When Romance takes your hand in Winnipeg she leads you first to, and then out on her favorite trails, via the Fort Garry Gate. And there she conjures up vast companies, organizations and individuals, enough to fill a library and to cover every canvas in the largest gallery. Book on book has been written on these old forts and their occupiers, and still there remains material galore—a store which will never suffer exhaustion. But the fact to be dwelt on in stepping here with Romance, is that they were touchstones drawing together men from enormous distances, obliterating distances and difficulties, creating Cartographers of Canada, soldiers who subdued the part to the whole; that in the gatherings around their hearth-fires, Hudson Bay, the Northwest, the region of the Mackenzie, the Saskatchewan, the names of the Fort-posts of the then almost unknown new North, tripped from men’s tongues as if they were out there just a little way beyond the Gate. It was the love of the Romantic, the love of adventure, and the love of action, in the hearts of the listener and the stay-at-home to which the story-teller, arriving from who-knows-where in the wilderness, appealed. It was the human interest that centred around Winnipeg and radiated thence, that, trickling back to the Old Country, determined new spirits to leave behind the old lands and step out boldly into the new country, though it were becurtained of hardship, cold, hunger and promise. One cannot very well hang back when Romance takes one’s hand. So you think, when some bright summer morning you motor down to Lower Fort Garry with your clubs, “Here is another old Fort given up to Golf.” And at once you recall the morning you tramped the Fort Mississauga links, fanned by the breezes of Lake Ontario. Strange, the eternal kinship of the Romantic in Canada!
It is a far cry from an Old Fort to truck farms. Yet Winnipeg changes from one to the other with the ease of a dancer of the minuet coping with the jazz of the moment. The big thousand acre wheat land represents the loaf, but the vitamine of the vegetable is as necessary as bread to the modern table, keen on the chemistry of foods. The truck farms encompassing Winnipeg and doubly upheld by her home-tables and her pickle factories, stage an army of picturesque foreign-folk—Galicians, Russians, Ruthenians, Mennonites, Dutch—who have the art of truck-farming at their finger tips. This is no mere figure of speech but a simple fact. And this knowledge they have employed to make Winnipeg one of the richest cities in the Dominion in this matter of fresh vegetables.
But the human interest centres in the picture made by these cauliflower, cucumber and rhubarb stretches. Especially since the laborers in these field-gardens are mostly women, one of the farms, if no more, being owned by a woman and personally operated by
AT THE WINDOW.
“... AND THERE IN THE CUCUMBER FIELD,
IS OLD KITTY.”
herself, with the aid of skillful woman employees. These women in the beans make picturesque figures with heads in white kerchiefs, full skirts tucked in gracefully at the waist and the big bushel basket in hand. Chatting with a motherly soul, broad and short with blue eyes it is revealed that she is a Mennonite, straight from Holland. Talking with a tall, thin young woman she tells that she came from the borderland of Poland and Russia, and that she speaks seven languages, but that she has always worked on the farm. And she touches the beans with a sort of stroking tenderness, as if she loved all things that grew.
In the onion field seven or more women working together make the weeds fly. They, too, cling to the kerchief of the Old World rather than to the hat of the New, as a protection against sun and the weather in the fields.