People here do not stumble against each other around corners, but see
largely and tranquilly from a long way off what they desire, or wish to
avoid, and they shape their path accordingly across the waves, and
troughs, and tongues, and dips and fans of the land.
When mere space and the stoop of the high sky begin to overwhelm, earth
provides little ponds and lakes, lying in soft-flanked hollows, where
people can step down out of the floods of air, and delight themselves
with small and known distances. Most of the women I saw about the houses
were down in the hollows, and most of the men were on the crests and the
flats. Once, while we halted a woman drove straight down at us from the
sky-line, along a golden path between black ploughed lands. When the
horse, who managed affairs, stopped at the cars, she nodded
mysteriously, and showed us a very small baby in the hollow of her arm.
Doubtless she was some exiled Queen flying North to found a dynasty and
establish a country. The Prairie makes everything wonderful.
They were threshing the wheat on both sides or the track as far as the
eye could see. The smoke of the machines went up in orderly perspective
alongside the mounds of chaff - thus: a machine, a house, a mound of
chaff, a stretch of wheat in stocks - and then repeat the pattern over
the next few degrees of longitude. We ran through strings of nearly
touching little towns, where I remembered an occasional shack; and
through big towns once represented by a name-board, a siding, and two
troopers of the North-West Police. In those days men proved that Wheat
would not grow north of some fool's line, or other, or, if it did, that
no one would grow it. And now the Wheat was marching with us as far as
the eye could reach; the railways were out, two, three hundred miles
north, peopling a new wheat country; and north of that again the Grand
Trunk was laying down a suburban extension of a few thousand miles
across the Continent, with branches perhaps to Dawson City, certainly to
Hudson Bay.
'Come north and look!' cried the Afrites of the Railway. 'You're only on
the fringe of it here.' I preferred to keep the old road, and to gape at
miracles accomplished since my day. The old, false-fronted,
hollow-stomached Western hotels were gone; their places filled by
five-storey brick or stone ones, with Post Offices to match.
Occasionally some overlooked fragment of the past still cleaved to a
town, and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often one had to get a
mile away and look back on a place - as one holds a palimpsest up against
the light - to identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings. Each
town supplied the big farming country behind it, and each town school
carried the Union Jack on a flagstaff in its playground. So far as one
could understand, the scholars are taught neither to hate, nor despise,
nor beg from, their own country.
I whispered to a man that I was a little tired of a three days' tyranny
of Wheat, besides being shocked at farmers who used clean bright straw
for fuel, and made bonfires of their chaff-hills. 'You're 'way behind
the times,' said he. 'There's fruit and dairying and any quantity of
mixed farming going forward all around - let alone irrigation further
West. Wheat's not our only king by a long sight. Wait till you strike
such and such a place.' It was there I met a prophet and a preacher in
the shape of a Commissioner of the Local Board of Trade (all towns have
them), who firmly showed me the vegetables which his district produced.
They were vegetables too - all neatly staged in a little kiosk near the
station.
I think the pious Thomas Tusser would have loved that man. 'Providence,'
said he, shedding pamphlets at every gesture, 'did not intend
everlasting Wheat in this section. No, sir! Our business is to keep
ahead of Providence - to meet her with mixed farming. Are you interested
in mixed farming? Psha! Too bad you missed our fruit and vegetable show.
It draws people together, mixed farming does. I don't say Wheat is
narrowing to the outlook, but I claim there's more sociability and money
in mixed farming. We've been hypnotised by Wheat and Cattle. Now - the
cars won't start yet awhile - I'll just tell you my ideas.'
For fifteen glorious minutes he gave me condensed essence of mixed
farming, with excursions into sugar-beet (did you know they are making
sugar in Alberta?), and he talked of farmyard muck, our dark mother of
all things, with proper devotion.
'What we want now,' he cried in farewell, 'is men - more men. Yes, and
women.'
They need women sorely for domestic help, to meet the mad rush of work
at harvest time - maids who will help in house, dairy, and chicken-run
till they are married.
A steady tide sets that way already; one contented settler recruiting
others from England; but if a tenth of that energy wasted on 'social
reform' could be diverted to decently thought out and supervised
emigration work ('Labour' does not yet object to people working on the
land) we might do something worth talking about. The races which work
and do not form Committees are going into the country at least as fast
as ours.
