VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
"Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and cheerily wise,
With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes,
Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good,
Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood,
Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,
As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world."
—
Service
.
It is on August 27th, in the evening, that the crew, all slicked up in their Sunday-go-to-meetings, draw us up on the beach of the City in the Silences, this Past-in-the-arms-of-the-Present,—Vermilion-on-the-Peace. The first thing to meet our eye is the red roof of the flour-mill of the H.B. Co., a picture of progressiveness set in a living frame of golden wheat, the heavy heads nodding to the harvest.
Vermilion is an old post of the Old Company. Alexander Mackenzie on his way to the Pacific found people at work here far back in 1792. The Vermilion of to-day stands a living monument to the initiative faith and hard work largely of one man, Mr. Francis D. Wilson, who has had charge of H.B. Co. interests here for nineteen years. Mr. Wilson found this place a fur-post on the edge of civilisation, and he has made of it a commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing centre. And his example has been contagious, for the half-breeds around him have become farmers, the Indians who traded furs a dozen years ago now buy harness and ploughs and breach-loading guns from The Company, paying for the same with wheat of their own growing.
The Flour Mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace
Vermilion is in latitude 58° 30' N.,—that is, about four hundred miles due north of Edmonton, and on practically the same parallel as Stockholm. The flour-mill that we now inspect is the most northerly wheat-mill on this continent, and it has been running for five years. It is the roller process, with a capacity of fifty barrels a day, the motor-power being a 40 H.P. Corliss engine. The wheat which feeds these rollers is all grown in nearby fields, and the resultant flour is consumed by the people of the lone posts of the Peace and the lower Mackenzie. Two years ago the H.B. Company paid to farmers, all of whom lived within a radius of five miles from the mill, the sum of $27,000 spot cash for their wheat. An electric plant lights the mill and fort buildings, affording fifty six-candle-power lights.
Right up to the door of the mill extends the sixty-acre wheat-field of the H.B. Company, from which Mr. Wilson computes that he will this year thrash two thousand bushels. If the H.B. wheat-field were to sell the H.B. mill these two thousand bushels at $1.25 a bushel (the ruling Vermilion price), there would be a net profit of $1500, after paying all expense of culture, to the credit of one branch of Mr. Wilson's commercial institution. For thirty years, wheat, oats, barley, and vegetables have been grown in Vermilion, not as an experiment, but as regular commercial crops. Cereals are sown late in April or early in May, and the harvest is gathered in August. More than once, wheat has matured in eighty-six days from seed-sowing to seed-garnering.
Vermilion farmers boast sulkies and gang-ploughs and the latest geared McCormick, Massey-Harris, and Deering farm implements,—self-binders and seeders. Everything is up-to-date. We ourselves counted fifteen self-binders at work. And grain is not the whole story. The farmers own thoroughbred Ayrshire stock and splendid horses. I happened to be at the garden of the Church of England Mission when the potato-crop was being harvested, and found that seven bags of seed planted in the middle of May produced one hundred bags by the end of August. Five potatoes that I gathered haphazard from one heap weighed exactly five and one-half pounds. I photographed and weighed a collection of vegetables grown by Robert Jones on the Dominion Experimental Farm.
Articles Made by Indians
A—Wall-pocket of white deerskin, embroidered in silk-work, and bordered with ermine—the work of a Cree woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
B—Gloves of white deerskin embroidered in silk, the work of a Slavi woman on the Liard River (a branch of the Mackenzie).
C, D, E, F, G, H, I—Moccasins as worn respectively by the Crees, Chipewyans, Slavis, Dog-Ribs, Yellow-Knives, Loucheux—all the work of the women.
J.—Flour bag from the mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace, the most northerly flour-mill in America.
K—Sinew, from close to the spine of the moose—used by the women of the North instead of thread.
L—Very valuable net of willow-bark made by an old squaw at Fort Resolution. This is almost a lost art, and harks back to the pre-string days.
M—The "crooked knife" or knife of the country.
N—Match-box made from a copper kettle by an old Beaver Indian at Fort Vermilion-on-the-Peace.
O—Babiche, or rawhide of the moose or caribou—"the iron of the country."
One cauliflower weighed eight pounds, half a dozen turnips weighed nine pounds each, and twenty table beets would easily average six pounds each. The carrots and onions were sown in the open in mid-May and were as inviting specimens as I have ever seen. Tomatoes ripened in the open air on this farm on July 13th. Peas, sown on May 23rd and gathered on August 12th, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel. Experimental plots of turnips gave sixteen tons to the acre, and white carrots twelve tons. Apple-trees and roses we found flourishing on this farm, with twenty-five varieties of red, black, and white currants. The wheat story is of compelling interest. Preston wheat, sown on May 6th and cut on August 22nd, weighed sixty-four pounds to the bushel; Ladoga wheat, sown on the last day of April and cut on September 5th, ran sixty-four pounds to the bushel also, and early Riga weighed sixty-three pounds. In the garden of the R.C. Mission we were presented with splendid specimens of ripened corn and with three cucumbers grown in the open air, which weighed over a pound each.
The Hudson's Bay Store
Vermilion is the centre of prairie and rolling timber-land greater in extent than the whole of Belgium. There are probably a million acres of land immediately tributary to the place, all capable of producing crops like those cited. Within a radius of ten miles of the H.B. post there are living now five hundred people of whom perhaps fifty are white. They all to some extent cultivate the soil, varying their farm operations by hunting, trapping, and freighting. The settlement boasts two churches, two mission schools, and two trading stores,—a happy, prosperous, and very progressive community. Everything in the place points to this conclusion.
The H.B. Company here, in addition to buying beaver-skins and growing $1.25 wheat and grinding flour and importing big red binders, breaks the monotony by running a sawmill and building modern steamboats. This sawmill turned out all the lumber for the new steamer Peace River, built here four years ago of native timber. She is a hundred and ten-foot stern-wheeler with twenty-two-foot beam, drawing two and a half feet and carrying forty tons burden. She can accommodate thirty passengers in comfortable cabins, and when going with the current, makes fifteen knots an hour. The sawmill which turned out the timbers for this boat has a capacity of fifteen thousand feet a day.
Within this mill I took, at random, the record sheet of one raft of one man's logs for the spring of 1906, cut in the immediate vicinity of Vermilion and floated along the Peace to the mill. Edmond Paul's logs in one raft gave a total of two hundred and eighty-eight logs, which cut at the mill 27,029 board feet of lumber. The biggest log in this raft was a twelve-foot log with twenty-six inches diameter at the small end, which cut three hundred and sixty-three feet of lumber.
Vermilion in its soil fertility, its modernism, culture, and arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole country spring when it is given rail communication with the plains-people to the south?
Waiting for steamboat connection, we are for weeks in this glorious autumn weather, guests in the hospitable home of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. Can we ever forget the generous kindness extended to us within these walls? Months of travel in open scows, sleeping on the ground, and stretching out in blankets on the decks of little tugs have prepared us to enjoy to the full the comforts of a cultured home. It is a modern house, with beds of old-fashioned pansies and sweet-Williams and rows of hollyhocks on all sides. The upper verandah affords a view of the Peace, here fully a mile in width, of incomparable beauty. To the visitor who steps over its threshold, Mr. Wilson's library indicates at once the reading man and the clever artificer. Scientific works of reference, good pictures, the latest magazines, certainly look inviting to ragged travellers who have opened no books, save those of nature and human-nature, for five long months. The office furniture, hand-made of native tamarack and birch, is Mr. Wilson's individual work in both design and execution. Admiring the outcome of hand and head, we get also a glimpse of a warm heart, for we are quick to notice that all these carefully-filed magazines and papers are available for reference to any one in the settlement, whether fort employé or not, who cares to come in here for a quiet hour to read.
Kipling says, "You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile," but the Wilson home gives the lie direct to this, blithe line. In a corner of the drawing-room stands an old-fashioned piano with a history. The honourable ancestress of all the modern square pianos and baby-grands of Canada, this little instrument came long years ago in the hold of a sailing ship to Hudson Bay, and by interior waterways was carried by portage and York-boat into Winnipeg, and subsequently into Edmonton. It carries on it the name of John Broadwood & Sons, London. Mrs. Wilson tells us that when she was little it was carried by the boys from house to house on the prairies to do duty wherever there was a social dance. The ghost of the old thing has much quiet here in Vermilion to think of the pretty girls in their short sleeves and muslin frocks who once trod Sir Rogers to its sweet strains.
Mrs. Wilson, the grand-daughter of Peter Warren Dease, the explorer, and the daughter of late Chief Factor Clarke of the H.B. Co., has put in a life of loving service among the people of Vermilion. Her knowledge of medicine and her devoted attention and nursing, extended in the hour of need alike to Indians and whites, has saved the life of many a mother and child; for doctors and professional nurses are unknown in Vermilion. These are the pioneer days, when interdependence breeds neighbourly kindness.
Everything on a Vermilion dinner-table is produced in the country, with the exception only of tea, coffee, sugar, and pepper. The country furnishes beef, pork, and fowl all locally matured; home-cured ham and bacon; every known variety of hardy and tender vegetables; home-made butter; bread made from flour grown and ground on the premises; pies whose four constituents—flour, lard, butter and fruit—are products of the country; home-made cheese; wild honey; home-made wines; splendid fish caught from the Peace, and a bewildering variety of wild game—moose, caribou, venison, grouse, brant, wild geese, canvas-backs, and mallards. Wild berries furnish jams and conserves of a dozen different kinds, such as raspberry, black currant, strawberry, blackberry, cranberry, blueberry, and saskatoon. The salt comes from Slave River, and sugar could very readily be produced from Vermilion beets if there should arise a market. What more would you? The Vermilionese on his fertile acres is as independent of the world outside as is the Eskimo in his Arctic igloo. The farm of Sheridan Lawrence, exhibiting its wide-stretching wheat-fields, some heads of which counted seventy-one kernels, with its patches of one-pound potatoes, twelve-foot sunflowers, and its quiverful of happy, tow-headed children, gives as sweet a picture of Canadian thrift and happiness as one would wish to see. Indeed, happiness seems to be the keynote of Vermilion, whether we seek it within the fort walls of the H.B. Co., on the fat acres of the farmers, or within the folds of Protestant or Roman Mission.
Papillon, a Beaver Brave
We carry away with us two pictures, that we like to cherish, of the convent kiddies of Vermilion. The first thing we saw when we peered round a corner of this old-fashioned building was the bright face of Sister Thomas of Canterbury playing see-saw with a dozen wide-grinning Slavi babies. When the morning came when we were to bid reluctant good-bye to Vermilion and all its spontaneous kindness, the last sight that met our eyes before we turned the corner of the Peace was the whole convent force of Vermilion perched high on stumps and fence-rails, wishing us bon voyage with fluttering pocket-handkerchiefs, while Sister Thomas of Canterbury, on a ladder, surmounted the crowd and waved her farewells with a table-cloth.