Thousands of “United Empire Loyalists,” sacrificing everything, flocked over the border and made new homes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario. This inrush from the lost colonies was followed by a considerable immigration from the mother-country, and the human tide flowed more strongly than ever after the end of the war with Napoleon. The United Kingdom contained less than half her present population, yet she was supposed to be overcrowded. Scotland and Ireland especially were drained of their people, because the political economists could find nothing for them to do at home.

It is believed that in the early years of the nineteenth century 25,000 Scottish peasants settled on Cape Breton Island alone, while great numbers were taken to the southern parts of Nova Scotia, and various counties in [a]British Settlers in the East] Upper and Lower Canada were peopled almost entirely from the same source. The members of a clan, or the inhabitants of a district, commonly emigrated together, and took up homes together in the New World, under leaders chosen or accepted by themselves. In 1804, eight hundred Highlanders, evicted by landlords who wanted the land for sheep runs, came over and made a new Glengarry between the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, where the land would be their own. About the same time an Irish officer, Thomas Talbot, threw himself with the “go” of a cavalry charge into an emigration movement, and never rested till he had settled twenty-eight townships north of Lake Erie.

One Highland chief, the Macnab, not only sent a large company of his own clansmen to Canada at his own expense, but took up his abode among them on the township allotted him by the Government. Later, in the early thirties, we hear of 400 discharged Irish soldiers coming over in a body, with their old officers at their head, and forming a military camp in the Upper Canadian backwoods, till their united efforts had cut out the roads and fields and built the houses of a civilized settlement. In England, about the same time, Lord Egremont organized an expedition of 760 Sussex folk, who also made homes for themselves in Upper Canada, as Ontario then was called. The emigrant ships were thick on the Atlantic, and in four years 160,000 British emigrants landed on Canadian soil.

While the silence of the desert spread over Scottish hillsides, the Canadian wilds awaked to vigorous life. From Lake Huron to the Atlantic, Canada was ringing with the settler’s axe. The air was black with smoke,—fire cleared the land faster than steel. The stones were [a]Coming from East to West] gathered into piles, and the plow, driven in and out among the blackened stumps, prepared the virgin soil for its first crop of oats and potatoes. The labor which forced the wilderness to blossom as the rose was enormous; but the men who gave it had strong hearts, and wrestled cheerfully with nature. Never thinking of ease, they won prosperity.

The children and grandchildren of those hardy eastern pioneers made just the right pioneering stuff for the newly opened West. They were reinforced by descendants of the folk their ancestors had left behind in the Old Country, now coming out to Western Canada direct,—English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, even Manxmen and Channel Islanders, Scandinavians, and others from Northern Europe. These were our nearest relations on that continent, descendants of the men left behind long centuries ago when their raiding kinsfolk settled in the British Isles; and now they sent contingents straight to the British prairies in Canada. Many of the same stock came in early, beginning long before the railway opened, from the Norse colony in Iceland which had “discovered America” five hundred years before Columbus. From the south came “Americans,” practically all of the same stock as the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, or of the Celtic stock to which most of the Highland Scots, Irish, Welsh and French belong. Many coming in from across the line were natives of Eastern Canada who had heard “the call of the West” while the only West ready to receive them was that of the States.

The newcomers spread over the prairie—spread so fast and so far, in fact, that they had to endure long isolation before any railway could reach them. “I had to haul my wheat 80 miles,” one old settler says, “and [a]Live Cattle and Dead Buffalo] then got forty cents a bushel for it.” But he was “a sticker,” and is now one of the most prosperous farmers in the country. Not owing to wheat, however; he was a stockman, long before live stock became popular. Wheat became King of the Plains, and few there were who would not bow down to him.

The reign of King Steer came first, however. Before the railway arrived, with the mass of settlers, the chief industry of the plains was ranching. The buffalo disappeared, but their place was partly filled by great herds of cattle, driven in from the States and roaming at large over the plains of our south-west and the foothills of the Rockies. Their offspring were rounded up when the time came, year after year, and driven across the line for sale. The rancher and his cowboys were almost the only white inhabitants—with the Mounted Police, who had to protect them from invading cattle and horse thieves, as they protected the Indians from whiskey-smugglers.

I was going to say that the first western freight the Canadian Pacific had to fetch out was cattle from the ranches. But, as an old railway man says, “The first live stock carried was dead stock.” The first substantial freight movement was that of buffalo skeletons. As soon as the prairie section got running, Métis and Indians were employed to gather up the millions of bones scattered over the plains where they had been shot down by generations of hunters. Great stacks of these bones were piled up like cord-wood beside the track—Regina’s first name was Pile of Bones—and thousands of carloads were shipped down to Chicago and other centres for use in sugar refining.

CHAPTER XI
Riding the Plains in 1905

KING STEER made a brave stand against King Wheat, but had to surrender when his realm was thrown open for settlement and the army of grain-growers poured in, cutting up the range with barbed-wire fences.