“Well, I saw one of them plowing with a team of oxen, and there was something wrong with the plow and he couldn’t find out what, let alone make a straight furrow. The others were picking up stones and carrying them quite a ways, and the skin was almost flayed off their tender hands. I fixed the plow, and told ’em to wear gloves, and helped ’em make a stone-boat. Of course they must have me stay for supper—dinner, they called it. I opened my eyes, I tell you, when they all came to supper dolled up in evening dress, London style; and her ladyship served up a dinner to match, winding up with black coffee and cigars. But they didn’t let their ‘style’ interfere with their work. That first year they broke 200 acres and had the luck to raise enough wheat for seed, besides oats enough for four horses; and the second year they had a splendid crop. There never was any doubt about their success, from the word go. They were good mixers—no starch, except in their shirts—they made themselves liked; and to-day, if you please, it’s those city boys that show half the newcomers around them how to live in the West.” CHAPTER XIII The Tree of Freedom THAT BUGLE again! You cannot hear it, but I know it is calling, for to-morrow is the birthday of the giant twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan. One more night under the stars, a brisk morning ride, and we canter up to the old fur-trading post. Paul Kane’s 139 people, “all living within the pickets of the fort” and not a white woman among them, have grown to 14,000, and, from their clothes and complexions, they might be in London or Toronto. In all the big crowd, gathered to hear the Governor-General of Canada proclaim the birth of a new Province with Edmonton for capital, we look in vain for beaded redskin or shaggy voyageur. We discover one cowboy, got up for the occasion, in buckskin coat and fringed leather shaps, and he looks as singular in such a gathering as a canary among sparrows—or a sparrow among canaries—for the ladies’ dresses and the fluttering Union Jacks make up a scene as bright as anything in the bird creation. And side by side with the cowboy’s bronco stands—an automobile. If we ask for the Hudson’s Bay Company, we are directed to a modern department store; yet, on investigation, we discover the old fur-trading Edmonton still busy behind the scenes. A million dollars’ worth of furs pour in every year from a multitude of outposts in the north, to be sorted and packed for the markets of the world.