Dreams have been written about the ocean and its effect upon individuals and peoples. Little has been recorded of the prairie, but there is a certain moment on the journey between Winnipeg and the mountains when an impressionable traveler hears its music, as untranslatable as it is distinct. It may come to you tramping the snow-piled platform of some wayside station, as you momentarily break a wintry journey, or out of a summer night.
I remember a midnight break-down on the C.P.R. somewhere between Edmonton and Calgary. At first the ceasing of the wheels brought only a sense of unusual quiet, penetrated, I must admit, by the rumble of a full-throated snore in the distance. Peering into the darkness from the dim enclosure of my berth, suddenly I saw the moon rise out of a cloud and send a spear of light over a limitless sea of grass. And yet not grass. Not the July-green Ontario carpet that I knew, but something—a great undulating naked hairy line of the very body of the Earth itself, the Earth all alive and full of hidden possibilities, murmuring in its [page 197] sleep. The murmur seemed to me rhythmical, almost like the purr of a large, sleepy cat. Sometimes across the murmur came a sigh, rather like a wind, but no wind that I had ever heard before. And in the sigh that heaved that living, grassy line there was a call, an invitation, as though immensity had deigned to speak. Then lanterns twinkling along the side of the sleeper, hoarse shouts and orders, and the great express, slowly gathering energy, shot away westward. But I, with thousands of others, had heard the voice of the prairie.
It was with such a feeling for the immensities with which she is surrounded that I accepted Calgary just as I found her, a symbol of nature on a grand scale. I did not ask many questions or wish to be deeply enlightened as to her history and antecedents. But as I had heard her called ‘a glorified Cow Town,’ I was glad to find a narrow Main Street giving me a far away suggestion of a trail rather than the usual wide Western Avenue.
The truth is that when the first railway train crossed the prairie, in 1886, this city was no more than a little distributing centre for a wild country. It was known to Indians, traders, and a few ranchers. It was commended by all on account of its situation, its winery air and warm Pacific winds. But the miracle that makes it [page 198] now was then non-existent, save in the minds of a few men. Shortly these thoughts emerged. The Canadian Government gave as part payment to the Canadian Pacific Railway, three million acres of land in the extreme west of the prairie belt.
“Ranching Country!” said the C.P.R. “In fifty years it may amount to something!” But there was an optimist who declared that a rainfall average but twenty inches held great harvests in possibility. Later on the railway arranged with the Dominion Government for a block of land stretching one hundred and fifty miles east. Irrigation! It is all in the word that makes the desert blossom. Hence the glorification of Calgary.
Everyone knows how the Government came to the assistance of the project by devising simple but effective irrigation laws. The western section of the C.P.R. block was watered by means of the canal which is one of the first and foremost of Calgary’s points of interest. It is seventeen miles long and a hundred and twenty feet wide at the water line, and has a hundred and fifty miles of secondary canals and eight hundred miles of irrigating ditches.
And so the rancher, who used to tie his horse to a post outside the store and proceed to trade in leisurely fashion became an “intensive farmer” and his needs [page 199] grew many. The spirit of young Calgary responded. By a modern magic the great factories and wholesale [page 200] depots, shops and houses emerged and there followed the busy streets and public buildings of a modern city.
One can only picture a place as one finds it. Here the first and the last note seems to be magnetism. Something intensely alive reached out and caught me. I felt it from the moment of arrival on what I supposed must be a public holiday, judging by the air of bustle at the railway station. I was told, however, that this was an everyday coming and going. I saw English and American tourists, Jews, Japanese, a Hindoo with a smooth-folded turban, and Indian with coloured baskets to sell, farmers, ranchers, business men, school girls,—all setting out to find their own Calgary.
Emerging on Ninth Avenue, once called Whiskey Row, one is suddenly in the midst of large hotels, public buildings and clubs, amongst which the Ranchers’ Club (on an Avenue near by) is unique. Here are the Administrative Offices of the Canadian Pacific from where the business of the vast land holdings, mines and other interests of the company are managed. Eventually you reach the great stock-yards of Pat Burns, the Cattle King, an old-time in the West, who controls its largest packing plant. Eighth Avenue is the principal shopping street, and they tell you that on Saturday night it is as congested as Piccadilly Circus. [page 201]
Essentially a man’s town, this is also a place which is in the grip of elemental forces. As I walked about in the mid-summer heat I wondered if it were temperature or altitude that made me feel so light-headed. I decided that it was altitude. And the dusty storm! “Something like a London fog” it has been called,” only a dust fog,”—an animated fog in which everything unsubstantial is fair prey. I have seen whole newspapers caught up like balloons and tossed sky-high.
A kindlier force is the Bow River, which waters the land and contains a mineral quality that is quite remarkable.
Calgary stands in the midst of millions of acres of workable soil. Professor Tanner, the agricultural chemist, says that it is richer than the famous “black earth” of central Russia. There is sunshine most of the year and bracing air softened by the Chinook winds, so that horses and cattle run in the open throughout the winter, and among the foothills are many notable ranches.
The E.P. Ranch, the property of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, in close proximity to Calgary, is of course the show place of the entire region, and the hills and valleys, streams and meadow-lands are beautiful enough to have aroused a desire for possession in so cosmopolitan a traveler as His Royal Highness. [page 202]
The Sarcee Indian Reserve, seven miles from Calgary, was used as a training camp during the war of 1914-19. |
We first saw the foothills from the Roof Garden of the Palliser Hotel,—ghostly beckoning peaks sixty miles away. One day we answered their call and motored to Banff through the foothill ranching country, the Morley Indian Reserve, past Kananaskes Falls, the mining country about Canmore, and on into the hills.
When you return to mountains, after long absence, the impression is as fresh as though you had never seen them before. It may come from the atmospheric effect of altitude, colour and spacing which makes you feel as if you are in a land of coloured pictures. Whether it is the airy green and white of the Alps, about which there seems to be a kind of vibration like the far chiming of small bells, the gorgeous crimson, and purples of the southern Rockies, the copper and gold of the Canadian range, there is to the plains-dweller, a sense of unreality in painted distances that custom does not dim. Banff is a great brown fugue of giant hills that would break your spirit if it could, but you know that [page 203] beyond it lies a marvelous journey westward in which beauty is not lost in vastness.
In the old days arrival by train at Banff had its compensations, when a jolly drag boasting four spirited [page 204] steeds conveyed you to the hotel. But even in an unatmospheric motor you may ascend the winding road with a clanking of chains and drive up with a splendid flourish before the entrance of an irregular pile that looks rather like the dream of some bold baron of a century ago. Before you enter, something draws you to the right of the stone portico; something more than the suggestion of a wide view. You look over and find intuition justified, for the wall of the building seems to fall away to the almost perpendicular mountain side. Set in a cranny commanding the Bow Valley and ringed about with mountains, this is an opera box from which one watches big plays on a big stage. Day after day the curtain is rung up on troops of winds and clouds and sun rays,—versatile actors who love variety.
I have seen a day so leaden that every peak was austere. Then a rift in the clouds, a band of pink, and the whole region a paradise of colour.
There is everything to do in Banff, and its admirers seem to be inordinately energetic. They play golf, and climb, and swim in the great Pool or canoe on the river. They visit the Buffalo Reserve and the Sun-dance Canyon and the Cave. There seems to be a peculiar reverence in everyone’s mind for the Cave. Even the pilot is reverent, as he solemnly conducts you through a mysterious tunnel cut out of solid rock. On each side [page 205] you hear the rush of water, and also you smell sulphur. The tunnel widens into a circular cave in the centre of which there is a pool of emerald green water through which bubbles of gas come constantly up to the surface, as though the spirit of the place wanted to be free once more. For long ago this was the home of a boiling geyser, a wild pre-historic youth who now does tricks for travelers. We felt more annoyance than reverence for his imprisoning Cave. [page 206] |
