Chapter XVII: The Floodtide of Wheat

But for the fact that it is verified by actual tabulation, the statement that the Canadian Pacific Railway during the autumn of the year of grace 1923 carried two hundred and fifteen million bushels of grain over the steel trail, en route to feed the hungry in all parts of the world, would seem, to some of us, incredible. This huge scale of grain transportation means that about one hundred and thirty thousand cars were charged with the duty of taking to the world’s markets the magnificent product and offering of the vast prairie country of Canada. In the above sentences we personify both the cars and the prairies, because it does not require much imagination to speak of such prolific soil and such burden-bearing rolling stock as if they were instinct with life. The fact that behind them both is the splendidly strong endeavour and the passionately devoted skill of faithful men and women, seems only to add force to the personification of the elements of production and distribution, which, under Providence, they use for the good of the world. To some of us who look back to earlier days in the West, there is vivid romance in this development, and there is a sort of Alladin-lamp wonder in the transformation which the above statements indicate.

Agriculture is the oldest and the most distinctively fundamental industry in human society. It is by no means the easiest. It knows scarcely any limitation in the hours of toil, and its most strenuous and imperative duties come at a time of the year when city dwellers seek the cool shades of the holiday season. But it has some strong compensations. There is the consciousness of being in an occupation absolutely essential to the existence of humanity, and one that involves dwelling near to Nature’s heart, unafraid of privation and want. Rural life has opportunities and spaces for meditation, which is in danger of becoming a lost art in some other spheres. Farms are feeders of cities in more ways than one. They give leaders to the public life and learned professions of the nation, and but for the fresh blood that farms pour into cities every year, these centres would die of pernicious anemia. Those of us who were born on farms and recall our boyhood days can understand how, in the nerve-wracking anxieties elsewhere, men can enter into Whittier’s fine picture of the country lad who knows nothing about insomnia and indigestion:

“Blessings on thee, little man,
Barefoot boy with cheek of tan,
With thy turned up pantaloons
And thy merry whistled tunes;
With thy red lips, redder still,
Kissed by strawberries on the hill;
With the sunshine on thy face
Through thy torn brim’s jaunty grace;
From my heart I give thee joy—
I was once a barefoot boy.”

As suggested above, some of us have seen much development since the railway came. I recall the small fields of grain in the original colony along the Red River and the somewhat larger ones that began to open out on the prairie. When reaping was done with the sickle and cradle, and threshing with the flail and the two horse treadmill, the acreage under cultivation could not be large. And though, in my time, our people began to bring in reapers from St. Paul by cart-train, even to that wonder which we called the “self-raker,” there was little inducement to grow much, because there was only a small local market and no way of exporting. Things were in that condition when the Governor-General, Lord Dufferin, and Lady Dufferin, visited Manitoba and drove the first spikes in the Pembina Branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway on September 29th, 1877. That branch was on the east of the Red River and some years went by before the steel crossed at Winnipeg and reached the prairies. But even in 1877 there was more grain being grown than could be marketed at home. And the eloquent Dufferin referred to the situation in his own sympathetic way when he said, near the conclusion of his famous address in Winnipeg, “You have been blessed with an abundant harvest, and soon, I trust, will a railway come to carry to those who need it, the surplus of your produce, now, as my own eyes have witnessed, imprisoned in your storehouses _for want of the means of transport_. May the expanding finances of the country soon place the Government in a position to gratify your just and natural expectations.”

Meanwhile, as they waited for the longed-for and greatly needed railway to come, some of the early settlers were experimenting in growing grain that would be adapted to the soil and the climate. There were some who thought that wheat could not be grown to perfection very far west and north of the Red River. But there were others who felt differently.

I recall that excellent man, eloquent of speech and graceful in manner, J. W. Taylor, the United States Consul at Winnipeg, often called “Saskatchewan” Taylor, by reason of his personal knowledge of our North-West country. Despite the fact that some of his countrymen to the south might not like it, Consul Taylor persisted in saying that north of the international boundary was “the very home of the wheat plant.” And had he lived to see it, his kindly heart would have rejoiced when wheat grown at Fort Vermillion on the Peace River, a thousand miles north-west of Winnipeg, took the first prize at a World’s Fair in his own country.

In any case the good consul did much to bring about this present day by helping the settlers to select suitable grain. Many a time, for instance, did he bring, in envelopes, to my father on the old Red River homestead, samples of wheat he had received from different parts of the States. And he and my father, who were great friends, would plant these in garden plots and wait through the summer to see which would come to perfection during the season before the frost arrived. Some of this same wheat was given to others till the original contents of the selected envelope produced a harvest in many fields.

Later on came benefactors like the painstaking Professor Saunders and Seager Whealler, and others who, through careful seed selection, transformed the face of the country by making it possible for harvests to ripen where nothing of that type ripened before. Thus it became possible in the year 1915, when our Empire was at war, for the great prairies to pour out their millions in wheat and flour to help in the battle for freedom. The soldiers in uniform at the front were supported by the soldiers in overalls at home, or the War could not have been won. And of these at home the soldiers of the soil deserve to be mentioned in despatches for their strenuous work in the greatest feeding industry of the world.

And now, beside the stations along the pioneer Canadian Pacific and its endless gridiron of branch lines on the prairie, we have been seeing in these recent autumn months of 1923 the teams with the drivers, waiting their turn at a thousand elevators. The river of wheat on the main line is being swollen into floodtide from the tributary branches. Back of the railway and headed towards it, we have seen apparently interminable lines of wagons laden with grain. Like a long procession of industrious ants we have seen these wagons coming along the level plain, then up and down the ridges, to empty their loads at the capacious elevators. Thence the grain is poured into the cars which stand by on the steel trails behind panting locomotives—iron horses that chafe and tug with impatience to get way. And they must get away as quickly as possible, for other trains are ready to use the sidings to relieve the pressure caused by the wagons pouring their load into the elevators. A great army of men are at work and thousands of horses. But it is a beneficent, constructive army of men, with their lumbering artillery of horses and wagons engaged in the gigantic task of sending food supplies to the great centres of population all over the world. The elevators are the peaceful headquarters of a great staff employed to transfer foodstuffs from these prairie commissary stores to the railway trains which carry them in rushing torrents of speed to the great lakes, the canals and the open sea. It is in great and wonderfully significant contrast to the scenes from which we take this illustration, when militarism made its way unchecked, and, on a hundred battle-fields, we saw wounded men and tortured horses and derailed trains in the havoc of war—“rider and horse, friend, foe, in one red burial blent.” Canadians have proven their mettle, as a peace-loving people will always do when aroused to resist wrong, but ours is not a militaristic nation. And we should take a noble pride in seeing in these peaceful, industrious hosts on Canadian plains some fulfilment of the promised time, when “men shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks and study war no more.”

The scenes in the time of the grain marketing movement to the railway and the elevators suggest massed formation for peaceful ends. But back of this massed formation is the individual home on whose character and success the future of the country depends. Tales, more or less mythical, perhaps, but with some foundation, are told of city-dwelling lads who thought of milk and bread as the product of the milk-wagon and the baker’s cart. But it is probably quite true that there is not enough thought given to the household on the plain where the origin of food products is better understood through the toil of the day. The homesteader on these great wheat areas had no easy task. The breaking of the land, the struggle to make ends meet till the farm became productive, the endurance of summer heat and winter cold, were all part of the daily round and the common task, and no human pen will ever fully portray the heroism of the pioneer women who bore their share of every burden and kept their homes in order without many of the comforts and facilities that are available to city dwellers. Then there came later on the care of stock, the sowing, reaping, threshing and marketing—in all of which there is need for tremendous persistence—these are elements in the industry of the farm; and one is sometimes appalled to think of what would happen if those employed in that industry should go on strike!

A recent and interesting development has taken place in the flowing of the river of wheat for export. It is a far cry from the days when special seed was brought by Consul Taylor in envelopes and sown in garden plots on the Red River to these days when the plains are dotted with vast farms all the way from the scene of those garden plots to the Rocky Mountains and from the international boundary-line to the Sub-Arctic. Now it is becoming evident that other outlets must be found for the floodtide of wheat in addition to the old course eastward to Fort William and beyond. It looks as if there will be somewhere on the prairies, ere long, a new watershed, a sort of “Great-Divide” such as we see in nature along the Canadian Pacific in the Mountains, where the rivers begin to flow both east and west to different outlets on the way to the lakes and the sea. After this manner also the rivers of wheat will run to either ocean.

A few days ago I was talking with that genial and experienced railway man (now retired) Mr. E. A. James, in Vancouver. Mr. James when a lad was the private telegraph operator for that master railroad builder, Van Horne, and went with him on a trip to the West Coast when the end of steel was not to its present terminus. Mr. James relates that one day Mr. Van Horne, Mr. L. A. Hamilton, and himself, were standing on rocks and stumps where Hastings and Granville Streets now intersect at the Post Office, in the business heart of Vancouver. Mr. Van Horne took out a piece of paper and sketched the location. Mr. James, a mere boy, had nothing wherewith to purchase any rocks and stumps and ventured a rather sceptical opinion as to the future of a city in such a locality. Mr. Van Horne said, “My boy, there will be a very great city here. To this place will come steel tracks carrying endless trains of passengers and freight. And from this place, an all-the-year-round port, will sail fleets of vessels engaged in trade all over the world.”

Now, since the Panama Canal has been opened, it is evident that trains of wheat will come to the Pacific in ever-growing number from some economic watershed on the plains. Outlets, both East and West, will be increasingly necessary to carry the produce of the vast prairie section to the food markets of the world. For many years Fort William and Montreal have struggled to handle the immense burden of this growing wheat traffic. Now the Pacific route has come to relieve the abnormal pressure on Eastern ports and lead to further developments in agriculture on the prairies. And from Vancouver and other points on the West Coast this wheat will go by vessels of all kinds to the ends of the earth—to the over-crowded centres of Europe and Asia and Africa, as well as to the islands of the sea. Thus shall the forecast made that day on the site of Vancouver City by Mr. Van Horne, the builder of the Canadian Pacific Railway, be justified, even though that forecast was made at the rough-looking outpost of

“A great new land,
Half-wakened by the wonder
And the prophetic thunder
Of triumphs yet untold.”