THE PEOPLE who now streamed in through the open door, who were they? Mostly Eastern Canadians. But who were these Eastern Canadians? We must look back a hundred years to find out.

When most of the English colonists to the south broke away from the Empire, many thousands of them considered this violent action wrong; and, without any doubt, if the object to be achieved was self-government, it could and would have been won later on without secession, as other colonists won it.

Thousands of “United Empire Loyalists,” sacrificing everything, flocked over the border and made new homes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario. This inrush from the lost colonies was followed by a considerable immigration from the mother-country, and the human tide flowed more strongly than ever after the end of the war with Napoleon. The United Kingdom contained less than half her present population, yet she was supposed to be overcrowded. Scotland and Ireland especially were drained of their people, because the political economists could find nothing for them to do at home.

It is believed that in the early years of the nineteenth century 25,000 Scottish peasants settled on Cape Breton Island alone, while great numbers were taken to the southern parts of Nova Scotia, and various counties in British Settlers in the East Upper and Lower Canada were peopled almost entirely from the same source. The members of a clan, or the inhabitants of a district, commonly emigrated together, and took up homes together in the New World, under leaders chosen or accepted by themselves. In 1804, eight hundred Highlanders, evicted by landlords who wanted the land for sheep runs, came over and made a new Glengarry between the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, where the land would be their own. About the same time an Irish officer, Thomas Talbot, threw himself with the “go” of a cavalry charge into an emigration movement, and never rested till he had settled twenty-eight townships north of Lake Erie.

One Highland chief, the Macnab, not only sent a large company of his own clansmen to Canada at his own expense, but took up his abode among them on the township allotted him by the Government. Later, in the early thirties, we hear of 400 discharged Irish soldiers coming over in a body, with their old officers at their head, and forming a military camp in the Upper Canadian backwoods, till their united efforts had cut out the roads and fields and built the houses of a civilized settlement. In England, about the same time, Lord Egremont organized an expedition of 760 Sussex folk, who also made homes for themselves in Upper Canada, as Ontario then was called. The emigrant ships were thick on the Atlantic, and in four years 160,000 British emigrants landed on Canadian soil.

While the silence of the desert spread over Scottish hillsides, the Canadian wilds awaked to vigorous life. From Lake Huron to the Atlantic, Canada was ringing with the settler’s axe. The air was black with smoke,—fire cleared the land faster than steel. The stones were Coming from East to West gathered into piles, and the plow, driven in and out among the blackened stumps, prepared the virgin soil for its first crop of oats and potatoes. The labor which forced the wilderness to blossom as the rose was enormous; but the men who gave it had strong hearts, and wrestled cheerfully with nature. Never thinking of ease, they won prosperity.

The children and grandchildren of those hardy eastern pioneers made just the right pioneering stuff for the newly opened West. They were reinforced by descendants of the folk their ancestors had left behind in the Old Country, now coming out to Western Canada direct,—English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, even Manxmen and Channel Islanders, Scandinavians, and others from Northern Europe. These were our nearest relations on that continent, descendants of the men left behind long centuries ago when their raiding kinsfolk settled in the British Isles; and now they sent contingents straight to the British prairies in Canada. Many of the same stock came in early, beginning long before the railway opened, from the Norse colony in Iceland which had “discovered America” five hundred years before Columbus. From the south came “Americans,” practically all of the same stock as the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, or of the Celtic stock to which most of the Highland Scots, Irish, Welsh and French belong. Many coming in from across the line were natives of Eastern Canada who had heard “the call of the West” while the only West ready to receive them was that of the States.

The newcomers spread over the prairie—spread so fast and so far, in fact, that they had to endure long isolation before any railway could reach them. “I had to haul my wheat 80 miles,” one old settler says, “and Live Cattle and Dead Buffalo then got forty cents a bushel for it.” But he was “a sticker,” and is now one of the most prosperous farmers in the country. Not owing to wheat, however; he was a stockman, long before live stock became popular. Wheat became King of the Plains, and few there were who would not bow down to him.

The reign of King Steer came first, however. Before the railway arrived, with the mass of settlers, the chief industry of the plains was ranching. The buffalo disappeared, but their place was partly filled by great herds of cattle, driven in from the States and roaming at large over the plains of our south-west and the foothills of the Rockies. Their offspring were rounded up when the time came, year after year, and driven across the line for sale. The rancher and his cowboys were almost the only white inhabitants—with the Mounted Police, who had to protect them from invading cattle and horse thieves, as they protected the Indians from whiskey-smugglers.

I was going to say that the first western freight the Canadian Pacific had to fetch out was cattle from the ranches. But, as an old railway man says, “The first live stock carried was dead stock.” The first substantial freight movement was that of buffalo skeletons. As soon as the prairie section got running, Métis and Indians were employed to gather up the millions of bones scattered over the plains where they had been shot down by generations of hunters. Great stacks of these bones were piled up like cord-wood beside the track—Regina’s first name was Pile of Bones—and thousands of carloads were shipped down to Chicago and other centres for use in sugar refining.

KING STEER made a brave stand against King Wheat, but had to surrender when his realm was thrown open for settlement and the army of grain-growers poured in, cutting up the range with barbed-wire fences.

This brings us to the beginning of the present century. Turn your telescope back to that time. Mount the broncos of imagination and ride with me, to see what I saw, riding the plains in 1905 when the new Prairie Provinces were just being born.

Down in Southern Alberta, the biggest ranch still surviving, with its lordly domain of 66,000 acres, has just been sold to a syndicate for $6 an acre—five times what its owner paid to the Government twenty years back—for sub-division into farms. The last 10,000 head of cattle are being driven off to a range leased from the Government many miles away to the north.

Wheat is waving, yellow and ripe, on farms newly fenced off the prairie, close by; and even the ranches up in the foothills, where they thought themselves secure, find speculative homesteaders cutting off quarter sections from the “free range.”

Much of the south-western prairie was fit for ranching, and for ranching only. But newcomers in their haste and ignorance demanded to have it thrown open for homesteading, and the Government, equally hasty Prairie Primeval Still in 1905 and ignorant, allowed them to flock in,—presently to flock out again, to districts where crops are reasonably sure. After many wasted years the deserted land may possibly be seen alive with flocks of sheep, and in the end with herds of cattle as in the beginning.

Riding away to the north—though not for lack of a train, if we wanted to take one—we pass through Calgary, already a city of 10,000, and after another fifty miles or so of “bald-headed prairie” we enter the beautiful park lands of Central Alberta. Here, along a railway closely following our road, the old Edmonton Trail of Cree and Blackfoot, we find a string of farmers who are neither “ranchers” nor “grain-growers,” though they raise both grain and cattle. Livestock is their mainstay; and already, though the day of the big ranch is over, the number of cattle in the West is greater than ever.

Strike eastward, though. Here, far from any railway line, we might think ourselves back in the days before the West was discovered even by Indians. We enter a land where no man dwells. We see the prairie primeval, as it was when it first arose from the sea and put on its mantle of green; sleeping on, untouched and unchanged, as it slept when the first silent red man stole out of the woods and shaded his eyes to scan its sunlit sea of grass.

Look close, and we detect the winding trails of buffalo, trod by uncounted generations in everlasting single file—mere shallow grooves all overgrown with grass. The buffalo have all been gone these thirty years. We cannot do as thirty years ago a traveller did—shoot a buffalo when dinner time came, roast the tongue, carry off the best of the hump, and leave the rest to the coyotes. We might bring down a prairie “We’re Canadians Now” chicken or duck now and then, but we have a long trip ahead of us, and no time for hunting. Like old Highland clansmen riding to war, we carry each a bag of oatmeal strapped to the saddle. There is nothing like it. “We owe to Scotland whiskey and oatmeal,” somebody says, “but the less we take of the one, and the more we take of the other, the less we lose and the more we gain.” For this trip we add a trifle of tea and sugar, and bacon, which our clansman would have thought luxurious.

Here and there we may happen on a square iron stake rising from a little mound in the midst of four shallow pits, pointing north, south, east and west. Surveyors have been here and left these landmarks so that home-seekers can see at once the corners of each quarter section; but the home-seekers have not yet come.

At last we see two parallel ruts worn smooth and deep through the grass. We have found the old trail which the army followed on its march to the relief of Battleford. Here is a little creek, “Fifteen-mile Springs” by name; it is fifteen miles north of the Saskatchewan River; and camping beside it we actually find two human beings, with a wagon and team. They are Minnesota farmers, on their way to join a score of others from the same State who are settling on homesteads far north-east of this.

“And don’t you want to be ‘Americans’ any longer?” I ask.

“No,” say they both, most emphatically, “we’re Canadians now.”

After a friendly meal of bread and bacon, we leave the good men behind, and with them leave the modern world. The ancient world opens up around us as we Birds and Beasts ride away to the north—the ancient prairie as it was, as it is, and never-more shall be.

Bathed in a glorious flood of sunshine, a glorious flood of air, the rolling plain spreads limitless to far horizons. Space, never-ending space, all round; and silence, but for the music of our horses’ hoofs.

High overhead fly steadily a flock of cranes, in perfect arrow-head formation, two long lines converging on the leader. Wild duck fly, straight but scattering, from slough to slough. The little greyish lark hops everywhere.

The gopher sits bolt upright on the edge of a hole, vanishing downward like a shot when he thinks audacity has reached fool-hardiness. Twenty yards ahead, beside the trail, a fountain of earth spouts up where a big striped badger is digging himself a home. He turns and stares at us, motionless, till we also stop, when he too disappears. Now and then a snake slips across the trail, a greenish-yellow innocent.

On the crest of a knoll, outlined against the sky, a great buzzard sits watching us till we come near, then soars away on the other side. A coyote steals swiftly over the plain, turning round and stopping now and then for a good look at us. Again and again, rounding a hillock, we startle a bunch of antelope; they make off in a leisurely-seeming way, but their graceful leaps take them out of range with the speed of a fast train. When the railway later on had to fence its track, the antelope at first would stop, distressed and puzzled by the mysterious obstacle to their migration; but they soon learned to clear the barrier at a bound. . . .

Suddenly we spy a house—then a second house, and Thin Thread of Settlement a little sod shack—the only sign of settlement between the South Saskatchewan and the Battle River valley. It looks like an isolated knot of dwellings, but we are really cutting across a long thin line. The newcomers left the railway at Saskatoon—the Canadian Northern, which before the end of the year will be through from Winnipeg to Edmonton—but, finding the land near the railway taken up, they have driven on and on to the south-west, till at last, after 85 miles, they have reached land without an owner. Others following them have gone on in the same direction, till now the thread of settlement stretches out to a length of a hundred miles from the railway.

The sod shack is the first western home of a farmer from Ontario, whose family will not be coming up till spring. On the next homestead is a good frame house, an unpainted and unvarnished shell so far, but showing taste and means which scorn to shelter even for a time Hospitable Métis within rough comfortable walls of turf. This, too, belongs to a born Briton from Ontario. The third settler is a cheery Perthshire Highlander. He has spent twelve years in Manitoba, sold his farm at a profit, and come far afield for a free homestead. He has already got 50 acres broken for next year’s crop, and finds time to act as baker for the settlers “baching it” around him.

Again we mount, and plunge into the wilderness. Evening draws in, and still we ride—in silence, for the joy of living is too deep for words. On a high hilltop we pause, enchanted by the vista opened suddenly at our feet. Deep in the darkening east a valley sleeps, veiled in a weird portentous purple mist.

Beside the next water we camp; that is, we cook our simple fare on a fire of dwarf willow and wild rose stems, hobble our broncos, roll ourselves in blankets and go to sleep under the friendly stars, lulled by the breeze that rustles in the grass, despite the heathen coyote’s evening hymn.

The next day we see trees ahead, and ride into the heart of Sixty-mile Bush, a curious isolated patch of wood rising like an island from the grassy sea, and interspersed with many a slough. Here we find human beings: two families of Métis. One woman speaks French and Cree; the other, educated in a convent, speaks English pretty well. Their eight little children, dark-skinned, black-eyed and very Indian looking, roll each other over on the floor; active and jolly, though remarkably quiet in their play.

Presently grandfather comes in: a pleasant-faced man, dark as an Indian, but bearded like a white man; a stalwart of seventy, without a white hair. Not a word of English can he speak, though long ago he travelled New Trails and Fresh Breaking as guide with an English hunter through the Rocky Mountains. In quite good French, he spins out reminiscences. He knew Louis Riel in the trouble of 1870—knew him so well that he strongly opposed inviting him back in 1884. But when the invitation was given, and the man he despised was leading his kinsfolk into hopeless rebellion, our friend took up his gun and fought like the rest at Batoche.

They are all most hospitable, these dusky folk of Sixty-mile Bush. “If you want wood for your camp-fire,” says the spokeswoman, “take all you need from our log pile. And aren’t you tired of sleeping on the prairie? The stable is dry and clean—the horses run out all summer—and there is plenty of hay in the stacks. Have you had enough of slough water? Here’s a pail of fine water from the well.” To be sure they have no yeast bread, but for a trifle we get one of their mighty bannocks—oval slabs, eighteen inches by twelve, and an inch thick—with a big lump of home-churned butter and a jug of fresh milk.

Crossing another stretch of treeless plain in the morning, we notice fresh wagon tracks leading away from the trail. We turn aside and follow one of these tracks, but it ends suddenly on the edge of a deep wooded coulee, where some new settler has gone to cut logs for his first shack. Exploring another fresh trail, we come upon a brown patch of newly broken land, with a brand-new box of a house in the middle, and the beginnings of a well dug beside it; but we have had our trouble for nothing, for the owner, after doing as much as this in compliance with the easy homestead law, has returned to the States for the winter, intending to come back for good next year. Open the Door and Walk In

Better luck farther on. Here is a house that is clearly inhabited, for we see through the window a loaf of bread on a shelf and a pile of wood by the stove. Now we country folk in the West don’t like a visitor to turn away just because we are out when he calls, especially near meal times. We leave the key over the door to welcome him by proxy, and if he knows anything about our ways he will reach up and find it at once. Most of us, in fact, don’t lock our doors at all; there is no need. . . . Oh, yes, there are exceptions. Now and then a low-down individual, or a whole family without one conscience to the dozen, will descend like a blight on a neighborhood; until they are driven out or reformed, things have a habit of disappearing; but in most parts we trust each other perfectly. . . . Putting up my hand, I find the hospitable key. We go in and make ourselves at home, lighting a fire for our bacon, and helping ourselves to bread and butter and potatoes by way of a change. Departing, we leave twenty-five cents apiece on the table; but we know that if the hostess had been at home she would almost certainly have refused the money.

A white spot in the distance attracts us, as twilight thickens. Riding over, we find it a very small tent—inhabited by a very large man, who cannot stand upright till he comes out of it. “Good enough for me,” he says with a laugh. “When I’m not sleeping I want to be out working. I started plowing the day I got here, and now look at that”—pointing to his fifty acres of new breaking. “The house can wait till I bring my folks up from Iowa next April. Then we’ll run up a house together in a brace of shakes.” The People’s King

“Why did you leave Iowa? Don’t they call it the finest agricultural State in the Union?”

“So it is, but no better than this’ll be. And anyway I’d only a rented farm, and I wanted one of my own. My next neighbor here came from down there too, and he had a good farm; but his boys were big enough to want farms too, and land prices went soaring out of sight, so he sold out for enough to stock half-a-dozen new farms up here.”

“You won’t find it strange to become a Canadian?”

“There’s nothing strange about it. Friend of mine down there said to me, ‘I ain’t going to have no king riding over me!’—Well, there’s some folks think no ways good but their own ways; and that’s the worst kind of ignorance. I told him the King was just a president, and brought up to the business, as no in-and-out president ever was. We have to elect a new one every four years, and you just elect a new one when you see there’s need. I know history, and I know how you give a bad king the air, and choose a new one and tell him to go ahead and be the sort of king you want and teach his son to do likewise—which he takes mighty good care to do. He’s just as much the people’s choice as ours is, and then some! And the best of it is, chosen and brought up as he is like that, you’ve always got a president that’s never been a party man and never can be, so all parties can trust him. Mighty sensible plan, seems to me.

“Then your king never goes against his people and parliament. He hasn’t anything like the power of our president. Once a president gets in, he appoints what ministers he likes—the House hasn’t a word to say about it though the Senate has—and there they are, planted for four years no matter what happens, congress or no King by Act of Parliament congress. Here in this Dominion of Canada, your Prime Minister is the only man that has anything like the power of our president, and even he has to do what parliament says—or get out. Talk about self-government! They’ve got it in England, and you’ve got it in Canada, a sight more of it than we have.

“There’s another sensible thing I like about your British ways. Whether you make much better laws or much about the same, if a man breaks them you get after him, and give him his medicine quick. We call ourselves hustlers! You don’t give your scallywag a thousand miles of rope and let him play around dodging the law as long as he can pay a lawyer.”

“As for the King, you’ve hit the nail on the head,” I remark. “If everybody looked for the facts as you do, without prejudice, half the differences of opinion on all sorts of questions would simply vanish. There is no nation without a king. Our neighbors, as you say, elect a King every four years and call him a President—we elect our President whenever we see cause, and call him a King. King George holds office entirely by authority of an Act of Parliament, and so will his son; though we are always glad to remember that they inherit the blood of Alfred the Great. We are a practical people, though we know well the value of sentiment and high tradition; and we have found the greatest practical advantages in possessing an independent and impartial president, who has no party bias, favors no class or sectional interest, and belongs not to the mother-land alone but to every country of our world-wide brotherhood. He, as no one else can, unites and represents us all. A French-Canadian’s Home

“As for our laws, they are not perfect, and I’m afraid we have not caught all the rascals yet; but on the whole the impression you have got is well justified.”

Half a mile away, in the darkening air, we see the outline of a house, with a cheerful beckoning light in the window, and we gallop across to see who is there. We find a French-Canadian couple who left Quebec in their youth and have just come back to their native land. Monsieur is unhitching his ox team in the dark. His habit is to rise at three, put in at least six hours’ work on the land before ten, rest through the mid-day heat, and then stick to the plow or harrow as long as he can see the animal’s horns. The house is a perfect model of cleanliness and good order. It has only one room, but is well if plainly furnished, and every utensil, bright as a new pin, hangs from its proper hook on the neatly plastered wall.

The man has made the house, from door-step to chimney-top, with his own hands. He admits that he spent $30 on window sashes, planed wood for door and floor, and the necessary nails; but otherwise the whole building has cost him in cash only the twenty-five cents charged by the Government for leave to cut logs in Cutknife Valley. He has brought a year’s rations, besides his eight work oxen and milch cow, so he is well able to wait till the second year for his wheat crop. Madame is packing all the eggs and butter she can gather and make for winter use. Between them they find time to read three weekly papers, one French and two English.

“I suppose you are a bit lonely out here as yet,” I remark.

“Lonely? Oh, dear no!” says our host, pointing to Indian Farmers a fiddle on a shelf. “We had a couple of dances this summer in my father’s house, and all the girls came from twenty miles around.” There is quite a colony of these “original Canadians” here already, and not one home without plenty of children.

We ride over to the battlefield in the morning. Twenty years have passed since the Indians caught us on Cutknife Hill, but the grassy slope is still strewn with empty cartridge shells. An old Indian who took his share in the fray goes over the battlefield with us, exchanging reminiscences where once we exchanged hot shot, and “reconstructing” the scene by creeping up the slope with an imaginary gun in his hand. Then the enemies of a bygone day sit down and take pot-luck together—pot-luck being a couple of prairie chicken brought down with one shot.

To-day, it seems, the painted warriors of ’85 are a peaceful community of farmers. Here comes one, driving by in his wagon with a good team of horses. Instead of picturesque blanket and bead-work, he wears what we have the conceit to call civilized clothes, and differs only in complexion from his European neighbors. On the edge of a poplar bluff we meet another Cree brave, who comes forward smiling to have his photograph taken when he has put up his horses in their log stable. His summer dwelling stands close by,—a genuine tepee, but made of canvas instead of buffalo skin—and in front of the door is a wash-tub. Think of it!

Still more remarkable than the wash-tub is the big threshing machine. A little later, and it will be hard at work pouring golden wheat into wagon after wagon. The whole outfit, steam engine and all, was bought by the tribe with their own earnings. The land is still Wouldn’t Live Without Trees held in common, but any tribesman who wants to fence off part of it as a farm is free to do so.

Through the park lands of the Battle River Valley we now ride for many hours—a country as rich as the prairie, and rich not only in soil, but in wood and water. High on the bank of a clear and rapid stream, in the shade of a beautiful grove, an old Ontario farmer and his sons, with an eye to the picturesque as well as the profitable, have built their mansion. Between them, they have taken a whole section, 640 acres, and have over 150 acres broken this first year.

“A grand country,” says the farmer’s wife, bringing out a jug of cool milk for the riders when their broncos have drunk their fill at the creek. “It’s as beautiful as where we came from, and that’s saying a lot. My husband and I wouldn’t live without trees. There was a man driving through to-day that said he wouldn’t live with them—says he feels choked in the brush. He’s taken a homestead where you can plow the whole half-mile furrow straight without a turn. Well, it takes all sorts to make a world.”

OUT ON the prairie again we ride, by the old freighting trail from Battleford to Saskatoon. But we only meet one freighting outfit all the way, a wagon drawn by two plodding oxen. “It was a big business, that freighting,” says a Scottish blacksmith who has built his shack and smithy beside the trail, “but it didn’t last long. The freighters made good money from the time settlers began to come in thick, but now the railway is open the trail is dead.” He might have said “barred and buried,” for it is not a surveyed road, and again and again we find ourselves charging into a wire fence and have to turn aside and make the circuit of some new farm.

He is a townsman, this swarthy smith; he has about as little farm experience as cash; but he is the sort of man that makes a successful farmer all the same. He is rich in brain and in brawn. From the mating of these, all wealth and welfare spring. The blacksmith put in a few acres of oats and potatoes last year, in the intervals of shoeing freighters’ teams, and then went off to work at his trade all winter in a lumber camp north of the Saskatchewan; this winter he will do the same—“and when I come back to the farm with a bit of money I’ll make things hum, as the Yankees say.”

The wife smiles, rocking her little girl to sleep. “Do you never wish yourself back in Scotland?” I ask, Scandinavians from the States thinking of her winters spent alone with her infants in the prairie shack. “Never!” says she. “We’re all so much better in health out here, and going to be better off too, in good time. Look at this lassie. She was always ailing, over there, and now she’s nearly as strong as the rest.”

There’s no such medicine in all the drug stores as the life-giving air of the West.

The hamlet of Saskatoon, where I found a bare hundred inhabitants four years ago, has three thousand now in 1905, and dreams of 30,000—a dream that we shall see come nearly true before our story ends. The town is a “jumping-off place” for hundreds of home-seekers bound for points south-west, where paper railways will presently be turned into steel.

Every railway station, for the matter of that, is a jumping-off place for new settlers. Here is one with neither a station building nor even a platform; just a siding; yet a couple of Norwegians are loading up wagons with furniture from a box car, while their wives cook dinner on the turf and a dozen children play in and out of two little tents. These people speak pretty good English, for they have spent five years in Dakota since they left their motherland. South-east of Edmonton there is already a large colony of Norwegians, a “New Norway” in fact.

As we ride west and north-west, however, we find ourselves among folk who know no English. “Galicians,” or “Galatians,” they are commonly called. Some of them come from Galicia in the Austrian Empire, but others are Ruthenians or Ukrainians from South-western Russia, and many from Poland, too. They belong, like the Serbs and Croats and Montenegrins, the Czechs Who are the Slavs? and Slovaks, and nearly all the Russians, to the great Slavic Race.

But who are the Slavs? Just a branch of the same white race that we ourselves belong to. Their ancestors, like ours, poured through Europe in waves of barbaric invasion from some far eastern home, but settled in Russia and neighboring lands, as our forefathers had passed on to settle on the shores of the Atlantic. The very name “Galician” reminds us of the real kinship between the Galicians of Austria-Hungary, the Galatians of Asia Minor to whom St. Paul wrote his epistle, the inhabitants of France whom Julius Cæsar describes as Gauls, and the Celtic Gaels of the British Isles.

Long separated from us, they have come to join us again. They come poor in money, as nearly all our fathers did; but having to work up “from nothing” is the best guarantee that they will work up to something. It was only in 1894 that the first Galicians arrived, nine families in all. They sent home such good reports of the country that now in 1905 there are 75,000 of them thriving here. Thriving in spite of their poverty? No—because of it.

Here is one just beginning. His home is a long low hovel, one end built of poplar logs roughly plastered over with brown mud, the other part made of sods, with grass sprouting from every joint and growing freely all over the roof. The owner, a tall good-humored Galician, has to stoop coming out of the door to welcome us. A distaff is under his arm; we have caught him spinning linen thread for a shirt, which he badly needs. The one and only door leads into the stable; we have to pass through this to reach the solitary living room, where the furniture consists of a home-made table and a bedstead Beginning with Nothing of round poplar logs covered with a few scraps of blankets. But he is a bachelor.

The ordinary Galician is a well-married man with a large family. The walls of his house are smoothed and white-washed; the high-pitched roof is of straw thatch, and rises in a series of steps at the corners. Beside one of these picturesque cottages we find the owner, with a red fez on his head, reaping oats with the primitive “cradle,” a scythe with three or four sticks projecting from the handle to catch the stalks as they fall. Most of the men, however, are still away; for the poor Galician, as soon as he has built his house, and perhaps dug up a little garden, goes off to earn money, generally on railway construction. His wife and children, having neither plow nor beast to draw one, do the best they can with the spade, and raise a little crop of oats, rye and potatoes.

The father’s earnings will buy an ox and plow, and with these he really begins to farm. Many a Galician farmer already has from 20 to 200 acres under crop, and from 10 to 100 head of live stock. In winter, he fills a rough box sleigh with grain and sets out for the nearest market, no matter how far it is. At night, he saves hotel or “stopping place” charges by sleeping on the snow beside his sleigh. I have heard of men who thought nothing of a fortnight’s journey of this sort. In three or four years, such a man is poor no longer.

These people raise practically everything they eat. Their clothing, like their furniture, is of the simplest. They go bare-foot all summer, and in winter they wear shoes out of doors only—sometimes not then. Of ventilation they know nothing except as something cold to be shut out—an idea not peculiar to Galicians! To tell the truth, Cousin Slav is much more like his English A Doukhobor Village neighbors than he is different from them—and a difference is not always a defect.

A saddle girth breaks as we near a village, and one of us (I won’t say which) rolls over on the ground. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The hour we spend held up in that village is one of surprise and delight. This is no haphazard collection of dwellings, with untidy little shacks and ambitious modern houses putting each other to shame. There is no distinction here between rich and poor; there are no rich and no poor; or rather, all are rich, though not one has more than trifling possessions.

The whole village has been built on an intelligent design, not allowed to spring up anyhow. The houses are symmetrically arranged in two long rows, with a broad avenue between. Each cottage, standing on its own lot, comprises “a but and a ben,” as they say in Scotland. The gable of the ben, or better end, faces the street, while the doors open sideways into the yard. The walls, substantially built of logs, present a neatly smoothed surface of white-washed earth. The roofs also are covered with earth, but even they are clean and neat. A raised ledge of earth runs along the foot of the wall, under the wide overhanging eaves, to form a sort of veranda seat. A little red and green pattern over each window adds a pleasant touch of color to the whole. Just outside the village is a ring of hard smooth earth, with a mound in the middle; this is the flax-breaking floor, the flax straw being crushed by a big wooden roller with small logs nailed lengthwise on its surface like cogs on a wheel.

They are a pleasant folk, these villagers. A woman, embroidering linen at her cottage door, rises to welcome Cleanliness and Simplicity us. She is ignorant of our tongue, and we of hers, but we both know the ancient universal language of signs, invented long before words. She guides us to the community saddler, and while he fixes the girth she takes us home and spreads before us bread, from an enormous rye loaf, butter, wild raspberry preserve, and milk—a royal feast.

Jutting out from one corner of the room is the great clay oven, which projects into the next apartment too, and has sleeping accommodation on the top. A shining table and benches, with a long bench around the wall, are the only furniture. Everything is marvellously clean: we might eat our dinner off the floor.

Music floats in at the open door; seven girls have come to entertain us, sitting on the ledge outside and singing hymns while we eat. For this is a village of Doukhobors.

We have all heard of the little gang of fanatical extremists bearing that name, who now and then make trouble for the police. The members of the Doukhobor community, as a whole, are distressed by such proceedings, for which they are often blamed. The saddler, when we go for the mended girth, expounds their views in quite good English. “When a criminal lunatic calls himself a Presbyterian or Catholic,” he protests, “you don’t hold up your hands and cry ‘Oh, those dreadful Presbyterians and Catholics!’ I know we have peculiar ideas, and we have suffered for them; but we are not criminals and we are not mad.”

They are like our Quakers in their opposition to fighting, and in the simplicity of their religious observances as well as their daily life. Each family has its little personal belongings; but the land, live stock and A “Stopping Place” implements are owned by the community. “The co-operation that we preach they practise,” an observer says, who knows them well, “and we should be honestly thankful to them for trying to live up to high ideals in a too materialistic age. Though they cultivate an almost primitive simplicity of life, in the cultivation of the ground they are by no means primitive, but keen to adopt the most scientific methods, which their strong co-operative organization enables them to practise with admirable success. They are industrious workers. Their cleanliness and good health are remarkable. The value of all this to our country is so great that it should not be impossible, with sufficient good-will and elasticity of law on our part, to allow them to work out their system side by side with our own—especially as their number is not large, for many leave their community rather than submit to its rules and restrictions.”

But the bugles are calling at Edmonton; we must be up and away. It is a long, long ride, and we can hardly resist the temptation to stop and chat with new settlers by the way. Here, for instance, is a farmer who keeps a stopping place—a common practice along trails where there is nothing like a hotel. Fifteen cents for a “noon” and twenty-five cents for a square meal, that seems the regular tariff.

These are evidently people of taste. The old gentleman and his grandchildren have already taken time, in the intervals of chores and attendance on hungry travellers, to lay out a garden, where asters, poppies and mignonette bloom in a setting of elk horns and buffalo skulls. In the parlor of the comfortable log house is a well-used library of a hundred books, including Dickens, Kipling, and a strong contingent of religious authors. The Long Migration

What a story of age-long adventure it is, the history of that family. The man has a French name, though he speaks no language but our own. His distant ancestors, hunting with chipped stone spears like our Indians, and moving on as they did from one hunting ground to another, wandered through Europe till they came to the Atlantic and settled on the coast of France. Centuries passed; America was discovered; two centuries more, and the family, good civilized French folk, continued the westward migration of their pre-historic tribe whose course had been barred by the sea. They settled under the English flag in North Carolina. Another century, and one of them made his way inland to Tennessee, where our friend grew up. Presently he moved north-west to Illinois, where he married; west again to Kansas, where his children were born; south-west into Oklahoma; and north-west at last to Alberta, where he is so much better satisfied than in any of his former homes that he is ready to sing, “Here all my wanderings cease!”

That is the story of thousands of Western families, mostly of the British, Scandinavian and German branches of our race. They come over from Europe, settle on the Atlantic sea-board, pull up stakes and strike inland; pull them up again to go farther in, and so on indefinitely; halting perhaps for a year or two, perhaps for generations, but always moving westward and generally northward too.

Among the old-timers, in a well-settled district that we presently pass through, is a Nova Scotian who has been farming up here for a dozen years. “My grandfather,” he says, “was a United Empire Loyalist. He had been a leading citizen of New York, and lost everything in the revolution. He knew nothing of country Newcomers from England life beyond his garden in Manhattan. But he never kicked; he got right down to it, and when some poor West Highlanders came in, more used to fishing than farming, it was the city man that showed them how to build log houses and clear the Nova Scotian forest.

“I thought of him one day, soon after I came up here, when I butted in to a family of newcomers from England. There were three brothers, all university graduates, who had never done a hand’s turn of work except in their sports, I reckon. Now they were trying to work three quarter sections, in partnership. They weren’t baching it like some high-toned ‘remittance men’ I’ve seen, who wouldn’t sweep out the shack or make a bed once in a year, for all the elegant way they’d been raised. No; one of them had a wife, and, though she’d been used to servants doing everything, she got down to it like a good one and kept the house as clean as her baby. But the men were trying to farm before they learnt how, which is a mistake.

“Well, I saw one of them plowing with a team of oxen, and there was something wrong with the plow and he couldn’t find out what, let alone make a straight furrow. The others were picking up stones and carrying them quite a ways, and the skin was almost flayed off their tender hands. I fixed the plow, and told ’em to wear gloves, and helped ’em make a stone-boat. Of course they must have me stay for supper—dinner, they called it. I opened my eyes, I tell you, when they all came to supper dolled up in evening dress, London style; and her ladyship served up a dinner to match, winding up with black coffee and cigars. But they didn’t let their ‘style’ interfere with their work. That first year they broke 200 acres and had the luck to raise enough Learners Become Teachers wheat for seed, besides oats enough for four horses; and the second year they had a splendid crop. There never was any doubt about their success, from the word go. They were good mixers—no starch, except in their shirts—they made themselves liked; and to-day, if you please, it’s those city boys that show half the newcomers around them how to live in the West.”