This brings us to the beginning of the present century. Turn your telescope back to that time. Mount the broncos of imagination and ride with me, to see what I saw, riding the plains in 1905 when the new Prairie Provinces were just being born.
Down in Southern Alberta, the biggest ranch still surviving, with its lordly domain of 66,000 acres, has just been sold to a syndicate for $6 an acre—five times what its owner paid to the Government twenty years back—for sub-division into farms. The last 10,000 head of cattle are being driven off to a range leased from the Government many miles away to the north.
Wheat is waving, yellow and ripe, on farms newly fenced off the prairie, close by; and even the ranches up in the foothills, where they thought themselves secure, find speculative homesteaders cutting off quarter sections from the “free range.”
Much of the south-western prairie was fit for ranching, and for ranching only. But newcomers in their haste and ignorance demanded to have it thrown open for homesteading, and the Government, equally hasty [a]Prairie Primeval Still in 1905] and ignorant, allowed them to flock in,—presently to flock out again, to districts where crops are reasonably sure. After many wasted years the deserted land may possibly be seen alive with flocks of sheep, and in the end with herds of cattle as in the beginning.
Riding away to the north—though not for lack of a train, if we wanted to take one—we pass through Calgary, already a city of 10,000, and after another fifty miles or so of “bald-headed prairie” we enter the beautiful park lands of Central Alberta. Here, along a railway closely following our road, the old Edmonton Trail of Cree and Blackfoot, we find a string of farmers who are neither “ranchers” nor “grain-growers,” though they raise both grain and cattle. Livestock is their mainstay; and already, though the day of the big ranch is over, the number of cattle in the West is greater than ever.
Strike eastward, though. Here, far from any railway line, we might think ourselves back in the days before the West was discovered even by Indians. We enter a land where no man dwells. We see the prairie primeval, as it was when it first arose from the sea and put on its mantle of green; sleeping on, untouched and unchanged, as it slept when the first silent red man stole out of the woods and shaded his eyes to scan its sunlit sea of grass.
Look close, and we detect the winding trails of buffalo, trod by uncounted generations in everlasting single file—mere shallow grooves all overgrown with grass. The buffalo have all been gone these thirty years. We cannot do as thirty years ago a traveller did—shoot a buffalo when dinner time came, roast the tongue, carry off the best of the hump, and leave the rest to the coyotes. We might bring down a prairie [a]“We’re Canadians Now”] chicken or duck now and then, but we have a long trip ahead of us, and no time for hunting. Like old Highland clansmen riding to war, we carry each a bag of oatmeal strapped to the saddle. There is nothing like it. “We owe to Scotland whiskey and oatmeal,” somebody says, “but the less we take of the one, and the more we take of the other, the less we lose and the more we gain.” For this trip we add a trifle of tea and sugar, and bacon, which our clansman would have thought luxurious.
Here and there we may happen on a square iron stake rising from a little mound in the midst of four shallow pits, pointing north, south, east and west. Surveyors have been here and left these landmarks so that home-seekers can see at once the corners of each quarter section; but the home-seekers have not yet come.
At last we see two parallel ruts worn smooth and deep through the grass. We have found the old trail which the army followed on its march to the relief of Battleford. Here is a little creek, “Fifteen-mile Springs” by name; it is fifteen miles north of the Saskatchewan River; and camping beside it we actually find two human beings, with a wagon and team. They are Minnesota farmers, on their way to join a score of others from the same State who are settling on homesteads far north-east of this.
“And don’t you want to be ‘Americans’ any longer?” I ask.