The children and grandchildren of those hardy eastern pioneers made just the right pioneering stuff for the newly opened West. They were reinforced by descendants of the folk their ancestors had left behind in the Old Country, now coming out to Western Canada direct,—English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, even Manxmen and Channel Islanders, Scandinavians, and others from Northern Europe. These were our nearest relations on that continent, descendants of the men left behind long centuries ago when their raiding kinsfolk settled in the British Isles; and now they sent contingents straight to the British prairies in Canada. Many of the same stock came in early, beginning long before the railway opened, from the Norse colony in Iceland which had “discovered America” five hundred years before Columbus. From the south came “Americans,” practically all of the same stock as the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, or of the Celtic stock to which most of the Highland Scots, Irish, Welsh and French belong. Many coming in from across the line were natives of Eastern Canada who had heard “the call of the West” while the only West ready to receive them was that of the States. The newcomers spread over the prairie—spread so fast and so far, in fact, that they had to endure long isolation before any railway could reach them. “I had to haul my wheat 80 miles,” one old settler says, “and then got forty cents a bushel for it.” But he was “a sticker,” and is now one of the most prosperous farmers in the country. Not owing to wheat, however; he was a stockman, long before live stock became popular. Wheat became King of the Plains, and few there were who would not bow down to him. The reign of King Steer came first, however. Before the railway arrived, with the mass of settlers, the chief industry of the plains was ranching. The buffalo disappeared, but their place was partly filled by great herds of cattle, driven in from the States and roaming at large over the plains of our south-west and the foothills of the Rockies. Their offspring were rounded up when the time came, year after year, and driven across the line for sale. The rancher and his cowboys were almost the only white inhabitants—with the Mounted Police, who had to protect them from invading cattle and horse thieves, as they protected the Indians from whiskey-smugglers.