Letters from America/The Prairies
XI
THE PRAIRIES
I passed the last few hours of the westward journey from Winnipeg to Regina in daylight, the daylight of a wet and cheerless Sunday. The car was half-empty, in possession of a family of small children and some theatrical ladies and gentlemen from the United States, travelling on 'one night stands,' who were collectively called 'The World-Renowned Barbary Pirates.' We jogged limply from little village to little village, each composed of little brown log-shacks, with a few buildings of tin and corrugated iron, and even of brick, and several grain-elevators. Each village—I beg your pardon, 'town'—seems to be exactly like the next. They differ a little in size, from populations of 100 to nearly 2000, and in age, for some have buildings dating almost back to the nineteenth century, and a few are still mostly tents. They seemed all to be emptied of their folk this Sabbath morn; though whether the inhabitants were at work, or in church, or had shot themselves from depression induced by the weather, it was impossible to tell. These little towns do not look to the passer-by comfortable as homes. Partly, there is the difficulty of distinguishing your village from the others. It would be as bad as being married to a Jap. And then towns should be on hills or in valleys, however small. A town dumped down, apparently by chance, on a flat expanse wears the same air of discomfort as a man trying to make his bed on a level, unyielding surface such as a lawn or pavement. He feels hopelessly incidental to the superficies of the earth. He is aware that the human race has thigh-bones....
Yet this country is not quite flat, as I had been led to expect. It does not give you that feeling of a plain you have in parts of Lombardy and Holland and Belgium. This may have been due to the grey mist and drizzle which curtained off the horizon. But the land was always very slightly rolling, and sometimes almost as uneven as a Surrey common. At first it seemed to be given to mixed farming a good deal; afterwards to wheat, oats, and barley. But a great part is uncultivated prairie-land, grass, with sparse bushes and patches of brushwood and a few rare trees, and continual clumps of large golden daisies. Occasional rough black roads wind through the brush and into the towns, and die into grass tracks along the wire fences. The day I went through, the interminable, oblique, thin rain took the gold out of the wheat and the brown from the distant fields and bushes, and drabbed all the colours in the grass. The children in the car cried to each other with the shrill, sick persistency of tired childhood, "How many inches to Regina?" "A Billion." "A Trillion." "A Shillion." The Barbary Pirates laughed incessantly. It seemed to me that the prairie would be a lonely place to live in, especially if it rained. But the people who have lived there for years tell me they get very homesick if they go away for a time. Valleys and hills seem to them petty, fretful, unlovable. The magic of the plains has them in thrall.
Certainly there is a little more democracy in the west of Canada than the east; the communities seem a little less incapable of looking after themselves. Out in the west they are erecting not despicable public buildings, founding universities, running a few public services. That 'politics' has a voice in these undertakings does not make them valueless. There are perceptible in the prairies, among all the corruption, irresponsibility, and disastrous individualism, some faint signs of the sense of the community. Take a very good test, the public libraries. As you traverse Canada from east to west they steadily improve. You begin in the city of Montreal, which is unable to support one, and pass through the dingy rooms and inadequate intellectual provision of Toronto and Winnipeg. After that the libraries and reading-rooms, small for the smaller cities, are cleaner and better kept, show signs of care and intelligence; until at last, in Calgary, you find a very neat and carefully kept building, stocked with an immense variety of periodicals, and an admirably chosen store of books, ranging from the classics to the most utterly modern literature. Few large English towns could show anything as good. Cross the Rockies to Vancouver, and you're back among dirty walls, grubby furniture, and inadequate literature again. There's nothing in Canada to compare with the magnificent libraries little New Zealand can show. But Calgary is hopeful.
These cities grow in population with unimaginable velocity. From thirty to thirty thousand in fifteen years is the usual rate. Pavements are laid down, stores and bigger stores and still bigger stores spring up. Trams buzz along the streets towards the unregarded horizon that lies across the end of most roads in these flat, geometrically planned, prairie-towns. Probably a Chinese quarter appears, and the beginnings of slums. Expensive and pleasant small dwelling-houses fringe the outskirts; and rents being so high, great edifices of residential flats rival the great stores. In other streets, or even sandwiched between the finer buildings, are dingy and decaying saloons, and innumerable little booths and hovels where adventurers deal dishonestly in Real Estate, and Employment Bureaux. And there are the vast erections of the great corporations, Hudson's Bay Company, and the banks and the railways, and, sometimes almost equally impressive, the public buildings. There are the beginnings of very costly universities; and Regina has built a superb great House of Parliament, with a wide sheet of water in front of it, a noble building.
The inhabitants of these cities are proud of them, and envious of each other with a bitter rivalry. They do not love their cities as a Manchester man loves Manchester or a Münchener Munich, for they have probably lately arrived in them, and will surely pass on soon. But while they are there they love them, and with no silent love. They boost. To boost is to commend outrageously. And each cries up his own city, both from pride, it would appear, and for profit. For the fortunes of Newville are very really the fortunes of its inhabitants. From the successful speculator, owner of whole blocks, to the waiter bringing you a Martini, who has paid up a fraction of the cost of a quarter-share in a town-lot—all are the richer, as well as the prouder, if Newville grows. It is imperative to praise Edmonton in Edmonton. But it is sudden death to praise it in Calgary. The partisans of each city proclaim its superiority to all the others in swiftness of growth, future population, size of buildings, price of land—by all recognised standards of excellence. I travelled from Edmonton to Calgary in the company of a citizen of Edmonton and a citizen of Calgary. Hour after hour they disputed. Land in Calgary had risen from five dollars to three hundred; but in Edmonton from three to five hundred. Edmonton had grown from thirty persons to forty thousand in twenty years; but Calgary from twenty to thirty thousand in twelve...."Where"—as a respite—"did I come from?" I had to tell them, not without shame, that my own town of Grantchester, having numbered three hundred at the time of Julius Cæsar's landing, had risen rapidly to nearly four by Doomsday Book, but was now declined to three-fifty. They seemed perplexed and angry.
Sentimental people in the East will talk of the romance of the West, and of these simple, brave pioneers who have wrung a living from the soil, and are properly proud of the rude little towns that mark their conquest over nature. That may apply to the frontiers of civilisation up North, but the prairie-towns have progressed beyond all that. A few of the old pioneers of the West survive to watch with startled eyes the wonderful fruits of the seed they sowed. Such are among the finest people in Canada, very different from the younger generation, with wider interests, good talkers, the best of company. From them, and from records, one can learn of the early settlers and the beginnings of the North-West Mounted Police. The police seem to have been superb. For no great reward, but the love of the thing, they imposed order and fairness upon half a continent. The Indians trusted them utterly; they were without fear. A store stands now in Calgary where forty years ago a policeman was shot to death by a murderer, followed over a thousand miles. He knew that the criminal would shoot; but it was the rule of the Mounted Police not to fire first. Wounded, he killed his man, then died. And there was the case of the desperado who crossed the border, and was eventually captured and held by an immense force of American police and military. They awaited a regiment of the Police to conduct the villain back to trial. Two appeared, and being asked, "Where is the escort?" replied, "We are the escort," and started back their five hundred miles ride with the murderer in tow. And there were the two who pursued a horse-thief from Dawson down to Minneapolis, caught him, and took him back to Dawson to be hanged. And there was the settler, who...
The tragedy of the West is that these men have passed, and that what they lived and died to secure for their race is now the foundation for a gigantic national gambling of a most unprofitable and disastrous kind. Hordes of people—who mostly seem to come from the great neighbouring Commonwealth, and are inspired with the national hunger for getting rich quickly without deserving it—prey on the community by their dealings in what is humorously called 'Real Estate.' For them our fathers died. What a sowing, and what a harvest! And where good men worked or perished is now a row of little shops, all devoted to the sale of town-lots in some distant spot that must infallibly become a great city in the next two years, and in the doorway of each lounges a thin-chested, much-spitting youth, with a flabby face, shifty eyes, and an inhuman mouth, who invites you continually, with the most raucous of American accents, to "step inside and examine our Praposition."