way were the gophers, sitting bolt upright beside their holes to watch the train go by, and sometimes crouching on the sleepers and letting the cars pass over their heads. Fifty-six miles up the track was the town, or the germ of a town, of Chamberlain, consisting of a fit tie group of cottages and a railway station. At the 123rd mile we came to Hanley, a com- paratively old town ; that is to say, it was founded in 1902, and already has several hundred citizens, 146 NORTHWARD FROM REGINA living for the most part in little shacks, but some of them putting up good frame houses. The first settlers here came from North Dakota and Minnesota, and included many half-Americanized Norwegians ; but in the last year or two a good many Eastern Canadians have arrived, as well as Old-Country folk. The next station, 14 miles further north, is the village of Dundurn, as youthful as Hanley. The line from the one to the other goes through wide stretches of cultivated land, producing heavy crops of wheat and oats. Here at Dundurn lives a German who a few years ago was not only an American citizen but a Senator of the State of Minnesota. He only came over the border in 1901 ; but in 1905 he reaped 45,000 bushels of wheat off his new Canadian estate ; and one of his neighbours, another German who has been a legislator in Minnesota, is a farmer of equally large ideas, having broken 5000 acres of prairie in his first two years. The country so far has been almost level, and wide flat stretches are still frequent ; but north of this the prairie has a rolling and humpy appearance, with patches large and small of willow copse, and many young poplars. The town of Haultain, next to Dundurn but ten miles further on, is named after the ex-premier of the Territories under the old regime, who now leads the opposition in Saskatchewan Province. SASKATOON 147 Saskatoon, a couple of years ago, was the jumping-off place where settlers bound for the western parts of the Province left the track for the trail. The opening of the Canadian Northern Railway, which crosses this Prince Albert line a little further north on its way west to Edmonton, has changed all that, and Saskatoon has lost some of its trade. It is still, however, a town of im- portance, with a population (in 1906) of 3031, against only 113 five years before, and growing fast. It is the supply centre for a large district, and the point of departure for many parties bound for points in the south-west, where railways exist only on paper or in the embryonic form of sur- veyors' trails through the grass. It was from Saskatoon that the Barr colony of Englishmen and Englishwomen set out, three or four years ago, on that long, miserable, muddy drive which gave them so unpleasant a first im- pression of their adopted colony. The home- hunters whom I came across in the Saskatoon district, however, were chiefly Americans. Here, for instance, was a native of Iowa — though his mother, by the way, was Scotch-Irish. He was brought up on a farm, but took to brick-laying in a city because of the wages. When he married, he determined that rather than bring his children up in a town he would become a farmer again. This was more easily said than done, 148 ON THE WESTWARD TRAIL in Iowa. At the prices asked for agricultural land in that State the best he could hope was to become a tenant, and dependence on the will of a landlord was a condition he could never abide. So away he came to Canada, where he and his sons could get farms of their own. His travelling companion was a more independent gentleman, the possessor of a good ranch in the State of Washington ; but " it won't be twelve months before he is in Canada, you'll see," said the Iowan ; and the Washingtonian did not deny it. A drive of 90 or 100 miles westward from Saskatoon across the prairie enabled me to visit an unusual variety of settlers. Most of them had begun to fence in their land ; and the result, to a traveller, was to say the least inconvenient. Again and again the old trail led us charging into a wire fence, and we had to turn aside and make a circuit of the farm. While the old winding trail had been thus cut off, the new straight trail, on the " road allowance " marked out by the govern- ment's land surveyors, was not yet made. Turning out of our way at one of these obstruc- tions, we found nestling in a poplar bluff a little log shack, measuring about 10ft. by 12 ft. — the first year's home — with a slightly larger frame- house built on at one end in the second year. The lady of the house, who was scraping potatoes for THE DUKHOBORS 149 dinner, could speak no English, but the eldest of her five children knew enough to tell me that they were a German family who had come north to Canada after spending three years in Dakota. About 30 miles along the trail we came upon a village of Dukhobors. There is a general im- pression that the " Dooks," as their neighbours call them, are a troublesome lot ; that, in addition to the outlandish ways you would expect to find among foreigners, they take crazy fits of starting out on pilgrimages to nowhere in particular, with- out any clothes on. This has certainly happened ; and on one occasion fourteen men who had led the march, and had therefore been arrested, adopted the policy of the hunger-strike. As they refused to eat, the police simply stretched them on the ground while a doctor pumped liquid food down their throats. It is only an insignificant minority of the Dukhobors, however, that has made the community notorious ; and this village on the Battleford trail has been entirely free from centri- fugal eccentricities. The western settlers as a rule do not congregate in villages but live each on his own farm ; and an ordinary western village, when it does come into existence, is a mere collection of separate units, no one house being built with any thought of general harmony. The Dukhobor ideal is com- munistic, and shows itself in the style and arrange- 150 PRACTISING SOCIALISTS merit of the village as much as in the life of the inhabitants. The houses are symmetrically arranged in two long rows with a broad avenue between. Each house, standing in its own ground, comprises a but and a ben, as we say in Scotland. The gable of the better end faces the street, while the doors open sideways into the yard. The walls, substantially built of logs, present to the eye a neatly smoothed surface of white-washed mud. The roofs are also of mud, but even they are tidy. A raised ledge of earth runs along the foot of the wall, and forms, with the widely overhanging eaves, a sort of verandah- seat. A little pattern over each window, done in red and green, adds a pleasant dash of colour without gaudiness to the whole. Every house I visited was as neat within as without ; so marvellously clean, in fact, that you might eat your dinner off the floor. A spotless wooden bench ran round the room, and jutting out from one corner was the great clay oven, opening into the next apartment, with sleeping accommodation on the top. These people are, as a rule, honest, inoffensive, and industrious. Most of them carry into practice their communistic ideal, with common ownership of the means of production, including work oxen and milch kine, and of the proceeds of their labour. Some, however, prefer to farm entirely on their FLAX ; FOOD ; DRESS 1 5 1 own account, and are not excommunicated for their individualism. The Dukhobors grow grain, but flax is one of their principal crops. Just outside the village is a great ring of hard smooth earth, with a mound in the middle ; and this is the flax-breaking floor, the flax being broken by dragging over it a big wooden roller with smaller logs nailed lengthwise on its surface like cogs on a wheel. This breaking is done by a horse, but the grain is threshed by steam. The Dukhobors are strict vegetarians ; or rather they are strict abstainers from anything killed, for in other respects their diet resembles that of their neigh- bours, including milk as well as tea and coffee and oatmeal and flour. A few of them speak good English. Large numbers of the men have worked on railway construction and have had other opportunities of learning the language of the country. Such instruction as the children get in the village seems to be entirely conveyed in Russian. The Dukhobors are already losing most of their distinctive features, so far as dress is concerned. I saw just one elderly woman wearing the great sheepskin coat, with the wool outside. Even on a Sunday only a very few of the boys and young men whom you meet strolling about the village and eating pea-nuts or sunflower seeds have a little red and green flower pattern embroidered 152 A DUKHOBOR PARLIAMENT on their waistcoats to distinguish them from the Tom, Dick, and Harry of the commonplace world outside. The girls, however — whose Sabbath amusement seems identical with that of their brothers — look very pleasant and comfortable in soft white dresses, perfectly plain and evidently concealing nothing in the shape of a corset, with white kerchiefs over their heads. The girls as a rule are decidedly good-looking, and the same in a less degree may be said of the men, though these are rather more spare in habit. They all take a Saturday night bath of the Russian variety, and there is no doubt that, from whatever cause, they are a healthy community. On Sunday morning at seven o'clock they assemble in a large room for a service that lasts about two hours and consists of singing, prayer, and addresses from the older men. There are 44 of these Dukhobor villages scattered over the eastern part of the plain, and every year their delegates come together to hold a little parliament of their own. At the last annual meeting quite remarkable progress was reported. During the year, for instance, nearly $60,000 (£12,000) had been spent on implements and machinery of the most modern type, and a banker's loan of $50,000 had been paid off. These people are naturally inclined to use machinery because they have doubts as to their right to impose compulsory labour on horses. This point One of Poundmaker's Braves, now a Peaceable Farmer (See page 164) A Group of Dukhobors CO-OPERATION 153 was considered by the conclave, which resolved that at any rate horses should not be worked when the temperature was below 13 degrees. The meeting decided on the community's behalf to take a number of contracts for railway con- struction — this having been one of the chief sources of the prosperity already achieved. The Dukhobors have by their co-operative system saved about $150,000 (£30,000) in three years on purchases amounting to something over $600,000 (£120,000). They make their own bricks and cement blocks ; they have built their own flour mill ; and they now propose to instal electric light, to connect their villages by a communal telephone system, and to build in every centre a school where the children will get an English education. Unfortunately, while the Dukhobors have been away earning money for the better equipment of their farms, many of these homesteads have not had the minimum of cultivation required by the law. In one of their settlements, also, their failure to pay taxes brought down on them a bailiff, who seized a quantity of cattle. The Dukhobors took up pitchforks, recaptured their cattle, and put the bailiff and his deputies to flight. The incident has its humorous side, considering that these militant non-taxpayers underwent much persecution in Russia, and finally went into exile, rather than take up arms. 154 THE EAGLE CREEK The country we are now passing through somewhat resembles that which I have described in Central Alberta, but is rather more open, and the sloughs, if not the patches of woodland, are perhaps less frequent. Running water is ex- tremely scarce ; in fact only one stream is crossed in the hundred miles. This Eagle Creek, accord- ingly, has an importance out of all proportion to its size, which to tell the truth is insignificant. It is a mere trickle in comparison with those three noble rivers, the North and South Saskatchewan and the Battle, which, rising in the Rocky Mountains, cross the whole width of the two Provinces, and, having joined, finally discharge their muddy waters into Hudson's Bay. Even the Eagle Creek, however, has cut out for itself a quite respectable valley, in whose shelter the poplar, cottonwood, willow, and birch attain a growth far larger than any you meet with on the plains above. The spot where the trail crosses the creek has been chosen for the site of a post office and store, kept by a Scotch-Canadian from Ontario. He migrated to Manitoba six years ago, and his experience is instructive. In Manitoba he could find no good land available for free homesteads within reasonable distance of a railway, and, after working a farm on shares, he pulled up stakes once more and finally settled on the banks of the distant Eagle Creek. In a couple of years, he POSTMASTER, AND BLACKSMITH 155 has seen a considerable change — not all for the better, from one point of view. The first year, the trail was alive with freighters going to and from Battleford. Now, the Canadian Northern Railway has put the freighters out of business, and they have either taken up homesteads and settled down to the more prosaic occupation of growing wheat or have struck out new routes for themselves further west and north. Still, a mail waggon passes four times a week each way ; and the table of times and fares has quite the flavour of an old coaching advertisement in Dickens's England. The postmaster and his two sons have between them five quarter-sections, or 800 acres, and at the end of two years 80 acres were actually under crop. In a log hut close by, the only other human habitation to be seen, I found a very different type of settler ; or rather a settler at a very different stage of his career. A neatly painted sign on the rough log wall of a smithy proclaimed his trade — " Horse-shoer and General Black- smith." He was a sturdy and swarthy Scot from Kirkcudbright, and he had only taken his home- stead in November — it was now September. He and his family had come in as poor as Galicians, and endowed with the same patient persevering industry that lifts them out of poverty — when they get the Canadian chance. Being Scots, they 156 NO GOING BACK were endowed also with some education ; and my first thought as I talked with them was that education and its offspring refinement must have made them feel their hardships more keenly. I presently came to the conclusion, however, that this effect was more than neutralized by its very cause ; that the possession of mental resources enabled them to rise above their material hardships. Having no capital or reserve fund, this man had had to work at his trade — there had been a fair amount of it, while the freighters were thick on the trail — to earn a little ready money, so he could not put in as much work as he should on his farm. Three acres under oats and potatoes, that was all he had to show for his first season. But he had spent the winter working as blacksmith at a lumber camp in the forest north of the Sas- katchewan, and he was going to spend another winter in the same way, earning $50 (£10) a month. When he came back in the spring he would " make things hum " on that homestead — as he would have said had he been an American. I asked him if, speaking frankly, he would rather go back to Scotland. No, not he ! I put the same question to his wife, who sat rocking her child to sleep. It is the woman who generally keeps a man back when he talks of emigrating ; and it is the woman who most feels the solitude HOMESTEAD RIGHTS CANCELLED 157 of the pioneer life and most often wants to go back. Here was a woman who had spent a whole winter husbandless, alone with her infants in a one-roomed prairie hut, with another lonely winter ahead of her. Did she not wish herself back in Scotland ? Never ! She was even more emphatic than her husband. They were all so much better out there, as well as bound to be better off before long. " And as for that lassie," she said, brightening up and pointing to a delicate little girl on the bed, " she'd have been dead if we'd stayed at home, and now she's nearly strong." There is indeed no such medicine in all the pharmacies as the air of the Canadian plains. A paper, fastened to the wall of the post office, giving notice that at the end of 60 days the home- stead rights granted to Mr So-and-so will be cancelled, is a reminder that this, though a land of promise, is a land where the promise has to be kept on both sides. The country gives the settler his 160 acres ; but, as I have already said, before he can have the decree made absolute, he must have lived on his farm at least six months out of the twelve for three years, and must have put five acres a year under cultivation. The conditions are not enforced too rigidly. If, for instance, a young man is living with his father on a neighbouring homestead, cultivation without residence is allowed to suffice ; and even the 158 KEEPING OPEN HOUSE minimum of cultivation is not insisted on, if the new-comer can show good reason for its non- fulfilment. It is to be feared, however, that the homestead inspectors, whose duty it is to travel up and down the country seeing that the settlers keep their bargain, are sometimes lax without legitimate reason ; and, without endorsing the charge, I feel bound to report a suspicion prevalent among some of the bona fide settlers that settlers of another description, or rather non-settlers, are allowed to keep land to which they have no right, thus shutting out men who are ready not only to take up land but to live on it and cultivate it in earnest. It is only fair to say, at the same time, that the officials in the land department at Ottawa profess readiness to investigate and remedy this and other abuses of the country's hospitality by lazy homesteaders and by certain land agents and their dummy representatives. There was no one to receive us when we came to the " stopping-place,' * kept by an ex-trooper of the Mounted Police, where we were to pass the night. But this matters little in the West. You stable your horses, find the key of the house in its usual place over the door, walk in, and make yourself at home, foraging on shelves and in cupboards and making delightful discoveries of scones and potatoes and berries, not to speak of mere bread and bacon and tea. You make a BATTLEFORD ONCE MORE 159 fire in the stove, splitting up a log for the purpose if there is no pile of firewood handy, and it is your own fault or misfortune if with all this you cannot produce a good meal, before the lady and gentleman of the house return from their toils or their travels. As for sleeping room, it is astonish- ing how much there is in what seems from the outside to be only a little log-house. On occasion you may even find a spring bed to sleep on ; though after a day's ride through Canadian air you must be delicate indeed if you could not sleep on the soft side of a plank. We were still a good many miles from Battle- ford when we first caught sight of the Saskatche- wan River away on the right. From this point the trail not only follows the river but remains on what may be called its southern bank — a strip, sometimes a mile or two wide, of rough, often sandy, and generally wooded land, sloping in irregular and broken terraces from the prairie on the left down to the river. Then, on a height far ahead, we caught sight of Battleford itself : the fort, or the remains of the fort, on the point of a high plateau between the Battle and the North Saskatchewan, where these two rivers join. At last we plunged down the valley side, drove right through the Battle River, and climbed the steep ascent to the fort, as I had climbed it twenty years before with the relieving army. A BATTLEFIELD REVISITED The Lucknow of Canada has been almost totally transformed since the famous siege in the Rebellion of '85. The old stockade and bastions, the only protection of the beleaguered population, have vanished, and even the line where the stockade ran can only be guessed at. The only easily recognizable ante-bellum structure is the officers' house, on the point of the promontory that juts out in front of the town — looking eastward down the valleys of the Battle River and North Sas- katchewan, on the right and left, to the point where they join, a mile or so below. Of the town itself as it stood when our column came to its relief not a trace remains visible, though I believe one or two fragments of the old buildings are built into the new. The town has certainly grown since 1885, but not remarkably. A few hours after my arrival I again took the trail for Cutknife Hill, at about the same hour in the afternoon, when on May 2, 1885, our little force, having raised the siege, set out for the same destination — to find the besiegers, who had pitched their camp on Poundmaker's reserve, 160 LOADED FOR THE TRAIL 161 40 miles away to the west. My comrades now, as then, were Mounted Police — a couple of them — but they had been infants when I took that trail before with Herchmer's men and the volun- teers. Not even now were we merely on pleasure bent. The battlefield was only to end the first stage of a long trek over country that was still a Great Lone Land, and we loaded our waggons with a fortnight's rations for man and beast; a shot-gun and rifle — not for defence, by any means, but for aggression upon such feathered and four-footed inhabitants as might enrich our bill of fare ; a military tent ; and wolf-skin " robes " to wrap ourselves in on the cold autumnal nights. There was no need of secrecy now, no call for an all-night march ; and we camped as darkness fell, in one of the gullies that gave our artillery so much trouble in '85. There was good drinking water in the creek : very different from the slough liquid which we should have to put up with at later stages in the Bad Lands. We were well supplied with bread, at any rate for the first few days, as well as with hard tack ; but the " soft tack" brought back painful recollections of the comrade, an Ottawa Civil Service man, who shared his bread with me — a delightful relief after the stony biscuit to which we were accustomed — on that weary night march before the battle. It was L 1 62 THE SOUNDS OF NIGHT the last thing he ate. When I saw him next he lay on Cutknife Hill with an Indian ball through his head ; and the flying bullets sang his requiem. The night was dark, and it was hard to find a spot moderately level and free from dog-rose bushes to sleep on ; dark till the Northern Lights began to play. It was also quiet — at intervals. Now and then our broncos, having finished their oats, came nuzzling among our tins and rations, or even turning up the corners of our robes to see if we had any hidden edibles about us, before they settled down to their regular night's work on the standing prairie hay. As we dozed off again, the silence of the wood was pierced and torn by the long-drawn scream of a coyote, the prairie wolf. Another answered him, with a ghastly yell as of a woman in torment ; and then the whole pack gave tongue in chorus, like an orchestra of steam sirens and fog-horns pitched in many keys. The horses went on munching, for the coyote is a coward despised by all his brother beasts above the rank of a sheep or a sickly calf. The screaming ended as suddenly as it began. Presently the wind rose, and for half an hour or more a rushing blast whistled through the wood and hissed along the grass. This, too, died suddenly away, and a dead calm followed, broken only by spasmodic outbursts from despairing NEW-COMER AND OLD-TIMER 163 wolves, till daylight roused us to breakfast and the road. A lovely country this, sloping down to the Battle River, with many a lake and stream among its meadow glades and wooded hills. Several considerable tracts are held by the Indians under treaty — it was on the Yellow-grass reserve we had pitched our camp — but the rest of the land is fast being taken up by settlers. Here, for instance, we came on a Lancashire man, an ex-official from the Manchester Post Office. He had been out three or four years, and though he had found the unaccustomed work hard at first he would not think of going back. He had 20 acres under grain, besides garden stuff. And here by way of contrast was an old-timer who had joined the Mounted Police more than 30 years ago and had now been farming 25 years. His experience, therefore, was worth having. On one field he had been growing wheat from the beginning, and its yield now averaged 25 to 30 bushels an acre. So far as grain was concerned, or such vegetables as potatoes and beans, he had rarely had trouble from frost. He bore a French name — his great grandfather fought under Napoleon — but spelt it in an English way to accommodate his English- speaking neighbours. When we crossed this reserve before dawn on that fatal May morning in 1885, Poundmaker 164 THE CREE BRAVE AS FARMER and his men were a horde of hostile savages with yellow war-paint on their faces. To-day these warriors and huntsmen are a peaceful community of farmers ; and the first of them I met was a pleasant-looking gentleman, in what we have the conceit to call civilized clothing, driving a farm waggon with a good team of horses, and apparently differing only in complexion from any of his European neighbours. On the edge of a poplar bluff I met another Cree brave, who came forward with a smile to have his photograph taken as soon as he had put up his horses in their log stable. His summer dwelling stood close by — a genuine old tepee, but made of canvas instead of buffalo-skin, — and in front of the door were a couple of factory chairs, and, mirabile dictu, a wash-tub. The wash-tub stage of civilization is not a low or contemptible one. Still more remark- able, when interpreted, was the steady whir of machinery that fell upon the ear. A little further on we looked over a log fence and saw in the middle of a wide stubble-field a modern steam threshing outfit, with a great stack of wheat going in at one end, and a fountain of straw spouting out at the other. The whole outfit, engine and all, had been bought by the tribe with their own earnings, and the whole of the work was being done by the Indians themselves. The land is held in common by the tribe ; but any Indian CUTKNIFE HILL 165 who wants to fence off part of it for a farm is free to do so. The average yield of these Indians' wheat crop in a good season is at least 35 bushels per acre, and they have often had more ; though in 1904, after rather a cold and wet season, the average was only about 22 bushels. Oats run as high as 80 bushels to the acre. The two hundred Indians on this reserve have about 500 head of cattle, owned individually, not tribally. The government, in fulfilment of its treaty with the Indians, pays them a yearly subsidy of $5 a head. It also distributes a little food, as a matter of policy, to encourage them while at work, and, as a matter of charity, helps those who are old and infirm ; but the tribe as a whole may claim to be self-supporting and prosperous. There are two missions, Roman Catholic on Poundmaker's and Anglican on Little Pine's reserve, each with a day-school attached. The health of the Indians is pretty good, and their number is steadily though slowly increasing. Just now, however, our interest perforce was less in the wheat-fields of to-day than in the battlefield of twenty years ago — and there it was, sloping up to the west from the other side of Cut knife Creek. The creek itself was now invisible from the plain, its valley having been almost filled up since the year of the rising by a thick growth of poplar and willow — one of many 166 ONE OF THE VICTORS indications that the forest, where not artificially checked, tends to spread over the prairie from north to south. On the turfy wind-swept slope where we had been caught by the rebels we now met Colonel MacDonnell of the Mounted Police, who had ridden over on the previous afternoon, (a forty-mile canter is nothing out there), to hunt up some old Indian who had been in the fight. With him was Mr Warden, the Indian agent, and his son, who talked Cree like a native, and, last but not least, a swarthy, good-humoured tribes- man with long black hair and a blanket suit. This was Piacutch, one of Poundmaker's men who had done his best or his worst to defeat us, and who now quietly chuckled whenever he recalled their victory over " the Police." But, I explained, there were only a handful of police in the outfit ; most of us were not even regular soldiers, but just clerks and working men and such like who had never fought before. Piacutch did not contradict me, though it is one of the cherished traditions of the tribe that they " beat the police.* ' He just smiled and said, " No matter ; if you had all been police we would have beaten you just the same." Plainly, however, his feeling in the matter was purely academical ; he bore no sort of a grudge against either white men in general or the police in particular ; and we went over the field together comparing notes and correcting REMINISCENCES OF THE FIGHT 167 each other's recollections, in the friendliest fashion. There, in the middle of the slope, I mentioned that some of our horses had been bunched together, and one of them was killed. " Yes," said Piacutch, " its bones were there a long time ; and down there " — pointing into one of the flanking coulees — " we found a dead policeman." He was not a policeman at all, by the way, but that was a detail. At the top of the slope we identified the spot where the guns were planted — the poor little brass 7-pounders, whose carriages collapsed early in the fray, and the Gatling, bravely handled by Captain Howard (who afterwards fought for us in South Africa), but as good as useless when the Indians had taken cover. The Indians did not all take cover, Piacutch was careful to explain. Walking westward a piece along the almost level plateau which had separated the guns from the Indian camp, he suddenly stopped and said, u There was an Indian here, sitting up, not lying down, and firing at the police all the time ; and the police couldn't hit him " But close by he paused at a little hollow in the ground and said, " There was a Stoney hit here, and buried here." Unhappily the Stoney was not allowed to rest in peace. By whom the thing was done I know not, nor why ; but the body had been removed : only Piacutch, poking in the ground with his foot, 168 HOW NAPATEKISIK WAS KILLED unearthed a broken piece of skull. The Crees, I should observe, have no affection for the Stoney Indians, dead or alive, though they were glad enough of their help in time of battle. " And where were you ? " I asked. Piacutch led me down the hillside into the coulee on the south of our position, turned round, and began stealing slowly up the slope, stooping low and pointing an imaginary gun at about the point from which I well remembered watching the progress of events. " Poundmaker was down here," he says, " with the biggest band, and it was here that old Napatekisik (Man-with-one-eye) was killed. He was Coming-day's father, and he was an old man. All the Indians were going to show their heads, and he said ' Don't show till I see.' He put his head up, and a bullet went into his chest." My new friend and old enemy insisted that he and his comrades did not take shelter in the bushes lining the trough of the little valley ; their only cover was the curve of the hill ; nor had they, as we believed, prepared for our reception by digging rifle-pits in the coulees, half-breed fashion. After the fight, he admitted, the women dug holes there, in case of another attack. Pointing to the hill crest on the far side of the coulee, I said I remembered having seen Indians firing at us from that exposed position. " Yes," WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN 169 said Piacutch, after thinking a little, " that's true ; they were trying to hit the police who were going for our camp. When a man came from the tents telling Poundmaker that the camp was in danger, Poundmaker brought most of us up the coulee to save it." That, in fact, was the critical moment of the whole affair, as the Indians evidently recognized. And Piacutch, for all his certainty that we were bound to be defeated, con- firmed what was the strong belief of the force at the time, that if we had pressed on, instead of halting cooped up on the hill, not only should we have got out of a most unpleasant situation our- selves, but we could have captured the enemy's camp and compelled the Indians, if they wanted to defend it, to come up into the open. " If the police had stayed on their horses," Piacutch confessed, " they could have got through to the camp, for the Indians could only have fired one shot as they passed." But the chance was thrown away, and there was nothing for us left but retreat as soon as the enemy could be turned out of the valley in our rear. When asked how the Indians knew we were coming that morning, Piacutch said : " There was an old Indian named Jacob-with-long-hair who always got up before everybody else. He went out over the hill, and his horse put up its ears, and then he listened and heard waggons coming ; so he galloped I/O POUNDMAKER'S WHIP back and told us, and we strung out as quick as we could, one by one." " And when we went away," I asked, " were you one of the lot that followed us ? " Well, all he was willing to admit was that when we were going down the hill they went down after us to gather up the biscuits and cartridges " and rifles." In one spot, it appeared, they found quite a pile of biscuits— I only wish I had known where to get one or two that day — and cartridges were thick on the ground as wild strawberries. As for empty cartridge cases and Canada Militia buttons, there are plenty of them on the hill to this day. " So you did not really mean to pursue us ? " " The young men wanted to," answered Piacutch, " to catch you as you went home through the woods, but Poundmaker held them back out of pity for you." In describing this incident another old Indian asserts that Poundmaker brandished his whip and threatened to flog any Indian who dared to go after the white man. So the enemies of twenty years ago sat down and took pot-luck together on the battlefield, — pot-luck being a couple of prairie chicken brought down from a tree-top beside the trail, — and while the red man went back to his farm the white man set out on a long ride of 250 miles southward across the great central plain of Southern Saskatchewan. THE FIRST STAGE OF SETTLEMENT 171 The country round Cut-knife Hill is probably as fertile as any in the West. Travelling south across the prairie from the battlefield, how- ever, the impression conveyed to the eye, which is incapable of analyzing soils, is simply that of immense and solitary space. For many miles at a stretch the plain is almost perfectly flat, and often we found it most inconveniently dry, yet it was rapidly being taken up by settlers. Now, the process of settlement was here to be seen in its very first stage, but it was all the more interest- ing on that account. The trail, or rather the track which we struck out for ourselves across the prairie, — for regular trails had not yet come into existence, — led us every now and then to a patch of newly broken ground. The turf had just been turned over by a first ploughing ; and sometimes on the edge of this brown patch stood a brand new little box of a house, of yellow planks ; but the owners, after doing as much as this in compliance with the homestead law, had gone home to the States for the winter, intending doubtless to come back for good in the spring. This was a little awkward when we wanted to camp for the night, or even for our nooning, as surface water was scarce and most of these beginners had not yet taken the trouble to dig wells. On the first afternoon after leaving Cut-knife we rode for hour after hour looking for at least a slough with 1/2 WATER AT LAST a puddle in it to give our horses their nightly drink. Sloughs there were in plenty, but all utterly dry, and even the grass which had over- grown their beds was rapidly losing its greenness. Ahead of us in the south-east rose a little square dot on the horizon, — evidently a house, for nothing rose from that horizon in the shape of a tree or other natural landmark. When we got up to it we found the windows boarded over, and not even the beginnings of a well outside. Half a mile across the prairie to the north there was another house, and beside it we could just distinguish a few moving figures. Wheeling to the left, we raced over the turf, only to find that dwelling also shut up for the winter. The men we had seen were probably the owner and his son, who after finishing their day's work had gone off to spend the night on a farm still farther north. The worst of it was that though they had begun to dig a well they had only got seven or eight feet down, and had found no water. It was nearly dark, and, rather than go on in our right direction with the chance of finding no water all night, we turned round and pelted back the way we had come : for there, rising from the chimney of a little log house we had passed some while before, a column of blue smoke cut the red sunset sky in two. Here, at any rate, was a man, ploughing with a THE FRENCH-CANADIAN EXODUS 173 yoke of oxen ; and he had a well, but there was little left in it, and his cattle had to drink. In fact, he said, every few days he had to hitch up and haul a couple of barrels from the nearest creek, three miles away ; still, we were welcome to what we needed. With intense relief we pitched our camp within the charmed circle — the ploughed strip ten or twelve feet wide — which every careful settler draws round his home as a guard against possible prairie fires. That log house and its humble inhabitants form as pleasant a picture as anything I witnessed in the whole journey. The man and his wife were both French-Canadians, and their presence on that far northern plain was a hopefully significant fact. One of the most painful features in the history of Canada for the last 30 years has been the exodus of French-Canadians from the Province of Quebec. It is believed that at least half a million of the two million French-Canadians are now to be found under the Stars and Stripes, though you might find it hard to identify a Jean Baptiste Lajeunesse and Dominique Lafortune under their new names of John Young and Washington Lucky. The greater number of these expatriated French-Canadians are to be found in the New England States, where they have supplied the labour for the cotton mills and shoe factories of many a Massachusetts town. There was also, 174 AMERICANIZED FRENCH-CANADIANS however, a large French-Canadian emigration, less permanent in intention, to the American North- West, and especially to Illinois andMichigan. Thousands of the habitants were, and still are, expert lumbermen, spending their winters, even when they have farms of their own in the St Lawrence valley, cutting and drawing timber from the northern forests. Such men as these found a great and profitable market for their labour in Michigan, a State which indeed may be said to have-been transformed from forest to farm- land by French-Canadian hands and axes. A large proportion of these French-Canadians, whatever their intentions were, settled down in the State they had cleared. Hundreds, if not thousands, of them are now being brought back into Canada, though not chiefly into their native Province, by the same economic force that is drawing northward hundreds of thousands of English-speaking Americans. These American- ized Frenchmen speak English perfectly, though most, if not all, of them speak French as well, and their names are generally spelt in the old French way, though pronounced in English fashion. The typical pair of French-Canadians who now came to our rescue had only returned to their native land a few months before, and though they had got twenty acres of prairie broken they GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 175 had not had time to get any of it under crop. In the Province of Quebec a good deal of the field work is still done by the women ; but madame had been brought up more in the American style, and found her hands pretty well occupied by the care of her house and her children, in addition to such trifles as making the butter and looking after the poultry. The house was a perfect model of cleanliness and good order. It consisted of one room only, but it was well if plainly furnished, and every kitchen utensil, bright as a new pin, hung from its proper hook on the neatly plastered log-wall, which was otherwise decorated with conventional coloured prints of the Holy Family. The husband had made that house, from door-step to chimney top, with his own hands, after drawing every stick of timber from the Cut-knife valley. He confessed that he had had to pay $30 (£6) for the window sashes and the planed wood forming the floor and the door, but otherwise the whole edifice had cost him in cash only the 25 cents charged by the Government for permission to cut logs. He had brought in a year's rations for his family from the United States, besides his eight oxen, his milch cow, and his farm imple- ments, so he was well able to wait till the second year for his wheat crop. Up here a team of work oxen would have cost him $200 (£40). Madame was thriftily packing all the eggs and butter she 176 GOOD SPIRITS could gather and make, for winter use, but she was quite willing to sell us some of each, as well as a little sugar, at an extremely low price. Mon- sieur's habit was to rise about three, and put in at least six hours' work on the land before 10 a.m., returning to the plough or harrow in the afternoon and sticking hard at it till dark. Hard work seemed not only to agree with him physically but to leave him plenty of spirit for a tune and a chat in the evening. Between them, moreover, they found time to read three weekly papers, — one French, and the others English of the Canadian and American varieties respectively. " I suppose you are a little lonely out here as yet," I remarked. " Lonely ? " said our host, " O, dear no ; we had a couple of dances last summer in my father's house, and all the girls came to it from 20 miles round." It turned out that his father had taken the next homestead, that his brother was settling over there, his cousin over yonder, and sundry other Americanized French-Canadians close by, so that in a few months there would be a very respectable little French colony in that township. " There's a store opened five miles west," he added, " and a man says he's going to open one right here in a few weeks, and keep everything." Not very far south of the French-Canadian NO TRAIL 177 homestead a colony of Germans has sprung up, beside Tramping Lake. Leaving this away on our right, we struck out in a south-easterly direction, hoping to pick up the old Swift Current trail by which we had marched north to the relief of Battleford more than 20 years before. Our task, however, was far from easy. Not one of the settlers could tell us the way, having come in by the trail from Battleford and knowing no other. There was, as we soon discovered, no other to know. Here and there a pair of parallel lines ran faintly through the grass, where some settler's waggon had passed, a week or maybe a month before ; but it generally ended on the edge of some deep and wooded coulee where the settler had merely gone to cut logs for his house-building. All we could do was to steer by compass across the sea of grass a course which must ultimately strike the old historic trail : and now and then we were able to verify our bearings by an iron stake, projecting from a little mound, and stamped with the number of the range and township. Our progress was not rapid in these circumstances, but, as we made a point of inquiring at every house we saw, we were rewarded by a good deal of information bearing on the chief object of our voyage. Here, for instance, on a little rise, which in that immensity of flatness might almost be called a 178 A PARSONAGE hill, lived a man from Ontario. Like the French- Canadian, he was evidently one of those whom diligence maketh rich. Though he had bought his logs from the Indians, he had not only built the house himself but had made the very lime for its foundations, by burning the stones that drifting ice-bergs in some remote geological epoch had scattered thinly over the plain. His next neighbour, whom we found harrowing with three oxen abreast, was so bent on getting every possible acre under cultivation that he had only put up for his own habitation a tiny sod shack. The walls were of turf piled on turf, and the roof of the same primitive material supported by the trunks of young poplar trees. A few miles further on was a more comfortable looking establishment surrounded by a fine garden full of carrots, swedes, and other homely vegetables. The proprietor, hard at work among his roots, dashed into the house and out again with a letter which he begged us to post at the nearest post office ; but, as we were not likely to light on a post office for a week or so, he thought he would wait for a better opportunity. He, by the way, was nominally an American, but really a native of the Isle of Man. His next neighbour was a Methodist minister, one of the large number — large absolutely, but ridiculously small in pro- portion to the territory they have to serve — A PICTURESQUE HOMESTEAD 179 of clergymen, chiefly Methodist, Presbyterian, and Anglican, who by incessant journeying in the saddle, the waggon or the sleigh, attempt to keep alive the habit of public worship and the spirit of religion among their vastly scattered parishioners. We found the reverend gentleman and his wife living in what can only be called a box, of rough planks covered with black felt paper inside to keep out the wind, and not very much larger than the packing case outside in which their piano had come up from Ontario. They had been so busy with the care of others that little time had been left for their own affairs, and, though they had some faint hope of being able to build a real house in the fall, they would most likely have to pass the whole of the western winter in that box. After a long morning's ride we found our path barred by a hill, a real hill, which had gradually been rising from the horizon ahead. Swerving to the north we plunged steeply down from the plain into a lovely valley, here chock-full of a jungle growth, poplar and willow and birch, but soon widening out and giving room for a pleasant meadow cut in two by a clear and rapid stream called the Bull-dog. High up on the eastern bank an old Ontario farmer and his sons, with an eye for the picturesque as well as the profitable, had built their primitive mansion. Between them i8o THE SWIFT CURRENT TRAIL they had taken up a whole section, 640 acres, and the eldest son was hard at work ploughing with a team of four oxen. They, at any rate, would have no lack of wood and water, and the soil they were ploughing was at least as good as that of the bare and monotonous dry plain. And now for a while we traversed a country which, if not flowing with milk and honey, at any rate left less of its richness to the imagination : a stretch of parkland, dotted by lakes and sloughs, divided by streams which if small had the great merit of being always wet, and plentifully endowed with timber. At last our long search was rewarded, and we camped for the night by the side of the Swift Current trail. In the morning, after laying in a supply of rarities such as sugar and eggs at the house of a French-Canadian from Minnesota, we set our faces to the south, and started on our last long ride of 180 miles to the nearest point on the Canadian Pacific Railway. THE DRY PATCH When I first knew it, the Swift Current trail was a sort of grand trunk road over which all supplies for the Battleford region had to be freighted. Its life and glory departed on the opening of the rail- way from Regina to Saskatoon ; but by that time the two parallel ruts forming the trail had been worn deep and smooth in the black prairie soil, and, judging by the survival of buffalo tracks meandering across the prairie in every direction 30 years after the disappearance of the buffalo, the trail might remain both visible and passable for an indefinite period, so gently does the weather touch the landscape hereabouts, even if the settlement of the great plain between the South Saskatchewan and the Battle River were indefinitely postponed and the trail left traffickless. That settlement had already begun, we soon had evidence, but very little of it. Only once, and that while we were still in the Battleford district, a sapling laid across the trail warned us that land had been taken up and fenced in just ahead, and forced us to make a circuit by a new and rough track through the grass for half a mile or so. We 181 1 82 THE PRAIRIE PRIMEVAL were still among the park lands when we met a couple of waggons lumbering northward behind yokes of sleepy brown oxen. The owners, it appeared, had taken up land at a place still destitute of a name but lying about a score of miles south of Sixty-mile Bush, and they were going into Battleford — a four days' journey, if they made 20 miles a day — for household belong- ings that had come up from the States by rail. We entered now a land where no man dwelt ; the prairie primeval, untouched and unchanged, sleeping on as it had slept when the first silent red man stole out of the woods and shaded his eyes to scan its sunlit sea of grass. As we left the valley of the Battle River further and further behind, the bluffs of willow and poplar became smaller and thinner, and their trees dwindled to shrubby insignificance, while longer and longer intervals passed between the sloughs. The prairie chicken, plentiful enough at first, gradually disappeared, and even the wild duck, which had risen in scores from every patch of water as we rode by, grew more and more scarce. Very soon the park lands of the north were all behind us, and the rolling, dry, illimitable plain stretched out to the horizon in front. The slender stunted stalks of the wild rose and the stubborn whip-like stems of the grey-leaved buck-brush scarcely relieved the monotony of the ANIMAL LIFE 183 smooth brown turf, and after a while even the sloughs lost their accustomed fringe of willow bushes. High over head flew steadily southward a flock of wavies, or cranes, in perfect arrowhead formation of two long lines converging on their leader, or an irregular bunch of wild duck travel- ling from slough to slough, while the little greyish shore lark hopped about everywhere. The ubiquitous gopher sat bolt upright on the edge of its hole, vanishing downward like a shot when it thought audacity had reached the point of fool- hardiness. Twenty yards ahead, beside the trail, a fountain of earth spouted up where a big striped badger was digging himself a new home or enlarging his old one. He turned and stared at us, motionless, till a rifle was aimed at him, — then vanished. Now and then a snake slipped across the trail, — Twining's garter-snake, the zoologists call it, a greenish-yellow animal with a black stripe along the back. It is a harm- less creature. There are said to be rattle-snakes here and there in Canada, but in many years and much travel I have never come across one. The sun set and the coyotes began to howl as the trail ran down a rough and stony slope towards the middle of a charming little lake. The blue water was daintily edged with ring within ring of snowy white alkali and vivid red weeds. Alas, it was only charming to the eye, and we held 1 84 "STINKING LAKE" our nostrils tight as we passed across the middle of the lake by a stony natural causeway. A large proportion of the sloughs and lakes on this prairie are alkaline, though in varying degrees, — some being quite drinkable ; others drinkable in small quantities, and with a risk of internal consequences ; others, like this " Stinking Lake/' abominable beyond words. Happily, before the twilight died away the smooth sky-line ahead began to wear a slightly serrated look, and as darkness fell we entered Sixty-mile Bush. This is a curious stretch of rather thickly if not heavily wooded land suddenly occurring in the midst of the bare plain, and interspersed, like the park lands of the north, with many sloughs, some of them perfectly fresh. The bush is inhabited, so far as human beings go, only by two French half-breed families. Beside one of these we camped for the night, and I had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance, now more than 20 years old, with a race that has played a not unimportant and often a useful, if sometimes an unhappy, part in the history of the West. These isolated denizens of Sixty-mile Bush seemed prosperous enough, with herds of cattle, good log farm buildings, and large stacks of rich natural hay from the prairies and sloughs. In the log house beside which we camped, compar- ing favourably with the shacks that satisfy many HALF-BREEDS OF SIXTY-MILE BUSH 185 white settlers for their first few years in the country, we found two married sisters. One of them could only speak the Cree Indian language, and a French patois ; the other had been educated in a convent and spoke English pretty well. Their eight little children, black-eyed, swarthy, and very Indian-looking, rolled and tumbled over each other on the floor, — active and jolly, though remarkably quiet in their play. The good women were as kind and hospitable as travellers could wish. Did we want wood for our camp fire ? We might have as much as we wanted from their log pile. Were we tired of sleeping on the prairie ? Their stable was dry, and not in use till winter, and there was plenty of hay in the stacks. Had we had enough (and we certainly had) of slough water ? Here was a pailful of the best from their well. To be sure, they had no bread, but we could have for a reasonable consideration one of their mighty bannocks, — great oval slabs, measuring about 18 inches by 12, and an inch thick — with a big lump of butter and a jug of milk. Presently arrived the father-in-law of the English-speaking dame : a pleasant-faced man, as dark as any Indian, but wearing a considerable beard ; a man of seventy, but without a white hair in his head. Not a word of English could he speak, though 40 years ago he had gone with an English hunter as guide all through the Rocky 186 A MAN OF 1885 Mountains. More interesting still, he had been at " Batoche/' — the three days' fight which broke the back of the rebellion in 1885. It was not, however, about Batoche that he was most inclined to speak, but rather of his share in the proceedings at an earlier and less tragic stage. He had been well acquainted with Louis Riel, the leader of the Red River rebellion in 1870, as well as of the Saskatchewan rising 15 years later. When the Saskatchewan half-breeds, tired of petitioning the Government in vain to recognize their right to their own farms, invited Riel to come back and put himself at their head, our friend of the Sixty- mile Bush was one of those who opposed the invitation. M I got up in meeting," said he, " and told them that in 1870 Riel had the country in the hollow of his hand, and what did he do ? He ran away like a coward." The invitation was sent nevertheless, and was accepted. You know the result. We had a visit from a skunk, in that farmyard. It was only a flying visit, but it was enough. The air was full of him long after he left. Gordon Cumming says that skunk meat is delicious, when skilfully dressed. If the dressing and the eating took place in the same township, Gordon Cumming must have had an impregnable appetite. For 20 miles after leaving the Sixty-mile Bush we saw no sign of man. Our trail lay as before A BEGINNING OF SETTLEMENT 187 over a bleak and hilly, or rather hillocky, plain, with here and there a little slough, or more commonly a hollow where a slough had been, now filled with dry, rustling, cream-coloured grass ; and from one or two heights we saw in the middle distance the blue waters of a lake many miles in length. At last we came upon the only settlement between the park lands of the Battle River Valley and the South Saskatche- wan. Here we found a hovel built of sods, — next to the bark shelter of an aboriginal Aus- tralian, the most primitive habitation in the world. It was the first western home of a farmer from Ontario, whose wife and children were not coming up from the East till spring. On the next home- stead, however, stood a good frame-house of sawn planks ; merely an unpainted and unfurnished shell so far, but giving promise of genuine comfort, and indicating taste and means which would not take shelter even for a time within sod walls. This also belonged to a born Briton from Ontario. A third settler whose acquaintance we made was a Perthshire Highlander. He had spent twelve years in Manitoba, but gained little except experience, having given too much for his farm. Too much, that is, at the time. Now, prices had risen so far that he had sold out at a profit ; and he had come far afield for a free homestead. The result of his Manitoban apprenticeship was 1 88 A HIGHLANDER'S ENERGY evident all round. In this first season in the new Province, he had got 50 acres broken and ready for the next year's crop. He had planted a sack of potatoes, but had only got a pailful in return for his labour. " That," he said, " was the gophers' doing ; but we will settle them next year." He had dug three wells, to a depth of 40 or 50 feet, but they were as dry at the bottom as they were at the top. At present, therefore, he was hauling five barrels of water every second day for his eight horses from a slough a mile and a half away ; " but," he said, M my neighbours here have only had to dig from 24 to 40 feet deep, and they have 8 or 10 feet of water in their wells." A most cheery and hopeful man, this Highlander. In addition to his own work he had acted as baker for all the settlers coming in ; and although what we saw appeared to be simply an isolated knot of farmhouses, it was really part of a long thin line. These settlers had come off the railway at Saskatoon, and, finding the land about there all taken up, they had come on and on in a south- westerly direction, till, after driving 85 miles, they had at last found land without an owner. Others following them had gone on in the same direction, until at the time of our visit the thread of settlement stretched out to a length of 100 miles from the nearest station. Of course these people were confident that railways would come ANTELOPE IN THE BAD HILLS 189 in after them ; and before long the Grand Trunk Pacific will have opened up a great part of that untouched plain. We halted for dinner that day beside the Eagle Creek, the only stream of any account which the traveller sees in the whole 160 miles from the Battle River to the South Saskatchewan. It is here an easily fordable little stream, from 10 to 20 feet wide and a couple of feet deep, and the only trees discoverable in its valley are scarcely more than bushes. Here we passed a stack or two of prairie hay, guarded from fire by ploughed- up circles of brown soil ; but there was no other sign of human beings, the haymakers being pro- bably the immigrants whose line of settlement we had crossed earlier in the day. Ascending from the Eagle Valley to a narrow table-land, we dipped almost at once into another and similar valley, threaded by a mere rivulet ; and then, after a long and gentle ascent, we entered upon the Bad Hills, a vast rolling dry plain to which there seemed no end. On the crest of a hillock, silhouetted against the sky, a great buzzard sat watching us till we came near, and then soared away on the other side. A coyote stole swiftly over the plain, stopping occasionally to have a good look at the invaders. Every now and then as we swung round a hillock we disturbed a bunch of antelope, who flew off, IQO A WATERLESS WASTE stepping along in a leisurely way to all appear- ance, but really getting out of range with some- thing like the speed of an express train. From one or two points as we mounted the crest of an earth wave we caught a distant glimpse of a large alkali lake, with an unpleasant reputation, but when the sun set — in a gorgeous heaven-wide illumination of purple and red and gold — we had not seen a drop of water near the trail since three in the afternoon ; and that had been only the last surviving puddle in the middle of an old slough. As the twilight died away we were cheered by the watery gleam in a hollow half a mile away on our left ; but when we got down to the spot the gleaming surface turned out to be merely whitish yellow grass rooted in hard baked mud. We threw cartridges from the shore — as there were no stones, and the prairie soil was too hard to yield a clod without a spade, — but no splash followed, nothing but the dullest of dull thuds. On we went, repeating this experiment over and over again, but always finding we had been deceived, until long after dark, we resolved to put up with a " dry camp " for the night. We tied up all our horses, lest they should wander off in search of the water their masters could not find, and after a scratch supper we rolled ourselves up in wolf- skins and went to sleep under the stars. Happily the grass was covered with hoar frost before the GUMBO, AND WHITE BEAR "LAKE" 191 night was old, and the horses got moisture enough with their food to keep them from suffering from thirst. It was just as well, for we had to travel ten or twelve miles more in the morning before we saw a drop of water ; and a mere drop it was, trickling out of a stony gorge known as Devil's Gully. Again and again we startled bunches of antelope, which scampered off at our approach ; and for eight or nine miles a wild horse, with a broken lasso round its neck, led our procession in mockery along the trail. The prairie soil was now com- posed of " gumbo," so dry that the surface of the ground was cracked in all directions, but so sticky that it made a hard lumpy ridge all round the tires of our waggon wheels. It is rich stuff, this gumbo, and if the rain could only be depended upon the region would be one of the most productive in the West. As it is, the only purpose for which it can be confidently recommended is the grazing of cattle and horses. After travelling about three and a half hours, — that is to say about twenty five miles, for the gradients are sometimes fairly steep — we arrived at what the maps call White Bear Lake — a sheet of water, according to the surveyors, about 12 miles long and perhaps a mile wide, with the trail making a circuit round its western end — in reality a dried-up waste with the trail running right across 192 "WERE CANUCKS NOW" it through weeds and grass. We now ascended a little winding gully, through which a stream once ran to feed the lake, and still adorned with one or two genuine trees, — genuine, if only ten feet high. It was well on in the afternoon before we reached water again and were able to camp for dinner. This little creek is known as Fifteen-mile Springs, — fifteen miles, that is, coming north from the South Saskatchewan River, — and here we met the first human beings we had seen since crossing the line of settlement north of Eagle Creek, 50 miles back. The new-comers were a couple of farmers from Minnesota, genuine Americans from birth ; wise men, with a keg of good water in their waggon. " And don't you want to be Americans any longer ? " I asked. " No," said they most emphatically, " we're Canucks now." They, it appeared, had first come in by way of Hanley, on the railway south of Saskatoon. Thence they had struck west across the prairie to a point somewhat east of Sixty-mile Bush, where they and twenty one others from the same State had founded a little Minnesotan colony. When I asked them about their prospects they admitted the land was rather dry ; but it was good, they affirmed ; and as for drinking water, so long as they could get it at a depth of a hundred feet, they would be satisfied, if only they could grow to THE SOUTH SASKATCHEWAN 193 crops. There was a lot of land in Minnesota where the people had had to go much deeper. " If we can grow crops." That seems a pretty large "if." Even supposing that for some years to come enough rain falls to make agriculture profitable, the record of rainfall in that region is so poor that to attempt farming here must be a rather risky speculation. Two hours more of gumbo and we drew a long breath of relief as the grand valley of the South Saskatchewan lay at our feet, the broad river flowing between strips of meadow. The sight of the river, however, recalled associations not of the pleasant est, for here, in 1885, our march to the relief of Battleford had suffered a most intolerable delay. At that time the only dwelling in the valley was a ferryman's hut, and the ferryman had fled from the Indians ; but now there stands on the south shore amid lawns and flowerbeds a large and handsome house, comparing favour- ably not merely with the common frame dwelling of the west, but with the more ambitious farm- house of the old-established east. This, in fact, is more than a farmhouse. It was put up by a well-to-do rancher a few years ago, when there was any quantity of free range for his cattle ; but so many settlers have come in, and, wisely or unwisely, taken up homesteads on the free range, that the proprietor has turned his house 194 FROM RIVER TO RAILWAY into an hotel, and has also established a little store. The climb from the valley up to the high prairie south of the Saskatchewan is a stiff one, through scenery which might almost be described as mountainous ; and the gorges running down through this rugged escarpment are full of trees that really deserve the name. Once the prairie level is reached, however, the country is bare and monotonous to a degree, and the soil is the stiff est gumbo. For the whole 30 miles forming the last stage of our southward journey, from the river to the railway, the trail runs through land which has been " homesteaded," mostly by English-speaking immigrants of a very good class from the United States, who take the land at its face value and ignore its somewhat droughty record. At the time of my visit, how- ever, few of these settlers had yet taken up residence ; in fact, there was no building of any sort to be seen till we had covered 15 miles, and then only a rough " half-way shack " put up as a shelter for the mail carrier in case of need. Be- yond that again the untouched wilderness con- tinued to within a couple of miles of Swift Current, where our roughing it came to an end. When, in the first year of the Canadian Pacific Railway's existence, we disembarked at this point for our long northward march to the relief THE CYPRESS HILLS 195 of Battleford, Swift Current consisted of three or four boxes — it would be flattery to call them houses. One or two of these still stand, but they are in the middle of a substantial little town. Until the last few years little use had been made of the country lying south of this, between the railway and the United States frontier, except for cattle ranching ; and that industry still flourishes in the Cypress Hills, a narrow range about 100 miles long and bearing timber enough to supply a local sawmill. Thirty miles east of Swift Current, too, there is a big ranch stocked with perhaps 15,000 head of cattle, established four or five years ago by a pair of Americans — one, by the way, of Canadian birth. In the latter years of the nineteenth century many settlers who came into this region went out again, ruined or disheartened by the drought. Nevertheless, for several years now the tide of population has been flowing in again, stronger and stronger ; and there seems no part of the " semi- arid area " that the home-seekers despise. Old- timers shake their heads at the rashness of the new-comers, saying, " Wait till the dry years come ! " It is greatly to be hoped, but hardly to be expected, that the old-timers will prove false prophets, and that the new-comers' persistent belief that rainfall increases with the spread of cultivation will prove in the course of years to have 196 THE DIMINUTION OF DROUGHT some foundation which scientists profess them- themselves unable to discern. I should like to quote here a recent expression of opinion, based on twenty years' experience at the other end of this dry region, in South-western Alberta. The Rev. Dr Gaetz, who settled at Red Deer as far back as 1884, made this statement when visiting Montreal in 1906 : — " I certainly used to think years ago that there were considerable areas of inferior land, but of late years I have so frequently been compelled to change my opinion, on witnessing the result of cultivation on these same areas, that my mental condition may be described as one of chronic optimism regarding almost all the land I once thought inferior. For example, there is a section of country lying between Olds and Calgary that, when driving over in my buckboard years ago, I found scorched as brown as a berry in July and August. I made up my mind that that section of country was a good place for grain-growers to stay away from. And when settlers began to pour in there in the rainy seasons in 1900 and two following years I wasted a good deal of very generous sympathy upon them. I frequently heard it said, ' Wait till the dry years come, and you will see these poor fellows pull out/ Well, we have just had a pretty dry summer following a snowless winter, and on my way here last week I MENNONITES FROM MANITOBA 197 saw in some of those very sections some of the grandest wheat fields I ever saw in any part of Eastern or Western Canada. The only reasonable theory to my mind is that this bald prairie, for centuries tramped by buffalo and annually swept by fire, became so parched and hard that very little moisture ever penetrated the surface ; the melting snow and falling rain alike fell quickly down in the low places, forming the sloughs everywhere to be seen in the earlier years. To-day these have almost entirely disappeared, for no other reason that I can conceive than that the wide area of well cultivated soil absorbs the moisture and retains it foi; the production of the splendid crops that are to be seen there to-day. I think there is good ground for believing that as these broad and apparently barren plains, which as yet are barely touched by the plough, are more widely and thoroughly cultivated, we shall see results we have not yet dreamed of." Whatever the risk may be, thousands of men are taking it who are not new to western con- ditions. A remarkable feature of the immigration to the Swift Current district in the last year or two has been the predominance of Mennonites, who have deliberately given up their farms in Manitoba to settle in this drier region. The immigration officer at Herbert, 28 miles east of Swift Current, says that this district until a year 198 ARTESIAN AND OTHER IRRIGATION or two ago was considered within the semi-dry belt, but now it contains a large and rapidly increasing settlement of Mennonites. The first year very little grain was sown, but in 1905, 2000 acres were in crop, and in 1906 the acreage leapt up to 8000, while the price of wild land increased from $6.50 to $10 (27s. to 41s. 8d.) an acre, and timber merchants could not keep up with the demand for building material. Among the old-country folk planting themselves near Swift Current, by the way, I heard of a Scot who had bought 1000 acres out of hand. If another cycle of dry years comes upon the new settlements, it is proposed by some to try irrigation from artesian wells ; but there is no evidence as yet that under this dry plain any water supply exists comparable to that which has been tapped by artesian boring in Kansas ; and, even if water were thus found in sufficient quantity, the question arises whether in quality it would not be too alkaline to do the land any good. I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that the speculative region of which I am now speaking is, though absolutely large, small in comparison with the vast well-watered regions encircling it in Manitoba, Eastern and Central Saskatchewan and Northern Alberta, not to speak of the great plains of Southern Alberta where natural irriga- tion from the mountains is easy. SOUTHERN ALBERTA ; THE CATTLE AND HORSE RANCHERS Twenty years ago Southern Alberta was a wilder- ness. The population consisted chiefly of Indians, little removed in time or temper from their scalping and tomahawking days ; of strong detachments of the North- West Mounted Police, to control as much as to protect the Indians ; and of a sprink- ling of pioneers engaged in, or dependent on, cattle ranching. As for agriculture, few had any idea that crops would grow upon these arid plains. The cattle-kings to whom great ranges had been leased by the Federal Government on easy terms were the undisputed and unenvied monarchs of the prairie. To-day the uninhabited prairie is dotted with homesteads, villages, and towns. The arid immensities of brown bunch-grass and grey sage-bush are chequered with yellow fields of wheat. The cowboy is a curiosity. The cattle- king has abdicated, and the farmer reigns in his stead. Twenty years ago Calgary, the starting point of my journey through this part of the country, was a little village which the Canadian Pacific '99 200 SOUTH FROM CALGARY Railway, then only just completed, had taken as its westernmost divisional centre before entering the Rocky Mountains. To-day it is a city, with handsome stone stores, banks, and hotels, and the population (in 1906) of 11,967 growing fast. The branch line to the south, until a very few years ago, passed through only two or three little villages in its whole course of 108 miles. To-day there are nine towns and villages between the terminal points, and each of them serves a con- siderable and rapidly increasing population. A mere glance at the quantity and variety of the goods discharged on to the railway platforms was enough to show this, had I known nothing more. Cases of clothing, dozens of stoves, and expensive agricultural implements, from the factories of Eastern Canada ; fruit from British Columbia and California ; preserved provisions, generally from Ontario but including well-known English brands ; and so on, through a long list. At one station, I noticed a great case clearly containing a cottage piano. It was the twenty-fifth piano delivered at the village that summer, and two years before the village had not begun to exist ! I have said that few dreamed twenty years ago of what has come to pass ; but the few existed, and they did more than dream. They were not merely voices crying in the wilderness, — they were too hopeful to cry, and too busy turning the WHEAT FOR JAPAN 201 wilderness into a garden. I know a man in Southern Alberta who has been growing wheat near Macleod for a quarter of a century. His experience is most instructive. He has known dry seasons ; but only once, in 1892, did the drought cause an almost total failure of crops. In 1896, the wheat yield was again very light ; but that was both preceded and followed by enormous crops. Another " old-timer " occupy- ing a responsible position further south confirms this declaration that, taking a series of five and twenty years, the moisture available in Southern Alberta, though small, is sufficient. It is Japan that a good many South Albert ans expect to provide the great future market for their wheat. The Japanese are taking to wheat instead of rice ; and the Americans have been supplying what they want in enormous quantities. Owing to the treatment of their fellow-countrymen in California, and to their cordial relations with the United Kingdom, the Japanese would natur- ally prefer to get their supplies from Canada. Unfortunately, the only Canadian wheat growers near enough to the Pacific sea-board to compete with the Americans have barely begun to develop their land, and their trans-Pacific trade is still but trifling in amount. The crop record for 1906 shows that the winter wheat in which the dry South trusts was only sown on 43,661 acres in the 202 THE MACLEOD POLICE whole Province, and produced 907,421 bushels, or nearly 21 bushels per acre ; and even the spring wheat, with its handsome average of about 34 bushels an acre from 97,760 acres, could only produce 3,332,292 bushels. (The other grain crops of the year were 13,192,150 bushels of oats, from 322,923 acres, or 40 bushels an acre, and 2,201,179 bushels of barley, from 75,678 acres, or 29 bushels an acre. The whole area under grain in Alberta was expected to increase from 540,022 acres in 1906, to 830,000 acres in 1907.) When I first visited Macleod it was little more than a stronghold of the semi-military North- West Mounted Police ; a " fort," consisting of a quadrangle of barracks and stables and officers' dwellings. The force had to keep order among the war-like Indians of the Blackfoot nation, and to guard a long stretch of invisible frontier against smugglers and horse-thieves. This they did most effectively. The protection of their own flag, by the way, was quite beyond their powers. Macleod may be called the capital of Windland. The west wind blows almost continuously a long and not too gentle blast from January to December. A new Union Jack was no sooner hoisted than its unravelment and disintegration began, and the flag had to be renewed about 30 times in the year. To-day Macleod is a town of some importance, — at the junction of the Canadian Pacific branch COW-CATCHER AND BRONCO 203 railway coming south from Edmonton and Calgary with the same company's Crow's Nest line, which forks off the main line near Medicine Hat and strikes almost due west till it crosses the Rocky Mountains by the Crow's Nest Pass and descends into the Kootenay mining district of Biitish Columbia. By the time I reached Macleod, I had made use of almost every conceivable conveyance in my western wanderings, — waggons on the trail, and anything on the track, from a railway president's private car to a cow-catcher. The cow-catcher is perhaps the most exciting means of transit, especially when it starts catching cows, — or rocks. It also gives the finest view and the freshest air. How many hundreds of exhilarating miles I have covered on a cow-catcher I should hardly like to guess. But even the airiest of cow-catchers, thundering along the dizziest precipices and flying over the deepest gorges, cannot compare for sheer enjoyment with the back of a fresh bronco. It was on such a mount, with a constable and some- times an Indian scout as guide, that I roamed over the ranching plains of Southern Alberta. On the borders of the Blood Indian Reserve, in a little wayside store about 25 miles south of Macleod, I met a rancher whose experience is worth telling. A Lincolnshire boy, he came out early in life to the United States and was brought 204 TWO MEN FROM THE STATES up on a western farm. After five or six years of copper and gold mining, he took to stock-raising in South Dakota, at a time when " free range " for cattle was unlimited and the owning or leasing of land was unnecessary. In 1899, the conditions were changed by the arrival of sheep, and owing to the conflict — which seems to have been sufficiently violent — between the cattle men and the sheep men, he " cleared up and walked out." In Southern Alberta he bought a large tract of land for $3.10 an acre ; land now worth $12 to $15 an acre. When I met him, he had on his 3000 acres about 50 horses and 600 head of cattle. His wheat crop for the year averaged 55 or 56 bushels per acre, and his oats 60 bushels ; while he also grew, on irrigated land, large crops of timothy and other grass for winter feed. The wheat yield, I should observe, was unusually high, his previous averages having run from 20 to 40 bushels ; but, even so, he was more than satisfied, and declared that he knew of no State in the Union with fewer crop failures to its debit. A neighbour of his, on slightly higher and drier land, had just threshed an average of 50 bushels of wheat per acre. The name of another American in this region occurs to me whose experience varies in certain respects from the ordinary fine. He came in from Iowa in 1900 ; and he acts on the principle of doing nothing himself that he can get others COMING BACK TO KING EDWARD 205 to do for him. He bought a considerable amount of land, but there his capital expenditure ceased. Four years later he had 800 acres under crop ; but his ploughing and seeding and threshing, as well as the hauling of his grain to the railway, were done by hired labour and hired machinery. After paying for all this, he banked a sum equal to $9 or $10 (37s. 6d. to 41s. 8d.) per acre. As the result of a single season's work, — or, rather, a single season's sitting still and looking on, — he cleared a good deal more than the capital he had invested in the business. As the sun set we came on a tall grizzled good- natured old fellow getting ready to camp. His long heavy waggon was covered with a low canvas awning stretched over a central ridge- pole. Built up on the back of the waggon was his store-cupboard, which he opened to show us a freighter's kitchen, displaying a tidy assortment of big tins and jars full of everything that a hardy traveller could want. He carried no furniture or stove ; a few blazing sticks on the ground would fry his pork and boil his tea ; and, for the rest, he was a nomadic patriarch whose possessions consisted of the herd of ponies munching the dry grass around him. " No," said he, when I asked if he was an American, " I'm a true-blue Canuck, born in Ontario. I've spent my life freighting, over the border ; but I'm coming back to King 206 END OF A GREAT RANCH Edward at last ! " I met the same old gentleman more than once circling round on that trip. He was looking for a homestead, but was in no hurry, and clearly meant to see a good deal of the country before choosing a home for himself ; and I daresay the old nomad was a little reluctant to settle down at all, But — revenons a nos bceufs. From the mention of the ex-Dakotan's herds of cattle and horses it may be gathered that Albertan stock-ranching, though shorn of its glory, is far from extinct. The livestock census of 1906 showed that there were 375,686 head of cattle in the Province, besides 93,001 horses, 80,055 sheep and 46,163 pigs. As a matter of fact, while the cattle industry is now carried on in a smaller way, its total output is larger than ever. The famous Cochrane ranch near Macleod, with its lordly domain of 66,000 acres, has been bought by a Mormon syndicate for subdivision into farms at a price ($6, or 25s., per acre) five times what Senator Cochrane paid for the land 20 years ago ; and when I visited the place I met the two gentle- men, one English and the other Irish, who had just bought the remaining live-stock, about 10,000 head, for a matter of $250,000 (£50,000). This big herd, it is interesting to know, was to be not dispersed but transferred bodily to a range of land let by the Government for this purpose, RANCHING IN THE FOOTHILLS 207 as being at present unlikely to be coveted for any other, many miles away to the north, near Gleichen and the Blackfoot Reserve. There remain in Southern Alberta a few ranches of considerable size, though much smaller than the Cochrane ; but the fact remains that, while the yearly ship- ments of beef-cattle from this district tend to increase rather than diminish, they are the output not of a few patriarchal herds, but of a great many " bunches " numbering from 150 to 600 head. In 1906, about 130,000 head of cattle reached Winnipeg from the west ; and 85,000 of these, or 26,000 more than in the previous year, were exported to the United Kingdom. The average price received by the ranchers for these export cattle was estimated at over $47, or nearly £10, a head. The value of a whole herd, however, taking young and old together, would be between $20 and $25 a head. The picturesque impressiveness of cattle-ranch- ing has certainly somewhat faded in the transfer of that industry from the few big capitalists and companies to the many small individuals. And yet the working of a small stock ranch is full of interest. A good many young educated English- men have embarked in this business in South- western Alberta, up among the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. Much of this region, though hilly, is as bare and dry looking as the " bald-head 208 HIGH AND HEALTHY prairie" below; but among those hills I have visited as charming a home, in as beautiful a situation, as an Englishman could wish to rest in. From the flower-fringed verandah we looked out over a rich valley, with its little river winding among the willow-brush, to a magnificent back- ground of pine-capped hills on the western side. The house itself, outwardly, was an old and grey one-storey log building ; but in the great drawing- room, with its pictures and books, its artistic furniture, its piano and pianola, and a hundred little signs of taste and refinement, to realize that we were not in an English town, but 6000 miles away in a Canadian wilderness, was almost impossible. The master of the house, an Oxonian, had a nice little estate of about 1500 acres, of which 160 acres were under grain, though his principal source of income was a herd of 300 or 400 head of cattle. Curiously enough, the exceptional severity of the past winter all over the plain was not felt up here among the foot-hills at a height of 4000 feet above sea-level. The climate of Southern Alberta, I may here observe, is one of the healthiest and most invigor- ating in the world. It is dry and it is high, even Macleod down on the plain being over 3000 feet above sea-level. Many consumptives who would simply die in the East live very comfortably here, — though, on the other hand, the high The south-western plain of Sas- katchewan and Alberta has for many years been the great cattle-ranching country. The big ranches are now being cut up for ordinary farming, and some of the ranchers are re- placing their herds by horses. The picture is from a photograph of a horse ranch in the Cypress Hills. THE MIRACLE OF THE CHINOOK 209 altitude and almost constant wind are not good for nervous patients. Malaria is unknown, and so should typhoid be, but, with new towns spring- ing up and inhabited long before they are furnished with drainage, typhoid claims and will claim its victims in the healthy West. The winter is not nearly so cold as that of Manitoba, the " chinook " wind from over the mountains having a remarkable lifting power on the temperature. A Calgary correspondent some years ago, describing the extraordinary effect of a sudden chinook one January night, wrote : " The day was an ordinary winter day, clear, bright, and frosty. About 8 p.m., without sign or warning, a gale sprang up in an instant. Those inside rushed outside to see a blizzard ; but instead they were met by a clear sky and a hot soft wind. In a few minutes the thermometer jumped from a few degrees above zero to 48. The wind was from a point or two north of west. A change so sudden, though unusual, has occurred before. But what seems strange is that all this time the thermometer was 40 degrees below zero at Laggan, a little over 100 miles west of here and in the mountains. Yet the wind, which was blowing a gale and at times almost a hurricane, was blowing directly from Laggan. The wind and the heat were maintained during the greater part of the night, and the cold was intense at the other point for all that time.'* o 210 THE "FREE RANGE" In the middle of February, 1907, when we in England were sympathetically shivering at the tales of arctic rigour telegraphed from the Canadian West, a Macleod correspondent was writing: " Everybody in Alberta rejoices in the magnificent weather. At the time of sending this dispatch, football and baseball matches are in progress on the town's square. The fair sex, clad in light spring clothing, turned out in force to attend the matches and to applaud the victors. The thermometer at this hour registers 49 degrees above zero. The air is clear and balmy, and farmers are only waiting the drying up of the fields to begin their spring work. Men are employed on five large public buildings in town, and the sounds made by the hammer and saw are heard in all directions." On the ranches among the foot-hills good springs that never freeze are fairly common, and the comparatively high temperature of the water is a great boon to the cattle and their owners ; while the grass, brown as it is, makes fine pasture. Most of the ranchers own a certain amount of land ; but, as cattle need about 15 acres a head if they have to forage for themselves all the year round, the freehold has to be supplemented by " free range " on the public land. A good deal of this is still available on the steep slopes and hill- tops, and some of it is never likely to be wanted FROM CATTLE TO HORSES 211 for agriculture ; but astonishingly unlikely spots are sometimes chosen for homesteads by rash new- comers. The rancher may awake any day to find a fenced farm cutting his herd off from their accustomed range on the hills unless he has managed to get a cattle lease from the Government, and such a lease, though nominally for 21 years, is not likely to be granted without a proviso that it is terminable at perhaps two years notice. Failing a lease, the rancher can only protect himself by buying more land from a railway company or by growing or buying hay for winter feed so as to accommodate his herd on a diminished area. A prudent rancher, it may be said, lays in a supply of prairie hay, no matter how large a range he has for his cattle ; for if the snow lies deep they starve, lacking the horses' sense to paw their food from under cover. Some ranchers, I find, are inclined to sell most of their cattle and go in for breeding horses, a far smaller number of which bring in an equal return. There is no doubt that a horse, besides appealing to the sentimental side of the average Englishman, is a very profitable creature when successfully raised. Let me quote the experience of an Irish gentleman whom I visited in a beauti- fully wooded river valley a day's ride from Macleod. His 51 " general purpose " mares presented him with 50 foals the first season, 46 212 THE HORSE MARKET the second, and 45 the third ; and in the three years he only lost one mare. He was offered $40 (£8), a piece for his sucking foals, but wisely resolved not to sell till they were of an age to bring the full price of farm-horses. An independent authority valued the brood mares at $80 (£16), a head, the young stock at an average of $75 (£15), the shire stallion at $850 (£170), and the land at $14 (58s.), an acre. This rancher, I should say, was no stranger either to the land or to the animal ; and not every herd would show such a rate of increase. Still, his experience shows what can be done in an ideal country for horse-breeding. If he should lose the free range behind his ranch, he could replace his mares by half their number of a heavier breed, whose offspring would be twice as valuable. The cattle rancher's difficulty is the horse rancher's opportunity. The settlers who annex the free range for their homesteads want horses to work the homesteads with, and are willing to give $350 (£70), for a satisfactory team, while higher grades fetch $400 (£80) and even $500 (£100) a pair. Incidentally, I may say that the Albertans see no money in thorough-breds, nor are they tempted to breed cavalry horses on the chance of a remount buyer accepting one or two in a season. It is, of course, a question how far the future development of automobiles, steam ploughs, MEAT-PACKING 213 and so forth may affect the situation ; but just now the horse market is decidedly good. On the other hand, the cattle market is depressed, and to change from cattle to horses means selling cheap and buying dear. Besides, to tell the truth, the demand for beef seems to have some elements of permanence which are not so plain in the case of horseflesh. The establishment of first-class meat- packing houses, such as are now projected at con- venient centres, may yet restore the prosperity, if they can not maintain the pre-eminence, of what is still one of the most important industries in Alberta. BLACKFOOT INDIANS, AND LATTER- DAY SAINTS The Indians can hardly be classed as New Canadians ; but it is not unimportant to know in what position they stand, with the tide of new life surging in around them. On the map, other- wise covered with a neat little chess-board pattern of townships six miles square — each of these forming a miniature chess-board of 36 " sections " — are about 40 undivided blocks of varying size showing the reserves held under treaty by Indian tribes. The largest tribe, known collectively as the Blackfoot nation, and speaking one language, occupies three reserves, the Blood and the Peigan, south of Macleod, and the Blackfoot reserve propei 60 miles further north near Gleichen. In 1885, when some of the Cree and Stoney tribes in the north went on the war-path against us and harried the country at the bidding of the half-breed leader, men held their breath for fear lest the warrior bands of the Blackfeet might plunge into the fray. If they had, the suppression of the Riel Rebellion would have been ten times bloodier than it was. The Blackfeet resisted every temptation, and INDIAN RIGHTS 215 kept the peace, thereby laying the Canadian people under an incalculable debt of gratitude. In spite — let us hope in ignorance — of this, the suggestion has been made that the Indians who occupy land now thought desirable by white men should be " persuaded " to give up the last fragments of their ancestral plains and allow themselves to be transplanted to some uncoveted region in the far north. At present, I trust, this idea is not cherished by any serious politician ; but the greed inspiring it is likely to increase as the good lands round the reserves are taken up, and the guardians of the nation's honour should be on the watch to prevent the first steps towards a repetition — with variations and aggravations — of the story of Naboth's vineyard. Inasmuch as 30 years ago these Indians were still in a state of primitive barbarism, and relieved by the abundance of buffalo from the slightest necessity for work, the extent to which they have adapted themselves to new conditions is really to their credit. A constant effort is made to bring over to the self-supporting list those who have been living on Government rations — a pauperizing process made necessary when the buffalo vanished. When I splashed through the Belly River and rode up on to the Blood reserve, I found them in possession of about 5000 head of cattle. They mow and stack a large amount of prairie hay, not 216 INDUSTRY only for their own winter use, but for the neigh- bouring ranchers. A good many of them own waggons, which they buy from the Government at $71 (over £14, 10s.) a-piece and pay for in cattle, which the Government agent needs in order to feed the poorer members of the tribe, or in wages earned by freighting and haymaking. Cultiva- tion of the soil is almost unknown among them, as it was almost unknown till lately among their white neighbours ; but now there is talk of an irrigation scheme, involving the construction of a 50-mile ditch through the reserve from the Belly River. This would be a big business ; but most of the cost would be defrayed from the tribal fund held in trust by the Government — a fund now being largely increased by the dollar a head per annum received from a ranching company for the grazing of a large herd of cattle on the reserve. If this scheme is carried out, the industrial pro- gress of these Indians, already satisfactory, should become much more rapid. Of their moral state it is less pleasant to speak. A large majority of the children are sent to one or other of the board- ing and industrial schools maintained by Anglican and Roman Catholic missions, the Government making a yearly grant of $72 per scholar ; and these scholars are kept more or less continuously under Christian influence till the age of 18. But those who afterwards prove more than nominal BLOOD CUSTOMS 217 adherents of Christianity are few ; and these Indians as a whole are in the loose condition of transition from the old system they have outgrown to the new system, which they have not assimi- lated. However, so far as offences against the country's law are concerned, the Indians can challenge comparison with their white fellow- citizens. Drunkenness, to be sure, tends to increase. It is naturally easier for Indians to get liquor now that short hair and white men's clothing make them almost indistinguishable from the half-breeds, to whom prohibitory laws do not apply. To check this evil a few constables have been appointed from among the Indians themselves, a step which the chiefs have long been urging. The Bloods still keep up some of their most notable customs, such as the great yearly sun- dance, and the dog-feast, when a dog is cere- moniously boiled and eaten. They have their secret society, with its proper initiation and degrees. They have even their medicine-man, who has some knowledge of herbs, but still uses noise as a remedy, and who gets magnificent prices (in currency of horseflesh) for his medicinal charms when he retires from business. Even a church-going Indian will sometimes call in the medicine-man in case of illness, though a qualified physician is maintained on the reserve by the 218 DISEASE Government. In knowledge of or respect for the laws of health the tribesmen have made little enough progress. If a child is hot with fever, the parents let it run naked in the snow. Many a patient who could be easily cured at the mission hospital is doomed if kept at home. A few years ago an epidemic of measles caused 90 deaths on this one reserve. The total population is over 1200, — females being in the majority, as on most of the reserves. Tuberculosis is the great cause of mortality, however, beginning as a skin or bone disease and finally fastening on the lungs. The power of such a scourge over these people is naturally increased by their modern habit of living in crowded loghouses all winter. The primitive tent is still the habitation of the Blood Indian in summer. It is a convenient edifice. I was fortunate enough to be present one day when practically all the Bloods and Peigans rode in to Macleod, bringing their houses with them rolled up in waggons or on the ancient travoy — two poles crossed over a pony's back, and trailing wide apart on the ground behind, with cross-sticks to carry the load. The next morning Macleod awoke to find itself neighboured by a large canvas suburb. The cause of this sudden migration was an announcement that Governor- General and a circus were to visit the town that day. A WAR DANCE 219 When his Excellency had been received in the formal and commonplace white way, with silk hats and bouquets and addresses, the Indians rode into the square and, dismounting, entertained him much more picturesquely with a dance. This might be more accurately described as a prance. The motion was a little monotonous, prancing round and round and in and out, with a single step ; and the music still more so, being the shrill shout of the dancers and the dull thump-thump of half a dozen Indians squatting round a drum in the middle of the dancing-ring. The dancers' costumes, on the other hand, were bewildering in variety. The basis was generally a suit of leather coat (or gaudy calico shirt), leggings and moccasins ; but the material was often hidden under masses of bead- work, blue and white and red, and the form disguised by flowing fringes of black-tipped white weasel-skins, or by miscellaneous attachments of feather and ribbon ; while the head-dress might be a pair of buffalo-horns gay with coloured streamers, on a proud structure of erect eagle-feathers with a feather tailpiece streaming down to the heels behind. One particularly gleeful redskin sported the national flag, cloak fashion, and his face was painted red with blue spots. Another wore one red stripe across the nose and cheeks and three down his chin, the facial ground- work 220 THE WOMEN'S DANCE being yellow ; but a commoner countenance consisted of round red spots on the natural brown. One brave had clothed his lower limbs in red paint as an airier substitute for leggings, his companions being rather over than under-clad. At last the performers fell back and their places were taken by women, the musicians rising to their feet and drumming on in that respectful position. The women's dance had even less variety than the men's, for they simply made a ring facing inwards to the drummers, shoulder to shoulder, and danced round sideways. Some of them wore nothing more picturesque than a perfunctory bunch of ribbon stitched on to plain black skirt and bodice ; but other dresses, though modern enough in shape and material, were of the gorgeous tints and patterns commonly manufactured in England for the ladies of Central Africa. Their smooth black hair was generally uncovered, but in one or two cases hidden by a handsome feather head-dress. In the afternoon, — having gloated over the circus, — some of the Bloods gave a musical ride, which was effective enough, though little more than a horse-back repetition of the morning's dance. Then the chiefs, " Crop-eared Wolf," " Thunder Chief," and lesser potentates, gathered round the Governor-General for a pow-wow, or a heckling. They, for the most part, wore sober POW-WOW WITH THE VICEROY 221 suits of black or navy-blue. They wanted more food distributed among their people. Lord Grey advised them to encourage their people to earn food by working. Then there was the question of the rent paid by the ranching company for the right to graze its cattle on the reserve. This the chiefs wanted distributed regularly among the tribe, like the yearly $5 per head paid by the Government under the treaty, instead of being capitalized in the " Indian Fund " for use in an indefinite future. Lord Grey could only reply that this was a matter for his Ministers. The chiefs next begged for the release of an Indian then in prison — that is, in the Mounted Police guard-room — for horse-stealing : but the Governor-General assured them that the culprit had only received half the sentence a white man would have got for a similar crime. As the answers were interpreted to them the chiefs showed no sign of impatience or discontent ; but I met four of them a few weeks later in a Canadian Pacific train — paying their first visit to Eastern Canada, by the way, and two of them enjoying their first experience of a railway journey — and they were bent on laying their demands before any official who might have power to grant them. I should add that the Macleod pow-wow festivities ended gloriously, from a Blood's point of view, with the shooting down on the prairie of half a 222 THE MOUNTED POLICE dozen steers, which were skinned, cut up, dis- tributed, cooked and eaten with the utmost promptitude. Also that the Governor-General supplemented this provision with a largesse of tea and real tobacco, — what the Indians commonly smoke being " kinikinik," the dried inner bark of the willow. It is doing no injustice to the good qualities of the Indians to say that the absence of serious crime among them is partly due to their respect for the North-West Mounted Police. Let me give an illustration. About ten years ago, a hundred or more Indians who had fled to the United States after the suppression of the Riel Rebellion were returning to their native Canada. They were carefully escorted by a whole troop of American cavalry to the frontier. There stood a corporal of police, one private constable, and an interpreter. The American officer looked round in bewilderment. " Who is in command ? " said he. " Myself," said the corporal. " But where is your troop ? " asked the officer. " Here they are," replied the corporal, pointing to his two comrades. The officer presently found breath to ask what the corporal proposed to do if the Indians turned sulky. " They won't," said the corporal decisively ; "we shall have no trouble with them." Nor had they ; the tribesmen going quietly back to their reserves as a matter of course. THE MOUNTED POLICE 223 The chief authority on a reserve is the Indian Agent, who not only exercises the authority of two ordinary magistrates, but is constantly appealed to by tribesmen for the settlement of private differences, matrimonial and other. If, however, a police sergeant or corporal is nearer, the Indians will often confidently bring their troubles to him instead. Twenty years ago the police had to protect the white man from the Indian. To-day, they have to protect the Indian from the white man. This they do perhaps as well as their numbers allow, but in at least one respect — more easily imagined than described — the protection is inadequate, and the danger naturally tends to increase with the growth of the surrounding white population. The same growth of white settlement has made necessary a vast change in the police force itself. Instead of being concentrated in large numbers at Battle- ford, Macleod, and a few other posts, they are scattered over the country in a multitude of small detachments. At this town you will find a commissioned officer, a constable, and a scout ; at that, a corporal and one other. Their military character survives in the rifle and the uniform, but their duties, in the region lately organized into the Provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, are becoming more and more those of civilian police- men. In the course of time the greater part 224 THE MORMONS of the force, as such, will possibly move out to the still unorganized territories in the north; but many of its present members are likely to stay where they are, transferring themselves to the new police which will have to keep order in the new Provinces. It is devoutly to be hoped that the new force will take over the spirit as well as the duties of the magnificent corps now under Commissioner Perry's command. Mean- while, for five years, an agreement has been made by which the Federal Government continues to maintain the force, reduced from a strength of 600 to 500, in the two new Provinces, each provincial Government paying $75,000 (£15,000) a year for their services. The police, old or new, will not be unaided in case of need. A corps of dragoons is now being raised by the Federal Government, under Colonel MacDonnelTs command, and will form not only an addition to the little standing army of Canada, but a nucleus and training school for a great mounted volunteer force, which should be easily raised among the young plainsmen of the West. The name of Mormon has an almost Blue- beardish horror for the general ear ; and yet what struck me most in going about among the Mormons of Southern Alberta was their extra- Ploughing a Prairie VVheatfield A Blood Indian Dance. {See page 219) POLYGAMY 225 ordinary ordinariness. I imagine it would be hard to find among them either great heights of intellect or great depths of depravity. Some of their Gentile neighbours express a strong conviction that the Mormons practise polygamy in Canada, as they do, or did, in the United States ; but the evidence seems of the slightest, and the accusation, if true at all, is probably true in a very small number of cases. To be sure, these are " orthodox " Mormons — not like the 94 sectarians " who accept the primal revelation of Joseph Smith but reject the polygamous teaching of Brigham Young as an innovation. Some of them thought, when they crossed the Canadian frontier, that by so doing they would escape the tyrannous decree of the United States Government forbidding them to have more than one wife a-piece. They were, however, promptly undeceived ; and any one possessing a second family had to make arrangements for its support in Utah while he brought the wife he preferred to Canada. Apart from the expense of keeping up two establishments, many a Mormon husband must have been considerably relieved when his better two-thirds were separated from each other by several hundred miles. A staunch defender of polygamy, at any rate in principle, said to me " My father and my wife's father were both polygamous children " — meaning, doubtless, 226 MORMON BEGINNERS children of polygamous parents — " but I saw there was so much trouble with a second wife that I only married one." Another Mormon more pungently observed, — " A neighbour of mine had five or six wives, and they fit like hell ! " It was about twenty years ago that the first half dozen Mormon families settled in Canada. Since then they have been coming in by the thousand, and they are still coming in, not only from Utah, but from Illinois, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, and Idaho. Their motive, whatever some of the first-comers may have expected in the way of freedom from law, is just that which brings Gentile Americans north — a hope of bettering their material con- dition. A few had land round Salt Lake City which they could sell at high prices. Others, however, were stranded in high and frosty valleys or in the domain of drought. Few of the early arrivals had any money to speak of ; and few, even to-day, come in " well-heeled." The poor Mormon would leave his family in a tent or " shack " and go off to earn a little money by hauling logs from the mountains or freighting goods from Lethbridge till his first crop was ripe. If he could not get a free homestead near his brother saints, he would buy land on the ten-year plan, paying six or seven per cent, interest on MOISTURE 227 the unpaid instalments. These land payments are still a burden on the community, and a good many of the debtors have had to ask an extension of time. Yet it would be a great mistake to think the Mormons an exception to the general rule of Albertan prosperity. Till recently their farming was on a small scale, but now farms of five or six hundred acres are common enough. The agriculture is not always of the thriftiest kind, but the wiser members of the community see the need of giving their land a summer fallow at regular intervals. The two chief Mormon colonies or " stakes " have as their centres the towns of Cardston and Raymond, both in the south-western corner of the province and within a few miles of the inter- national frontier. Mrs Card, by the way, who came in with her husband in 1887, was one of Brigham Young's daughters. In the more westerly colony, named after her, the settlers declare that they can grow fine crops of fall, or winter, wheat without irrigation. Some, indeed, appear to have left their American farms and come to Canada partly to escape the extra labour which irrigation entails. Two of the earliest pioneers, not Mormons, who have lived in the district over twenty years, assert that in that time only one season has been marked by in- sufficient moisture. When I rode down from 228 CARDSTON STAKE the plateau of the Blood Reserve, and found myself at once in the town of Cardston, I learnt that a couple of hailstorms on two consecutive days in July had cut a lane of devastation through the settlement, breaking every northern or western window in Cardston and wiping every trace of harvest clean out of their path ; but the last recorded hail-storm had been 16 years before, and the people were inclined to take the chance of another coming within the next 16 years rather than subscribe to the government's hail insurance fund. One farmer, whose whole crop had been destroyed, told me he could easily afford it, having had bumper crops several years running. The Mormons who planned the town site of Cardston did so apparently in a belief that it would become a Canadian rival to the parent Salt Lake City. The main street is an avenue of lordly breadth, and on the average " lot " a Brigham Young might build a house to accom- modate his whole family. If the plan is not spoiled by sub-division, Cardston may in time become a beautiful garden city ; but in its infancy, with its little houses standing forlorn on great squares of land, it rather reminds you of a small boy in his father's clothes. The Mormons are a clannish folk, as is natural with any peculiar people who know that their MORMON ORGANIZATION 229 peculiarity is not admired by the rest of the world. The kind of freemasonry that runs through their whole system tends certainly to exclusiveness. Their members are " advised " — and this may mean a great deal — not to join such Gentile friendly societies as the Foresters or Oddfellows, on the ground that their church is itself an efficient friendly society. Yet their intercourse with their neighbours is friendly and free enough ; they unite with Gentiles in political organization, though they would probably not vote for a Gentile if any Mormon candidate aspired to represent their district in the Provincial Legislature ; and their leaders warmly resent the charge of inhospitality brought against Mormon farmers by some of their Gentile neighbours. I have even heard of an old ex-Mormon who, far from being persecuted for his apostasy, not only continued to live at peace with his Mormon friends in the States, but followed them to Canada and settled among them near Cardston. Apostasy, it seems, the Mormon Church does not greatly fear. At any rate, one powerful safeguard against it exists in the fact that a very large proportion of the men hold some sort of ecclesiastical office. As expounded to me at length by the president (a storekeeper) and the bishop (a farmer) of the " stake," only intemper- ance or some other moral defect should debar 230 MORMON SERVICES any male Mormon from the priesthood, and he can attain the dignity of deacon at the age of twelve. It is the duty of " teachers " to keep iniquity out of the brotherhood. A Gentile will tell you indeed that Mormons try to shield each other from the law of the land, so long as the offender satisfies the law of the church. This the President emphatically denies. " I myself," he says, " have reported a Mormon criminal to the police. We do try to settle quarrels without going to law ; and an offender has to make re- paration before the church ; but we don't shield him from the law." Even Gentiles in search of justice, it is claimed, have sometimes applied to the Mormon Church courts. The beginnings of a tabernacle to seat 1600 had been made, and the building was to cost $30,000 (£6000), which had been already sub- scribed. Meanwhile public worship was con- ducted in an assembly room which was also used for " mutual improvement " meetings, theatricals, and other entertainments, includ- ing a dance every Friday night in winter. A Sabbath school is held from ten to twelve every Sunday morning ; and the regular service (with the sacrament) from two to four in the afternoon. At the latter the bishop presides, but he does not necessarily give the address. There is no " temple " in Canada yet ; so any Mormon MISSIONS AND SCHOOLING 231 wanting to get married with the rites of his church must journey to Salt Lake City or one of the three other temples in the United States. There is a " tithing house," and any Mormon who fails to bring the bishop one-tenth of his produce or income can neither enter a temple nor receive any promotion in the church. The bishop — who, like the rest, is an unpaid official — has to send the whole produce of the tithe, amounting to more than $12,000 (£2400), in Cardston " stake " in 1905, to the presiding bishop of the church at Salt Lake. A certain amount may be sent back for local purposes, but in this matter the colony is entirely at the mercy of headquarters. Whether the Canadian Mormons can afford to export a tenth of their income every year is a matter for themselves to decide ; but the country from which the money is sent has also a little interest in the matter. I may say that the Mormon community, which numbers in all about 420,000, spends a large amount in attempts to win over the world ; and that the Cardston " stake " alone sends out annually 15 or 20 amateur missionaries for campaigns of two or three years. The school at Cardston has about 500 children on the roll. It is a public school, but the children are nearly all Mormons, there is a Mormon principal, and the church supplements the taxes 232 DIET, IDEAL AND REAL by a subscription. The religious teaching is confined to the last half -hour, from 3.30 to 4, and some at any rate of the Gentiles appear to find it quite unobjectionable. The Mormon Church has its own " religion class organization," with special teachers, who, however, only take the children in hand once a week. According to the president and bishop, politeness is one of the virtues most insistently taught to the little Mormons, — I hope with more success than attends the spelling lesson, if a certain shop sign at Card- ston is a fair test : " Kandy and fruit ; Kand goods ; plain and fancy biskits." I am also assured that plain and healthy living is not only urged as a duty, but enforced as an ecclesiastical obligation. Tobacco, alcohol, and even such stimulants as tea and coffee are forbidden to the pious Mormon. The rule, however, is not of cast iron, allowances being made for the elderly and feeble ; and the community as a whole scarcely lives up to its ideal. There is much dyspepsia among the Mormons as among the other immigrants from the Western States, where the rudiments of healthy feeding are even less under- stood than in the dyspeptic East. Coffee, black enough to write with ; tea, thoroughly stewed ; hot " biscuit," the very opposite of " twice- cooked " ; and a constant succession of fried beef-steaks, — these are some of the favourite BEET-SUGAR AND IRRIGATION 233 scourges of the West. The deadly frying-pan is always at hand, and easily used. You will find Americans, otherwise sane, frying the dough instead of baking it, and calling the result bread. The orthodox Mormon, when ill, calls for the elders of his church, who come and pray and lay their hands on him and anoint him with holy oil ; but there are not many now who refuse to call in a doctor besides ; and there is a doctor of their own religious persuasion in Cardston, as well as a Gentile physician to whom a good many Mormons have now independence enough to resort. The Mormon colony at Raymond has, as I have said, risen like Cardston to the dignity of a " stake." The town is about half as large again as Cardston, which has a population of 1000. Raymond is chiefly distinguished by its possession of a beet-sugar factory, the beets being cultivated under irrigation with great success. There is a large number of Mormons near Claresholm also ; and, as I have said, on the old Cochrane ranch still another colony is springing up. Claresholm is a station on the Canadian Pacific running north from Macleod ; and Card- ston and Raymond have a railway to Lethbridge, on the Canadian Pacific further east. As to the future of these people, there seems no reason to doubt they that will contribute a very fair 234 FUTURE OF MORMONISM share to the trade of the country, as they are already doing much to increase its agricultural productiveness. They will also mingle more and more with their fellow-Canadians, in spite of their isolating system of mass settlement ; and this will almost certainly have a loosening effect on the mass, both socially and ecclesiastically, in spite of all the elaborate church harness in which they are held. Like the Jews, they were welded together by persecution ; but the comparative brevity of the welding period, and the lack of roots in a heroic past, make the analogy of very little value, so far as encouragement to hope for permanence is concerned. Joseph Smith's plates of gold are sadly handicapped in a durability competition with Moses and his tables of stone. However, I do not suggest that the dissolution of Mormonism is near at hand ; and meanwhile the Mormons may find some delicate internal problems coming up for solution, one of these being the question whether the Canadian branch shall continue taking orders from and paying tribute to the parent organization in another country. A WEST BEYOND THE WEST Beyond the foot-hills, the mountains. For Alberta, though a prairie province, runs up to the summit and watershed of the Rockies to find her western limit. One glimpse, and only one, may I give of this rugged edge of the New West. A drive of 60 miles west from Macleod, over the plain and up through the foot-hills, brought me to the mouth of the Crow's Nest Pass, a narrow opening where the Old Man River rushed out between two mountains which resembled a lion and turtle. Gushing out of a rock in the turtle's hind foot came a milky-white sulphur stream. The beavers had used this spot as a sanatorium ; their dam still obstructed the stream a few yards from its source, and the stumps of the trees they had felled stood all along the banks. Plunging through the sulphur- ous gorge, I found the pass widening into a valley, with a comparatively level bottom, shut in by mountains on every side. The turtle rose in the rear, shutting out the sunrise ; on the left, a dense pine forest sloped up from the southern bank of the river, clothing with green 235 236 IN THE CROW'S NEST PASS the foot-hills of a snow-streaked sierra. Another sharp-toothed ridge, grey but dashed with glistening white, seemed to bar the way to the west. Far off on the right, looking over the heads of all the intervening heights, the Crow's Nest towered in stony solitude, — a huge dome of naked rock, holding proudly aloof from clusters of peaks around. The road was bad beyond the reach of ad- jectives. In ten miles it forded the Old Man's River six times and smaller streams as many more. Then there was a brief interval of passable travelling. The woods retreated, and an enter- prising Scot had found the strath just wide enough to establish himself in a tent as the first and only settler in the Crow's Nest Pass. But a couple of miles further west the waggon trail came to a sudden end on the shores of a lake, which stretched from side to side of the pass. There was a bunch of horses roaming about the valley, and coming up to their owner's tent every night for a lick at a lump of rock salt ; but they had not yet learnt a horse's duty to a man, and after a wild experience on the backs of two of them I judged them hardly fit for the delicate work of negotiating precipices. I therefore went on up the pass on foot. The scene now became exquisitely beautiful. A gentle breeze came wandering down the pass, LAKE AND MOUNTAIN 237 and the ripples plashing on the eastern beach made harmony with the tapping of the wood- peckers. Other sound there was none, nor sign of man's existence. A rocky bridle path struck off to the right, but, narrow as it was, it found no room to pass along the shore, and had to climb over a shoulder of the mountain. Up and down it went, at most impracticable angles, now overtopping the fir trees that sprang from the edge of the lake, then dipping almost into the clear green water beside their roots. Here the footing was of solid rock, and there it lay among sharp loose fragments brought down with the winter avalanches. As the trail came round a mountain spur and fell once more to the level of the lake, a vague and distant murmur broke into a deafening roar, and a torrent crossed the path. A single tree- trunk carried me safely over. Pouring out of a cave in the overhanging cliff the little river thundered down in a waterfall. The path now rose, steeper and rockier than ever, till I was glad to climb with hands as well as feet, marvelling that a fingerless pony with 500 lb. of freight on his back should be able to make the ascent at all. Now and then, even a sure- footed Indian cayuse had failed in the attempt, and toppled over into the lake. After another sharp descent the trail lost itself in a jungle. Mountains, lake, sky, all were hidden by the 238 BURNT FOREST dense brush that threatened to put out the traveller's eyes and made it hard to distinguish the path under his feet. On this path, or close to it, an Indian hunter not long before had come upon his quarry before he could aim his gun, and perished in the embrace of a grizzly bear. The bushes drew back and the trail passed out into a desolate stretch of burnt forest, where the click of a grasshopper and the momentary gleam of his yellow wings alone enlivened the scene of death. The mountains on the other side of the pass reappeared, so close and so high that they seemed ready to fall upon the invading mortal. The climbing sun peeped over the jagged edge and illuminated the snow he could not melt ; but the beautiful vision was marred by the rake of blackened stems through which it appeared. Unhappily, such devastation as this is not rare in Canada, east or west. A few miles further south I had seen a mountain of valuable timber on fire for a week, and I left it burning. The grimy desert was left behind, and the land lived again. A rivulet babbled down the trail, careless of passengers' rights. Streams innumer- able crossed the path, of water most temptingly cold and exquisitely pure. Grouse fluttered up in disgust from under my feet. Squirrels and chipmunks chattered protests against the intru- sion. Another lake appeared, exquisitely beautiful COAL MINES 239 like the first, with an eagle soaring overhead and a flock of wild duck breaking the reflection of the mountains on the shining surface. A few miles beyond this point rose the sources of the Old Man's River, and the next little stream was flowing west — to the Pacific instead of the Atlantic. Behind lay Alberta ; ahead, British Columbia. It was the top of the Crow's Nest Pass. That is what the pass looked like when I went up into it first, as lately as 1893. When I went next it was by railway, a Canadian Pacific line running right over into the Kootenay mining region of British Columbia. The mountains were still there, and the lakes, and the waterfall — you can see its picture in a guide-book — but through the pass runs a string of mining towns, coking ovens, sidings, stations, and other unfortunate necessities of civilization. The Crow's Nest Pass, in fact, is one of the richest sources of coal supply in Canada. People who must have their mountain scenery unalloyed have after all a tremendous field to choose from in the West. They can spare the Crow's Nest to the utilitarian coal-burning world. I should like to take my readers over the " great divide " and down into British Columbia. That Province, when not summarily sentenced asa" sea of mountains," is commonly supposed to produce little but minerals and timber. Never- 240 FRUIT RANCHING theless, west of the mountains, and even in the midst of them, there is a vast amount of first-rate farming land. Lord Aberdeen has a great ranch in the Okanagan Valley where apples and plums are grown to perfection, under irrigation, and he is cutting up part of the estate into small holdings. Further down the valley, but still in the " sea of mountains," peaches are the favourite crop. These and many other successes and experiments promise to make British Columbia a rival of California. British Columbia, however, demands a book to itself. It is a Province apart, unique, magni- ficent, and will not be crushed into the same pair of covers with the prairie home of the New Canadians. m - - 1 ^^^^^ n , e e e d r r s e r*~> The ranching country of Souther Alberta slopes up through the fool hills to the Rocky Mountains. Ther as the traveller goes west by th Canadian Pacific Railway, rang follows range, of indescribabl variety and grandeur, intersperse with fertile and beautiful valleys This is a scene in the Fraser Rive Valley, in the far south-west corne of the Dominion, only forty mile from the Pacific Ocean, and on th frontier of the United States. HOW THE NEW CANADIANS LIVE The Westerner " lives well." That is to say, he has plenty of good food ; but he does not always make the best use of it, and in feeding if in little else I should not advise old-country folk to adopt the new-country ways in a hurry. The American, and the Canadian also, generally take too much meat, made as indigestible as possible in the frying pan ; and they scarcely draw that distinction between summer and winter diet which the climate suggests. They also take too much tea. I have travelled over the prairie with an old freighter who fed himself — and me, as I remember with pain — at every halt, making five times a day, on fried salt pork, bread, and boiled tea. The western farmer is not a primitive barbarian like that, but he still boils his tea, and the copper-bottomed tea-pot is left simmering indefinitely on the stove for casual use. As a rule, however, there is plenty of variety in the farmer's bill of fare. He takes porridge and milk for breakfast as well as his fried pork or beef -steak, salt pork being chiefly used in summer and fresh frozen beef in winter. Many Q 3 4» 242 FOOD AND DRINK of the Americans come in with a habit of taking coffee, but soon fall in with the ways of the country and give it up for tea. Bread making is not as common an art as it should be, and thick bannocks or scones are commonly used when there is no baker within reach. For dinner, besides the regulation meat and potatoes, and bread and butter and tea, the Canadians, and of course the Americans, will have their round flat pies, containing fruit sandwiched between the upper and under crust, — an article known distinctively as American, but exactly similar to the pies I have seen exposed for sale by market women in the old country. There will also be plenty of stewed fruit; either the fresh barrelled apples bought by the well-to-do farmer, or dried apples and apricots, or the small fruits that grow wild almost all over the West, such as strawberries, raspberries, black and red currants, gooseberries, choke-cherries, huckleberries, and cranberries. The supper, taken as soon as the day's work is done, is practically a repetition of the breakfast or dinner, with the porridge perhaps left out. Alcoholic drinks are very seldom used or even kept in the house ; and, though many a Westerner who abstains at home will not refuse a nip when he goes to town, total abstinence is much more common out there than in the old country. Many Englishmen develop into abstainers when they VENTILATION AND BATHING 243 emigrate ; which is just as well, as alcohol has an even speedier and worse effect in the dry western air than it has in the moister atmosphere of the United Kingdom. In the matter of ventila- tion, the Canadian is behind even the Englishman, — which is saying a good deal. I know a western farmer who always sleeps with his window slightly open even in the depth of winter ; but on the whole, the people think of fresh air simply as something cold to be kept out, and with this object a vast number of them go the length of pasting up every crack. Increase of knowledge as to the bad effect of second-hand air on the health is leading to some improvement ; scientific systems of ventilation will be adopted by and by ; and meanwhile some of the better-informed old- timers are advising new-comers to build all living and sleeping rooms with high ceilings. As for bathing, which the Englishman — thanks to a small minority of his race — is supposed to make a daily religious practice, it is customary in varying degrees. One Westerner assures me that it is " practically unknown except among the British settlers " ; another, that there is " not enough of it among average settlers " ; while others declare that the weekly " tub " is common, and nearly all agree that if there is a lake or river near, the young fellows go in either daily or at any rate very often, in summer. 244 HARD WORK There is a ridiculous legend, started by the " slacker " and spread by the credulous, that the Canadian farmer is a sort of slave-driver or sweater. Such a man is to be found here and there ; and the Salvation Army is compiling a black list of rascals who will hire a man " on trial " for a month, pick a quarrel with him just before the month is out, send him off without a dollar of wages, and repeat the operation on the next new-comer. But there is no country where all the rascals are behind bars ; and in Canada, where there is keen competition for farm hands, the average farmer would treat his men well from selfish motives even if he was not, as he is, an honest man. It is just as well, to be sure, that an emigrant should be warned not to expect too easy a life. The season for work on the land is comparatively short, so that you have to take advantage of every hour and be ready to work from early in the morning till late at night. But in England I know many farmers, not to speak of farm labourers, who seem to work nearly as long and nearly as hard, not only in summer but almost all the year. You will find men here and there, even in the West, who take life easily. Content, I suppose, with a very moderate return, they spend their toil at a very moderate rate. The average farmer, however, is neither a sweater nor a sluggard. A good farmer, a man of prairie SUNDAY 245 experience, will get up about five, feed the horses, have his breakfast, and be at work on the land with his team by seven. He will dine at noon, get to work again at half-past one, and knock off for the night about six. Many a farmer, however, perfers to rise earlier, start on the land about six, take a long rest in the heat of the day, — say from eleven to three or even four, — and then go back to his work and keep it up till twilight fades into darkness. Whichever his plan, the master expects his man to do as he does. After such a full day of hard out-door work, neither of them wants to stay long out of bed when supper is despatched, and there is little thought of recreation beyond the evening pipe. Sunday, apart from necessary attention to live stock, is kept as a day of rest. There is, in fact, a strong sentiment throughout the West against Sunday labour ; and even railway construction, urgent as it is, has to pause from Saturday to Monday. Some farmers spend at any rate part of the day doing petty repairs, while their wives go to church ; but many men, quite unused to church-going in the old home where there is a church at every man's door, adopt the habit in a half-settled country where churches are few and far between and a religious service is an event of some rarity. In some localities it is remarked that nearly all the settlers attend service whenever one is 246 RECREATION announced, and whatever the denomination may be that gives them the opportunity. Some of them, at any rate, whether they would subscribe to any creed or none, are grateful for the influence that lifts them every now and then from the rut of material interests and ambitions ; and the rest at any rate appreciate the variety that a weekly or fortnightly or monthly service brings into their lives, not to speak of the oppor- tunity of meeting their often distant neighbours. When no service is held, or when, as is common there is only one service because the minister has to visit two or three centres every Sunday, a part of the day is given up to social intercourse, a recreation all the more enjoyed when every visit means a drive of several miles. Visiting and reading, in fact, are the staple recreations of the West, all the year round. Few have any large store of literature ; but the books are being constantly lent. In summer and autumn, except in the very busiest seasons, there is always a certain amount of baseball, football, and more rarely cricket, wherever settlement has grown out of its earliest and sparsest stage. I find that next to the climate the loneliness of prairie life is what the English emigrant most dreads. To a townsman or towns woman, of course, life in the country is always lonely, and even the English farm labourer will find less company on his WINTER OCCUPATIONS 247 Canadian homestead than in his native home ; but in the districts now being settled up the isolation is steadily lessening. It is true that the English and Canadian farmers live on their own farms, and not in villages like the Dukhobors ; but unless the settler has gone particularly far afield, he is not likely to be many months without neighbours, and neighbours out there are neigh- bourly. In winter, though there is always a certain amount of work to be done, — and appreciably more where there are cattle than on a purely grain-growing farm, — there is plenty of time for recreation. The boys make a skating rink on the nearest slough ; and their elders make up moon- light sleighing parties. With the pure white country snow covering the ground, the moon and stars shining down through the clearest atmosphere in the world, and a frequent display of aurora, the night is often so light that you can shoot a coyote at a range of a quarter of a mile. Dances and card parties are common in farm- houses, — gambling, by the way, being rare either then or at any other time. In a village, the churches are centres of communal life ; as in other parts of the English-speaking world, the church " social " or concert is a most popular institution, and in many places these are supplemented by debating societies and reading circles. The 248 SCHOOLS Sunday School, of course, must have its annual picnic ; and picnics are also a common way of celebrating " Queen's Birthday " and Dominion Day. The yearly visit of a circus attracts the whole population from a radius of many miles ; and a theatrical company sometimes goes the round of the larger towns. Some of the English ranchers hunt the coyote with dogs ; but hunting, even in its western sense of shooting, is not a very common form of sport, though a farmer may now and then take his gun and bring home a few prairie chicken or wild duck. As cheerful a sight as meets your eye as you travel through the West is the little prairie school house. Wherever there are twelve children in an area five miles square the Government forms a school district. The school is managed by three local trustees. The Government pays a large part of the cost, the remainder being raised by a school tax, which varies from $4 to $15 (16s. 8d. to 62s. 6d.) a year on a farm of 160 acres, the average being perhaps $6 (25s.). Attendance at school is compulsory, but in many districts so far the enforcement of this law has been rather lax, and, as generally happens elsewhere, the children from homes where education is most needed are most likely to be irregular in attend- ance. This, however, is but a passing phase. Even the most ignorant Gajicians are coming SCHOOL AND OTHER RATES 249 to see the value of schooling, and such is the spirit of the West that the educational interests of New Canada are in no danger whatever of being neglected either by the Governments or by the people at large. By the end of 1906 there had been organized 1399 school districts in Manitoba, 1190 in Saskatchewan, and 742 in Alberta, and the Saskatchewan Legislature has already made provision for a Provincial University. The only direct tax levied on the settler, in addition to the education rate, is a local improve- ment tax, for the up-keep of roads, bridges being generally built and maintained by the Government. The local improvement tax in a new district amounts to about $4 (16s. 8d.) a year on the quarter section ; two days' personal work on the road, or one day if a man brings his team, being taken as equivalent to the cash. THE FUTURE The future of the great territory I have attempted to describe should be made a subject of earnest, if not anxious, thought by all who desire the welfare of our Empire and our race. So far as material things go, there is no cause for anxiety about the future of the country in general. Here and there, now and then, damage may be caused by drought and other accidents of weather, or by disease among live stock and crops ; but Canada is less subject to these scourges than most other countries, and it is unlikely in the extreme that the districts affected will at any time be more than a small fraction of the whole Dominion. Over-speculation may cause a tem- porary set-back in commerce ; but the natural resources of the country are so varied and so vast that speedy recovery is as certain as any- thing in human affairs can be. Land may be " boomed " up to a point above its value ; but that point is still far out of sight. The choice land in possession of the Western Canada Com- pany, to give only one instance, has fetched during the past season an average of about $9 250 THE NEED OF THE FUTURE 251 an acre ; but the land — probably inferior, and certainly not superior — in the Western States of the neighbouring republic, from which many of the purchasers come, is fetching $40, $50, or even more. It is not, however, of material prosperity that I am chiefly thinking. Amid all the exhilaration and satisfaction caused by a sight of hundreds of thousands of human beings transforming a wilderness into a garden under the British flag, the question constantly arises, and with growing insistency, " What are the British people going to do about it ? " Children now at school may live to see a time when the Canadian part of our Empire will contain a larger population than the Motherland itself. How can we in the United Kingdom and the Dominion to-day, the present guardians of the Imperial destiny, help to ensure that the future population of Canada, with its fast increasing influence in our councils, and possibly destined to be the predominant partner, shall grow not only in material and moral prosperity, but in solidarity and brotherhood with the Motherland and all other lands now joined together under the British flag ? It is not enough to put aside with a smile the extravagant visions of certain American prophets who think that the American farmers, to-day deserting the United States for Canada, will to-morrow insist on Canada's be- 252 GOVERNMENT AND FARMER coming a part of the United States ; or of those who imagine that the western half of the Dominion will at any rate secede from the eastern half, and set up a separate commonwealth of its own. The question is, how to strengthen those feelings and those interests which tend to keep such extrava- gant dreams from ever becoming the ideal of any appreciable section of the Canadian people. Obviously, the Canadian people and Govern- ments can do far more to ensure a satisfactory solution to this problem than the people and Government of the Motherland, especially in the direction of material prosperity. They have done much already. The western farmer enjoys, it is true, great advantages in the shape of virgin soil, freedom from rent, and very low direct taxa- tion ; he is, moreover, an enterprising person, capable of making the most of his advantages ; yet the federal and provincial authorities have not allowed this consideration to make them fold their arms and let the farmer paddle his own canoe. The experimental farm system, which I have already described, is one of the most effective means yet devised by the Federal Government for helping the farmer. The provincial Govern- ments also are entering into partnerships with their farming constituents in a way to which we in England are unaccustomed. The Albertan Department of Agriculture, for instance, en- THE TARIFF 253 courages the dairy industry by marketing the butter which it produces. The direction, how- ever, in which Government, the Federal Govern- ment in this case, may find it hard to satisfy the farmers' demands is indicated by the word tariff. In framing any national Customs tariff the Canadian Government is confronted by the obvious fact that such protection as the manu- facturing East would like would be far from agreeable to the agricultural West. But this conflict of interests occurs in almost every country, and there is no serious reason to suppose that a compromise which the two interests will accept cannot be arrived at. Of the greater tariff question, that concerning a preferential or reciprocal trade arrangement between the different countries of the Empire, I shall venture to say no more than that the increase of Canadian population, and especially of that section of it which produces what we want and consumes what we can supply, must strengthen the argument in favour of safeguarding and increasing by every practicable means the trade between the Mother Country and the Dominion. Vastly important as such material considera- tions are, there are moral — sentimental if you like — considerations which are hardly less urgent. The people who emigrate to Canada from the United Kingdom, even when they know they 254 KNOWLEDGE OF THE EMPIRE are driven to do so because the United Kingdom has not given them a chance of work for them- selves or prospect of work for their children, have naturally a feeling of affection for the Mother Country which you cannot expect to find among immigrants of other races. It is in the power of the Canadian Governments, by just laws and their just enforcement, greatly to foster the devotion of all new-comers to the institutions of their adopted land, and indirectly, of course, to the Empire of which that land forms a more and more valued part. A great deal might be done, however, and perhaps more by individual than Government means, to create and foster among these new-comers a knowledge of the Empire to which they have come, and especially of the Old Country, which for many years must hold the headship of the great British Confederacy — a knowledge which ought to produce appreciation, and perhaps a feeling even stronger than that. The Government of Manitoba, as is well known, has set an admirable example — which we in England would follow, if our authorities were not so fearful of being thought " demonstrative " — by decreeing that the country's flag shall be flown over every school. Whether a similar law has yet been passed in the newer Provinces I am not aware ; but I know that the flag is flying over many of their schools, law or no law, CHEAP POSTAGE TO BE USED 255 and that in still more of these schools, if not in all, the children are being taught what the privileges and the duties of British citizenship mean to them and to the world's life in which this Empire should always be a beneficent factor. One of the most hopeful methods yet invented with the object of fostering brotherhood among the British nations is the system of inter-com- munication between schools in different parts of the British world, initiated by the League of the Empire. But it has to be remembered that people nowadays, and this to a greater extent through- out the North American continent than even in Europe, depend for their information, and un- consciously for their opinions, largely on the newspaper press. The reduction of postage rates on newspapers and other forms of litera- ture from this country to the Dominion is there- fore a step of no little consequence ; and even now that this reform has been secured, there is need of an organized effort to make full use of its advantage. Many people in this country, I know well enough, send newspapers regularly to their friends who have gone to Canada ; but the great majority of immigrants find themselves dependent for their news entirely on the local Press, which is necessarily most concerned with local affairs and gets most of its news of Old Country matters filtered through American 256 OPEN COMMUNICATION agencies. I should like to commend to such organizations as I have already mentioned, and to individuals throughout the land, the Imperial advantage and the imperious need of seeing as far as possible that every one who leaves these shores is kept in regular communication with those who remain. To establish such communica- tion with people who have gone into Canada from the United States or from Continental Europe would be more difficult, but, being also even more desirable, should be carried out in spite of the difficulty. The task of preserving, strengthening, and, where it does not yet exist, creating a sense of brotherhood between the inhabitants of the Old Country and the new is one that must surely commend itself as an imperative duty to the Churches, whose very foundation is brotherhood. The authorities of the Church of England, and especially of such organizations as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the Colonial and Continental Church Society, have shown that they realize the need, and are doing much, though little in proportion to the wealth of their communion — endeavouring chiefly to establish churches and provide clergymen and lay workers among the settlers who have gone out from England. The Nonconformists are EMIGRATION 257 also doing something in this direction, though they might do much more. They probably feel that most of the settlers coming into Canada from the United States have been connected with Methodist, Presbyterian, and other non- Episcopal Churches — Nonconformist is happily an unmeaning and obsolete word in America — and that they are better off financially than the emigrants who leave these shores. But this very fact, though rendering the need of church-building less urgent, offers British Non- conformists a magnificent opportunity for opening fraternal communication with the American element in the New West. Nor should it be forgotten that in the aggregate a very large number of the immigrants from this side have been more or less closely connected with Noncon- forming or, in Scotland, Presbyterian Churches. If it is said that any of these suggestions involve a new departure of perhaps an uncon- ventional kind, the reply is simply that the situation to be dealt with is novel, and con- ventionality is not going to solve the problem. The subject of emigration I have already dealt with ; but, as it is most closely connected with that of racial and Imperial unity, I am com- pelled to emphasize, in closing, the desirability, in the interest of this country and the Empire as a whole, of encouraging would-be emigrants R 258 FOREIGNERS WANTED of the right sort to make new homes for themselves within the borders of the Empire. If, however, both the quality and the number of British emi- grants go on rising as they are rising now, while our birth-rate goes on falling, the most doggedly conservative of our people, whether they call themselves Liberal or Tory, will demand that " something must be done " to make the Old Country's life more attractive and her industries more lucrative. " We cannot lose all our best blood," people are saying already ; and, though it is emphatically true that emigration is simply a movement from one part of " our country " to another, it is also true that defective social condi- tions or short-sighted fiscal policy may drive our able-bodied and able-minded men across the sea to an extent positively injurious to that part of the Empire which they leave. And, even if no check is put on the emigration movement, it is quite evident that these islands alone cannot supply anything like the amount of humanity that the vast spaces of Canada are waiting and thirsting for. I should not fear a considerable influx even of Japanese and other Asiatics, though I am well aware of the special arguments against such a movement, and therefore I do not press the point. As to the Continental races of Europe, even the most backward of them, it would be the height of folly to discourage their emigration to Canada. FINANCE 259 With any rational and patriotic system of educa- tion in their new home, these people will in a generation or less be intelligent English-speaking citizens ; and they will reinforce the stock from which the future British race must be produced. In emigrationfrom the United Kingdom to Canada, though the new country gains more than the old loses, the local loss must be taken into account. The immigration of foreigners — of course not those of the undesirable and unimprovable type — is a clear gain to the Empire. One word more. Canada, as the High Com- missioner has said in the preface, needs money as well as men for her development. Mr Courtney, till lately the Deputy Minister of Finance at Ottawa, warned us some time ago against " wild- cat " schemes ; and every honest Canadian emphatically echoes his words. Unfortunately, however, people over here, in their comparative ignorance of conditions over there, may be tempted to shun all Canadian schemes, for fear they should find themselves unawares in a " wild- cat's " claws. Here, then, is an occupation ready made for some trustworthy financial authority, with no suspicion of having an axe to grind, who will help British investors to discriminate clearly between Canadian schemes which are hopeless and insane and those which are at any rate sane and hopeful ; or between purely 260 A LAST WORD speculative projects and those which, being based on the fertile land itself, are " as good as the bank." It is a pity that, through fear born of ignorance, the British investor keeps out of Canadian fields into which the American investor pours his money with confidence ; and I say this knowing very well that many millions of British money are invested in Canadian Government stocks and other gilt-edged securities. It is a pity also that a great representative Canadian con- cern like the Canadian Pacific Railway, with its almost fabulous possessions in land, should be treated on the New York and even on the London Stock Exchange as if it were merely one of the bunch of " American rails M that seem to exist for speculators to juggle with. The moral of which is, like the moral of everything I have attempted to say in these pages, that the people of this old centre of the British State should seriously study the problems of Greater Britain ; and, in the power of knowledge, should, while there is time, take such individual and collective action as will preserve, develop, and unify the King's whole realm. INDEX Aberdeen, Earl of, 240 Alberta Province, 104, 133 ; cli- mate, 105, 118, 128, 137, 208 ; population, 66, 69; produce, 129, 130; water question, 196, 201, 227 American immigrants, 53, 89, 92, 194, 195 ; statistics, 54, 70, 106 ; origins, 107, 129, 134; character, no; Americanism and British citizenship, 57, 107, 109 ; specu- lation, 112 ; Iowans, 78, 120, 147, 204 ; a stopping - place keeper, 1135a dissatisfied plains- man, 106 ; bringing in the family, 12X ; Californians, 134 ; Minne- sotans, 146, 192 ; Manxman, 178 ; Mormons, 224 Animals, wild, 119, 182, 189 ; mosquito and bull-dog fly, 46, 47; coyote, 162, 183, 189, 248; skunk, 186 ; birds, 170, 182, 183, 189, 239; gopher, badger, fox, 33, 145, 183 ; snake, 183 ; ante- lope, 189, 191 ; bear, 238 Asiatics, 258 Assiniboia, 64 Athabasca, 48, 64 ; Landing, 137 ; River, 137 "Baching," 100 Bad Hills, 189 Bathing, 34, 243 Batoche, 43, 50 Battlefield : Cutknife Hill in 1885, 36; to-day, 91, 160 Battleford in 1885, 29, 35 ; to-day, 160 Battleford, North, 90 Battle River, 35, 130, 159 Beaver dam, 235 Beaver Hills, 130 Beaver River, 46, 48 Bee-keeping, 82 Beet sugar, 233 Brandon, 69 British Columbia, 203, 239 Buffalo (bison), 10, 130 Bull-dog Creek, 179 Calgary, 199, 209 Canora, 89 Capital, need of, xi, 259 Cardston, 227 Carrot River, 86 Cattle and horses : in Manitoba, 81, 82 ; Saskatchewan, 195 ; Alberta, 199, 204, 206 ; ranch leases, 206, 211 ; Cochrane ranch, 206 ; prices, 207 ; free range, 210 ; horse-breeding, 211 ; horses in Crow's Nest Pass, 236 Cayuse and bronco, 32, 45, 203 Chamberlain, 145 Church Army, 53 Churches, work of, 117, 132, 178, 245, 256; foreign, 71, 125; a parsonage, 179 Churchill, 84 Claresholm, 233 Climate, 33, 45. 54, 7». 75. 83, 105, 118, 137, 138; winter, 60, 94, 128, 210; and health, 47, 127, 157, 208 ; long days, 138 ; rain- fall question, 195 ; wind, 202, 209 ; hail, 228 Coal, 239 Cold Lake, 48 Communication and travel : early ways, 9, 20, 21 ; stern- wheel steamboat, 35, 49, 59 ; by trail to Edmonton, 105 ; rail from Regina to Saskatoon, 144 ; trail to Battleford, 148 ; to Cutknife, 162; across country, 171, 177; Swift Current trail, 181 ; dry camp, 190; the cow-catcher, 203 ; freighter's waggon, 205 ; cost of freighting, 116 Co-operation among settlers, 87, 135, 153 Country, character of: soil and capacity, 22, 23, 62, 76, 118 ; general summary, 57; treeless prairie, 31, 83, 182, 199; park 361 262 INDEX lands, 36, 46, 104, 163, 182 ; valleys, 48, 154, 159, 193 ; water, 45, 171, 191, 195 ; alkali lakes, 183, 190 ; forest and swamp, 46, 48 ; the prairie in autumn, 123 ; the Far North, 137 ; prairie, primeval, 182 ; semi-arid area, 181, 190 ; wells, 172, 173, 188 ; gumbo, 191 ; mountains, 235 Cow-boy, the, 133 Crow's Nest Pass, 203, 235 Cypress Hills, 195 Dairy produce, 81, 253 Dragoons, new force, 224 Drainage works, 83, 129 Drink, 242 Duck Lake, 26, 50 Dukhobors, 149 Dundurn, 146 Dun vegan, 137 Dutch settlers, 134 Eagle Creek, 154, 189 Edmonton : Alberta's capital, 104, 130 ; Proclamation Day, 133 ; as a railway centre, 136 Education: 248,249; school lands, 62, 63 ; school-book traveller, 90 Elevators, 80 Elk Park, 130 Emigrants : questions of, 13 ; right and wrong sort, 96, 257 ; emi- gration societies, 52 ; fares, 53. See also Immigration English people, 91, 163, 203 ; the all-British colony, 91 ; and climate, 94 ; town boys' success, 98 ; Alberta ranchers, 207 Esterhazy, 144 Expansion of Canada, 16 Farm implements, prices of, 135 Farm speculation, 112 Farmers and Government, 142, 252 Farmers and their men, 244 Farming, mixed, 81 Farms, experimental, 142 " Fertile Belt," 23 Fires, precautions against, 145, I 73» 189 ; burnt forest, 238 Fish, 71 Flag, the, 254 Flowers, wild, 46 Food: 34, 113, 158, 241; Galicians', 127 ; Mormons', 232 Foresters, Order of, 87 Fort Garry, 9, 67 Fort Pitt in 1885, 28, 46 ; to-day, 92 Fort Saskatchewan, 131 Fort Simpson, 137 Fort Vermilion, 138 Freighting, cost, 116, 155 ; an old freighter, 205 French Canadians, 54, 119, 135, 173, 180 Frog Lake massacre, 27, 46, 92 Fruit, 119, 143, 240, 242 Fur trade, 20, 131 Future of the West, 10, 65, 250 Galicians : in Manitoba, 70, 86; in Alberta, 123; a bothy, 124 Geological Survey, 22, 84 Germans, 54, 89, 143, 149, 177 Gimli, 71 Great Slave Lake, 137 Grey, Earl, at Edmonton, 133; at Macleod, 219 Hal f-b reeds: ancestry and character, 20 ; Riel's rebellions, 24, 25, 185; St Albert, 134; Sixty-mile Bush, 184. See also Risings Hanley, 145 Haultain, 146 Hecla, 71 Herbert, 197 Holidays, 109, 248 Horses. See Cattle, and Cayuse Hotels, 90; and "stopping- places," 113, 158 Houses of settlers : log house, 175, 187 ; sod house, 178, 187 ; plank shack, 179 ; a rancher's home 208 ; Galicians', 124 ; Duk- hobors', 150 ; ventilation, 243 Hudson's Bay Company: early history of territory, 19 ; terms of annexation to Canada, 23 ; Company's land holding, 62 ; Edmonton store, 132 ; Fort Vermilion flour mill, 138 Hudson's Bay Route, 84 Humboldt, 89 Hungarians, 144 INDEX 263 Icelanders, 71 Immigrants: statistics, 51 ; harvesters, 68 ; effect of the West on new-comers, 72 Imperial questions, 251, 254 Indian Head, 142 Indians: early trade with, 20; treatment of, 26 ; Big Bear, 27 ; Poundmaker, 29, 170; Mooso- min, 44, 91 ; Chippewayans, 47 ; Cree farmers, 164, 199 ; Blackfoot, Blood, and Peigan, 214 ; coveted reserves, 215 ; self- support, 215; education and morality, 216; Blood customs, 217 ; disease, 218 ; war-dance at Macleod, 219 ; and Mounted Police, 222 Irish horse-rancher, 211 Irrigation : in U.S., 55, 198, 227 ; in Western Canada, 64, 198 Japan, trade with, 58, 201 Jews, 144 Keewatin Territory, 84 Labour : nawying, 60 ; farm work, 68, 75, 244 Lake Dauphin, 86 Lake Manitoba, 86 Lake Winnipeg, 71 Lake Winnipegosis, 86 Land available for cultivation, estimate of, 63, 84 Land, for sale, 54, 63, 64, 87, 142; land companies, 64 Land, free, 54, 106, 135; home- stead conditions, 57, 157 ; abuses, 158 ; homestead statis- tics, 57, 62 Land, division of, 214 Land booms, 67 Lands, school, 62, 63 Lipton, 143 Literature, 115, 246, 255 Lloyd, Archdeacon, 39, 40 Lloydminster, 91 MacDonnell, Col., 224 Mackenzie Territory and River, 137 Macleod, 202 Makaroff, 88 Manitoba : first settlement, 21, 67; Province formed, 25; the Province to-day, 67; popula- tion, 69 ; farming, 74 ; surface, 83 ; extension of boundaries wanted, 84 ; Dauphin region, 86 ; the flag, 254 Mannville, 105 Melfort, 109 Mennonites, 89, 197 Migrations, the great, 15 Money : Dollars and £ s. d., 32 Moose Jaw, 142 Moosomin, 142 Mormons in Alberta, 224 ; poly- gamy, 225; organization, 229; education, 231 ; diet and health, 232 ; future, 234 Newspapers, 117, 176, 255 North, the Far, 136 Norwegians, 9a Old Man River, 235 Ontarians, 178, 179, 187, 205 Otter, Col., 31 Park lands, 36, 46, 104, 163, 182 Past and present, 16 Peace River, 137 Perry, Commissioner, 224 Pianos, 200 Pioneers, 137 Poles, 56 Police, N.W. Mounted : in war time, 26, 28, 37 ; headquarters, 140; Macleod, 202 ; and Indians, 222 ; present duties, 223 Politics, Provincial, 140 Population : need of, 11 ; statis- tics, 66, 69 Portage la Prairie, 69 Postage, 255 Prince Albert, 26, 87, 88 Provisions, prices of, 90, 116 Railways: ii, 12; Canadian Pacific in 1885, 30, 31 ; and to-day, 59, 136, 140, 199, 202, 233, 239, 260 ; Canadian North- ern, 59, 86, 89, X04, 136, 147; Grand Trunk Pacific, 59, 136, 189; Mr Hill's plans, 59 ; grievances, 59 ; navvies wanted, 60 ; Federal Railway Commission, 61 ; grain cars, 80 ; Southern Alberta, 233 264 INDEX Raymond, 233 Recreations, 95, 176, 246 Red Deer, 196 Red River Valley: first settle- ment, 21 ; fertility, 22 ; blessing the river, 71 Regina, capital of Saskatchewan, 140 Remittance man, 100 Riding Mountain, 86 Risings, the : Red River Rebel- lion of 1870, 24 ; Saskatchewan Rising of 1885, 25 ; rebel success at Duck Lake, 26 ; Indians on war-path, 27; Frog Lake massacre, 27 ; Fort Pitt sur- rendered, 28 ; siege of Battle- ford, 29 ; Relief Expedition, 30 ; cold and heat on the prairie, 33 ; siege raised, 35 ; Cutknife Hill fight, 36 ; feelings under fire, 38 ; volunteers' bravery, 39 ; rising suppressed, 43 ; Poundmaker's surrender, 43 ; pursuit of Big Bear, 45 ; escape of his prisoners, 48 Rocky Mountains, 203, 235 ; foot- hills, 207 St Albert, 134 Salvation Army, 52, 87 Saskatchewan Province: Central, 88, 147 ; Southern, 141 ; popula- tion, 66, 69 Saskatchewan River, North, 49, I3L 159 Saskatchewan River, South, 35, 89. 193 Saskatoon, 93, 147 Saunders, Dr, 62 Scandinavians, 54, 71, 74, 92, 129 Scotsmen, 95, 154, 187, 198 Selkirk, Lord, 21 Settlement, the first, 21 Sixty-mile Bush, 184 Social distinctions, 100 Soil, nature and capacity of, 22, 33 Sports, 95, 246, 248 Squatters, 135 Star, 125 Strassburg, 143 Strathcona, 118 Strathcona, Lord, Preface by, 9 ; position in 1870, 24 Sunday, 245 Swift Current in 1885, 31 ; to-day, 195 Tariff, 253 Taxation, 248, 249 Thingvalla, 73 Tisdale, 87 Togo, 88 Towns and villages : rapid growth of, 91, 117, 200 ; land prices, 91, 131 ; a Dukhobor village, 149 ; a Mormon town, 227 Trade, external, 12 ; with Japan, 58, 201 United Kingdom, food for, 10, 65 United States: settlement of the West, 15 ; Canadian emigration campaign, 53 ; counter-attrac- tions, 55 ; causes of emigration, in; westward migrations, 113; experience in Oklahoma, 114 ; French-Canadians in, 173. See also Americans Vegreville, 119 Vermilion, 116 War correspondent's experiences, 17, 32, 38 War man, 90 Water-power, 83 Wetaskiwin, 129 Wheat : possible production, 65; average crops, 65, 77 ; quality and cultivation, 75 ; profit, 77, 205 ; in the Far North, 138 ; in Saskatchewan, 142, 146, 163 ; in Alberta, 114, 128, 201, 204, 205, 227 ; and other grain, 81, 128, 202 White Bear " Lake," 191 Winnipeg in 1870, 67 ; to-day, 68, 69 Wolseley, Lord, 24 Yukon and Klondike, 138 TURNBULL AND SPEAR*, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH I