iver strike together--the old "Forks"
of the pioneer days. It sits where the old trails of the pathfinder
and the fur trader join, and its very streets grew up about those
trails.

From the piles of pelts dumped by Indians and hunters outside the old
Hudson Bay stockade at Fort Garry, and the sacks of raw grain that the
old prairie schooners brought in, Winnipeg of today has grown up.

And it has grown up with the astonishing, swift maturity of the West.
Fifty years ago there was not even a village. Forty years ago it was a
mere spot on the world map, put there only to indicate the locality of
Louis Kiel's Red River Rebellion, and Wolseley's march to Fort Garry,
as its name was. In 1881 it became just Winnipeg, a townlet with less
than 8,000 souls in it. Today it ranks with the greatest commercial
cities in Canada, and its greatness can be felt in the tingling energy
of its streets.

The wonder of that swift growth is a thing that can be brought directly
home. I stood on the station with a man old but still active, and he
said to me:

"Do you see that block of buildings over there? I had the piece of
ground on which it was built. I sold it for a hundred dollars, it was
prairie then. It's worth many thousands now. And that piece where
that big factory stands, that was mine. I let that go for under three
hundred, and the present owners bought in the end for twenty and more
times that sum. Oh, we were all foolish then, how could we tell that
Winnipeg was going to grow? It was a 'back-block' town, shacks along a
dusty track. And the railway hadn't come. A three-story wooden house,
that was a marvel to be sure; now we have skyscrapers."

And fast though Winnipeg has grown, or because she has grown at such a
pace, one can still see the traces and feel the spirit of the old
spacious days in her streets. They are long streets and so planned
that they seem to have been built by men who knew that there were no
limits on the immense plains, and so broad that one knows that the
designers had been conscious that there was no need to pinch the
sidewalks and carriage-ways with all the prairie at the back of them.

Along these sumptuous avenues there still remain many of the low-built
and casual houses that men put up in the early days, and it is these
standing beside the modernity of the business buildings, soaring
sky-high, the massive grain elevators and the big brisk mills that give
the city its curious blendi