Edmonton is a fine, lusty 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 astonishing excess of automobiles one has learnt to expect in Canadian towns. A brisk electric tram service weaves the mass of street movement together, and at night over all shines 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.