CHAPTER XVII
AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS

There was a time when Englishmen got a very bad name in Canada. It was not to be wondered at. For a long time English youths, who came to be known as Remittance Men, used to be shipped out by relations anxious only to get rid of them. These helped to create an opinion that Englishmen were more remarkable for their drinking than their working powers; and when to them was added shipload after shipload of unemployables from yet lower classes, Canadians began to get impatient of English immigrants. It was not logical of them to suppose that these were favourable specimens of our working-classes; it is never logical to suppose that the best men of a country are ready to leave it. Logic, however, is difficult to insist on under these circumstances, and though there were plenty of Englishmen even then, and even more Scots perhaps, who were obviously as good as any farmers on the prairie, the bad name of the English clung to them. That is all, or nearly all, changed now; and the project connected with those farms, which came to be known in the English papers as the Ready-made farms, proved that the Canadian Pacific Railway Company at any rate, which is the biggest landowner in Canada, was ready to welcome English farmers to the land, if they could get the right sort. Readers will perhaps remember that the idea of the company was to provide farms ploughed, irrigated, sowed, and furnished with house and out-buildings, into which English colonists, having been handed the front-door key, could enter—straight from England—as well equipped almost as settlers who had lived there for years. The purchase money was to be spread over a certain term, after which the land would become the property of the farmers.

The plan saves all that intermediate period during which the ordinary homesteader has to set up his shack, sink his well, and generally unsettle himself over the tedious work of settling in. Good farmers are not necessarily born pioneers; and since the prairie in winter, when work is slack, does not show a very hospitable climate to new-comers and those unaccustomed to it, it generally happens that the English immigrant has to waste the spring and perhaps the whole working season in the unremunerative business of settling in. The Ready-made farms were intended to save all this time and trouble, and they were at once filled—in the spring of 1910—by specially picked men from the old country. The men were not all necessarily farmers, but they were, hypothetically, at any rate, men of intelligence and grit.

I wanted to see how they were getting on after six months of this new life on the prairie. For that purpose I took train from Calgary with a friend, back along the line to Strathmore, which is forty miles east, and is the station for Nightingale, as this first colony of ready-made farmers has been named. Strathmore itself is not peculiarly beautiful or peculiarly interesting, though it has a demonstration farm which is. We went over the demonstration farm with Professor Eliott, its manager, who struck me as one of the keenest and most interesting men of the West. What he does not know of the productivity of the prairie is probably not worth knowing; and his experience seems to be at the service of any farmer who has the intelligence to apply for it. He showed us his barns and splendid teams of horses and leviathan oats, and the little trees which he has planted in this country where it was thought no trees would grow, and which he believes will change the face of it in a few years. We were full of the future of the prairie when we got back to Strathmore, and put up for the night in the last bedroom of the one and only hotel. The two of us were lucky to get that last bedroom containing a double bed to ourselves, for more often even than in Calgary six people sleep in such a room and are very glad of the accommodation. So I was told. It shows how things move in Alberta; what a hustle there is upon the country.

We tossed for the bed, and I got it, and the other man took two blankets and the floor. I slept very well, especially after a mounted policeman came in and threw out two gentlemen next door who were, as the hotel boy tersely put it, 'seeing snakes together.' My friend slept less well. The room was small, not much bigger than the bed, and we could not get the window to stay open. It had not been constructed with a view to admitting fresh air. Still, after breakfast in a dark chamber, where about thirty guests of every profession and clothing (but all land-seekers) ate in silence, we started pretty fit for Nightingale in a two-horse rig.

I wish I could describe the prairie. Harvesting was over, so that in any case the leagues of golden wheat which you read about in advertisements were not visible. It was another kind of monotony altogether that we drove through—a kind I cannot begin to suggest the charm of. It was a kind of bare, rolling, sunburnt country, with a high sea-wind blowing through it, and waves of dust and an endless sky. Intensely wearisome or intensely refreshing it must be, according to a man's temperament; and going there from trees and hills must be like changing from a room with patterned paper to one with whitewashed walls. And then the soil, light and fertile, stoneless, ready for the plough—the farmer wants no variety of that.

We drove fourteen miles, as far as I can remember, to get to Nightingale, and it was all bad driving. Alberta seems to want roads badly. In the old ranching days roads mattered less. The prairie was a ready-made riding country, and nothing was produced or needed that could not, so to speak, go of itself across country. 'I never owned a plough the seventeen years I was there,' a retired rancher told me proudly. 'It was a fine country then.' But it is a fine country now, too, and going to be finer still when it has roads. At present even the roadways are changing. Once you could go everywhere. Now from day to day a new farmer takes up a new piece of land, and what was the road is enclosed by a wire fence.