The grain lands of western Canada begin in Manitoba in the fertile Red River valley, which is world famous for the fine quality of its wheat. From here to the Rockies is a prairie sea, with farmsteads for islands.
American windmills tower over Saskatchewan prairie lands that were largely settled by American farmers. The province is still so thinly populated that it has only five people to every ten square miles.
The wheat harvest, like time and tide, waits for no man and when the crop is ready it must be promptly cut. The grain is usually threshed in the fields and sent at once to the nearest elevator.
While in Regina I have had a talk with the governor-general of Saskatchewan in his big two-story mansion that twenty years ago seemed to be situated in the middle of the prairie. When I motored out to visit His Excellency, although I was wrapped in buffalo robes and wore a coon-skin coat and coon-skin cap, I was almost frozen, and when I entered the mansion it was like jumping from winter into the lap of summer. At one end of the house is a conservatory, where the flowers bloom all the time, although Jack Frost has bitten off all other vegetation with the “forty-degrees-below-zero teeth” he uses in this latitude.
From Regina, the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway runs west to Calgary. Were we to travel by that route, we should pass through Moose Jaw and Swift Current, two important commercial centres for the wheat lands. The story is told that Lord Dunsmore, a pioneer settler, once mended the wheel of his prairie cart with the jaw bone of a moose on the site of the former city, and thus gave the place its name. Moose Jaw is a live stock as well as a wheat shipping point. It has the largest stock yards west of Winnipeg. An extensive dairying industry has grown up in that region.
North of Regina are Prince Albert and Battleford, noted for their fur trade and lumber mills, and also Saskatoon, the second largest city of the province, which we shall visit on our way to Edmonton. At Saskatoon is the University of Saskatchewan, which was patterned largely after the University of Chicago. It has the right to a Rhodes scholarship; and its departments include all the arts and sciences.
As sixty per cent. of the people are dependent upon agriculture, farm courses receive much attention. A thousand-acre experimental farm is owned by the university and the engineering courses include the designing and operation of farm machinery. Even the elementary schools are interested in agriculture, a campaign having been carried on recently to eradicate gophers, which destroy the wheat. The children killed two million of these little animals in one year, thereby saving, it is estimated, a million bushels of grain. A department of ceramics has been organized at the university to experiment with the extensive clay deposits of the province, the various grades of which are suited for building brick, tile, pottery, and china. Saskatchewan’s only other mineral of any importance is lignite coal, although natural gas has been discovered at Swift Current.