Romantic Canada

by Victoria Hayward

Here are women with bundles of rhubarb in their arms, loaded up to and steadied by their chins. These are assisted in the bundling by a homemade wooden contrivance for holding the refractory stalks together, while the strong fingers of the women gather and jam into a slipless knot the coarse cord which enables the bundle of pie-plant to come invitingly to the Winnipeg market. And here are cabbages fit for kings, whose heads, though they look solid and heavy enough, are evidently touched with the wand of wanderlust, since the farm-superintendent explains while we stand looking at them, lost in amazement, that these same cabbages charter whole cars to themselves and go off some fine morning east and west and even over the border to points South, he knows not where.

And there, in the cucumber fields, is Old Kitty wearing her bag apron, her old face cobwebbed with the fine lines etched by a long life spent beneath the Manitoba sun that ripens the wheat. Kitty belongs indeed to old times. She must have been among the first of the women emigrants to these parts. She speaks little English. Schools were not for her. In her youth it was not “Kitty against a Textbook”, but “Kitty against the Wilderness”, and the prize was Existence. And Kitty won; so that her aged dumbness before you, is the most eloquent oratory. And her smile is like a benediction.

While you watch Kitty with her stick carefully turning aside the leaves to discover thereunder the cool-green cucumbers, and wait for the moment when she straightens her back to rest and give you that whimsical, sweet smile that bids you stay though no word is exchanged, the man who partly owns this farm, with his sister, comes up, and as you move away with him to watch the carts loading ready for the early morning start to market, you speak of Kitty and he amazes you with the intelligence that he and his sister called her “Mother”.

“Our own mother died when we were children and perhaps we would have died too if it had not been for that old woman. Those were hard times, and life was difficult enough for grown-ups on the Prairie in those days, let alone children. But she pulled us through. And she still orders me around and tells me what to do,” he added, laughingly.

So that was old Kitty’s “bit”—her contribution to the life-line of Prairie settlement! Yet if Kitty had to come over now she might be debarred on the score of illiteracy.

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At Selkirk, before you have forgotten the towering offices and the bustle of Winnipeg not an hour behind you by trolley, there is the same little scow ferry on a wire, by which to cross the Red River, as that by which you crossed the Saint Francis at Pierreville. It would seem, too, as if this calm water and its wet reflections of grass and trees, were a re-cast of the pastoral streams meandering to the Saint Lawrence. And, having hailed the ferry, turning toward the city again, following the road of the East bank, one comes upon Gonor, a village that follows the highway for several miles. This village, which might have been lifted up root and branch from somewhere in the Carpathians and set down here in the heart of the Canadian West is made up of row on row of little foreign houses with quaint, whitewashed sides and the steep hand-split shingle roofs, set about by little farm-buildings, with overhanging Swiss log-roofs and everywhere, farmyard chickens, ducks and tiny porkers! And here and there down the long street a little church peeps out, each with its own distinctive architecture, the straight, almost Puritanical lines of the Swedish, the breath of Asia in the minaret of the Russian, the voice of poverty and hard struggle in the low unpainted little Bukowinian.

Back from this village and the River stretches mile after mile of sparse settlement and pioneer farm, some well on the road to prosperity and others still rough-cast; and here and there the neat little cottages of the Manitoba Department of Education—the little cottages that are a part of the new scheme for having the teacher reside among the people, maintaining in these home-like, modern houses an example of the kind of comfort to which the foreigner on the land can aspire. The school is a centre for drawing the parents as well as the children together. It is a very practical idea, but compared with notions only lately prevalent, there is certainly a touch of Romance in the determination of Manitoba to bring the school to the child rather than the child to the school.

Here on these roads and others in the vicinity of Winnipeg, and in fact everywhere throughout this Province, on the small farms just hacking their way out of the bush with rows of wheat—rows every year planting their feet to a longer stride—the Scarecrow is a character not to be despised. In fact, he plays the important role of a Knight of the Fields, defending the defenceless wheat from the piratical incursions of crows and small birds. The Scarecrow is a substitute for a man. And wherever one defying the battle and the breeze is spied, it unfolds the story of some man who has planted his foot on a portion of land and is tenaciously hanging on by the aid of any invention or device which he can bring to his assistance.

It must feel less lonesome for the man, toiling alone in these fields out of sight of any neighbour, and sometimes of his own little cottage, to look up and see that “the other fellow” is still on the job and means to stick it. O, there is no doubt about it that even the Scarecrow has its psychology! Why else has it stood the test of Time, come up simultaneously from the fields of all lands, crossed the ocean and surmounted every difficulty in its path across the continent, arriving here to hold its own as “Knight of these Western Plains”? Oh no, you cannot take the scarecrow from these old-timers—these old flotsam and jetsam farms and gardens, East and West, without a distinct loss in Romance to all Canada. For this old man of the fields speaks a universal language which appeals to all hearts, young and old. In fact, he seems to be the very fountainhead of youth. For whenever one happens upon him unexpectedly, instantly, swift as light, there is an outburst of laughter—“The Scarecrow! The Scarecrow!”