“Look at those wholesale houses,” he continues. “Did you ever see anything like them? Most of them started as two- or three-story structures, but their business has grown so that they have had to be pushed up to six stories or more. Winnipeg is one of the chief markets of western North America. If you had a pair of long-distance glasses that would enable you to look from here to the Pacific you could find no city in western Canada that can approach it, and your eyes would travel as far as Toronto before any city of its size could be seen.
“If it were now summer,” the Winnipegger continues, “your telescope would show you that you are at the eastern end of the greatest grain-growing region on earth. To the west of us are six million acres of land that will grow wheat and other foodstuffs with little more labour than scratching the ground. Western Canada raised in one year almost a half billion bushels of wheat and almost as much oats, to say nothing of millions of bushels of barley, rye, and flax seed.”
“Don’t you think it is a bit cold here on the roof?” I rather timidly manage to ask.
“Well, perhaps so,” is the reply, “but when I talk about Winnipeg I grow so warm that I could stand stark naked on the North Pole and not feel uncomfortable.”
Leaving the Union Bank Building, we go for a motor ride through the city. Main Street, the chief business thoroughfare, was one of the old Indian trails that followed the course of the Red River past the old Hudson’s Bay Company fort. And it still contains some of the city’s best commercial properties. Along it real estate has been rapidly rising in price and is said to be now fully as high as in Minneapolis or Toronto. Portage Avenue, which we saw from the roof, cuts Main Street almost at right angles. It also is part of an old Indian trail that extended from here a thousand miles westward to Edmonton, a city now reached by three great railroad lines.
Notice the banks! Winnipeg is one of the financial centres of Canada, with branches of the chief banks of the Dominion. Now we are going toward the river, past the Hudson’s Bay Company stores. Turning to the right, we pass the Manitoba Club, the University of Manitoba, and the parliament buildings. Like Washington, Winnipeg is a city of magnificent distances. The main streets are one hundred and thirty-two feet wide, and they stretch on and on out into the country. In the residential districts they wind this way and that along the Assiniboine River. Boulevards have been laid out on both sides of the stream in such a way that every residence has a back yard running down to the water, and nearly all have gardens and trees. There are miles of fine houses in this part of Winnipeg. The chief building materials are white brick and a cream-coloured stone found near by. This is, in fact, a white city, and it looks as neat as a pin under the bright sunshine. The boosting Winnipeggers say the sun shines here for thirteen months or more every year. It is true that of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, three hundred and thirty are usually cloudless.
Winnipeg grew within fifty years from a Hudson’s Bay post of two hundred people to the third largest city in the Dominion. It is the greatest grain market in Canada, all eastward-bound wheat being inspected and graded here.
Corn is cut by machinery in southern Manitoba. The land is worked in such large tracts that it pays to use the most modern labour-saving devices.