The story of southern Alberta is the story of the passing of Canada’s great cattle ranches, the reclamation of millions of acres of dry land by irrigation, and the growth of general farming where once the open range stretched for hundreds of miles.
From Calgary I have ridden out to visit the mighty irrigation works of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This corporation has taken over three million acres, or a block of land forty miles wide and extending from Calgary one hundred and forty miles eastward. It is divided into three sections. The central division gets its water from the Saint Mary’s River, and the east and west divisions from the Bow River, which does not depend upon the rainfall for its volume, being fed by the snows and glaciers of the Rockies.
At Bassano, about eighty miles from Calgary, is the great Horseshoe Bend dam, where the level of the Bow has been raised forty feet. The dam is eight thousand feet long, with a spillway of seven hundred and twenty feet. From it the water flows out through twenty-five hundred miles of irrigation canals and ditches. This dam has been the means by which the semi-arid lands of southern Alberta, formerly good only for cattle grazing, have been turned into thousands of farms, raising wheat, alfalfa, and corn, as well as fruits and vegetables.
The dam at Bassano is the second largest in the world, being exceeded in size only by the one at Aswan, which holds back the waters of the Nile. The water stored here flows out through 2,500 miles of irrigation canals and ditches.
The riproaring cowboy with his bucking bronco was a familiar figure of the old Alberta, but with the passing of the “Wild West” he is now rarely seen except in exhibitions known as “stampedes.”
Among the ranch owners of the Alberta foothills is no less a personage than the Prince of Wales, who occasionally visits his property and rides herd on his cattle.
The ranching industry of Alberta was at its height during the thirty years from 1870 to 1900. With the disappearance of buffalo from the Canadian plains, cattle men from the United States began bringing their herds over the border to the grazing lands east of the foothills of the Rockies. The luxuriant prairie grass provided excellent forage, and the warm Chinook winds kept the winters so mild that the cattle could feed out-of-doors the year round. When the high ground was covered with snow, there were always river bottoms and hollows to furnish shelter and feed.