Up to the North and Home Again
THE MUSIC of a foaming torrent mingles with the softened hum of mowers
and roar of heavy trains rushing wheat to the steamers at Fort William,
as we plane up—not down—to the south-east corner of the Province. The
crisp music is the voice of Winnipeg River, busy making electric light
and power for the city and the towns beyond.
Right about turn. There is the very same water, spread out and sleeping
in the shallow expanse of Lake Winnipeg. The shimmer of the surface
breaks into flashing points of light as hundreds of Icelandic settlers
pull out the fish.
Now for a long swift spin to the farthest North. Leaving Manitoba
behind, we soon leave the woods behind too. Beneath us lies a treeless
rolling plain.
Astonishing! We were brought up to believe Northern Canada a “frozen
wilderness.” We find it contains great stretches of green pasture, gay
with innumerable flowers, alive with birds and beasts and butterflies.
Even the Arctic islands, which most people imagine covered with
perpetual snow and ice, we find carrying much vegetation and fattening
herds of musk ox and caribou. A large part of Alaska, and nearly all
Greenland, are mountainous. These keep their mantle of ice the year
round because of their height and snowfall; but they are not in Canada.
For periods varying from two to four or five months, as the explorer
Stefansson tells us, most of our northern land is a picture of green
prairie and flowering meadows; the flowering plants are much more
conspicuous than the mosses and lichens which many people imagine are
the only specimens of vegetable life to be seen.
The summer is short up here, if reckoned by months, but not if reckoned
in hours of sunshine. Where the sun never sets, for weeks or months at a
time, the summer warmth is continuous, unbroken by the cooling of night.
In polar regions you may experience a temperature of 95 to 100 in the
shade.
One day, as Stefansson predicts, this continent will draw a large part
of its meat supply from vast herds of reindeer grazing on these northern
prairies of Canada. The caribou is simply a variety of reindeer, and as
easily tamed.
The 1,280 reindeer brought over from Siberia to Alaska, between 1892 and
1902, have increased beyond all expectations, and now number more than
200,000, after 100,000 have been killed for their meat and hides. And
Alaska possesses only one-tenth of the area available for this purpose
on our vast northern plains.
Our children will smile at our notion that this north land is “useless.”
We have not learnt to use it; that is all.
Rising again, and skimming over Hudson Bay, we overtake a ship of the
Company making her yearly voyage to England with a cargo of furs. Yes,
it is the same old Corporation of Adventurers, carrying on its ancient
trade. Times have changed even up in the North, but the change has been
very slight compared to the transformation of the South under the
magical touch of steel rails. Steam has long taken the place of sails,
at sea; stern-wheelers ply at intervals on the Peace, Mackenzie and
Stikeen Rivers; but everywhere the stout rowboat and fragile canoe in
summer, the dog cariole in winter, are still the express trains of a
country thousands of miles wide, from British Columbia to Labrador. On
the shores of all three oceans, and at scores of posts between, the
Company goes on bartering goods for the furs brought in by Indians and
Eskimo.
On and on we glide, over the land of the midnight sun, with its Eskimo
encampments. We leave the continent behind, but the land is still almost
continuous: we are crossing the Arctic Archipelago, and some of its
islands are huge. Threading its way among them goes a little steamer,
apparently on its way to the North Pole. No, but it goes within seven
degrees of the Pole, on its yearly voyage with supplies for the Canadian
Mounted Police stations and post-offices on the east and north shores of
Baffin Island, on North Devon, and on Ellesmere, the most northerly
island of all.
It is only when we reach the top of this island that we look down on the
northern boundary of Canada, and realize that our Dominion has enormous
breadth as well as length. From this point to the southern boundary of
Manitoba is about 2,450 miles in a straight line; to the south extremity
of Ontario, 2,650 miles.
We are scarcely tempted to spend the winter up here, though the Police
would be very good company. Turning back towards the mainland, we fly in
silence to the west, a vast expanse of sea on one hand, a barren shore
line on the other. The whole world may be dead, for all we see of life,
except the life of the birds.
Hark! In the midst of this utter solitude, the virgin air gives birth to
a still, small human voice. Incredible, yet true. It is a wireless
message giving us news from home, two thousand miles away, and telling
also of events that happened a few hours ago in Europe, in India, in
Australasia. Speeding on, we see at last the explanation. There on
Herschel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, is a wireless station, the end of
a chain of aerial communication stretching south to the prairies of
Alberta, west to Dawson City, Prince Rupert and Vancouver, east to
Norway House, Winnipeg and Ottawa, and keeping this outermost sentinel
of Canada in touch with the whole civilized world. The Mounted Police
wave a greeting to us as we pass.[1]
-----
[1] This may be called prophetic. The ship of 1924 carrying the wireless
apparatus round to the Arctic was caught in the ice and abandoned; but
another set is being got ready, and should be at work before this book
is many months old.
We have reached the north-west corner of the Dominion. The yearly
steamer bringing supplies from British Columbia, round through Behring
Sea, has just arrived. Inland, we catch a flying glimpse of Yukon
Territory, which blazed into fame as the gold-seekers’ Mecca in 1898.
Now, striking up the valley of the Mackenzie, we pass a string of
outposts where the fur traders, the Mounted Police and the missionaries
live and watch and trade and teach among the Indians. The braves no
longer fight, but they live as they did by hunting and trapping the
beaver and the rest of the fur bearing folk.
A noble valley this, now spreading wide, now narrowing to a canyon where
the Ramparts rise hundreds of feet sheer up from the river’s edge, now
opening again to show green meadows and woodland. Here, a mountainous
region is densely clad with spruce; there, light birch and poplar
restore life to a stretch of brulé; jack-pine and tamarack vary the
scene; and yonder a gaunt escarpment of bare rock climbs to a height of
3,000 feet.
If we followed the Mackenzie through all its windings, we should find it
the longest river in Canada, 2,500 miles to the head of the Finlay. Let
us be content to strike a bee-line of 1,000 miles from the Arctic Sea to
the Peace River.
Another noble valley this, and, where we strike it at the “head of
steel,” dotted not with fur traders’ forts but with farmhouses, schools,
and villages. Here is a Canadian farmer whom I saw a dozen years ago
setting out from Edson, on a 300-mile drive through the backwoods to
reach this “land of promise.” He has a great farm now, with 300 acres of
fine wheat and oats, and the railway is almost at his door; when it
pushes through to the coast he will be satisfied, he says. “But we’ve
got a creamery at the Crossing, now, and that’s been a godsend. They
reckoned on making 40,000 pounds of butter in a year, and they got up to
that in three months. In the first two months they had paid the farmers
$6,600 for cream, which brightened things up considerably—that year was
dry as we had never known it up here before.” Another Peace River farmer
is filling a silo with sunflower for his aristocratic herd of pure
Jerseys.
* * * * *
Southward again we fly, but swerve a little to the east. Those little
log shacks in the brush remind us that the pioneering spirit is not by
any means extinct. As a matter of fact, as many as 2,576 homesteads were
taken up in this Province in 1923 and 1924, besides 3,507 in
Saskatchewan and 1,121 in Manitoba.
“If you are a great people,” as Joshua told an Israelite tribe when it
wanted more land, “then get up to the wood country and cut for
yourselves there in the land of the giants.” Only there are no giants,
either men or trees, to be encountered in the prairie backwoods.
Still keeping a south-easterly course, we come out of the woods again
and rub our eyes. Are we back in the middle of last century? Buffalo in
thousands roam the plain beneath. Newcomers? Yes, but the oldest of
old-timers, too. Not one was to be seen when we passed here twenty years
ago. But the Dominion Government bought up a few hundred surviving in
the United States and fenced in a prairie “park” at Wainwright as a
sanctuary for these original inhabitants of the West. They have thriven
and multiplied fast. A wonderful sight, that shaggy monarch of the
ancient plains and all his wild barbaric following. . . . And over
there, a few miles away, a fair-haired girl is milking a sleek imported
Shorthorn, a cow with a pedigree of thirty proud generations. . . . The
old and the new, the native and the immigrant; and what a contrast! They
are not so different as their skins appear. Some interesting alliances
have been made between the wild buffalo and tame cattle. But more
success is hoped from a union arranged between buffalo and yak, the
long-haired cattle of the cold Himalayas.
The good old buffalo “robe” is again on the market, for hundreds of the
band have now to be killed every year. The park is becoming a fur farm
as well as sanctuary.
[Illustration: _Lake Louise—Rocky Mountains National Park_]
[Illustration: _Mount Robson—Jasper National Park_]
[Illustration: _The E. P. Ranch, High River, Alta.
The Prince of Wales and his Canadian Home_]
Scores of private fur farms, nearly all devoted to fox raising, have
been established in the West, though the East has still ten times as
many. This will become one of our leading industries. Trapping, in
comparison, is a wastefully laborious and crude as well as cruel method,
though still by far the chief source of the Dominion’s fur supply—and
Canada is “the last great fur preserve of the world.”
In 1924 Saskatchewan sent out 1,161,805 pelts, Manitoba 711,778, Alberta
503,070, British Columbia 180,844, the North West Territories 164,903,
and Yukon 50,070, or 2,772,470 in all.
Of the 70,029 beaver, British Columbia contributed 21,509, Alberta
coming second with 20,057, and Manitoba third with 14,806. Of the
233,037 ermine or weasel, Saskatchewan sent 82,437, Manitoba 63,054,
Alberta 57,962, and British Columbia 25,128. The muskrat numbered
2,121,929, of which 1,006,863 came from Saskatchewan, 554,716 from
Manitoba, 331,144 from Alberta, 108,632 from the North West Territories,
and 85,670 from British Columbia. The beaver catch showed a great
increase over the previous year’s figure, 51,737; but the muskrat total
fell heavily, as the number taken in 1923 had been 3,100,074.
The total value of the western fur catch in 1924 was $8,798,773, of
which $1,970,013 is credited to Alberta, $1,927,914 to Saskatchewan,
$1,908,354 to Manitoba, $1,529,376 to the North West Territories,
$1,116,037 to British Columbia, and $347,079 to the Yukon. The whole
Dominion’s total was $15,643,817, for 4,207,593 pelts, and included
$2,542,992 for 169,172 beaver and $3,440,363 for 2,985,395 muskrat.
Sometimes a fur farm does not need to be “established”; it establishes
itself. On the banks of the Red Deer, away there in the south, you can
see—if the telescope is strong enough—a beaver gnawing at a tree. Now
he has finished, and skips to one side. Down falls the tree with a
crash. The enterprising farmer who owns that land, when he found the
beavers coolly colonizing his water-front, adopted them under special
licence, and supplements their diet of bark with a dessert of carrots,
for which they will presently pay him with their skins.
Turning back from these oldest Canadians to the newest, we plunge into
the thick of the “Galicians” whom we watched coming in. Twenty years
have made a great change here too. Many of the thatched cottages have
been abandoned for modern houses, which, however, are scarcely so
picturesque. The little plots dug up with a spade and reaped with a
scythe have expanded into broad farms worked with the most modern
machinery.
In agriculture, these “New Canadians” have been more than willing, and
many of them keen and quick, to learn the ways of our country. Their
natural thriftiness, ingrained by the poverty of bygone days, has
largely saved them from branching out in the fatal course of
over-ambition. Then the kind of land they have generally settled on, the
brush land, has helped to keep them in the safe path of mixed farming.
There is something in the woodland that seems to fix a family to the
soil with peculiar tenacity—partly, no doubt, because we value most
what we have taken most trouble to secure. Then the Slavs have come to
us with no idea except to make a permanent home. “In the brush country
they can’t be beaten,” says an observer of experience. “It is
wonderful,” says another who knows them well, “what a transformation
they have made; how they have developed the country as well as their own
homes.”
Those who live near the unifying railway and the town easily pick up our
language, and also have a chance of visiting a “better farming train”
and hearing an agricultural lecturer. But the folk away out in the back
country, who need most help, get least of it.
Look at this little schoolhouse, where a young teacher is playing with
the boys and girls. It is in their free hours out of school, quite as
much as in their “lessons,” that they learn our spirit and our ways as
well as our speech. This young woman has such tact and sympathy and
sense that the parents love her, as the children do, and come to her for
information and advice on all sorts of subjects quite apart from school
work. But she is absolutely alone; to every one else in this district
English is a foreign tongue; our Canadian spirit and ideals are
unfamiliar.
Lectures are valuable, when they are listened to and understood; books
and papers, if they are read, and read with ease. But living interest,
personal friendship and sympathetic insight, have ten times the
attracting and stimulating force of all other influences put together.
Without the power of winning affection by giving it, the strongest
intellect is feeble at a task like this—to make the “New Canadian” not
only at home in our country but at home with ourselves; to make him one
of us. It is not paternalism that will do this, but fraternalism.
We must back up those solitary teachers, and, doing that, we shall back
up those New Canadians themselves who are already keen to see their
whole people on the highest level the best of us have reached. We cannot
wish them to adopt our faults when they adopt our language. We have
something to learn from them, as well as they from us.
It is not unnatural uniformity we want. If we got it we should not like
it; and we are better without it. The highest music is not unison, but
harmony, in which our varied voices play their natural parts. Unity is
our aim, not monotony.
We must penetrate the remotest settlement, the densest mass, with the
national spirit of Canada—the spirit and sentiment that knit us
together, the ideals that shame us instinctively when we are unworthy of
them. But only when inspired ourselves by such ideals can we inspire
others with them.
Whether by casual neighborly intercourse, by travelling among them as an
unassuming friend, by large and carefully thought-out systems of
intensive education, or by establishing among them little community
settlement houses in which the teachers of several districts and others
who see the need and the opportunity would live together—or by all
these means and any others which good-will and good sense united can
devise—this aim can and must be achieved.
Achieving this, we shall have laid the sure foundation of a splendid
future for our country, every diverse element joining, in mutual
appreciation and respect, to form one great harmonious community.
* * * * *
Once more we find ourselves approaching Edmonton. When we rode up to it
in 1905 we were just in time to see it raised to the rank of a capital
city. Since then it has adorned itself with a lordly Parliament House,
which crowns the northern bank of the deep wooded valley, and a fine
range of university buildings on the opposite heights.
We slow down over a garden, charmed by its harmonious blend of colors.
There is something uncommon about it too. Half the flowers are natives;
half are immigrants. “Like me and father,” says mother, with a rake in
her hand. “He came from England; I was born here in the West; so I put
in the nasturtium and mignonette and sweet peas and morning-glories that
he loved over there, and he begged me to bring in the goldenrod and wild
aster and Indian paint-brush and wild sunflower, the prairie rose and
wild violets and Canada lily that I grew up with. There never was such a
country as this for wild flowers, he says, and he has been all round the
world. The finest of all are the little ones, like the ‘shooting star’;
dainty and delicate as a piece of embroidery worked by the fairies.”
Perfect in harmony, rich in variety.
Listen again. The city is holding a musical festival. The grandeur of “O
Canada” follows the glorious simplicity of “God Save the King.” Perfect
harmony again; and many of those blending voices had never sung or
spoken a word of English, a few years back. These folk who come to us
with other languages are said to be more musical than the rest of us.
They have practised singing more in their daily lives, perhaps; but
nearly all of us have musical capacity, if we will only train and use it
as we might. Music will be one of the great forces to weld us together.
As if to echo our thoughts, that lad on the gang plow below breaks out
in song—a song of Robert Burns, the plowman poet. I know teams that
would jump at such an outburst, but these beasts are used to it.
Let us go down. We have time for one more visit. The city is far behind,
the journey almost ended, and the sun still high.
A very modest farmhouse is this we have come to: not much of it, but
spick and span, what there is. Barn and sheds all painted; beasts, not
many of them, but all good. The house-wife is singing as she comes to
the door, and only stops when she catches sight of her unexpected
visitors. No need to ask why the boy sings at his work.
She is “sorry to have nothing better” than deliciously cool butter-milk
to quench our thirst—as if there could be anything better, on a hot
afternoon like this! Will we let her make us a cup of tea? Not on any
account.
Happily, this seems the only thing she has to be sorry for. She and her
husband have had difficulties, she admits when asked, but she brushes
them lightly aside for cheerful topics. “Everyone has difficulties, of
course,” says she, “but they were made to be got over.” And we can
imagine how that spirit of hers smoothed the way over them. “Anyway,”
she adds, “why worry about difficulties when there’s so much to be
thankful for?”
Her husband is one of her chief “things to be thankful for,” we discover
at once. And where did he come from? Oh, his parents came out here from
some corner of the old Austrian Empire, and settled next door to an
Ontarian farmer with a Nova Scotian wife. These must have been the best
kind of neighbors, for they treated the newcomers like brother and
sister. Well, that Canadian couple, having a wealth of natural affection
and no children to spend it on, had adopted three orphans, who were part
English and part Scotch, with a dash of Irish; and our hostess was one
of them. Her elder brother also had married into the Slavonic family.
“And a good family they are,” she exclaims; “there’s none better;
right-down good Canadians”—thanks largely to the “neighboring” they got
when they first came in.
We look at each other. One of our party smiles. “I’m what they call a
pure Scot,” he says, “and never heard of a single ancestor who wasn’t.
But if I could see a little farther back I know I should find Norsemen
among my forbears, besides Celts, and the folk who held Scotland before
the Celts came in, and fought them like Indians. To tell the truth,
there’s no such thing as a ‘pure’ race in the world—or, if there is,
it’s a poor one, too. I hadn’t thought of it before, but with such a
threefold inheritance I’m thrice as rich as if I had only one.”
“Then my children are richer still,” says the mother, laughing.
“To be sure they are—a dozen times as rich; for every one of the races
they inherit from is a blend in itself.”
“And when neighbors ask what ‘race’ my children belong to,” the mother
goes on, “I say I can’t guess a riddle—they belong to so many, and all
good. But this I know, the children are what their father and mother
are, just pure Canadian.”
The mother is right. We need not and should not forget the roots from
which we spring; we cannot pull up and burn those roots, if we wanted,
and we should not want. Every cause for love and pride that we have in
the lands of our past, we ought to cherish. Those who best remember the
past and rightly value it are the least likely to forget their duty to
the present and the future. Valuing our distant roots, we shall value
more highly and love with more devotion the tree which has sprung from
them, this many-rooted, many-gifted tree, the united brotherhood of the
Canadian people.
A last flight through the air, and we glide to rest on a gently sloping
hillside. At our feet is a lovely picture, reminding me of a famous view
in the garden of England, in spite of differences in detail. A picture
of softly undulating green and gold; wide fields of yellow grain, with
many a copse of poplar and willow, and here and there a darker grove of
stately spruce; herds of fine cattle, teams of big horses—and yonder a
big school, chief glory of a little town. We have done with adventures
of travel; we must plunge once more into all the adventures of Home.
See the children playing under the maples, beside that gabled farmhouse
on the knoll. That is Home. The biggest boy, a son of the Stars and
Stripes, runs a sister flag up to the mast-head. Wherever we were born,
we are all true Canadians now. True Westerners too. The better
Westerners we are, the better we can serve Canada; and the better
Canadians we are, the better we can serve the West.
That is the flag of our own world-wide brotherhood, our royal
commonwealth,—his flag, and yours, and mine—the Union Jack. It is a
signal. The children are running to meet me at the gate. As soon as I
have landed you other Westerners at your own doors, I must get into my
overalls—only first we must see our visitors off by train.
“No,” they protest, “we had rather stay and get into overalls
ourselves.”
There is only one answer to that—“Brothers, Welcome!”
THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST
_“What is the Spirit of the West?” I was asked when I began to write._
_You have read the book? Then you have seen the fruits of that Spirit,
in its actions and achievements. If that is not answer enough, here is
the Spirit of the West as I have seen it; here are the dominant ideals
of Western life._
_The Spirit of Courage. The brave heart for a short heroic dash, and for
persistence, more heroic still, through the long march to a distant
goal. The spirit that never flinches at an obstacle or set-back, but
fights its way through to victory. The spirit that finds pleasure in
other toils than play, and saving humor in grave events which overwhelm
a dull and bitter mind._
_The Spirit of Independence. The spirit that takes pride in swimming the
creeks in its way without waiting or shouting for some one else to fetch
a boat._
_The Spirit of Ambition—often hasty and overgrown in our exhilarating
air of boundless possibilities, but, when turned by buffeting experience
from the goal of quantity to that of quality, capable of winning both._
_The Spirit of Truth. The ideals of frankness, candor, straightness and
fair play. The spirit of scorn for crookedness, trickery, graft, lying
and pretence, in business, politics and social life. The spirit that
wants to think straight as well as act straight, refusing to deceive
itself by prejudice and conventional parrot-phrases. The spirit of
open-mindedness, of quick willingness to learn._
_The Spirit of Unselfishness. The ideals of hospitality, sociability,
geniality, generosity, and neighborly helpfulness._
_Selfishness, envy and suspicion, an ill disposition to blame anyone but
ourselves for every wrong; a passing frown of discouragement and
complaint, sometimes with fair excuse; these you may find in the West,
as you may strike a misty morning on the sunny plain or a hard frost on
the balmy coast; but they are foreign to the Spirit of the West._
_Without that Spirit, though the land should rise to gorgeous heights of
moneyed wealth by perfecting its science of material production and
commercial organization, the West would be poor and mean, a body without
a soul._
_Therefore, of all the proud ambitions of the West, the proudest is to
keep that noble Spirit strong._
_The Spirit has hours of weakness, but it soon revives, to proclaim with
the strength of a giant refreshed—_
_“In the fell clutch of circumstance_
_I have not winced nor cried aloud._
_Under the bludgeonings of chance_
_My head is bloody, but unbowed._
_“It matters not how strait the gate,_
_How charged with punishment the scroll._
_I am the master of my fate,_
_I am the captain of my soul.”_
THE END
I N D E X
Adventures, life full of them, 2.
Agriculture, 54;
ranching, 127;
mixed farming, 129;
fruit, 164;
irrigation, 169;
bees, 170;
improving livestock, 171, 177;
“We have to Learn,” 174;
enormous production, 178;
need of co-operation, 178, 183;
“semi-tropical,” 179;
the small farmer, 181;
grain growing and dairying, 183, 191.
Air patrol, 166.
Animal and plant life: pre-historic, 4;
modern, 14, 15, 131, 197;
beaver, 35;
his achievements and value, 35, 192, 193;
buffalo, 18, 20, 45, 48, 54, 129;
wholesale slaughter, 61;
collecting his bones, 127;
present increase, 192;
caribou, 46, 187;
coyote and antelope, 17, 131;
dogs, 10, 20;
bred for wool, 72;
horses, 19, 23;
maize 11;
trees, 140;
far north, 188.
Arctic Ocean: Hearne’s arrival, 47;
Mackenzie’s, 50.
British brotherhood of nations, 28, 156, 200.
British justice, 79, 137.
British Navy’s task, 160.
Calgary, 105, 129, 169.
Climates, 169, 175, 179.
Coats, Capt., 47, 58, 85.
Columbia River, 50.
Coppermine River, 46.
Dominion formed, 88;
width North to South, 189.
Edmonton in 1846, 60;
in 1905, 151, 196.
Empires, British and United States, 156.
Eskimo, 10, 47;
massacred by Indians, 48.
Exploration, Spanish and British, 25;
Norse, 26;
French, 26;
Cartier, Champlain, 26;
La Salle, 27;
Frobisher, Hudson, 28;
Radisson and Groseillers, 30;
Vérendrye, 41;
Kellsey, Hendry, 44;
Hearne, 46;
Mackenzie, 49;
Thompson, 50;
Fraser, 51;
Lewis and Clark, 51;
Franklin, 64;
McClure, 65;
Drake, Cook, 69;
Palliser, Hector, 84;
Amundsen, 66;
Stefansson, 188.
Fisheries, 161, 187.
Fleming, Sir Sandford, 159.
Forest, 15, 161;
fires, 161;
air patrol, 166.
Fort Carlton, 61.
Fort Chipewyan, 49.
Fort de la Corne, 45.
Fort Cumberland, 48.
Fort Pitt, 62.
Fort Rouge, 42.
Fort Vancouver, 72.
Fossils: giant lizards, 5;
trilobites, 7;
mammoth, 8;
horses, 19.
Fraser River, 49, 51.
Freighting, 141.
French Cession of Canada to British, 27.
Fur trade, 26;
French monopoly, 32;
buffalo skins, 35;
beaver in fashion, 37;
scene at trading post, 39;
“Free Traders,” 41;
the traders’ life, 56;
sea otter, 73, 151;
fur farming, 192;
statistics, 193.
Gardens, 147, 197.
Gas, natural, 170.
Great Slave Lake, discovery, 48.
Hudson’s Bay, 28;
Company formed, 33;
its powers, 37;
French raids and competition, 40, 49;
traders sent up country, 44;
Scottish-Canadian rivals, 45;
North West Company formed, 49;
Companies at war, 52;
the rivals unite, 56;
Company’s rule extended to Pacific, 56;
Simpson’s journeys, 59;
Company and Indians, 85, 91;
Territory enters Dominion, 88;
Company continues, 151, 188.
Hudson Straits navigation, 57.
Indians, origin of, 9;
southward migration, 11;
industry and art, 11, 12, 21, 74;
baking and gardening, 12;
Mexican and Peruvian civilization, 12, 13;
the Six Nations, 13;
lacrosse, 13;
Algonquins, 14;
mound builders, 16;
a night raid, 16;
travoys, 20;
agriculture, 16, 21;
story telling, 22;
dancing, 64, 74;
racing and betting, 63, 73;
slavery, 73;
Flat-heads, 74;
kindness and barbarity, 85.
Indian tribal fighting, 21, 23, 85;
Sioux and Cree, 31;
Saulteaux and Sioux, 61;
Blackfoot and Cree, 63, 87.
Indian treaties, 93;
refugees from United States, 95;
Sitting Bull, 96.
Indians and Métis, 99;
Indians farming, 139.
Kane, Paul: artist’s journey in 1846, 60.
King and president, 136.
Lake and river route to West, 59.
Liquor and Indians, 55.
Mackenzie River, 49, 189, 190.
Manufactures, 167, 168.
Métis, the, 49;
revolts, 89, 98;
a hospitable family, 133.
Migrations of men, 2, 9, 24, 148.
Minerals: coal, 7, 81, 167;
copper, 21, 46;
gold, etc., in B.C., 75, 161, 165;
potters’ clay, 171.
Missionaries: Evans prints in Cree, 86;
peacemaker Lacombe, 87.
Mississippi, 27;
discovery, 31.
Mountains, birth of, 7;
first sight of Rockies, 43;
an Alpine paradise, 165.
Mounted Police and frontier crime, 91;
force organized, 92;
Col. MacLeod’s reign of law, 93;
in the Arctic, 189.
Northern Territory and Islands: caribou pasture, 187;
reindeer, 188;
Government stations, 189;
wireless, 190.
North-west Passage, 26, 29;
Franklin’s last voyage, 64;
passage discovered, 66;
Amundsen gets through, 66;
Captain Cook’s attempt, 69.
Ogilby, John, his book, 36.
Pacific Coast: Mackenzie’s arrival, 50;
Hudson’s Bay Co., 56, 71;
claims of Spain and United States, 70;
frontier agreement, 71;
early ranching, 72;
Kane’s visit in 1847, 72;
Coast Indian ways, 73;
colony under company, 75;
gold rush, 75;
company rule ended, 76;
Cariboo trail, 77;
Judge Begbie keeps order, 79;
Province of British Columbia formed, enters Dominion, 81;
United States and San Juan Island, 81;
the Province to-day, 159.
Peace River, 189, 191.
Pemmican, 19;
war, 54.
Politics: the art of living together, 153.
Portage la Prairie, 42.
Prairie primeval, 14;
first inhabitants, 16;
the prairie in 1905, 129;
to-day, 167.
Prince Rupert, 33, 161.
Provinces formed: Manitoba, 90;
British Columbia, 81;
Alberta and Saskatchewan, 151;
Dimensions, 180.
Railway, Transcontinental, proposed, 84;
its necessity, 117;
built by Canadian Pacific Co., 120;
last spike driven, 122;
irrigation, 169;
C.N.R., 60, 161, 172;
Winnipeg yards, 184.
Regina, 127, 171.
Red River rising of 1870, 89.
Riel rebellion of 1885, 98;
Duck Lake fight, 99;
Frog Lake massacre, 101;
Big Bear and Fort Pitt, 102;
army from the East, 103;
Cutknife Hill, 106;
Fish Creek, 111;
Batoche, 112;
Indian chiefs’ surrender, 112;
battlefield twenty years after, 139.
Rupert’s Land, 38;
enters Dominion, 88.
Saskatchewan rivers discovered, 43.
Saskatoon, 142.
Schools and colleges, 180, 185, 195.
Settlement: Lord Selkirk’s pioneers, 53, 85;
door opened by railway, 124;
Eastern Canadians, 124, 132, 140, 148;
British newcomers, 126, 133, 141, 149, 164;
from United States, 130, 135, 147, 152;
French-Canadians, 138;
Scandinavians, 142, 187;
Slavs, 142, 152, 194;
Doukhobors, 145, 165;
a pioneer family in the North, 161;
“The land is Canada’s,” 176;
new plans needed, 181;
homesteading, 191;
brush land, 192, 194;
Canada and “New Canadians,” 195;
racial blending, 198.
Shipping, 160.
Territorial Government, 153.
Thompson River, 49.
Trade, Oriental, 25, 160.
Travel, ways of, 20, 57;
in 1872, 159; 189.
Unicorn, 36.
Vancouver, 123, 160.
Victoria, 159;
observatory, 159.
War, the, 164.
Water Powers, 167, 187.
Western Canada: size and variety, 3, 158, 180;
pre-historic state, 4;
ignorance of its capacity, 83;
S. J. Dawson finds a “Paradise of Fertility,” 83;
the West in 1905, 128;
Central Alberta, 129;
hospitality, 135;
a stopping place, 147;
the country now, 158;
children, 162, 185;
simple and high living, 163;
better houses, 172;
telephones, 172;
tree planting, 173;
nomadic instinct survives, 174;
automobiles, 177;
“Extravagance,” 177;
recreation, 185;
national defence, 185;
music, 197;
“The Spirit of the West,” 201.
White men reach America, 23.
Winnipeg: Fort Rouge founded, 42;
Kane’s visit, 60, 184.
Wireless, 166.
Yukon, 190.
[Illustration]
_Sketch Map of_
_Western Canada_
THIS BOOK IS A
PRODUCTION OF
[Illustration: Ryerson Press]
TORONTO, CANADA
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.
Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.