In the early days of the Northwest, the days when the Garrys and sister forts were in their heyday, before the city was; in the days when dog teams and sleds furrowed their paths along the big trails north and south, when the patient ox-teams motored the would-be settlers from Auld Scotia and elsewhere, from Winnipeg to some land-grant along the Buffalo Trail; in the days when the farmer hauled his wheat in the creaking ox-cart back to Winnipeg to be ground into flour by the one gristmill that then served this now elevator-dotted land; in other words, in the days when red men and furs held revelry, and agriculture was yet hidden in the womb of Time, the wander-loving French-Canadian came here in the character of settler, trapper, canoeist, fur-dealer, boatman and coureur de bois out of Old Quebec, much as he is now pushing out to settle his own Provincial north.
In such suburban towns as Saint Boniface and Saint Norbert, and in their citizens, present-day Winnipeg traces her French strain back to Quebec and through Quebec to Normandy and Brittany, whence came many of the customs and touches met with here, clinging so curiously to the skirts of the West.
These little French “Bluffs” loom on the landscape not only in the vicinity of Winnipeg, but are happened upon here and there throughout all the Province, especially in the North.
At Saint Norbert one steps down out of the car to be met by a colourful wayside sign of the Jefferson Highway, “From New Orleans to Winnipeg”, with “Palm to Pine” illustrations in colour. The Romance covered by this sign, cosmopolitan as any on the continent, lies in the complete metamorphosis suffered by Winnipeg and the middle west for which it stands, in the matter of distance. Distance with a big “D” has been wiped out. You are as near to the world, in touch with it as intimately in Winnipeg as anywhere else in Canada or over the American border.
This elimination of distance, owes its being to distance-created needs. In this, Winnipeg was a pathfinder, an urge. The things which she stood for in the North led Prince Rupert and navigation to conquer Hudson Bay. Raw trails were broken and river-boats built to reach her fur-preserves and fur-market. She shod the ox and designed the big wheels of the prairie-cart to recover the waste lands of the Prairie from the heel of the Buffalo. The Prairie and the Pacific called for the railroad that primarily grouped Canada into one whole, with a united morale. It was the remoteness, once for all definitely broken by the railroad, which hatched the modern passion for “close connections”. The voice of the West is passionate in its demand for great highways like this, bringing within hail the sunny seaports of the beautiful Gulf of Mexico on the one hand, and the equally individual climate-and-trade-romanticism of the New North, practical Hudson Bay ports with navigation and ships coming and going, piloted hither by the wraiths of the Elizabethan Galleons, pioneers in sea-adventure, on
A “KNIGHT OF THE FIELD”
DEFENDING THE WHEAT.
FOOT BRIDGE TO TRAPPIST MONASTERY,
SAINT NORBERT.