I was going to say that the first western freight the Canadian Pacific had to fetch out was cattle from the ranches. But, as an old railway man says, “The first live stock carried was dead stock.” The first substantial freight movement was that of buffalo skeletons. As soon as the prairie section got running, Métis and Indians were employed to gather up the millions of bones scattered over the plains where they had been shot down by generations of hunters. Great stacks of these bones were piled up like cord-wood beside the track—Regina’s first name was Pile of Bones—and thousands of carloads were shipped down to Chicago and other centres for use in sugar refining. 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.