Riding the Plains in 1905
KING STEER made a brave stand against King Wheat, but had to surrender
when his realm was thrown open for settlement and the army of
grain-growers poured in, cutting up the range with barbed-wire fences.
This brings us to the beginning of the present century. Turn your
telescope back to that time. Mount the broncos of imagination and ride
with me, to see what I saw, riding the plains in 1905 when the new
Prairie Provinces were just being born.
Down in Southern Alberta, the biggest ranch still surviving, with its
lordly domain of 66,000 acres, has just been sold to a syndicate for $6
an acre—five times what its owner paid to the Government twenty years
back—for sub-division into farms. The last 10,000 head of cattle are
being driven off to a range leased from the Government many miles away
to the north.
Wheat is waving, yellow and ripe, on farms newly fenced off the prairie,
close by; and even the ranches up in the foothills, where they thought
themselves secure, find speculative homesteaders cutting off quarter
sections from the “free range.”
Much of the south-western prairie was fit for ranching, and for ranching
only. But newcomers in their haste and ignorance demanded to have it
thrown open for homesteading, and the Government, equally hasty and
ignorant, allowed them to flock in,—presently to flock out again, to
districts where crops are reasonably sure. After many wasted years the
deserted land may possibly be seen alive with flocks of sheep, and in
the end with herds of cattle as in the beginning.
Riding away to the north—though not for lack of a train, if we wanted
to take one—we pass through Calgary, already a city of 10,000, and
after another fifty miles or so of “bald-headed prairie” we enter the
beautiful park lands of Central Alberta. Here, along a railway closely
following our road, the old Edmonton Trail of Cree and Blackfoot, we
find a string of farmers who are neither “ranchers” nor “grain-growers,”
though they raise both grain and cattle. Livestock is their mainstay;
and already, though the day of the big ranch is over, the number of
cattle in the West is greater than ever.
Strike eastward, though. Here, far from any railway line, we might think
ourselves back in the days before the West was discovered even by
Indians. We enter a land where no man dwells. We see the prairie
primeval, as it was when it first arose from the sea and put on its
mantle of green; sleeping on, untouched and unchanged, as it slept when
the first silent red man stole out of the woods and shaded his eyes to
scan its sunlit sea of grass.
Look close, and we detect the winding trails of buffalo, trod by
uncounted generations in everlasting single file—mere shallow grooves
all overgrown with grass. The buffalo have all been gone these thirty
years. We cannot do as thirty years ago a traveller did—shoot a buffalo
when dinner time came, roast the tongue, carry off the best of the hump,
and leave the rest to the coyotes. We might bring down a prairie chicken
or duck now and then, but we have a long trip ahead of us, and no time
for hunting. Like old Highland clansmen riding to war, we carry each a
bag of oatmeal strapped to the saddle. There is nothing like it. “We owe
to Scotland whiskey and oatmeal,” somebody says, “but the less we take
of the one, and the more we take of the other, the less we lose and the
more we gain.” For this trip we add a trifle of tea and sugar, and
bacon, which our clansman would have thought luxurious.
Here and there we may happen on a square iron stake rising from a little
mound in the midst of four shallow pits, pointing north, south, east and
west. Surveyors have been here and left these landmarks so that
home-seekers can see at once the corners of each quarter section; but
the home-seekers have not yet come.
At last we see two parallel ruts worn smooth and deep through the grass.
We have found the old trail which the army followed on its march to the
relief of Battleford. Here is a little creek, “Fifteen-mile Springs” by
name; it is fifteen miles north of the Saskatchewan River; and camping
beside it we actually find two human beings, with a wagon and team. They
are Minnesota farmers, on their way to join a score of others from the
same State who are settling on homesteads far north-east of this.
“And don’t you want to be ‘Americans’ any longer?” I ask.
“No,” say they both, most emphatically, “we’re Canadians now.”
After a friendly meal of bread and bacon, we leave the good men behind,
and with them leave the modern world. The ancient world opens up around
us as we ride away to the north—the ancient prairie as it was, as it
is, and never-more shall be.
Bathed in a glorious flood of sunshine, a glorious flood of air, the
rolling plain spreads limitless to far horizons. Space, never-ending
space, all round; and silence, but for the music of our horses’ hoofs.
High overhead fly steadily a flock of cranes, in perfect arrow-head
formation, two long lines converging on the leader. Wild duck fly,
straight but scattering, from slough to slough. The little greyish lark
hops everywhere.
The gopher sits bolt upright on the edge of a hole, vanishing downward
like a shot when he thinks audacity has reached fool-hardiness. Twenty
yards ahead, beside the trail, a fountain of earth spouts up where a big
striped badger is digging himself a home. He turns and stares at us,
motionless, till we also stop, when he too disappears. Now and then a
snake slips across the trail, a greenish-yellow innocent.
On the crest of a knoll, outlined against the sky, a great buzzard sits
watching us till we come near, then soars away on the other side. A
coyote steals swiftly over the plain, turning round and stopping now and
then for a good look at us. Again and again, rounding a hillock, we
startle a bunch of antelope; they make off in a leisurely-seeming way,
but their graceful leaps take them out of range with the speed of a fast
train. When the railway later on had to fence its track, the antelope at
first would stop, distressed and puzzled by the mysterious obstacle to
their migration; but they soon learned to clear the barrier at a
bound. . . .
Suddenly we spy a house—then a second house, and a little sod
shack—the only sign of settlement between the South Saskatchewan and
the Battle River valley. It looks like an isolated knot of dwellings,
but we are really cutting across a long thin line. The newcomers left
the railway at Saskatoon—the Canadian Northern, which before the end of
the year will be through from Winnipeg to Edmonton—but, finding the
land near the railway taken up, they have driven on and on to the
south-west, till at last, after 85 miles, they have reached land without
an owner. Others following them have gone on in the same direction, till
now the thread of settlement stretches out to a length of a hundred
miles from the railway.
[Illustration]
_Antelope on the Alert_
The sod shack is the first western home of a farmer from Ontario, whose
family will not be coming up till spring. On the next homestead is a
good frame house, an unpainted and unvarnished shell so far, but showing
taste and means which scorn to shelter even for a time within rough
comfortable walls of turf. This, too, belongs to a born Briton from
Ontario. The third settler is a cheery Perthshire Highlander. He has
spent twelve years in Manitoba, sold his farm at a profit, and come far
afield for a free homestead. He has already got 50 acres broken for next
year’s crop, and finds time to act as baker for the settlers “baching
it” around him.
Again we mount, and plunge into the wilderness. Evening draws in, and
still we ride—in silence, for the joy of living is too deep for words.
On a high hilltop we pause, enchanted by the vista opened suddenly at
our feet. Deep in the darkening east a valley sleeps, veiled in a weird
portentous purple mist.
Beside the next water we camp; that is, we cook our simple fare on a
fire of dwarf willow and wild rose stems, hobble our broncos, roll
ourselves in blankets and go to sleep under the friendly stars, lulled
by the breeze that rustles in the grass, despite the heathen coyote’s
evening hymn.
The next day we see trees ahead, and ride into the heart of Sixty-mile
Bush, a curious isolated patch of wood rising like an island from the
grassy sea, and interspersed with many a slough. Here we find human
beings: two families of Métis. One woman speaks French and Cree; the
other, educated in a convent, speaks English pretty well. Their eight
little children, dark-skinned, black-eyed and very Indian looking, roll
each other over on the floor; active and jolly, though remarkably quiet
in their play.
Presently grandfather comes in: a pleasant-faced man, dark as an Indian,
but bearded like a white man; a stalwart of seventy, without a white
hair. Not a word of English can he speak, though long ago he travelled
as guide with an English hunter through the Rocky Mountains. In quite
good French, he spins out reminiscences. He knew Louis Riel in the
trouble of 1870—knew him so well that he strongly opposed inviting him
back in 1884. But when the invitation was given, and the man he despised
was leading his kinsfolk into hopeless rebellion, our friend took up his
gun and fought like the rest at Batoche.
They are all most hospitable, these dusky folk of Sixty-mile Bush. “If
you want wood for your camp-fire,” says the spokeswoman, “take all you
need from our log pile. And aren’t you tired of sleeping on the prairie?
The stable is dry and clean—the horses run out all summer—and there is
plenty of hay in the stacks. Have you had enough of slough water? Here’s
a pail of fine water from the well.” To be sure they have no yeast
bread, but for a trifle we get one of their mighty bannocks—oval slabs,
eighteen inches by twelve, and an inch thick—with a big lump of
home-churned butter and a jug of fresh milk.
Crossing another stretch of treeless plain in the morning, we notice
fresh wagon tracks leading away from the trail. We turn aside and follow
one of these tracks, but it ends suddenly on the edge of a deep wooded
coulee, where some new settler has gone to cut logs for his first shack.
Exploring another fresh trail, we come upon a brown patch of newly
broken land, with a brand-new box of a house in the middle, and the
beginnings of a well dug beside it; but we have had our trouble for
nothing, for the owner, after doing as much as this in compliance with
the easy homestead law, has returned to the States for the winter,
intending to come back for good next year.
Better luck farther on. Here is a house that is clearly inhabited, for
we see through the window a loaf of bread on a shelf and a pile of wood
by the stove. Now we country folk in the West don’t like a visitor to
turn away just because we are out when he calls, especially near meal
times. We leave the key over the door to welcome him by proxy, and if he
knows anything about our ways he will reach up and find it at once. Most
of us, in fact, don’t lock our doors at all; there is no need. . . . Oh,
yes, there are exceptions. Now and then a low-down individual, or a
whole family without one conscience to the dozen, will descend like a
blight on a neighborhood; until they are driven out or reformed, things
have a habit of disappearing; but in most parts we trust each other
perfectly. . . . Putting up my hand, I find the hospitable key. We go in
and make ourselves at home, lighting a fire for our bacon, and helping
ourselves to bread and butter and potatoes by way of a change.
Departing, we leave twenty-five cents apiece on the table; but we know
that if the hostess had been at home she would almost certainly have
refused the money.
A white spot in the distance attracts us, as twilight thickens. Riding
over, we find it a very small tent—inhabited by a very large man, who
cannot stand upright till he comes out of it. “Good enough for me,” he
says with a laugh. “When I’m not sleeping I want to be out working. I
started plowing the day I got here, and now look at that”—pointing to
his fifty acres of new breaking. “The house can wait till I bring my
folks up from Iowa next April. Then we’ll run up a house together in a
brace of shakes.”
“Why did you leave Iowa? Don’t they call it the finest agricultural
State in the Union?”
“So it is, but no better than this’ll be. And anyway I’d only a rented
farm, and I wanted one of my own. My next neighbor here came from down
there too, and he had a good farm; but his boys were big enough to want
farms too, and land prices went soaring out of sight, so he sold out for
enough to stock half-a-dozen new farms up here.”
“You won’t find it strange to become a Canadian?”
“There’s nothing strange about it. Friend of mine down there said to me,
‘I ain’t going to have no king riding over me!’—Well, there’s some
folks think no ways good but their own ways; and that’s the worst kind
of ignorance. I told him the King was just a president, and brought up
to the business, as no in-and-out president ever was. We have to elect a
new one every four years, and you just elect a new one when you see
there’s need. I know history, and I know how you give a bad king the
air, and choose a new one and tell him to go ahead and be the sort of
king you want and teach his son to do likewise—which he takes mighty
good care to do. He’s just as much the people’s choice as ours is, and
then some! And the best of it is, chosen and brought up as he is like
that, you’ve always got a president that’s never been a party man and
never can be, so all parties can trust him. Mighty sensible plan, seems
to me.
“Then your king never goes against his people and parliament. He hasn’t
anything like the power of our president. Once a president gets in, he
appoints what ministers he likes—the House hasn’t a word to say about
it though the Senate has—and there they are, planted for four years no
matter what happens, congress or no congress. Here in this Dominion of
Canada, your Prime Minister is the only man that has anything like the
power of our president, and even he has to do what parliament says—or
get out. Talk about self-government! They’ve got it in England, and
you’ve got it in Canada, a sight more of it than we have.
“There’s another sensible thing I like about your British ways. Whether
you make much better laws or much about the same, if a man breaks them
you get after him, and give him his medicine quick. We call ourselves
hustlers! You don’t give your scallywag a thousand miles of rope and let
him play around dodging the law as long as he can pay a lawyer.”
“As for the King, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” I remark. “If
everybody looked for the facts as you do, without prejudice, half the
differences of opinion on all sorts of questions would simply vanish.
There is no nation without a king. Our neighbors, as you say, elect a
King every four years and call him a President—we elect our President
whenever we see cause, and call him a King. King George holds office
entirely by authority of an Act of Parliament, and so will his son;
though we are always glad to remember that they inherit the blood of
Alfred the Great. We are a practical people, though we know well the
value of sentiment and high tradition; and we have found the greatest
practical advantages in possessing an independent and impartial
president, who has no party bias, favors no class or sectional interest,
and belongs not to the mother-land alone but to every country of our
world-wide brotherhood. He, as no one else can, unites and represents us
all.
“As for our laws, they are not perfect, and I’m afraid we have not
caught all the rascals yet; but on the whole the impression you have got
is well justified.”
Half a mile away, in the darkening air, we see the outline of a house,
with a cheerful beckoning light in the window, and we gallop across to
see who is there. We find a French-Canadian couple who left Quebec in
their youth and have just come back to their native land. Monsieur is
unhitching his ox team in the dark. His habit is to rise at three, put
in at least six hours’ work on the land before ten, rest through the
mid-day heat, and then stick to the plow or harrow as long as he can see
the animal’s horns. The house is a perfect model of cleanliness and good
order. It has only one room, but is well if plainly furnished, and every
utensil, bright as a new pin, hangs from its proper hook on the neatly
plastered wall.
The man has made the house, from door-step to chimney-top, with his own
hands. He admits that he spent $30 on window sashes, planed wood for
door and floor, and the necessary nails; but otherwise the whole
building has cost him in cash only the twenty-five cents charged by the
Government for leave to cut logs in Cutknife Valley. He has brought a
year’s rations, besides his eight work oxen and milch cow, so he is well
able to wait till the second year for his wheat crop. Madame is packing
all the eggs and butter she can gather and make for winter use. Between
them they find time to read three weekly papers, one French and two
English.
“I suppose you are a bit lonely out here as yet,” I remark.
“Lonely? Oh, dear no!” says our host, pointing to a fiddle on a shelf.
“We had a couple of dances this summer in my father’s house, and all the
girls came from twenty miles around.” There is quite a colony of these
“original Canadians” here already, and not one home without plenty of
children.
We ride over to the battlefield in the morning. Twenty years have passed
since the Indians caught us on Cutknife Hill, but the grassy slope is
still strewn with empty cartridge shells. An old Indian who took his
share in the fray goes over the battlefield with us, exchanging
reminiscences where once we exchanged hot shot, and “reconstructing” the
scene by creeping up the slope with an imaginary gun in his hand. Then
the enemies of a bygone day sit down and take pot-luck
together—pot-luck being a couple of prairie chicken brought down with
one shot.
To-day, it seems, the painted warriors of ’85 are a peaceful community
of farmers. Here comes one, driving by in his wagon with a good team of
horses. Instead of picturesque blanket and bead-work, he wears what we
have the conceit to call civilized clothes, and differs only in
complexion from his European neighbors. On the edge of a poplar bluff we
meet another Cree brave, who comes forward smiling to have his
photograph taken when he has put up his horses in their log stable. His
summer dwelling stands close by,—a genuine tepee, but made of canvas
instead of buffalo skin—and in front of the door is a wash-tub. Think
of it!
Still more remarkable than the wash-tub is the big threshing machine. A
little later, and it will be hard at work pouring golden wheat into
wagon after wagon. The whole outfit, steam engine and all, was bought by
the tribe with their own earnings. The land is still held in common, but
any tribesman who wants to fence off part of it as a farm is free to do
so.
Through the park lands of the Battle River Valley we now ride for many
hours—a country as rich as the prairie, and rich not only in soil, but
in wood and water. High on the bank of a clear and rapid stream, in the
shade of a beautiful grove, an old Ontario farmer and his sons, with an
eye to the picturesque as well as the profitable, have built their
mansion. Between them, they have taken a whole section, 640 acres, and
have over 150 acres broken this first year.
“A grand country,” says the farmer’s wife, bringing out a jug of cool
milk for the riders when their broncos have drunk their fill at the
creek. “It’s as beautiful as where we came from, and that’s saying a
lot. My husband and I wouldn’t live without trees. There was a man
driving through to-day that said he wouldn’t live _with_ them—says he
feels choked in the brush. He’s taken a homestead where you can plow the
whole half-mile furrow straight without a turn. Well, it takes all sorts
to make a world.”