SASKATCHEWAN
We have left Winnipeg and are now travelling across the great Canadian
prairie, which stretches westward to the Rockies for a distance of
eight hundred miles. This land, much of which in summer is in vast
fields of golden grain, is now bare and brown, extending on and on in
rolling treeless plains as far as our eyes can reach. Most of it is cut
up into sections a mile square, divided by highway spaces one hundred
feet wide. However, an automobile or wagon can go almost anywhere on
the prairie, and everyone makes his own road.
Sixty miles west of Winnipeg we pass Portage la Prairie, near where
John Sanderson, the man who filed the first homestead on the prairies,
is still living. This part of the Dominion was then inhabited by
Indians, and its only roads were the buffalo trails made by the great
herds that roamed the country. To-day it is dotted with the comfortable
homes of prosperous farmers, and the transcontinental railways have
brought it within a few days’ travel of the Atlantic and the Pacific
seaboards.
A hundred and fifty miles farther west we cross the boundary into
Saskatchewan, the greatest wheat province of the Dominion. It has an
area larger than that of any European country except Russia, and is as
large as France, Belgium, and Holland combined. From the United States
boundary, rolling grain lands extend northward through more than one
third of its area. The remainder is mostly forest, thinning out toward
Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabaska at the north, and inhabited chiefly
by deer, elk, moose, and black bear. There are saw-mills at work
throughout the central part of the province, and the annual lumber cut
is worth in the neighbourhood of two million dollars.
Except at the southwest, Saskatchewan is well watered. The Saskatchewan
River, which has many branches, drains the southern and central
sections. This stream in the early days was a canoe route to the
Rockies. For a long time afterward, when the only railway was the
Canadian Pacific line in the southern part of the province, the river
was the highway of commerce for the north. It was used largely by
settlers who floated their belongings down it to the homesteads they
had taken up on its banks. Now the steamboats that plied there have
almost entirely disappeared. The northern part of the province is made
up of lakes and rivers so numerous that some of them have not yet been
named. The southwest is a strip of semi-arid land that has been brought
under cultivation by irrigation and now raises large crops of alfalfa.
A small part of southwestern Saskatchewan, near the Alberta boundary,
is adapted for cattle and sheep raising. The Chinook winds from the
Pacific keep the winters mild and the snowfall light, so that live
stock may graze in the open all the year round. Elsewhere the winters
are extremely cold. The ground is frozen dry and hard, the lakes and
streams are covered with ice, and the average elevation of about
fifteen hundred feet above sea level makes the air dry and crisp. The
people do not seem to mind the cold. I have seen children playing
out-of-doors when it was twenty-five degrees below zero. The summers
are hot, and the long days of sunshine are just right for wheat growing.
After travelling fourteen or fifteen hours from Winnipeg, we are in
Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, on the main line of the Canadian
Pacific, about midway between Winnipeg and the Rockies. I visited
it first in 1905, when the province was less than a year old. Until
that time all the land between Manitoba and British Columbia, from
the United States to the Arctic Ocean, belonged to the Northwest
Territories. It had minor subdivisions, but the country as a whole was
governed by territorial officials with headquarters at Regina. As the
flood of immigrants began to spread over the West, the people of the
wheat belt decided that they wanted more than a territorial government
and so brought the matter before the Canadian parliament. As a result
the great inland provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed.
They are the only provinces in the Dominion that do not border on the
sea.
Regina was then a town of ragged houses, ungainly buildings, and wide
streets with board sidewalks reaching far out into the country. One
of the streets was two miles long, extending across the prairie to
the mounted police barracks and the government house. Regina was the
headquarters of the Northwest Mounted Police until that organization
was amalgamated with the dominion force as the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police, and the city is still a training camp for recruits.
Saskatchewan was not then old enough to have a state house, and the
government offices were in rooms on the second floors of various
buildings. Most of the provincial business was done in a little brick
structure above the Bank of Commerce.
The hotels of the town were then packed to overflowing, even in winter,
and in the spring and summer it was not uncommon to find the halls
filled with cots. I had to sleep in a room with two beds, and with a
companion who snored so that he shook the door open night after night.
It was of no use to complain, as the landlord could tell one to go
elsewhere, knowing very well that there was no elsewhere but outdoors.
To-day Regina is ten times as large as it was twenty years ago. It is
a modern city with up-to-date hotels, ten banks, handsome parliament
buildings, and twelve railway lines radiating in every direction. It is
the largest manufacturing centre between Winnipeg and Calgary, and an
important distributing point for farm implements and supplies.
The dome of the capitol building, which was completed in 1911, can now
be seen from miles away on the prairie. This is an imposing structure
five hundred and forty-two feet long, situated in the midst of a
beautiful park on the banks of an artificial lake made by draining
Wascana Creek. The city has many other parks, and the residence
streets are lined with young trees, planted within the last twenty
years. Forty miles to the east is a government farm at Indian Head,
where experiments are made in growing and testing trees suited to the
prairies. Fifty million seedlings have been distributed in one year
among the farms and towns. Out in the country the trees are planted
as windbreaks and to provide the farmers with fuel. They have greatly
changed the aspect of the prairies within the last two decades.
[Illustration: The grain lands of western Canada begin in Manitoba
in the fertile Red River valley, which is world famous for the fine
quality of its wheat. From here to the Rockies is a prairie sea, with
farmsteads for islands.]
[Illustration: American windmills tower over Saskatchewan prairie lands
that were largely settled by American farmers. The province is still
so thinly populated that it has only five people to every ten square
miles.]
[Illustration: The wheat harvest, like time and tide, waits for no
man and when the crop is ready it must be promptly cut. The grain
is usually threshed in the fields and sent at once to the nearest
elevator.]
While in Regina I have had a talk with the governor-general of
Saskatchewan in his big two-story mansion that twenty years ago seemed
to be situated in the middle of the prairie. When I motored out to
visit His Excellency, although I was wrapped in buffalo robes and wore
a coon-skin coat and coon-skin cap, I was almost frozen, and when I
entered the mansion it was like jumping from winter into the lap of
summer. At one end of the house is a conservatory, where the flowers
bloom all the time, although Jack Frost has bitten off all other
vegetation with the “forty-degrees-below-zero teeth” he uses in this
latitude.
From Regina, the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway runs west to
Calgary. Were we to travel by that route, we should pass through Moose
Jaw and Swift Current, two important commercial centres for the wheat
lands. The story is told that Lord Dunsmore, a pioneer settler, once
mended the wheel of his prairie cart with the jaw bone of a moose on
the site of the former city, and thus gave the place its name. Moose
Jaw is a live stock as well as a wheat shipping point. It has the
largest stock yards west of Winnipeg. An extensive dairying industry
has grown up in that region.
North of Regina are Prince Albert and Battleford, noted for their fur
trade and lumber mills, and also Saskatoon, the second largest city of
the province, which we shall visit on our way to Edmonton. At Saskatoon
is the University of Saskatchewan, which was patterned largely after
the University of Chicago. It has the right to a Rhodes scholarship;
and its departments include all the arts and sciences.
As sixty per cent. of the people are dependent upon agriculture,
farm courses receive much attention. A thousand-acre experimental
farm is owned by the university and the engineering courses include
the designing and operation of farm machinery. Even the elementary
schools are interested in agriculture, a campaign having been carried
on recently to eradicate gophers, which destroy the wheat. The children
killed two million of these little animals in one year, thereby saving,
it is estimated, a million bushels of grain. A department of ceramics
has been organized at the university to experiment with the extensive
clay deposits of the province, the various grades of which are suited
for building brick, tile, pottery, and china. Saskatchewan’s only other
mineral of any importance is lignite coal, although natural gas has
been discovered at Swift Current.