eautifully
gilded and engraved stock certificates taking the place of real
profits--of almost worth-nothing shares in worthless holes in the
ground selling on a face value of a next-door profit-yielding neighbor.
The American is without a peer as pioneer on land, in mine, in forest;
but the boomster, who invariably follows on the heels of that pioneer,
is also the most expert "houn' dawg" to rouse the wildcatter.
Canadians have too often wakened up only at the wildcat stage, and
British capital has come in to reorganize inflated and collapsed
properties on a purely investment basis. The American pioneer does
nothing on an investment basis. He goes in on a wild and rampant
dare-devil gamble. If he loses--as lose he often does--he takes his
medicine and never whines. If he wins, the welkin rings.

What happened in Kootenay was largely repeated ten years later in
Klondike and ten years yet later in Cobalt, and it must not be
forgotten that when Canadian capital refused to bond the nickel mines
of Sudbury, it was American capital that dared the risk.

What happened in the mining booms was only a faint foreshadowing of the
furore that broke to a madness in real estate when American settlers
began crossing the boundary in tens and hundreds of thousands a year.
Canadians knew they had wonderfully fertile farming land. Hadn't they
been telling themselves so since confederation, when they pledged the
credit of Canada to build a transcontinental? They knew they had the
most fertile wheat lands on earth, but what was the use of knowing that
when you could not sell those lands for fifty cents an acre? What was
the use of raising forty bushels of wheat to the acre, when you burned
it in the stack or fed it to cattle worth only ten dollars a head,
because you could get neither wheat nor cattle to market? You really
believed you had the best land on earth, but what good did the belief
do you? Sons and daughters forsook the Canadian farmstead for the
United States. Between the early eighties and the early nineties, of
Canada's population of five millions, over a million--some estimates
place it at a million and a half--Canadians left the Dominion for the
United States. You find the place names of Ontario all through
Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota and the two Dakotas; and you find
Jean Ba'tiste drifting from the lumber woods of Quebec to the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan and to the redwoods of California and to the
yell