Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

The Royal train arrived in Calgary, Alberta, on the morning of Sunday, September 14th, after some of the members of the train had spent an hour or so shooting gophers, a small field rat, part squirrel, and at all times a great pest in grain country.

Calgary was a town that charmed at once. It stands in brilliant sunlight—and that sunlight seems to have an eternal quality—in a nest of enfolding hills. Two rivers with the humorous names of Bow and Elbow run through it; they are blue with the astonishing blueness of glacial silt.

From the hills, or from the tops of such tall buildings as the beautiful Palliser Hotel, the high and austere dividing line of the Rockies can be seen across the rolling country. Snow-cowled, and almost impalpable above the ground mist, the great range of mountains looks like the curtain wall of a stronghold of mystics.

In the streets the city itself has an air of radiance. There is an invigoration in the atmosphere that seems to give all things a peculiar quality of zest. The sidewalks have a bustling and crisp virility, the public buildings are handsome, and the streets of homes particularly gracious.

The Sunday reception of the Prince was eloquent but quiet. There were the usual big crowds, but the day was deliberately without ceremonial. Divine Service at the Pro-Cathedral, where the Prince unveiled a handsome rood-screen to the memory of those fallen in the war, was the only item in a restful day, which was spent almost entirely in the country at the County Club.

But perhaps the visit to the County Club was not altogether quiet.

The drive out to this charming place in a pit of a valley, where one of the rivers winds through the rolling hills, began in the comely residential streets.

These residential districts of Canada and America certainly impress one. The well-proportioned and pretty houses, with their deep verandahs, the trees that group about them, the sparkling grass that comes down to the edge of the curb—all give one the sense of being the work of craftsmen who are masters in design. That sense seems to me to be evident, not only in domestic architecture, but in the design of public buildings. The feeling I had was that the people on this Continent certainly know how to build. And by building, I do not mean merely erecting a house of distinction, but also choosing sites of distinction.

Nearly all the newer public buildings are of excellent design, and all are placed in excellent positions. Some of these sites are actually brilliant; the Parliament Houses at Ottawa, as seen from the river, are intensely apposite, so are those at Edmonton and Regina, while the sites of such buildings as the Banff Springs Hotel, and, in a lesser sense, the Château at Lake Louise, seem to me to have been chosen with real genius.

In saying that the people on this Continent certainly know how to build, I am speaking of both the United States and Canada. This fine sense of architecture is even more apparent in the United States (I, of course, only speak of the few towns I visited) than in Canada, for there are more buildings and it is a richer country. The sense of architecture may spring from that country, or it may be that the whole Continent has the instinct. As I am not competent to judge, I accuse the whole of the Western hemisphere of that virtue.