Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

In 1904, when its population was ten thousand, Edmonton became a city and the capital of Alberta. It was then a typical frontier town of the New West. Its main thoroughfare was a crooked street laid out along an old Indian trail, and its buildings were of all shapes, heights, and materials. The older structures were wooden and of one story, the newer ones of brick and stone and often four stories high. The town was growing rapidly and the price of business property was soon out of sight. A fifty-foot lot on Main Street sold for twenty thousand dollars, and there was a demand for land in the business section at four and five hundred dollars per front foot.

That year the Canadian Northern transcontinental line reached Edmonton, and four years later the Grand Trunk Pacific was put through. In 1913 the Canadian Pacific completed the bridge uniting the northern part of the city with its former terminus across the river at Strathcona, which had been made a part of Edmonton the year before. In addition to these three transcontinental lines, Edmonton now has railway connection with every part of central and southern Alberta, as well as a road built northwesterly along the Lesser Slave Lake to the Peace River district. The trains run over that route twice a week; they are equipped with sleeping cars and a diner for most of the way.

The location of Edmonton is much like that of St. Louis. The city is on a large river in the midst of a farming region almost as rich as the Mississippi Valley. It is in the northern part of the wheat belt, and the surrounding country is adapted to mixed farming as well as wheat growing. It produces enormous crops of oats, barley, and timothy. I have seen wheat near here so tall that it almost tickled my chin, and oats and timothy as high as my head. The land will raise from seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five bushels of oats to the acre, and an average of forty bushels of winter wheat. The farmers are now growing barley for hogs; they say that barley-fed pork is better than corn-fed pork. They also feed wheat to cattle and sheep. Indeed, when I was at Fort William I was told that thousands of sheep are fattened there each winter on the elevator screenings.

I am surprised at the climate of Edmonton. For most of the winter it is as mild as that of our central states. The weather is tempered by the Japanese current, just as western Europe is affected by the Gulf Stream. The warm winds that blow over the Rockies keep British Columbia green the year round and take the edge off the cold at Edmonton and Calgary.

Edmonton is an important coal centre, with thirty mines in its vicinity. Indeed, Alberta’s coal deposits are estimated to contain 1,000,000,000,000 tons, which is one seventh of the total supply of the world. It is eighty per cent. of Canada’s coal reserves. Coal is found throughout about half of the province from the United States boundary to the Peace River, and is mined at the rate of about five million tons a year. Half of the product is lignite, about two per cent. anthracite, and the remainder bituminous. Nova Scotia is a close second in the coal production of the Dominion, and British Columbia ranks third.

Because of the long haul across the prairies, Alberta coal cannot compete in eastern Canada with that from the United States. Even the mines of Nova Scotia are farther from Canada’s industrial centres than is our Appalachian coal region. Cape Breton is more than a thousand miles from Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, and about two thousand miles from Winnipeg. Scranton, Pennsylvania, on the other hand, is only four hundred miles from Toronto, and Pittsburgh but three hundred and sixty-seven. Consequently, Alberta coal supplies little more than the local demand.

Of the three hundred mines in operation, only about seventy are important. Many of the others, some operated by only one man, are known as “country banks.” In these the coal is dug out by the farmers, who often drive thirty miles or more to one of the “banks.” At some places bunk houses and stables have been erected to provide shelter for settlers who cannot make the round trip in one day.

Alberta ranks next to Ontario in the production of natural gas, which is found chiefly about Medicine Hat and in the Viking field, which supplies Edmonton. Oil in small quantities is produced south of Calgary, and new wells are being drilled in the southeastern part of the province near the Saskatchewan border, and even north of Peace River.

The Peace River Valley, the southernmost part of which is four hundred miles above Montana, is the northern frontier of Alberta. It has been opened up largely within the last ten years. Across the British Columbia line, part of the valley has been set aside as the Peace River Block, where the settlement is controlled by the Dominion government.

The basin of the Peace River consists of a vast region of level or rolling land, much of which is thickly wooded with fir, spruce, pine, tamarack, and birch. The forests are full of moose, deer, and bear, and the beaver, lynx, marten, and muskrat are trapped for their furs. There are vast stretches of rich black loam that produce annually about a million bushels of wheat, three or four million bushels of oats, and almost a million bushels of barley. Considering the latitude, the winter climate is moderate, and in summer there is almost continual daylight for the space of three months.