The reign of King Steer came first, however. Before the railway arrived, with the mass of settlers, the chief industry of the plains was ranching. The buffalo disappeared, but their place was partly filled by great herds of cattle, driven in from the States and roaming at large over the plains of our south-west and the foothills of the Rockies. Their offspring were rounded up when the time came, year after year, and driven across the line for sale. The rancher and his cowboys were almost the only white inhabitants—with the Mounted Police, who had to protect them from invading cattle and horse thieves, as they protected the Indians from whiskey-smugglers.
I was going to say that the first western freight the Canadian Pacific had to fetch out was cattle from the ranches. But, as an old railway man says, “The first live stock carried was dead stock.” The first substantial freight movement was that of buffalo skeletons. As soon as the prairie section got running, Métis and Indians were employed to gather up the millions of bones scattered over the plains where they had been shot down by generations of hunters. Great stacks of these bones were piled up like cord-wood beside the track—Regina’s first name was Pile of Bones—and thousands of carloads were shipped down to Chicago and other centres for use in sugar refining.
KING STEER made a brave stand against King Wheat, but had to surrender when his realm was thrown open for settlement and the army of grain-growers poured in, cutting up the range with barbed-wire fences.
This brings us to the beginning of the present century. Turn your telescope back to that time. Mount the broncos of imagination and ride with me, to see what I saw, riding the plains in 1905 when the new Prairie Provinces were just being born.
Down in Southern Alberta, the biggest ranch still surviving, with its lordly domain of 66,000 acres, has just been sold to a syndicate for $6 an acre—five times what its owner paid to the Government twenty years back—for sub-division into farms. The last 10,000 head of cattle are being driven off to a range leased from the Government many miles away to the north.
Wheat is waving, yellow and ripe, on farms newly fenced off the prairie, close by; and even the ranches up in the foothills, where they thought themselves secure, find speculative homesteaders cutting off quarter sections from the “free range.”