CANADA never knew a “Wild West.” We are forced to turn elsewhere for “penny thriller” and “dime novel” material, based on frontier lawlessness and bloodshed.
Three agencies have been mainly responsible for the peaceful and prosperous peopling of the West. Two of them, the R.N.W.M.P. and the Hudson’s Bay Company, have long ago received recognition for their part in this marvel of empire-building. But there is another whose achievement is but little known or lightly heralded.
It is WOMAN. Wives and daughters of the bearded pioneers who conquered Canada’s plains trekked west with them; lived in lowly sod-houses; shared all hardships; made instant Home wherever the oxen were unyoked. These women helped tame a wilderness, and wherever they went was law and order.
Elsewhere in Western America, the hotbloods, the blacksheep and fortune hunters sloughed off from a rising civilization went into the West without the good influence of womenfolks–and straight-way became “bad men,” “killers” and “road-agents.”
Because nearly every early Canadian in the West had found good women nearby, there was no “Wild West.” And the influence of Canadian women is still alive–on the farms, in the factories, the stores and in the modern civic life of this oldtime buffalo kingdom of the Northwest.
Abroad at Home
WHAT has become of the old-fashioned winter? We would like to know the feelings of that self-exiled band who fled the wholesome prairies of Canada last fall, as they open up their home papers on some Californian strand and read of the ice famine in Iceland; of the hens laying and the dandelions sprouting in Canada, in December; of outdoor swimming at Vancouver; of spring-like mornings in Manitoba, with birds singing and school boys laying off overcoats at play.
Enthusiasm
ENTHUSIASM is the spark which fires the fuel of ability and personality to do its work. Without Enthusiasm, these qualities are dormant and ineffective–mere potentialities of power.
A man may overcome error; he may lack judgment and acquire it; he may make mistakes and remedy them; but he can do none of these things without enthusiasm.