B ULLETS whistled about my ears as I leapt from my horse on Cutknife Hill. The Indians had us neatly ringed in, as once they used to trap the buffalo. Puffs of smoke rose from the gully on our left, from the gully on our right, from the creek-bed in our rear, from the ridge beyond the gully on each hand. Man after man fell, killed or wounded. The friend who had shared his supper with me, the night before, lay dead, a bullet through his head. The next bullet might go through mine. For five long h

H OW IS your own imagination, to-day? I hope it is good and strong, because you will need to use it now. The most surprising things used to happen, right here in the West, with no man here to see them. Mother Earth and her elder children had the most extraordinary adventures before the first man came. Our eyes, if we will only use them, come to the help of our imagination here. Down in the Red Deer Valley of Alberta monsters used to live, more huge and wonderful than dragons in a fairy tale. No

L OOK far enough, and we see him, a wanderer with his little family, starting from the heart of Asia, hunting and fishing as they go, camping for a few years or a century in one place, moving on when their number increases and food is not enough for all, or when some other tribe comes up behind and drives them on,—moving on, and on, and on,—a few families at a time or hundreds together. They belong, as all the American “Indians” do, to one great human stock that spread out east and west along th

O NE DAY a strange piece of news came to an Indian prairie camp. The men and women, squatting on the grass, and smoking their willow-bark, discussed the great news, and even the children stopped their play to listen and wonder. A new kind of man had been seen, far away in the south,—a light-skinned man. How did the news come? The scattered Indian tribes had little to do with each other, except when they fought, and in a fight they generally killed all the men they conquered who did not escape. B

T HE KING of the West was no longer the buffalo. From the time the Company opened its first fort on the Bay, the beaver was king; and his reign lasted two hundred years. White men and red alike, all were his servants. They served him for what they could get out of him, as courtiers often did with human kings in days not long ago. The buffalo remained the chief food and house-material used by the plainsmen themselves, but its skin was not so easy to sell as the beaver’s. To be sure, it had a cash

W ERE all those good lives wasted, then, and the scores of good ships too, lost in three centuries of wild-goose chase? But for that wild-goose chase, carried on by brave British sailors from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, our Dominion of Canada, stretching from sea to sea, would never have come into existence. If we had not taken a vigorous part in the exploration of the Pacific coast, the Russians coming down from the north and Spaniards coming up from the south would between them have s

F OR HUNDREDS of years the West had now been explored—inland, to find new routes for the fur trade, and up in the north to find a new sea route from Europe to Asia—but no explorer had come in to find new homes for his fellow-men. In the middle of last century, however, the Government of Canada sent up a scientific expedition to find out the real facts about this country—for one thing, whether it was fit for agriculture. The fur traders said it was not. People overseas, and most people even in th

N O; BUT out in the vast beyond were the makings of trouble enough. From little Manitoba to the mountains, the thousand miles of plain, then vaguely known as “The Saskatchewan,” lay unguarded and unwatched. The old ruling company had given up its power, and no new ruler had appeared. The throne was empty. The Company’s authority over most of the tribes had been extraordinary. By treating the Indians as its children, with a wise mixture of patience and firmness, by avoiding interference as a rule

T HERE were only fifteen hundred white folk in Manitoba at the time of the trouble in 1870, but around them lived ten thousand people of mixed race. Three-fifths of these owed their white blood to French voyageurs; the rest drew theirs chiefly from Scots higher up in the Hudson’s Bay service. A small but steady stream of white settlers now began to trickle in, coming from Ontario through the States. The French Métis soon found themselves in a minority. The wilder spirits sold their land and flit

D O YOU see that rough man with a key in his hand? It looks like a spade, you say—and so it is; but it is doing the work of a key. He strikes it into the soil; he digs up a sod. That is all you observe, till your imagination awakes—and then you see that he is opening the door of the West. He has turned the first sod of a railway line from the East. The saving of the West from destruction, the swift suppression of revolt when delay might have rallied all the Indians to the rebel flag, was only ma

T HE PEOPLE who now streamed in through the open door, who were they? Mostly Eastern Canadians. But who were these Eastern Canadians? We must look back a hundred years to find out. When most of the English colonists to the south broke away from the Empire, many thousands of them considered this violent action wrong; and, without any doubt, if the object to be achieved was self-government, it could and would have been won later on without secession, as other colonists won it. Thousands of “United

K ING STEER made a brave stand against King Wheat, but had to surrender when his realm was thrown open for settlement and the army of grain-growers poured in, cutting up the range with barbed-wire fences. This brings us to the beginning of the present century. Turn your telescope back to that time. Mount the broncos of imagination and ride with me, to see what I saw, riding the plains in 1905 when the new Prairie Provinces were just being born. Down in Southern Alberta, the biggest ranch still s

O UT ON the prairie again we ride, by the old freighting trail from Battleford to Saskatoon. But we only meet one freighting outfit all the way, a wagon drawn by two plodding oxen. “It was a big business, that freighting,” says a Scottish blacksmith who has built his shack and smithy beside the trail, “but it didn’t last long. The freighters made good money from the time settlers began to come in thick, but now the railway is open the trail is dead.” He might have said “barred and buried,” for i

T HAT BUGLE again! You cannot hear it, but I know it is calling, for to-morrow is the birthday of the giant twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan. One more night under the stars, a brisk morning ride, and we canter up to the old fur-trading post. Paul Kane’s 139 people, “all living within the pickets of the fort” and not a white woman among them, have grown to 14,000, and, from their clothes and complexions, they might be in London or Toronto. In all the big crowd, gathered to hear the Governor-Genera

“ Cela est bien dit; mais je sais aussi qu’il faut cultiver notre jardin. ” “ That is well said, but I also know that we must cultivate our garden. ” A FTER many adventures, the speaker of these famous words at last found satisfaction, which nothing else had brought, in winning his daily bread from a little patch of earth. Our “garden” is so big that we should still need months of travel to see it all, even now when trains are running over 20,000 miles of western railways. Our lawns and beds are

A WAY WE glide, down the eastern slope. We have entered Alberta now. A farming Province? Yes, all the Prairie Provinces are. That is their chief glory, for agriculture is the one industry that man cannot do without, unless he cuts down his numbers by ninety-nine per cent. and tries to live like his savage forefathers, by hunting and fishing alone. Yet farming is not everything, even here. We only hear of what comes off the surface of the prairie, as a rule; but underground there is wealth we hav

T HE MUSIC of a foaming torrent mingles with the softened hum of mowers and roar of heavy trains rushing wheat to the steamers at Fort William, as we plane up—not down—to the south-east corner of the Province. The crisp music is the voice of Winnipeg River, busy making electric light and power for the city and the towns beyond. Right about turn. There is the very same water, spread out and sleeping in the shallow expanse of Lake Winnipeg. The shimmer of the surface breaks into flashing points of

“What is the Spirit of the West?” I was asked when I began to write. You have read the book? Then you have seen the fruits of that Spirit, in its actions and achievements. If that is not answer enough, here is the Spirit of the West as I have seen it; here are the dominant ideals of Western life. The Spirit of Courage. The brave heart for a short heroic dash, and for persistence, more heroic still, through the long march to a distant goal. The spirit that never flinches at an obstacle or set-bac