Calgary

“ There's nothing in Canada to compare with the magnificent libraries little New Zealand can show. But Calgary is hopeful.
These cities grow in population with unimaginable velocity. From thirty to thirty thousand in fifteen years is the usual rate. Pavements are laid down, stores and bigger stores and still bigger stores spring up. Trams buzz along the streets towards the unregarded horizon that lies across the end of most roads in these flat, geometrically planned, prairie-towns. ”

“ It is the sunset and the sunrise that make the foothill country a world of mystery and of beauty, a world to dream about and long for in later days.
Through this mystic world of gold and blue and purple drove Cameron and his wife, on their way to the little town of Calgary, three days after the ruthless burning of their home. As the sun dipped behind the western peaks they reached the crossing of the Elbow and entered the wide Bow Valley, upon whose level plain was situated the busy, ambitious and would-be wicked little pioneer town. ”

“ Now Calgary is a stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important. There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not succeed. ”

“ As you traverse Canada from east to west they steadily improve. You begin in the city of Montreal, which is unable to support one, and pass through the dingy rooms and inadequate intellectual provision of Toronto and Winnipeg. After that the libraries and reading-rooms, small for the smaller cities, are cleaner and better kept, show signs of care and intelligence; until at last, in Calgary, you find a very neat and carefully kept building, stocked with an immense variety of periodicals, and an admirably chosen store of books, ranging from the classics to the most utterly modern literature. ”

“ To this place come the farmer-folk from the wheatlands of the queenly Peace, and the priests and trappers from the Athabasca, which the bow-bearers call by another name, meaning the great river of the woods. And hither come the traders and road builders from the pass between the cleft mountains where, of old, dwelt Jasper of the yellow head; these, and the horse-taming men from young Calgary. We who love games and the glory of them, stand at salute.
These are the men from Winnipeg, the Mother City of the North. Honour upon honour be to her! ”

“ An hour later, amid a lightening of the clouds over the West, that spread a watery gold over the prairie, Anderson sprang to his feet.
"The Rockies!"
And there, a hundred miles away, peering over the edge of the land, ran from north to south a vast chain of snow peaks, and Elizabeth saw at last that even the prairies have an end.
The car was shunted at Calgary, in order that its occupants might enjoy a peaceful night. When she found herself alone in her tiny room, Elizabeth stood for a while before her reflection in the glass. Her eyes were frowning and distressed; her cheeks glowed. ”

“ The exact time was the big day of the celebrated “Stampede,” Calgary’s famous civic celebration. It was in July and among the many events that had drawn thousands of people to the new Northwestern metropolis, Norman and Roy were on the program as aviators and exhibitors of their new aeroplane.
These young men were born in Calgary and had lived eighteen years in that city. Since 10 this almost covered the period of Calgary’s growth from a trading post to a modern city, each young man had a knowledge of the wilderness and its romance that other boys could get only from history. ”

“ I am writing in the railway-station, in the waiting-rooms of which are many farmers, all on their way to Calgary—for which place, also, I am bound, expecting to start at the very inconvenient hour of two p.m.
The scene, as I sit, is not cheering. Far as the eye can reach there is the prairie. It was the same all the way from Winnipeg. It will be the same all the way to Calgary, some 400 or 500 miles hence. It is intensely hot, and men and women sit in the open air, under such shade as the wooden houses afford. It is intensely cold in the winter. ”

“ A month up here in the Rockies would make a young man of me or of anyone else. I must be off before I become as gay as a horse fed on beans. This is, I take it, the real and sufficient reason of the peculiar spirits of the mountaineers, who rather alarmed me with their liveliness at Calgary. Their exuberance is due to air, and air alone. As I sit, a long row of mules files past; a man is riding at the head, the others follow with their burdens packed on their backs. He is a ‘prospector,’ and is on his way to the other side. ”

“ Calgary is the big cow-town of the West, just beginning to aspire to higher—or lower (there's a real question there) —civilization, and mixing schaps and silks on its streets in a strange struggle between the past and the future. But my stay there was short, as I was able to catch my branch train with little delay, and that night saw me at Arthurs' nearest station. The homestead rush is on here in earnest; the trains are crowded, mostly with Americans, and the hotels are simply spilling over. They're a motley crowd, these homesteaders. ”

“ That autumn storm was a hundred and eight miles long from its tail at Fort French to its nose at Fort Calgary with a hundred degrees of cold and the nip of a crocodile. Then at Fort Calgary I had to wait in barracks, for the unfinished Canadian Pacific Railroad ran trains, weather permitting, or when the driver was sober. Anyway, I had time to lose my sustenance money over a game of poker, and when Rich Mixed and I got on board the train we had nothing to reform with except a tin of crackers. We were beastly pinched on the six hundred mile crawl east to Regina, the mounted police headquarters. ”

“ Surely in bringing the workless man of the Old World to the manless work of the New, the Canadian Government and the transportation companies are doing a bit of God's work.
Half way between Winnipeg and the Pacific we reach Calgary, breezy, buoyant Calgary, the commercial metropolis of the foothills, already a busy mart and predestined to be the distributing point for many railroads. The biggest man-made thing in Calgary is the C.P.R. irrigation works, the largest on this continent. ”

“ Calgary ranks next to Montreal and the twin ports of Fort William and Port Arthur in its grain storage capacity. It is surrounded by thousands of acres of wheat lands, not in vast stretches such as we saw in Saskatchewan, but divided up among the general farming lands of the province. The city is an important industrial centre, and in some of its factories natural gas, piped from wells a hundred miles away, is used to produce power. ”

“ If the city authorities were indifferent to the fate of the country regions, on which, by the way Calgary was wholly dependent, there was one man at least who kept the welfare of his beloved country close to his heart. The erstwhile Scotch stable lad, who for many years had dedicated his thought, his labor and his heart to the farming and ranching people of Alberta, begrudged himself even a few hours sleep. ”

“ But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has been the knowledge that west of her is Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg has been doubling her population each decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of Calgary, Vancouver; all growing apace until it is a rash man who today can prophesy which will be the largest city of the Dominion of Canada, a dozen years hence. The Canadian cities have certainly been growing in the American fashion—to use that word in its broadest sense. ”

“ It also has prosperous churches and a good hospital. It bids fair to be a considerable city in the near future. Calgary is the headquarters of the British Columbia Land and Irrigation Departments of the Canadian Pacific Railway. ”

“ After spending about a week at Maple Creek,—a small but flourishing township, contiguous to the Crane Lake, from whence a distant view of the Cypress Hills in the South may be obtained,—and finding nothing offering to suit him, Charles Barton determined to proceed on to Calgary, which lies about seventy miles east of the "Rockies." ”

“ Alberta is north of our Montana, and is all prairie-land; but from Father Lacombe's parsonage one sees the snow-capped Rockies, s [56] ixty miles away, lying above the horizon like a line of clouds tinged with the delicate hues of mother-of-pearl in the sunshine. Calgary was a mere post in the wilderness for years after the priest went there. The buffaloes roamed the prairie in fabulous numbers, the Indians used the bow and arrow in the chase, and the maps we studied at the time showed the whole region enclosed in a loop, and marked "Blackfoot Indians." ”

“ The growth of our cities is simply wonderful. Winnipeg has doubled its population in five years; Calgary has nearly trebled the number of its citizens in the same period, while Montreal has become the New York of Canada. ”

“ Calgary is a beautiful place on the slope of the foothills, at an elevation of about 3400 feet, rather cold in winter, but delightful in the summer and fall. On the out-ranch, however, where there was a lot of timber, the winged pests—mosquitoes, gnats, horse- and deer-flies—made work in the woods very trying, more especially the two latter, whose bite will draw blood every time. The surrounding country, especially out towards Fort McLeod, is full of immense sloughs, where the wild slough grass will often grow to a height of five feet, and as much as 1000 tons can be cut off a single slough. ”

“ Alberta at present is being planned into existence. It is not booming simply on its own merits, great though these {143} may be. It lay fallow for many years. For all one knows, other parts of Canada may have more of a future. But they are not being boomed as Alberta is, because the time has not yet come when they must, in the opinion of the railway companies, be filled in.
The need for the filling in of Alberta is one of the reasons why Calgary has sprung up so quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-aged, can remember camping in Calgary in tents. ”

“ At dusk we stopped at the bustling town of Dunmore, just where the railway crosses the broad Assiniboia River on a long bridge. Here many of our fellow sleepers left us, and several new passengers got into our car to ride through to Calgary, the largest town in the Northwest Territory—seven or eight thousand inhabitants—and where the Edmonton branch goes off two hundred miles into the north, and will soon go three or four hundred miles further through the opening wheat country which the world is now pouring into. ”

“ Not of the buried yesterdays, but of the days to be,
The glory and the gateway of the yellow West is she.
The Northern Lights dance down her plains with soft and silvery feet,
The sunrise gilds her prairies when the dawn and daylight meet ”

“ The altitude of Winnipeg is only seven hundred and fifty-seven feet above the sea-level, whilst that of Calgary is actually two hundred feet higher than the topmost peak of Sea Fell, England’s highest mountain; and perhaps the elevation of much of the country accounts not only for its being colder than some corresponding latitudes of the old world, but also for the buoyant atmosphere in the west, and for the characteristic hopefulness and eagerness and energy of the people. ”

“ Nay, as will be seen, we have clues to agricultural possibilities in regions far to the north of the northern boundary of Alberta.
It is strange how persistently the public imagination goes astray concerning matters of latitude. Nine years ago I found Calgary shrugging its shoulders over a city called Edmonton, situated some two hundred miles to the north. Daring pioneers up there were understood to be making praiseworthy efforts in the direction of grain-growing ”

“ For this bright morning is the 1st of September, their 12th of August, and there will be massacre amongst the prairie chickens ere nightfall. The shooting is open to all, and you may roam over anybody's land.
We can see the "Rockies" for the first time this morning. Since we have been at Calgary the mountains have sulked in clouds and mist, and Calgary does not, as some people would have you believe, lie under the Rockies, but fifty miles away. In the clear morning air, they appear nearer to us than they really are. ”

“ Knight, the founder of the colony at Raymond, Cardston and Magrath in Southern Alberta, told me in Calgary one day how he had selected Canada for his sect. As a boy he had one dream—to be a help to his people—but he had little money to be of much use to them. One night he had a vision of a silver mine in a certain locality. He located the mine and worked it with excellent results and with the proceeds he established the Mormon settlements in Alberta to which he had been providentially directed. ”

“ We had about twenty chickens killed; and some people lost heavily, losing even colts, calves, and pigs. The oat-crop, which was being harvested at the time, was so cut to bits and driven into the ground that not even straw was saved.
My first experience in Calgary was with the mounted police, for as we stopped at the station three policemen boarded our tourist sleeping-car, and while one stood guard at each door, the third walked over to one of the seats, lifted the spring cushion, and pulled out from the recess underneath a 21⁄2-gallon keg of whisky. ”