the edge of the wilderness

"The bells of the Roman Mission,
That call from their turrets twain
To the boatmen on the river,
To the hunter on the plain."

That friend was a fellow-townsman of the "Quaker Poet." The story was
told to Whittier and inspired the lines of _The Red River Voyageur_.

CHAPTER II

WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING

"To the far-flung fenceless prairie
Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,
To our neighbor's barn in the offing
And the line of the new-cut rail;
To the plough in her league-long furrow."

--_Rudyard Kipling_.

Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at
Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it
will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.

From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and
two railway lines are open to us,--the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian
Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the
latter.

Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand
miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are
pouring. "The sleeping nation beyond," is what General Sherman in a
moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We
are on the heels of the greatest economic trek this world has ever seen.
The historian of to-morrow will rank it with the world migrations.

The flourishing centres of Portage la Prairie, Brandon with its
Experimental Farm, Regina, the headquarters of the Mounted Police,
Moose Jaw, and Medicine Hat are passed, and with these the new, raw
towns in the tar-paper stage, towns that smell of sawdust, naked stand
of paint. Never in the world's history did towns spring into life as
these do. To-day the wind on the prairie, to-morrow the sharp
conversation of the hammer on the nail-head, next week the implement
warehouse, the tent hotel, the little cluster of homes. In England it
takes a bishop to make a city, but here the nucleus needed is a wheat
elevator, red against the setting sun.

The ploughs that we saw in Winnipeg are at work here among the buffalo
bones and the spring anemones. As day breaks we catch a glimpse of a
sunbonneted mother and her three little kiddies. An ox is their rude
coadjutor, and through the flower-sod they cut their first furrow. It is
the beginning of a new home. Involuntarily one's mind jumps to the
crowded cities of the Old World with their pa