“Liquid gold,” the brown water deserves to be called, now running to waste in all our rivers. We only use a minute fraction of it all, to make electric light and power. One day we may use it, as they now do in Norway, to extract from the air all the nitrogen we need to put back in the land, to replace what we have taken out in wheat. The richest soil cannot be drained of its riches without becoming poor.
It is not lack of power that keeps even the prairie from developing great manufactures, but only lack of a great population to buy the goods. Long haulage of raw material does not prevent large-scale manufacturing in other “purely agricultural” regions.
You don’t like statistics, perhaps—I don’t exactly love them myself—but a few picked figures now and then are good to chew on. Take these, for instance:
Already the manufactures of Western Canada amount to $333,000,000 in a year. British Columbia stands [a]The Zephyr Called Chinook] first with $149,000,000, Manitoba next with $94,000,000, then Alberta with $51,000,000 and Saskatchewan with $38,000,000. “Vegetable products” account for $88,000,000, including $42,000,000 from flour and grist mills; “Animal products,” for $73,000,000, including $31,000,000 from slaughtering and meat packing, and nearly $21,000,000 from butter and cheese; “Wood and paper,” for $88,000,000, of which British Columbia contributes $62,000,000. Textiles exceed $17,000,000, and iron and steel industries $13,000,000.
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The foothills past, we sail out over the plain in company with the balmy Chinook. A wonderful wind this zephyr, as the Greeks called it—
“Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea.”
In the middle of winter it has come to my farm, a hundred miles east of the mountains, and driven the mercury up to 75. Not “in the shade,” of course; but why stay in the shade when you can be out in the warm sun?
The city of Calgary, as we fly over it now, has five times the people it had when we rode through it twenty years ago. And the face of the country east and south has completely changed. The West is not satisfied with new roads and railways, it must have new lakes and rivers too. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company has tapped the Bow in two places, and the streams flowing out spread over a three-million-acre block in 4,000 miles of irrigating ditches and canals. It is the biggest irrigation scheme in the world, except a few carried out by powerful Governments. The farmers of several neighboring [a]Irrigation, Bees, and Gas] districts have now co-operative irrigation systems of their own, with the Provincial Government’s help.