Canada

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGB

I Geographical . . . • • 7

II The Conquest of Canada ... 34

Chapter I

Geography plays such an influential part in the past story and the present condition of that long string of British North American provinces which, stretching right across North America, now comprise the Dominion of Canada, that some preliminary indication of its character seems indispensable here. The shape of the Dominion is, in short, unique among countries — among those at least which count for much in our modern civilization. It has affected its history in the past so vitally and influences all its political, commercial, and social considerations so strongly to-day, that a general idea of its physical characteristics seems vital to a proper understanding of its past and present conditions.

Inhabited Australia is a fringe round or partly round an island Continent, with an uninhabitable heart of drought and heat. 7

Inhabited Canada, on the contrary, is a thin belt across a continent, confronting everywhere a northern wilderness where winter cold, not torrid drought, is the enemy.

If you regard the mere surface of the map this is not so apparent ; you will see a straight line, with curves only at one or two points, running from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a distance of nearly three thousand miles, signifying the boundary between Canada and the United States. To the northward of this there appears upon the map of British North America an illimitable country fading away into the Arctic regions. But the point lo be noted is that nearly the whole population of present-day Canada clusters along that southern boundary line within a belt of country from one to two hundred miles in width. There are sections of this line or base too rugged for serious occupation now or ever, either upon or to the north of it. There are some containing an old and well-established civilization not nearly a hundred miles wide, with no prospect of extending itself northward from natural obstacles. Lastly, there are other very considerable sections of this long line that have no limit to their northward expansion but a vaguely conjectured one, not yet proven, where a no longer endurable winter or a too short summer will call an absolute halt. Of the seven million souls or more now residing in the Dominion, six million and a half are probably living within a hundred and fifty miles of that three thousand mile long boundary line, and this is what makes the Dominion unlike any other country in the world. Over the eastern half, speaking approximately, the spread of population to the northward of this narrow belt will not be sufficient within measurable time, if ever, to alter seriously the present conditions. For the wilderness is generally rough and sterile, and the climate of necessity increasingly severe. On most of the western half, the first conditions do not exist, and the belt is gradually expanding northward, and will continue to do so till the severity of climate alone makes further advance impossible.

Leaving population and its possibilities, however, for the present, and regarding only the physical surface of the Dominion, the reader may usefully picture it as divided into three grand and distinct sections proceeding from east to west. First, comes the region of unbroken primaeval forest, out of which the axe has hacked every acre which is inhabited. This extends from the Atlantic to beyond Lake Superior, the most westerly of the great lakes, or in other words, about half-way across the continent. Upon this eastern half, and in a strip along the bottom of it, about three-quarters of the population of Canada at present reside, a proportion which will steadily decrease in relation to the whole. Next, moving westward, comes the open prairie country, which rolls away for nearly eight hundred miles to the foot of the stupendous barrier of the Rocky Mountains. Lastly is that third section which consists of the great ranges and still mainly mountainous stretches down to the Pacific, and may be defined with sufficient accuracy as British Columbia.

The greatest in area of these three — the eastern section — is represented by the old provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, little Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Ontario, together with the virtually unpeopled and but partially explored wilds of Labrador and the Hudson's Bay, which, as seats of future population, may be dismissed from the mind. Nearly the whole of this vast surface is undulating or broken, though seldom rising to the height of actual mountains. The Laurentian Range in the province of Quebec, however, reaches the altitude of from three to four thousand feet, while the Appalachian Chain that runs up through all the Atlantic provinces of the United States culminates in New Brunswick in heights of rather less distinction. The southern and more accessible portions of these provinces have now this Ions: time been converted into flourishing and populous regions. But by far I the greater portion of the surface of the eastern half of the Dominion, some fifteen hundred miles long, is still wild woodland or scrub, which for the most part covers a rugged, rocky surface, threaded by waterways and crowded with lakes. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, particularly the former — being limited in area — have a smaller proportion of wilderness, and this, for geographical reasons, is not a great northern hinterland like the other, but merely the rejected rugged or inferior portions of provinces whose civilization is scattered around and through them on the desirable lands.

Quebec and Ontario, as displayed upon a map painted to indicate physical conditions, would exhibit a vast shaggy wilderness with a narrow fringe of prosperous civilization strung along its southern boundary, save at the eastern and western extremities, which are in the grip — like most of the interior — of a rugged and inhospitable wilderness. The expansion of this narrow belt, which contains all the civilization and nearly all the settled population of Quebec and Ontario, can never be sufficient to alter appreciably this general bird's-eye view of the country sketched on a broad canvas, and avoiding all those reservations which only tend to confusion and do not much matter. The inducements to extending serious settlement northward in the face of difficulties are conspicuously wanting, above all, in a country whose surplus people can migrate west with such ease and still remain in Canada. Over this immense hinterland from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to beyond the head of Lake Superior, stretching northward to the Hudson's Bay, and north of the Hudson's Bay into space, are sprinkled thousands of clear lakes of every size and innumerable clear rivers and streams running over rocky beds. Everywhere is forest or scrub, pine of different varieties preponderating, save where forest fires have left miles of bare charred poles. Where there is sufficient soil the woods are thick ; where the rocks are on the surface, the trees are poor and straggling. Wherever lakes, streams, and woods are in combination there must be beauties.

But the monotony over hundreds of miles, added to a certain air of hardness and desolation, makes a type of scenery that cannot be realised by anyone used only to European standards and variety. The wild scenery of Canada is, in detail, very often beautiful. But its qualities are very similar all the way from Nova Scotia to Winn peg, and the great and extraordinary change en to the prairies. It is at its best where the woods frinofincr its countless lakes and waterways are of hardwood, such as beech, maple, elm, and the like. The old settled parts of the country are generallypleasing as rural landscape, but there, again, character tends to uniformity, whether in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, or Ontario. In French Canada the difference of style of rural architecture and methods of early settlement from those of the English provinces gives some variety, and provides a pleasing contrast. The change on to the prairies is prodigious. You seem to have emerged into another world. Hitherto the forest has been dominant. Not the forest of our English associations, where you can stroll easily through bracken and over grassy glades, between graceful, shapely trees, or through easily threaded undergrowth, but woods of dense, tangled growth springing out of the rotting wreckage of fallen trees, or scattered more thinly over the rough surface of barren rocks. The hills and even the mountains, where such they be, are covered to their summits with timber of some kind. You move for ever as if with a hood over your head.

The only smooth and open places are the surface of the many lakes and rivers, while through all the summer months mosquitoes and other pestilent insects hold unchecked sway. Even the cleared, civilized, and populous areas show at once that they have been cut in no very remote times out of the all-pervading primaeval forest — heavy and thick in this case, for the land was fertile in varying degree, and it was an arduous task. In the farming countries, whether of Nova Scotia or Ontario, pleasant and homelike though they now look, the mark of a once forest country is all over them. The woods that have been left on practically every farm for utility purposes are obviously patches of the original clothing of the land, though often tamed by thinning into more gracious-looking groves. The close fencing, for farms and consequently fields are everywhere small, is mainly of timber rails. In many places the stumps of the forest trees may even yet be seen, while along the fringes of the old settled countries the process of hacking farms out of the forest — though no longer of the profitable significance it had before the West was opened — still proceeds sufficiently to provide an illustration, with its stumpstrewn clearings, of how Eastern Canada was made. There are no open commons of heather or grass, or wide fenceless tracts, as there are in little England, and most other old countries. The whole inhabited rural country of every province of Eastern Canada consists either of forest or of railed-in fields under cultivation. It will give the reader a good idea of this situation when it is remarked that for the manoeuvring of cavalry, even on a small scale, there is not a single natural arena between the prairies and the Atlantic.

Winnipeg stands virtually at the gate of the prairie country, the central one of those three grand divisions which Nature has fixed on the Dominion. The fifteen hundred miles of forest wilderness (to use approximate figures) 'press so near to the prairie capital and the Red River, that the brief interval of compromise need not trouble us on so large a canvas. To the bred-and-born Canadian of the old provinces, this stepping out on to the prairies is literally like entering a new world. Much more so, indeed, than to th^ Briton from home, who is accustomed in our southern downs and northern moorlands to open sweeps for so far, at any rate, as the eye can travel, which is all that really matters. To the European the prairies do not impart an utterly new, and not always a pleasant, sensation, as they do in the case of the Eastern Canadian, who has lived always in an artificially created landscape, woods and timber fences all about him and the boundless forest always within conscious reach upon one flank, and wide, open seas either of fresh or salt water upon the other. This prairie country, generally known as the " North- West, " is neither for the most part flat, nor yet is it devoid of woodland. It is not often the monotonous billiard table of the old-time tall story, over which you could run a straight furrow with a plough from Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, nor yet the treeless waste that it is often supposed to be. There are stretches of flat country, to be sure but a great part of the prairie is undulating and often hilly, like the down land of Wiltshire and Hampshire.

This prairie division of Canada includes the original province of Manitoba, founded forty years ago, and the newer provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, the last being nearest to the Rocky Mountains. Though comparisons between old and new countries are generally not happy ones, the rolling prairie, with its short, natural grass, interspersed with large breadths of wheat and oats, or brown fallows and clumps of trees, is really not at all unlike the do^vn countries of England. There are low ranges of hills, too, here and there, sometimes smooth like downs, but often lightly covered with wood, though the trees are generally of a different kind from those in the forest country. Indeed, almost everything here is the very reverse of the eastern country. The woodland is in mere patches, and of small stature, upon an otherwise open landscape, or it grips the sides and summits of low hills as already mentioned, and nearly always grows thick along the water-courses. Here too, practically the whole country is of a smooth surface without rocks or stones. The streams and rivers are fairly numerous, but they have cut deep hollows through the down-like prairie country, and slide smoothly along with muddy current between soft, woody banks. There are plenty of lakes, and some very large ones, but small meres and pools in the hollows of the prairie are a characteristic feature of much of the country. Some regions are flatter, others hillier ; in some there is more, in others less wood. But this type of country and similarity of landscape stretches for seven to eight hundred miles till the huge barrier of the Rockies looms in sight, and a continuous chain of rugged and jagged peaks rears up against the horizon. Towns and villages are strung at intervals along the railroads, and homesteads are now scattered over most of the country at the rate of about two or three to the square mile, whereas in Eastern Canada, the farms being smaller, there would be roughly about five to the mile. Not only east and west, but from south (the American border line) to north, so far as we need take it here into account, this type of country extends, with no great variations, and its farms always pushing on to the still unpeopled territories. The enclosures here are larger than in Eastern Canada, and are of wire fencing, which scarcely detracts at all from the wide-open look of the landscape.

Districts vary much in fertility, but good or reasonably good land greatly preponderates There are, however, some large expanses of barren lands. The rainfall, it is needless to say, in a country so world-famous for its grain, is sufficient, but this, too, is more certain in some parts than in others. Speaking generally it decreases as you approach the Rockies, making grain farming more precarious, while the southern portion of Alberta is so dry that irrigation is practised on a large scale.

The atmosphere is so clear that these mountains come into view when about a hundred miles distant. At eighty miles they seem to be climbing high up into the sky. The country now becomes more broken and hilly, and the streams running out of it are no longer muddy and sluggish, but have the transparency of mountain waters and run fast over stony bottoms. This is known as the foot-hill country, and is more suited to stock than to tillage.

But as we are not for the moment concerned with such details, it is enough that here ends the great prairie country of Canada, the middle section, to put it concisely, of the Dominion. From it you pass into the tremendous gloom and solitude of rugged and sterile Alps from eight to ten thousand feet high, to emerge in due course into another country which faces and drains into the Pacific. This is British Columbia. If the Eastern Canadian, after travelling through seven hundred miles of the rugged wilderness which divides his own home country from it, steps out on to the prairie as on to a new world, he experiences another shock on the railroad as it crawls at a slow pace for a day or night through Alpine gorges to emerge on to the Pacific slope, with its sights, growths, scents, and general atmosphere quite different again from anything experienced either in Eastern Candida or on the Prairie. When Columbus was asked to describe the newly discovered island of Jamaica, he briefly indicated its mountainous and diversified surface by crumpling up a piece of paper and throwing it on the table. This rough method of illustration would apply still more to British Columbia. It is a land of great mountain ranges running north and south, parallel to the sea coast, of which the Rockies and the Selkirks, virtually the same, are the dominant system, while westward from these, lower ranges, in more irregular courses, may be said to descend in steps to the Pacific coast.

Having thus briefly indicated the character of the three grand divisions of Canada, what few further words can be said in a single chapter about the physical conditions of each and the Dominion as a whole may be commenced at the point we have reached, and continued in a rapid backward journey to the Atlantic. British Columbia is about eight hundred miles in length from north to south, and about half that in width ; a sea of mountains and hills all clad with forest, mainly of the pine family, save where the peaks of the Rockies soar in naked rock above the timber line, in some cases capped with perpetual snow and flanked with glaciers. Far the greater proportion of the province is as yet uninhabited and practically uninhabitable, except for such purposes as lumbering and mining. Just here British territory does not extend to " the North Pole," the detached American territory of Alaska, purchased from Russia, intervening just where the cold northern wilds of British Columbia terminate in the celebrated mining district of the Yukon, divided between Canada and the United States. The province, only forty years old in any serious sense, as regards present and future habitation is a mass of intricate labyrinths in the shape of narrow valleys or wider rolling plateaus between the ranges. The Canadian Pacific railroad has now, this long time, climbed the Rockies, forced its way through them and descended through the broken but far less difficult country to the Pacific, while another line to the northward is in the making.

The first named road has its port at Vancouver, now a large city quite close to the American border. Local communication, so far as it has yet gone for fruit growers, farmers, miners and lumbermen, depends on branch railroads, or considerable lakes, of which last there are quite a number in the valleys. The scenery of the Rockies and Selkirk ranges is magnificent, and on the scale of the Swiss Alps, the highest peak reaching eleven thousand feet. That of the lower mountain and hill country is often very beautiful, particularly in the wide valleys and rolling plateaus, often known as " the park country," from the fact of its being prairie diversified with woods, gracefully grouped, as in an English park. This country lies between the Rockies and the sea coast strip, and enjoys a very fine climate — cold in winter, but less so than that of the prairies, and so dry in summer in many parts as to require irrigation for successful horticulture or farming. The coast strip is hilly and broken right down to the Pacific, and entirely covered with timber very largely consisting of huge cedars, pines and hemlocks of a size unknown in Eastern Canada. This gives the hills and mountains a rather monotonous aspect, while the density and gloom of the forest itself is prodigious. The climate on and near the sea coast is utterly different from that of any other part of the Dominion, being akin to Devonshire ; brighter and drier than this last summer, but even wetter and but little colder in winter.

The Fraser, rising in the Rockies, is the chief river of the province. It flows into the sea at New Westminster, the old capital and seat of the fishing industry, and within a few miles of Vancouver, the present commercial and shipping capital, which is seated on its own deeply embayed riverless harbour. The rivers of South-Eastern British Columbia drain into the Columbia river, and find their way to the sea through the neighbouring American State of Washington. Population is thickest on the south-western seaboard corner, represented mainly by the cities of Vancouver and New Westminster, engaged in trade, manufacturing, and fishing. Rural life there as elsewhere is restricted by nature within narrow confines. This is, indeed, the great feature of the province, a rough and rugged country with its population farming here and there in fertile " pockets," or mining for coal, gold, silver, and other minerals in mountain valleys, and, so far, only sprinkled about in the southern portion of the province.

Opposite to Vancouver city, of most illchosen and confusing name, twenty to thirty miles away lies the southern and settled portion of the island of Vancouver, which, about thirty miles in width, runs northward parallel with the coast for two hundred and fifty miles. It is mainly at present a mountainous forest-clad wilderness. But on the southern point stands Victoria, the oldest city and port of the province, and^ though far behind Vancouver City in wealth and population, the political capital of the province. For a short distance behind this city spreads a smooth, attractive, and gracious farming and fruit-growing country, terminated by the highland wilderness, which constitutes most of the island Victoria and its neighbourhood has the most perfect climate in British North America. It is that in short of southern England upon its very best behaviour. The wayside growths, the turf, the fields, the very scents, with the moist softness of the air, and the look of the seashore, recall an English country-side.

Returning over the Rockies to the prairie country, which is calculated to carry an infinitely greater population than British Columbia, we must notice the two pioneer and dominant cities of the western province of Alberta — Calgary, on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, a hundred miles north of the American border, and within sight of the Rockies, and Edmonton, a hundred and seventy miles north of this again and further from the mountains. The Bow River, rushing down from the mountains in broad, clear, and swift current, pursues later, under the name of the Saskatchewau. a slower, muddier course through the entire prairie country, uniting with the North Saskatchewan and emptying into Lake Winnipeg. The Red River runs due north from American territory to Winnipeg, and, there receiving the Assiniboine, the second of the great rivers of the occupied prairie country, continues into the same great Lake Winnipeg, which in turn empties its waters into Hudson's Bay. The shallowness of these prairie lakes is well illustrated in this, the largest of all, for though over two hundred miles long, it has a maximum depth of less than thirty feet. This belt of prairie, now more or less settled for three hundred and odd miles in width, is pressing tentatively northwards. Of the geography of the vast northern wilderness and the Athabasca country, neither space admits nor utility requires in so brief a sketch any mention. As a field for future population, its limits will be determined by climatic conditions rather than by soil fertility. But all these things are still unproven and belong to the future.

Leaving the prairie country, over which, unlike British Columbia, railroads can be run and are being run in all directions with ease through regions that can or will fill their cars with produce, we once more enter the forests of the eastern belt. A portion of the province of Manitoba overlaps into this country. The Lake of the Woods, a hundred miles east of Winnipeg on the Canadian Pacific Raih'oad — a real deep eastern lake — is a great lumber centre, and a little farther east is a tract of fertile country, being cleared of woods for farming purposes. It is known as New Ontario, being at the western end of that province, an oasis of farming country neither *' East " nor *' West, " After that all is silence, not likely to be ever seriously broken, for six hundred more miles till we are back again in thickly peopled old Ontario. Another important centre, however, of life and trade, and another oasis in the wilderness must not be left behind unnoticed, and that is the twin towns, practically one, of Port Arthur and Fort William. They stand knit together at the head of Lake Superior, between hard, sterile, desolate heights, and handle all the western traffic that goes down to the eastern centres by the great lakes of Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, and thence by way of the St. La^vrence to the Atlantic. This Gulf of St. LawTence, it is hardly necessary to state, is the great mouth which receives the larger part of the volume of trade and travel that goes in and out of Canada, and by this means can penetrate to its heart at Montreal before unloading cargoes or stepping on shore. Nor will the reminder be needed that this same great waterway is absolutely icebound from

November to April. This monopoly of summer traffic in the pre diice of the west, however, is expected in the near future to be shared by Hudson's Bay, when the necessary railroad connections promised by one political party are completed. Fortunately, just to the south of the Gulf of St. LaAvrence, Canada has a short strip of seacoast which does not freeze up and affords throughout the ^vinter an alternative entry into the country. This is the southern shore of Nova Scotia, and the adjoining coast of New Brunswick, represented by the two ports of Halifax and St. John. If it w^ere not for this, all European access on the Atlantic to the Dominion, except by way of the United States, would be sealed up for five months of the year. As it is now, by means of railroads to Quebec and Montreal, though they traverse in parts much semiwilderness country, goods and passengers can go in and out of Canada throughout the winter, while the same ports serve as an entry at all times to their respective provinces, as w^ell as a secondary means of access to the Dominion in the summer season.

NeA\^oundland, the earliest discovered and the earliest occupied of the lands within Canadian seas, is curiously enough, as it would seem at first sight, the only province which has rejected inclusion in the Dominion of Canada. It forms a barrier between the

Gulf of St. Lawrence and the outer Atlantic, for its northern point looks over the narrow Strait of Belle Isle to Labrador, easily visible, while its southern extremities look over the wader strait dividing it from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, which province constitutes the lower horn of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Canadian summer traffic passes through one or other of these passages, to enter Canadian waters, and strangely enough, within sight of coasts, in the case of Newfoundland, as desolate to all seeming, and very nearly so in actual fact, as when the Cabots first discovered them in 1496.

Nova Scotia is the first of the Dominion provinces to confront the Atlantic traveller, a long, narrow peninsula, nearly three hundred miles in length, with an average w^idth of only thirty to seventy miles. It is tied to the mainland by a neck narrower still, and this mainland is New Brunswick, which formed with it at one time the old French province of Acadie. Spreading along the north shore of both these provinces in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and within easy sight is Prince Edward Island, one hundred and thirty miles long and from five to thirty miles in width. These three provinces, the comparatively small area of the latter being partially atoned for by its thick population, form together The Maritime Provinces, a distinct geographical group, as against that of Quebec and Ontario. These two groups may be considered the two sub- divisions of Eastern Canada. The wilder and remoter parts of Eastern Quebec on the Lower St. Lawrence merge, to be sure, with the wilder northern portions of New Brunswick, but the whole of the west side of the last-named province borders the American State of Maine. This makes a wide gap between the populous portions of New Brunswick, which lie to the southward on the St. John River, and on the Bay of Fundy, and a still greater gap between Nova Scotia yet further east, and the civilization of Quebec. A railroad from the maritime provinces now cuts through American territory to Montreal, the heart of Canada. Till recently the Intercolonial line was the only outlet. This labours due north to the south shore of the St. La\\Tence and the frin^re of French Canadian settlement, and then turning up the river has a further journey of two hundred miles before reaching Quebec, the gateway of what was called "The Canadas" before the Confederation of 1867. Nature and international treaties have placed a barrier between these maritime provinces on the one side, and Quebec and Ontario on the other. Canadians speak with traditional bitterness of the Ashburton Boundary Treaty of 1842, which permitted the State of Maine to thrust itself up behind New Brunswick to within a short distance of the Lower St. Lawrence. Railroads in recent times, impelled more by the necessity of winter ports for the Dominion than winter internal communications, have done much to bind these two divisions of Eastern Canada together. Formerly the maritime provinces had their faces — their sea fronts, that is to say — ^turned to their near neighbours, the New England States, and their great, shaggy, uplifted backs to the Canadas. Even now it takes as long to go from one to the other as it does from London to the North of Scotland.