What a contrast, between the waist-deep sea of green alfalfa and the dry land still untouched by the life-giving water of the Bow! Southern Alberta does not lack moisture: an inexhaustible supply pours down from the mountain snow in never-failing streams.
Look at that three-acre picture, set in a broad green frame of maple, ash, willow, poplar and dainty caragana, and filled with melons, tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries, giant cabbages, onions and potatoes—all watered, like the farm beyond, from the St. Mary River, near Lethbridge. “I thought there was no such color as green up here when we came in first,” says the farmer’s wife, “but that was before we turned the water on. And look at it now!” It is a sight for sore eyes.
Do you hear the hum of bees? They are flying to and from that cottage yonder. The lady knitting at the door, under a shady porch of wild hop-vine, says she makes $10 per square foot of her “holding,” which is a two-by-two wooden stand with a hive on it. The bees pasture on the neighbors’ alfalfa, and bring her $40 worth of honey in a season. Reckon what that comes to per acre, if you have the time and arithmetic. Somebody must have reckoned it up, for he has just brought in ten million bees for distribution through these Western Provinces.
Eastward still we fly. Do you smell gas? That is the “medicine” of Medicine Hat. Puncture the earth, and up it comes: ready-made light and heat. Hot-house flowers grown by that heat have beautified the tables of Montreal, 2,000 miles away. [a]Quality, in Cattle and Sheep]
Here we are skimming over a cattle ranch. The old-style ranch is not quite dead, but is on its last legs—like the old-style caterpillar that shrivels up into a chrysalis before its resurrection into a beautiful new-style butterfly. Listen to the rancher talking to one of his neighbors. “I’ve got to go out of business,” says he.
“No,” says neighbor; “just change it, as I did. I used to let the beasts rustle, and turn them off as four or five-year-olds. Now, the market for that sort of stuff is gone. I breed them and feed them through the winter, so they’re in fine shape as two-year-olds, and at the worst of times I get a good enough price for a good beast. Here’s the latest Government report from the Winnipeg stockyards: ‘The market was draggy owing to the poor quality of the offerings, but there was a good demand for anything showing quality and flesh.’ They’ve been telling us that for years, and it’s time we took it in.”
Hear the music rising from the next ranch—sheep baa-ing for their lambs. Their owner was not satisfied with the common range ewes, weighing about 100 pounds and giving five or six pounds of wool. Six years ago he began buying pure-bred rams, and now his average is 175 pounds of sheep and nearly ten pounds of wool. Quality, only quality pays. And quality in the beast shows quality in the man.
We are in Saskatchewan already. Here is another fine Parliament Building in the middle of a garden, with pleasure boats on a lake. Little “Pile of Bones,” as it was before the railway came, is now Regina, Queen City of the Middle Province. On a cabinet minister’s window-sill is a beautiful vase. No, it is not imported from England or France; it is made of fine white Saskatchewan [a]New Homes for Old] clay, the only deposit known in Canada. But it is not this rare white clay that makes the wealth of Saskatchewan; it is the common brown dirt.
We speed through the sunny air, and over the vast central plain. Would you recognize it? The unbroken wilderness, where twenty years ago we rode day after day without meeting a soul, is now a checker-board of golden wheat fields, dotted with farmhouses and big barns, villages and schools, and crossed by a network of railways, each a string of elevator-beads—not only the Canadian Pacific now, but two other transcontinental systems, the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk, now merged in the Canadian National.
Nearly all the sod shacks have gone. From most of the log cabins the people have moved into new frame houses, though many of the old dwellings have been cased in to make the new. The frame house itself has been vastly improved, in looks as well as convenience. The natural taste for beauty is finding expression, as it was seldom allowed to in hard pioneering days. Hundreds of prairie habitations are pleasant to look upon, tasteful in color and form, with shady verandas, and gardens neatly fenced.