Mount Robson—Jasper National Park
The E. P. Ranch, High River, Alta.
The Prince of Wales and his Canadian Home
Scores of private fur farms, nearly all devoted to fox raising, have been established in the West, though the East has still ten times as many. This will become one [a]Fur Farming and Trapping] of our leading industries. Trapping, in comparison, is a wastefully laborious and crude as well as cruel method, though still by far the chief source of the Dominion’s fur supply—and Canada is “the last great fur preserve of the world.”
In 1924 Saskatchewan sent out 1,161,805 pelts, Manitoba 711,778, Alberta 503,070, British Columbia 180,844, the North West Territories 164,903, and Yukon 50,070, or 2,772,470 in all.
Of the 70,029 beaver, British Columbia contributed 21,509, Alberta coming second with 20,057, and Manitoba third with 14,806. Of the 233,037 ermine or weasel, Saskatchewan sent 82,437, Manitoba 63,054, Alberta 57,962, and British Columbia 25,128. The muskrat numbered 2,121,929, of which 1,006,863 came from Saskatchewan, 554,716 from Manitoba, 331,144 from Alberta, 108,632 from the North West Territories, and 85,670 from British Columbia. The beaver catch showed a great increase over the previous year’s figure, 51,737; but the muskrat total fell heavily, as the number taken in 1923 had been 3,100,074.
The total value of the western fur catch in 1924 was $8,798,773, of which $1,970,013 is credited to Alberta, $1,927,914 to Saskatchewan, $1,908,354 to Manitoba, $1,529,376 to the North West Territories, $1,116,037 to British Columbia, and $347,079 to the Yukon. The whole Dominion’s total was $15,643,817, for 4,207,593 pelts, and included $2,542,992 for 169,172 beaver and $3,440,363 for 2,985,395 muskrat.
Sometimes a fur farm does not need to be “established”; it establishes itself. On the banks of the Red Deer, away there in the south, you can see—if the telescope is strong enough—a beaver gnawing at a tree. [a]Transforming the Brush Country] Now he has finished, and skips to one side. Down falls the tree with a crash. The enterprising farmer who owns that land, when he found the beavers coolly colonizing his water-front, adopted them under special licence, and supplements their diet of bark with a dessert of carrots, for which they will presently pay him with their skins.
Turning back from these oldest Canadians to the newest, we plunge into the thick of the “Galicians” whom we watched coming in. Twenty years have made a great change here too. Many of the thatched cottages have been abandoned for modern houses, which, however, are scarcely so picturesque. The little plots dug up with a spade and reaped with a scythe have expanded into broad farms worked with the most modern machinery.