CHAPTER XXIII
SASKATCHEWAN
We have left Winnipeg and are now travelling across the great Canadian prairie, which stretches westward to the Rockies for a distance of eight hundred miles. This land, much of which in summer is in vast fields of golden grain, is now bare and brown, extending on and on in rolling treeless plains as far as our eyes can reach. Most of it is cut up into sections a mile square, divided by highway spaces one hundred feet wide. However, an automobile or wagon can go almost anywhere on the prairie, and everyone makes his own road.
Sixty miles west of Winnipeg we pass Portage la Prairie, near where John Sanderson, the man who filed the first homestead on the prairies, is still living. This part of the Dominion was then inhabited by Indians, and its only roads were the buffalo trails made by the great herds that roamed the country. To-day it is dotted with the comfortable homes of prosperous farmers, and the transcontinental railways have brought it within a few days’ travel of the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards.
A hundred and fifty miles farther west we cross the boundary into Saskatchewan, the greatest wheat province of the Dominion. It has an area larger than that of any European country except Russia, and is as large as France, Belgium, and Holland combined. From the United States boundary, rolling grain lands extend northward through more than one third of its area. The remainder is mostly forest, thinning out toward Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabaska at the north, and inhabited chiefly by deer, elk, moose, and black bear. There are saw-mills at work throughout the central part of the province, and the annual lumber cut is worth in the neighbourhood of two million dollars.
Except at the southwest, Saskatchewan is well watered. The Saskatchewan River, which has many branches, drains the southern and central sections. This stream in the early days was a canoe route to the Rockies. For a long time afterward, when the only railway was the Canadian Pacific line in the southern part of the province, the river was the highway of commerce for the north. It was used largely by settlers who floated their belongings down it to the homesteads they had taken up on its banks. Now the steamboats that plied there have almost entirely disappeared. The northern part of the province is made up of lakes and rivers so numerous that some of them have not yet been named. The southwest is a strip of semi-arid land that has been brought under cultivation by irrigation and now raises large crops of alfalfa.
A small part of southwestern Saskatchewan, near the Alberta boundary, is adapted for cattle and sheep raising. The Chinook winds from the Pacific keep the winters mild and the snowfall light, so that live stock may graze in the open all the year round. Elsewhere the winters are extremely cold. The ground is frozen dry and hard, the lakes and streams are covered with ice, and the average elevation of about fifteen hundred feet above sea level makes the air dry and crisp. The people do not seem to mind the cold. I have seen children playing out-of-doors when it was twenty-five degrees below zero. The summers are hot, and the long days of sunshine are just right for wheat growing.
After travelling fourteen or fifteen hours from Winnipeg, we are in Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, about midway between Winnipeg and the Rockies. I visited it first in 1905, when the province was less than a year old. Until that time all the land between Manitoba and British Columbia, from the United States to the Arctic Ocean, belonged to the Northwest Territories. It had minor subdivisions, but the country as a whole was governed by territorial officials with headquarters at Regina. As the flood of immigrants began to spread over the West, the people of the wheat belt decided that they wanted more than a territorial government and so brought the matter before the Canadian parliament. As a result the great inland provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed. They are the only provinces in the Dominion that do not border on the sea.
Regina was then a town of ragged houses, ungainly buildings, and wide streets with board sidewalks reaching far out into the country. One of the streets was two miles long, extending across the prairie to the mounted police barracks and the government house. Regina was the headquarters of the Northwest Mounted Police until that organization was amalgamated with the dominion force as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the city is still a training camp for recruits. Saskatchewan was not then old enough to have a state house, and the government offices were in rooms on the second floors of various buildings. Most of the provincial business was done in a little brick structure above the Bank of Commerce.
The hotels of the town were then packed to overflowing, even in winter, and in the spring and summer it was not uncommon to find the halls filled with cots. I had to sleep in a room with two beds, and with a companion who snored so that he shook the door open night after night. It was of no use to complain, as the landlord could tell one to go elsewhere, knowing very well that there was no elsewhere but outdoors.
To-day Regina is ten times as large as it was twenty years ago. It is a modern city with up-to-date hotels, ten banks, handsome parliament buildings, and twelve railway lines radiating in every direction. It is the largest manufacturing centre between Winnipeg and Calgary, and an important distributing point for farm implements and supplies.
The dome of the capitol building, which was completed in 1911, can now be seen from miles away on the prairie. This is an imposing structure five hundred and forty-two feet long, situated in the midst of a beautiful park on the banks of an artificial lake made by draining Wascana Creek. The city has many other parks, and the residence streets are lined with young trees, planted within the last twenty years. Forty miles to the east is a government farm at Indian Head, where experiments are made in growing and testing trees suited to the prairies. Fifty million seedlings have been distributed in one year among the farms and towns. Out in the country the trees are planted as windbreaks and to provide the farmers with fuel. They have greatly changed the aspect of the prairies within the last two decades.
While in Regina I have had a talk with the governor-general of Saskatchewan in his big two-story mansion that twenty years ago seemed to be situated in the middle of the prairie. When I motored out to visit His Excellency, although I was wrapped in buffalo robes and wore a coon-skin coat and coon-skin cap, I was almost frozen, and when I entered the mansion it was like jumping from winter into the lap of summer. At one end of the house is a conservatory, where the flowers bloom all the time, although Jack Frost has bitten off all other vegetation with the “forty-degrees-below-zero teeth” he uses in this latitude.
From Regina, the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway runs west to Calgary. Were we to travel by that route, we should pass through Moose Jaw and Swift Current, two important commercial centres for the wheat lands. The story is told that Lord Dunsmore, a pioneer settler, once mended the wheel of his prairie cart with the jaw bone of a moose on the site of the former city, and thus gave the place its name. Moose Jaw is a live stock as well as a wheat shipping point. It has the largest stock yards west of Winnipeg. An extensive dairying industry has grown up in that region.
North of Regina are Prince Albert and Battleford, noted for their fur trade and lumber mills, and also Saskatoon, the second largest city of the province, which we shall visit on our way to Edmonton. At Saskatoon is the University of Saskatchewan, which was patterned largely after the University of Chicago. It has the right to a Rhodes scholarship; and its departments include all the arts and sciences.
As sixty per cent. of the people are dependent upon agriculture, farm courses receive much attention. A thousand-acre experimental farm is owned by the university and the engineering courses include the designing and operation of farm machinery. Even the elementary schools are interested in agriculture, a campaign having been carried on recently to eradicate gophers, which destroy the wheat. The children killed two million of these little animals in one year, thereby saving, it is estimated, a million bushels of grain. A department of ceramics has been organized at the university to experiment with the extensive clay deposits of the province, the various grades of which are suited for building brick, tile, pottery, and china. Saskatchewan’s only other mineral of any importance is lignite coal, although natural gas has been discovered at Swift Current.