Toward evening, through the long twilight, we entered a hill country, where were a great many cattle and horses, and some Mexican cowboys rounding up the stock ere nightfall.
Here, also, the wilder life of the hills came close upon us. Just as we drew beyond the prairie a large grey wolf had crossed our way. He had no fear of the iron horse; he stood and watched us with evident curiosity, lifting one forepaw as he gazed upon the flying train, not fifty feet away. When we were gone by, he turned and trotted leisurely into the bush.
New buildings with added frequency met our view. Sometimes whole new towns. All this I afterward learned is largely owing to the present American immigration.
At dusk we stopped at the bustling town of Dunmore, just where the railway crosses the broad Assiniboia River on a long bridge. Here many of our fellow sleepers left us, and several new passengers got into our car to ride through to Calgary, the largest town in the Northwest Territory—seven or eight thousand inhabitants—and where the Edmonton branch goes off two hundred miles into the north, and will soon go three or four hundred miles further through the opening wheat country which the world is now pouring into.
This morning we were following the Silver Bow River, past a long lake which it widens into in the journey of its waters toward Hudson’s Bay; then we were among fir-clad foot-hills, and then, quite suddenly, as the enveloping mist lifted, there were revealed upon either side of us the gigantic, bare, rocky, snow-capped masses of the real Rocky Mountain chain. I have never yet seen as immense and gigantic masses of bare rock, unless it be the Cordillera of Michoacan, in Mexico.
Here we are at a fine modern hotel kept by the Canadian Pacific Railroad. It is cool, even cold, almost. As cold as on Lake Superior, 54 and 56 degrees, and as in St. Paul the days we were there, but here the air is so much drier that one sits by the open window and does not feel the cold.
WHITE BEAR LAKE—ST. PAUL.