QUEBEC PROVINCE
One of the most interesting facts concerning Canada is that very little
is known about it. Its eight million people are scattered along the
southern strip—a mere fraction of the country. The great bulk of Canada
is neither settled nor surveyed. Nay, it has not been explored, save in
the sense that a person proceeding along the road from London to
Scotland may be said to have explored England.
Settlement in Western Canada is necessarily of recent date. But in
Eastern Canada civilisation has already had a good innings. The
colonising of Quebec province began three hundred years ago. Therefore a
hasty thinker would be apt to suppose that, however much uncertainty may
envelop other parts of the Dominion, Quebec province must by this time
be well-trodden territory. What smiles that supposition would cause
among the urbane politicians and officials I met in the provincial
Parliament House!
If the population of Canada, instead of being eight millions, were one
hundred and ten millions—that is, an equivalent to the German and
French nations rolled into one—and if the whole of that population were
concentrated in Quebec province, the inference of the hasty thinker
would probably be correct. For the area of Quebec province is nearly
equal to France and Germany combined.
[Illustration: QUEBEC FROM THE ST. LAWRENCE: WINTER SCENE]
How can a couple of million busy people inspect and investigate, let
alone settle and develop, such an area? Necessarily they and their
homes, their farms, their factories, and their railways occupy but a
fraction of their vast territory. All the rest of the country is
available to whomsoever cares to go and unlock its riches.
Time was when the French-Canadians gave little attention to the problems
and possibilities presented by the unknown geography with which they
were associated. Prosperous, healthy, and happy, they were satisfied to
let the land north of 48° latitude and west of 70° longitude look after
itself. But nowadays settled Quebec is much interested in unsettled
Quebec. I will tell you why.
Canada, having a pre-vision of her destiny, is vigorously engaged in
promoting it. She has set herself the task of attracting population by
proclaiming her resources. The paramount need has become the ruling
interest. In travelling through the country, you will find that matter
uppermost in the mind of every adult with whom you converse. And it is
recognised as a leading concern of the State. The Federal Government and
the Provincial Governments are expending much thought, ingenuity, and
money in furthering this national policy of promoting immigration. The
collecting of facts, with a view to their publication, is recognised as
one important means to that end. Therefore the Governments are
constantly sending prospecting scientists into the unknown lands to
scratch the face of Nature and gain some clues.
To give an idea of Quebec province, I will briefly outline a journey
made in 1905 by Mr. A. P. Low (now Deputy Minister of Mines) into the
Chibougamau district. It is by no means remote, being not much more than
a hundred miles from a railway. How Mr. Low came to be sent there was
because certain prominent citizens of Quebec, having received
interesting tidings from the Chibougamau district, suggested to Sir
Wilfrid Laurier that a member of the Geological Survey ought to go and
have a look at it. The interesting tidings are worth recalling, since
they illustrate the sort of treatment pioneers receive at the hands of
Fate. It appears that Mr. Peter McKenzie made a “prospecting and trading
journey” through the region in 1903, and while this enterprising
gentleman was looking for iron ores “he chanced upon an important
discovery of asbestos” (I quote from a Government record, save that I
decline to spell the infusible fibrous mineral with a “u”). Thus
encouraged, Mr. McKenzie re-visited the district in the following year,
and this time he searched for copper deposits, and found “a large mass
of gold-bearing quartz.” Had he gone yet a third time, and tried to
locate a tin mine, he would, I presume, have stumbled upon a reef of
diamonds; but that is mere conjecture.
Now for Mr. Low’s experiences. Leaving Ottawa on June 21st, he went by
rail to Lake St. John, and there secured the services of eight Indians,
four (who knew the Chibougamau district as well as I know Charing Cross)
being engaged to act as canoemen, the other four being required merely
to assist with the baggage on the outward journey. And here let me point
out what a useful rôle, in connection with the development of Canada, is
served by the red man, now that he has been tamed and completely cured
of his old abominable practice of removing people’s scalps. To the
prospector and the surveyor the Indians are invaluable pilots and
porters, their navigation of swift currents being marked by a skill to
which the average white man is a stranger. Sustained toil is not to
their liking, since it is inconsistent with that large measure of
leisure and meditation which they associate with human existence; but,
for the rest, Canada’s pioneers and explorers give them a good name. One
distinguished surveyor, who has had much experience in the wilds, told
me he could recall only a single instance of dishonesty on the part of
an Indian who had served him; nor, when he detailed the affair, could I
shut my eyes to an element of justification in the delinquent’s conduct.
[Illustration: ASBESTOS QUARRY AT THETFORD, QUEBEC PROVINCE]
[Illustration: FARMLAND SCENERY, ASCOT, QUEBEC PROVINCE]
“I arranged with the Indian,” said the surveyor, “that, for an agreed
sum, he should pilot me along a dangerous stretch of river to a portage
where I proposed to camp for the night. He did so, and I paid him his
money; but you may imagine my annoyance when, on returning to the
river-side after half an hour’s stroll in the woods, I found that the
ruffian had absconded with a pair of my blankets. Such an unusual
occurrence rankled in my memory, and four months later, on the return
journey, I made it my business to inquire for that Indian. It turned out
that he was still in the district, and when I charged him with the theft
he calmly admitted it. But it was right, he contended, that he should
take my blankets, and he went on to tell me why. Nine years previously,
a white man engaged him as guide, and afterwards slipped off without
paying the promised fee. It was a mean thing to do, and a most unwise
one, because the Indian has a very tenacious memory for anything in the
nature of treachery. For nine years, you see, this Ojibway had nursed
his wrong, and from the next white man who came along he exacted
retribution. From my point of view this was rather crude justice, and at
first I requested the return of my property. But I did not press the
point when I saw how incapable he was of grasping the subtlety that
white men are not answerable for one another’s sins.”
Before railways were invented, and when the whole world depended on
roads and rivers, it must have been hard to say where settlement ended
and the wilderness began. But to-day civilisation marks its domain by
steel lines, and a territory that lacks railways is unable to compete,
whether in agriculture, mining, or manufactures, with territories that
possess railways. Mr. Low’s experiences—which are the experiences of
Canada’s hundred and one other explorers—reintroduce us to the world as
it existed before Watt and Stephenson interfered. No road having been
made to the Chibougamau district, he had to fall back on the rivers. And
with rivers, be it noted, Nature has liberally endowed Quebec province.
Having laid in a good stock of provisions, Mr. Low secured some stout
cedar canoes, and set off on his journey from Lake St. John—he and the
Indians. They did not advance with the speed which readers of Fenimore
Cooper’s novels would expect. Their rate of progress averaged fifteen
miles a day, the responsibility for this dilatoriness lying wholly with
the Ashwapmuchuan River. Only every now and then is it a level,
composed, and Thames-like avenue of water. In between whiles, after the
wont of Canadian rivers, it plays leap-frog down the gradients. On
approaching foaming rapids and roaring cascades, Mr. Low and the Indians
got out and walked. Carrying canoes, stores, and baggage over portages
that are sometimes a mile in length is, of course, a laborious and slow
business. On the other hand, it is better to go through with that ordeal
than to be whirled over a waterfall that has a sheer drop of sixty
feet—to mention one picturesque feature occurring along Mr. Low’s
route.
I will not dilate upon the glorious mountains and the verdant valleys
that came under the explorer’s notice. The lovely lakes—some of them
twenty miles and more in length—rather tried his patience. “Many of
them are so indented and dotted with islands,” he deplored, “that it is
difficult for even the Indian guides to follow correctly the channels.”
He noted the millions of dormant dollars existing in the form of timber:
the black spruce (most abundant of all), the fir, the banksian pine, the
aspen and balsam poplars, the white birch, the cedar, and other useful
sorts. “White spruce up to twenty-four inches in diameter are,” he
reported, “in many places numerous enough to permit of profitable
lumbering if any means existed for transport to the southern markets.”
But discerning science did not confine itself to indicating the fortunes
in forests that awaited human immigrants. It shed a passing tear over
the timber wealth that had been already consumed by immigrants of
another genus. “Larch formerly grew in abundance,” Mr. Low reported,
“and often they exceeded the white spruce in size,” as was obvious from
old trees still standing as skeletons. But about twelve years ago, it
seems, those forests were destroyed by a visitation of the European
larch saw-fly—that wasp without a waist whose caterpillars have a large
appetite, twenty legs, and an interesting way of standing with the hind
part of their bodies gracefully curled over their heads. So our European
saw-fly was the guilty party, was he? One wonders how in the name of
Christopher Columbus he got across.
Mr. Low found some white fellow-creatures in the virgin territory he was
exploring. To begin with, he saw (as the opening of this narrative will
have prepared my readers to learn) a small party of miners working at
the asbestos outcrops on Asbestos Island in McKenzie Bay, which is
situated in the north-west corner of Chibougamau Lake. He also found in
the district other white, or whitish, people, who were residents of long
standing. Indeed, the strange fact has to be noted that groups of these
white or whitish people are to be found in even the most northerly and
remote districts of unexplored and unexploited Canada. The history of
the Hudson’s Bay Company—one of the greatest dramas that the world and
the centuries have witnessed—was sufficiently outlined in the preceding
chapter. In this place it is merely necessary to relate that, on
approaching Lake Mistassini, Mr. Low found “a number of old men, women
and children” congregated on the shore, awaiting the arrival of some
flour and groceries they were expecting by canoe from Hudson Bay. Much
earlier in his travels, at a point only some sixty miles from Lake St.
John, he had come upon another settlement of the ancient fur-collecting
corporation.
In a manner wholly unforeseen, the Hudson’s Bay Company is proving of
great value to modern Canada. Each of its outposts of civilisation is a
treasury of clues to the agricultural possibilities of an unknown
country. The trappers, in their remote isolation, have naturally gone in
for a little gardening. It has helped to pass the time, not to mention
the advantage of having fresh vegetables and ripe gooseberries on the
dinner-table. When the rare visitor now arrives, as an emissary from
populated regions away in the south, the Hudson Bay folk must be
intensely gratified by the interest he takes in their cultivated
back-yards.
Mr. Low is not the man to neglect opportunities. “The surrounding
country appears to be fertile,” he noted, “as, in the clearing about the
old Hudson’s Bay Company post, timothy grass grows abundantly and small
fruits ripen early.” On the other hand, no great success had apparently
attended horticultural efforts at the second trappers’ settlement he
visited. “Great difficulty is experienced,” we are told, “in growing a
small crop of potatoes, although the soil is the best in the region.”
Again, “attempts have been made at this place to grow oats, barley, and
wheat, but without success.” The explanation of this unsatisfactory
state of things is detected by the scientific mind, and a valuable hint
to the agricultural world is the result. This particular Hudson’s Bay
post happens to be twelve hundred feet above sea-level—indeed, it
occurs very near the line of greatest elevation running through Quebec
province. “When lands are situated above the thousand-foot level,” Mr.
Low points out, “there is constant danger of summer frosts, though these
would probably be lessened by clearing the lands and breaking the
surface with the plough.” He emphasises his contention by instancing
experiences at the Hudson’s Bay post beside Waswanipi Lake, which is
situated about one hundred and fifty miles away to the south-west. The
climatic conditions are more favourable there because the elevation is
only seven hundred feet above sea-level. At the Waswanipi station, we
learn, “excellent root crops are grown annually, while experiments with
the cultivation of cereals show that oats, barley, and the hardier
varieties of wheat easily ripen.” The Canadian settler, when choosing a
northern homestead, will be well advised to keep this matter of
elevation in mind.
Mr. Low, it will be observed, by no means limits his investigations,
when travelling through a new country, to matters germane to his own
science. “The fisheries of the larger lakes,” reported this broad-minded
geologist, “will undoubtedly be a source of considerable wealth to the
province as soon as a railway provides quick transport.” Speaking from
personal experience, he goes on to say that “the chief food fishes are
lake-trout, brook-trout, pike, pickerel, sturgeon, whitefish, and two
species of sucker.” The sucker is, I believe, also known on the North
American continent as the “stone-roller” and the “red-horse.” No doubt
it is more appetising than it sounds.
Coming now to matters belonging to Mr. Low’s special province, I must
first mention his discovery of an interesting freak of Nature. “Near the
western end of McKenzie Bay,” it seems, “is a low cone of dark, rotten
serpentine, peculiar on account of its magnetic attraction, the compass
pointing to it from all directions within a radius of half a mile.”
A geological report is, of course, a solemn, technical, and
unsensational document. The business of a geologist is to identify the
rocks, seen and unseen, the word “rocks,” in its scientific application,
including pretty well every constituent of the globe save water and air.
The geologist does not mine for gold, silver, and precious stones; he
merely decides whether and where it would be worth while to mine for
them. His task is to go in advance and prepare the way for the
prospector.
Thus Mr. Low’s report does little more than hint at mineral wealth.
Having confirmed the discovery of a large mass of gold-bearing quartz,
he states the conditions under which similar bodies may perhaps be found
in neighbouring localities. As to copper, we have to be content with the
information that “in a number of places good signs of ore are seen in
diabase schists.” Concerning iron, a “locality of promise” is indicated.
With regard to asbestos, which lends itself to readier identification,
we have more definite information. “All the areas of serpentine
discovered in the region up to the present time,” Mr. Low’s report bears
witness, “contain veins of asbestos, and in many places these veins are
of sufficient size and number to form valuable deposits as soon as a
railway is built to the shores of Chibougamau Lake.”
Mr. Low made the return journey in fine style, “shooting all the rapids
along the river,” and arriving at Lake St. John on September 1st. Thus
his explorations occupied more than nine weeks, and—rendering testimony
on yet another important point—he mentions a sustained experience of
fine weather, “not a day having been lost by rain or head-winds.”
Thus by following in the footsteps of a scientific scout of
civilisation, we have had a peep at one morsel of a huge territory which
man has scarcely begun to utilise. There are no means of measuring its
natural resources; we know only that they are vast. Conjecture may,
however, be based on analogy. The present population of Quebec is
practically restricted to a tenth part of the province. What is being
done in that tenth part does not by any means represent finality, since
development in many districts is still at an early stage. Nevertheless,
the achievements of a part supply a clue to the possibilities of the
whole, so I will mention a few instructive facts.
Last year some fifty million bushels of oats were grown in the province
of Quebec; and since to most persons 50,000,000 is an indefinite total,
and only vaguely impressive, like 5,000,000 or 500,000,000, I may
mention, for the purpose of affording the reader a standard of
comparison, that in 1909 the quantity of that grain grown in
Scotland—the national head-quarters of oat-cakes and porridge—was only
thirty-eight million bushels. Let me quote another item from the long
list of products yielded by the fraction of Quebec province that is at
present under cultivation. The French-Canadians and their neighbours
annually grow about seventeen million bushels of potatoes, or enough to
supply the entire population of Ireland from one year’s end to another,
allowing for a consumption of 2½ lbs. per week for every man, woman and
child. They also grow enough tobacco (principally black and strong
kinds, but including a good deal of Havana) to meet the annual
requirements of over a million moderate smokers; while Quebec’s immense
quantities of apples, cheese, cherries, butter, pears, pumpkins and
melons also provide the statistician with much food for thought.
And, while I am about it, let me give a hint or two with reference to
the present mineral output of the province. Note, then, that in 1909
some three thousand miners received £270,000 as wages for wresting
£459,000 worth of asbestos from the serpentine rocks of Quebec—a region
which in the same year enriched the world with over a million barrels of
Portland cement (representing a value of £263,000), besides noteworthy
quantities of copper, graphite, marble, granite, phosphate, mica,
chromite, and ochres.
[Illustration: GATHERING MAPLE SYRUP IN EASTERN CANADA]
[Illustration: TOBACCO GROWING, QUEBEC PROVINCE]
As to the forests, they represent a vast treasury from which the lumber
and pulp industries draw annually a value of about £4,000,000; nor
should we forget the six thousand tons of luscious syrup tapped from the
maple trees. Again, there is not an area of the earth more richly
endowed with water-power; and therefore to Quebec’s manufacturing
activity, which has had a brilliant beginning, no man can foresee the
end.
Those of my readers who are well-read sportsmen will have been wondering
why, all this time, I have omitted to mention a supreme attraction of
the region under notice. With its vast virgin forests full of game, its
thousands of lakes and rivers alive with fish, Quebec has won the title,
in Canada and the United States, of the Angler’s and Sportsman’s
Paradise. Many a wealthy American whiles away delightful months hunting
the caribou, moose and red deer, the beaver, mink and yellow fox, the
woodcock, partridge and widgeon, in that beautiful country of the St.
Lawrence River and the Laurentian Range. American angling clubs lease
Quebec’s famous salmon pools, and hundreds of New York’s busy citizens
spend their holidays capturing the monster trout, bass, pike, and
whitefish for which the province is famous.
And anybody may acquire the freehold of one hundred acres of that
favoured country on paying 16s. 6d., with four following annual payments
of the same amount, the price of Crown land being 10d. per acre, rising
to 2s. 6d. in certain areas. For the rest, steamers ply on some of the
lakes, the Government is rapidly extending its network of colonisation
roads, and in one district free railway transport is conceded to
arriving settlers and their families, with 300 lbs. of household
effects.
Nor do these facilities exhaust the measures taken by the provincial
authorities to secure population. They recognise a necessity to make
further special effort in view of a notable disadvantage in the matter
of immigration that is peculiar to Quebec. The majority of new arrivals
from the United Kingdom—little dreaming what charming and helpful
neighbours the French-Canadians make—elect to locate themselves in the
provinces where their mother-tongue prevails, and, the number of
immigrants from France being insufficient to adjust the balance, Quebec
has its grievance. Perhaps I ought rather to say that Quebec had its
grievance, for the genius of French-Canadian politicians has proved a
match for the situation.
A law was passed granting boons and honour to the mothers and fathers
who rear twelve children or more. I first heard of this stroke of
enlightened statesmanship when discussing Canada’s future with M. E. E.
Taché, the Deputy Minister of Lands and Forests in Quebec’s noble
Parliament House.
“We do not get our due proportion of the inrush of settlers,” explained
M. Taché. “Very well, then, for peopling our vast province we look
rather to the natural increase of the population already here;” and he
presented me with a copy of Volume II. of an interesting Government
publication.
This publication shows the law of the twelve children in working. It
seems that during the first fourteen years of the existence of the
statute 3,395 heads of families were registered as qualified to receive
the free grant of 100 acres (or, in the alternative, fifty dollars) by
which a progressive Government recognised the service they had rendered
to Canada by rearing large families. Those 3,395 names had been printed
in Volume I., and the significant fact has to be added that, in the
comparatively short ensuing period of fifteen months, as many as 2,018
heads of families were added to the roll of honour.
[Illustration: TYPICAL FRENCH-CANADIAN FAMILY: SIXTEEN CHILDREN]
Those prize-winners are recorded in page after page of a table printed
in six columns. The first column gives the name of the head of the
family—usually, of course, the father, but occasionally his widow or
his eldest son. Then occurs the name of the wife, or, in the case of a
second marriage, of the wives. The third and fourth subdivisions
indicate the parish and county of residence. From the fifth column we
learn how many children there are in the family, and the sixth column
reveals whether the hundred acres or the fifty dollars were preferred.
Since the grant of land is associated with an obligation to clear and
cultivate it, and since the people of Quebec are already provided with
ample farms, it is natural that choice alighted, in a majority of cases,
on the money payment. Here and there, indeed, the table reveals a large
family so wealthy and contented that they have waived their claim alike
to the land and the cash. The proud father accepts as a sufficient
reward the honourable publicity conferred by having his name
conspicuously printed in State archives.
The column devoted to “_Nombre d’enfants_” repays examination. The
repetition of the number 12 is constantly interrupted by 13, and, less
frequently, by 14; but you do not have to turn many pages before you
come upon a 15, then other 15’s, with a sprinkling of 16’s, and with
even a 17 here and there. When, on page sixty, I found evidence that a
French-Canadian of Montmorency had 18 children I did not doubt that
here, at last, I had reached high-water mark. Yet no; on turning to page
127 I learnt that M. Cajetan Vezina, of Hebertville, in the county of
Lac St. Jean, had 19 children. Among the 2,018 entries that proved to be
the top score. _Vive Québec! Vive la famille!_