This man has been improving his land steadily from [a]Our Friend the Cow] the start, till almost the last inch of his quarter is under cultivation. He is a hard worker, of course; “but I don’t kill myself,” he says; “what’s the use? I don’t want the moon.” Yet he is by no means lacking in ambition. He had a very high ambition from the beginning—to be independent—and he has got more than he aimed at; while thousands who aimed at something much bigger have overshot the mark, through over-ambition, and are not even independent, but struggling in the chains of heavy debt.
Small men, or rather men with small means, can do big things by working together, as the Danes have shown us by the wonderful results of their combination of scientific dairying and hog-raising with nation-wide co-operation in marketing.
This Province of Manitoba has been learning fast in the last few years. She still grows over two million acres of wheat—Saskatchewan has twelve million and Alberta nearly six—but no longer stakes her whole existence on that crop. In 1920 butter and cheese factories received from Manitoban farmers the milk or cream of 24,600 cows. By 1923 that number had risen to 107,200, yielding 10,730,000 pounds of butter and 231,000 of cheese. In the same year Alberta sold 17,870,000 pounds of butter and 1,865,000 of cheese, from 158,000 cows, while Saskatchewan’s output, from 95,400 cows, was 10,870,000 pounds of butter and 119,000 of cheese. A few years ago we were importing butter to the prairie; now we are exporting butter from this same prairie to England, and the people there are delighted with its quality.
The prairie farmers’ takings for the year, from these factories, came to nearly $13,000,000. British Columbia’s [a]Winnipeg] factory output of 2,960,000 pounds of butter and 290,000 pounds of cheese, from 39,000 cows, gave the farmers over $2,000,000. These figures take no account of the enormous quantity of milk sold in its natural state, or used on the farms.
Winnipeg alone must need a big supply. The little settlement which had such a stormy and romantic infancy has grown into the largest city of the West, with nearly 200,000 inhabitants, including 30,000 Slavs, 14,500 Hebrews, 6,700 Scandinavians and 6,200 Germans and Dutch. It is noticeable, by the way, that seventy per cent of the people in the five biggest prairie cities—Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton—are of “British” stock, including “Americans” of British descent; though they are only fifty-six per cent of the whole population of the three Provinces. That is, the English-speaking folk tend to gather in cities much more than the Slavs, and very much more than the Scandinavians and Germans.
Winnipeg holds all the railways bunched together in her hand, before they spread out east and west. The largest railway “yard” in America is here—the Canadian Pacific’s, with 258 miles of track in it; and the Canadian National has 200 miles of yard track too. In twelve months 225,000,000 bushels of western wheat have passed out through this eastern gateway.
Here is a Parliament Building, stately and fine enough for a Dominion, not to speak of a Province. “When Canada has a bigger population than the little mother-land, as one day she certainly will have, and the Empire wants a more central capital than London, Winnipeg will be all ready with the equipment,” a hopeful Westerner remarks. [a]Boys and Girls]
She is certainly ready with the golf links, where eminent statesmen are said to find their chief recreation. There must be a dozen such courses around this city, and some of them are owned not by clubs but by the community, so that here, at any rate, golf is not only the rich man’s game; any one may play who can.
We have little leisure out on the Western country-side, and get all the healthy exercise we need on the farm; but hundreds of country villages have their baseball and tennis clubs for summer, and hockey for winter. The cities and towns, of course, have their organized sports and healthy athletic clubs of all kinds, with enthusiastic musical and literary associations too. The churches and schoolhouses, in town and country alike, are centres of social activity.
If there is one country school in the West where the children are not any day to be found playing and shouting as children should, I have yet to find it, and hope I never shall. Many school gardens are cultivated by the pupils; and large numbers of farm boys and girls are now active members of juvenile societies which give prizes for the best-bred and best-fed steers, heifers and hogs, or the best samples of grain. That youngster of eleven, captain of the soccer team, “pitched on” the hay of an eight-acre field the other day, by himself, when a sudden emergency called his father away and it “looked like rain.”