Edmonton

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Straight across the country, winding over plains, around sleughs, threading its way through bluffs, over prairie undulations, fording streams and crossing rivers, and so making its course northwest from Winnipeg for nine hundred miles, runs the Edmonton trail.
Macmillan was the last of that far-famed and adventurous body of men who were known all through the western country for their skill, their courage, their endurance in their profession of freighters from Winnipeg to the far outpost of Edmonton and beyond into the Peace River and Mackenzie River districts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is not squalid like Birmingham, or cramped like Canton, or scattered like Edmonton, or sham like Berlin, or hellish like New York, or tiresome like Nice. It is all right. The only depressing thing is that it will always be what it is, only larger, and that no Canadian city can ever be anything better or different. If they are good they may become Toronto. ”

“ The elevator is a municipal institution, and municipal ownership is the general rule in Edmonton, the city owning and operating the trolley lines, the electric light plant, the water-works, and the telephone system. Edmonton would be the earthly paradise of the disciples of Henry George, for it is a single-tax town. The University of Alberta with its splendid campus of three hundred and fifty acres, fronts the impressive capitol, of cream-hued sandstone, which stands on the Edmonton side of the river. ”

“ Winnipeg has been from the first a predestined centre of commerce. It is the metropolis of the transcontinental lines and is the one supreme gateway through which all travellers and all traffic from ocean to ocean must pass. No other city on the western continent has such an absolute monopoly of all transit from the east to the west, or the reverse.
Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, most attractive in its beauty of locality, stands on the bold bluffs of the Saskatchewan. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is Stamford Hill, where the rich City indigo and East and West India merchants live. Warm men, all of them. There, ahead of us, on the right, goes the river Lea: as pretty fishing there as you’d find even in the famous trout streams of Hampshire. What a quaint, quiet rural place this is at Tottenham! And Edmonton, with its tea-gardens; why, London might be fifty miles away! ”

“ It belongs to the Canadian Northern Railway Company. For many years Edmonton was known as the last house in the world. This, of course, was not literally true, and it would be hard to state where or which is the ultimate hearth-stone in this very good land of Canada, but assuredly Edmonton was the last post-office and, until this year, the End of Steel. To-day, this road is born. When will it die? We fall into a way of thinking it is here for eternity, but railways vanish like everything else. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Back through Edmonton, back through Winnipeg, back through that young giant, Fort William—but not back across the Great Lakes. Instead of that transit we took train, by the courtesy of the Canadian Pacific, round the northern shore of Superior, a beautiful wooded desolate country, which, without minerals, offers little prospect for the future. Some 200 miles north of it, the Grand Trunk, that enterprising pioneer of empire, has opened up another line which extends for a thousand miles, and should develop a new corn and lumber district. Canada is like an expanding flower ”

“ Edmonton is the capital of the western side of the prairie, even as Winnipeg is of the eastern. I do not suppose the average Briton has the least conception of the amenities of Winnipeg. He would probably be surprised to hear that the Fort Garry Hotel there is nearly as modern and luxurious as any hotel in Northumberland Avenue. There were no such luxuries in 1914 in Edmonton. The town was in a strangely half-formed condition, rude and raw, but with a great atmosphere of energy, bustle, and future greatness. With its railway connections and waterways it is bound to be a large city. ”

“ There are numerous factories in the valley, and Edmonton consists largely of the cottages of artisans. The church of All Saints has been extensively restored, but retains part of the ancient fabric of Perpendicular and earlier date. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His route lay through the Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, up the North Saskatchewan to Edmonton House, up the Athabasca to Jasper’s, across the Yellowhead Pass—through which the Canadian National Railway now runs—then down the whole length of the Columbia, by the Arrow Lakes and Fort Okanagan.
At Edmonton he found quite “a large establishment,” forty or fifty men, with their wives and children, amounting altogether to about 139, all living within the pickets of the fort. The men were occupied chiefly in building the company’s boats, sawing timber and cutting up firewood. ”

“ 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 ”

“ SIR JOHN. Neighbour Banks of Waltham, and Goodman Smug, the honest Smith of Edmonton, as I dwell betwixt you both at Enfield, I know the taste of both your ale houses, they are good both, smart both. Hem, Grass and hay! we are all mortal; let’s live till we die, and be merry ”

“ From the Red River Settlement to Edmonton, about 800 miles, the road lies through a fertile and park-like country, and an excellent cart trail already exists. From Edmonton to Jasper House, a distance of about 400 miles, the surface is slightly undulating, the lower ground universally swampy, and everywhere covered with thick forest. ”

“ We stopped for two days at Edmonton, a large trading port or fort of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It stands on high ground above the Saskatchewan, is formed of rough palisades, with flanking towers, sufficiently strong to resist an attack of Indians, and contains a blacksmith’s forge and carpenter’s shop, and some thirty families; while attached to it is a large body of hunters, employed in collecting furs for the Company, or in killing buffalo for food. Bound the fort, wheat, potatoes, and vegetables of all sorts, are produced in abundance ”

“ 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. ”

“ In ratio of increase the Western cities far surpass the Eastern cities. Winnipeg, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton are rushing to the front. Of course, the growth of the clearings of these secondary centers serves to swell the clearings at Montreal and Toronto. Ultimate settlement of differences or balances at the smaller places is made by putting through drafts on the greater centers. ”