Seeds of Pine

by Emily F. Murphy

The bow-and-arrow stage through which these Indian lads are passing corresponds in the white boy to that inevitable condition of development known as gun fever. In our city, at a highly immoral price, we dress up in khaki the boys of the lower classes, give them guns, and call them scouts. I like the Indian way better. Of course, there is this to be said for our method, that it instils a martial spirit into the youngsters so that when they are grown larger we shall have no lack of soldiers. This is a statement so obvious and axiomatic that it hardly needs writing down.

Well, so be it! How else are our bonds to be protected? And may not the lower classes be relied upon to constantly produce batches of boys to step into the ranks? Yes! I believe in Boys' Brigades and in war. I have some bonds myself.

In the village, several homesteaders who are trending northward to the Peace River country, have drawn up to the hotel. Their wagons are piled high with farm implements and household stuff which they purchased at Edmonton.

All of these people are topful of enthusiasm, being of wise and gallant mind. Indeed, the whole country seems surcharged with it and even the poplars clap their hands. The settlers will tell you the only knocker here is Opportunity. There is always a mirage in the pioneer's sky which, God be praised, he manages to haul down bit by bit and pin to the solid earth. "The pins!" you ask. Ah yes! I may as well tell you; they are surveyors' stakes and tamarack fence-poles.

I have some little talk with a woman who is resting on the balcony while her horses are being fed. She comes from the United States and, until her marriage three months ago, practised her profession as a trained nurse. Her husband is going to make entry for a homestead, and when, in three years, he has "proven up," they will open a store in one of the villages. By that time, the railway will have reached their district. Here is a woman of varied interests and many pursuits; one with more than an arm up her sleeve. I am doubly sure of her practicability now that she has told me of the stuff she has packed in the corners of the wagon, and in the narrow spaces between the household utensils. She has seeds for her kitchen garden, also sweet peas, mignonette, sunflowers, hollyhocks, and pansies. The firebox of her stove contains a hand sewing-machine, while the oven is the receptacle for a guitar, some music a surgical case, a box of medicines, a small looking-glass, two metal candlesticks, a roll of coloured pictures for her walls, a few thin paper classics, stationery, fishing-tackle, and a well-stored work-bag. The matches she carries in a case with a close top, while the groceries are packed in tin bread boxes which will serve the same end in her new home. Besides their cooking utensils, toilet articles, clothing, blankets, and tent, this couple carry a rifle, a shot-gun, ammunition, and other small but useful things like a map, a compass, and an almanac. The wagon has a canvas top.

One man who is also heading for the far north tells me he has sold everything from painkiller to mining stock. Of late, he has been selling real-estate, but the bottom has dropped out of this business. For the future, he intends raising potatoes on the land instead of prices. He has "cleaned up" eight thousand dollars in real-estate, but he wishes me to understand he made this honestly by taking options on property and selling before the options came due.

With remarkable precision of language, he explains how the slump in real-estate is chiefly due to those large, didactic gentlemen of slow conscience and insulting superior manner who come here by the trainload and tell the North she is still a flapper, and that it is unbecoming of her to do up her hair and lengthen her skirts, after which cheap and unsolicited advice, they take themselves and their pestiferous money homewards.

Their opinions are quoted from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which I must know takes in Spruceville, till the bankers are seized with the complaint known as cold feet—pest take them!—and "get orders from headquarters" to close up all outstanding accounts. These banker fellows, my informant says, lose their beauty sleep, but as far as he can see, lose nothing else. A business man may be potentially rich and yet be put into bankruptcy by a corporation, the spoils going to the corporation, or its manager. There should be a law against elderly wide-jawed financiers who prophesy hard times because, with them, the wish is father to the thought. There is nothing in all the world they desire so much in order that they may, by their phenomenal rates of interest, pillage the country to their heart's satisfaction. So gainful is their pursuit, my friend will not be at all surprised if, at the last day, it is found that these tongue-lolling financiers have a lien on heaven; indeed, he believes this to be inevitable. Owing to the fact that we are unaccustomed to it, the process of thinking is a somewhat painful one to us of Alberta, but it is wonderful what flashes of illumination come to us sometimes.

To-day, the first train of cars has entered this place. It belongs to the Canadian Northern Railway Company. For many years Edmonton was known as the last house in the world. This, of course, was not literally true, and it would be hard to state where or which is the ultimate hearth-stone in this very good land of Canada, but assuredly Edmonton was the last post-office and, until this year, the End of Steel. To-day, this road is born. When will it die? We fall into a way of thinking it is here for eternity, but railways vanish like everything else. Even the great Appian Way, which lasted for over two thousand years, has, in these last centuries, become little more than a name.

To build even one of our railways, a hundred forests are sacrificed, and, in the uncanny gloom of the dead country which lies in the heart of the earth, thousands of bowed, grim workers toil, Vulcan-like, for the iron to make its spikes and nails.