When ready to be transferred to a steamer, the wheat is drawn from the bottom of a bin, again elevated to the top of the building, weighed, and then poured into the vessel through spouts. It is not touched by hand from the time it leaves the car until it is taken from the hold of the ship, and the work is done so cheaply that it costs only a fraction of a cent to transfer a bushel of wheat from the car to the boats. For ten or eleven cents a bushel it can be carried a thousand miles or more down the lakes and put into the hold of an ocean steamer that takes it to Europe.
In one of the elevators of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Fort William a train of wheat is handled every twenty minutes during the season. I timed the workers as they unloaded one car. It contained sixteen hundred bushels of wheat, or enough, at twenty-five bushels an acre, to equal the crop of a sixty-four acre farm. Nevertheless, it was elevated, weighed, and put in the tanks within less than eight minutes.
The open navigation season on the Great Lakes lasts from May to December, and during this time as much as five million bushels of wheat a day have been put on freight boats at Fort William or Port Arthur for trans-shipment to the East. Some of the freighters unload their cargoes at Georgian Bay ports, on the east side of Lake Huron, from where the wheat goes by rail to Montreal. Other ships discharge at Port Colborne, Ontario, from where the grain is carried on barges through the Welland Canal and thence down the St. Lawrence and its canals to Montreal. Still other shipments go through United States ports. A few small steamers take their cargoes all the way by water from the head of the Lakes to Montreal; the grain carried in this way is only between two and three per cent. of the total.
The all-water route and the combined rail-and-water route from the head of the Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard are much cheaper than the all-rail route, due to high railway freight rates in eastern Canada. A bushel of wheat can be sent over the thirteen hundred miles between Calgary and Fort William for about fifteen cents, while the overland freight rate from Fort William to Quebec or Montreal, a distance of only a thousand miles, is twenty-one cents. The rate on the all-water route from Fort William to Montreal is ten cents cheaper, or eleven cents. From Fort William to New York via Buffalo it is fourteen cents, but vessels sailing from New York offer lower ocean rates and can get cheaper marine insurance, so that more than half of Canada’s export wheat is shipped abroad via the United States.
Whenever we have put a high tariff on Canadian wheat, the amount exported to our country declines. We now admit Canadian wheat free of duty on condition that none shall be consumed in the United States. This does not mean that it may not be manufactured. At present fifty per cent. of all that is imported is made into flour, and then reëxported.
Some of the lake freighters in the Port Arthur and Fort William harbours are like no other craft I have seen. They have an elevated forecastle at the bow for the crew, with the engines and officers’ quarters in the stern. In rough weather one can pass from bow to stern only by means of a life rope, and orders and reports are given by telephone. In the stretch of deck between is a series of hatches, sometimes thirty or more, through which the cargoes are loaded or discharged. A single vessel will often carry three hundred thousand bushels of wheat, or the equivalent of six or seven trainloads of forty cars each. Among the boats in the lake grain trade this season were a number of small ocean-going freighters from Norway, attracted here by the cargoes available at profitable rates.
Besides the great fleet of grain-carrying ships, passenger steamers run from Port Arthur and Fort William to Georgian Bay, touching at all the important ports on the route. I steamed for eighteen hours through Lake Superior coming here on one of the boats from the “Soo.” That lake is so large that at times we lost sight of land and it seemed as though we were in mid-ocean. At other times we could see the irregular coastline, which is rock-bound and picturesque. The water of Lake Superior is as clear as crystal; it is icy cold the year round.
CHAPTER XX
WINNIPEG—WHERE THE PRAIRIES BEGIN
Stand with me on the top of the Union Bank Building, and take a look at the city of Winnipeg. You had best pull your hat down over your ears and button your fur coat up to your neck for the wind is blowing a gale. The sky is bright, and the air is sharp and so full of ozone that we seem to be breathing champagne. I venture you have never felt so much alive. The city stretches out on all sides for miles. Office buildings and stores are going up, new shingle roofs shine brightly under the winter sun, and we can almost smell the paint of the suburban additions. Within fifty years Winnipeg has jumped from a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post of two hundred people to a city of more than two hundred thousand, and it is still growing. The value of the buildings erected last year amounted to more than half that of the new construction in Montreal.
Now turn about and look up Portage Avenue. Twenty years ago that street hardly existed. To-day it has millions of dollars’ worth of business blocks, any of which would be a credit to a city the same size in the States. That nine-story department store over there is the largest in western Canada. Farther down Main Street are the Canadian Pacific hotel and railway offices, and beyond them the great terminals of the Canadian National Railways. “Yes, sir,” says the Winnipegger at my side, “you can see how we have grown. It was about the beginning of this century that we began to build for all time and eternity. Before that most of our buildings were put up without cellars and had flimsy foundations. We had not realized that Winnipeg was bound to be the greatest city of Central Canada.