Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 17

III

Edmonton, the capital of Alberta, was the Prince's farthest north. He arrived there on Friday, September 12th, to receive the unstinted welcome which, long since, we had come to know was Canada's natural att.i.tude towards him. As we crossed the broad main street to the station, the sight of the vast human flower-bed that filled the road below the railway bridge made one tingle at the thoroughness with which these towns gathered to express themselves.

Canada, as I may have hinted already, has a way of leading strangers astray concerning herself. In Eastern Canada we were told that we would find the West "different." From what was said to us, there was some reason for expecting to find an entirely new race on the Pacific side of Winnipeg. It would be a race further removed from the British tradition, a race not so easy to get on with, a race not moved by the impulses and enthusiasms that stirred the East.

And in the West? Well, all I can say is that quite a number of Western men shook me by the hand and told me how thankful I must be now that I had left the cold and rigid East for the more generous warmth of the s.p.a.cious West. And hadn't I found the East a strange place, inhabited by people not easy to get on with, and removed from the British tradition--and so on...?

This singular state of things may seem queer to the Briton, but I think it is easily explainable. In the first place, Canada is so vast that her people, even though they be on the same continent, are as removed from immediate intimacy as the Kentish man is from the man in a Russian province. And not only does great distance make for lack of knowledge, but the fact that each province is self-contained and feeds upon itself, so to speak, in the matter of news and so on, makes the citizen in Ontario, or Quebec, or New Brunswick, regard the people of the West as living in a distant and strange land.

The Canadian, too, is intensely loyal to Canada; that means he is intensely jealous for her reputation. He warned us against all possibilities, I think, so that we should be ready for any disappointment.

There was not the slightest need for warning. Whether East or West, Canada was solid in its welcome, and, as far as I am able to judge, there is no difference at all in the texture of human habit and mind East or West. There is the same fine, st.u.r.dy quality of loyalty and hospitality over the whole Dominion. Canada is Canada all through.

Edmonton is a fine, l.u.s.ty place. It is the prairie town in its teens.

It has not yet put off its coltish air. It is Winnipeg just leaving school, and has the wonderful precocity of these eager towns of the West. It is running almost before it has learnt to walk.

While full-blooded Indians still move in its streets, it is putting up buildings worthy of a European metropolis. It has opened big up-to-date stores and public offices by the side of streets that are yet the mere stamped earth of the untutored plain.

Along its main boulevard, Jasper Avenue, slip the astonis.h.i.+ng excess of automobiles one has learnt to expect in Canadian towns. A brisk electric tram service weaves the ma.s.s of street movement together, and at night over all s.h.i.+nes an exuberance of electric light.

That main street is tingling with modernity. Its stores, its music-halls, its "movie" theatres, and its hotels glitter with the nervous intensity of a spirit avid of the latest ideas.

Fringing the canyon of the brown North Saskatchewan River is a beautiful automobile road, winding among pretty residential plots and comely enough for any town.

Yet swing out in a motor for a few miles, and one is in a land where the roads--if any--are but the merest trails, where the silent and brooding prairie (hereabouts blessed with trees) stretches emptily for miles by the thousand.

Turn the car north, and it heads for "The Great Lone Land," that expands about the reticent stretches of the Great Slave country, or follows the Peace River and the Athabasca beyond the cold line of the Arctic Circle.

To get to these rich and isolated lands--and one thinks this out in the lounge of an hotel worthy of the Strand--the traveller must take devious and disconnected ways. Railways tap great tracts of the country, going up to Fort McMurray and the Peace River, and these connect up with river and lake steamers that ply at intervals. But travel here is yet mainly in the speculative stage, and long waits and guides and canoes and a camping outfit are necessary.

In winter, if the traveller is adventurous and tough, he can progress more swiftly. He can go up by automobile and run along the courses of the rivers on the thick ice, and, on the ice, cross the big lakes.

Though the land is within the Arctic Circle, it is rich. I talked with a traveller who had just returned from this area, and he spoke of the superb tall crops of grain he had seen on his journey. It will be magnificent land when it is opened up, and can accommodate the population of a kingdom. The growing season, of course, is shorter, but this is somewhat balanced by the longer northern days and the intense sunlight that is proper to them. The drawbacks are the very long winters, loneliness and the difficulties of transport.

Edmonton, sitting across the gorge of the Saskatchewan, feeds these districts and reflects them. Because of this it is a city of anachronisms. High up on the cliff, its site chosen with the usual appositness of Canada, is the Capitol building, a bright and soaring structure done in the latest manner. Right under that decisively modern pile is a group of rough wooden houses. They are the original stores of the Hudson Bay Company, standing exactly as they did when they formed an outpost point of civilization in the Northwest.

It is obviously a town in a young land, pus.h.i.+ng ahead, as the Prince indicated in his speech to the Provincial Government, with all the intensity and zest of youth, having all the sense of freedom and possibility that the rich and great farming, furbearing and timber-growing tracts give it.

IV

The keen spirit of the city was reflected in the welcome it gave the Prince. It was a wet, grey day, but the whole town was out to line the streets and to gather at the ceremonial points. And it was a musical greeting. Edmonton is p.r.o.ne to melody. Bra.s.s bands appear to flourish here. There was one at every street corner. And not only did they play as the Prince in the midst of his red-tuniced "Mountie" escort pa.s.sed by, but they played all day, so that the city was given over to a non-stop carnival of popular airs.

At the Parliament Buildings the crowds were as dense as ever. They showed the same spirit in listening to addresses and reply, and the same hustling sense of "getting there" when entering the building to take part in the public reception. The addresses of welcome were a novelty. Engrossed on vellum, it had been sewn on the purple silk lining of a yellow-furred coyote skin, a local touch that interested the Prince. There was another such touch after the reception. A body of Stony Indians were presented to His Royal Highness. These Indians had travelled from a distance in the hope of seeing the son of the Great White Chief, and they not only saw him but were presented to him.

He talked with particular sympathy to one chief whose son had been a comrade-in-arms in the Canadian ranks during the war and who had been killed in the fighting.

The opening of a war memorial hall, a big and dazzling dance at the Government House, and other functions, fulfilled the usual round. And, last but not least, the Prince became a player and a "fan" in a ball game.

There was a match (I hope "match" is right) between the local team, and one of its pa.s.sionate rivals, and the Prince went to the ground to take part. Walking to the "diamond" (I'm sure that is right), he equipped himself in authentic manner, with floppy, jockey-peaked cap and a ruthless glance, took his stance as a "pitcher" and delivered two b.a.l.l.s. I don't know whether they were stingers or swizzers, or whatever the syncopated phraseology of the great game dubs them, but they were matters of great admiration.

Having led to the undoing (I hope, for that was his task) of some one, the Prince then joined the audience. He chose not the best seats, but the popular ones, for he sat on the gra.s.s among the "bleachers," and when one has sat out of the shade in the hot prairie sun one knows what "bleachers" means.

This sporting little interlude was immensely popular, and the Prince left Edmonton with the reputation of being a true "fan" and "a real good feller."

CHAPTER XV

CALGARY AND THE CATTLE RANCH

I

The Royal train arrived in Calgary, Alberta, on the morning of Sunday, September 14th, after some of the members of the train had spent an hour or so shooting gophers, a small field rat, part squirrel, and at all times a great pest in grain country.

Calgary was a town that charmed at once. It stands in brilliant sunlight--and that sunlight seems to have an eternal quality--in a nest of enfolding hills. Two rivers with the humorous names of Bow and Elbow run through it; they are blue with the astonis.h.i.+ng blueness of glacial silt.

From the hills, or from the tops of such tall buildings as the beautiful Palliser Hotel, the high and austere dividing line of the Rockies can be seen across the rolling country. Snow-cowled, and almost impalpable above the ground mist, the great range of mountains looks like the curtain wall of a stronghold of mystics.

In the streets the city itself has an air of radiance. There is an invigoration in the atmosphere that seems to give all things a peculiar quality of zest. The sidewalks have a bustling and crisp virility, the public buildings are handsome, and the streets of homes particularly gracious.

The Sunday reception of the Prince was eloquent but quiet. There were the usual big crowds, but the day was deliberately without ceremonial.

Divine Service at the Pro-Cathedral, where the Prince unveiled a handsome rood-screen to the memory of those fallen in the war, was the only item in a restful day, which was spent almost entirely in the country at the County Club.

But perhaps the visit to the County Club was not altogether quiet.

The drive out to this charming place in a pit of a valley, where one of the rivers winds through the rolling hills, began in the comely residential streets.

These residential districts of Canada and America certainly impress one. The well-proportioned and pretty houses, with their deep verandahs, the trees that group about them, the sparkling gra.s.s that comes down to the edge of the curb--all give one the sense of being the work of craftsmen who are masters in design. That sense seems to me to be evident, not only in domestic architecture, but in the design of public buildings. The feeling I had was that the people on this Continent certainly know how to build. And by building, I do not mean merely erecting a house of distinction, but also choosing sites of distinction.

Nearly all the newer public buildings are of excellent design, and all are placed in excellent positions. Some of these sites are actually brilliant; the Parliament Houses at Ottawa, as seen from the river, are intensely apposite, so are those at Edmonton and Regina, while the sites of such buildings as the Banff Springs Hotel, and, in a lesser sense, the Chateau at Lake Louise, seem to me to have been chosen with real genius.

In saying that the people on this Continent certainly know how to build, I am speaking of both the United States and Canada. This fine sense of architecture is even more apparent in the United States (I, of course, only speak of the few towns I visited) than in Canada, for there are more buildings and it is a richer country. The sense of architecture may spring from that country, or it may be that the whole Continent has the instinct. As I am not competent to judge, I accuse the whole of the Western hemisphere of that virtue.

The Prince pa.s.sed through these pretty districts where are the beautiful houses of ranchers and packing kings, farmers and pig rearers whose energy and vision have made Calgary rich as well as good to look upon. Pa.s.sing from this region of good houses and good roads, he came upon a highway that is prairie even less than unalloyed, for constant traffic has scored it with a myriad ruts and b.u.mps.

Half-way up a hill, where a bridge of wood jumps across the stream that winds amid the pleasant gardens of the houses, the Prince's car was held up. A mob of militants rushed down upon it, and neither chauffeur, nor Chief of Staff, nor suite could resist.

It was an attack not by Bolshevists, but by Boy Scouts. They flung themselves across the road in a ma.s.s, and would take no nonsense from any one. They insisted that the engine should take a holiday, and that they should hitch themselves to the car. They won their point and hitched. The car, under some hundred boy-power, went up the long hill--and a gruelling hill it is--through the club gates, and down a longer hill, to where, in a deep cup, the house stands.

At the club the visit was entirely formal. The Prince became an ordinary member and chatted to other men and women members in a thoroughly club-like manner.

"He is so easy to get on with," said one lady. "I found it was I who was the more reserved for the first few minutes, and it was I who had to become more human.

"He is a young man who has something to say, and who has ears to listen to things worth while. He has no use for preliminaries or any other nonsense that wastes time in 'getting together.'"

He lunched at the club and drifted about among the people gathered on the lawns before going for a hard walk over the hills.