Brick homesteads and windmill frames began to dot the prairie, and Kit saw belts of wheat. Sometimes the binders’ varnished arms tossed in the tall grain, but for the most part red-gold stooks dotted the long fields. Wagons rolled about the stubble, smoke trailed languidly across the sky, and dust clouds marked the spots where the threshers were at work.
One machine was near the trail, and Kit saw chaff and beaten straw fall like a yellow cataract from the elevator. Where the stuff came down sweating men piled bags of grain.
“A prairie wheat bin; the fellow means to hold his crop,” Austin remarked. “When I first knew the prairie the storekeeper took the lot and charged ten per cent, on the bill he carried over. He couldn’t take the farm, because another fellow held a mortgage. When the farmer had had enough, he quit, and all his creditors found was a notice, ‘Pulled out for British Columbia.’ The hard men stayed with it, and although some grumble they acknowledge they got their reward. Well, railroading’s strenuous, but by contrast with farming I reckon it easy. What’s your notion, Dick?”
The driver turned and grinned. “I’d sooner drive a flivver over the meanest trail. Them fellows began at sun-up and they won’t stop so long as they can see. Packing two-hundred-pound wheat-bags soon makes me tired.”
“But what helped the farmers to make good?” Kit asked.
“In Canada the question is, who helped? You think us a sober lot, but Nature’s our antagonist, and the fight is pretty stern. At the beginning, the settlers’ wheat rusted, was hailed out, and frozen in the fall. Then the scientific experimenter got to work. He cross-fertilized the plants and grew wheat that ripened before the frost arrived. To haul wheat a long distance to the elevators is expensive, and our railroad engineers pushed branch tracks across the plains. We don’t go where the traffic waits; we shove ahead into the wilds and the traffic follows us. Our roads are rough, but the cars get there.”
“In Manitoba railroads will soon be numerous,” Kit remarked. “For all that, cultivation’s spotty. The province is an old province, but one crosses belts where one does not see a homestead. How do you account for it?”
“Now I’m beaten! Perhaps our temperament accounts for something. We like fresh ground, and we like to go as far as possible. In the sandy belts, blowing grit cuts the wheat, and in places the water’s alkaline. All the same, when you can get gumbo soil in Manitoba, to start for the Peace River isn’t sensible. In fact, on the plains settlement’s capricious. Saskatoon, so to speak, sprang up, but Regina’s growth was slow. Brandon’s old and small, and Fairmead, for example, has not grown for twenty years.”
“Quit talking and hold tight!” said the driver, and they plunged into a ravine.
Somehow they got round the corner by the narrow bridge, but the front wing was over the creek. On the hill in front the car rocked, rattled savagely, and stopped.