ROMANCE CLINGS TO THE SKIRTS OF WINNIPEG.
_An extended sojourn...._
An extended sojourn in Winnipeg is in the nature of a revelation. One
goes to Winnipeg expecting and finding it as a city--the Colossus of the
Plains--modern, business-like, a pattern-builder in wide streets, with
everything else in keeping on a big scale, but just a little crude and
bare along certain lines, as every _new_ city, or even house, is bound
to be. That is the picture one draws aforetime. But the fact is that a
few weeks in Winnipeg reveal it--and the revelation is almost sharp
enough to be a shock--as a centre of the Romantic--itself a personality,
involving the life of the entire West and especially the
Prairie--combining the east and the west, the great north and trailing
south, the old and the new, the Indian, the French and the English--the
great epic of fur and afterwards that of wheat. No city of the Dominion
is more closely of the same Romantic blood as Quebec, than Winnipeg, and
strangely enough, one conceives this western city of Canada, from the
viewpoint of a sculptor, not as “a strong man” but as _a woman_,
eternally feminine, with trailing garments, with the immediately
surrounding country out and beyond as far to the north and west as
Canada goes, extending the hands of Romance, to cling fast to her
skirts; as the figure of a mother held in leash and hardly able to step
for the many loving hands of clinging children.
Romance is a free spirit of the air. One cannot tell where she will
alight, or what she sees that makes her choose some one spot and reject
others. But when you recall the many characters of history who have
written their sign manual across the Winnipeg page, these mellow and
tone the sharp edges of big business until you regard it not as the
growth of a day, but as the attainment, the reward, for which all the
fine personalities stepping up to recognition out of the colourful
pageant of the Past gave their best efforts and their lives. These
towering buildings, these wide streets, are the fulfillment of the
dreams of men who looked forward.
When Romance takes your hand in Winnipeg she leads you first to, and
then out on her favorite trails, via the Fort Garry Gate. And there she
conjures up vast companies, organizations and individuals, enough to
fill a library and to cover every canvas in the largest gallery. Book on
book has been written on these old forts and their occupiers, and still
there remains material galore--a store which will never suffer
exhaustion. But the fact to be dwelt on in stepping here with Romance,
is that they were touchstones drawing together men from enormous
distances, obliterating distances and difficulties, creating
Cartographers of Canada, soldiers who subdued the part to the whole;
that in the gatherings around their hearth-fires, Hudson Bay, the
Northwest, the region of the Mackenzie, the Saskatchewan, the names of
the Fort-posts of the then almost unknown new North, tripped from men’s
tongues as if they were out there just a little way beyond the Gate. It
was the love of the Romantic, the love of adventure, and the love of
action, in the hearts of the listener and the stay-at-home to which the
story-teller, arriving from who-knows-where in the wilderness, appealed.
It was the human interest that centred around Winnipeg and radiated
thence, that, trickling back to the Old Country, determined new spirits
to leave behind the old lands and step out boldly into the new country,
though it were becurtained of hardship, cold, hunger and promise. One
cannot very well hang back when Romance takes one’s hand. So you think,
when some bright summer morning you motor down to Lower Fort Garry with
your clubs, “Here is another old Fort given up to Golf.” And at once you
recall the morning you tramped the Fort Mississauga links, fanned by the
breezes of Lake Ontario. Strange, the eternal kinship of the Romantic in
Canada!
It is a far cry from an Old Fort to truck farms. Yet Winnipeg changes
from one to the other with the ease of a dancer of the minuet coping
with the jazz of the moment. The big thousand acre wheat land represents
the loaf, but the vitamine of the vegetable is as necessary as bread to
the modern table, keen on the chemistry of foods. The truck farms
encompassing Winnipeg and doubly upheld by her home-tables and her
pickle factories, stage an army of picturesque foreign-folk--Galicians,
Russians, Ruthenians, Mennonites, Dutch--who have the art of
truck-farming at their finger tips. This is no mere figure of speech but
a simple fact. And this knowledge they have employed to make Winnipeg
one of the richest cities in the Dominion in this matter of fresh
vegetables.
But the human interest centres in the picture made by these cauliflower,
cucumber and rhubarb stretches. Especially since the laborers in these
field-gardens are mostly women, one of the farms, if no more, being
owned by a woman and personally operated by
[Illustration:
AT THE WINDOW.]
[Illustration:
“... AND THERE IN THE CUCUMBER FIELD,
IS OLD KITTY.”]
herself, with the aid of skillful woman employees. These women in the
beans make picturesque figures with heads in white kerchiefs, full
skirts tucked in gracefully at the waist and the big bushel basket in
hand. Chatting with a motherly soul, broad and short with blue eyes it
is revealed that she is a Mennonite, straight from Holland. Talking with
a tall, thin young woman she tells that she came from the borderland of
Poland and Russia, and that she speaks seven languages, but that she has
always worked on the farm. And she touches the beans with a sort of
stroking tenderness, as if she loved all things that grew.
In the onion field seven or more women working together make the weeds
fly. They, too, cling to the kerchief of the Old World rather than to
the hat of the New, as a protection against sun and the weather in the
fields.
Here are women with bundles of rhubarb in their arms, loaded up to and
steadied by their chins. These are assisted in the bundling by a
homemade wooden contrivance for holding the refractory stalks together,
while the strong fingers of the women gather and jam into a slipless
knot the coarse cord which enables the bundle of pie-plant to come
invitingly to the Winnipeg market. And here are cabbages fit for kings,
whose heads, though they look solid and heavy enough, are evidently
touched with the wand of wanderlust, since the farm-superintendent
explains while we stand looking at them, lost in amazement, that these
same cabbages charter whole cars to themselves and go off some fine
morning east and west and even over the border to points South, he knows
not where.
And there, in the cucumber fields, is Old Kitty wearing her bag apron,
her old face cobwebbed with the fine lines etched by a long life spent
beneath the Manitoba sun that ripens the wheat. Kitty belongs indeed to
old times. She must have been among the first of the women emigrants to
these parts. She speaks little English. Schools were not for her. In her
youth it was not “Kitty against a Textbook”, but “Kitty against the
Wilderness”, and the prize was Existence. And Kitty won; so that her
aged dumbness before you, is the most eloquent oratory. And her smile is
like a benediction.
While you watch Kitty with her stick carefully turning aside the leaves
to discover thereunder the cool-green cucumbers, and wait for the moment
when she straightens her back to rest and give you that whimsical, sweet
smile that bids you stay though no word is exchanged, the man who
partly owns this farm, with his sister, comes up, and as you move away
with him to watch the carts loading ready for the early morning start to
market, you speak of Kitty and he amazes you with the intelligence that
he and his sister called her “Mother”.
“Our own mother died when we were children and perhaps we would have
died too if it had not been for that old woman. Those were hard times,
and life was difficult enough for grown-ups on the Prairie in those
days, let alone children. But she pulled us through. And she still
orders me around and tells me what to do,” he added, laughingly.
So that was old Kitty’s “bit”--her contribution to the life-line of
Prairie settlement! Yet if Kitty had to come over now she might be
debarred on the score of illiteracy.
* * * * *
At Selkirk, before you have forgotten the towering offices and the
bustle of Winnipeg not an hour behind you by trolley, there is the same
little scow ferry on a wire, by which to cross the Red River, as that by
which you crossed the Saint Francis at Pierreville. It would seem, too,
as if this calm water and its wet reflections of grass and trees, were a
re-cast of the pastoral streams meandering to the Saint Lawrence. And,
having hailed the ferry, turning toward the city again, following the
road of the East bank, one comes upon Gonor, a village that follows the
highway for several miles. This village, which might have been lifted up
root and branch from somewhere in the Carpathians and set down here in
the heart of the Canadian West is made up of row on row of little
foreign houses with quaint, whitewashed sides and the steep hand-split
shingle roofs, set about by little farm-buildings, with overhanging
Swiss log-roofs and everywhere, farmyard chickens, ducks and tiny
porkers! And here and there down the long street a little church peeps
out, each with its own distinctive architecture, the straight, almost
Puritanical lines of the Swedish, the breath of Asia in the minaret of
the Russian, the voice of poverty and hard struggle in the low unpainted
little Bukowinian.
Back from this village and the River stretches mile after mile of sparse
settlement and pioneer farm, some well on the road to prosperity and
others still rough-cast; and here and there the neat little cottages of
the Manitoba Department of Education--the little cottages that are a
part of the new scheme for having the teacher reside among the people,
maintaining in these home-like, modern houses an example of the kind of
comfort to which the foreigner on the land can aspire. The school is a
centre for drawing the parents as well as the children together. It is a
very practical idea, but compared with notions only lately prevalent,
there is certainly a touch of Romance in the determination of Manitoba
to bring the school to the child rather than the child to the school.
Here on these roads and others in the vicinity of Winnipeg, and in fact
everywhere throughout this Province, on the small farms just hacking
their way out of the bush with rows of wheat--rows every year planting
their feet to a longer stride--the _Scarecrow_ is a character not to be
despised. In fact, he plays the important role of a Knight of the
Fields, defending the defenceless wheat from the piratical incursions of
crows and small birds. The Scarecrow is a substitute for a man. And
wherever one defying the battle and the breeze is spied, it unfolds the
story of some man who has planted his foot on a portion of land and is
tenaciously hanging on by the aid of any invention or device which he
can bring to his assistance.
It must feel less lonesome for the man, toiling alone in these fields
out of sight of any neighbour, and sometimes of his own little cottage,
to look up and see that “the other fellow” is still on the job and means
to stick it. O, there is no doubt about it that even the Scarecrow has
its psychology! Why else has it stood the test of Time, come up
simultaneously from the fields of all lands, crossed the ocean and
surmounted every difficulty in its path across the continent, arriving
here to hold its own as “Knight of these Western Plains”? Oh no, you
cannot take the scarecrow from these old-timers--these old flotsam and
jetsam farms and gardens, East and West, without a distinct loss in
Romance to all Canada. For this old man of the fields speaks a universal
language which appeals to all hearts, young and old. In fact, he seems
to be the very fountainhead of youth. For whenever one happens upon him
unexpectedly, instantly, swift as light, there is an outburst of
laughter--“The Scarecrow! The Scarecrow!”
In the early days of the Northwest, the days when the Garrys and sister
forts were in their heyday, before the city was; in the days when dog
teams and sleds furrowed their paths along the big trails north and
south, when the patient ox-teams motored the would-be settlers from Auld
Scotia and elsewhere, from Winnipeg to some land-grant along the Buffalo
Trail; in the days when the farmer hauled his wheat in the creaking
ox-cart back to Winnipeg to be ground into flour by the one gristmill
that then served this now elevator-dotted land; in other words, in the
days when red men and furs held revelry, and agriculture was yet hidden
in the womb of Time, the wander-loving French-Canadian came here in the
character of settler, trapper, canoeist, fur-dealer, boatman and
_coureur de bois_ out of Old Quebec, much as he is now pushing out to
settle his own Provincial north.
In such suburban towns as Saint Boniface and Saint Norbert, and in their
citizens, present-day Winnipeg traces her French strain back to Quebec
and through Quebec to Normandy and Brittany, whence came many of the
customs and touches met with here, clinging so curiously to the skirts
of the West.
These little French “Bluffs” loom on the landscape not only in the
vicinity of Winnipeg, but are happened upon here and there throughout
all the Province, especially in the North.
At Saint Norbert one steps down out of the car to be met by a colourful
wayside sign of the Jefferson Highway, “From New Orleans to Winnipeg”,
with “Palm to Pine” illustrations in colour. The Romance covered by this
sign, cosmopolitan as any on the continent, lies in the complete
metamorphosis suffered by Winnipeg and the middle west for which it
stands, in the matter of distance. Distance with a big “D” has been
wiped out. You are as near to the world, in touch with it as intimately
in Winnipeg as anywhere else in Canada or over the American border.
This elimination of distance, owes its being to distance-created needs.
In this, Winnipeg was a pathfinder, an urge. The things which she stood
for in the North led Prince Rupert and navigation to conquer Hudson Bay.
Raw trails were broken and river-boats built to reach her fur-preserves
and fur-market. She shod the ox and designed the big wheels of the
prairie-cart to recover the waste lands of the Prairie from the heel of
the Buffalo. The Prairie and the Pacific called for the railroad that
primarily grouped Canada into one whole, with a united morale. It was
the _remoteness_, once for all definitely broken by the railroad, which
hatched the modern passion for “close connections”. The voice of the
West is passionate in its demand for great highways like this, bringing
within hail the sunny seaports of the beautiful Gulf of Mexico on the
one hand, and the equally individual climate-and-trade-romanticism of
the New North, practical Hudson Bay ports with navigation and ships
coming and going, piloted hither by the wraiths of the Elizabethan
Galleons, pioneers in sea-adventure, on
[Illustration:
A “KNIGHT OF THE FIELD”
DEFENDING THE WHEAT.]
[Illustration:
FOOT BRIDGE TO TRAPPIST MONASTERY,
SAINT NORBERT.]
the other. Distance, for which this section of Canada once stood,
sponsored the automobile, the airship, the telephone, the radio--the
things that are drawing individuals and families together, co-relating
separate businesses into one great co-ordinated momentum, called Trade,
making every city suburban to all the others, and uniting, supporting
and developing the National consciousness. Transportation, good roads!
They introduce the man in Vancouver to his brother in Winnipeg and
Halifax. Canada is a unit. There is psychology and powerful suggestion
in linking up the fronded palm, fanning beside the Gulf, with the sturdy
evergreen of the North.
At Saint Norbert there are touches of Quebec, in a little altar-chapel
in the woods, to which small pilgrimages are made. There is the Church
and Convent and a most picturesque group of Holy figures about _La
Crucifie_ in the cemetery.
The French language commingles everywhere with the English. In the
little shops here, as well as in the big shops of Winnipeg, two
delicacies are offered for sale--_Fromage de Trappe_ and _Miel de
Trappe_--Trappist Cheese and Trappist Honey. And here, within a stone’s
throw of Saint Norbert, is situated the Trappist Monastery whence these
products hail. This Trappist Monastery is the only door we have ever
found closed to us in Canada! But that makes it the more romantic.
Nevertheless, we have ridden in their empty wheat-cart, driven by a
Trappist brother in his flowing habit, the reins in one hand and huge
rosary with individual beads, comparable in size with small crab-apples,
in the other. We passed on this ride other brothers swinging down the
beautiful tree-line approach to the Monastery, driving spans of horses
with full cartloads of “No. 1 Northern”, and saying their Rosaries at
the same time--a rare subject even in Canada’s immense gallery. Surely,
Prairie wheat rides to the elevator in a variety of carts, and many
languages urge the horses to their task. A little office at the gate was
as far as our driver dared take us. The Brother in the office takes
orders for the cheese and honey, and entertains us with a book of
photographs showing the chief Trappist Monasteries of the world. We
returned by a little foot-bridge over a stream, and by a woodland path
edged with blueberry-bushes and other attractive undergrowth of the cool
woods.
* * * * *
Although the immediate vicinity of Winnipeg is able to show such a
profusion and variety of colour, the entire Province of Manitoba,
together with Saskatchewan and Alberta, produces a riotous line of
romance equal to these nearer roads or any of the older Canadian
Provincial gardens. The little Russian boy standing by a window blowing
soap bubbles, through a wheat-straw, unconsciously presents a symbolic
picture of the romantic dream both projected and fulfilled by the
Prairie. To all those with vision, its Voice called. It called above all
to the home-hungry children of the Old World to come and settle here.
Called them to visualize their dreams, and, is still calling. But its
call reached only those with initiative, for it offered on the surface
only tasks and difficulties--put the wheat-straw in their fingers and
said “Build your own dream-castle. Here is land without boundary. But
the vision, the dream,--is yours.”