AWAY WE glide, down the eastern slope. We have entered Alberta now. A farming Province? Yes, all the Prairie Provinces are. That is their chief glory, for agriculture is the one industry that man cannot do without, unless he cuts down his numbers by ninety-nine per cent. and tries to live like his savage forefathers, by hunting and fishing alone.
Yet farming is not everything, even here. We only hear of what comes off the surface of the prairie, as a rule; but underground there is wealth we have scarcely begun to touch. Look at those coal mines on the mountain slopes—down south and up north, and away out on the plain. One-seventh of all the coal in the world is right here in Alberta. Already she digs out more than any other Province in Canada.
“When we came in first and dug our well,” an old settler once told me, “we threw out two wagon loads of coal. One time we made a little camp fire at night and were surprised to find it still burning in the morning. We had made our fire of sticks on a bed of coal, without knowing it.”
British Columbia, richer in water-power, and with plenty of coal within easy reach, will one day be the busiest manufacturing workshop of the whole Pacific slope. But Alberta and Saskatchewan have great water-power too, and Manitoba has more than all three put together.
It is hard for any one to believe, who thinks of the Prairie Provinces as flat, that their streams have “fall” enough to create the tremendous water-power which careful measurement shows them to possess. But look! One of the streams that join to make the Bow River starts at a height of 6,775 feet above sea level. Even from Calgary the water falls 2,150 feet, and from Edmonton 750 feet, to the meeting place of the North and South Saskatchewan; from that point it falls 540 feet more before entering Lake Winnipeg; and between the Lake and the sea at Port Nelson is an additional fall of 710 feet. In the south-east, the water from Lake of the Woods has to fall about 350 feet to reach Lake Winnipeg.
“Liquid gold,” the brown water deserves to be called, now running to waste in all our rivers. We only use a minute fraction of it all, to make electric light and power. One day we may use it, as they now do in Norway, to extract from the air all the nitrogen we need to put back in the land, to replace what we have taken out in wheat. The richest soil cannot be drained of its riches without becoming poor.
