The Book of the West The story of western Canada, its birth and early adventures, its youthful combats, its peaceful settlement, its great transformation, and its present ways

THE KING of the West was no longer the buffalo. From the time the Company opened its first fort on the Bay, the beaver was king; and his reign lasted two hundred years. White me...

AWAY WE glide, down the eastern slope. We have entered Alberta now. A farming Province? Yes, all the Prairie Provinces are. That is their chief glory, for agriculture is the one...

THE MUSIC of a foaming torrent mingles with the softened hum of mowers and roar of heavy trains rushing wheat to the steamers at Fort William, as we plane up—not down—to the sou...

THERE were only fifteen hundred white folk in Manitoba at the time of the trouble in 1870, but around them lived ten thousand people of mixed race. Three-fifths of these owed th...

LOOK far enough, and we see him, a wanderer with his little family, starting from the heart of Asia, hunting and fishing as they go, camping for a few years or a century in one...

But for that wild-goose chase, carried on by brave British sailors from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, our Dominion of Canada, stretching from sea to sea, would never have...

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 rang...

ONE DAY a strange piece of news came to an Indian prairie camp. The men and women, squatting on the grass, and smoking their willow-bark, discussed the great news, and even the...

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 oxe...

Our “garden” is so big that we should still need months of travel to see it all, even now when trains are running over 20,000 miles of western railways. Our lawns and beds are m...

FOR HUNDREDS of years the West had now been explored—inland, to find new routes for the fur trade, and up in the north to find a new sea route from Europe to Asia—but no explore...

DO YOU see that rough man with a key in his hand? It looks like a spade, you say—and so it is; but it is doing the work of a key. He strikes it into the soil; he digs up a sod....

THAT BUGLE again! You cannot hear it, but I know it is calling, for to-morrow is the birthday of the giant twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan. One more night under the stars, a bri...

NO; BUT out in the vast beyond were the makings of trouble enough. From little Manitoba to the mountains, the thousand miles of plain, then vaguely known as “The Saskatchewan,”...

The most surprising things used to happen, right here in the West, with no man here to see them. Mother Earth and her elder children had the most extraordinary adventures before...

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.