Read Ebook: The Book of the West The story of western Canada its birth and early adventures its youthful combats its peaceful settlement its great transformation and its present ways by Kennedy Howard Angus

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THE OLD TIMES

THE GREAT DIVIDE

THE NEW TIMES

THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST 201

INDEX 203

MOUNTED POLICE CHASING WHISKEY SMUGGLERS 97

A HORSE RANCH 112

WHERE NO TREES GREW. FORESTRY STATION, INDIAN HEAD 113

QUALITY RAISING QUALITY. SCHOOL FAIR PRIZE WINNERS 113

FROM THE RUSSIAN OVEN 176

THE OLD HOUSE AND THE NEW. ON A RUTHENIAN FARM 177

A FAMILY FROM POLAND 177

LAKE LOUISE, ROCKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK 192

MOUNT ROBSON, JASPER NATIONAL PARK 193

SKETCH MAP OF WESTERN CANADA 206

THE BOOK OF THE WEST

A Hill-Top Adventure

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THE OLD TIMES

HOW IS your own imagination, to-day?

I hope it is good and strong, because you will need to use it now.

The most surprising things used to happen, right here in the West, with no man here to see them. Mother Earth and her elder children had the most extraordinary adventures before the first man came.

Our eyes, if we will only use them, come to the help of our imagination here. Down in the Red Deer Valley of Alberta monsters used to live, more huge and wonderful than dragons in a fairy tale.

No human eyes ever saw them in life. No men lived here, or anywhere on earth, so long, long ago. But we ourselves can see those very beasts, their huge old bones and awful teeth; yes, the very pattern of their skin, printed on the soft mud they sank and died in,--mud now hardened into rock. Many of these monstrous skeletons have been put together and set up in museums. Every year more come into sight, as the river undermines its banks and the rock breaks up and wears away.

You can see these creatures, dead, with your eyes. Now set your imagination to work, and see them alive.

What a picture! A dense jungle, of waving horsetail reeds and rushes tall as our poplars, of spreading tree-ferns, of towering trees like tropical palms. Here and there, an open stretch of gleaming, stagnant water. Flitting overhead are curious birds with rows of sharp teeth in their long beaks, and still more curious reptiles of the air with fleshy wings, like overgrown bats. What are they looking down at? There is a stir among the greenery. A lizard, fifty feet long, is wallowing in his muddy bed; his head appears, with dull eyes looking out from a stupid little brain; then his neck, longer than any giraffe's. We call him the Gigantosaurus, or giant lizard. He seizes a tree with his forepaws, bends it down, and begins to munch the leaves and twigs.

Suddenly he stops, looks round in alarm, and dives. Too late. Another huge lizard comes crashing and splashing through the greenery,--not quite so big, but fierce and strong, his mighty jaws grinning with terrible fangs. It is the Tyrannosaurus. He throws himself on the poor leaf-eater, and bites and tears, and tears and bites, till the helpless monster lies dead in the swamp. A whole tribe of the conqueror's family, and other flesh-eaters of all sizes and many curious shapes, creep up and share the feast, till nothing is left but the bones--for us to discover, a few million years later, and collect for our museums.

That was the most ornamental and spectacular age in the whole history of animal life on this earth. Nothing so fantastic has ever lived, before or since. One beast had a crest of many pointed plates jutting out of its high humped back from head to tail. Several had two or three horns, on forehead and snout. One had a full suit of bony armor plates, including a movable shield over each eye. Another had a bill like a duck, and a towering dome of a skull that gives an impression of high intellect; but his brain, like that of all the rest, was ridiculously small. There were hundreds of different kinds of these quaint animals roaming about here at the same time.

Even that is not the earliest scene of Western life we can see when we open the telescope of imagination and look back through the ages past.

Look back far enough, and we see the hot earth spinning through space, a soft and fluid ball,--red-hot, only we cannot see the color, for a thick cloud of vapor covers all. As the earth cools, it shrinks, wrinkling and crinkling. The parts of its skin that rise make continents and islands, the parts that sink make seas and lakes. It goes on shrinking, and its shape changes constantly. A sea-bottom rises, and becomes land; land sinks, and is covered by sea. Up and down, up and down, for millions of years.

Little beasts appeared in the sea. High up in the Rocky Mountains we find them by countless thousands--the trilobites, related to the crabs,--their shapes preserved and moulded in the solid stone. But that stone, when they lived and died, was soft mud at the bottom of the sea. There were no Rocky Mountains then. The oldest mountains in this part of the world are nearer the coast. They are worn down and rounded now; for as soon as a mountain is raised it begins to wear away, split by frost, falling in landslides, and washed down by rain. Even when the giant lizards browsed and played and fought in the jungle, there were no Rockies yet.

The giant lizards came, and passed away. The earth still shrank, and threw up more wrinkles,--the Rocky Mountains at last rising out of the sea. They are still so new that their ridges and edges and peaks have not yet lost their sharpness, yet so many thousand years old that their uppermost rocks, worn away to sand and carried down in rivers to the plain, have had time to bury the lizards many feet deep. They have buried, too, the tropical palms and ferns and reeds, and pressed them into coal, which we dig up and burn.

Millions of years pass,--and when we look through our telescope again the country has so changed that we cannot recognize it. Instead of being hotter than now, it is colder. Most of it, in fact, has disappeared, under an immensely thick sheet of ice. This icy mantle covers nearly all Canada, and a great part of the United States. Its edge advances, century after century, farther and farther south, slowly but surely, wiping out forests, grinding and grooving the rocks underneath, as glaciers always do. Then it slowly retires,--through more centuries,--advances again, and again withdraws to the north. A third time the land is covered before the final retreat of the Arctic ice.

How did this happen? Most likely by the surfaces of the earth and sea-bottom in these northern parts rising many hundred feet and then sinking, to rise and sink again and again. In some parts of the world even now the level of the land is rising, in others falling; and wherever the land is high enough to-day, with a considerable snowfall, we know it is always covered with snow and ice, summer and winter.

Let us take a look at our country as it was when the second ice-cap had melted and the last had not yet formed.

The monsters have gone, for ever vanished from the earth. Gone are the tree-ferns and towering palms. New birds have come, like those we know, and sing among trees and shrubs of the kind still growing around us. The hairy rhinoceros, the mammoth and the mastodon, thunder over the grassy plain. We see our northern musk ox grazing as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee.

We look for men and find none at all. Not one man, woman or child, in all these two vast continents. Fifteen million square miles, empty and waiting, all ready for man, but waiting for him in vain; perhaps till even the last and smallest of the ice-caps has disappeared.

Far away in the north-west the land comes to an end; but looking over the water we see the coast of Asia only sixty miles off, with a convenient little group of islands half-way over. There is nothing to prevent man from coming over in a canoe in summer, or on the ice in winter.

And there he is, coming!

LOOK far enough, and we see him, a wanderer with his little family, starting from the heart of Asia, hunting and fishing as they go, camping for a few years or a century in one place, moving on when their number increases and food is not enough for all, or when some other tribe comes up behind and drives them on,--moving on, and on, and on,--a few families at a time or hundreds together. They belong, as all the American "Indians" do, to one great human stock that spread out east and west along the northern lands of Asia and Europe, where their closest kin to-day are found among the tribes of North Siberia and the Lapps of Russia and Norway. Another branch of the same ancestral stock settled in China, where it made many new inventions and slowly built up a civilization of its own, with high achievements in literature and art. But our "Indians" must have broken away long before that, for they had none of these inventions to bring with them,--not even that of the wheel, either for vehicles, for spinning, or for pottery; though the wheel was in common use among the Chinese and other old-world races thousands of years ago.

Let us watch these first men coming, now, and see what they are like.

They are a shaggy-looking folk, with bear-skins thrown over their shoulders and tied round their waists. Their hair hangs long and black. Their skin is dark.

They have little baggage. They bring nothing with them except spears, bows and arrows, and furs. For a spear they have fixed a pointed bone or horn or sharp broken stone to the end of a pole. Their arrows are just little spears. The furs are the skins of bear, walrus, seal and caribou.

When we ourselves start on a journey, we know where we are going; we are bound for some particular place with a name. But these first wanderers from Asia don't know where they are going, and don't much care. They are not looking for a place to settle down in, land of their own to farm, to build a house on. So long as they find plenty of wild beasts, berries and roots to eat, they are satisfied. They know how to make fire, by twirling a stick between their hands till its lower end, by friction against another piece of dry wood, kindles a spark which they catch on dry bark or moss and blow into flame. They have neither pottery nor baskets, but carry small articles in a big bowl-shaped receptacle of rawhide. Their only animal is the dog, the half-tamed descendant of foxes, wolves or jackals.

These first comers have "discovered America," without knowing it. They have no idea that they are the first to set foot in a "new world." It looks just like the "old-world" to them. They have been living on the sea-shore, over there at the tip of Asia. Their number has increased, and other tribes have come up behind them, so they have simply crossed over to the land they have often seen at a distance, where they can have the hunting all to themselves. They just go on living as they have been used to living.

Some of them wander along the north coast, where they still wander,--we call them Eskimo.

Most of the newcomers, however, turn to the right, and follow the coast to the south. One family follows another, family after family, band after band,--not close on each other's heels, or many at a time, but in driblets, for hundreds or thousands of years. When the coast of Alaska is dotted with encampments, the next comers pass on and pitch their skin tents on the empty shores of British Columbia. There they are astonished to find a mighty forest. They make rough shelters of bark and branches, instead of skin tents. After a time some clever fellow says,--"This is a good place to live; we don't need to wander about all the time, for the salmon and deer are plenty. Let us cut down trees and build houses." So they do, though they have never seen such a thing as a house before. They learn to be carpenters, and finally wood carvers. They have no teachers, they just learn by trying. With axes of big chipped stone they cut down trees, and build houses with thick posts which they carve and color in rough imitation of men. They make boats, each of one tree, hollowed out like Robinson Crusoe's.

More little bands follow, and settle all along the shore of the Continent. Some of them strike inland, perhaps chased off the coast by others, perhaps finding the food supply too poor where they have landed. One party comes at last to what we now call Mexico.

One day, while the men are off hunting, the children find here and there a plant of wild maize, and bite the juicy grains off the cob. The men come back at night, empty-handed; game is getting scarce. They are glad to eat the corn their children have found. It is good. Later on, when the corn is ripe and hard to chew, some one has a bright idea. I think it must have been a woman, a mother with little children whose teeth cannot chew the hard grains. She spreads a handful of the grains on a flat stone, breaks them up with a stone hammer, and mixes the meal with water, so the little ones have mush to eat. Some of the mush she roasts in lumps. She is the first baker in the new world. Next year another woman, or perhaps it is the same, takes some of the big grains left over, makes a scratch in the earth, and drops them in, so that she can have food close at hand without wandering about to pick the wild ears. She is the first gardener.

Year after year more corn is planted, till there are fields of it. The men still hunt, and leave the farming to their wives, but they are glad to have so much food without hunting. The band does not need to move every time the game is scarce. The people settle down and make a permanent home for themselves. More bands come, and quarrel and fight as savages do,--we all have a good deal of the savage in us even yet,--but the foolishness of it strikes them presently, so a number of bands join to make a tribe. One tribe fights another, but at last several tribes join to make a nation. As food is plentiful, the men have time to think and plan and invent. They mould clay into pottery, and bake it. They twist fibres and spin cotton, though they never happen to think of a spinning wheel. They make looms, and learn weaving. They have no iron, but with stone and copper tools they cut rock and build pyramids, and temples decorated with sculpture. They become expert goldsmiths and silversmiths. They invent a kind of writing, something like that of ancient Egypt.

Passing Mexico by, other bands thread their way along the isthmus of Panama, or skirt the coast till they come to South America, and there they settle and grow into a nation, high up among the mountains of Peru. Here also the people build cities, and roads, and aqueducts, and temples adorned with sheets of dazzling gold. They farm, and spin, and weave. They tame the wild llama, and make it their beast of burden; its cousin, the wild alpaca, too, they raise in flocks for its wool.

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