What will become of this one-thousand-mile stretch of swamped rock-land? Nobody knows. There it lies separating East from West, as land impassable, unnavigable as water. Firs and minerals, these are the only things to be expected from it. Firs tend to grow less, but the minerals of course may in the end so count that no one will wish the country other than the rock it is. All along the line the railway authorities have up the names of stations, as though there really were stations there, and, even more, as though there were villages or towns which those stations served. You are carried past a hundred such stations—names on a board and nothing more at all, unless it be a solitary wooden shack in which some railway subordinate passes his life seeing that the line is clear. The gangs of workers, Galicians or Italians, who do repairs along the line, camp out; you see their camps now and then, temporary settlements in this No Man's Land.
'Pays mélancolique et marécageux!' So Pierre Loti named Les Landes, and the description fits this country too, though I doubt if melancholy is a word to be found in a Canadian's vocabulary. 'Pretty poor stuff' a Canadian might allow it to be, but would immediately begin to talk of the fish in its waters, the big game to be got among the woods, and the mining possibilities it would reveal as soon as prospectors and syndicates got together. There never was a people less born to be depressed than the Canadians; nor do I think they will ever produce a Pierre Loti.
For my part, I began to find this country most fascinating when I started to think of its effect upon the history of Canada. It is easy to see that its very impenetrability hindered for a long time the growth of the West. Where there was no road there was no way for progress, and the great wheatlands were shut up beyond it, while Eastern Canada developed. What is less easy to see is the effect such a waste must have when the country on the other side has been populated and fertilised. A little time ago people began to think that East and West would simply reverse their order of importance. They said, 'Quebec and Ontario have depreciated in value. The rich land of Ontario has been ruined, why should any one stay there when in the West there is limitless wheatland to settle on?' But the trackless country still lay between—distance is not annihilated by a single railroad, nor by a dozen railroads. Quebeckers did not move West much. Ontarian farmers began to find that exhausted land could be renovated by scientific methods. If the plains had adjoined their farms, they would not have bothered to try those methods, but the muskeg and rock lay between. Some of them went West, but not all; they did not like it that the West was being settled from the States and Europe. In any case the West would have been an unfamiliar country—the American and English immigrants only made it more so—and the boasts of the West roused Eastern pride. Was the West best? Ontarians looked about them and found that not only could their present farms be improved but that there lay still in their own particular country virgin land that needed only to be cleared and worked. Already there is the new Ontario, north of the old Ontario, offering fresh fields and pastures new for the Canadian born who didn't mind clearing land as well as working it. It is land upon which the average immigrant is lost, upon which the average Ontarian is at home. Thus begins a northern movement which may spread any distance.
I have not said, and would not say, that the rock and water of Ontario account for this northern movement, for the fact that people are beginning to say, 'This East and West business is overdone. Canada is not a thin, straight line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but a country stretching north to Hudson Bay, having the depth of the States almost, if a race spreads hardy enough to inhabit it.' The immediate cause of the northern movement was the discovery that wheat was as hardy as men, if not hardier, and would grow more north than an old-time settler ever dreamed of. The movement began in the North-West. All I would say is that if the waste country had not lain between the Ontarian farmer and the West he would have rushed with the rest, and the balance of importance would have shifted altogether westward. As it is, Ontarian farmers thrive again; new Ontario thrives excellently in a score of ways; the Canadian-born prosper in that part of Canada where they are—and always have been—most massed and most solidly Canadian. The West is a medley of races; and if it had suddenly become dominant by reason of its vastly superior prosperity, a people that could definitely be called Canadian would have been still further to seek than it is. Canada, in effect, would have had to restart becoming a nation.
All that day the rock and bog and timber kept dropping behind the train, and it was sunset before we came to the shore of Lake Superior. A thunderous glow hung over the lake, glimmering on the great granite cliffs. It was dark before we came to Port Arthur—proud possessor of the largest elevator in the world, and fierce rival of Fort William. In the morning we were in Manitoba.
CHAPTER XIII
THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW
TIMERS OF WINNIPEG
Winnipeg introduces the West. 'If you like Winnipeg,' I had been told before I got there, 'you will like the West.' I had been somewhat disheartened by this information. I had pictured Winnipeg as a smoke-laden city of mean and narrow streets, set off with board walks and wooden shacks of various sizes. I knew that I should not like Winnipeg if it were like that. Well, it is not like that. Main Street, which follows exactly the lines of the old Hudson Bay Company's trail, is a hundred and thirty-two feet wide, and the other streets are in proportion. Above is the immensely clear and lofty Canadian sky. The wooden shacks are not there, and you will have to go far to find the board walks. True, the buildings are, on the whole, less impressive than the streets, but there are some magnificent blocks rising several stories; and if you take an observation-car to go and see the sights of Winnipeg, you will find yourself brought to spots where further fine blocks are rising; and with the eye of the imagination you will behold Winnipeg as splendidly lofty as New York. I am not sure that for a place as warm as Winnipeg in summer and as cold in winter (I have heard the very truest Canadians say that they have been nearly frozen there in winter) the laying out of the town in so spacious a style is ideal. Streets narrower and more easily screened from the sun and wind would have seemed more comfortable to begin with. But then Winnipeg is growing, growing, growing; and it may be that some day even Main Street will seem shut in when it has its skyscrapers.