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TO THE PEOPLE OF
CANADA
This book is
gratefully dedicated by the author who, during many long journeys in
the Canadian West was always and everywhere treated with an extreme
friendliness to which he here testifies but which he cannot easily
return in equal measure.
PREFACE
If all those into
whose hands this book may fall were as well informed upon the
Dominion of Canada as are the people of the United States, there
would not be needed a word of explanation of the title of this
volume. Yet to those who might otherwise infer that what is here
related applies equally to all parts of Canada, it is necessary to
explain that the work deals solely with scenes and phases of life in
the newer, and mainly the western, parts of that country. The great
English colony which stirs the pages of more than two centuries of
history has for its capitals such proud and notable cities as
Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, Halifax, and many others, to distinguish
the progressive civilization of the region east of Lake Huron — the
older provinces. But the Canada of the geographies of to-day is a
land of greater area than the United States; it is, in fact, the
“British America” of old. A great trans-Canadian railway has joined
the ambitious province of the Pacific slope to the provinces of old
Canada with stitches of steel across the Plains. There the same
mixed surplusage of Europe that settled our own West is elbowing the
fur-trader and the Indian out of the way, and is laying out farms
far north, in the smiling Peace River district, where it was only a
little while ago supposed that there were but two seasons, winter
and late spring. It is with that new part of Canada, between the
ancient and well-populated provinces and the sturdy new cities of
the Pacific Coast, that this book deals. Some references to the
North are added in those chapters that treat of hunting and fishing
and fur-trading.
The chapters that compose this book originally formed a series of
papers which recorded journeys and studies made in Canada during the
past three years. The first one to be published was that which
describes a settler’s colony in which a few titled foreigners took
the lead; the others were written so recently that they should
possess the same interest and value as if they here first met the
public eye. What that interest and value amount to is for the reader
to judge, the author’s position being such that he may only call
attention to the fact that he had access to private papers and
documents when he prepared the sketches of the Hudson Bay Company,
and that, in pursuing information about the great province of
British Columbia, he was not able to learn that a serious and
extended study of its resources had ever been made. The principal
studies and sketches were prepared for and published in Harper’s
Magazine. The spirit in which they were written was solely that of
one who loves the open air and his fellow-men of every condition and
color, and who has had the good-fortune to witness in newer Canada
something of the old and almost departed life of the plainsmen and
woodsmen, and of the newer forces of nation-building on our
continent.
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