The surrounding prairie is absolutely flat, and was the bed of a prehistoric lake—the last remnant of the waters that once covered the whole interior; and as we race across it we can picture how the wavelets rose and fell before the ancient wind by noticing the olive-and-gray ripples that flow over the long grass under this noonday breeze. Here and there cattle are standing up to their bellies in the lush meadow. Far off to the southward a dark line indicates the fringe of trees along the Assiniboine. Nothing else breaks the verdant flats that sweep around us save the track and the telegraph poles, straight as a ray of light behind and ahead to their vanishing points on each horizon. After a while habitations and farms grow more numerous, for we have imperceptibly risen to a region lighter in soil and formerly held at a cheaper price than the speculative tracts near the city, whose owners have seen settlers go steadily past them.
The centre of this is the far-scattered town of Portage la Prairie, an old landing-place of the voyageurs, who here loaded their boat-cargoes into carts and carried them across to Lake Manitoba, there to be re-embarked for the long canoe voyage inland. Here are now great wheat elevators and mills, and hence a railway has pushed 250 miles northwestward, to continue nobody knows how much farther. Brandon, seventy-five miles beyond, is a wide-awake, handsomely built young city on the Assiniboine, sustained by an immense agricultural environment. In regard to this let me quote somewhat from a standard work on the prairies: “Leaving Brandon, we have fairly reached the first of the great prairie steppes, that rise one after the other at long intervals to the Rocky Mountains; and now we are on the real prairie, not the monotonous, uninteresting plain your imagination has pictured, but a great billowy ocean of grass and flowers, now swelling into low hills, again dropping into broad basins with gleaming ponds, and broken here and there by valleys and by irregular lines of trees marking the watercourses. The horizon only limits the view; and, as far as the eye can reach, the prairie is dotted with newly made farms, with great black squares where the sod has just been turned by the plow, and with herds of cattle. The short, sweet grass, studded with brilliant flowers, covers the land as with a carpet, ever changing in color as the flowers of the different seasons and places give to it their predominating hue.... Here is produced, in the greatest perfection, the most famous of all varieties of wheat—that known as the ‘hard Fyfe wheat of Manitoba’—and oats as well, and rye, barley and flax, and gigantic potatoes, and almost everything that can be grown in a temperate climate.... Three hundred miles from Winnipeg we pass through the famous Bell Farm, embracing one hundred square miles of land. This is a veritable manufactory of wheat, where the work is done with almost military organization—plowing by brigades and reaping by divisions. Think of a farm where the furrows are ordinarily four miles long, and of a country where such a thing is possible! There are neat stone cottages and ample barns for miles around, and the collection of buildings about the headquarters near the railway station makes a respectable village, there being among them a church, an hotel, a flour mill, and, of course, a grain elevator, for in this country these elevators appear wherever there is wheat to be handled or stored.”
The fertile, pleasantly habitable region of the Canadian West is a triangular region with a base 800 miles in width east and west, and a northern limit marked by the forests beyond the Saskatchewan. Between these forests and the Rocky Mountains the arable country extends almost to the borders of Alaska, and through it are scattered trading stations and small settlements among a peaceful and semi-industrious Indian population. The climate is dry, yet the rainfall (except in the southwestern part) is quite sufficient for agriculture. The winters are rigorous, but not so long as those of Quebec, and the snowfall is light. Wheat, oats, barley and vegetables grow to perfection even farther north than the Peace River valley, in latitude 56° to 57°—the parallel which in the east passes just north of Labrador. Settlement on these fine prairies (which are often bushy, and show no sage-brush and little alkali) is only a decade old, yet last year there was produced a surplus for export of twelve million bushels of wheat alone.
Not far beyond the Regina wheat plain, which is about 1,800 feet above the sea, the altitude is abruptly increased by a rise to the top of the Coteau de Missouri, where the average of elevation is 3,000 feet. Here the climate is drier, and grazing becomes the principal industry, especially toward the foothills, where enormous herds of horses, cattle and sheep are pastured. Of this great and growing business Calgary is headquarters.
Only ten years ago this was the home of millions of buffalo, whose trails and wallows mark the surface in every direction; but not a bison is now to be seen within a long distance northward. The prairies from Regina westward are dotted with lakes, generally of fresh water, are well grassed, and broken by wooded eminences. The elk and mule-deer are still common, and in the autumn immense herds of antelope, migrating southward, are still to be seen from the car windows. Around the lakes crowd countless wild fowl at all seasons, while flocks of prairie chickens whirl away on each side at our approach. In the seasons of migration geese and ducks are here in myriads.
We cross the South Saskatchewan near some extensive coal mines, and toward evening of Friday (we left Montreal on Monday night and Winnipeg on Thursday morning) we catch our first brief glimpse of the Rockies—a serrated white line notching the sunset horizon. To-morrow morning we shall awake within their glorious gates.
STONE POGAMOGGANS OF THE CANADIAN SIOUX.