Genre of wheat is no less distinct than genre of the ’longshore road. Here is the Sower, here the Reaper, here the Stacker-of-the-big-Sheaves—the Stooker as the Prairie calls him. He may be a man from the East, a Sioux, or a townsman out to lend a hand. With his brown water-jug and his bronzed face, he is almost a symbolic figure, building the golden sheaves in stacks of five for the playing breeze and warm sun to give the ripening touches to the grain that makes Canada—the bread-giver of the world.
“THE STOOKER,” AS THE PRAIRIE CALLS HIM.
CHAPTER XXV.
ROMANCE CLINGS TO THE SKIRTS OF WINNIPEG.
N extended sojourn in Winnipeg is in the nature of a revelation. One goes to Winnipeg expecting and finding it as a city—the Colossus of the Plains—modern, business-like, a pattern-builder in wide streets, with everything else in keeping on a big scale, but just a little crude and bare along certain lines, as every new city, or even house, is bound to be. That is the picture one draws aforetime. But the fact is that a few weeks in Winnipeg reveal it—and the revelation is almost sharp enough to be a shock—as a centre of the Romantic—itself a personality, involving the life of the entire West and especially the Prairie—combining the east and the west, the great north and trailing south, the old and the new, the Indian, the French and the English—the great epic of fur and afterwards that of wheat. No city of the Dominion is more closely of the same Romantic blood as Quebec, than Winnipeg, and strangely enough, one conceives this western city of Canada, from the viewpoint of a sculptor, not as “a strong man” but as a woman, eternally feminine, with trailing garments, with the immediately surrounding country out and beyond as far to the north and west as Canada goes, extending the hands of Romance, to cling fast to her skirts; as the figure of a mother held in leash and hardly able to step for the many loving hands of clinging children.
Romance is a free spirit of the air. One cannot tell where she will alight, or what she sees that makes her choose some one spot and reject others. But when you recall the many characters of history who have written their sign manual across the Winnipeg page, these mellow and tone the sharp edges of big business until you regard it not as the growth of a day, but as the attainment, the reward, for which all the fine personalities stepping up to recognition out of the colourful pageant of the Past gave their best efforts and their lives. These towering buildings, these wide streets, are the fulfillment of the dreams of men who looked forward.