Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

As a town it impresses with its vividity at once. That, indeed, is the quality of most Canadian cities. They capture one with their air of modernity and vivacity at first impact. True, one sometimes finds that the town that seemed great and bustling dwindles after a few fine streets into suburbs of dirt roadways, but one has been impressed. It may be very good window dressing, though, on the other hand, it is probably good planning which concentrates all the activity and interests of the town in the decisively main avenues.

II

Friday, October 3rd, saw the Prince visiting a string of three towns.

Medicine Hat was the first of these, an attractive, park-like place full of "pep." Medicine Hat's claim to fame beyond its name lies in the fact that, having discovered that it was sitting upon a vast subterranean reservoir of natural gas, it promptly harnessed it to its own use. Now, that elemental thing is in the control of humanity, and heats the town, and tamely drives the wheels of industry.

The outstanding ceremony was the way little boys suddenly took fright on a roof. In the middle of the town, beside the street, is a tall, thin standpipe, and this standpipe was to demonstrate a "shoot off" of the gas. Scores of small boys climbed on to the roofs of neighbouring sheds to see the fun. First there was a meek, submissive flame burning at the top of the pipe, and looking weak in the fine sunlight. Then, abruptly, the flame shot up a hundred feet, and there was a loud roaring. Not only was the roaring a terrifying thing, but the force of that rush of gas made the ground, the roof and the little boys tremble. Little boys came off that roof in record time, and with such a clatter that the effort of the standpipe almost lost its place as a star turn. This tremendous pressure is not habitual; it is, I believe, obtained by bursting a charge in one of the gas wells.

The Prince also saw the uses to which the gas was put in a big pottery mill. The kilns here were an incandescent mass of fire, the work of the easily controlled gas that does the work with a tithe of the labour and at a mere fraction of the cost necessitated by ordinary baking kilns.

Maple Creek and Swift Current were stepping-off places, with all their populations packed in the square about the station to give the Prince a hearty greeting. At Maple Creek the pretty daughters of the township were very much in evidence, and held His Royal Highness up with autograph albums.

Moose Jaw, one of the few towns where a quaint name is traceable, for it is the creek where the white man mended the cart with a moose jaw-bone, which the Prince reached on the morning of October 4th, is a bigger town and proud of its position as a grain, food and machinery distributing centre for Southern Saskatchewan. In its station courtyard it had built up an admirable exhibit of its vegetables and fruit, its sides of bacon, its grain in ear, its porridge oats in packets, and its butter and cream in drums and churns; while chiefest of all it showed ramparts of some of the two million sacks of flour it handles annually. The whole of the exhibit was set in a moat of grain and potatoes.

The Prince went to the University Grounds, where a mighty crowd attended the welcoming ceremony, and where a wild and timeless waltz-quadrille of motors which straggled all-whither over the grounds, marked the attempts of people to locate and follow him when he drove away to the hospital and a big packing factory. At the packing plant he saw the whole process of handling meat, from the moment when cowboys in chaps drove the herd to the pens to the final jointing of the steer.

From Moose Jaw he went to Regina, which he reached that afternoon. Regina is the capital of Saskatchewan, but an accidental capital. Somewhere about 1880 it was decided to start itself in quite another place. Qu'Appelle, where there was a Hudson Bay Fort and the country was attractive, was the site chosen. And Qu'Appelle opened its mouth too wide—or, anyhow so the version of the story I was told goes. The land-owners there asked an outside number of million dollars, and the townplanners went to Pile o' Bones instead.