[Illustration: Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt]
Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages--Armenian, Arabic, Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu, Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the _London Times_, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out from among the flotsam in the kelp.
Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do. "But they are all good pay," the implement-man says. Looking at the red ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history. The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and formative!
We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A. Stewart says to us, "Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has fallen by the way." We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a cot. "Tell him that you are going into the land of fur," whispers the doctor, "he has been a trapper all his life."