50

Red River Farmers.

Fur Company of Canada and they were told that, if the latter Company were victorious, they would be deprived of the land which they had bought. So hard did their lot seem that they resolved to quit the country, and they had actually started in 1816 when, on Lord Selkirk appearing with a fresh band of emigrants, they agreed to remain. Their descendants in the third generation are now successful and prosperous farmers, and it was their farms which struck me as very different from the Prairie farms which I had seen elsewhere. Their experience demonstrates how fertile the soil is along the Red River Valley.

I visited farms in the parish of Kildonan where wheat had been sown and where crops had been reaped for sixty years in succession without manure being applied. Indeed, the Red River farmers have long regarded the natural fertilizers of the soil as an incumbrance of which they try to rid themselves with the least possible trouble. Their habit was either to cast manure into the river or else to build out-houses in such a way that it might fall down and be no more seen. When this region passed from under the jurisdiction of the Hudson Bay Company and became a Province of Canada, one of the earliest legislative enactments provided that the farmer who polluted a river with manure should pay a fine of $25, or

else be imprisoned for two months. Even now it is more common to collect the manure in heaps than to strew it over the land. The only fertilizer added to many fields is the ash from burned straw. I often saw the straw, remaining after the grain had been thrashed, set on fire as the quickest way to dispose of it. However, as the country becomes more thickly peopled, straw will be taken to market and sold for money instead of being converted into ashes.

That a piece of land should bear wheat for three generations in succession is extraordinary, but that the yield at the end of that period should amount to 25 bushels an acre is more extraordinary still. On virgin soil the yield is enormous. The best evidence on this head, because it is perfectly authentic, is that furnished by Mr. Senator Sutherland, a native of the Province, to a Committee of the Dominion House of Commons in 1876. Mr. Sutherland then said that he had "raised 60 bushels of spring wheat per acre, weighing 66 lbs. per bushel, the land having been measured and the grain weighed carefully. F have also received reliable information to the effect that 70 bushels of wheat have been produced from 1 bushel of wheat sown." Another interesting fact rests on the same trustworthy authority; this is the abundance of grass and

52

Prairie Grasses.

cheapness of hay. The prairie grasses, of which there are six varieties in this Province, contain much nutriment; they can be converted into hay at the cost of $1 a ton. These wild grasses often grow to the height of 5 feet; the yield of hay is as much as 4 tons an acre.

While the descendants of the original settlers are living in comfort, the new-comers are prospering also. They have to struggle against certain drawbacks as is the lot of all prairie farmers; in their case, however, it is emphatically true that patience and perseverance have their reward. I conversed with many of the later settlers. One of them was a very intelligent man who had emigrated from the North of Ireland to Ontario fifteen years ago and who had migrated to Manitoba a year before I saw him, being induced to do so because the return from his farm did not keep pace with the increase and the demands of his family. His flock of a dozen children gave him no concern in his Manitoba home. His eldest daughter had found a good place at a liberal wage in a clergyman's household, while his crops were so abundant that he could easily feed all the mouths dependent upon him and lay something aside for the future.

He had but one fault to find with the country, and he was not singular in his complaint. The

violence of the thunderstorms appalled him. I was not surprised to hear him say this. I have had some experience of thunderstorms and I am prepared to maintain that those of Manitoba are so terrific as to be beyond all rivalry. In Ontario the flashes of lightning are more vivid and the peals of thunder are far more resonant than in England, but a Manitoba thunderstorm is to one in Ontario what one in Ontario is to one in England. When Manitoba is visited with such a storm the rain falls as if the windows of heaven were open, the thunder crashes as if the celestial combat imagined by Milton were at its height, the lightning fills the air with sheets of dazzling brightness athwart which dart tongues of flame. The air is so charged with electricity that the simplest operation reveals its presence. It can be made manifest by merely combing one's hair. At times it appears in a startling fashion. The Earl of Southesk records in the narrative of his travels here that, when about to wrap himself in a fur robe, "a white sheet of electrical flame blazed into his face, for a moment illuminating the whole tent."

The Manitoba farmer who reaps fabulously large crops can afford to bear the discomforts of occasional thunderstorms of exceptional violence. When locusts, or grasshoppers as they are here

called, visit the country they cause greater uneasiness because they occasion far greater loss than all the thunderstorms. This plague is not peculiar to Manitoba; it is dreaded by farmers in the Western States from Minnesota to Colorado. At Denver, the capital of Colorado, I once saw a flight of grasshoppers, resembling a scintillating brown cloud, pass over the city, and many were the speculations among the onlookers as to the part of the State on which it would descend and work destruction. The settlers in Manitoba have suffered less from this pest than their neighbours in the United States. Since the first settlers came here in 1812 the grasshoppers have appeared thirteen times, whereas they have visited the State of Minnesota six times since 1855; in the former case the visitations having been thirteen during sixty-eight years and in the latter, six during twenty-five years. The Indians welcome grasshoppers; they catch, roast and eat them and pronounce them very good. Happily for the farmers, who prefer bushels of grain upon which they can live, to bushels of grasshoppers which devour their crops, the voracious insects are not regular visitors. As many as thirty-five years have elapsed between their successive appearances. Moreover, the farmers are better able now to ward off their ravages than they were in bygone days.