We boiled our pot by the side of the road; we sought milk and bread at farmhouses; we slept at night in the wheat with shocks piled on three sides of us to keep out the wind, and a broken shock underneath us to keep us soft—and the night sky above us was of swans’ plumage, and all the golden stalks and stubble about us and above us were exaggerated among the stars.
Night was very different on the plains from night in the mountains. No sound of waters, no castellated peaks rising in the moonlight, no sense of vast unevenness and disjected rocks; but instead, a feeling of being in a great encampment where the swarming shocks of wheat were tents, the tents of such a host that the numbers took away one’s breath. The poet rejoiced. He loved it. The odour of the yellow stalks was a new breath of life to him—for he was a prairie boy.
The dawn-twilight was long and quiet, and the mornings were serene. No workers were in sight. The disparity in numbers between men and wheat was remarkable to my eyes. In Russia, the whole plain would have been alive with the gay cottons of peasant lads and lasses. But here, harvesting machinery displaces whole populations of men and women.
Indians began to be numerous on the road as we approached the Blood Reservation, Indian farm-wagons with women and children sprawling on the hay at the bottom, and then Indians on horseback, all one piece with their horses. We left the golden grain behind and crossed the Reserve. Vachel explained what a squaw-man is—a white who marries an Indian girl in order to get hold of her portion of land, the Indians of to-day being almost all of them endowed with land by the Government. We found again the Kootenai, now brawling through the plains, and bathed again, and reverted in spirit to those mountains. Then we tramped from tent to tent across the green wilderness where the Indians lived. Indian boys in many-coloured garments pranced on their horses, chased lines of cattle and horses, and kept the lines straight by galloping incessantly between them from left to right to one end of the line, and then right to left to the other end.
We met Indians in voluminous seedy clothes, walking with a stoop; men with gloomy ruminating faces who tried to avoid contact with a white man. We talked to them; they raised their red romantic faces and glared at us like owls startled by light. They could not speak English, so they answered nothing, but just turned out of our way and slouched on. Or the livelier ones made signs to us. The stout squaws stared at us. The slender girls on their horses were almost indistinguishable from boys.
What a beaten-down and untidy place a Reservation is, strewn with jetsam from the wigwam, hoofed till not a flower remains! The Indians spend more time on horseback than on foot—they can’t farm, or won’t farm, and possess only the roughest of comforts. We came to a Government Practice Farm where Indians were being taught, and saw squaws working there—but very little sign of decent cultivation on the reservations. The Indian asks enough on which to live. He wants no more, will work for no more. He makes plentiful use of canned foods, and lives from hand to mouth. Hence you never hear of Indian cooks. It is curious to contrast the genius of the negro for cooking and the absence of a taste for cooking in the Indians.
After the Indians we came to the Mormons. They were as much surprised as the Dukhobors. How should Mormons be here? Perhaps we are the first to make the discovery that the Mormons have invaded Canada. These are the first Mormons to invite the shelter of the Empire. As usual, they have made their settlement in a very obscure part, far from the centre of authority. And if trouble should arise they have only to trek through the Rockies, and then Uncle Sam and Senator Smoot will protect them.
We were regaled at farmhouses by sweet Mormon brides, who gave us bannocks, who gave us of their simmering greengages out of the great cauldron on the stove. Elders on horseback very politely, and with many details, showed us the way to Cardston and the Mormon Temple. We were happily and sympathetically disposed towards the Mormons, and Vachel, who has taught the Salt-Lake-City girls to dance whilst he chanted to them “The Queen of Sheba,” has a soft spot in his heart for the sect. It was really started by a renegade preacher from his own sect of Disciples, Sidney Rigdon, who revised the unsaleable manuscript of a novel called The Book of Mormon. He conspired with Joseph Smith, who discovered the book written in aboriginal American hieroglyphics on gold plates and translated it by the aid of certain miraculous spectacles into King’s English, or I should say President’s English, who was murdered; who therefore gave way to Brigham Young, to whom were revealed many mysteries.