Canada, the Spellbinder

by Lilian Whiting

The telephone service is practically universal, welding into unity all the labour on a great farm of hundreds of acres, and enabling the farmhouse to be in touch with city and town. Appreciating the importance of this, the government of each province lends substantial aid in the instalment of telephone service, and the main telephone lines in these three western provinces are owned and operated by the government. Thus all agricultural communities are linked together in close contact and communication.

Social conditions thereby establish themselves on a satisfactory basis. The comfort of the rural home is assured. There is no isolation to be encountered. Good roads, railway facilities of the best order that the world can afford, telephones, and telegraphs make possible a social life impossible under former pioneer conditions.

Churches spring up wherever there are people, for religion and education go hand in hand in Canada.

The garden facilities are not the least of the attractions to settlers. The abundance with which garden stuff of all kinds—potatoes, peas, beans, onions, turnips, pumpkins, and squash, as well as lettuce, radishes, rhubarb, and small fruits—grow in all this region is something to see.

This agricultural empire is so great in its promise for the future, so interesting and enchaining in its present development, that there is hardly a limit to the imagination regarding its importance in a not distant period.

The "great North-West" is a term which has been commonly employed to designate the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the northern part of British Columbia. It is rather a vague term; yet it indicates, if it does not exactly define, a region of unrivalled scenic grandeur, and of such potential resources and favourable conditions of climate as to virtually add a new continent to the world. Such is the march of progress, however, that at the time of writing the "North-West," strictly speaking, is that portion of the land north of these provinces stretching eastward to Hudson Bay and northward to the Arctic Ocean and including that part of the Yukon on the Canadian side of the Alaskan border. This definition is according to Watson Griffin's map of the Dominion of Canada in his accurate and authoritative work, Canada of the Twentieth Century, which appeared in May, 1916, bringing all matter pertaining to the country up to date with statistical accuracy. It is pointed out by Mr. Griffin that in the older provinces, such as Quebec and Ontario, the climate has been virtually transformed by the culture of the soil. In southern Manitoba it is also on record that while the early settlers lost their crops by summer frosts, no such disasters are now experienced. The experiments in agriculture have proved that the soil under cultivation stores up the heat received during the long, bright days, and that the radiation of this heat at night prevents the fatal frosts. Climatic conditions are not, therefore, arbitrary and fixed beyond control, but are largely amenable to civilisation. It is this fact that lends probability to the expectation of creating prosperous conditions for living in the region north of the sixtieth parallel. "In fact," says Mr. Watson Griffin, "at some of the Hudson's Bay Company posts in these territories the clearing, draining, and cultivation of the land has already had a remarkable effect, and if this is true where very small areas have been brought under cultivation, it is conceivable that the cultivation of wide areas might have a very great influence in preventing summer frosts." If well-cultivated soil does receive and store the sun's heat it seems reasonable to suppose that in these northern districts, where the summer days are so long, the general opening of the soil to the sun and air should have a marked effect.

The most reliable experts unite in the conviction that the Mackenzie Basin is capable of supporting an agricultural population. The soil is rich; and in that part of the Basin alone, lying between Athabasca Lake and the Arctic Ocean, there is a belt of land 940 miles long and over 60 miles wide. Ninety miles south of latitude sixty-three ripe strawberries are found. A little farther to the south currants and other small fruits grow luxuriantly. There are already scanty settlements, remote and apart, in this country, and an increasing population of huntsmen, fur-traders, and tourists to whom sport is the attraction; and the first consideration that would occur to the traveller, or to any student of this almost unmapped region of infinite space, would be as to the ways and means for safeguarding human life and for the maintenance of law and order. For untold centuries this region has been the home and haunt of the Indians and of wild and ferocious animals. The Indian tribes possessed all this district in which to roam at will. Their means of subsistence were hunting and fishing, and their resources for clothing consisted in the skins and furs of captured animals. Any adequate conception of the wildness of this unbroken wilderness is almost impossible to grasp. The primæval forests impenetrable with their dense growth of underbrush, fallen trees, colossal rocks washed bare by the beating storms of centuries, with uncounted and fairly innumerable leagues of lakes, rivers, swamps—how unconquerable this primitive world of Nature! Yet the call of the North-West, even this remote and unknown North-West, has sounded, and the ear of poet, prophet, and priest is that which registers the cry unheard and unheeded by others.

It is a significant commentary on human life, in its assertion of that divinity which man feels within him, that the first white men to fare forth to penetrate this wilderness were the French missionary priests, and that the intense motive that drew them into hardships and dangers incredible was that of the love of God and the longing to make known to the untamed Red Man the help and comfort of the Divine Power—to bring to these children of nature something of the message of a diviner destiny. "To Pierre Radisson and his comrade, the Sieur Groseillers, belong the credit of having first penetrated this vast tract of undiscovered country," writes Mr. A. L. Haydon in his remarkable book, The Riders of the Plains. No romance was ever more enthralling than this volume, nor would it be possible to offer any adequate interpretation of the great North-West that did not take account of Mr. Haydon's work. With the thrilling adventures of these French missionaries all students of history are acquainted; and it is such a chapter in life and in literature that any transcription of the experiences would of itself make a volume. In its fulness it can only perhaps be found in the pages of the Recording Angel. "They plunged into the unknown," says Mr. Haydon; "took the daring leap that all such pioneers are called upon to take; and along the paths they blazed followed a host of others hardly less intrepid. He who would read of the further discovery and exploitation of the North-West of Canada must study the glowing life-stories of Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, De la Verendrye, and others."

There were also temporal as well as spiritual leadings. The adventurous fur-traders pushed further and further into the primæval wilderness and established forts as centres of supplies and as definite places for their barter with the Indians. Two separate and important companies entered on this quest, the famous Hudson's Bay Company and the North-West Fur Company. The outposts that each of these energetic associations established were like lighted torches into the darkness; even this untrodden wilderness began to respond to the first conquest of humanity. Myths and traditions also led on. There were rumours in the air, whisperings of voices on the wind, that some vast and unknown sea lay between the western coast and Japan. The Pacific Ocean was known, but these nebulous intimations pointed to a body of water never yet discovered. In 1731 the Sieur De la Verendrye, as gallant a gentleman as ever sought his fortune in the new world, started gaily from Montreal upon the quest for this great sea. With his company he took the route up the Red River to its junction with the Assiniboine, making camp at Fort Rouge, the site of the present city of Winnipeg. Rumours still haunted the air of "mighty waters beyond the mountains," and over the infinite and trackless expanse of prairie they still further extended the march, but the formidable foothills of the Rocky Mountains proved too great a barrier, and it was due to the persistence, and probably, too, also to the greater physical vigour of a young fur-trader, Alexander Mackenzie, of the North-West Company, that the mysteries of the mountain ranges were penetrated, the foothills crossed, and the river traced that now bears his name.