That main street is tingling with modernity. Its stores, its music-halls, its "movie" theatres, and its hotels glitter with the nervous intensity of a spirit avid of the latest ideas.
Fringing the canyon of the brown North Saskatchewan River is a beautiful automobile road, winding among pretty residential plots and comely enough for any town.
Yet swing out in a motor for a few miles, and one is in a land where the roads—if any—are but the merest trails, where the silent and brooding prairie (hereabouts blessed with trees) stretches emptily for miles by the thousand.
Turn the car north, and it heads for "The Great Lone Land," that expands about the reticent stretches of the Great Slave country, or follows the Peace River and the Athabasca beyond the cold line of the Arctic Circle.
To get to these rich and isolated lands—and one thinks this out in the lounge of an hotel worthy of the Strand—the traveller must take devious and disconnected ways. Railways tap great tracts of the country, going up to Fort McMurray and the Peace River, and these connect up with river and lake steamers that ply at intervals. But travel here is yet mainly in the speculative stage, and long waits and guides and canoes and a camping outfit are necessary.
In winter, if the traveller is adventurous and tough, he can progress more swiftly. He can go up by automobile and run along the courses of the rivers on the thick ice, and, on the ice, cross the big lakes.
Though the land is within the Arctic Circle, it is rich. I talked with a traveller who had just returned from this area, and he spoke of the superb tall crops of grain he had seen on his journey. It will be magnificent land when it is opened up, and can accommodate the population of a kingdom. The growing season, of course, is shorter, but this is somewhat balanced by the longer northern days and the intense sunlight that is proper to them. The drawbacks are the very long winters, loneliness and the difficulties of transport.
Edmonton, sitting across the gorge of the Saskatchewan, feeds these districts and reflects them. Because of this it is a city of anachronisms. High up on the cliff, its site chosen with the usual appositness of Canada, is the Capitol building, a bright and soaring structure done in the latest manner. Right under that decisively modern pile is a group of rough wooden houses. They are the original stores of the Hudson Bay Company, standing exactly as they did when they formed an outpost point of civilization in the Northwest.
It is obviously a town in a young land, pushing ahead, as the Prince indicated in his speech to the Provincial Government, with all the intensity and zest of youth, having all the sense of freedom and possibility that the rich and great farming, furbearing and timber-growing tracts give it.