The United States cattle men were followed by Canadians and Britishers. One of the first big ranch holders was Senator Cochrane of Montreal. He owned sixty-seven thousand acres, and most of it cost him only a dollar an acre. There were other immense holdings, and the grazing industry continued to grow until it extended into southwestern Saskatchewan and included horses and sheep as well as cattle.
Then the homesteaders began to take up their claims. In 1902 the first tract of land for irrigation purposes was bought from the government by the Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, and in 1903 the Canadian Pacific Railway’s big irrigation project was begun. In May of the same year there occurred one of the severest snow storms in the history of the plains. It lasted for a week, and fully half the range cattle in what was then Alberta territory perished. The introduction of wire fences dealt another hard blow to cattle ranching. Large herds can be run all the year round only on an open range.
There are still a few big stock men in Alberta, but they have been crowded into the foothills west of the old original “cow” country. Small herds pasture on the open range also in the Peace River district. As a matter of fact, Alberta still leads the Dominion in the production of beef and breeding cattle. It has as much livestock as ever, each mixed farm having at least a few head. There are a half million dairy cattle in the province.
Most of the stock raised to-day is pure bred. There are cattle sales at Calgary every year as big as any in the United States. The favourite animal is the Shorthorn, but there are many Polled Angus and Galloways. The best breeding animals come from England, and there are some ranchmen who make a specialty of raising choice beef for the English market. Within the last ten years the cattle in Alberta have tripled in number, and their total value is now in the neighbourhood of one hundred and twenty-five million dollars.
On my way from Edmonton to Calgary I passed through the famous dairying region of Alberta. The cheese industry is still in its infancy, but the province makes more than enough butter each year to spread a slice of bread for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It supplies butter for the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and is now shipping it to England via Vancouver and the Panama Canal.
Sheep can exist on poorer pasture than cattle, and some large flocks are still ranged in the higher foothills of southern Alberta. They are chiefly Merinos that have been brought in from Montana. On the small farms the homesteaders often raise the medium-fleeced English breeds, such as Shropshires, Hampshires, and Southdowns. Some of the ranchers are experimenting in raising the karakul sheep, a native of Central Asia, whose curly black pelts are so highly prized for fur coats and wraps.
Horse raising was another big industry of early Alberta. The bronco is now almost extinct, and almost the only light-weight horse now reared is a high-bred animal valuable chiefly as a polo pony. In Alberta, as elsewhere in the Dominion and in the United States, the motor car has taken the place of the horse as a means of transportation, and nine tenths of the animals in the province to-day are of the heavy Clydesdale or Percheron types, and used solely for farm work.
I have gone through Calgary’s several meat packing houses, and have visited its thirteen grain elevators, which all together can hold four million bushels of wheat. Calgary ranks next to Montreal and the twin ports of Fort William and Port Arthur in its grain storage capacity. It is surrounded by thousands of acres of wheat lands, not in vast stretches such as we saw in Saskatchewan, but divided up among the general farming lands of the province. The city is an important industrial centre, and in some of its factories natural gas, piped from wells a hundred miles away, is used to produce power.
Calgary is less than fifty years old. Nevertheless, it has sky-scrapers, fine public buildings, and wide streets and boulevards. Many of the business buildings are of the light gray sandstone found near by, and nearly every residence is surrounded by grounds. The city lies along the Bow and Elbow rivers, and the chief residential section on the heights above these streams has magnificent views of the peaks of the Rockies, one hundred miles distant.
Like many of the big cities of Western Canada, Calgary began as a fort of the Mounted Police. That was in 1874. Its real growth dates from August, 1883, when the first train of the main line of the Canadian Pacific pulled into the town. Before that time much of the freight for the ranch lands came farther south through Macleod, which, the old-timers tell me, was the real “cow town” of southern Alberta. Goods were brought up the Missouri River to the head of navigation at Benton, Montana, and thence carried overland to Macleod in covered wagons drawn by horse, ox, or mule teams.