THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO
I sat in the tail of the train smoking, while Ontario dropped behind,
league after league of thin trees growing out of the rock, of rock
growing out of bog or lake, of bog or lake covering all solid things.
Sometimes the trees were green and dark; sometimes green and light;
sometimes nothing but scorched trunks--black skeletons of trees left
by a forest fire which had killed everything within reach like a
beast of prey, but consumed only the tender parts.
Somebody, as we swung over a typical piece of muskeg country--black
and juicy bogland covered with a foot maybe of clear water--began to
tell a story of a train that had run off the rails and plunged head
first into just such a place. It had been a long train, he said; a
goods train, and it had gone down and down. When he saw it, the last
truck only stuck out of the muskeg. We listened respectfully. It
{110} was at least a well-found story, illustrating the difficulties
the engineers had had in laying the lines across a treacherous ooze
that nothing seemed to fill or make firm.
What will become of this one-thousand-mile stretch of swamped
rock-land? Nobody knows. There it lies separating East from West,
as land impassable, unnavigable as water. Firs and minerals, these
are the only things to be expected from it. Firs tend to grow less,
but the minerals of course may in the end so count that no one will
wish the country other than the rock it is. All along the line the
railway authorities have up the names of stations, as though there
really were stations there, and, even more, as though there were
villages or towns which those stations served. You are carried past
a hundred such stations--names on a board and nothing more at all,
unless it be a solitary wooden shack in which some railway
subordinate passes his life seeing that the line is clear. The gangs
of workers, Galicians or Italians, who do repairs along the line,
camp out; you see their camps now and then, temporary settlements in
this No Man's Land.
'_Pays mélancolique et marécageux!_' So Pierre Loti named Les
Landes, and the description fits this country too, though I doubt if
{111} melancholy is a word to be found in a Canadian's vocabulary.
'Pretty poor stuff' a Canadian might allow it to be, but would
immediately begin to talk of the fish in its waters, the big game to
be got among the woods, and the mining possibilities it would reveal
as soon as prospectors and syndicates got together. There never was
a people less born to be depressed than the Canadians; nor do I think
they will ever produce a Pierre Loti.
For my part, I began to find this country most fascinating when I
started to think of its effect upon the history of Canada. It is
easy to see that its very impenetrability hindered for a long time
the growth of the West. Where there was no road there was no way for
progress, and the great wheatlands were shut up beyond it, while
Eastern Canada developed. What is less easy to see is the effect
such a waste must have when the country on the other side has been
populated and fertilised. A little time ago people began to think
that East and West would simply reverse their order of importance.
They said, 'Quebec and Ontario have depreciated in value. The rich
land of Ontario has been ruined, why should any one stay there when
in the West there is limitless wheatland to settle on?' {112} But the
trackless country still lay between--distance is not annihilated by a
single railroad, nor by a dozen railroads. Quebeckers did not move
West much. Ontarian farmers began to find that exhausted land could
be renovated by scientific methods. If the plains had adjoined their
farms, they would not have bothered to try those methods, but the
muskeg and rock lay between. Some of them went West, but not all;
they did not like it that the West was being settled from the States
and Europe. In any case the West would have been an unfamiliar
country--the American and English immigrants only made it more
so--and the boasts of the West roused Eastern pride. Was the West
best? Ontarians looked about them and found that not only could
their present farms be improved but that there lay still in their own
particular country virgin land that needed only to be cleared and
worked. Already there is the new Ontario, north of the old Ontario,
offering fresh fields and pastures new for the Canadian born who
didn't mind clearing land as well as working it. It is land upon
which the average immigrant is lost, upon which the average Ontarian
is at home. Thus begins a northern movement which may spread any
distance.
{113}
I have not said, and would not say, that the rock and water of
Ontario account for this northern movement, for the fact that people
are beginning to say, 'This East and West business is overdone.
Canada is not a thin, straight line from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
but a country stretching north to Hudson Bay, having the depth of the
States almost, if a race spreads hardy enough to inhabit it.' The
immediate cause of the northern movement was the discovery that wheat
was as hardy as men, if not hardier, and would grow more north than
an old-time settler ever dreamed of. The movement began in the
North-West. All I would say is that if the waste country had not
lain between the Ontarian farmer and the West he would have rushed
with the rest, and the balance of importance would have shifted
altogether westward. As it is, Ontarian farmers thrive again; new
Ontario thrives excellently in a score of ways; the Canadian-born
prosper in that part of Canada where they are--and always have
been--most massed and most solidly Canadian. The West is a medley of
races; and if it had suddenly become dominant by reason of its vastly
superior prosperity, a people that could definitely be called
Canadian would have been still further to seek than it is. {114}
Canada, in effect, would have had to restart becoming a nation.
All that day the rock and bog and timber kept dropping behind the
train, and it was sunset before we came to the shore of Lake
Superior. A thunderous glow hung over the lake, glimmering on the
great granite cliffs. It was dark before we came to Port
Arthur--proud possessor of the largest elevator in the world, and
fierce rival of Fort William. In the morning we were in Manitoba.
{115}