CHAPTER XI

Riding the Plains in 1905

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 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 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 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 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.

_Antelope on the Alert_

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 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 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.

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.”

“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 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.

“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 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 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.”