the only one with Abenaki labour—and Abenaki atmosphere throughout. Its counterpart has been here a long time. Its beginnings reach back very far into Canadian history.
Visiting the dyer, madame, swishing her ribbons into her pots of boiling dyes and out again even as you watch, speaks with regret, and if she is an old-timer, with genuine sorrow, at the passing of the old homemade dye of which her Indian forbears knew so well the secret. “Those dyes”, she says in her soft English voice full of the plaintive tones of the red man, and rich with memories of the past, “those dyes were beautiful! and, oh, we could get such lovely colours with them! Oh, but now we couldn’t make the dyes. It would take too much, and so we use the store dyes. And of course we are very glad to get them. But the old colours were lovely.”
And in dreams, you can see, she still beholds the pinks and blues of other days. And herein lies what for her is the tragedy of the larger trade.
However, the younger woman snapping the ribbons into splint-lengths with her sharp scissors has no regrets. She holds up for inspection the spokes of the bottom-wheel. “Six colours, madame,” says she—“yellow, purple, vivid green, light blue, red and then pink.”
But the wheel turning in her hand like the wheel of fortune, brings us around to the grass again without which there can be no basket. The grass is a story in many chapters spreading out to the countryside and, crossing the river, trailing its way through St. Francois du Lac, the large town facing Pierreville, out to the French farms bordering the high-road to popular Abenaki Springs, where summer visitors go “to drink the waters” and idle away the summer days.
The grass is grown in a bed. When grown it stands up in long wisps two to three feet high. Pulled while still green, girls of the farm-family clean it of decaying leaves but do not bother to clip any clinging roots because these hold the plant together better for the braiding. Apparently it is wilted or dried only a few days when the “tresseuse” takes it in hand. All down both sides of the river thousands of miles of this grass-braid is turned out. Winter and summer the braiding goes on. We saw them braiding away in August—the same hands are braiding to-night. Abenaki fingers learned the A.B.C. of it in 1685 when they erected their wigwams on the east bank of the river and here in the year 1922 they are still—braiding.
The “braid”, of later years, has grown to be a business in itself. French farm-families of the neighborhood often grow the grass and braid it. Then they make it up in hanks or echeveaux, and retail it to the basket-weavers in Pierreville and Odanak. An Abenaki who can make more baskets than she can grow grass for, is very glad to invest a little capital in the hanks, as she also invests in the rolls of wooden ribbon from the factory.
The Abenakis, despite all the work being done in the homes, are a very neat people. They are nearly all well-to-do. Even if they do put all their dependence in one—basket! So far it has proved a very safe investment yielding a high rate of interest. They mostly all own splendid little homes, some quite fine houses in spacious grounds.
“Our village” is as sweet a village as old Quebec affords anywhere! Its main street is shaded by tall and stately old trees. In the centre of the village and situated in a grove on the high bank overlooking the river is their fine church, a simple yet dignified and peaceful little place of worship.
Father de Gonzaque, the curé, is himself of Abenaki descent and a most genial man. Calling on him one Sunday morning after Mass, the Grand Chief happened to drop in and between them they kept the Abenaki ball rolling to our enlightenment for upwards of an hour.
Father de Gonzaque is not only of Abenaki descent but he has been priest here twenty-five years. And this is the Grand Chief Nicholas Panadi’s third time of office, so we were indeed fortunate that Sunday morning.
Among other things we learned that the present church is the fourth on this site. The first was a wooden one built in 1700, and was burned in 1759 by British troops, the Abenakis having espoused the cause of France—and lost in the game for half a continent. But the Abenakis were good churchmen. They built a second church the following year, in 1760, this held the riverbank and the tribe until 1818, when it was accidentally burned. Then for ten years they had no church, and Mass was said in the council room. In 1828 the third was built and this in 1900 was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, and since that time the present edifice has been erected, so that in a double sense this is Father de Gonzaque’s church—for he built it.
An interesting tablet occupies a conspicuous place in the wall on the left-hand side facing the altar, and reads thus:
HONOUR,
To the Honourable Mathieu Stanley Quay, Senator of
Pennsylvania, U.S.A., of Abenaki descent.
“He made glad with his works
And his memory is blessed forever.”
A.D. 1902.
In the grounds of the church, in addition to the parish priest’s house, the sisters have a large school for the Abenaki children, and there is also a neat graveyard, and the Grand Chief’s house borders upon a little lane bounding the church property. In front of the church on a bank overhanging the river is a large summer house apparently for the convenience and pleasure of Abenakis awaiting the church service. It is remarkable for its rusticity, all the work being the handiwork of Indians. And this in addition to commanding a superb view up and down the river made it an interesting rendezvous for us of an August afternoon. Not all the Abenakis are Catholic, however, as is testified by the little brick church—also beautifully situated in a grove of trees on the riverside—of the Church of England. The church is of historic interest in that Queen Victoria herself gave the sum of fifty pounds towards the building of it. It dates back to 1866.
There is also a Church of England school, and there they teach both Abenaki and English. So that all in all the Abenaki children are well taught, and all claim that the Abenakis are very intelligent and quick to learn.
When the United States Government sent an observer to Canada some years ago from the Indian Department in Washington to see what could be learned from Canada as to the government of the Indians, the Abenaki at Pierreville was one of the tribes and villages visited. The visitor went back enthusiastic. He wrote pages about them in his report which began: “In the beautiful little village of Pierreville”.
And this report was certainly borne out by all that we saw of the Indians there. Like the Hurons they have intermarried very much with the French, so that there are very few full-blooded Indians now living. One of the purest is now an old man of eighty. He lives a little way out of town and spends the evening of his life in comfort though not in idleness. For he is the toy-canoe maker of the tribe. He specializes in little birch-bark canoes about a foot long.
Whenever I see, no matter where, one of these little craft exhibited for sale, it carries me swiftly back to the morning we came on old Joseph Paul sitting at his bench in the shade of a big tree in his dooryard. The old man is a little deaf but his pins and tools were all laid out so neatly! Everything—twine and strips—just where he could put his fingers on it with the least loss of time. It was inspiring just to watch him building the little boat in hand. I had always had an idea somehow that it was squaws who built the canoes till I saw this old man at work. Is it ten dozen canoes a week he makes?
As I hold one of these little canoes in my hand what does it not symbolize?
It symbolizes for one thing the voyagings of this people. Even now, although they have homes here, the Abenakis are still voyageurs. In the summer the men go off as guides to the sportsmen from the “Clubs”. The reedy places of the wild duck’s nest, the best pools for trout, the haunts of deer and bear and other wild creatures are familiar chapters in their nature book. Those who are not guides turn a penny by tripping it every summer to fashionable resorts of the Adirondacks with their baskets and canoes. But chiefly baskets! The sweet-grass baskets are made in many shapes. One company especially, one of the largest wholesale dealers in Indian wares in Canada or the United States, shows a sample book with many patterns and each pattern done in several different sizes. Some are all green and others in colour. The basket-makers have the trade at their finger tips. Never at a loss, they can make anything which can be made with grass. The very old women are expert napkin-ring makers, which is their specialty.
One old woman sits in her garden on the hill-climbing road from the traverse, as the French call the ferry, and weaves her rings that are to grace the dinner-tables of the east and west. She invites us, in her frank manner, to sit down, seeing perhaps in the summer visitor a possible customer. But no, she does not sell retail. “They are all engaged, madame,” she remarks modestly. Then she adds, “but maybe, I think, perhaps you like to look?”
So we take the chair madame offers, and a neighbor comes out and leans over the garden gate and we chat, and on the calm river le traversier ferries the flat-boat to and fro and his passengers in their strange heterogeneous ensemble present a passing show that carries one out on imaginary roads that lead back to the age when romance was in flower here and Louis Crevier was le Grand Seigneur over all this fair demesne.
That one may have some idea of the passengers who traverse the St. Francois at Pierreville the following comprehensive avis or public notice at the landing-place will tell more in its quaint way than a dozen paragraphs:
1 personne 5 cts.
1 Voiture semple 15 cts.
1 voiture double 20 cts.
1 Personne a cheval 15 cts.
1 Cheval ou 1 bête a cornes 15 cts.
Plusieurs chevaux chacun 5 cts.
Plusieurs bêtes a cornes chacun 5 cts.
1 Mouton 1 cochon 1 veau chacun 15 cts.
Plusieurs de ces bêtes chacune 5 cts.
Tout voyage de Bac 15 cts.
1 Automobile 25 cts.
In addition to the basket-industry, the men at the factory by our door, make rustic porch-furniture out of their ribbons of white ash. They paint the frames of the chairs that bright art-red which gives our porches such an air of welcome on a warm summer day.
Seldom a train goes out to Montreal—and there is just one a day—but carries crate upon crate of baskets and shipment upon shipment of this handmade furniture. When you come to think of it $250,000 worth of sweet grass baskets spells a great many baskets. It spells application and swift industrious fingers. It spells good homes and comfort for the three hundred Abenakis living in “the beautiful little village of Pierreville”, and it spells a dainty sweet-grass basket for many homes in Canada and the United States.
CHAPTER XXI.
“TO MARKET, TO MARKET.”
HERE is a day in the year 1676 which must ever stand out from the murk of the early centuries as a Red Letter Day in Canadian history.
That is the day whose dawn broke on the first Canadian Public Market in full swing.
The scene is laid in La Place de Notre Dames des Victoires in the shadow of Chateau Saint Louis, in old Quebec.
It takes but little imagination to reconstruct the colourful scene upon which the first beams of the rising sun, touching with light the gray and frowning walls of the towering Chateau, lifted the curtain of night.
Here were the market-boats from far and near drawn up on the beach. Here were the rude stalls and booths laden with the vegetable products of the little clearings beyond the city walls and at Ile d’Orleans; here were Quebec’s first Market-women; and hither flowed throughout the morning a most colourful pageant of patrons.
Viewed from to-day this market-scene is not important on its own account. Its little turn-over is blotted out. Its significance lies rather in the fact that here were planted the beginnings of the market-carts, the stalls and booths, the long line of Market-women, the wealth of products, “and a’ that” from the finger-like farms of to-day.
Its significance affords the markets of the hour an unbroken retrospect of nearly two hundred and fifty years.
And of course that first market of Notre Dame des Victoires was herself but a daughter of the old markets everywhere in vogue in France transplanted to Quebec. So that if “blood counts” the “’scutcheon” of the markets now scattered throughout Canada, many of them in the great out-of-doors literally under the banner of the Maple Leaf, is certainly that of an “Honourable Company”.
To Quebec then, belongs the title of “Mother of the Canadian Market”. It was on her foot that the Province children of the Dominion learned to ride:
Home again, home again, jiggety jig.”
And that they learned it well there is Dominion-wide proof: for not a city of worth-while size but has its public market. Everybody knows the Halifax market. Prince Edward Islanders claim that the Charlottetown market is ne plus ultra! Quebec now has as many as four open-air markets. In Montreal “Bonsecour” is a word familiar in every household. Its vegetables and flowers line-up under the very shadow of the Nelson Column, the Cathedral de Notre Dame and the Chateau de Ramesay.
Kingston, Toronto, Brantford and every other considerable city of Ontario draw out the line of the market.
Winnipeg magnetizes the products of the truck-farm under the shadow of her city hall. And here the Market-train, that is Vision, calls “All aboard for Points West” and so, if you wish, in time you come in to Saskatoon, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria. And when you get to Vancouver the stalls of colour are grouped about the Post Office just as they used to be in Halifax.
Each city has its own ideas of a market. And so, although the line of the market is long, each has its own urban individuality.
The four in Quebec, although they are all of Quebec and all French, would never be mistaken for each other. The same individuality is evident in each stall, in each market.
Madame of Saint Roch’s sells from her cart, seated in the middle, with her vegetable family all grouped around her.
She is packed in, as it were. She never alights, like her sister of the Montcalm, using the bottom of her cart as a counter, or walks about a little as do the vendors of Finlay, or spreads her stock out on boxes as do the saleswomen of Champlain. So it is at Saint Roch’s we come upon the little Flower-girl seated among her posies and sweet as the flowers she sells.
But she is not the only vendor of les belle fleurs even in Saint Roch’s; here is the old woman from Charlebourg seated behind a jar of peonies and Saint Joseph lilies, and here another beaming old face outlined by cauliflowers, bunched like so many nosegays up and down the roof-supports of her old cart.
Oh, what an air to these old French-markets of Canada! “Bon jour, madame, bon jour” the same old voice hails patrons year after year. And the attendant pageant of citizens who come to buy! What a humanly interesting tide flows back and forth, now here now there, now this way, now that, through the avenues of colour afforded by the fruits, vegetables and flowers.
Here is a Sister, face almost lost under the picturesque black bonnet, in her hands the long basket, from her side depending the Crucifix silently reminding the pious habitant in whose Name she begs.
In the early morning come the housewives who believe in the old adage of “the early bird”. These know what they want. They pounce and go.
By and by the stragglers begin to trip in, mothers who have had to see their children safely off to school, and blow off steam a little in the colourful atmosphere, before beginning to buy.
But the respite enjoyed by the old women in the carts is not for long. Their gossip and chat and calling back and forth from cart to cart, is cut short by a rising-tide of housewives arriving to buy in a heat for the noon dinner. Ten o’clock sees the tide of trade in flood, with women behind stepping on the heels of women ahead and tumultuous streams of purple beets, the chrome of carrots, the spring-green of lettuce, the pearl of onions, the fruity bloom of peach or plum, cascading into waiting basket or bag.
Now, mingling with the throng may be seen the rather more sportily dressed figures of the summer visitors, temporarily domiciled at the Frontenac and out to “do” the city—Quebec, the Capital-city of Canadian romance.
The Quebec market has filled the pages of two centuries and a half, and in all that time there, over there, a little to one side away from the crowd, a little on the outskirts of Food, as it were, has sat and still sits “the vendor of baskets” (without which no woman can come to market), and a curious appendage of “simples”—dried herbs, little squares of Spruce-gum, tiny bunches of wizened roots.
* * * *
It is but a step from the Markets of Quebec to the markets of Ontario in a matter of miles, but in atmosphere you step from Old France to Old England.
Here in Kingston or Brantford is the old Market Hall that might be in Nottingham or Newark or any other English market-town. And here the market-men are of the English type—Old-Country fellows or United Empire Loyalists. Here is the canvas-covered farm-wagon looking like the spiritual ancestress of the prairie schooner. There is a change from women to men as salesmen. There is not the customary tumultuous chatter of the French. But there is more sunlight, more massed dashes of cadmium, larger splashes of greens, reds, and purples thrown out by the Ontario peaches, cucumbers and watermelons, netted baskets of tomatoes, grapes of the Peninsula Vineyards.
CHAPTER XXII.
ONTARIO.
NTARIO is so modern, and, to use a popular term, “up-to-date”, that some years ago we were told by Torontonian after Torontonian that if we were on the quest of the romantic we would not find it in Ontario.
We did not know what to make of it at the time, having in mind a number of quaint old field-stone houses which we had seen along the road from the car window in coming through from Montreal.
About these houses there was that certain unmistakable “something” which for lack of a better word is called “atmosphere”. “Atmosphere and story” just seemed to radiate from all their old windows.
I see yet, the picture made by their old, yellow-brown stone sides and their steep roofs; all, in a clump of Lombardy poplars and smooth, rolling fields, with here an apple orchard, and here a sprinkling of sheep grazing on the rounded knolls, and cows standing with feet in the brook.
Then I tried to make my Toronto friends see those old stone-houses. “U-u-mph,” they said, “but they’re damp.”
Not long after that we came in contact with that other type of early-Ontario house. The one with the low sides made of wood thinly stuccoed with white plaster on the outside—the “Roughcast” houses of Ontario. They of course carry in their now “peeling” plaster an appeal to remember the Old Pioneers and days—the days when the hardships of the wilderness rose up as a wall to deter all but the hardiest spirits from blazing a trail here; here, where the true West had its portal.
Usually a clump of lilac bushes stands by these old doors, the boughs gnarled and thick with age and the increasing struggle for existence—the old lilac that strikes the human interest note and tells plainer than words, of the domesticity that once was the pride of the little family domiciled here so far away from “Home,” in the Old Country. And over against these two old types of Provincial houses are set the really palatial dwellings that represent the newer Ontario. And yet to prove that no hard line separates Old and New, there is a fine, old home down Saint Catharine’s way that claims to be one of the earliest houses in the Province which, under the skilful renovation of a modern architect, still holds itself proudly with “the best”.
If one had time to go into all the old houses of the Province, the real old-timers—I am sure one would still find, as in Quebec, many fruits of the loom. The old, woven carpet and bedspread, the old loom, and here and there, perhaps, a grandmother to weave and many sitting and sewing at squares for “pieced-pattern” bed-quilts.
In Empire Loyalist homes, of the country, there is, of course, still to be found many a handsome and valuable piece of old furniture. Some of the oldest and daintiest chairs we have ever come across, and one of the dearest collections of little, old books, we once encountered in British Columbia, out of Ontario.
Ontario is a sweeping Province of magnificent lakes and waterways. Her coastline is almost as extensive as that of any Province. If it were not that certain Atlantic Provinces have almost a monopoly of the word, she might even be called “Maritime”.
Toronto is even now entering upon an era of a new waterfront with docking accommodations of the best. For the Lake trade? Yes. And presently for the Ocean’s.
So, in Ontario the trail of Romance, we soon discovered, led almost as surely “By the ’longshore road” as down Nova Scotia way.
Ontario being a land of lakes, is, in consequence, a land of campers and camp-fires; a land of the canoe; a land of fishing and hunting. And in the North a land of logging, with the picturesque figures of the lumbermen on snow-shoes.
Out there in the Georgian Bay is the romance of thirty thousand islands. There are the picturesque figures of the Ojibways in canoes, still taking the same old fishing and “trade” routes as in the days before the coming of Champlain. Still there is Manitoulin.
The craft in greatest favour everywhere on lake, river and bay of Ontario, is the canoe. I do not think anyone can know what an extensive cult is the “canoe” till they see it in Ontario. In season it creeps on the bosom of the lake like a leaf dropped silently from the tree. And Romance rides in more or less every canoe, so that, if anything, the Romantic may be said to be more difficult to keep up with in Ontario than any of the Provinces. The trail of the Romantic invariably leads to a tent somewhere by a stream. And
a camper may be just as romantic a figure as one who mows the hay, or lists to the Angelus out of the Percé fishboat. What can be more Romantic than a group around a campfire? Here seems to be situated the very source and fountain-head of “pipe-dreams”, stories of the forest, legends of the Indians—all interwoven and crossed with traditions of pioneer explorers.
And these old tales are always having new chapters added, every time an angler catches a fish; everytime a hunter takes a gun under arm.
Go out anywhere with an Ojibway of the Georgian Bay region, and you will happen upon a black pot a-sling over a log upheld by two other logs, and a roaring fire under the pot. Across the log may be several bits of branches with a forked branch cut to give “beard” to the hook from which swing a number of smoky tea-kettles and lard-pails, all hard a-boil with tea, potatoes, or fish, or maybe just pork, suspended in the flame and the smoke, or above the live coals, toward which a frying-pan is tilted to bake the dough it holds into a cake of bread.
Do not these pots and kettles call to the cauldrons of Quebec, the Madeleines and far Newfoundland, as to sisters? Ethnology of people! Sometimes, it would seem, there is an ethnology of inanimate things.
Here in Ontario, among the Indians, one finds skilful workers of sweetgrass, though apparently there is nowhere such a concentration into a trade as in Pierreville.
But the Ontario squaw shows much delicacy in the use of porcupine quills. These she dyes, or uses au naturel, in combination often with birch-bark, to make a basket that is of Ontario, and one which would hold its own everytime with the Quebec basket “pour Madame’s boudoir.” The Ojibway woman shows an innate taste in design. The “patterns”, as well as the colours employed in her basket, are frequently exquisite in their harmony.
Somewhere on the beach or under trees, clinging to life, yet half decadent, as a thing whose usefulness has been “outclassed”, one happens here and there on the tribal or community-canoes, long, sinuous lines of boathood half bizarre by reason of design, simplicity of material and traditions of the builders; but more than half “bizarre” by reason of things that cannot be classified yet nevertheless are positive in suggestion. Was it in such canoes the Iroquois pursued the Hurons fleeing toward the wilderness and out of it, to the shelter of the French at Quebec? Was it in such canoes that the old explorers, Champlain, Frontenac, the old Jesuit Missionaries, Breboeuf, Carron, pushed along these lakes and water-highways? Was it in such, the coureurs du bois, the trapper, the pioneer, the soldier, all those characters of old—romantic characters of Old France, Old England, Old Scotia—was it in such they took the paddle in hand, metamorphosing it at a stroke into a “quill” wherewith to write “France” and “England” across the page of a continent?
Here, too, among the Ojibways is still in use the hollowed stone with its companion, nicely smooth and rounded for grinding corn. Old squaws of the Ojibways can, and do still, “turn the trick” easily enough. Then there is another form of mortar, with a wooden pestle four or five feet in length, bulky at each end and slender in the middle, so that two hands may grasp it quite easily.
Thus, by these two instruments, comes the grain to the dough of the frying-pan loaf.
CHAPTER XXIII.
ONTARIO CONTINUED.
ISTORY furnishes Ontario with a dramatic inheritance hardly less colourful than that of Quebec. In the early part of the seventeenth century this was the real battleground between conquering Europeans and the Redmen for the possession of the vast inland stretches of country about the Great Lakes. It was the sanctuary of thousands of Empire Loyalists after the war of American Independence. And it was again a battleground in the war of 1812.
Many great names are written in, many striking figures illumine the Ontario log. And as one wanders about in present day Ontario as in Quebec, memories of this fine past are constantly creeping out at unexpected moments to convince one that the past is ever present.
Great men and great events do not die. To these early days belong many an old fort and earthwork whose frowning severity is now time-softened and mellowed by the touchstone of romance.
Such a flambeau of story is old Fort Mississauga, at Niagara-on-the-Lake. In the clearing about this old tower, where men under arms drilled a hundred years ago, sporting figures of golfers now roam, and caddies “present” sticks for this “drive” or that. From the ramparts—recalling the ramparts at Annapolis Royal—one looks down to watch the waves playing “Hide-and-Go-Seek” among upstanding timbers that resemble the weathered and bleached ribs of some old wreck. These were the old Fort’s seaward-straining palisades.
Across the river is that historic old French fort, Niagara, now belonging to the United States, and up the river at Fort George, grow the thorn trees, which a pretty legend says came from slips sent from France to French officers stationed at Fort Niagara. And while thinking of the old fort, which is the symbol of history to the people of to-day, what can be more romantic than the Martello Tower cropping up suddenly out of the waters of Kingston harbor like some sea-creature come up to breathe?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The period of the influx of United Empire Loyalists brought also that interesting people, the Mohawk Indians, to settle under their chief, Brant, on their allotment of land at the mouth of the Grand River, and to give a name to one of Ontario’s most prosperous cities.
The story of the Mohawks’ loyalty to the Crown is one of the longest and most romantic stories of those romantic times. But the objective peak of interest is reached in “His Britannic Majesty George III’s Chapel to the Mohawks”—a few miles out of Brantford. Down in this old wooden church with the Royal Coat of Arms quaintly set over the door, abides that atmosphere of tranquility only attained by the old church, old home, or old person that has lived through great experiences and scenes, but now, having come out of all these, has reached the detachment of a placid old age that “regrets little, and would change still less”.
The view from this old “Chapel”, up out of that stormy period, dually staging Indian warfare and Colonial pioneering, is like a pastoral benediction bestowed on those white men and red who fought so hard for Ontario and the unity of the Empire.
And somehow, as you sit in a pew of this quiet church with the spirits of the great Chief Brant and others, whose graves stand in the churchyard, hovering in the air of splendid achievement which makes up the Province’s inheritance, you cannot but feel that there is a great bond of common experience uniting into one family this church—the quaint church with the little “House of the Angels” over the altar at Indian Lorette—the Catholic church at Pierreville, whose forbear went up in flames during the French and English struggle for supremacy on the Saint Lawrence, and the old Colonial church at Grand Pré, standing amid its curtain of Lombardies, and surrounded by memorial gravestones whereon are cut names now immortally chiselled in the history of Nova Scotia and of Canada.
Recognition of the fact that this chain of old churches, to which many another throughout Canada of its own right belongs, has stood for the fundamental in an age when the very grip of the pioneer on the land was in a sense uncertain, must tend to reveal the hand of destiny, and strengthen the Canadian’s national consciousness.
That, it seems to me, is the first lesson Romance reads to the people of Canada from the doorway of these old churches, happened upon here and there from the Atlantic to the Pacific and striking northward with the great rivers running toward Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean. The very name of this old Mohawk church is national.
In the city of Brantford, in addition to the fine bronze memorial of Brant, supported by the figures of other Mohawk warriors, there is an unique monument marking an event of world-wide interest—the invention of the telephone by the late Alexander Graham Bell. The early home of Bell, where he perfected the marvellous invention which was to render such signal service to mankind, and which by virtue of that invention is more than a Provincial landmark, stands a few miles out of town on a high bluff above the Tugela. It is a quiet spot, and one of those ample old houses whose very atmosphere must have been conducive to research and experiment. Canada not only possesses the distinction of this homestead and all that it stands for, but for years Mr. Bell came back every summer to his chosen home near Baddeck on the Bras D’Or Lake to carry on further researches and experiments; and it seems in keeping with his deep love for his home here that when the Great Voice rang him up, it should find him in Canada; and that he should be buried, as he is, in Canadian soil.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A great deal of story and romance is bound up with the canals of Ontario. The building of canals at so early a date proves the practical attitude of the early settlers of this section toward the importance of good water-highways for craft and commerce. The canals seem to ante-date the roads in some places. In all cases, they supplement the great lakes and rivers, amplifying the span of Provincial and National waterways.
The canals of Ontario are pivotal as the Province is pivotal. Without them the Great Lakes would never come to the sea or the sea to the Great Lakes.
Romance gets aboard the canal-boat of Ontario no less than aboard her sisters of the Richelieu. Nor does she stop to question whether it be a thousand-ton freighter, or a mere barge with picturesque windmill-sails to the pump and a line of family wash strung out from the caboose; or a blackened line of hulks with coal, “bound up”, or “bound down”, she steps aboard. Romance is true blue. She rides with the humblest, or on the white-and-gold pleasure boat to view the majesty of Capes Trinity and Eternity on the Saguenay, with equal ease.
What wonder then, that the canals of Canada have their individualities—individualities no less romantic than those of the lakes, the sea, or the rivers. The largest and most imposing of these is of course the Canal-town. The very presence of the canal gives one of these town the right to reach out understandingly, and with a certain degree of similarity, to any of the old river-towns of the Saint Lawrence, and to claim relation with any town of the coast whose harbour and trade-interests have given it the distinctive name of “sea-port”.
Canal-towns have just a little more atmosphere than a town minus a “water-gate” and a “water-street”. Craft of one kind or another seek out these towns, coming to them, not in the usual marine settings, but apparently upon the bosom of agriculture. Everyone knows what a shock it is to look across what is apparently a solid field of grain or potatoes and to see sailing through the vegetation a steamer’s red funnel, capped by a plume of black smoke. Yet this is a “headless horseman” effect which the inhabitants of some of the canal regions of Ontario know well.
Another feature, purely the canal’s own, is the lock. What pictures are afforded of the different types of traders which without any orderings except those of chance and circumstance, assemble here from time to time, forming little groups which are as a collective voice asking the lock-master to open the gates! And when later they string out one behind the other through the lock, what are they but so many carriers of Canadian trade? Here is one with paper-pulp, one with lumber, another with coal. And so the list could be drawn out indefinitely.
At the locks, pictures are made by the power-buildings in well-kept lawns and gardens; gardens with their riotous splashes of bloom waved over by that world-known dash of colour which is the British Flag.
Across the ship-canals land-traffic must needs throw its turnbridge. The opening of the lock-gate is the signal to the bridge attendant to give the dusty old viaduct its swing. And so the “locking” of a vessel calls into being many interesting facets of life, which would not exist except for the canal. One of these facets is the collection of country teams which drive up and are called upon to wait while the ships go through. It is a pretty illustration of land-trade waiting on sea-movement—which has been the law since the world began. Another, and more individual feature etched by the Canal is the old-time fisherman. All the canals of the world must know this type of Isaak Walton. Mrs. MacRobie of Iroquois is an authority on this kind of fishing. Her favourite fishing-ground is the Galops Canal at Iroquois just where
the clean ribbon of water crosses the foot of her back-yard. For thirty years she and her husband sat beside each other daily on the canal-bank. Now, her husband having died, she is left to fish alone, except when the neighbours’ barefooted boys come along with their poles and cans of wriggling earthworms and drop their cork-bobs on the water next to hers. Mrs. MacRobie has a store of local history from which she draws, on the evening we join her at the fishing. Her father and grandfather have handed down to her medals which show the part the family took in the Battle of Windmill Point, in the war of 1812. On another evening she invites us into the house to see these treasures. And then it is she brings out what seems to be an old-fashioned prayer or hymn book, in a calf binding, but turns out to be a clever earthen receptacle for “spirits”. This “book” is very old; and the story that goes with it is to the effect that a man could take it into church when he had had a long cold journey to get there and not be suspected of having reached the church largely by the aid of John Barleycorn. It is said of it, too, that its ancient owner found it of great convenience in his campaigns. This little “Treasury of Devotion” is now of increased interest in view of present day Prohibition, and it is also of interest in showing that indulgence was not without artistic and literary camouflage even in days of yore.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE PRAIRIE.
HE Canadian Prairie may be compared to a vast stage set through the length of three entire provinces for the enactment of one great epic entitled “WHEAT”.
Wheat is the greatest piece of realism staged in Canada. And its companion-piece, in point of size and importance, is “Fish”—The Maritime. Taken together they seem to point to Canada as the living parable of “the loaves and the fishes.” The ovens of Quebec as well as the ovens of all the other Provinces look to the Prairies for fulfilment.
But the wheat of the Prairie Provinces does not confine itself to, nor is it used up by these home ovens! rather it overflows to other ovens overseas, converting Canada by a sweet yet subtle power into a symbolic character—the bread-mother of the world. The thousand-mile wave of tawny grain from Thunder Bay to the foothills of the Rockies is a rippling voice; the voice of a most pleasing personality; a voice that carries across the stage in accents at once assured and winning, speaking to the world at large, so that it penetrates to remotest nooks and corners of the earth, speaking as the finest voices do, to the heart and the individual. One has only to follow the long Prairie trail to see how many and varied are the ears that have heard the magic call of Canadian wheat.
On the Prairie, Englishman, Scotchman, Irishman, American, have one and all hit the trail in the train of wheat. On the Prairie, too, are to be found other followers in that train, men from the wheat-lands of Old Europe and men who never saw a field of wheat until coming here—Icelanders, Poles, Ukrainians, Austrians, Finlanders, Swedes, Bukowinians; and how many others? Talking with the old-timers, the pioneers, the prairie schooner, the ox-cart, the buffalo herd, are still vividly within the memory of men now living beside the main highway of railway tracks with fast fliers from Halifax to Vancouver passing and re-passing several times a day.
Nowhere is the quick development of Canada so evident as here on the plains. Yet the steady voice of wheat is still calling; and to her voice are now added other important voices, and still others. Men and women with families are still coming and will come. The Prairie is big and generous and it gives. At the same time it admits that what it needs is more people; on the principle that the bigger the stage the more people are on demand in the chorus. The individuals who have listened to the call of the Prairie and followed its pipe have one and all brought with them their own individuality as well as some of the fundamental things which were theirs by reason of the old life back in the rural parts of Europe.
They are now giving these, the best of themselves and of the old lands, to the Prairie Provinces. As a class the foreigners are now known as “New Canadians”. The tiny homes which these built when they first came to Canada out of saplings and such wood as the country roundabout afforded, are in many instances little gems of architecture. The sides of these houses outside the framework of wood are plastered—usually by the women of the household—a yard or two at a time, each yard of plaster being scrupulously whitewashed as it goes along. Sometimes the roofs are sodded and masses of wild-flowers not infrequently bloom thereon. But more frequently the steep little roof is built of split-by-hand shingles, rough and artistic.
Inside these little houses, so strongly resembling their quaint cousins of Quebec, are all the handmade things and furnishings which mark the century-old French homes of Eastern Canada. There are, first of all, the same little windows flung open to the breeze, the same manifestations of art-reds and blues in paint over doors and windows. Inside, in the living room are handmade wooden benches, many with lines distinctly Russian; on the floor, hand-loom carpets and about the walls, a bit of the same home-weaving in tapestry effect, lined, perhaps by a frieze of empty egg-shells with bizarre patterns in red and black, almost Egyptian. So fragile are some of these simple things, so passing their reign in the rapid prosperity overtaking the children of the older generation that it seems to be a question as to whether these abilities to create a house and artistic furnishings out of almost nothing will survive to enrich the national life as in Quebec.
In the dooryard of these houses there are strange contraptions of wood for holding a log in place while it is being sawn. So easily manipulated are these things, that stepped into Canada as an idea from somewhere in the Carpathians, that even a small boy operates them successfully.
In these yards, too, are wells with big wheels and artistic roofs of hand-split shingles of a foreign steepness—wells, whence women with plotoks on their heads, call as sisters, to the women at the wells in Nova Scotia, in Cape Breton, in the Madeleines.
Here in many instances are to be seen the same rodded fences as occur in Newfoundland, each of course, with its touch of individuality, some fairly straight and others serpentining about the little garden of flowers which the old-timers love. In many cases too there is the same little patch of tobacco, as that met with in the jardins along the Saint Lawrence. In the kitchens of these houses are homemade wooden spoons, stirring-sticks and wooden forks. Some of these are given a coat of red or blue paint. Lemon yellow is a favourite colour for the wooden benches that stand against the walls.
It speaks well for the sturdy character of many of these oldtime places that some of them have been able to hold their own within thirty miles of Winnipeg—not being obliterated by the wave of modernism of which the great capital city is the crest.
The New Canadians, representing many lands and widely separated sections of Old Europe, have contributed to the Prairie Provinces a variety in the way of Church architecture. Cupolas and domes distinctly Eastern, almost Turkish, startle one above the tops of Manitoba maples or the bush of the river-banks. These architectural figures of the landscape, apart altogether from their religious significance, are centres where, crossing the threshold on Sundays, one has an opportunity of hearing Swedish music or the rich, deep chanting of the Russian responses; and of viewing at close hand the artistry that goes to make up the interior appointments of these churches transplanted from the East to the West. Here, too, silhouetted against the sky, is the little separate bell-tower and perhaps the three-barred Cross of the Eastern Christian Church. Here and there in the corner of a wheat-field, at the cross-section of a Prairie highway, one sees, as in Quebec, the tall, uplifted Crucifix set up. It is indeed a mosaic of vast dimensions and great breadth, essayed of the Prairie.
Genre of wheat is no less distinct than genre of the ’longshore road. Here is the Sower, here the Reaper, here the Stacker-of-the-big-Sheaves—the Stooker as the Prairie calls him. He may be a man from the East, a Sioux, or a townsman out to lend a hand. With his brown water-jug and his bronzed face, he is almost a symbolic figure, building the golden sheaves in stacks of five for the playing breeze and warm sun to give the ripening touches to the grain that makes Canada—the bread-giver of the world.