THAT BUGLE again! You cannot hear it, but I know it is calling, for to-morrow is the birthday of the giant twins, Alberta and Saskatchewan. One more night under the stars, a brisk morning ride, and we canter up to the old fur-trading post. Paul Kane’s 139 people, “all living within the pickets of the fort” and not a white woman among them, have grown to 14,000, and, from their clothes and complexions, they might be in London or Toronto.
In all the big crowd, gathered to hear the Governor-General of Canada proclaim the birth of a new Province with Edmonton for capital, we look in vain for beaded redskin or shaggy voyageur. We discover one cowboy, got up for the occasion, in buckskin coat and fringed leather shaps, and he looks as singular in such a gathering as a canary among sparrows—or a sparrow among canaries—for the ladies’ dresses and the fluttering Union Jacks make up a scene as bright as anything in the bird creation. And side by side with the cowboy’s bronco stands—an automobile. If we ask for the Hudson’s Bay Company, we are directed to a modern department store; yet, on investigation, we discover the old fur-trading Edmonton still busy behind the scenes. A million dollars’ worth of furs pour in every year from a multitude of outposts in the north, to be sorted and packed for the markets of the world.
Settlers look longingly up the trail by which the furs come down, and already all the surveyed land for eighty miles north, except the heavy brush, is taken up. In fact, pioneers are squatting twenty miles beyond the survey. But many of the late arrivals at Edmonton are men of some means who will buy land within easy reach of a railway. Among them are scores of families who have abandoned California, many good Dutch farmers from Pennsylvania, and hundreds from the Western States. At the same time, the “Galicians” are being largely reinforced, and they cannot afford to be as particular. They take brush land without hesitation, clear it, and, having spent much toil transforming it into farms, take root as firmly as the toughest willows they have just pulled out.
Our ear catches fragments of many tongues, therefore, in this expectant crowd, till the platform fills and the ceremony begins.