out from the Public Library the record of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago, deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their minutes) that "Our Northern tier of States is too far north to successfully grow wheat." For years Winnipeg was considered the northern limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of limitation was pushed farther back until it is Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared "Farthest North." To-day we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due north of Edmonton!
In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. "But," the old chap says, "the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin' red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart, poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife." This incident was not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.
What Cook & Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when the Second Charles ruled in England—an age when men said not "How cheap?" but "How good?", not "How easy?" but "How well?" The Hudson's Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot. Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats, guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.
For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the benefit of employés, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here they are as we copied them down:
Let all things be done decently and in order.
1 Cor. xiv, 40.
Be punctual, be regular, be clean.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
Be obliging and kind one to another.
Let no angry word be heard among you
Be not fond of change. (Sic.)
Be clothed with humility, not finery.
Take all things by the smooth handle.
Be civil to all, but familiar with few.
As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American—
"Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let
go your overcoat. Thieves are around,"
the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our shoulders, "Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!"
A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, "What makes Winnipeg?" Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it out. "This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the remittance man from England, sorr," with a quizzical look at the checked suit of his interlocutor, "shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!" As Mulcahey winks the other eye, we drift out into this "Buckle of the Wheat-Belt."
What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the world's history.
Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801; and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures—the lure of the land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in figures—the "power of the man."
Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages—Armenian, Arabic, Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu, Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the London Times, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out from among the flotsam in the kelp.
Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the
