Among the old-timers, in a well-settled district that we presently pass through, is a Nova Scotian who has been farming up here for a dozen years. “My grandfather,” he says, “was a United Empire Loyalist. He had been a leading citizen of New York, and lost everything in the revolution. He knew nothing of country [a]Newcomers from England] life beyond his garden in Manhattan. But he never kicked; he got right down to it, and when some poor West Highlanders came in, more used to fishing than farming, it was the city man that showed them how to build log houses and clear the Nova Scotian forest.
“I thought of him one day, soon after I came up here, when I butted in to a family of newcomers from England. There were three brothers, all university graduates, who had never done a hand’s turn of work except in their sports, I reckon. Now they were trying to work three quarter sections, in partnership. They weren’t baching it like some high-toned ‘remittance men’ I’ve seen, who wouldn’t sweep out the shack or make a bed once in a year, for all the elegant way they’d been raised. No; one of them had a wife, and, though she’d been used to servants doing everything, she got down to it like a good one and kept the house as clean as her baby. But the men were trying to farm before they learnt how, which is a mistake.
“Well, I saw one of them plowing with a team of oxen, and there was something wrong with the plow and he couldn’t find out what, let alone make a straight furrow. The others were picking up stones and carrying them quite a ways, and the skin was almost flayed off their tender hands. I fixed the plow, and told ’em to wear gloves, and helped ’em make a stone-boat. Of course they must have me stay for supper—dinner, they called it. I opened my eyes, I tell you, when they all came to supper dolled up in evening dress, London style; and her ladyship served up a dinner to match, winding up with black coffee and cigars. But they didn’t let their ‘style’ interfere with their work. That first year they broke 200 acres and had the luck to raise enough [a]Learners Become Teachers] wheat for seed, besides oats enough for four horses; and the second year they had a splendid crop. There never was any doubt about their success, from the word go. They were good mixers—no starch, except in their shirts—they made themselves liked; and to-day, if you please, it’s those city boys that show half the newcomers around them how to live in the West.”
CHAPTER XIII
The Tree of Freedom
THAT BUGLE again! You cannot hear it, but I know it is calling, for to-morrow is the birthday of the giant twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan. One more night under the stars, a brisk morning ride, and we canter up to the old fur-trading post. Paul Kane’s 139 people, “all living within the pickets of the fort” and not a white woman among them, have grown to 14,000, and, from their clothes and complexions, they might be in London or Toronto.
In all the big crowd, gathered to hear the Governor-General of Canada proclaim the birth of a new Province with Edmonton for capital, we look in vain for beaded redskin or shaggy voyageur. We discover one cowboy, got up for the occasion, in buckskin coat and fringed leather shaps, and he looks as singular in such a gathering as a canary among sparrows—or a sparrow among canaries—for the ladies’ dresses and the fluttering Union Jacks make up a scene as bright as anything in the bird creation. And side by side with the cowboy’s bronco stands—an automobile. If we ask for the Hudson’s Bay Company, we are directed to a modern department store; yet, on investigation, we discover the old fur-trading Edmonton still busy behind the scenes. A million dollars’ worth of furs pour in every year from a multitude of outposts in the north, to be sorted and packed for the markets of the world. [a]Two New Provinces Born]
Settlers look longingly up the trail by which the furs come down, and already all the surveyed land for eighty miles north, except the heavy brush, is taken up. In fact, pioneers are squatting twenty miles beyond the survey. But many of the late arrivals at Edmonton are men of some means who will buy land within easy reach of a railway. Among them are scores of families who have abandoned California, many good Dutch farmers from Pennsylvania, and hundreds from the Western States. At the same time, the “Galicians” are being largely reinforced, and they cannot afford to be as particular. They take brush land without hesitation, clear it, and, having spent much toil transforming it into farms, take root as firmly as the toughest willows they have just pulled out.
Our ear catches fragments of many tongues, therefore, in this expectant crowd, till the platform fills and the ceremony begins.
Think of what this ceremony means, both here and at Regina, which to-day becomes the capital of the new Province of Saskatchewan and will have its own festivities as soon as the Governor-General can arrive.