Edmonton, Alberta

“ The entrance to the Wonderland begins, as was said, some five hours from Edmonton. The best plan is to leave this thriving young capital of Alberta by a late evening train, and waken in the morning to find one's self in a region where the peaks to the south of the Yellowhead Pass begin to appear on the horizon. He who understands the romance of railroad travel will raise the heavy blind of the windows of his lower berth or his drawing-room, so as not to miss the strange panorama of the night. ”

“ Edmonton is still a centre of the fur-trade, and even now, in winter time, picturesque dog-trains arrive from the north in the provincial capital, whilst in the heart of Alberta traders, surveyors, mail-carriers and missionaries are leading the kind of life described in the “Wild West” books of our childhood. Still, on winter’s nights, in the white Albertan wilderness, many a man, for one motive or another, is sleeping out under the stars, defiant of the frost and loneliness ”

“ Already northern Alberta had sent two thousand men. The rumour in Edmonton ran that there were only a few places left to be filled in the north Alberta quota. For these few places hundreds of men were fighting in the streets.
Alighting from their train, Duff and his men stood amazed, aghast, gazing upon the scene before them. Duff climbed a wagon wheel and surveyed the crowd packing the street in front of the bulletin boards. ”

“ In the midst of this Joyce thought of the stranger she had followed that day, and shuddered, she hardly knew why.
All this was forgotten as, half an hour later, she crept beneath her downy feather robe and fell asleep, dreaming dreams in which gold and radium were sadly mixed with Indians and traps, white foxes, wild buffaloes and moonlit night.
[118]
CHAPTER IX
EAGLE EYES
There are some who believe that, should one be so fortunate as to reach Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, he would be at an outpost of civilization. Nothing could be more false. Edmonton is not an outpost. It is a city. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Administration, &c.—-The local government of Alberta is carried on by a provincial organization resembling that of the other Canadian provinces. The capital of the province is Edmonton, and here reside the lieutenant-governor and cabinet. The legislature consists of one house—-the Legislative Assembly——of twenty-five members. Responsible government after the British model is followed, and the revenue is chiefly derived from grants from the Dominion government. Alberta has a system of municipal government similar to that of the other provinces. ”

“ By Bills brought into the Dominion Parliament by the Premier, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, on the 21st of February, 1905, and subsequently passed, the four Northwest Territories ceded to the Dominion by Great Britain in 1870 were reorganized as two provinces, and admitted to membership in the Canadian Federal Union, bearing the names of Alberta and Saskatchewan, with Edmonton for the capital of the former and Regina for the latter. ”

“ Central Alberta, from Edmonton to the Rocky Mountains, is likely in the future to be the Canadian “Black Country,” far more extensive and productive than even the original Black Country. It is calculated that the areas known as the Edmonton coal district cover at least 10,000 square miles and contain at least sixty million tons of workable coal. Already branch lines are running to districts where the coal is even now being got, eastward from Winnipeg to Moncton, the capital of New Brunswick. ”

“ Such wide measures as a system of government-owned internal elevators were bringing the farmers of all three Western provinces into closer conference and in 1908 the feeling in favor of amalgamation of all Alberta farmers into one organization began to crystallize.
Finally in September a conference was held between representatives of the Alberta Farmers' Association and the Canadian Society of Equity. The constitution drafted at this conference was submitted to the annual conventions of both bodies at Edmonton on January 13th, 1909. ”

“ Already a few citizens have subscribed 450 acres of land, in a glorious situation, on high ground a few miles from the centre of the city, with the serrated line of the Rocky Mountains cutting the western horizon seventy miles away, and $500,000 are given as a beginning. There is a strong rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton and Saskatoon, further north in Alberta. The State University is at Saskatoon, but Calgary is going ahead with its University for South Alberta, and will worry the Government for a charter empowering it to confer degrees when its students are ready for the degrees. ”

“ As they later rejoined the party, Morton, the Chief Justice, and Mariette returned from a saunter in the course of which they too had been chatting to the engine-drivers.
"I know the part of the country those men want," the American was saying. "I was all over Alberta last fall--part of it in a motor car. We jumped about those stubble-fields in a way to make a leopard jealous! Every bone in my body was sore for weeks afterwards. But it was worth while. That's a country!"--he threw up his hands. "I was at Edmonton on the day when the last Government lands, the odd numbers, were thrown open. ”

“ Calgary is laid out at the juncture of two rivers,—the Bow and the Elbow,—and is a busy trade centre for nearly all the ranching districts of Southern Alberta; and as the Calgary and Edmonton branches unite here with the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway, it is rapidly becoming a large and important emporium for the trade of the North-West Provinces. Its edifices and public buildings are sound and substantial; whilst its churches, hotels, stores, and factories, give ample evidence of the successful nature of its business prospects. ”

“ The old fort on Vancouver Island is now Victoria; Fort Edmonton is the seat of law and commerce in the Peace River region; old Fort William has seen Port Arthur rise by its side; Fort Garry is Winnipeg; Calgary, the chief city of Alberta, is on the site of another fort; and Sault Ste. Marie was once a Northwest post.
But civilization is still so far off from most of the "factories," as the company's posts are called, that the day when they shall become cities is in no man's thought or ken. ”

“ The warm winds that blow over the Rockies keep British Columbia green the year round and take the edge off the cold at Edmonton and Calgary.
Edmonton is an important coal centre, with thirty mines in its vicinity. Indeed, Alberta’s coal deposits are estimated to contain 1,000,000,000,000 tons, which is one seventh of the total supply of the world. It is eighty per cent. of Canada’s coal reserves. Coal is found throughout about half of the province from the United States boundary to the Peace River, and is mined at the rate of about five million tons a year. ”

“ Edmonton’s resources are more varied and her population more cosmopolitan than most of them. By her doors flows one of the great rivers of America, with timber and coal along its banks all the way to its source, while stretching away on every side is the rich soil of that wonderfully fertile belt that is bringing riches to tens of thousands of pioneer settlers. To all this it may be added that this new northern City has tributary to it, the vast northern region even down to the Arctic Sea, with little fear of any future rival. ”

“ This new Province, carved out of the heart of the world's biggest wheat-farm, would seem to hold within it all the elements that make for national greatness: the richest soil in the world, oil, timber, fur, fish, great underlying coal measures, a hinterland which is a very Pandora's box of gifts. Strong, sane, young people have the situation in hand, each alert to grasp the skirts of happy Chance. Peace walks within these western borders. What more would you?
The very first man we hunt out in Edmonton is Mr. Wyllie of Chipewyan. ”

“ Edmonton is a city still marked by the fine savour of the "Old-Timers," who meet once a year to renew associations, and for some fleeting but glorious hours recall the past on the great river. Age is thinning them out, and by and by the remainder man will shake his "few, sad, last gray hairs," and slip out, too. But the tradition of him, it is to be hoped, will live, and bind his memory forever to the soil he trod, when all this Western world was a wilderness, each primitive settlement a happy family, each unit an unsophisticated, hospitable soul. ”

“ Twenty-seven years before he had come out from France as a young missionary at once entering the field in the neighbourhood of Peace River, and this was the first time that he had ventured out even as far as Edmonton. As we approached this modern city in the evening with its lighted streets and throngs of busy people and he mentally compared it with the little port of the lonely post twenty-seven years before, his surprise at the change can well be imagined. ”

“ No one knew this better than Curlie Carson. He was not a stranger to other cities. Chicago, New York City he knew. Belize, in British Honduras, had seen him on her streets. Paris he loved for her beauty. Yet none of these thrilled him more than did Edmonton. On his days off, between flights, nothing suited him quite so well as sitting in the narrow lobby of his own hotel, the old Prince George, listening to the scraps of conversation that drifted unbidden to his ears. For, while not an outpost, Edmonton is the gateway to a thousand outposts. All the vast Northwest lies beyond it. ”

“ Ill questing it would be that should seek nowadays for the old inn. Instead, down by Angel Road Station and the Lea marshes, you find only factories and odours of the Pit, horrent and obscene. We have yet to come to the kernel, the nucleus of this Edmonton. Here it is, at Lower Edmonton, at the end of many houses, in a left-hand turning—Edmonton Green; the green a little shorn, perhaps, of its old proportions, and certainly by no means rural. ”

“ Whether East or West, Canada was solid in its welcome, and, as far as I am able to judge, there is no difference at all in the texture of human habit and mind East or West. There is the same fine, sturdy quality of loyalty and hospitality over the whole Dominion. Canada is Canada all through.
Edmonton is a fine, lusty place. It is the prairie town in its teens. It has not yet put off its coltish air. It is Winnipeg just leaving school, and has the wonderful precocity of these eager towns of the West. It is running almost before it has learnt to walk. ”

“ In the village, several homesteaders who are trending northward to the Peace River country, have drawn up to the hotel. Their wagons are piled high with farm implements and household stuff which they purchased at Edmonton.
All of these people are topful of enthusiasm, being of wise and gallant mind. Indeed, the whole country seems surcharged with it and even the poplars clap their hands. The settlers will tell you the only knocker here is Opportunity. There is always a mirage in the pioneer's sky which, God be praised, he manages to haul down bit by bit and pin to the solid earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Upper Edmonton in turn imperceptibly becomes Lower Edmonton, the old village now strung to London by leagues of houses. A long mile beyond the “Bell” is reached a fragment of Edmonton Green, where the poor “Witch of Edmonton” was burned in 1621. We may here desert the road, and its trams running on to a gap of still-open fields which the builder threatens to close; then again the industrial outliers of Enfield will shadow it almost continuously to the edge of the county. ”

“ And here, roughly, two hundred and fifty miles north, is the northern boundary line of our settlements, Prince Albert at the east, Battleford at the center, Edmonton at the west, each of these points the center of a country ravaged by half-breeds and bands of Indians. ”

“ I deeply regret that I was not able to visit Edmonton, which bids fair to rival any place in the North-West. Settlement is rapidly increasing there, and I met at Battleford one man who alone had commissions from ten Ontario farmers to buy for them at that place. Nothing can exceed the fertility and excellence of the land along almost the whole course of that great river, and to the north of it in the wide strip belting its banks and extending up to the Peace River, there will be room for a great population whose opportunities for profitable cultivation of the soil will be most enviable. ”

“ There are very few sections of the United States that ever had such a prospect. ... The northern limit of the farming belt, and of comfortable human settlement, has been indefinitely extended by a better knowledge of the country. Edmonton, hitherto a sort of northern ultima Thule will become a distributing point for vast regions far to the North and North-West, even to the fertile levels of the Peace River, where wheat is now known to grow as surely and as strongly as in Manitoba itself. ”