CHAPTER VII.

LIFE ON THE PRAIRIE.

‘You will find Moose Jaw a very pretty place,’ said a gentleman to me as I left Winnipeg; and certainly it is a pretty place, though not exactly according to an Englishman’s idea of prettiness.

It consists of a railway-station and an assemblage of wooden huts and shops, which have all been called into existence within the last twelve months. It boasts a weekly organ (such as it is), two or three places of worship, one or two billiard-rooms, and a post-office—not a tent, as in some parts of the country in which I have been, but a real wooden-house. The shopkeepers seem to have nothing to do, and the pigs perambulate the streets, evidently enjoying the fine freedom allowed them in this part of the world. There are at this time about 700 or 800 settlers, some of the farmers who came out last year having moved further west.

I am writing in the railway-station, in the waiting-rooms of which are many farmers, all on their way to Calgary—for which place, also, I am bound, expecting to start at the very inconvenient hour of two p.m.

The scene, as I sit, is not cheering. Far as the eye can reach there is the prairie. It was the same all the way from Winnipeg. It will be the same all the way to Calgary, some 400 or 500 miles hence. It is intensely hot, and men and women sit in the open air, under such shade as the wooden houses afford. It is intensely cold in the winter. Not a tree is to be seen, or a hill, or a farmhouse; nothing to relieve the monotony of the sea of grass land on every side, except here and there a prairie fire—the first step to be taken before the farmer commences the cultivation of the soil; and I must own a prairie fire by night is rather a pretty sight.

I parted last night with a General and his wife, who have come to settle about forty miles off. At present he and his family have no fresh meat, and he has to make an arrangement with a Brandon butcher, about a hundred and fifty miles off, to supply him with a Sunday joint. Tinned meats his family have tried, and he has got with him a fresh joint of meat, which he purchased in Winnipeg; but there are prairie chickens always to be had, and in some places, as we came along, we saw an abundance of wild ducks on the Assiniboine River, and in swamps, over which we rushed in the Pullman car.

This luxury cannot be expected in Moose Jaw. Here there is no water at all. Last year the farmers had no rain, and they fear they will have none now. As it is, the prairie begins to look a little scorched. I should be loth to spend the remainder of my days here; but a farmer may make a living, and so may a farm-labourer. As to any other class of people here, there is no opening at all. The town is full of shopkeepers, barristers, auctioneers, and dealers. Mechanics who come out will starve. When the land around is taken up they will have a chance, but not till then.

As I sit, a dark figure beckons me to come to him. He has a Jim Crow hat, a blanket around his martial form, and a gayer one in front. He has rings in his ears, bracelets on his arms, and a string of some kind of beads around his neck. He offers me his hand, and I shake it. Then I commence a conversation. ‘What you called?’ I say. He makes an unintelligible reply. ‘You Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson?’ I ask; and again he gives an unintelligent grunt. I offer him a cigar, and he sits down on his haunches in the shade. He is one of the Black Bull men, who have been chased from the States, in consequence of having made that part of the world too hot for them. They are not natives of this country, but have settled in the prairie two or three miles off. I tell him to be a good boy, and I dare say he will obey my injunction as literally as any other man in England or anywhere else.

Again I look, and two red-coated warriors greet me. They are on the look-out for contraband, and are as fine and clean and well-set fellows as any I have seen anywhere. They belong to the mounted police, and live chiefly in the saddle, as there are but five hundred of them to all this gigantic North-West. I had already made their acquaintance. At the first station we came to after leaving Manitoba, one of them came into the car, gave a searching glance all round, and then walked out. ‘What was that for?’ I asked the General. ‘Oh! he has come to see if we have any whisky. They are very particular. I was coming this way once, when a fellow traveller took out his pocket flask and began drinking. The mounted policeman who saw him do it immediately took his flask from him, and emptied it there and then.’ This strict prohibition is the result, not of the prevalence of Temperance sentiment in the North-West, but rather of fear of the Indians, who are better shots than the mounted police, although not so well provided with fire-arms. The people seem to anticipate that the law will be relaxed when the whites are more numerous and the Indians fewer. The law has had good results, nevertheless. In obedience to it the German gives up his lager-beer. And next to the Scotch the Germans make the best emigrants.

The General tells me such is the fineness of the climate that he finds he can get on very well without his customary glass of grog. At Moose Jaw the inhabitants take to Hop Bitters instead, and one of the institutions of the place is the Hop Bitters Brewery.

I believe you may keep whisky if you get a permit, and a permit is not difficult, I understand, to get.

I am sorry to say the General, in spite of the mounted police, offered me a drop of whisky, and at a later period a friend, as we sat smoking, asked me if I was ready for a ‘smile.’ Of course, in my ignorance, I replied in the affirmative. Diving under his seat, he brought out a fine bottle of real Scotch, and, mixing it with water, offered me a ‘smile.’ You may be sure I indignantly refused. You cannot expect me to be a party to the violation of the law.

These Indians just now are creating a little apprehension, especially the tribe under the renowned Yellow Calf, who it was hoped had taken to farming, and who last year had a good crop, and bought a reaping machine; but the Indians are very restless, and Yellow Calf has sent a messenger to rouse the tribes, and a strong party of the mounted police are detached to watch his movements. They are dying off the face of the earth, and we may well suppose that they bear no love to the white man, who has taken possession of the lands which they once knew to be their own. Here the people evidently think that the sooner the Indians are exterminated the better. The men do not work; all that is done by the squaws—wretched women with long black hair, and little black eyes as round as beads, and who rejoice in blankets quite as unromantic, but quite as comfortable, as those of their lords and masters. Hitherto, I have not made way with the dusky beauties, but I may be more successful by-and-by.

I believe the Indians have a real grievance against the Canadian Government. It was agreed that they should be settled in reserves, and that they should have a certain amount of food supplied. This compact was fairly observed by the Canadian Government; but in an evil hour they made this part of their duty over to contractors, and we know what contractors are, all the world over. The Indians say faith has not been kept with them, and it is to be feared that they have good reason for saying so. Just now they are starving, as this is the close season, and they are not permitted to hunt or fish. They say that there is no close season as far as the stomach is concerned, and from personal experience I may say I believe they are right.

It is now noon on the prairie, and I am dying of the heat. Oh, for the forest shade! Oh, for the crystal stream! Alas! the water here is not good for the stranger, and I fear to touch it. At Toronto I managed pretty well on Apollinaris water; but out here nothing of the kind is to be had. What am I to do? The beef here is so tough that you can’t cut it with a knife, and must have belonged to the oldest importation from my native land; and I have to pay a price for which I can have a luxurious repast in London. O Spiers and Pond! O Gordon and Co.! O respected Ring and Brymer, under whose juicy joints and sparkling wines the ancient Corporation of London renews its youth! How my soul longs for your flesh-pots in this dry and thirsty land, where no water is! I have been out on the prairie under the burning sun. It is cracked, and parched, and bare, and the flowers refuse to bloom, and only the gigantic grasshopper or the pretty but repulsive snake meets my eye. That dim line, protracted to the horizon east and west, is the railroad. That far-off collection of sheds is the rising town of Moose Jaw. That blue line on the horizon, which makes me pant for the sea, is a mirage. Far off are some white tents glistening in the sun. They are the wigwams of the Indians.

Like the Wandering Jew, again I urge on my wild career, and here I am with noble savages—so hideous that words fail to tell their hideousness. No wonder the squaws are bashful. They have little to be proud of, though they have necklaces and rings and ornaments around their belts, and gay shawls, which have come from some far away factory. Some of them have put a streak of red paint where the black hair divides. Others are painted as much as any Dowager of Mayfair, and have ear ornaments that reach down to the middle. Not one is fairly passable.

Rousseau and the sentimentalists, who talk of the savage, greatly err in their estimate of that noble individual. He is lazy and filthy, gluttonous, and would be a wine-bibber had he the chance. I looked into his tent, and there he was sitting naked, whilst his squaw was cooking a bit of a horse with the hair on for his dinner. He is unpleasant as a neighbour for many reasons, and is indifferent how he gets a dollar, or how his squaw earns it either. All along the prairie he seems to have nothing to do but to rush to the nearest railway station, and sit there all day in the hope that some passing traveller may give him tobacco or cash, the only two things on earth he seems to care for. Apparently, the mothers are fond of their young. The men are clever at stealing horses, and the traveller must look after his horses by night, or he may find them, as friends of my own did, gone in the morning. But to return to the prairie, it is an awful place to travel in alone; it is so easy to lose one’s way. I heard wonderful stories in this respect. Fancy being lost on the prairie; nothing but the grass to eat; nothing but the sky to look at; nothing in the shape of human speech to listen to. Out here by myself, I felt more than once how appropriate the language of the poet beloved by our grandmothers:

‘O Solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place.’

There is a good deal of hardship to be encountered by any who would penetrate to the dim and mysterious region we denominate the North-West. For instance, I left Moose Jaw at half-past two yesterday morning by a train timed to arrive there at a quarter-past one; at which unreasonable hour I had to leave my bed, just as I was getting into a sound sleep, and to catch the train, which was so crowded that I could scarcely get a seat, and the atmosphere of which was not redolent of the odours of Araby the Blest. There I had to sit till the time I mention, as the engine managed to get off the line. Deeply do I pity the poor emigrants tempted into this part of the world by the delusive utterances of sham emigration agents at home and local journals—which, when they are not abusing one another, seem to delight in giving representations of the country by no means literally to be depended on; the only thing to do is to go to the fountain head—the Government office. People who make up their minds to come into these parts must learn to put up with a good deal. Here is a sad case, a very exceptional one, I admit, but I am bound to tell the whole truth. I quote from a Winnipeg paper: ‘David Kirkpatrick, his wife, and nine children, the eldest a girl of twelve, arrived from Scotland on Wednesday. A part of the voyage was made on board the _Algoma_. The cold was intense, and many of the passengers suffered severely. Among these was Mrs. Kirkpatrick. The exposure, in her case, brought on a kind of low fever, and the poor woman died yesterday morning. The husband’s case is deplorable. With nine children on his hands, what is he to do? He has a longing desire to get back to his friends in Scotland, but has not the means. Will the public come to his rescue? He and his helpless children are to be found in the immigrant sheds.’ I fear such cases are far from uncommon. Imagine a poor woman leaving her native land, crossing the restless Atlantic, perhaps feeble with poor living, and worried with the care of nine helpless children, perhaps scarce recovered from sea-sickness, put on board an emigrant train, snatching hasty meals, or such accommodation as is provided at the expense of Dominion Government (I do not blame them or the railway authorities, they do all they can), travelling at uncertain hours, and arriving at her destination utterly overcome by fatigue. What wonder is it that a poor woman now and then sacrifices her life in the attempt to build up a new home in this Promised Land? No wonder that now and then death comes to such just as they reach Jordan and think that they are to reap the fruit of all their weary toil.

[Picture: Pioneer Store at Brandon in 1882]

As I left Brandon on my way hither I saw by the side of one of the stations quite a little village of tents. ‘What is that?’ said I to one of the mounted police. ‘The emigrants,’ was his reply. ‘They do say,’ said he slowly, ‘that there is some sickness amongst them.’ Whether the rumour was founded on fact I had no time to inquire, but certainly, when one thinks of the hardships of the emigrants’ lot, and the peculiar unfitness of many of them to stand hardships, I should not be surprised to learn that such was the case. The further I come out, the less demand I find for emigrants. It is only ploughmen who are wanted here. The man who will succeed is the farmer with a small capital. He has a splendid chance. When the country is settled the mechanic may have his turn.

But remember, after all has been said and done, this is the Great Lone Land. Emigration here is but a drop in the ocean as regards results. I am now some 850 miles to the north-west of Winnipeg. The country is an unbroken level, and, with the exception of Brandon and Moose Jaw, you see hardly a farmhouse, hardly any ploughed land, no sheep grazing on the downs, no herds fattening in the prairie; not a single tree to hide one from the snows of winter or the suns of summer. By day you melt in the sun, by night you shiver with the cold. When we came to a swamp now and then we saw a few wild ducks. Once in the course of the weary ride we saw two or three deer. All the rest was a parched plain, with here and there some lovely flowers, and with buffalo bones bleaching wherever you turn your eye. In some parts the soil was strongly impregnated with alkali, so much so, indeed, that it made the ground white, and left a crust of what looked like ice on the lakes and ponds. Can that huge region ever grow wheat and fatten flocks? The experience of the experimental farms proves that it will. All I know is that ages must elapse before Moose Jaw shall be a Manchester, or Brandon, in spite of its many advantages, the headquarters of the agricultural interest, with a corn market equalling that of Norwich or Ipswich. Yet there are parts of Manitoba which contain undoubtedly as fine corn-growing country as any in the world.

This is especially true of the new tract of country opened up by the Canadian Pacific in the south-west. As a rule, the further from the railway the land is, the better it is. At the same time, it is to be remembered that a farmer who has no railway access is at a great disadvantage, and that in the winter it is no joke sending a man with a team of oxen and a waggon-load of produce twenty or thirty miles across the prairie, where a snowstorm, or ‘a blorrard’ at any time, may occur.

This is the great drawback of Manitoba: it has no trees. In Ontario the farmer has his crops protected by a belt of trees from the inclemency of the weather. But, then, in Manitoba the farmer has this advantage, that he has not to devote the greater part of his time and money to the cutting down of his trees. He has only to plough the soil, and there is an abundant harvest. If Manitoba lacks trees, it is expected to yield a plentiful supply of coal. As I came along last night we saw a station supplied with gas. It appears that in boring for water they discovered gas, which they now utilize to light the station and to work a steam engine. This was not, however, in Manitoba, but in Alberta, just after we had left Medicine Hat, that pretty oasis in the desert, with the usual supply of hotels, billiard-rooms, and stores, and where I came into contact with the Cree Indians, a race even uglier than the Sioux Indian, whom I found at Moose Jaw. They have higher cheekbones, and don’t plait their hair, and some of the old men reminded me not a little in outline of the late Lord Beaconsfield, whom the Canadians consider Sir John Macdonald strongly resembles.

It is curious to note how the buffalo has vanished from the region which was formerly his happy hunting-ground. He has now forsaken the country; you see only his bones and his track. Some people say that the railway has done it, and others that the destruction is the work of the Americans, who say, ‘Kill the buffalo and you get rid of the Indians.’ These latter are to be met with everywhere, clad in flannel garments radiant with all the hues of the rainbow. Chiefly they affect blankets—red, blue, or green. At Calgary I came across more of them—this time of the Blackfoot tribe. There is very little difference in any of them. In one thing they all resemble each other, that is, they don’t seem to care much about work. As English does not happen to be one of their accomplishments, my intercourse with them has been of a somewhat limited character.

For the sake of intending emigrants let me dispel a couple of popular errors. One that the heat is most enjoyable; another, that it is a cheap country to come to. Neither assertion is exactly the truth. As I write the heat is insufferable, and yet this is early spring. I saw snow yesterday in a hollow of the hills not yet melted, and last night, sleeping in a stuffy Pullman car full of people, I was awoke with the cold. The other fallacy which I would expose is that this is a cheap country. On the contrary, it is nothing of the kind. Paxton Hood, if I remember aright, once gave a lecture on America under the title of the ‘Land of the Big Dollar.’ If I were to lecture on Canada I should call it the ‘Land of the Little Dollar.’ A dollar here is of no account. This morning I went into a shop and had a bottle of ginger-beer, and the cost was one shilling; and this, too, after I had been administering a little ‘soft sawder’ to the fair American damsel who waited on me (she was from Michigan, and was remarkably wide awake), in the mistaken hope that she would be a little reasonable in her charge. Everyone smokes cigars all day long, and yet Canadian cigars are as costly as they are atrocious. Fortunately one can’t spend money in drink, as that is prohibited, and the chemists at Calgary have recently got into a scrape for supplying customers with essence of lemon, by means of which they manage to fuddle themselves. The price of fruit is prohibitory; cucumbers, such as you in London would give three halfpence for, are here at Calgary as much as a shilling. Eggs are four shillings a dozen; meat and bacon and ham are as dear as in England, and not a quarter so good. I am appalled as I see how the money goes; I fear to be stranded at the foot of the Rockies. If I get back to the west I shall have to work my passage back to England as fireman or stoker, or in some such ignoble capacity. If I was younger I would turn gardener. I believe anyone who would come out here with sufficient capital to plant a nursery ground or to stock a good fruit garden would make a lot of money, as the farmers, of course, do not think of such things, and the supply is quite unequal to the demand. In Calgary they did not have three inches of frost all last winter. It is true they have even now a sharp nip of frost; but I hear of peas flourishing at a farmer’s close by, and the region abounds with wild strawberries and raspberries and cherries. If they grow wild, surely they will equally prosper under more careful culture.

A Special Committee of the Dominion House of Commons which was appointed last session to obtain evidence upon the agricultural industries of the country, examined several witnesses as to the suitability of Canada, and especially of the Canadian North-West, for the growth of forest and fruit trees. The testimony given showed that there are many varieties of fruit which thrive in Great Britain, Germany, Russia, and other European countries, which would, if transplanted, be equally suited to the climate of the North-West, it being stated that excellent fruit is grown in great quantities in Europe at points where the temperature ranges considerably lower than it does in Canada. It is urged that the example of the Russian and German Governments should be followed in the establishment of plantations of fruit trees and experimental farms in different parts of the Dominion, to test the kind of trees and fruits best suited to the different localities.

Since my return the following paper has been put into my hands:—‘The following is a reliable estimate of this season’s wheat crop in Manitoba and the North-West Territories:—Estimated wheat acreage in Manitoba, 350,000; yield at 23 bushels per acre, 8,000,000; estimated wheat acreage in North-West Territories, 65,000; yield at 23 bushels per acre, or 1,500,000 bushels—a total of 415,000 acres and 9,500,000 bushels. Deducting 2,760,000 bushels for home consumption and seed, a surplus remains of 6,740,000 bushels. Everything now points to a larger yield per acre than that of 1883.

[Picture: Harvesting on the Bell Farm, Indian Head, N.W.I.]

‘Operations have been carried on very extensively this season at the Bell Farm, in the Canadian North-West, which is said to be the largest farm in the world. Though this is but the second year of cultivation, there are already 8,000 acres under crop, 5,000 to 6,000 of which are under wheat, and a portion of the remainder under flax. Last year 10,000 bushels were exported from the farm, and the excellence of the grain secured for it a good price in the market. The crop of this year is estimated to be 40 per cent. better. Experts from Montana who have recently visited this section of the Canadian North-West, state that they never saw any grain in the United States to equal that on and around the Bell Farm.’