Howard Angus Kennedy

“ 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. ”

“ Life Full of Adventure Then, looking forward, we see the moving picture of our modern West, the inrushing flood of humanity, these forty years of peace and safety, of swift transformation from a hunter’s wilderness to a land of a million homes, of marvellous, though unsatisfying, progress.
This picture too is crowded with adventure, of many kinds. People are constantly having adventures without knowing it. They pass through life and think it dull because they have a dull habit of not looking at the thousand points of interest as they pass. ”

“ We have entered Alberta now. A farming Province? Yes, all the Prairie Provinces are. That is their chief glory, for agriculture is the one industry that man cannot do without, unless he cuts down his numbers by ninety-nine per cent. and tries to live like his savage forefathers, by hunting and fishing alone.
Yet farming is not everything, even here. We only hear of what comes off the surface of the prairie, as a rule; but underground there is wealth we have scarcely begun to touch. Look at those coal mines on the mountain slopes—down south and up north, and away out on the plain. ”

“ Again we mount, and plunge into the wilderness. Evening draws in, and still we ride—in silence, for the joy of living is too deep for words. On a high hilltop we pause, enchanted by the vista opened suddenly at our feet. Deep in the darkening east a valley sleeps, veiled in a weird portentous purple mist.
Beside the next water we camp; that is, we cook our simple fare on a fire of dwarf willow and wild rose stems, hobble our broncos, roll ourselves in blankets and go to sleep under the friendly stars, lulled by the breeze that rustles in the grass, despite the heathen coyote’s evening hymn. ”

“ When the first Indian landed in empty America, far back in the mysterious past, that was a great adventure. And when the last family of European newcomers stepped off the train this very morning, after a journey of 6,000 miles by sea and land, that was just as big an adventure to them. When a boy has learned to shoot, and hunts down a coyote, he feels that he has had an adventure; but when he merely hunts up a stray cow in the brush of the back pasture, on his pony, that too is an adventure, and tests his power of observation and discovery as well as horsemanship. ”

“ The Indians had us neatly ringed in, as once they used to trap the buffalo. Puffs of smoke rose from the gully on our left, from the gully on our right, from the creek-bed in our rear, from the ridge beyond the gully on each hand. Man after man fell, killed or wounded. The friend who had shared his supper with me, the night before, lay dead, a bullet through his head. The next bullet might go through mine. For five long hours the painted braves kept up the zip-zip-zip, shooting us down like rabbits. It was my first adventure in the West,—and the last of its kind the West will ever know. ”

“ Up to the North and Home Again THE MUSIC of a foaming torrent mingles with the softened hum of mowers and roar of heavy trains rushing wheat to the steamers at Fort William, as we plane up—not down—to the south-east corner of the Province. The crisp music is the voice of Winnipeg River, busy making electric light and power for the city and the towns beyond.
Right about turn. There is the very same water, spread out and sleeping in the shallow expanse of Lake Winnipeg. The shimmer of the surface breaks into flashing points of light as hundreds of Icelandic settlers pull out the fish. ”

“ No hand of man is raised to kill; but hunters are busy killing. In the woods, the rabbit squeals as the weasel catches him by the throat. On the prairie, the hovering hawk drops swiftly to seize a gopher. On the lake, the skimming gull darts down and snatches out a fish. In the mountains, the eagle swoops and carries The Mound Builders off a marmot; the prowling bear claws at a rotting stump and gobbles down grubs by the mouthful.
Far away in the south, the prairie is invaded by man. ”

“ The stones were Coming from East to West gathered into piles, and the plow, driven in and out among the blackened stumps, prepared the virgin soil for its first crop of oats and potatoes. The labor which forced the wilderness to blossom as the rose was enormous; but the men who gave it had strong hearts, and wrestled cheerfully with nature. ”

“ Our lawns and beds are measured by the million acres; our shrubbery, the forest, by the million acres too; with mountain ranges for our ornamental rockery, an ocean for our fish-pond. As the crow flies, a thousand miles divide a Manitoba farm on Lake of the Woods from an Albertan farm on Peace River; and the bird would have another 500 miles to fly before he saw the end of the West on the British Columbian coast. Fifteen hundred miles—nearly the breadth of the Atlantic, from Newfoundland to old Ireland. ”

“ We have reached the north-west corner of the Dominion. The yearly steamer bringing supplies from British Columbia, round through Behring Sea, has just arrived. Inland, we catch a flying glimpse of Yukon Territory, which blazed into fame as the gold-seekers’ Mecca in 1898. Now, striking up the valley of the Mackenzie, we pass a string of outposts where the fur traders, the Mounted Police and the missionaries live and watch and trade and teach among the Indians. The braves no longer fight, but they live as they did by hunting and trapping the beaver and the rest of the fur bearing folk. ”

“ Instead of being hotter than now, it is colder. Most of it, in fact, has disappeared, under an immensely thick sheet of ice. This icy mantle covers nearly all Canada, and a great part of the United States. Its edge advances, century after century, farther and farther south, slowly but surely, wiping out forests, grinding and grooving the rocks underneath, as glaciers always do. Then it slowly Mammoths, but no Men retires,—through more centuries,—advances again, and again withdraws to the north. A third time the land is covered before the final retreat of the Arctic ice. ”

“ We speed through the sunny air, and over the vast central plain. Would you recognize it? The unbroken wilderness, where twenty years ago we rode day after day without meeting a soul, is now a checker-board of golden wheat fields, dotted with farmhouses and big barns, villages and schools, and crossed by a network of railways, each a string of elevator-beads—not only the Canadian Pacific now, but two other transcontinental systems, the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk, now merged in the Canadian National. ”

“ Step by step, our great human family has made great progress in the first essential art of civilization, the art of living together. The tribes of England, for instance, after hating and fighting each other as fiercely as the tribes of Canada did a few years ago, not only made peace, but united in one English nation. The tribes of Scotland did the same; even the Highlanders and the Lowlanders, speaking different languages, saw the folly of fighting, and united in one Scottish nation. ”

“ We must penetrate the remotest settlement, the densest mass, with the national spirit of Canada—the spirit and sentiment that knit us together, the ideals that shame us instinctively when we are unworthy of them. But only when inspired ourselves by such ideals can we inspire others with them. ”

“ This West of ours, containing so many thousands born or long resident in the United States, can do much to strengthen the ties between these two empire-commonwealths. But, until our neighbors awake The Two Sister Empires from the dream of irresponsible isolation, and come forward boldly to take their sister-empire by the hand, we must all make it perfectly clear to them that neither bribes nor boycotts can break our union or shake our independence. ”

“ The oldest mountains in this part of the world are nearer the coast. They are worn down and rounded now; for as soon as a mountain is raised it begins to wear away, split by frost, falling in landslides, and washed down by rain. Even when the giant lizards browsed and played and fought in the jungle, there were no Rockies yet.
The giant lizards came, and passed away. The earth still shrank, and threw up more wrinkles,—the Rocky Mountains at last rising out of the sea. ”

“ Our most urgent need is to unearth our hidden wealth, Small Farming for Big Population to develop our enormous undeveloped resources, of which our uncultivated or half-cultivated land is the greatest part. Our first business, then, is plainly to get population, people able and willing to work. We have to devise new plans of settlement, of land-holding or land arrangement, of agricultural production and agricultural commerce—yes, and agricultural manufacture, so that we shall no longer depend almost wholly on the sale of raw material. ”

“ Yet the reasons which decided Canada to carry out this tremendous railway scheme were wholly peaceful—to The Railway a National Necessity open up a land of homes for loyal people on the plains, and to join the East and Centre with the farthest West; to unite our scattered little communities in one great Dominion.
There was only one thing uniting these three regions—a sentiment. They all knew and felt that they were members of one great brotherhood, the royal republic known as the British Empire. ”

“ The gopher sits bolt upright on the edge of a hole, vanishing downward like a shot when he thinks audacity has reached fool-hardiness. Twenty yards ahead, beside the trail, a fountain of earth spouts up where a big striped badger is digging himself a home. He turns and stares at us, motionless, till we also stop, when he too disappears. Now and then a snake slips across the trail, a greenish-yellow innocent. ”

“ These folk who come to us with other languages are said to be more musical than the rest of us. They have practised singing more in their daily lives, perhaps; but nearly all of us have musical capacity, if we will only train and use it as we might. Music will be one of the great forces to weld us together.
As if to echo our thoughts, that lad on the gang plow below breaks out in song—a song of Robert Burns, the plowman poet. I know teams that would jump at such an outburst, but these beasts are used to it. ”

“ They are a pleasant folk, these villagers. A woman, embroidering linen at her cottage door, rises to welcome Cleanliness and Simplicity us. She is ignorant of our tongue, and we of hers, but we both know the ancient universal language of signs, invented long before words. She guides us to the community saddler, and while he fixes the girth she takes us home and spreads before us bread, from an enormous rye loaf, butter, wild raspberry preserve, and milk—a royal feast. ”

“ The nations must learn the art of living and working together. Recognizing others’ interests as well as their own, they must join to study and perfect arrangements which will make the idea of war between them as absurd as it would be to-day between England and Scotland, Kansas and Iowa, Alberta and Saskatchewan, or Canada and Australia.
We have our feet securely now on the first well-tested step of the ladder. We have the priceless possession of a united commonwealth of self-governing nations which we call the British Empire ”

“ The Wood Indians, living in a country full of lakes and rivers, in summer did all their travelling by canoe. In winter they stayed idle in camp, down in some sheltered valley or forest glade, living in rough shelters or tents of birch-bark or caribou hide. Presently, when they came out into the open to follow the buffalo, they had to leave their canoes behind. They did not like carrying loads on their backs; and one day an Indian, no lazier than the rest, but with more active brains, thought of a new way to make the dogs do that work. ”

“ The flaming words of the new “Messiah” and his apostles had more effect on the tribes along the North Saskatchewan. The more intelligent chiefs, like Poundmaker of the Crees, knew well enough what the end of the war must be, sooner or later; but the younger braves, the hot-headed extremists, were shouting for a fight, and carried the tribe with them. An Indian chief will never hang back when his tribe is bent on war, however crazy he may think it; so even Poundmaker, the white man’s friend, fought the white man rather than be called a coward by his own foolish folk. ”

“ Those who best remember the past and rightly value it are the least likely to forget their duty to the present and the future. Valuing our distant roots, we shall value more highly A Picture of Home and love with more devotion the tree which has sprung from them, this many-rooted, many-gifted tree, the united brotherhood of the Canadian people. ”

“ All provisions had to be brought up on the backs of men, and before a mule track could be cut along the precipices the men were reduced to a diet of wild berries. Yet some were not too hungry, nor too absorbed in dreams of gold, to be charmed by the wild magnificence of the canyon—the gloomy depths closed in for miles by perpendicular walls, then opening out in steep fantastic slopes, all splashed with brown and cream and orange and purple and black, and sprinkled with dark green solitary pines. ”