“I’ll prove it to you,” was the answer. “I have to go twenty miles for firewood, don’t I? That’s forty miles, there and back, for a load. It takes twenty loads to keep us warm one winter. Twenty times forty miles is eight hundred. Now, am I right?”
Lest it be thought that these depleting conditions applied only to the territory of feeble branch railways like ours, look at a few other conditions which afflicted the infancy of the country immediately tributary to the main line of the C.P.R.
E. A. James, who became the operating manager of the Canadian Northern lines after my removal to Toronto, used to tell how in 1886 he was one of the C.P.R. men who received no salary for four months. The C.P.R., though it had connected with the Pacific ocean, was like a poor man with a large and growing family, who finds his boys pushing their legs through their breeches faster than he can conveniently cover them. The original outbound traffic from the Territories had been buffalo bones, but the supply was limited. Though a line had been built through the mountains, snowslides compelled the erection of long and costly sheds to protect the track from the avalanches which were destroying life and property—nine men were carried to death as they were working on a bridge in 1885.
The C.P.R. was on the Pacific shore; but there was no traffic with the Orient. Steamers had to be provided which could not possibly pay at the start. The first C.P.R. steamer from Vancouver to Asia carried two carloads of shingles and the bodies of several Chinamen piously being returned to their ancestral sepulchres.
The capital of the North West Territories had been moved from Battleford to Regina with the building of the railway across the plains. Regina had about fifteen hundred people. When it had for ten years been the seat of government for a territory several times as large as the whole German Empire, if a new-comer wanted a house, the owner, instead of naming the rent, asked what he would pay. Calgary was the cowboy’s haunt, and the remittance man’s refuge. Edmonton was still at the back of beyond; several days’ journey from a railway.
In Manitoba, Brandon was bravely telling itself that some day it would beat Portage la Prairie, and furtively dreaming of keeping up with Winnipeg, when once it had reached its stride. About twenty-five hundred people were on the southern slope of the Assiniboine; and a great deal of wheat was sold by farmers on Pacific Avenue, beside which stood several elevators. The grain came from far south, and far north—because there was no other railway to receive it. Brandon now stretches across the Assiniboine valley, right to the border of the Dominion Government’s experimental farm.
The history of the acquisition of that farm for public purposes illustrates, as well as any episode I know of, what the position of land and agriculture was in a favoured section of Manitoba about the time I became a Manitoban. The original homesteader and pre-emptor of the Experimental Farm was a bachelor named Charlie Stewart, whose brother Jack took the land immediately west of him. Charlie had 320 acres, running down to the river, covering the northern slope, and taking in some of the upland. It had all the diversities which should distinguish an experimental station.
The harvest of 1887 was the best Manitoba had ever known—the most abundant, indeed, until the phenomenal crop of 1915. The C.P.R. had twelve million bushels of grain to haul to Port Arthur, and the task staggered the equipment resources of what was even then regarded as an enormous railway system. Fields that were estimated to yield twenty-five bushels to the acre, threshed out forty and more. Ideal weather had come just at the time the heads were filling; and instead of some rows not amounting to anything, as often happens when milk in the ear is scarce and development is hindered by hot sun and dry winds, every husk contained its berry.
This 1887 crop, of magnificent quality, sold in Brandon at from forty-eight to fifty-one cents a bushel. It was a common saying among the farmers that a good European war was needed to make Manitoba wheat worth something—perhaps two dollars a bushel might be obtained at some impossible time. The big European war did come, and wheat did go to two dollars a bushel—far higher, in fact. But there was not so much rejoicing as seemed possible in the eighties; for the other unthinkable thing had happened, and Manitoba farm boys were being slain in the European war that made Canadian wheat so dear.