Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

The wonder of that swift growth is a thing that can be brought directly home. I stood on the station with a man old but still active, and he said to me:

"Do you see that block of buildings over there? I had the piece of ground on which it was built. I sold it for a hundred dollars, it was prairie then. It's worth many thousands now. And that piece where that big factory stands, that was mine. I let that go for under three hundred, and the present owners bought in the end for twenty and more times that sum. Oh, we were all foolish then, how could we tell that Winnipeg was going to grow? It was a 'back-block' town, shacks along a dusty track. And the railway hadn't come. A three-story wooden house, that was a marvel to be sure; now we have skyscrapers."

And fast though Winnipeg has grown, or because she has grown at such a pace, one can still see the traces and feel the spirit of the old spacious days in her streets. They are long streets and so planned that they seem to have been built by men who knew that there were no limits on the immense plains, and so broad that one knows that the designers had been conscious that there was no need to pinch the sidewalks and carriage-ways with all the prairie at the back of them.

Along these sumptuous avenues there still remain many of the low-built and casual houses that men put up in the early days, and it is these standing beside the modernity of the business buildings, soaring sky-high, the massive grain elevators and the big brisk mills that give the city its curious blending of pioneer days and thrusting, twentieth-century virility.

It is a town like no other that we had visited, and where one had the feeling that up-to-date card-indexing systems were being worked by men in the woolly riding chaps of old plainsmen.

In the people of the streets one experienced the same curious sense of "difference." In splendid boulevards such as Main, and Portage, which turns from it, there are stores worthy of New York and London in size, smartness and glowing attraction. And the women crowds that make these streets busy are as crisply dressed in modern fashions as any on the Continent, but there is a definite individuality in the air of the men.

Canadian men dress with a conspicuous indifference. They wear anything from overalls and broad-banded sweaters to lounge suits that ever seem ill-fitting. In Winnipeg there is the same disregard for personal appearance plus a hat with a higher crown. As we went West the crown of the soft hat climbed higher, and the brim became both wider and more curly.

There is, too, on the sidewalks of Winnipeg the conglomeration of races that go to feed the West. The city is the great emigrant centre that serves the farmers, the fruit-growers of the Rockies, the ranchmen in the foothills, and even the industries on the Pacific Slopes. Everywhere outside agencies there are great blackboards on which demands for farm labourers at five dollars a day and other workers are chalked.

To these agencies flow strange men in blouse-shirts, wearing strange caps—generally of fur—carrying strange-looking suit-cases and speaking the strange tongues of far European or Asiatic lands. Chinese and Japanese (whom the Canadian lumps under the general term "Orientals"), negroes, a few Indians, and a hotch-potch of races walk the streets of Winnipeg, and Winnipeg deals with them, houses them, gives them advice, and distributes them over the wide lands of Canada, where they will work and working will gradually fuse into the racial whole that is the Canadian race.

In the hotels, too, one notices that a change is taking place. The "Oriental"—the Japanese in this case—takes the place of the Canadian bell-boy and porter, and he takes this place more and more as one goes West. There are, of course, always Chinese "Chop Suey and Noodles' Restaurants," as well as Chinese laundries in Canadian towns; we met them as early as St. John's, Newfoundland; but from Winnipeg to the Pacific Coast these establishments grow in numbers, until in Vancouver and Victoria there are big "Oriental" quarters—cities within the cities that harbour them.