208 CANADA

of brick or stone, with large outbuildings,
sheltered by plantations, all within easy 
sight of one another and representing farms 
of from a hundred and sixty to six hundred 
and forty acres. Though wheat is the great
cash crop, mixed farming is widely practised,
oats, hay, and stock of all kinds being 
everywhere prominent. The fields out here
are large, and being fenced with wire, the 
country retains its wide open aspect, utterly
different from Old Canada, with its small 
railed-in fields and abundance of wood. Most 
of the vegetables and small fruits known in
England flourish here, as in Ontario. Apples,
however, do not succeed well, and the orchard
is the one familiar object of country life 
lacking. To the original province of Manitoba
two western provinces of Saskatchewan and 
Alberta, filling up the interval to the 
Rocky Mountains, have been formally united 
to the Dominion Confederation. In the three
prairie provinces there are now 1,800,000
people out of seven and odd million in the
whole Dominion. Ten years ago there were 
400,000.In the history of British colonization
there is no counterpart to the rapidity with 
which the North-West has grown in a dozen years.
The old troubles have been largely overcome.
In the newer districts, generally pressing
in a northerly direction, the pioneer has, 
of course, to face the ordinary hardships. But a multi-

THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 209

plication of railroads, telegraphs, telephones,
and elevators (great storehouses on railroads 
where the farmers sell and deposit their wheat,
and many other modern inventions have made 
the life of even the most extended settlements 
less formidable. Moreover, there has been a 
great tendency to settle new districts 
collectively. A knowledge of the country, 
too, what seeds to sow, and all that belongs
to agricultural science, has reduced the danger
of early frosts, and even the climate, 
which is generally the case when a wilderness
is reclaimed, has softened a little.
One great factor in the progress of the 
country remains to be told. Though the price 
of wheat in the world has never recovered its
old figures, yet the North-Western farmer,
owing to the widely recognized top quality 
of his grain and to improvements in transporta-
tion, gets about double the price he used to.
Formerly, from the cost of getting it to 
Europe, the North-Western grower only received
about half of even the low-marked price in 
England. Growing wheat on the virgin soil 
of the prairie is far cheaper than in Great 
Britain or in Old Canada, where manure and 
expensive preparation are necessary. But at 
the old North-West prices, even with a 
successful crop there was not much profit 
left at 2s. or 2s. 6d. a bushel. It is not 
surprising that the world did not rush in to 
face a new

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