We are in Saskatchewan already. Here is another fine Parliament Building in the middle of a garden, with pleasure boats on a lake. Little “Pile of Bones,” as it was before the railway came, is now Regina, Queen City of the Middle Province. On a cabinet minister’s window-sill is a beautiful vase. No, it is not imported from England or France; it is made of fine white Saskatchewan clay, the only deposit known in Canada. But it is not this rare white clay that makes the wealth of Saskatchewan; it is the common brown dirt.
We speed through the sunny air, and over the vast central plain. Would you recognize it? The unbroken wilderness, where twenty years ago we rode day after day without meeting a soul, is now a checker-board of golden wheat fields, dotted with farmhouses and big barns, villages and schools, and crossed by a network of railways, each a string of elevator-beads—not only the Canadian Pacific now, but two other transcontinental systems, the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk, now merged in the Canadian National.
Nearly all the sod shacks have gone. From most of the log cabins the people have moved into new frame houses, though many of the old dwellings have been cased in to make the new. The frame house itself has been vastly improved, in looks as well as convenience. The natural taste for beauty is finding expression, as it was seldom allowed to in hard pioneering days. Hundreds of prairie habitations are pleasant to look upon, tasteful in color and form, with shady verandas, and gardens neatly fenced.
I wish it could be said that the average prairie farmhouse was provided with a bathroom, hot and cold water, and drainage, and kept comfortably warm in the coldest spells of weather; but only an exceptional district here and there has a majority of its homes as well equipped as that. Ten years from now, such a district will be no longer exceptional.
Look at that network of wires along the roadsides, and running into nearly every house. This Province uses 96,000 telephones, Manitoba 68,000, Alberta 64,000 and British Columbia 79,000. That means 958,000 miles of wire. It is not as if we were short of post-offices; over 4,200 serve these four Provinces; with 350 rural delivery routes, so that many thousands of country folk get their letters, and papers, and even “cash on delivery” parcels, without going to any post-office.