THE PASSING OF THE CATTLE RANGE
The story of southern Alberta is the story of the passing of Canada’s
great cattle ranches, the reclamation of millions of acres of dry land
by irrigation, and the growth of general farming where once the open
range stretched for hundreds of miles.
From Calgary I have ridden out to visit the mighty irrigation works of
the Canadian Pacific Railway. This corporation has taken over three
million acres, or a block of land forty miles wide and extending from
Calgary one hundred and forty miles eastward. It is divided into three
sections. The central division gets its water from the Saint Mary’s
River, and the east and west divisions from the Bow River, which does
not depend upon the rainfall for its volume, being fed by the snows and
glaciers of the Rockies.
At Bassano, about eighty miles from Calgary, is the great Horseshoe
Bend dam, where the level of the Bow has been raised forty feet. The
dam is eight thousand feet long, with a spillway of seven hundred and
twenty feet. From it the water flows out through twenty-five hundred
miles of irrigation canals and ditches. This dam has been the means
by which the semi-arid lands of southern Alberta, formerly good only
for cattle grazing, have been turned into thousands of farms, raising
wheat, alfalfa, and corn, as well as fruits and vegetables.
[Illustration: The dam at Bassano is the second largest in the world,
being exceeded in size only by the one at Aswan, which holds back the
waters of the Nile. The water stored here flows out through 2,500 miles
of irrigation canals and ditches.]
[Illustration: The riproaring cowboy with his bucking bronco was a
familiar figure of the old Alberta, but with the passing of the “Wild
West” he is now rarely seen except in exhibitions known as “stampedes.”]
[Illustration: Among the ranch owners of the Alberta foothills is no
less a personage than the Prince of Wales, who occasionally visits his
property and rides herd on his cattle.]
The ranching industry of Alberta was at its height during the thirty
years from 1870 to 1900. With the disappearance of buffalo from the
Canadian plains, cattle men from the United States began bringing their
herds over the border to the grazing lands east of the foothills of the
Rockies. The luxuriant prairie grass provided excellent forage, and
the warm Chinook winds kept the winters so mild that the cattle could
feed out-of-doors the year round. When the high ground was covered with
snow, there were always river bottoms and hollows to furnish shelter
and feed.
The United States cattle men were followed by Canadians and Britishers.
One of the first big ranch holders was Senator Cochrane of Montreal. He
owned sixty-seven thousand acres, and most of it cost him only a dollar
an acre. There were other immense holdings, and the grazing industry
continued to grow until it extended into southwestern Saskatchewan and
included horses and sheep as well as cattle.
Then the homesteaders began to take up their claims. In 1902 the first
tract of land for irrigation purposes was bought from the government by
the Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, and in 1903 the Canadian
Pacific Railway’s big irrigation project was begun. In May of the same
year there occurred one of the severest snow storms in the history of
the plains. It lasted for a week, and fully half the range cattle in
what was then Alberta territory perished. The introduction of wire
fences dealt another hard blow to cattle ranching. Large herds can be
run all the year round only on an open range.
There are still a few big stock men in Alberta, but they have been
crowded into the foothills west of the old original “cow” country.
Small herds pasture on the open range also in the Peace River district.
As a matter of fact, Alberta still leads the Dominion in the production
of beef and breeding cattle. It has as much livestock as ever, each
mixed farm having at least a few head. There are a half million dairy
cattle in the province.
Most of the stock raised to-day is pure bred. There are cattle sales at
Calgary every year as big as any in the United States. The favourite
animal is the Shorthorn, but there are many Polled Angus and Galloways.
The best breeding animals come from England, and there are some
ranchmen who make a specialty of raising choice beef for the English
market. Within the last ten years the cattle in Alberta have tripled
in number, and their total value is now in the neighbourhood of one
hundred and twenty-five million dollars.
On my way from Edmonton to Calgary I passed through the famous dairying
region of Alberta. The cheese industry is still in its infancy, but the
province makes more than enough butter each year to spread a slice of
bread for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It supplies
butter for the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and is now shipping it
to England via Vancouver and the Panama Canal.
Sheep can exist on poorer pasture than cattle, and some large flocks
are still ranged in the higher foothills of southern Alberta. They are
chiefly Merinos that have been brought in from Montana. On the small
farms the homesteaders often raise the medium-fleeced English breeds,
such as Shropshires, Hampshires, and Southdowns. Some of the ranchers
are experimenting in raising the karakul sheep, a native of Central
Asia, whose curly black pelts are so highly prized for fur coats and
wraps.
Horse raising was another big industry of early Alberta. The bronco is
now almost extinct, and almost the only light-weight horse now reared
is a high-bred animal valuable chiefly as a polo pony. In Alberta,
as elsewhere in the Dominion and in the United States, the motor car
has taken the place of the horse as a means of transportation, and
nine tenths of the animals in the province to-day are of the heavy
Clydesdale or Percheron types, and used solely for farm work.
I have gone through Calgary’s several meat packing houses, and have
visited its thirteen grain elevators, which all together can hold
four million bushels of wheat. Calgary ranks next to Montreal and
the twin ports of Fort William and Port Arthur in its grain storage
capacity. It is surrounded by thousands of acres of wheat lands, not
in vast stretches such as we saw in Saskatchewan, but divided up among
the general farming lands of the province. The city is an important
industrial centre, and in some of its factories natural gas, piped from
wells a hundred miles away, is used to produce power.
Calgary is less than fifty years old. Nevertheless, it has
sky-scrapers, fine public buildings, and wide streets and boulevards.
Many of the business buildings are of the light gray sandstone found
near by, and nearly every residence is surrounded by grounds. The city
lies along the Bow and Elbow rivers, and the chief residential section
on the heights above these streams has magnificent views of the peaks
of the Rockies, one hundred miles distant.
Like many of the big cities of Western Canada, Calgary began as a fort
of the Mounted Police. That was in 1874. Its real growth dates from
August, 1883, when the first train of the main line of the Canadian
Pacific pulled into the town. Before that time much of the freight
for the ranch lands came farther south through Macleod, which, the
old-timers tell me, was the real “cow town” of southern Alberta. Goods
were brought up the Missouri River to the head of navigation at Benton,
Montana, and thence carried overland to Macleod in covered wagons drawn
by horse, ox, or mule teams.
The cattle town of Calgary is now a matter of history, and the old
cattle men who rode the western plains when Alberta was a wilderness
have nearly all passed away. Indeed, it is hard to believe that this
up-to-date place is the frontier town I found here some years ago.
Then cowboys galloped through the streets, and fine-looking Englishmen
in riding clothes played polo on the outskirts. The Ranchers’ Club of
that day was composed largely of the sons of wealthy British families.
Many of them were remittance men who had come out here to make their
fortunes and grow up with the country. Some came because they were
ne’er-do-wells or their families did not want them at home, and others
because they liked the wild life of the prairies. They received a
certain amount of money every month or every quarter, most of which
was spent in drinking and carousing. The son of an English lord, for
instance, could be seen almost any day hanging over the bar, and
another boy who had ducal blood in his veins would cheerfully borrow a
quarter of you in the lean times just before remittance day.
[Illustration: Calgary, chief city of the prairie province of Alberta,
is less than fifty years old. Beginning as a fur-trading and police
post, it now has sky-scrapers and palatial homes.]
[Illustration: At Macleod, in southern Alberta, the headquarters of the
Mounted Police are in the centre of an important live-stock region,
where, in the early days of open ranges, cattle thieves were a constant
menace.]
Others of these men brought money with them to invest. One of them,
the son of Admiral Cochrane of the British navy, owned a big ranch
near Calgary on which he kept six thousand of the wildest Canadian
cattle. Every year or so he brought in a new instalment of bulls from
Scotland, giving his agents at home instructions to send him the
fiercest animals they could secure. When asked why he did this, he
replied:
“You see, I have to pay my cowboys so much a month, and I want to raise
stock that will make them earn their wages. Besides, it adds to the
life of the ranch.”
“I went out once to see Billy Cochrane,” said a Calgary banker to me.
“When I arrived at the ranch I found him seated on the fence of one of
his corrals watching a fight between two bulls. As he saw me he told me
to hurry and have a look. I climbed up beside him, and as I watched the
struggle going on beneath, I said: ‘Why, Billy, if you do not separate
those bulls one will soon kill the other.’ ‘Let them kill,’ was the
reply. ‘This is the real thing. It is better than any Spanish bull
fight, and I would give a bull any day for the show.’
“We watched the struggle for more than an hour, Cochrane clapping his
hands and urging the animals on to battle. Finally one drove his horns
into the side of the other and killed it. To my protest against this
wanton waste of valuable live stock, Cochrane replied: ‘Oh! it doesn’t
matter at all. We must have some fun.’”
Another famous character of old-time Calgary was Dickie Bright, the
grandson of the man after whom Bright’s disease was named. Dickie had
been supplied with money by his grandfather and sent out. He invested
it all in a ranch and then asked for a large remittance from time to
time to increase his herds. He sent home florid stories of the money
he was making and how he was fast becoming a cattle king. Shortly
after writing one of his most enthusiastic letters he received a
dispatch from New York saying that his grandfather had just arrived
and was coming out to see him. The boy was in a quandary. He had spent
his remittance in riotous living and he had no cattle. Adjoining him,
however, was one of the largest ranch owners of the West. Dickie
confided his trouble to this man and persuaded him to lend a thousand
head of his best stock for one night.
“Granddad can stay but a day,” said he, “and I will see that they are
driven back to you the next morning.”
The rancher was something of a sportsman himself, and he finally
consented to help the boy. The cattle were sent over. Old Doctor Bright
duly arrived and was driven out to the herd, which Dickie said was
only a sample of his stock that had been brought in to be shown to
his visitor. The boy added, however, that it was not good to keep the
cattle penned up, and that they must go back upon the range right away.
The old doctor was delighted, and before he left he gave Dickie a check
for ten thousand dollars to develop the business.
Another young remittance man added to his income by pretending to have
a gopher farm. His father had never heard the word “gopher” before,
and supposed that the tiny ground squirrels were some kind of valuable
live stock. He was, therefore, quite pleased when his boy wrote an
enthusiastic letter saying that he had now seven hundred blooded
gophers on his range. When sonny added that the animals were in good
condition, but that it would take a thousand dollars more to carry
them through the winter for the market next spring, father sent on the
money.