ceremony performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding. One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, "I wudna have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a properly-ordained meenister." And he was coming. Even now he was floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks before.
When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton phrase, "they do not teem with conversational grace." Straight from Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago. In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and in his simplicity thought himself "the first that ever burst into that silent sea." When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled sound, he was in doubt how to place it.
"Is it the clang of wild-geese?
Is it the Indian's yell,
That lends to the voice of the North-wind
The tones of a far-off bell?"
The Indian boatmen said nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's parrot.
"The voyageur smiles as he listens
To the sound that grows apace;
Well he knows the vesper ringing
Of the bells of St. Boniface."
Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness
"The bells of the Roman Mission,
That call from their turrets twain
To the boatmen on the river,
To the hunter on the plain."
That friend was a fellow-townsman of the "Quaker Poet." The story was told to Whittier and inspired the lines of The Red River Voyageur.
CHAPTER II
WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
"To the far-flung fenceless prairie
Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,
To our neighbor's barn in the offing
And the line of the new-cut rail;
To the plough in her league-long furrow."
—Rudyard Kipling.
Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.
From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and two railway lines are open to us—the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the latter.
Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are pouring. "The sleeping nation beyond," is what General Sherman in a moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We are on the heels of the greatest economic trek this world has ever seen. The historian of to-morrow will rank it with the world migrations.
The flourishing centres of Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police, Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat elevator, red against the setting sun.
The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the crowded cities of the Old World with their pale-cheeked children and fetid alleyways. Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.
Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy, buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R. irrigation works, the largest on this continent. The area included in the irrigation block is twice as big as the Island of Porto Rico and one-eighth the size of England and Wales; and the ultimate expenditure on the undertaking will reach the five million mark.
Calgary is the centre of a country literally flowing with milk and honey and fat things. The oil-fields of Pincher Creek, with their rich promise of becoming a second Pennsylvania, are contiguous to the city. The winter wheat grown in Southern Alberta was awarded first prize and gold medal at the World's Fair in Oregon in 1905. The hackney carriage horses which took first prize at the last Montreal and New York horse-fairs were foaled and raised near Calgary. If we were to continue going due west from this point, all the scenic glories of the Rocky Mountains would be ours—seventy Switzerlands in one. But that journey must stand over for another day, with the journey to Prince Rupert, the ocean terminus of the Grand Trunk Pacific.
Turning sharply to the north, we travel two hundred miles, and draw into where Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, sits smiling on the banks of her silver Saskatchewan. As he sees us digging out our tents and dunnage, the porter asks, "Then yer not comin' back?" "No." "You are goin' to the North Pole, then, the place you wuz hollerin' fer!"
With the exception of Victoria, Edmonton has the most charming location of all cities of Western Canada. High Hope stalks her streets. There is a spirit of initiative and assuredness in this virile town, a culture and thoughtfulness in her people, expectancy in the very air. It is the city of contrasts; the ox-cart dodges the automobile; in the track of French heel treads the moccasin; the silk hat salutes the Stetson.
Edmonton is the end of steel. Three lines converge here: the Canadian Northern, the Canadian Pacific, and the Grand Trunk Pacific. The Canadian Northern arrived first, coming in four years ago. Now that Edmonton has arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis, anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into Edmonton, as little was known of the valley of the Saskatchewan as is known now of the valley of the Peace. Without exception, Canadian men of letters go to other countries for recognition, but not so all our men of deeds. Mackenzie
