In some respects, the Winnipeg of thirty years ago was a truer reflection of the conditions in the country from which it drew its sustenance than it has been during the last two decades. The boom had broken so disastrously that people asked whether the prairie region could ever be a country. Immigration fell to almost nothing. Beyond Manitoba, for several years, there were more abandoned than occupied homesteads. We said: “The greatest of these is Hope,” but we didn’t say “Hope” with capital letters during most of the ten years I was with the Manitoba North Western, the last three of which were spent in Winnipeg.

The census of 1891, in the midst of that period, gave only 152,000 people for all Manitoba, and 98,000 for the Northwest Territories. This quarter of a million, from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and from the American boundary to the Arctic ocean, included about forty-five thousand Indians and Eskimos. From 1881 to 1891, the natural increase among the whites, and immigration to the present provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta—leaving out of this the present North West Territories—increased the population by only forty-two thousand.

Winnipeg, then, was the only city for about three-quarters of a million habitable square miles. When the first locomotive entered the city on Christmas Eve, in 1879, on rails laid over double-length ties across the Red River ice, under the supervision of Mr. D. D. Mann, about six thousand people were within it. At the height of the boom, in 1882, the population was estimated at 33,000. When I first saw it in 1886 the people were said to number 20,000, of whom probably 2,000 were creditable to Hope. By 1891 the total had crept to 25,000. The growth was puny until later than the twentieth century came in, for in 1901, five years after the Canadian Northern was begun, the enumerators found only 42,000 people in Winnipeg.

The explanation, of course, is that prairie agriculture had not developed as rapidly as the prophets of Hope had foretold. The abandoned homestead told an eloquent story, but not the whole story. The conditions governing crop production on the plains were imperfectly understood. The conditions underlying permanent settlement were not appreciated by the Governments or by the business people who were largely interested in colonization.

The prairie farmer’s two prime foes are frost and drought. To defeat frost, early-ripening varieties of wheat are necessary; for, if possible, the entire process from seeder to binder should be completed within 110 days. The evolution of Red Fife and later of Marquis wheat largely solved the frost problem, though it is still true, despite the issuance of much literature, that the nearer you approach the North Pole the chillier the nights are prone to be.

There is no denying that over a considerable proportion of the treeless prairies the climate tends to scarcity rather than abundance of rain. Through the late eighties it was commonly said that while wheat might possibly be grown around Regina, the ultima thule of wheat farming was Moose Jaw, forty miles west. The Government’s maps of the pre-railroad era showed Battleford, the capital of the North West Territories, at the junction of the Battle and North Saskatchewan rivers, 300 miles north of the international boundary, as the northern apex of the great American desert. The flora of the country was of drought-resisting species, like that of the middle northwestern states.

Conservation of moisture in cultivated soil was thought to be entirely a matter for unassisted Divine Providence. It was found to be good to let a third of the broken ground lie fallow each year—to give it a rest, and to clean it of weeds. The farmer saw last year’s stubble swiftly hidden by weeds in May and early June. Towards the end of June he plowed the weeds in, using a logging or other chain from his off-horse’s whippletree to the coulter, with a dragging loop to pull the long plants straight into the furrow, and entirely bury them. The heavier the green crop plowed in, the more, when rotted, it enriched the soil. But the heavier the weeds, the stronger their roots and the easier for the sun to dry out the loose covering soil. When the summer-fallow had been plowed, the farmer left it untouched. The sun thoroughly dried the land. Rains in the fall, and the melting snows of spring did the less soaking because of the more drying of the torrid summer time.

Experience has changed all that, thanks mainly to the experiments of a wheat-grower below the line, who became famous as “Dry-Farming Campbell”. The wise farmer, with his gang plow, turning two or more furrows at a time, harrows as he plows, and makes a mulch of finely powdered soil, through which the sun cannot suck up the moisture as he did through unmulched soil. By frequent harrowing during the summer the mulch is kept efficient, and the moisture wonderfully conserved. Next year, if there is drought all around, the sower will confidently expect twenty bushels from each acre of his dry-farmed land.

This simple device for the conquest of aridity had not been discovered when I became a Westerner. But there was no reason why immigration should not have been fostered on wiser lines than those that were followed. The immigration policy of the then Dominion Government, viewed in the light of 1924, is something wonderful to behold; and its literature something terrible to read. It was represented that a British family arriving with seven hundred and twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents could carry their farm until their farm carried them.

It was an alluring prospect that the Queen’s Government held out to the Queen’s subjects. The spirit of it was “You tickle the soil with a plowshare, and it giggles you back a fortune.” There wasn’t a word of cautionary advice. The newcomer was to discover his homestead, build a house, buy a yoke of oxen, a wagon and a plow, and watch himself grow rich with his growing grain. It used to be said, with some sediment of truth, no doubt, that Government agents told the confiding Englishman, who had never seen a milkpail, that his oxen would plow the land all day and furnish cream at sunset.

There was great need for people in the illimitable, empty country; but there was greater need for very uncommon common sense among those who procured the people. The politician and his henchmen who were thinking of votes risked none of their own money on immigration promotions. But there were other interests, who sincerely desired to settle the prairies with good people, and who obligated their own and others’ finances to that end—the owners of the Manitoba North Western, for example.

Over and above their means for raising capital for building the railway, they established companies for furnishing the railway’s territory with the settlers who alone could furnish the railway with the traffic, which alone could keep it alive. The Commercial Colonization Company was chiefly concerned with catching the immigrant. The Canadian Settlers’ Loan and Trust Company financed him, when, at his own charges, he arrived on the scene of his predicted triumph.

Legislation was procured under which a lien could be placed on the homestead—the 160 acres of land—while it was still the property of the Canadian Government, and the homesteader was performing the work which, after three years, would secure him a patent. In those days no intending farmer in his senses thought of buying land, when he could get 160 acres free, and could pre-empt another quarter section, with the right to buy it at $2.50 an acre.

The emigrant was told a farm would be selected for him, and that the Settlers’ Loan and Trust Company would build a house, dig a well, furnish a yoke of stout and trusty oxen, a wagon, a plow, and other items of a farmer’s outfit, and would ask no payments for two years, by which time, all being fairly well, his crops would at least enable him to live and meet the fixed charges of his debt.

The improvements, gear, and interest due for two years would absorb $600, and the homestead would be obligated to that extent. That was a very good scheme, on paper, as most financial schemes are. But it lacked two essentials of success—the right selection of people, and the right initiation of them into the mysteries of wresting a living from an unknown soil, and a capricious, misunderstood climate.

The rock upon which so many immigration schemes have split has been the belief that the most essential requirement of all was people with money of their own. A Scot is the last man in the world to depreciate the value of money; but nobody is better aware that money is not the principal thing, when a family is invited to emigrate to a strange land. Distant fields look green. Distant farm work is very apt to look romantic. It is a beautiful contemplation for a man, tired of an old-world city and its grinding occupation, to gaze across half the world, and see himself the centre of an exquisitely balanced estate—the lowing herd winding slowly o’er the lea; the rustling fields of golden grain in the still more golden, evening sunglow; and the occasional sallying forth to shoot the game which chiefly retards the plough.

This vision of a new life, in a new world, has got seed-catalogue gardening beaten to a hum-drummery. It may go into a man’s history as a charming idyll of the mind, but it is likely to meet sudden death at a pair of calloused hands, a yoke of cattle who insist on running the wagon into the middle of a miry slough, and a plow which, striking a stone concealed in virgin soil, lifts its handle against an unoffending jaw. The West always needed people with the will to work, and an inherent attachment to the land, and not too proud to take guidance from those who had been through the mill. When money has gone and profitable experience hasn’t come; the will to work on the farm is likely to succumb to a desire to return to urban occupations, which, though they are good enough in themselves, are not Canada-builders, as farming is.

The Manitoba North Western subsidiaries and allies settled a great many people on the plains about Birtle, on the incomplete co-operative plan. But many of the selections were not wisely determined, and inadequate measures were taken to see that they made the best of their chances when once they were installed. Nobody can tell the story of the ineffectual attempts of a green old country townie to make a prairie farmer of himself as well as the man himself can, when his sense of humour is sharpened by, and has survived the discipline, cruel as it has often been. I am rather proud of having been a good potato harvester as a boy in Scotland, but that isn’t training enough to qualify one to depict the romantic difference between the prophecy of a Government folder a generation ago, and the alternately perspiring and freezing job of trying to make it come true.

Scarcely more than ten per cent. of the six hundred brigade made good on their homesteads. I spent many weeks one summer, after the railway had received a receiver, among the farmers around Saltcoats, trying to find customers for the lands which had fallen in to us, since the patents were granted, and the homesteads forsaken. In some cases we were glad to get a hundred and sixty dollars for land, improvements and all. If I confessed all the truth it might be not so very far removed from a story of the land-poor epoch in Minnesota, which assuredly is an opulent state of the Union to-day.

A farmer drove into a prairie town down there—Marshall, I think—with a calf for which he was seeking milk. Asked how he reached such a fix he said:

“Well, a stranger came to my place with this calf and wanted milk for it. We had none; so he asked me if I would trade something for the calf. I said ‘No’, but he was so cussed persistent that at last I told him the only thing I could trade for the calf was a section of land. He wouldn’t have it; but was willing to take half a section. Finally I accepted his terms. But I got ahead of him, after all; for when we came to make out the papers I found the sucker couldn’t read! and I’ve landed the whole durn section on him.”

One farmer whom I visited was an old naval man. He was literally a sailor on horseback. He was just starting out on his horse to round up his solitary cow. He would buy no more land; and, indeed, declared he would leave the country if only he could get out. “This is no country for a reasonable man,” he complained, “when you have to go eight hundred miles for cordwood.”

“That can’t be so,” I retorted, looking eastward towards the Porcupine Hills clothed with timber and abounding with game.

“I’ll prove it to you,” was the answer. “I have to go twenty miles for firewood, don’t I? That’s forty miles, there and back, for a load. It takes twenty loads to keep us warm one winter. Twenty times forty miles is eight hundred. Now, am I right?”

Lest it be thought that these depleting conditions applied only to the territory of feeble branch railways like ours, look at a few other conditions which afflicted the infancy of the country immediately tributary to the main line of the C.P.R.

E. A. James, who became the operating manager of the Canadian Northern lines after my removal to Toronto, used to tell how in 1886 he was one of the C.P.R. men who received no salary for four months. The C.P.R., though it had connected with the Pacific ocean, was like a poor man with a large and growing family, who finds his boys pushing their legs through their breeches faster than he can conveniently cover them. The original outbound traffic from the Territories had been buffalo bones, but the supply was limited. Though a line had been built through the mountains, snowslides compelled the erection of long and costly sheds to protect the track from the avalanches which were destroying life and property—nine men were carried to death as they were working on a bridge in 1885.

The C.P.R. was on the Pacific shore; but there was no traffic with the Orient. Steamers had to be provided which could not possibly pay at the start. The first C.P.R. steamer from Vancouver to Asia carried two carloads of shingles and the bodies of several Chinamen piously being returned to their ancestral sepulchres.

The capital of the North West Territories had been moved from Battleford to Regina with the building of the railway across the plains. Regina had about fifteen hundred people. When it had for ten years been the seat of government for a territory several times as large as the whole German Empire, if a new-comer wanted a house, the owner, instead of naming the rent, asked what he would pay. Calgary was the cowboy’s haunt, and the remittance man’s refuge. Edmonton was still at the back of beyond; several days’ journey from a railway.

In Manitoba, Brandon was bravely telling itself that some day it would beat Portage la Prairie, and furtively dreaming of keeping up with Winnipeg, when once it had reached its stride. About twenty-five hundred people were on the southern slope of the Assiniboine; and a great deal of wheat was sold by farmers on Pacific Avenue, beside which stood several elevators. The grain came from far south, and far north—because there was no other railway to receive it. Brandon now stretches across the Assiniboine valley, right to the border of the Dominion Government’s experimental farm.

The history of the acquisition of that farm for public purposes illustrates, as well as any episode I know of, what the position of land and agriculture was in a favoured section of Manitoba about the time I became a Manitoban. The original homesteader and pre-emptor of the Experimental Farm was a bachelor named Charlie Stewart, whose brother Jack took the land immediately west of him. Charlie had 320 acres, running down to the river, covering the northern slope, and taking in some of the upland. It had all the diversities which should distinguish an experimental station.

The harvest of 1887 was the best Manitoba had ever known—the most abundant, indeed, until the phenomenal crop of 1915. The C.P.R. had twelve million bushels of grain to haul to Port Arthur, and the task staggered the equipment resources of what was even then regarded as an enormous railway system. Fields that were estimated to yield twenty-five bushels to the acre, threshed out forty and more. Ideal weather had come just at the time the heads were filling; and instead of some rows not amounting to anything, as often happens when milk in the ear is scarce and development is hindered by hot sun and dry winds, every husk contained its berry.

This 1887 crop, of magnificent quality, sold in Brandon at from forty-eight to fifty-one cents a bushel. It was a common saying among the farmers that a good European war was needed to make Manitoba wheat worth something—perhaps two dollars a bushel might be obtained at some impossible time. The big European war did come, and wheat did go to two dollars a bushel—far higher, in fact. But there was not so much rejoicing as seemed possible in the eighties; for the other unthinkable thing had happened, and Manitoba farm boys were being slain in the European war that made Canadian wheat so dear.

During the summer and harvest of 1887 the Dominion Government agents had tried to buy Charlie Stewart’s farm. He didn’t want to sell; for the place was handy to town; his old mother was well settled with him; and there were advantages in being so near Brandon. On the other side, the Government wanted so ideal a place, and the situation was something of Ahab and Naboth’s vineyard over again, but with no Jezebel intervening.

One day in the early winter Charlie Stewart was horse-power threshing at Dan MacMillan’s, up the valley, close to where the Little Saskatchewan enters the Assiniboine—perfectly level fields, good soil, and flanked by what was left of the original bush, in which were scores and scores of stumps the trunks of which had been cut down and taken away by the beaver, remains of whose houses were still among the brush. To the outfit a Government agent drove. Charlie Stewart left the stack, and after about ten minutes returned, the agent driving away. When he was a couple of hundred yards off, Stewart began to blaspheme as mildly as he knew how, with regret that he had sold his farm.

Impetuosity was nothing new to Charlie Stewart, as one of his mares, circling with the horse-power gear below him, silently testified. She was a big, dark-grey Percheron, foaled on the present Experimental Farm. When she was a few weeks old, and while Charlie was plowing with her mother, she got out of the yard, and came over to impede the breaking, as fillies desiring nourishment will. Failing to drive her off, Charlie pulled her back to the stable by the ears—and her ears never pricked again.

Next time you travel westward through Brandon, watch the Assiniboine valley as the train begins to climb away from the spacious station. You will see the Experimental Farm in and across the valley, west of the main road to the north, which crosses the river by the steel bridge. It is a lovely sight, of perfectly developing crops, trees flourishing with luxuriant foliage, and buildings which belong to yourself as much as they belong to anybody. As you reflect that the Dominion Government, in the year of Manitoba’s record crop, bought that three hundred and twenty acres of land and buildings on it for twelve hundred dollars, you will know that, in terms of money at least, the West was cheap—to those who had the money.

It must not be supposed that because the crop of 1887 was extraordinarily good, farm returns were not fluctuous. Eighty-seven was perfectly fine. Eight-eight was also fine—up to the second week in August. Then came a frost, a killing frost, and thousands of acres of splendidly-grown straw and half-filled heads were plowed in. To those whose grain was far enough advanced not to be utterly spoiled by one awful night, the fall brought a marvellous comfort.

It was the time of Old Hutch’s corner of wheat at Chicago; and Western farmers with a pretty fair sample could sell for up to a dollar and twelve cents a bushel. The high prices did not last long, but they were a godsend to those who received them.

The fluctuation had its influence on the tendency towards farmers’ organizations which quickly became discernible in the West, and which had already found expression in the Farmers’ Union, the inspiring spirit of which was a Mr. Purvis, a true forerunner of the Motherwells, Crerars, Woods and Morrisons.

The Union men objected that, as to grades and prices, the wheat buyer, was a dictator to the man who had driven into town with his load, and must take what was offered, or haul his stuff home on the chance that next week prices would still further be down. The C.P.R., under its monopoly charter, was in a very strong position, and was also under persistent imputation of being in collusion with the grain buyers. Perhaps nothing is more remarkable in modern Canadian life than the suspicion that the railways are at the bottom of every sharp practice which the public believes it has seen, or knows it has endured. In the eighties it was notoriously undeniable that Manitoba farmers, near the boundary, received several cents a bushel less for their wheat than was paid across the line, for exactly the same grade, the price of which was understood to be finally determined by exactly the same final condition—the European market. With the Canadian Pacific enjoying a virtual monopoly, it was easy to assume that the whole trouble was with the magnates of Montreal. But it wasn’t.

After his advent in 1882, it did not take Van Horne long to establish his supremacy. The president of the C.P.R. was George Stephen, who became Lord Mountstephen. But he had removed to England, and Van Horne had a free hand in Canada. He had his faults, of course; but he was a big man, who saw railway policies in a big way. His attitude to the farmers was like his attitude to poor little lines like the Manitoba North Western. He knew that the more the farmers received for their crops, after paying freight charges, the more they could buy, and the more west-bound freight the C.P.R. would carry. He knew that the small railway was acting as a feeder to the C.P.R. for both outbound and inbound traffic. He gave the weak line a square deal every time until it became apparent that it was intended to compete with the C.P.R. in the long-haul business. Then there was a fight, in which his antagonist needed all his wits if he wished to admire himself when peace was restored.

Well, the Farmers’ Union busied itself with the scandal, as the Union called it, of Manitoba farmers having to sell their wheat for many cents a bushel less than their brethren did a few miles away. Just as the Canada Colonization Company is not the pioneer in financing land settlement, so the grain growers’ organizations of this century were not the first farmers’ bodies to jump into the business of grain buying, in self-defense of the farmers’ interests.

The Farmers’ Union began to buy wheat along our side of the border at higher prices than were paid by the Manitoba elevator and milling people. For some time there was a great deal of puzzlement as to how in the world Purvis and his men managed to buy grain, and pay for it. The truth was that the C.P.R. and the Bank of Montreal, its very good friend, had a hand in the revolution—not purely as a sort of joint Santa Claus for the farmer, but because it was not good business to allow the farmer to be ground beneath the upper and the nether millstone.

I do not suggest, of course, that any railways have been operated in Western Canada purely as philanthropic enterprises. The farmer hardly claims that distinction for himself. But I do assert that the element of public service and public fairplay has entered more largely into railway administration than the public has often been informed; and that, often and often, compared with his fellows, in purely private undertakings, the lot of the railway president, manager, and financier has not been a happy one.