A noble valley this, now spreading wide, now narrowing to a canyon where the Ramparts rise hundreds of feet sheer up from the river’s edge, now opening again to show green meadows and woodland. Here, a mountainous [a]Mackenzie and Peace Rivers] region is densely clad with spruce; there, light birch and poplar restore life to a stretch of brulé; jack-pine and tamarack vary the scene; and yonder a gaunt escarpment of bare rock climbs to a height of 3,000 feet.
If we followed the Mackenzie through all its windings, we should find it the longest river in Canada, 2,500 miles to the head of the Finlay. Let us be content to strike a bee-line of 1,000 miles from the Arctic Sea to the Peace River.
Another noble valley this, and, where we strike it at the “head of steel,” dotted not with fur traders’ forts but with farmhouses, schools, and villages. Here is a Canadian farmer whom I saw a dozen years ago setting out from Edson, on a 300-mile drive through the backwoods to reach this “land of promise.” He has a great farm now, with 300 acres of fine wheat and oats, and the railway is almost at his door; when it pushes through to the coast he will be satisfied, he says. “But we’ve got a creamery at the Crossing, now, and that’s been a godsend. They reckoned on making 40,000 pounds of butter in a year, and they got up to that in three months. In the first two months they had paid the farmers $6,600 for cream, which brightened things up considerably—that year was dry as we had never known it up here before.” Another Peace River farmer is filling a silo with sunflower for his aristocratic herd of pure Jerseys.
Southward again we fly, but swerve a little to the east. Those little log shacks in the brush remind us that the pioneering spirit is not by any means extinct. As a matter of fact, as many as 2,576 homesteads were taken up in this Province in 1923 and 1924, besides 3,507 in Saskatchewan and 1,121 in Manitoba. [a]The Buffalo Comes Back]
“If you are a great people,” as Joshua told an Israelite tribe when it wanted more land, “then get up to the wood country and cut for yourselves there in the land of the giants.” Only there are no giants, either men or trees, to be encountered in the prairie backwoods.
Still keeping a south-easterly course, we come out of the woods again and rub our eyes. Are we back in the middle of last century? Buffalo in thousands roam the plain beneath. Newcomers? Yes, but the oldest of old-timers, too. Not one was to be seen when we passed here twenty years ago. But the Dominion Government bought up a few hundred surviving in the United States and fenced in a prairie “park” at Wainwright as a sanctuary for these original inhabitants of the West. They have thriven and multiplied fast. A wonderful sight, that shaggy monarch of the ancient plains and all his wild barbaric following. . . . And over there, a few miles away, a fair-haired girl is milking a sleek imported Shorthorn, a cow with a pedigree of thirty proud generations. . . . The old and the new, the native and the immigrant; and what a contrast! They are not so different as their skins appear. Some interesting alliances have been made between the wild buffalo and tame cattle. But more success is hoped from a union arranged between buffalo and yak, the long-haired cattle of the cold Himalayas.
The good old buffalo “robe” is again on the market, for hundreds of the band have now to be killed every year. The park is becoming a fur farm as well as sanctuary.
Lake Louise—Rocky Mountains National Park