Come with me to Edmonton, the capital and second largest city of Alberta. It is built on high bluffs on both sides of the Saskatchewan River, and we can see standing out against the landscape the great steel girders of the Canadian Pacific “high level” bridge, which joins the north and south sections of the city. Edmonton has between sixty-five and seventy thousand people. It is noted for its factories and wholesale houses and as a distributing point for the Northwest. There are several meat packing houses here, and the city’s creameries supply forty per cent. of the entire output of butter in the province. It owns its own street railway, and its water, light, power, and telephone systems. It is an important educational centre, and in the University of Alberta has the farthest north college on the continent. It has eight hundred acres of parks and golf links belonging to the municipality.

The city is not far from the site of a Hudson’s Bay Company fort built in 1795. Near by was a trading post of the Northwest Fur Company, its one time rival. When, in 1821, the two companies were amalgamated, a new fort was erected. This was called Edmonton, which was the name of the birthplace of the Hudson’s Bay official in charge. You remember how the English town figures in John Gilpin’s famous ride:

For a half century afterward Edmonton was an important trading and distributing point for all western Canada. Furs were sent from here down the Saskatchewan to York Factory on Hudson Bay, and supplies were packed overland to the Athabaska and taken by canoe to the head waters of that stream. Some were floated down the river to Lake Athabaska, thence into Great Slave Lake, and on into the Mackenzie, which carried them to the trading posts near the Arctic. Big cargoes of goods are still shipped by that route every year, and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of furs are brought back over it to Edmonton, to be sent on to New York or London.

After the transfer of this northern territory from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Canadian government, the town grew steadily. Its first real land boom occurred in 1882, when it was rumoured that the Canadian Pacific would build through here on its way to the Yellowhead Pass over the Rockies. The excitement caused by this rumour was short lived, however, as the officials decided to cross the mountains by the Kicking Horse Pass farther south. It was not until 1891, or almost ten years later, that the Canadian Pacific built a branch line to Strathcona, just across the river. A year later Edmonton was incorporated as a town, and in 1898 its growth was greatly stimulated by its importance as an outfitting post for the thousands of gold seekers who made their way to the Klondike by the overland route.

In 1904, when its population was ten thousand, Edmonton became a city and the capital of Alberta. It was then a typical frontier town of the New West. Its main thoroughfare was a crooked street laid out along an old Indian trail, and its buildings were of all shapes, heights, and materials. The older structures were wooden and of one story, the newer ones of brick and stone and often four stories high. The town was growing rapidly and the price of business property was soon out of sight. A fifty-foot lot on Main Street sold for twenty thousand dollars, and there was a demand for land in the business section at four and five hundred dollars per front foot.

That year the Canadian Northern transcontinental line reached Edmonton, and four years later the Grand Trunk Pacific was put through. In 1913 the Canadian Pacific completed the bridge uniting the northern part of the city with its former terminus across the river at Strathcona, which had been made a part of Edmonton the year before. In addition to these three transcontinental lines, Edmonton now has railway connection with every part of central and southern Alberta, as well as a road built northwesterly along the Lesser Slave Lake to the Peace River district. The trains run over that route twice a week; they are equipped with sleeping cars and a diner for most of the way.

The location of Edmonton is much like that of St. Louis. The city is on a large river in the midst of a farming region almost as rich as the Mississippi Valley. It is in the northern part of the wheat belt, and the surrounding country is adapted to mixed farming as well as wheat growing. It produces enormous crops of oats, barley, and timothy. I have seen wheat near here so tall that it almost tickled my chin, and oats and timothy as high as my head. The land will raise from seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five bushels of oats to the acre, and an average of forty bushels of winter wheat. The farmers are now growing barley for hogs; they say that barley-fed pork is better than corn-fed pork. They also feed wheat to cattle and sheep. Indeed, when I was at Fort William I was told that thousands of sheep are fattened there each winter on the elevator screenings.

I am surprised at the climate of Edmonton. For most of the winter it is as mild as that of our central states. The weather is tempered by the Japanese current, just as western Europe is affected by the Gulf Stream. The warm winds that blow over the Rockies keep British Columbia green the year round and take the edge off the cold at Edmonton and Calgary.

Edmonton is an important coal centre, with thirty mines in its vicinity. Indeed, Alberta’s coal deposits are estimated to contain 1,000,000,000,000 tons, which is one seventh of the total supply of the world. It is eighty per cent. of Canada’s coal reserves. Coal is found throughout about half of the province from the United States boundary to the Peace River, and is mined at the rate of about five million tons a year. Half of the product is lignite, about two per cent. anthracite, and the remainder bituminous. Nova Scotia is a close second in the coal production of the Dominion, and British Columbia ranks third.

Because of the long haul across the prairies, Alberta coal cannot compete in eastern Canada with that from the United States. Even the mines of Nova Scotia are farther from Canada’s industrial centres than is our Appalachian coal region. Cape Breton is more than a thousand miles from Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, and about two thousand miles from Winnipeg. Scranton, Pennsylvania, on the other hand, is only four hundred miles from Toronto, and Pittsburgh but three hundred and sixty-seven. Consequently, Alberta coal supplies little more than the local demand.

Of the three hundred mines in operation, only about seventy are important. Many of the others, some operated by only one man, are known as “country banks.” In these the coal is dug out by the farmers, who often drive thirty miles or more to one of the “banks.” At some places bunk houses and stables have been erected to provide shelter for settlers who cannot make the round trip in one day.

Alberta ranks next to Ontario in the production of natural gas, which is found chiefly about Medicine Hat and in the Viking field, which supplies Edmonton. Oil in small quantities is produced south of Calgary, and new wells are being drilled in the southeastern part of the province near the Saskatchewan border, and even north of Peace River.

The Peace River Valley, the southernmost part of which is four hundred miles above Montana, is the northern frontier of Alberta. It has been opened up largely within the last ten years. Across the British Columbia line, part of the valley has been set aside as the Peace River Block, where the settlement is controlled by the Dominion government.

The basin of the Peace River consists of a vast region of level or rolling land, much of which is thickly wooded with fir, spruce, pine, tamarack, and birch. The forests are full of moose, deer, and bear, and the beaver, lynx, marten, and muskrat are trapped for their furs. There are vast stretches of rich black loam that produce annually about a million bushels of wheat, three or four million bushels of oats, and almost a million bushels of barley. Considering the latitude, the winter climate is moderate, and in summer there is almost continual daylight for the space of three months.

This district is dotted with settlements along the route of the railway from Edmonton. It has telephone and telegraph connections with southern Alberta, and a half dozen weekly newspapers are published in its various towns. There are all together a hundred or more schools. The largest settlement is Grande Prairie, near the British Columbia border, but the oldest is the town of Peace River, which lies in a thickly wooded region on the banks of the Peace. It is two hundred and fifty miles northwest of Edmonton. The trip, which was formerly over a wagon trail and took two or three weeks, can now be made by rail in twenty-six hours.

Steamboats ply up and down Peace River for hundreds of miles, the route downstream to Fort Smith being used by many trappers and prospectors bound for the far Northwest. The trip takes one past the historic old post of Fort Vermilion, two hundred and fifty miles beyond Peace River town. To the northeast of Vermilion is said to be a herd of wood buffalo, probably the last of their species roaming wild.

A shorter route from Edmonton to the Northwest, and one that has grown in popularity since oil has been found along the Mackenzie, is down the Athabaska River, through Great Slave Lake, and down the Mackenzie to Fort Norman, the trading post for the oil region.

Let us imagine ourselves taking a trip over this route, which penetrates to the very heart of the Northwest Territories. The train leaves Edmonton only once a week. It usually starts Tuesday morning, and we should reach “End of Steel,” on the bank of the Clearwater River, the following day. Here we take one of the little motor boats that push along the freight scows carrying supplies to the trading posts during the open season, and chug down that stream for twenty miles to its junction with the Athabaska at Fort McMurray.

At Fort McMurray we take a steamer and go down the Athabaska and across the lake of that name. The river loses its identity when it empties into the lake, the river that joins Lake Athabaska and Great Slave Lake being known as the Slave. The latter stream at times flows through land soaked in oil. This “tar sand,” as it is called, has been used as paving material in Edmonton, and is said to have outlasted asphalt. It is probable that when better transportation facilities are available it will be commercially valuable.

Just before reaching Fort Smith, halfway between Lake Athabaska and Great Slave Lake, we leave our boat and ride in wagons over a portage of fifteen miles. Fort Smith is just across the Alberta boundary. It is the capital of the Northwest Territories. Here the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is all-powerful, and it must be satisfied that the traveller going farther north has food and other essentials sufficient for his trip. In this land, where supplies are brought in only once a year, no chances are taken on allowing inexperienced prospectors to become public burdens.

Two hundred miles north of Fort Smith we reach Great Slave Lake, the fourth largest inland body of water on the North American continent. It is almost three hundred miles long, and the delta that is being pushed out at the mouth of the Slave River may some day divide the lake into two parts. Great Slave Lake is drained by the mighty Mackenzie, down which we float on the last lap of our journey. This river is as long as the Missouri, and carries a much larger volume of water. It is like the mighty waterways of Siberia.

We are several days going down the Mackenzie to Fort Norman. Fifty-four miles north of here, and only sixty miles south of the arctic circle, is the first producing oil well in the Northwest Territories. The well was the cause of a miniature “oil rush” to this land that is frozen for nine months of the year. At this time no one knows how much oil there is here. The region may never be of any greater importance than it is now, or it may be another mighty oil field such as those in Oklahoma and Texas. But even if oil is found in paying quantities it will be many years before its exploitation will be commercially profitable. The nearest railway is twelve hundred miles away, and the river boats are of such shallow draft that they cannot carry heavy freight. A pipe line to Prince Rupert or Vancouver would mean an expenditure of almost one hundred million dollars, and to make such a line pay it would be necessary to produce thirty thousand barrels of oil daily.

In the meantime, prospectors have come in from at directions, travelling overland as well as by river. One man made the fifteen-hundred-mile trip from Edmonton with a dog team, and others have mushed their way over the mountains from the Klondike. Two aviators of the Imperial Oil Company attempted to fly to Fort Norman. They were obliged to land several hundred miles to the south and both planes were smashed. However, by using the undamaged parts of one plane they were able to repair the other, except for a propeller. They finally collected a pile of sled runners from a near-by trading post, stuck them together with glue made by boiling down a moose hide, and with a hunting knife carved out a pair of propellers that enabled them to fly back the eight hundred miles to Peace River.

On every hand I hear stories of how the vast Canadian Northwest is being opened up. Edmonton is at the gateway to the valleys of the Peace, the Athabaska, and the Mackenzie rivers, and each year sees more settlers penetrating the remote areas that once knew the white man only through the traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Arthur Conan Doyle has caught the spirit of this new Northwest in his “Athabaska Trail”: