The story of southern Alberta is the story of the passing of Canada’s great cattle ranches, the reclamation of millions of acres of dry land by irrigation, and the growth of general farming where once the open range stretched for hundreds of miles.

From Calgary I have ridden out to visit the mighty irrigation works of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This corporation has taken over three million acres, or a block of land forty miles wide and extending from Calgary one hundred and forty miles eastward. It is divided into three sections. The central division gets its water from the Saint Mary’s River, and the east and west divisions from the Bow River, which does not depend upon the rainfall for its volume, being fed by the snows and glaciers of the Rockies.

At Bassano, about eighty miles from Calgary, is the great Horseshoe Bend dam, where the level of the Bow has been raised forty feet. The dam is eight thousand feet long, with a spillway of seven hundred and twenty feet. From it the water flows out through twenty-five hundred miles of irrigation canals and ditches. This dam has been the means by which the semi-arid lands of southern Alberta, formerly good only for cattle grazing, have been turned into thousands of farms, raising wheat, alfalfa, and corn, as well as fruits and vegetables.

The ranching industry of Alberta was at its height during the thirty years from 1870 to 1900. With the disappearance of buffalo from the Canadian plains, cattle men from the United States began bringing their herds over the border to the grazing lands east of the foothills of the Rockies. The luxuriant prairie grass provided excellent forage, and the warm Chinook winds kept the winters so mild that the cattle could feed out-of-doors the year round. When the high ground was covered with snow, there were always river bottoms and hollows to furnish shelter and feed.

The United States cattle men were followed by Canadians and Britishers. One of the first big ranch holders was Senator Cochrane of Montreal. He owned sixty-seven thousand acres, and most of it cost him only a dollar an acre. There were other immense holdings, and the grazing industry continued to grow until it extended into southwestern Saskatchewan and included horses and sheep as well as cattle.

Then the homesteaders began to take up their claims. In 1902 the first tract of land for irrigation purposes was bought from the government by the Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, and in 1903 the Canadian Pacific Railway’s big irrigation project was begun. In May of the same year there occurred one of the severest snow storms in the history of the plains. It lasted for a week, and fully half the range cattle in what was then Alberta territory perished. The introduction of wire fences dealt another hard blow to cattle ranching. Large herds can be run all the year round only on an open range.

There are still a few big stock men in Alberta, but they have been crowded into the foothills west of the old original “cow” country. Small herds pasture on the open range also in the Peace River district. As a matter of fact, Alberta still leads the Dominion in the production of beef and breeding cattle. It has as much livestock as ever, each mixed farm having at least a few head. There are a half million dairy cattle in the province.

Most of the stock raised to-day is pure bred. There are cattle sales at Calgary every year as big as any in the United States. The favourite animal is the Shorthorn, but there are many Polled Angus and Galloways. The best breeding animals come from England, and there are some ranchmen who make a specialty of raising choice beef for the English market. Within the last ten years the cattle in Alberta have tripled in number, and their total value is now in the neighbourhood of one hundred and twenty-five million dollars.

On my way from Edmonton to Calgary I passed through the famous dairying region of Alberta. The cheese industry is still in its infancy, but the province makes more than enough butter each year to spread a slice of bread for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It supplies butter for the Yukon and Northwest Territories, and is now shipping it to England via Vancouver and the Panama Canal.

Sheep can exist on poorer pasture than cattle, and some large flocks are still ranged in the higher foothills of southern Alberta. They are chiefly Merinos that have been brought in from Montana. On the small farms the homesteaders often raise the medium-fleeced English breeds, such as Shropshires, Hampshires, and Southdowns. Some of the ranchers are experimenting in raising the karakul sheep, a native of Central Asia, whose curly black pelts are so highly prized for fur coats and wraps.

Horse raising was another big industry of early Alberta. The bronco is now almost extinct, and almost the only light-weight horse now reared is a high-bred animal valuable chiefly as a polo pony. In Alberta, as elsewhere in the Dominion and in the United States, the motor car has taken the place of the horse as a means of transportation, and nine tenths of the animals in the province to-day are of the heavy Clydesdale or Percheron types, and used solely for farm work.

I have gone through Calgary’s several meat packing houses, and have visited its thirteen grain elevators, which all together can hold four million bushels of wheat. Calgary ranks next to Montreal and the twin ports of Fort William and Port Arthur in its grain storage capacity. It is surrounded by thousands of acres of wheat lands, not in vast stretches such as we saw in Saskatchewan, but divided up among the general farming lands of the province. The city is an important industrial centre, and in some of its factories natural gas, piped from wells a hundred miles away, is used to produce power.

Calgary is less than fifty years old. Nevertheless, it has sky-scrapers, fine public buildings, and wide streets and boulevards. Many of the business buildings are of the light gray sandstone found near by, and nearly every residence is surrounded by grounds. The city lies along the Bow and Elbow rivers, and the chief residential section on the heights above these streams has magnificent views of the peaks of the Rockies, one hundred miles distant.

Like many of the big cities of Western Canada, Calgary began as a fort of the Mounted Police. That was in 1874. Its real growth dates from August, 1883, when the first train of the main line of the Canadian Pacific pulled into the town. Before that time much of the freight for the ranch lands came farther south through Macleod, which, the old-timers tell me, was the real “cow town” of southern Alberta. Goods were brought up the Missouri River to the head of navigation at Benton, Montana, and thence carried overland to Macleod in covered wagons drawn by horse, ox, or mule teams.

The cattle town of Calgary is now a matter of history, and the old cattle men who rode the western plains when Alberta was a wilderness have nearly all passed away. Indeed, it is hard to believe that this up-to-date place is the frontier town I found here some years ago. Then cowboys galloped through the streets, and fine-looking Englishmen in riding clothes played polo on the outskirts. The Ranchers’ Club of that day was composed largely of the sons of wealthy British families. Many of them were remittance men who had come out here to make their fortunes and grow up with the country. Some came because they were ne’er-do-wells or their families did not want them at home, and others because they liked the wild life of the prairies. They received a certain amount of money every month or every quarter, most of which was spent in drinking and carousing. The son of an English lord, for instance, could be seen almost any day hanging over the bar, and another boy who had ducal blood in his veins would cheerfully borrow a quarter of you in the lean times just before remittance day.

Others of these men brought money with them to invest. One of them, the son of Admiral Cochrane of the British navy, owned a big ranch near Calgary on which he kept six thousand of the wildest Canadian cattle. Every year or so he brought in a new instalment of bulls from Scotland, giving his agents at home instructions to send him the fiercest animals they could secure. When asked why he did this, he replied:

“You see, I have to pay my cowboys so much a month, and I want to raise stock that will make them earn their wages. Besides, it adds to the life of the ranch.”

“I went out once to see Billy Cochrane,” said a Calgary banker to me. “When I arrived at the ranch I found him seated on the fence of one of his corrals watching a fight between two bulls. As he saw me he told me to hurry and have a look. I climbed up beside him, and as I watched the struggle going on beneath, I said: ‘Why, Billy, if you do not separate those bulls one will soon kill the other.’ ‘Let them kill,’ was the reply. ‘This is the real thing. It is better than any Spanish bull fight, and I would give a bull any day for the show.’

“We watched the struggle for more than an hour, Cochrane clapping his hands and urging the animals on to battle. Finally one drove his horns into the side of the other and killed it. To my protest against this wanton waste of valuable live stock, Cochrane replied: ‘Oh! it doesn’t matter at all. We must have some fun.’”

Another famous character of old-time Calgary was Dickie Bright, the grandson of the man after whom Bright’s disease was named. Dickie had been supplied with money by his grandfather and sent out. He invested it all in a ranch and then asked for a large remittance from time to time to increase his herds. He sent home florid stories of the money he was making and how he was fast becoming a cattle king. Shortly after writing one of his most enthusiastic letters he received a dispatch from New York saying that his grandfather had just arrived and was coming out to see him. The boy was in a quandary. He had spent his remittance in riotous living and he had no cattle. Adjoining him, however, was one of the largest ranch owners of the West. Dickie confided his trouble to this man and persuaded him to lend a thousand head of his best stock for one night.

“Granddad can stay but a day,” said he, “and I will see that they are driven back to you the next morning.”

The rancher was something of a sportsman himself, and he finally consented to help the boy. The cattle were sent over. Old Doctor Bright duly arrived and was driven out to the herd, which Dickie said was only a sample of his stock that had been brought in to be shown to his visitor. The boy added, however, that it was not good to keep the cattle penned up, and that they must go back upon the range right away. The old doctor was delighted, and before he left he gave Dickie a check for ten thousand dollars to develop the business.

Another young remittance man added to his income by pretending to have a gopher farm. His father had never heard the word “gopher” before, and supposed that the tiny ground squirrels were some kind of valuable live stock. He was, therefore, quite pleased when his boy wrote an enthusiastic letter saying that he had now seven hundred blooded gophers on his range. When sonny added that the animals were in good condition, but that it would take a thousand dollars more to carry them through the winter for the market next spring, father sent on the money.