Read Online The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881 by Pierre Berton - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Pierre Berton
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Hind, too, felt was unfit for human habitation.
Hind’s enthusiasm for the Fertile Belt was to have a profound effect on the railway planners; from that point on few gave serious consideration to taking the CPR farther to the south. Hind also helped promote the North West as a land of promise. “A great future lies before the valley of the Saskatchewan,” he declared. “It will become the granary of British Columbia, the vast pasture field by which the mining industry of the Rocky Mountains will be fed.”
In 1871, a decade after Hind wrote those words, his vision still belonged to the future. The land beyond the lakes had not changed greatly since he and Palliser explored it. To the men of the North West Canada remained a foreign country; their world ran north and south. In the Far West, the mail bore United States postage for it went out to civilization by way of Fort Benton, Montana, a situation that continued until the end of the decade. The Red River settlers’ nearest neighbours lived in Minnesota and the most travelled of the prairie trails was the one that ran from Fort Garry to the railhead at St. Cloud, where the settlers did their shopping.
There were, in point of fact, several “Wests,” each with its own social customs, way of life, traditions and loyalties. The truly wild West of the whiskey traders and wolf hunters in the foothills north of the Montana border bore no relation at all to the cultivated valley of the Selkirk settlers, eight hundred miles to the east. Even the mode of transportation was different: in the Far West bull trains took the place of Red River carts. The Métis buffalo hunters, who were beginning to quit the Red River country for the unsettled plains, had established Tail Creek town, the strangest of all communities, near the site of what is now Stettler, Alberta. Their West was as distinct from that of the Hudson’s Bay traders as Belgium is from Yugoslavia. Beyond the mountain wall lay other “Wests”: the lively camps of the Cariboo miners, complete with hurdy-gurdy girls and wide open saloons, and the fiercely British colony of Victoria with its pretty English gardens and its obligatory rituals of teatime and tiffin.
The whiskey traders lived in impregnable forts, which bore names like Robbers’ Roost, Whiskey Gap and Whoop-up. They fought the nomadic wolf hunters with rifles and cannon and, on one memorable occasion, with the threat of a lighted cigar held over an open barrel of gunpowder. Their folkways reflected the frontier culture of the American West, of which they were a spiritual extension. They carried six-shooters on their hips and they believed that the only good Indian was a dead one.
The traditions of the Selkirk settlers in Manitoba, founded sixty years before by the fifth Earl, and still the only agricultural community in all the North West, were Scottish. The feast days were Scottish, the worship was Scottish, the music was Scottish and the chief mode of transportation, the Red River cart, had a Scottish ancestor.
Tail Creek town, by 1874, was the capital of the western buffalo hunt. Its floating population sometimes reached two thousand. Here, in four hundred huts of sod and log, the language was French, the accent Canadian, the religion Catholic and the institutions peculiarly Métis. When the season was at its height, men and women danced all night to the unceasing screeching of violins which were passed from one exhausted fiddler to the next until the dawn broke. It was afrenzy that contrasted sharply with the cool precision of the hunts themselves.
One hundred miles to the north lay the palisades of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Edmonton, a minor fief, feudal in its structure, sufficient unto itself. This was the chief centre for the sparse band of missionaries, traders and trappers who travelled the forested belt of the North Saskatchewan. South of that natural boundary lay the empty plains, dominated by the Indian tribes. As late as 1875
Hind’s enthusiasm for the Fertile Belt was to have a profound effect on the railway planners; from that point on few gave serious consideration to taking the CPR farther to the south. Hind also helped promote the North West as a land of promise. “A great future lies before the valley of the Saskatchewan,” he declared. “It will become the granary of British Columbia, the vast pasture field by which the mining industry of the Rocky Mountains will be fed.”
In 1871, a decade after Hind wrote those words, his vision still belonged to the future. The land beyond the lakes had not changed greatly since he and Palliser explored it. To the men of the North West Canada remained a foreign country; their world ran north and south. In the Far West, the mail bore United States postage for it went out to civilization by way of Fort Benton, Montana, a situation that continued until the end of the decade. The Red River settlers’ nearest neighbours lived in Minnesota and the most travelled of the prairie trails was the one that ran from Fort Garry to the railhead at St. Cloud, where the settlers did their shopping.
There were, in point of fact, several “Wests,” each with its own social customs, way of life, traditions and loyalties. The truly wild West of the whiskey traders and wolf hunters in the foothills north of the Montana border bore no relation at all to the cultivated valley of the Selkirk settlers, eight hundred miles to the east. Even the mode of transportation was different: in the Far West bull trains took the place of Red River carts. The Métis buffalo hunters, who were beginning to quit the Red River country for the unsettled plains, had established Tail Creek town, the strangest of all communities, near the site of what is now Stettler, Alberta. Their West was as distinct from that of the Hudson’s Bay traders as Belgium is from Yugoslavia. Beyond the mountain wall lay other “Wests”: the lively camps of the Cariboo miners, complete with hurdy-gurdy girls and wide open saloons, and the fiercely British colony of Victoria with its pretty English gardens and its obligatory rituals of teatime and tiffin.
The whiskey traders lived in impregnable forts, which bore names like Robbers’ Roost, Whiskey Gap and Whoop-up. They fought the nomadic wolf hunters with rifles and cannon and, on one memorable occasion, with the threat of a lighted cigar held over an open barrel of gunpowder. Their folkways reflected the frontier culture of the American West, of which they were a spiritual extension. They carried six-shooters on their hips and they believed that the only good Indian was a dead one.
The traditions of the Selkirk settlers in Manitoba, founded sixty years before by the fifth Earl, and still the only agricultural community in all the North West, were Scottish. The feast days were Scottish, the worship was Scottish, the music was Scottish and the chief mode of transportation, the Red River cart, had a Scottish ancestor.
Tail Creek town, by 1874, was the capital of the western buffalo hunt. Its floating population sometimes reached two thousand. Here, in four hundred huts of sod and log, the language was French, the accent Canadian, the religion Catholic and the institutions peculiarly Métis. When the season was at its height, men and women danced all night to the unceasing screeching of violins which were passed from one exhausted fiddler to the next until the dawn broke. It was afrenzy that contrasted sharply with the cool precision of the hunts themselves.
One hundred miles to the north lay the palisades of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Edmonton, a minor fief, feudal in its structure, sufficient unto itself. This was the chief centre for the sparse band of missionaries, traders and trappers who travelled the forested belt of the North Saskatchewan. South of that natural boundary lay the empty plains, dominated by the Indian tribes. As late as 1875
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