Homes and Careers in Canada

by Harry Jeffs

On a still greater scale were the works of the International Harvester Company, another branch of a famous American firm. More than three-quarters of a century ago Mr. McCormick, forbear of the present controlling McCormick—he was a pious Presbyterian with the Scottish instinct for getting on—invented a reaping machine which answered so well in a Virginia wheatfield that it led to a revolution in agricultural machinery. All sorts of machines were produced and have been continuously improved for all the principal operations of agriculture on the grand scale. To-day McCormick’s International Harvester Company is the greatest agricultural machinery industry in the world. The firm saw the opportunities offered by the development of the Prairie Provinces and were quick to take advantage of them. I was told that farmers can get all the machinery they need without paying a cent down. The firm looks to the future rather than to the present. It knows that its money is safe and will fructify in the fields of the farmers, to whom it gives the longest credit. Again I saw the processes of manufacture of the parts of reapers, binders, tedders, self-dumping and other rakes, hay lubbers, huskers and shredders, harrows, drills, and ploughs. I was shown a forty-five horse power plough driven by a gasolene engine. It is furnished with twelve coulters, each 14 inches deep. It will plough twenty acres a day of ten hours, and if necessary can be run throughout the whole twenty-four hours at certain seasons. Anything more perfect and capable of getting through so much work at such a small expenditure of human labour it would be impossible to conceive. It is such machinery as that turned out by the Oliver Chilled Plough Works and the International Harvester Works that has made the marvellous wheat production of the Prairie Provinces, increasing constantly at the rate of millions of bushels a year, possible.

Hamilton is also the scene of enormous works of the Canadian Westinghouse Brake Company, a branch of the Pittsburg Company, whose brakes are necessities of existence to every railway company and to most of the electrical tram systems of the world.

A constant stream of immigrants pours into Hamilton. The demand for labour is insatiable. I noticed in the International Harvester Works that warnings and regulations for the guidance of the employés were printed in seven languages. It was evident that the workmen were a cosmopolitan mixture of races. They included many men from the Balkan States, Italians, Russians, and others who in Canada take more kindly to manufacturing and railway construction employment than to the life of agriculture. Mr. Marsh informed me that in March 1,200 men could readily be found employment in the various Hamilton factories.

Ontario, with its four millions of population out of the seven millions of Canada, is the great manufacturing Province, although there are growing manufactures in the Eastern Provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec. A Government publication summarising the industries of Ontario states that, in addition to Hamilton and in and around Toronto, at London, further west on its own river Thames; at Brantford, Chatham, Guelph, Kingston, Ottawa, Peterborough, St. Catharines, St. Thomas, Stratford, Berlin, Collingwood, Galt, Ingersoll, Oshawa, Sarnia, Sault Ste. Marie, Woodstock, and scores of other centres, the mills and factories are busy. They produce vast quantities of iron and everything that iron makes, from a tin-tack to a locomotive. The agricultural machinery made in Canada stands so high in reputation that it finds a market not only in South America and in the sister realms of Australia and New Zealand and in the Mother Country itself, but in continental Europe. Several other special lines of manufacture, including parlour organs, are now well known abroad; but in most branches the Canadians themselves use all that their manufacturers produce; and here in the towns of Ontario are produced not only such wares as we have just mentioned, but cotton, woollen and leather goods and clothing; waggons and carriages, on wheels or runners; furniture, paper, and almost everything else that is made of wood; foodstuffs, plain and fancy—but really there is no end to the list.

These manufacturing towns are spread over the Province in a way rather strange to Old Country men, whose centres of industry are generally to be found clustering in a few districts marked out for such a purpose by particular local advantage. There is no “Black Country” in Ontario. There is, however, one district where manufacturing towns are particularly numerous, in the south-west part of the Province. There is no coal-field here, but the great coal-fields of Pennsylvania lie just across Lake Erie; and this region has the enormous advantage of lying within easy reach of Niagara Falls. The glory of the Falls is their beauty, and it is to be hoped that their beauty and grandeur will be religiously preserved for ever. The Falls, however, provide an enormous force, which can be used without destroying or greatly injuring their appearance. This force is already being developed by the Ontario Government and private enterprise, and is being conducted through electric cables to the manufacturing towns, where it will provide motive power for almost unlimited machinery.

At Sault Ste. Marie, where the water of Lake Superior pours out into Lake Huron, a gigantic iron and steel industry is being developed. At the upper end of Lake Superior again are the twin seaports, Fort William and Port Arthur, where millions of bushels of prairie grain are loaded yearly in a multitude of steamers and shipped down to ports on the eastern shores of Lake Huron.

GALA DAY AT WINNIPEG.

Travelling westward I passed out of Ontario with its lakes and wooded hills into Manitoba, the first of the Prairie Provinces. Within the memory of middle-aged men Manitoba and all west of it was practically a grass-grown wilderness, spangled during the summer months with a succession of flowers of many varieties that grow magnificently—some of them such as are the pride of gardens at home. There is a picture of the Provincial capital, Winnipeg—which is now as large as Bradford—in 1872, showing a tiny market town of about 2,000 population. Among the figures in the picture is that of the late Lord Strathcona, then the directing spirit of the Hudson’s Bay Company. To his enterprise is largely due the subsequent development of the country. The population to-day exceeds 200,000, and the city, at the fork of the Red River and the Assiniboine, in addition to being the corn exchange of the West, is becoming a manufacturing centre of the first importance. Main Street, Winnipeg, is a scene of surpassing interest to the English visitor. I was told that, if you knew how to distinguish them, you might meet in a walk along Main Street people of forty nationalities. At night it dazzles with the glare of its electric lights. There are hotels to suit every pocket, great departmental stores employing each their 500 to 2,000 “clerks,” shops fitted up in the most modern American style and offering the world’s best to the Winnipeg folk and visitors to the city, who appear to have inexhaustible supplies of dollar bills. The money turned over in Winnipeg would make a handsome revenue for a fair-sized kingdom. Its citizens build churches without counting the cost, and the churches, with such preachers as the Congregational Dr. J. L. Gordon, a flaming orator, with a rush of rainbow rhetoric, and the Presbyterian “Sky Pilot,” Dr. C. R. Gordon, draw crowded congregations and often turn away hundreds from their services. There are no fewer than 115 churches and five colleges, including the Wesley Training College for ministers. At St. Boniface, near by, is a large French settlement with a fine cathedral church, recalling the fact that here was a famous Roman Catholic mission to the Indians and half-breeds. In the burial ground of the cathedral I saw the tomb of Louis Riel, the French half-breed who, at the beginning of the development of the West, raised the Indians and half-breeds against the Canadian Government and paid for the rebellion with his life. It is the development of the West with its increasing population that has been the making of Winnipeg. It does a wholesale trade of more than £6,000,000 a year, and has more than 400 factories, employing something like 20,000 workers. A very large number of English immigrants have settled in Winnipeg, and many of them have rapidly become rich men, while they have sent for their young relatives and friends to join with them in taking advantage of the wonderful opportunities offered to men with grit and business enterprise. For young men not disposed to go on the land, but desiring a business career, I should say there is not a better place to make for than Winnipeg. Such departmental stores as Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s establishments, with the scores of huge concerns in every department of trade, with the sixty banks and the offices of professional men, Real Estate agents and the like, are always on the look-out for young fellows who are not afraid of work and are willing to adapt themselves to the conditions of the country. I did not gather from what I saw of business methods in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and the cities farther west that the work is more exacting than it is in the Old Country. The hours usually are certainly shorter. What is demanded is the willing heart, a quick intelligence and the ability to do just what is required. The “slacker” in Canada hangs fire as he does in England. I heard some comparisons between native Canadians and English new-comers in business houses, which were rather in favour of the new-comers. It is said that the young Canadian is much more ready to get time off for a baseball match or a pool contest than is his English competitor. It may be that the English competitor is usually a young fellow with ambition and energy above the average, or he would have stayed in the Old Country, where the temptations to slacking are so numerous and so fascinating.

On the journey of 300 miles odd from Winnipeg to Regina, the capital of the central Prairie Province of Saskatchewan, the traveller sees the prairie stretching out on either side of the line to the horizon. Early in the summer it is a sea of green growing wheat; towards harvest time it is a sea of gold, with the wheat to the height of a man; after harvest the prairie presents the appearance of a vast encampment with the wheat stooks waiting for the threshing. The threshing over, the prairie glows at night with conflagrations as if a hostile army was marching through the land destroying as it went, but all that is happening is the burning of waste straw and refuse from the threshing, the ashes being the only fertiliser that the soil has so far received. There are brand-new towns and villages at every three or four miles, each the centre of a rapidly-growing trade with the farmers and other settlers in the district. What will most strike the English visitor, however, is the succession of elevators along the line, resembling huge square or oblong towers with a turret on the top. The elevators are the receptacles of the corn ready for the market. Each will hold an enormous quantity, ranging from scores of thousands to millions of bushels. Many of the elevators belong to the wholesale buyers or to great milling firms. A large number have been built, however, by the railway companies to hold the grain until transport is available to convey it to the markets. So great is the pressure between the harvest and Christmas time that all the freightage rolling stock of the companies is called into service, and all the elevators are crammed to bursting point with the wheat and oats, and even then the farmers complain that wheat has to remain in the fields week after week because the elevator accommodation is insufficient. It is a revelation to the travelling visitor of the inconceivable food-growing capacity of Central Canada, of which as yet scarcely the half of the cultivable soil has been broken. It is easy to understand and to believe the boast that Canada, when its cornlands are fully cultivated, will be able to feed four-hundred-millions of the world’s population.