XII
SASKATCHEWAN, THE WHEAT PROVINCE
TO borrow a threadbare but expressive phrase, “Wheat is king,” in Saskatchewan. Go where one will, in the inhabited part of the province, one is never allowed to forget this. One travels through miles on miles of wheat fields, and the most conspicuous building at many a wayside station is a giant “elevator”—if there does not chance, indeed, to be a row of these. Every budding town seems to begin with an agricultural implement “depot”; and near the railway stations in the cities self-binders, gasoline engines, and threshing machines, gaudy with yellow and crimson paint, are drawn up, awaiting their purchasers, by the hundred.
Nor is this the only token of the empire of King Wheat! In train and city, as well as at the tables of the farmers, the talk is of weather—good or bad—for the sowing and the harvest, for in Saskatchewan every man, woman and child realizes that in the last analysis the dependence of the whole community is on the measure of success which attends the cultivation of the soil. Wheat is king; and as in the old days every road led to Rome, so in writing of Saskatchewan—though this is true to a certain extent of most of the Canadian provinces—it is impossible to avoid coming back again and again to the farmer and his crops and his doings, his difficulties and his successes, and his way of meeting all kinds of problems. Here at least he is the hero of the drama—the central figure in the picture, and therefore I shall make no apology for seeming to travel in a circle.
Let us speak first of the kingdom of wheat.
Saskatchewan, in the south, has a breadth of three hundred and ninety miles, and a length of about seven hundred and fifty miles, or an area of somewhat over a quarter of a million square miles, including a water surface of about eight thousand three hundred miles, made up chiefly of lakes, large and small. It is larger than France, and over twice the size of the British Isles, with which it roughly corresponds in latitude. Edinburgh, by the way, is further north than any part of Saskatchewan yet settled, and the northern boundary of the province—the 60th parallel of north latitude—touches the two European capitals, Christiania of Norway and St. Petersburg of Russia.
It comprises the greater part of “the second prairie steppe,” which has an average elevation of about fifteen hundred feet above sea-level, but Lake Athabasca, thrusting itself into its extreme north-west, is less than seven hundred feet above the sea, and the highest summit of the Cypress hills is over four thousand two hundred feet. Thus this “prairie province” is by no means all a level plain. In fact, it possesses such differences of surface that it has been said that it may be divided into “four well-defined zones.” In the south (with the exception of some hilly districts) and extending to Saskatoon is the rolling prairie. Next comes a belt of mingled prairie and woodlands, dotted with small lakes, and often described as park-like. Then, about Prince Albert, begins the great northern forest of “spruce, tamarac, jack-pine, poplar and birch.” This timbered belt crosses the province, and is between three and four hundred miles wide. North of it is the fourth zone, only sparsely wooded.
The province is situated in the very heart of the Dominion, but it is watered by several great rivers, which have cut their way deep into the plains. One of these, the Saskatchewan or “Rushing Water,” as the Indians called it—has given its name to the province in which its two branches, the North and the South Saskatchewan, unite to flow together into Lake Winnipeg and thence to Hudson Bay. Farther north the mightiest river is the Churchill, one thousand miles long, which by many a tumultuous rapid hurries to the same inland sea.
For a long time Saskatchewan had a bad reputation so far as climate is concerned, and if any British immigrant comes to settle in the country without understanding that the winters are very much colder than those he has been accustomed to, he will probably be much disappointed and may feel himself ill-used, though the chances are that he ought to have made more particular inquiries before he came. The disadvantages of the climate are a low winter temperature (for ten years the average temperature of the coldest months, January and February, shows from 27 to 29 degrees of frost); an occasional severe snowstorm or “blizzard,” and some dry windy weather at other seasons of the year, when the blowing of the dust is very trying.
The advantages, often held by residents in Saskatchewan of more than two or three years’ standing to outweigh the disadvantages, are the clear exhilarating atmosphere, the light snowfall, the bright sunshine at all seasons, the cool, pleasant nights of summer, and the infrequence of rain or thaws during winter. Usually the cold weather does not reach its greatest severity till after Christmas, and winter may be said to end late in March. The sowing of the crops occasionally begins in March, but generally not until April.
It used to be supposed that the climate of the province was too severe to allow grain crops to come to perfection, but a few years ago the experiment of growing wheat was made successfully a little east of Regina, at Indian Head (where, by the way, are situated a Dominion experimental farm and forest nursery), and in 1911, at the “Land Exhibition” in New York, a prize of $1,000 (£205) in gold, offered by Sir Thomas Shaughnessy for the best “one hundred pounds of milling wheat grown in America,” was carried off by a sample of Marquis wheat, grown on a farm near Rosthern, about forty miles north of Saskatoon. The Marquis variety of wheat was originated by the “Dominion cerealist,” Dr. Charles Saunders, on the Central Experimental Farm at Ottawa, and the prize sample was grown by Mr. Seager Wheeler, an Englishman from the Isle of Wight who had been farming in Saskatchewan for fifteen years.
The importance of Saskatchewan as a wheat-growing region is only of recent development. When white men first settled in the country, a generation ago, they began with cattle ranching; now it is the prime wheat-growing province in the Dominion. In 1913 the crop amounted to 108,288,000 bushels; but though for years to come the actual yield of this grain is likely to increase enormously, for the land at present under crop does not, it is said, greatly exceed that set apart for roads, there are signs that in the future other products of the farm will dispute the almost exclusive sway of King Wheat. For example, at the International Exhibition at Lethbridge, in 1912, Saskatchewan won the first prize for the “best collection of farm products.” One argument in favour of changing to a greater diversity of crops is that it tends to simplify the labour problem, as the harvesting of different crops is spread over a longer period than that of wheat alone.
At present about 80 per cent. of the population of the province belongs to the farming class, but the opportunities in Saskatchewan are not limited to the cultivation of the soil. The northern half of the province, lacking railways, is not yet ready for ordinary settlers, but in the great woods north of Prince Albert the lumber industry is important. In fact, in 1911, between eight and nine thousand men found employment in the lumber camps and mills. There is, by the way, a vast demand in the West for railway ties or “sleepers,” and this is largely supplied by the jack-pine of the northern woods.
Flouring mills, as might be expected, are amongst the chief of Saskatchewan’s industrial establishments, and brick-making plants are numerous. There is an excellent home market for bricks, and suitable clay is found in every quarter, north, south, east and west. There are already several companies making structural steel for bridges, and soon large iron works will be established at Prince Albert, deposits of good iron ore having been discovered in the northern wilderness.
Prince Albert (of which the first house is said to have been the log-cabin of a Presbyterian missionary, put up in 1866) is rich in the so-called “white coal,” and before long the city will be supplied with hydro-electric power from the La Colle falls in the Saskatchewan river, which flows past her very doors. The damming of the river to develop the power will serve the purpose of improving its navigability, and it is anticipated that soon there will be steamboat communication between Lake Winnipeg and Edmonton. In the south, just within the borders of the province, near Roche Percée, and away in a north-westerly direction along the eastern escarpment of the “third prairie steppe,” lignite or “brown coal” has been found in many different places, and in Saskatchewan there were thirty mines in 1910, employing in all nearly four hundred persons.
It is difficult to exaggerate the part played in Saskatchewan by the railways. Lying almost midway between the Pacific and the communication by means of the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence with the Atlantic, this region had no outlet for any of the products of its fertile soil till the coming of the railways. In truth, there were no products, but only possibilities, for the settlers came in after the Canadian Pacific Railway—the pioneer line—which crossed the province on its way to the far west; and since then branch lines and little new towns have grown up together, till now this one great railway has over two thousand four hundred miles of “steel” in Saskatchewan alone, and its single track of 1885 (which it was such a mighty feat to build through the lone prairies and across the rugged western mountains) has become a complicated network. But what this first line meant in binding the separated provinces into a real union was shown in that very year, 1885, when for the second time the half-breeds, led by Louis Riel, rose in revolt.
This time the storm centre was in the North-West Territories—from which in 1905 the new provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were carved out—far west and north of the Red River, but though there were long gaps in the railway, the troops sent from Eastern Canada reached the scene of the disturbance in about a month, or less than half the time which it had taken Wolseley’s force to reach the Red River fifteen years earlier. During the last ten or twelve years a younger railway company, the Canadian Northern, which in 1901 had not a mile of line in operation in Saskatchewan, has been adding line to line, and branch to branch, entering new districts, where farmers had gone in on the promise of its coming, carrying into the country immigrants and “settlers’ effects” by the car-load, and out of it train upon train of wheat. It also is knotting together a network across southern Saskatchewan. Last year its lines in the province had lengthened to 1,785 miles, and it is still reaching forward in many directions, including that of Hudson Bay.
Lastly, the luxurious passenger trains of the Grand Trunk Pacific are crossing Saskatchewan, with the promise of another easy ocean-to-ocean route; and the promise also of additional means of transportation for the annual millions of bushels of Saskatchewan’s wheat. But more quickly even than the railway companies have been pushing the construction of their new lines increases the product of the fields and farms; and every new avenue of transportation, while improving the situation in certain districts, also adds to the magnitude of the problem to be solved, for there are always people, regardless of isolation and hardships, ready to go in advance of the railways.
At present the authorities are giving no encouragement to immigrants to settle in the northern part of Saskatchewan, for that district is entirely without transportation facilities, and is better suited to the wandering, adventurous lives of the hunter and trapper than of the would-be maker of a new home. The former serve best, perhaps, as heroes for boyish romances of the Ballantyne type; but the real interest of the story of the Canadian West belongs to the home-makers—the nation-builders—who are surging in to take possession of the land.
In 1901, the population of Saskatchewan was nearly 91,300; in 1911, it was over 492,400, when, by the way, the male population exceeded the female by 91,000. During 1911, 44,000 immigrants settled in Saskatchewan. Of these 59 per cent. were Americans, whose experience of farming under similar conditions makes them excellent settlers; whilst the remaining number, which entered by ocean ports, represented no less than forty-six nationalities. Amongst the homesteaders for the year, besides Canadians from the east, and people from the British Isles and from the United States, were French, Germans, Belgians and Hollanders, Swiss, Italians, Roumanians, Syrians, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, Danes and Icelanders, Swedes and Norwegians. The people from Northern Europe make particularly good settlers, and though some of the foreigners appear to be of an unpromising type as material for the building up of a nation on British lines, they are often found, on closer acquaintance, to have some special excellence to contribute to the general “melting pot.” The assimilation of all these peoples is no small problem for the young Dominion, however.
In Saskatchewan, as elsewhere, perhaps the greatest force for the Canadianizing of the newcomers is the common school, which has an influence extending into the home circles of the children who attend. It is fortunate for the nation that a large proportion of the teachers (chiefly young women) hold a high view of their calling, and therefore are peculiarly well-suited to act as guides to the newcomers.
The different churches in the province are also toiling bravely amongst the immigrants, but their task is complicated by differences of race, language and traditions; and by the tendency of the population to scatter itself in little groups—sometimes only a single family and sometimes even one individual—far and wide, wherever fertile land is to be had. Of late years immigrants have been coming in so fast, that the churches, though adding constantly to their force of men and women, clergymen and missionaries have great difficulty in overtaking the work; in fact, they cannot do it.
In Saskatchewan the leading denomination is the Presbyterian; then follow the Roman Catholics, the Methodists, the Anglicans, the Lutherans, the Greek-Catholics, the Baptists and the Mennonites.
Despite all that is being done, many of the settlers are for years out of reach of church services, and some of the groups of foreigners are practically left to themselves in this respect, for want of people to work amongst them. For enforcing law and order amongst the scattered settlers and for many other services, Saskatchewan owes much to the small body of North-West Mounted Police, who have inculcated respect for British justice in the breasts of red and white men, newcomers and old settlers.
The Saskatchewan people themselves are wrestling valiantly with their own problems, religious, educational, social. In this connection it is interesting to note that a place in Saskatchewan—Sintaluta, near Indian Head—was the birthplace of that powerful organization of farmers, the “Grain-Growers’ Association,” and that its founder, Hon. W. R. Motherwell, himself a farmer and a graduate of the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph, is now the provincial Minister of Agriculture. This organization, with which is affiliated the “Grain-Growers’ Association of Manitoba” and the “United Farmers” of Alberta, has led in the struggle against the great corporations, which were too much for the individual farmer, for better transportation and elevator facilities. Later, an accessory association was established called the “Grain-Growers’ Grain Company,” to enable the organized farmers to market their grain on a basis of co-operation.
This principle is growing in favour in Saskatchewan, and it is hoped that by its aid the conditions of life amongst the farming community may be made so desirable as to check the trend of population to the towns. Saskatchewan has now a co-operative elevator company, a co-operative telephone system in the rural districts, connected with government-owned trunk lines and city services—which is perhaps as great an advantage from the social as from the business point of view—and co-operative creameries, and insurance of crops against damage by hail, assisted by government. Moreover, in the University of Saskatchewan, at Saskatoon, scientific instruction in agriculture is given a first place, and great efforts are made to extend the influence and usefulness of the university to every class and locality in the province.
With regard to education, a rural school district may be established in Saskatchewan where there are four persons resident who would be liable to assessment, and at least twelve children between the ages of five and sixteen years. No district may exceed twenty-five square miles in area, but in practice districts are rarely so large. The schools are supported in part by local rates, and in part by provincial grants. Teachers’ salaries in rural districts vary from $50 (£10) to $65 (£13) the month, whilst board can usually be obtained at from $12 (£2 8s.) to $15 (£3) the month. During the five years ending with 1910, the number of school districts more than doubled, no less than one thousand three hundred new ones being organized. There are also high schools and collegiate institutes, scattered through the province, where young people can obtain more advanced instruction.
Though primarily an agricultural province, Saskatchewan is dotted with enterprising little villages and growing towns, and has four small but busy and fast-growing cities. First comes Regina, the capital, where annually gather the members of the single chamber of the Provincial Legislature; next comes Saskatoon, a railway centre and the seat of the university; then the older cities of Moose Jaw and Prince Albert. The population of the largest of these is somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty thousand; but in the Canadian West just at present figures become ridiculously out-of-date even in a few months.
Still, Saskatchewan holds wide her doors for others to enter. She wants men—and women—for her farms and her young towns. She has Dominion lands to offer as homesteads (see Appendix, Note B, page 297), and wild or improved lands which may be bought from the railways and other companies at from $10 (£2 8s.) the acre up to $30 (£6) or $40 (£8), according to locality, etc. There are opportunities for business and professional men, but the demand is greatest for workers on the farms. If engaged by the year, average wages for a good man would be about $25 (£5) the month, with board; but if the engagement were only for eight months, the average might be from $25 (£5) to $40 (£8) the month; while for harvesting and threshing only, men receive from $35 (£7) to $50 (£10) the month, or $2 to $3 (8s. to 12s.) the day; and every year “Harvesters’ Excursions” are run from the east.
There is often a good demand in the cities and towns in summer for unskilled labour; and in the lumber camps in the winter; and sometimes newcomers of the artizan and mechanics’ class can readily obtain work at their trades; but the demand fluctuates, and it is wise for such immigrants to take care to procure reliable and recent information before going to any town.
Capable domestic servants are always in demand at wages of about $15 (£3) a month, and upwards. Anyone wishing for recent and particular information concerning the rates of wages, and the demand for workers in any special trade, could not do better, however, than write to the Secretary of the Bureau of Labour, Regina, Saskatchewan.
XIII
ALBERTA: WHERE PRAIRIES AND MOUNTAINS MEET
ALBERTA is in the same latitude as its sister province of Saskatchewan, is almost of the same size (being about three thousand square miles larger), and “came of age,” as it were, or attained the rights of a province, upon the same day, September 1, 1905. Its situation, as an inland province very far from the eastern seaboard, and shut in from the west by mighty chains of mountains, has delayed its progress; but it has grown with the building of railways, and recently its population has shown the most rapid increase of any of the provinces. In the decade between the census years, 1901 and 1911, its increase was 424 per cent., and last year its population was swelled by about ninety thousand new arrivals, from the eastern provinces, the United States, and countries beyond the seas, including a goodly number of British.
It is a land of great natural wealth and wonderful variety of beauty, for within it the last elevated “prairie steppe” gives way to mountains with peaks that soar into the blue high above the snowline. The Rockies, indeed, form the irregular boundary line of the south-west, which divides Alberta from British Columbia; and there is many a noble mountain within the province, though one is often misled, by the inadequacies of the ordinary maps, into thinking of it almost wholly as a prairie land.
In the south the country is of the rolling prairie type, though its altitude is high; but further north it has the park-like character of woodlands, interspersed with open prairie, and further north still, though the park-like country still prevails in certain districts, the land in general is a forest-covered wilderness, broken by lakes and muskegs. The latter make summer journeys extremely difficult, and it is easier for the Indians and traders and missionaries, who at present are the sole inhabitants, to travel when winter has sealed up the lakes and morasses with ice, thus making possible short-cuts between places which in summer can be reached only by devious journeys up one stream and down another, with laborious portages between.
Edmonton is still a centre of the fur-trade, and even now, in winter time, picturesque dog-trains arrive from the north in the provincial capital, whilst in the heart of Alberta traders, surveyors, mail-carriers and missionaries are leading the kind of life described in the “Wild West” books of our childhood. Still, on winter’s nights, in the white Albertan wilderness, many a man, for one motive or another, is sleeping out under the stars, defiant of the frost and loneliness; and still, in the long days of the northern summer, canoes ply on the rivers, which are the only roads in portions of Alberta.
Of the numerous lakes of the province, Athabasca, which Alberta shares with Saskatchewan, has a surface of 2,850 square miles, but Lesser Slave Lake, the largest entirely within the province, is only four hundred and eighty square miles in extent. The rivers of Alberta are more important than the lakes. The four principal are the North and the South Saskatchewan; the Athabasca and the Peace river, which all rise in the Rocky Mountains, flow in an easterly or north-easterly direction, and have numerous tributaries, amongst which are some which might themselves take rank as important rivers. Both lakes and rivers, by the way, abound in fish, white fish being a staple food of the Indians and of the few white men in the north, as well as of the dogs used as draught animals.
The climate resembles that of Saskatchewan in its cold winters, hot summer days, and its dry, bright weather all the year round. Sometimes the mercury sinks in winter far below zero; sometimes in summer it registers as high as 90 degrees in the shade; but the nights are never unbearably hot, and the weather is never of the “muggy” type which in some places makes exertion so distasteful. There is little difference between the mean summer temperature in various parts of the province, owing, perhaps, to the fact that the general altitude is much greater in the south than the north. As it approaches the mountains at the boundary, the country is about four thousand feet above sea-level, but it slopes gently downward towards the north and east, till in the far north the altitude is less than one thousand feet. The Peace River valley has as warm a summer as the valley of the Saskatchewan, three hundred miles to the south, and everywhere there are long hours of sunshine in the growing season.
The climate of parts of the province, even as far north as the Peace River valley, is much modified by the “chinook,” winds which, tempered by the warm Japanese current of the North Pacific, blow through the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and sometimes even in mid-winter cause a rise of temperature of fifty or sixty degrees in a few hours. One effect of this is the melting of the snow with marvellous rapidity, and in an ordinary season horses and cattle can live and thrive on the open ranges all winter, though provident farmers keep a good supply of hay on hand for emergencies. In most parts of the province there is a sufficient rainfall for the needs of the crops, and the rain comes as a rule most abundantly when most needed, but there are districts in the south where irrigation is being practised with great success and advantage.
The natural resources of Alberta are varied and abundant. First and foremost is the soil, of which a well-known English agriculturist and chemist, Professor Farmer, wrote: “Although we have hitherto considered the black earth of central Russia the richest in the world, that land has now to yield its distinguished position to the rich, deep, black soil of Western Canada.” Other experts bear almost equally strong testimony to the value of the soil of these provinces, but in Alberta it was estimated very recently that only about 3 per cent. of her hundred million acres suitable for farming is as yet cultivated.
Farming there began in the wild, free, un-English form of cattle-raising on ranches, so large that sixty to one hundred acres of pasturage was allowed for each animal, in herds in some cases numbering thousands. The natural conditions of food, water springs, and sufficient shelter were so good that little attention was needed or given, and two men were supposed to be able to manage fifteen hundred head of cattle. The ranches were bought by large companies, or (more often) leased from government, and every year thousands of beasts were sent to the markets of the eastern provinces or to those of England. A few large ranches remain still, chiefly in the neighbourhood of MacLeod.
But now the dashing, picturesque “cow-boys” are fast passing away. Their place is being taken by farmers of a more plodding type, and every year sees more railway lines cutting into the old-time ranches, and more homesteaders arriving to build their little shacks and villages in the lands which were once the pasture ground of innumerable buffaloes, and then of cattle scarcely less wild.
There are, however, a multitude of farmers who continue on a small scale the stock-raising industry, and in 1910 there were actually twice as many head of cattle in Alberta as there were in 1901, though there were still not quite as many as there had been in 1906. The fact is that though grain-growing offers the line of least resistance for the establishment of many a newcomer, who has not the means to purchase stock, and is obliged to turn to something that will speedily bring a return in ready money, the belief in “mixed” as opposed to exclusive grain farming is gaining ground in Alberta, as elsewhere in Canada. Besides its other advantages it prevents the farmer suffering so severely in a bad year, when his risk is divided between different kinds of agricultural products.
It required some experiment to discover the class of wheat best adapted to Alberta’s soil and climate; but in 1902 seed was imported from Kansas of the variety known as “Turkey Red,” and it so improved in the new region that it soon won wider fame than before under the new name of “Alberta Red.”
This is a winter wheat, and the plan is favoured in this province of sowing both spring and winter wheat, as it spreads out the labour of sowing and harvesting into two periods instead of one. Winter wheat grows best in the southern district, but, though not quite so hard when grown further north, where the rainfall is greater, “Alberta Red” still proves an excellent crop in many parts of the province, and year by year a large additional acreage is sown with it. Other grain crops usually give a very satisfactory result, though, of course, the yield is much affected by weather conditions.
Occasionally farmers lose heavily by severe hailstorms, at the time when harvest is approaching, or very early frosts damage the grain, but crops may be insured in government-aided co-operative associations against the first disaster—which is usually very local when it occurs—and the farmer may secure himself against the worst effects of the second by the more general adoption of the combination of dairying or some other form of “mixed farming” with wheat-growing.
By the way, the little town of Red Deer is noted in agricultural circles from the fact that upon a farm near by was raised the “champion dairy cow” of Canada, rejoicing in the name of “Rosalind of Old Basing,” which “surpassed in a twenty-four months’ official test the previous highest butter record in Canada, by giving the milk equivalent of fourteen hundred and seventy-five pounds of butter.”
Dairying was “a state-supervised industry” in days before Alberta attained provincial standing; now there is a provincial Dairy Commissioner, who, aided by a number of experts, assists the industry in a variety of ways; and there is at Calgary a government “dairy station,” where butter is manufactured on the most approved lines from cream collected at fourteen co-operative creameries. But the numerous private creameries and cheese factories are by no means shut out from the benefits of expert aid and instruction, while a scheme of travelling dairies has been evolved to improve the output of butter made on the farms.