With regard to sheep, Mr. Roblin supplied discouraging information. So far as climate and soil are concerned, the prairie provinces are admirably suited for sheep-raising. Moreover, prices for lamb and mutton rule high. But the coyote, or prairie-wolf, while harmless to other stock, preys on sheep. It is the farmer’s one enemy in the animal kingdom of Canada. Governments and municipalities offer bonuses for coyote scalps, and ultimately, no doubt, canis latrano will be exterminated. Meanwhile those prairie farmers who have flocks of Shropshires, Oxfords, and Leicesters are put to the expense of close fences.
“But,” said Mr. Roblin, “although I speak in this disconsolate tone about sheep-raising, it has, I believe, a great future; in this way. The prolific yield of the earth has caused farmers to become careless and to allow noxious weeds to grow rampant. Now sheep thrive and produce excellent mutton on these very weeds, which means that the sheep-owner is achieving a double purpose: he is cleaning his land very thoroughly—the sheep absolutely exterminate the weeds—and he is securing a handsome return from his fine fat sheep in doing so.” As for the outlet, Mr. Roblin declared that Winnipeg, “with half the population of Montreal, has double the demand for mutton.” Indeed, he considers that the sheep-raiser finds a better local market in Manitoba than anywhere else in Canada.
With the advance of dairying, hog-raising is assuming importance. But, as Mr. Roblin pointed out, every farmer can, if he chooses, cheaply rear without milk a few swine on by-products that would otherwise be wasted. Not enough pork is produced in Central Canada to supply the local demand, but market conditions do not greatly encourage the industry. As the people of Manitoba want light, mild-cured bacon and hams, Yorkshires and Berkshires stand in chief favour.
Finally, I gathered these further facts of interest to anyone who contemplates tilling the prairie soil:
Currants, gooseberries, raspberries, and strawberries have long been cultivated profitably in Manitoba; and of late years some hardy apples have proved successful on the Siberian crab. All garden vegetables, save a few that require a long season, are grown to a high state of perfection in the prairie provinces. Eggs and poultry command a good market and receive increasing attention. Following upon the widespread cultivation of clover, bee-keeping has become easy and profitable.
WHEAT GROWING IN THE EASTERN TOWNSHIPS: LENDING A HAND AT STOOKING
CHAPTER VIII
AMONG THE DUKHOBORS
To watch the development of North America is to see Nature performing an endless conjuring trick with the human race. At New York, Quebec, and the other ocean ports there is that interminable procession of arriving liners, crowded in the steerage with persons who, in face, speech, clothes, ideas, and demeanour, are foreigners—foreigners obviously, and, as would seem, unalterably—yet when you travel about the country you make the bewildering discovery that they are not there. A family of newly landed foreigners, it is true, you may chance to fall in with, but the accumulated mass, the avalanche of emigrants who have been arriving in daily thousands for tens of years past—they have mysteriously vanished. And in their place you see millions of Yankees and Canadians who have dropped, apparently, from the skies.
The process of absorption, of adaptation, of transmogrification, is rapid, as two personal incidents may serve to show. Crossing the Atlantic recently, I happened to be standing in the between-decks promenade of the steerage, with my attention engaged by a group of inert Scandinavians, who—because of their strange attire and talk, their clumsy movements, and their wondering eyes looking out helplessly from flabby countenances—seemed creatures from another planet. By way of contrast, there stood at my side a dapper little elderly man in a cowboy hat, and having alert and penetrating eyes and a neatly trimmed tuft of hair on his otherwise clean-shaven face—in a word, the typical smart Yankee as one sees him on the stage.