The women here also dress in furs. Their cheeks are red from Jack Frost’s nipping cold, and the ozone in the air paints their eyes bright. When they begin to talk one knows at once that they are the wives and the daughters of the giants beside them, for they sing the praises of Winnipeg as loud as the men.
Until 1912 Manitoba contained only half as much land as it does to-day. It was almost a perfect square and was known as the “Postage Stamp” province. Then a section of the Northwest Territories was added to it, and now it is as large as North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, and Indiana combined. From the Lake of the Woods and the Ontario boundary it extends westward to Saskatchewan, while from the boundary of North Dakota and Minnesota it stretches northward for a distance almost as long as from New York to Chicago.
Although known as a prairie province, as a matter of fact, only five per cent. of Manitoba is rightly included under this designation. This is in the southern part, where the fertile Red River Valley grows some of the finest wheat of all Canada. Three fourths of the province is covered with forest, mostly second growth, which has sprung up since the great forest fires in the past swept over the country. In the north are also vast regions of barren land and muskeg, whose only value is in their game and fish. Near The Pas, four hundred and eighty-three miles north of Winnipeg, is a region of minerals, where deposits of copper, gold, and silver are known to exist, but where the developments as yet are of no great importance.
About five hundred miles north of Winnipeg is a belt of clay land similar to that I have described in Ontario. This belt is level and well adapted to mixed farming. The Winnipeggers tell me that the railway built toward Hudson Bay has done much to open that part of Manitoba to settlement. The climate is said to be warmer than that of Winnipeg, owing to the absence of windswept plains and the proximity of the waters of Hudson Bay, which have a temperature higher than those of Lake Superior. Hardy grains and vegetables can be grown, and strawberries have been raised at The Pas.
The first charter to build a railway to Hudson Bay was granted as far back as 1880, and the project has been under discussion more or less ever since. The various Canadian trunk lines at different times have made plans for extensions to the Bay, and I am told that James J. Hill once owned a concession to build such a line. The railway from Winnipeg to The Pas on the Saskatchewan River was completed about 1906, and from there it was planned to extend it on to Hudson Bay. Actual work was held up a long time because of a controversy as to whether the northern terminus should be at Port Nelson or farther north at Fort Churchill. Port Nelson was finally decided upon in 1912 and work was resumed.
As there were no settlements along the route, and as the builders had to carry with them all their supplies and food, the line was pushed northward a short distance at a time, and progress was slow. The plans included a harbour at Port Nelson and the erection there of two four-million bushel wheat elevators. However, the ships loaded with supplies for the new port met with disaster, and later it was learned that the entire appropriation for the railway had been spent leaving the line far from completion. The project was finally abandoned in 1917, when three hundred and thirty-two of the four hundred and twenty-four miles from The Pas to Port Nelson had been built. An irregular service has been since maintained to Mile 214, mostly for the accommodation of miners and hunters.
The Hudson Bay route would bring the wheat of the Northwest a thousand miles nearer the ocean. Port Nelson is as near Liverpool as is Montreal, and a carload of wheat from Regina in Saskatchewan could be at the Hudson Bay port in the same time it would take to reach Fort William. The distance from Winnipeg to Liverpool via Hudson Bay is three thousand miles, whereas by Montreal it is 4228 miles. Passengers to England from St. Paul and Minneapolis by using this route would shorten their railroad journey by at least five or six hundred miles. The chief objection to the completion of the Hudson Bay railway is the difficulty of navigating, not the Bay itself, but Hudson Strait, which leads into it. The strait opens out into the Atlantic a little below Greenland. It is between four and five hundred miles long, and from fifty to two hundred miles wide. From the middle of October until June it is sure to be full of ice from the Arctic Ocean, and some parts of it are usually blocked for a month longer. Moreover, it is not safe to rely upon it being open later than the first week in October.
CHAPTER XXI
THE GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAYS
Can you imagine all the railroads of the United States divided into two systems, paralleling each other from our Atlantic coast to the Pacific? Think of them as north of a line drawn from Baltimore westward through St. Louis to San Francisco. Let the distance between terminals be nearly four thousand miles, and the total length of track ten times as great. Finally, suppose that the larger of the two systems is owned and operated by Uncle Sam, and the other by such a corporation as the New York Central. If you can do that you will have the background of the railroad situation in Canada to-day.
With a mile of track for every twenty-three people, Canada has more railroads in proportion to her population than any other country on earth. Only the United States and Russia have a greater total mileage. Geographically, British America extends from our northern border to the Arctic Ocean, but the active life of the Dominion is mostly confined to a strip of territory averaging less than five hundred miles wide from north to south and more than three thousand miles long.