CHAPTER XVII

AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS

There was a time when Englishmen got a very bad name in Canada. It was not to be wondered at. For a long time English youths, who came to be known as Remittance Men, used to be shipped out by relations anxious only to get rid of them. These helped to create an opinion that Englishmen were more remarkable for their drinking than their working powers; and when to them was added shipload after shipload of unemployables from yet lower classes, Canadians began to get impatient of English immigrants. It was not logical of them to suppose that these were favourable specimens of our working-classes; it is never logical to suppose that the best men of a country are ready to leave it. Logic, however, is difficult to insist on under these circumstances, and though there were plenty of Englishmen even then, and even more Scots perhaps, who were obviously as good as any farmers on the {162} prairie, the bad name of the English clung to them. That is all, or nearly all, changed now; and the project connected with those farms, which came to be known in the English papers as the Ready-made farms, proved that the Canadian Pacific Railway Company at any rate, which is the biggest landowner in Canada, was ready to welcome English farmers to the land, if they could get the right sort. Readers will perhaps remember that the idea of the company was to provide farms ploughed, irrigated, sowed, and furnished with house and out-buildings, into which English colonists, having been handed the front-door key, could enter--straight from England--as well equipped almost as settlers who had lived there for years. The purchase money was to be spread over a certain term, after which the land would become the property of the farmers.

The plan saves all that intermediate period during which the ordinary homesteader has to set up his shack, sink his well, and generally unsettle himself over the tedious work of settling in. Good farmers are not necessarily born pioneers; and since the prairie in winter, when work is slack, does not show a very hospitable climate to new-comers and those unaccustomed to it, it generally happens that {163} the English immigrant has to waste the spring and perhaps the whole working season in the unremunerative business of settling in. The Ready-made farms were intended to save all this time and trouble, and they were at once filled--in the spring of 1910--by specially picked men from the old country. The men were not all necessarily farmers, but they were, hypothetically, at any rate, men of intelligence and grit.

I wanted to see how they were getting on after six months of this new life on the prairie. For that purpose I took train from Calgary with a friend, back along the line to Strathmore, which is forty miles east, and is the station for Nightingale, as this first colony of ready-made farmers has been named. Strathmore itself is not peculiarly beautiful or peculiarly interesting, though it has a demonstration farm which is. We went over the demonstration farm with Professor Eliott, its manager, who struck me as one of the keenest and most interesting men of the West. What he does not know of the productivity of the prairie is probably not worth knowing; and his experience seems to be at the service of any farmer who has the intelligence to apply for it. He showed us his barns and splendid teams of horses and leviathan oats, and the little trees which he has planted {164} in this country where it was thought no trees would grow, and which he believes will change the face of it in a few years. We were full of the future of the prairie when we got back to Strathmore, and put up for the night in the last bedroom of the one and only hotel. The two of us were lucky to get that last bedroom containing a double bed to ourselves, for more often even than in Calgary six people sleep in such a room and are very glad of the accommodation. So I was told. It shows how things move in Alberta; what a hustle there is upon the country.

We tossed for the bed, and I got it, and the other man took two blankets and the floor. I slept very well, especially after a mounted policeman came in and threw out two gentlemen next door who were, as the hotel boy tersely put it, 'seeing snakes together.' My friend slept less well. The room was small, not much bigger than the bed, and we could not get the window to stay open. It had not been constructed with a view to admitting fresh air. Still, after breakfast in a dark chamber, where about thirty guests of every profession and clothing (but all land-seekers) ate in silence, we started pretty fit for Nightingale in a two-horse rig.

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I wish I could describe the prairie. Harvesting was over, so that in any case the leagues of golden wheat which you read about in advertisements were not visible. It was another kind of monotony altogether that we drove through--a kind I cannot begin to suggest the charm of. It was a kind of bare, rolling, sunburnt country, with a high sea-wind blowing through it, and waves of dust and an endless sky. Intensely wearisome or intensely refreshing it must be, according to a man's temperament; and going there from trees and hills must be like changing from a room with patterned paper to one with whitewashed walls. And then the soil, light and fertile, stoneless, ready for the plough--the farmer wants no variety of that.

We drove fourteen miles, as far as I can remember, to get to Nightingale, and it was all bad driving. Alberta seems to want roads badly. In the old ranching days roads mattered less. The prairie was a ready-made riding country, and nothing was produced or needed that could not, so to speak, go of itself across country. 'I never owned a plough the seventeen years I was there,' a retired rancher told me proudly. 'It was a fine country then.' But it is a fine country now, too, and going to be finer still when it has roads. At present even {166} the roadways are changing. Once you could go everywhere. Now from day to day a new farmer takes up a new piece of land, and what was the road is enclosed by a wire fence.

One of the most inspiriting farms we passed was that of a man who had been out from Cheshire only three months. He was now a chicken rancher--kept fowls, as we say; and in his brief occupation had got up--off a quarter block--eighty tons of hay, besides winning thirty-eight prizes at Albertan poultry shows. This would seem to show that Alberta is not yet rich in pure bred fowls. The Cheshire chicken rancher said he hoped to show the people round what a good table bird ought to look like. He was already a Canadian in all but accent. May he prosper!

After talking with him we drove on again towards Nightingale in the same sea-wind along the same bad roads. The sameness of the country was amazing; nor should I have known in the end that we had come to Nightingale but for the man driving us. 'See that avenue?' he said. 'The shacks standing along that are the farms. It seems more sociable being along a road.' 'Certainly,' I said. So it is more sociable to live along a road, provided you know it is a road. I {167} didn't, but the colonists did, and that was the main thing. We found those we visited apparently contented and undoubtedly hopeful. Canada has the gift of making men hopeful. Though it had been in this part a very poor year, owing to drought, and though the irrigation had not been properly ready (but accidents will happen, and the company was charging only a nominal rent as a result of this) the farmers seemed as cheery as they would have been dismal in England. The crops had been poor, but they would do for chicken-feed. A bumper year was a sure thing some time or other. The future held no clouds. They were going to study Canadian methods suited to the country. I rubbed my eyes. These sentiments were being enunciated by an English farmer, who was meanwhile giving us a most hospitable English lunch. He was going to tell more people to come out. It was the finest farming land possible, once you get the water on it. Only one must take local advice how to run things. It was no good standing out, and knowing better than people on the spot, as one of the colonists was doing. He, I gathered, was the only man regarded as likely to do badly, being determined to stick to the methods of his English forebears. His leading {168} wrongheadedness was in declining to believe that the winter was going to be or could be as long and as hard as people said, and he had not got in half the food needful for his cattle.

I suppose, but for that winter, the prairie would be the most sought-after country in the world. But for that winter, however, it would not possess the amazing friable soil it does. As has been remarked, one cannot have everything all the time. The winter is very severe, and there should be no disguising of the fact, nor indeed any exaggerating of it. Formerly its hardships were no doubt exaggerated. People had no use for a hard winter. Nowadays leisured people go in search of it--on the understanding, however, that it shall be made easy for them. They would like it less if they had to work in it in a below zero temperature, twenty or thirty miles from anywhere. I do not say that work under such conditions should or would disgust healthy and energetic men, provided they were prepared for it. It might even delight them. But it should be prepared for. English farmers in particular should be made to understand the drawbacks as well as the advantages of the new land they are going to. Honesty is in fact the best {169} emigration policy. Given that, it is tolerably certain that these transplanted English farmers are going to find it more than worth while to have settled in Nightingale or any of the newer prairie colonies, and what is more--Canada is going to find it more than worth while to have them settled there.

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