CHAPTER VIII THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES AND THE RISE OF THE NORTH-WEST

The prairie country is generally known, and
has hitherto been always known, as the North-
West. It begins about one thousand six
hundred miles west of Halifax, and con-
sequently about two hundred miles west
of the half-way line across the continent;
while its most southerly point lies further 
north than the populated parts of Eastern
Canada. Till 1869 the North-West had no 
existence for Canada. It was an unknown 
wilderness, used as a fur-trading ground by
the Hudsons Bay Company, and under their 
jurisdiction. Early in the century Lord 
Selkirk, the philanthropic promoter of High-
land immigration to Canada, had planted a 
handful of Scotch agricultural settlers there,
who were brutally used by the fur traders. The
antagonism of the traders, who resented all 
intrusion, together with the inaccessible 
nature of the country, and the bad reputation
of its climate, hid it from the world as behind
a curtain for many generations.

THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 191

It took the officials and servants of the
fur companies ten weeks to travel through
the wilderness by canoe from Montreal to
Fort Garry, which stood on the site of Winni-
-peg. Before 1870 Canada terminated where
the fertile western peninsula of Ontario abuts
upon Lake Huron. The former steady influx
of settlers had practically ceased. All the
good land in Old Canada had been occupied,
and most of it converted into finished farms,
while the rest was rapidly becoming so. On
maps and plans there were still great tracts
of forest behind the northern edge of the good
and settled up countries, offered for settlement.
But oversea immigrants, who had the other 
colonies and the United States for selection,
would have none of it; it was too poor. 
The Canada of that day was, in short, filled up.
If any were to open up the forest regions still
available, it was such natives of the country
who had no better alternative, and they 
did so in a halting fashion. Would-be immi-
-grants knew now what clearing land in Canada
meant. The heavy, continuous axe work, the 
slow progress, the years of waiting till the 
stumps could be removed: this was well enough 
on good land. It had raised thousands of poor
labouring men to the position of comfortable 
farmers. But going through these years of toil
to possess only indifferent land at the end of
it was quite another matter,

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People, Duncan, The Western Canada Series, David Duncan

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The West 1763-1812, The West 1812-1841, Western Canda,
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 Western provinces, Sask Gen Web, Saskatchewan Gen Web