[Illustration: As Saskatchewan was not made a province until 1904, Regina is one of the youngest capital cities in Canada. It was for many years the headquarters of the Mounted Police for all the Northwest.] CHAPTER XXIII SASKATCHEWAN We have left Winnipeg and are now travelling across the great Canadian prairie, which stretches westward to the Rockies for a distance of eight hundred miles. This land, much of which in summer is in vast fields of golden grain, is now bare and brown, extending on and on in rolling treeless plains as far as our eyes can reach. Most of it is cut up into sections a mile square, divided by highway spaces one hundred feet wide. However, an automobile or wagon can go almost anywhere on the prairie, and everyone makes his own road. Sixty miles west of Winnipeg we pass Portage la Prairie, near where John Sanderson, the man who filed the first homestead on the prairies, is still living. This part of the Dominion was then inhabited by Indians, and its only roads were the buffalo trails made by the great herds that roamed the country. To-day it is dotted with the comfortable homes of prosperous farmers, and the transcontinental railways have brought it within a few days’ travel of the Atlantic and the Pacific seaboards. A hundred and fifty miles farther west we cross the boundary into Saskatchewan, the greatest wheat province of the Dominion. It has an area larger than that of any European country except Russia, and is as large as France, Belgium, and Holland combined. From the United States boundary, rolling grain lands extend northward through more than one third of its area. The remainder is mostly forest, thinning out toward Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabaska at the north, and inhabited chiefly by deer, elk, moose, and black bear. There are saw-mills at work throughout the central part of the province, and the annual lumber cut is worth in the neighbourhood of two million dollars. Except at the southwest, Saskatchewan is well watered. The Saskatchewan River, which has many branches, drains the southern and central sections. This stream in the early days was a canoe route to the Rockies. For a long time afterward, when the only railway was the Canadian Pacific line in the southern part of the province, the river was the highway of commerce for the north. It was used largely by settlers who floated their belongings down it to the homesteads they had taken up on its banks. Now the steamboats that plied there have almost entirely disappeared. The northern part of the province is made up of lakes and rivers so numerous that some of them have not yet been named. The southwest is a strip of semi-arid land that has been brought under cultivation by irrigation and now raises large crops of alfalfa.