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 waysKennedy, Howard Angus
History
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
Kennedy, Howard Angus
Northwest, Canadian
Do you hear the hum of bees? They are flying to and from that cottage
yonder. The lady knitting at the door, under a shady porch of wild
hop-vine, says she makes $10 per square foot of her “holding,” which is
a two-by-two wooden stand with a hive on it. The bees pasture on the
neighbors’ alfalfa, and bring her $40 worth of honey in a season. Reckon
what that comes to per acre, if you have the time and arithmetic.
Somebody must have reckoned it up, for he has just brought in ten
million bees for distribution through these Western Provinces.
Eastward still we fly. Do you smell gas? That is the “medicine” of
Medicine Hat. Puncture the earth, and up it comes: ready-made light and
heat. Hot-house flowers grown by that heat have beautified the tables of
Montreal, 2,000 miles away.
Here we are skimming over a cattle ranch. The old-style ranch is not
quite dead, but is on its last legs—like the old-style caterpillar that
shrivels up into a chrysalis before its resurrection into a beautiful
new-style butterfly. Listen to the rancher talking to one of his
neighbors. “I’ve got to go out of business,” says he.
“No,” says neighbor; “just change it, as I did. I used to let the beasts
rustle, and turn them off as four or five-year-olds. Now, the market for
that sort of stuff is gone. I breed them and feed them through the
winter, so they’re in fine shape as two-year-olds, and at the worst of
times I get a good enough price for a good beast. Here’s the latest
Government report from the Winnipeg stockyards: ‘The market was draggy
owing to the poor quality of the offerings, but there was a good demand
for anything showing quality and flesh.’ They’ve been telling us that
for years, and it’s time we took it in.”
Hear the music rising from the next ranch—sheep baa-ing for their
lambs. Their owner was not satisfied with the common range ewes,
weighing about 100 pounds and giving five or six pounds of wool. Six
years ago he began buying pure-bred rams, and now his average is 175
pounds of sheep and nearly ten pounds of wool. Quality, only quality
pays. And quality in the beast shows quality in the man.
We are in Saskatchewan already. Here is another fine Parliament Building
in the middle of a garden, with pleasure boats on a lake. Little “Pile
of Bones,” as it was before the railway came, is now Regina, Queen City
of the Middle Province. On a cabinet minister’s window-sill is a
beautiful vase. No, it is not imported from England or France; it is
made of fine white Saskatchewan clay, the only deposit known in Canada.
But it is not this rare white clay that makes the wealth of
Saskatchewan; it is the common brown dirt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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