1. CUTTING WHEAT ON A 4,000 ACRE FARM, SASKATCHEWAN.
2. HASTINGS STREET, VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA.
1. JASPER AVENUE, EDMONTON, ALBERTA.
2. STOOKING WHEAT, BENITA, SASKATCHEWAN.
XIII
ALBERTA: WHERE PRAIRIES AND MOUNTAINS MEET
ALBERTA is in the same latitude as its sister province of Saskatchewan, is almost of the same size (being about three thousand square miles larger), and “came of age,” as it were, or attained the rights of a province, upon the same day, September 1, 1905. Its situation, as an inland province very far from the eastern seaboard, and shut in from the west by mighty chains of mountains, has delayed its progress; but it has grown with the building of railways, and recently its population has shown the most rapid increase of any of the provinces. In the decade between the census years, 1901 and 1911, its increase was 424 per cent., and last year its population was swelled by about ninety thousand new arrivals, from the eastern provinces, the United States, and countries beyond the seas, including a goodly number of British.
It is a land of great natural wealth and wonderful variety of beauty, for within it the last elevated “prairie steppe” gives way to mountains with peaks that soar into the blue high above the snowline. The Rockies, indeed, form the irregular boundary line of the south-west, which divides Alberta from British Columbia; and there is many a noble mountain within the province, though one is often misled, by the inadequacies of the ordinary maps, into thinking of it almost wholly as a prairie land.
In the south the country is of the rolling prairie type, though its altitude is high; but further north it has the park-like character of woodlands, interspersed with open prairie, and further north still, though the park-like country still prevails in certain districts, the land in general is a forest-covered wilderness, broken by lakes and muskegs. The latter make summer journeys extremely difficult, and it is easier for the Indians and traders and missionaries, who at present are the sole inhabitants, to travel when winter has sealed up the lakes and morasses with ice, thus making possible short-cuts between places which in summer can be reached only by devious journeys up one stream and down another, with laborious portages between.