Canada: the Empire of the North

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Transcriber's note:

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in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
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CANADA

THE EMPIRE OF THE NORTH

Being the Romantic Story of the
New Dominion's Growth from
Colony to Kingdom

by

AGNES C. LAUT

Author of "The Conquest of the Great North-West" "Lords of the North,"
Etc.

[Frontispiece: Map of Western Canada]

Boston and London
Ginn and Company, Publishers
1909
Copyright, 1909, by Agnes C. Laut
Entered at Stationers' Hall
All Rights Reserved

PREFACE

To re-create the shadowy figures of the heroic past, to clothe the dead
once more in flesh and blood, to set the puppets of the play in life's
great dramas again upon the stage of action,--frankly, this may not be
formal history, but it is what makes the past most real to the present
day. Pictures of men and women, of moving throngs and heroic episodes,
stick faster in the mind than lists of governors and arguments on
treaties. Such pictures may not be history, but they breathe life into
the skeletons of the past.

Canada's past is more dramatic than any romance ever penned. The story
of that past has been told many times and in many volumes, with far
digressions on Louisiana and New England and the kingcraft of Europe.
The trouble is, the story has not been told in one volume. Too much
has been attempted. To include the story of New England wars and
Louisiana's pioneer days, the story of Canada itself has been either
cramped or crowded. To the eastern writer, Canada's history has been
the record of French and English conflict. To him there has been
practically no Canada west of the Great Lakes; and in order to tell the
intrigue of European tricksters, very often the writer has been
compelled to exclude the story of the Canadian people,--meaning by
people the breadwinners, the toilers, rather than the governing
classes. Similarly, to the western writer, Canada meant the Hudson's
Bay Company. As for the Pacific coast, it has been almost ignored in
any story of Canada.

Needless to say, a complete history of a country as vast as Canada,
whose past in every section fairly teems with action, could not be
crowded into one volume. To give even the story {iv} of Canada's most
prominent episodes and actors is a matter of rigidly excluding the
extraneous.

All that has been attempted here is such a story--_story, not
history_--of the romance and adventure in Canada's nation building as
will give the casual reader knowledge of the country's past, and how
that past led along a trail of great heroism to the destiny of a
Northern Empire. This volume is in no sense formal history. There
will be found in it no such lists of governors with dates appended, of
treaties with articles running to the fours and eights and tens, of
battles grouped with dates, as have made Canadian history a nightmare
to children.

It is only such a story as boys and girls may read, or the hurried
business man on the train, who wants to know "what was doing" in the
past; and it is mainly a story of men and women and things doing.

I have not given at the end of each chapter the list of authorities
customary in formal history. At the same time it is hardly necessary
to say I have dug most rigorously down to original sources for facts;
and of secondary authorities, from _Pierre Boucher, his Book_, to
modern reprints of _Champlain and L'Escarbot_, there are not any I have
not consulted more or less. Especially am I indebted to the
_Documentary History of New York_, sixteen volumes, bearing on early
border wars; to _Documents Relatifs a la Nouvelle France, Quebec_; to
the _Canadian Archives_ since 1886; to the special historical issues of
each of the eastern provinces; and to the monumental works of Dr.
Kingsford. Nearly all the places described are from frequent visits or
from living on the spot.

{v}

INTRODUCTION

"The Twentieth century belongs to Canada."

The prediction of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Premier of the Dominion, seems
likely to have bigger fulfillment than Canadians themselves realize.
What does it mean?

Canada stands at the same place in the world's history as England stood
in the Golden Age of Queen Elizabeth--on the threshold of her future as
a great nation. Her population is the same, about seven million. Her
mental attitude is similar, that of a great awakening, a consciousness
of new strength, an exuberance of energy biting on the bit to run the
race; mellowed memory of hard-won battles against tremendous odds in
the past; for the future, a golden vision opening on vistas too far to
follow. They dreamed pretty big in the days of Queen Elizabeth, but
they did n't dream big enough for what was to come; and they are
dreaming pretty big up in Canada to-day, but it is hard to forecast the
future when a nation the size of all Europe is setting out on the
career of her world history.

To put it differently: Canada's position is very much the same to-day
as the United States' a century ago. Her population is about seven
million. The population of the United States was seven million in
1810. One was a strip of isolated settlements north and south along
the Atlantic seaboard; the other, a string of provinces east and west
along the waterways that ramify from the St. Lawrence. Both possessed
and were flanked by vast unexploited territory the size of Russia; the
United States by a Louisiana, Canada by the Great Northwest. What the
Civil War did for the United States, Confederation did for the Canadian
provinces--welded them into a nation. The parallel need not be carried
farther. If the same development {vi} follows Confederation in Canada
as followed the Civil War in the United States, the twentieth century
will witness the birth and growth of a world power.

To no one has the future opening before Canada come as a greater
surprise than to Canadians themselves. A few years ago such a claim as
the Premier's would have been regarded as the effusions of the
after-dinner speaker. While Canadian politicians were hoping for the
honor of being accorded colonial place in the English Parliament, they
suddenly awakened to find themselves a nation. They suddenly realized
that history, and big history, too, was in the making. Instead of
Canada being dependent on the Empire, the Empire's most far-seeing
statesmen were looking to Canada for the strength of the British
Empire. No longer is there a desire among Canadians for place in the
Parliament at Westminster. With a new empire of their own to develop,
equal in size to the whole of Europe, Canadian public men realize they
have enough to do without taking a hand in European affairs.

As the different Canadian provinces came into Confederation they were
like beads on a string a thousand miles apart. First were the Maritime
Provinces, with western bounds touching the eastern bounds of Quebec,
but in reality with the settlements of New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia,
and Prince Edward Island separated from the settlements of Quebec by a
thousand miles of untracked forest. Only the Ottawa River separated
Quebec from Ontario, but one province was French, the other English,
aliens to each other in religion, language, and customs. A thousand
miles of rock-bound, winter-bound wastes lay between Ontario and the
scattered settlement of Red River in Manitoba. Not an interest was in
common between the little province of the middle west and her sisters
to the east. Then prairie land came for a thousand miles, and
mountains for six hundred miles, before reaching the Pacific province
of British Columbia, more completely cut off from other parts of Canada
than from Mexico or Panama. In fact, it would have been easier for
British Columbia to trade with Mexico and Panama than with the rest of
Canada.

{vii} To bind these far-separated patches of settlement, oases in a
desert of wilds, into a nation was the object of the union known as
Confederation. But a nation can live only as it trades what it draws
from the soil. Naturally, the isolated provinces looked for trade to
the United States, just across an invisible boundary. It seemed absurd
that the Canadian provinces should try to trade with each other, a
thousand miles apart, rather than with the United States, a stone's
throw from the door of each province. But the United States erected a
tariff wall that Canada could not climb. The struggling Dominion was
thrown solely on herself, and set about the giant task of linking the
provinces together, building railroads from Atlantic to Pacific, canals
from tide water to the Great Lakes. In actual cash this cost Canada
four hundred million dollars, not counting land grants and private
subscriptions for stock, which would bring up the cost of binding the
provinces together to a billion. This was a staggering burden for a
country with smaller population than Greater New York--a burden as big
as Japan and Russia assumed for their war; but, like war, the
expenditure was a fight for national existence. Without the railroads
and canals, the provinces could not have been bound together into a
nation.

These were Canada's pioneer days, when she was spending more than she
was earning, when she bound herself down to grinding poverty and big
risks and hard tasks. It was a long pull, and a hard pull; but it was
a pull altogether. That was Canada's seed time; this is her harvest.
That was her night work, when she toiled, while other nations slept;
now is the awakening, when the world sees what she was doing. Railroad
man, farmer, miner, manufacturer, all had the same struggle, the big
outlay of labor and money at first, the big risk and no profit, the
long period of waiting.

Canada was laying her foundations of yesterday for the superstructure
of prosperity to-day and to-morrow--the New Empire.

When one surveys the country as a whole, the facts are so big they are
bewildering.

{viii} In the first place, the area of the Dominion is within a few
thousand miles of as large as all Europe. To be more specific, you
could spread the surface of Italy and Spain and Turkey and Greece and
Austria over eastern Canada, and you would still have an area uncovered
in the east alone bigger than the German Empire. England spread flat
on the surface of Eastern Canada would just serve to cover the Maritime
Provinces nicely, leaving uncovered Quebec, which is a third bigger
than Germany; Ontario, which is bigger than France; and Labrador
(Ungava), which is about the size of Austria.

In the west you could spread the British Isles out flat, and you would
not cover Manitoba--with her new boundaries extending to Hudson Bay.
It would take a country the size of France to cover the province of
Saskatchewan, a country larger than Germany to cover Alberta, two
countries the size of Germany to cover British Columbia and the Yukon,
and there would still be left uncovered the northern half of the
West--an area the size of European Russia.

No Old World monarch from William the Conqueror to Napoleon could boast
of such a realm. People are fond of tracing ancestry back to feudal
barons of the Middle Ages. What feudal baron of the Middle Ages, or
Lord of the Outer Marches, was heir to such heritage as Canada may
claim? Think of it! Combine all the feudatory domains of the Rhine
and the Danube, you have not so vast an estate as a single western
province. Or gather up all the estates of England's midland counties
and eastern shires and borderlands, you have not enough land to fill
one of Canada's inland seas,--Lake Superior.

If there were a population in eastern Canada equal to France,--and
Quebec alone would support a population equal to France,--and in
Manitoba equal to the British Isles, and in Saskatchewan equal to
France, and in Alberta equal to Germany, and in British Columbia equal
to Germany,--ignoring Yukon, Mackenzie River, Keewatin, and Labrador,
taking only those parts of Canada where climate has been tested and
lands surveyed,--Canada would support two hundred million people.

{ix} The figures are staggering, but they are not half so improbable as
the actual facts of what has taken place in the United States.
America's population was acquired against hard odds. There were no
railroads when the movement to America began. The only ocean goers
were sailboats of slow progress and great discomfort. In Europe was
profound ignorance regarding America; to-day all is changed. Canada
begins where the United States left off. The whole world is gridironed
with railroads. Fast Atlantic liners offer greater comfort to the
emigrant than he has known at home. Ignorance of America has given
place to almost romantic glamour. Just when the free lands of the
United States are exhausted and the government is putting up bars to
keep out the immigrant, Canada is in a position to open her doors wide.
Less than a fortieth of the entire West is inhabited. Of the Great
Clay Belt of North Ontario only a patch on the southern edge is
populated. The same may be said of the Great Forest Belt of Quebec.
These facts are the magnet that will attract the immigrant to Canada.
The United States wants no more immigrants.

And the movement to Canada has begun. To her shores are thronging the
hosts of the Old World's dispossessed, in multitudes greater than any
army that ever marched to conquest under Napoleon. When the history of
America comes to be written in a hundred years, it will not be the
record of a slaughter field with contending nations battling for the
mastery, or generals wading to glory knee-deep in blood. It will be an
account of the most wonderful race movement, the most wonderful
experiment in democracy the world has known.

The people thronging to Canada for homes, who are to be her nation
builders, are people crowded out of their home lands, who had n't room
for the shoulder swing manhood and womanhood need to carve out
honorable careers. Look at them in the streets of London, or Glasgow,
or Dublin, or Berlin, these _emigres_, as the French called their
royalists, whom revolution drove from home, and I think the word
_emigre_ is a truer description of the newcomer to Canada than the word
"emigrant." They are {x} poor, they are desperately poor, so poor that
a month's illness or a shut-down of the factory may push them from
poverty to the abyss. They are thrifty, but can neither earn nor save
enough to feel absolutely sure that the hollow-eyed specter of Want may
not seize them by the throat. They are willing to work, so eager to
work that at the docks and the factory gates they trample and jostle
one another for the chance to work. They are the underpinnings, the
underprops of an old system, these _emigres_, by which the masses were
expected to toil for the benefit of the classes.

"It's all the average man or woman is good for," says the Old Order,
"just a day's wage representing bodily needs."

"Wait," says the New Order. "Give him room! Give him an opportunity!
Give him a full stomach to pump blood to his muscles and life to his
brain! Wait and see! If he fails _then_, let him drop to the bottom
of the social pit without stop of poorhouse or help!"

A penniless immigrant boy arrives in New York. First he peddles
peanuts, then he trades in a half-huckster way whatever comes to hand
and earns profits. Presently he becomes a fur trader and invests his
savings in real estate. Before that man dies, he has a monthly income
equal to the yearly income of European kings. That man's name was John
Jacob Astor.

Or a young Scotch boy comes out on a sailing vessel to Canada. For a
score of years he is an obscure clerk at a distant trading post in
Labrador. He comes out of the wilds to take a higher position as land
commissioner. Presently he is backing railroad ventures of tremendous
cost and tremendous risk. Within thirty years from the time he came
out of the wilds penniless, that man possesses a fortune equal to the
national income of European kingdoms. The man's name is Lord
Strathcona.

Or a hard-working coal miner emigrates to Canada. The man has brains
as well as hands. Other coal miners emigrate at the same time, but
this man is as keen as a razor in foresight and care. From coal miner
he becomes coal manager, from manager {xi} operator, from operator
owner, and dies worth a fortune that the barons of the Middle Ages
would have drenched their countries in blood to win. The man's name is
James Dunsmuir.

Or it is a boy clerking in a departmental store. He emigrates. When
he goes back to England it is to marry a lady in waiting to the Queen.
He is now known as Lord Mount-Stephen.

What was the secret of the success? Ability in the first place, but in
the second, opportunity; opportunity and room for shoulder swing to
show what a man can do when keen ability and tireless energy have
untrammeled freedom to do their best.

Examples of the _emigres'_ success could be multiplied. It is more
than a mere material success; it is eternal proof that, given a fair
chance and a square deal and shoulder swing, the boy born penniless can
run the race and outstrip the boy born to power.

"Have you, then, no _menial_ classes in Canada?" asked a member of the
Old Order.

"No, I'm thankful to say," said I.

"Then _who_ does the work?"

"The workers."

"But what's the difference?"

"Just this: your menial of the Old Country is the child of a menial,
whose father before him was a menial, whose ancestors were in servile
positions to other people back as far as you like to go,--to the time
when men were serfs wearing an iron collar with the brand of the lord
who owned them. With us no stigma is attached to work. _Your_ menial
expects to be a menial all his life. With our worker, just as sure as
the sun rises and sets, if he continues to work and is no fool, he will
rise to earn a competency, to improve himself, to own his own labor, to
own his own home, to hire the labor of other men who are beginners as
he once was himself."

"Then you have no social classes?"

"Lots. The _ups_, who have succeeded; and the _half-way ups_, who are
succeeding; and the _beginners_, who are going to succeed; and the
_downs_, who never try. And as success doesn't necessarily mean money,
but doing the best at whatever one tries, {xii} you can see that the
_ups_ and the _halfway ups_, and the _beginners_ and the _downs_ have
each their own classes of special workers."

"That," she answered, "is not democracy; it is revolution." She was
thinking of those Old World hard-and-fast divisions of society into
royalty, aristocracy, commons, peasantry.

"It is not revolution," I explained. "It is rebirth! When you send
your _emigre_ out to us, he is a made-over man."

But it is not given to all _emigre's_ to become great capitalists or
great leaders. Some who have the opportunity have not the ability, and
the majority would not, for all the rewards that greatness offers,
choose careers that entail long years of nerve-wracking, unflagging
labor. But on a minor scale the same process of making over takes
place. One case will illustrate.

Some years before immigration to Canada had become general, two or
three hundred Icelanders were landed in Winnipeg destitute. From some
reason, which I have forgotten,--probably the quarantine of an
immigrant,--the Icelanders could not be housed in the government
immigration hall. They were absolutely without money, household goods,
property of any sort except clothing, and that was scant, the men
having but one suit of the poorest clothes, the women thin homespun
dresses so worn one could see many of them had no underwear. The
people represented the very dregs of poverty. Withdrawing to the
vacant lots in the west end of Winnipeg,--at that time a mere
town,--the newcomers slept for the first nights, herded in the rooms of
an Icelander opulent enough to have rented a house. Those who could
not gain admittance to this house slept under the high board sidewalks,
then a feature of the new town. I remember as a child watching them
sit on the high sidewalk till it was dark, then roll under.
Fortunately it was summer, but it was useless for people in this
condition to go bare to the prairie farm. To make land yield, you must
have house and barns and stock and implements, and I doubt if these
people had as much as a jackknife. I remember how two or three of the
older women used to sit crying each night in despair till they
disappeared in the crowded house, fourteen or {xiii} twenty of them to
a room. Within a week, the men were all at work sawing wood from door
to door at a dollar and a half a cord the women out by the day washing
at a dollar a day. Within a month they had earned enough to buy lumber
and tar paper. Tar-papered shanties went up like mushrooms on the
vacant lots. Before winter each family had bought a cow and chickens.
I shall not betray confidence by telling where the cow and chickens
slept. Those immigrants were not desirable neighbors. Other people
moved hastily away from the region. Such a condition would not be
tolerated now, when there are spacious immigration halls and sanitary
inspectors to see that cows and people do not house under the same
roof. What with work and peddling milk, by spring the people were able
to move out on the free prairie farms. To-day those Icelanders own
farms clear of debt, own stock that would be considered the possession
of a capitalist in Iceland, and have money in the savings banks. Their
sons and daughters have had university educations and have entered
every avenue of life, farming, trading, practicing medicine, actually
teaching English in English schools. Some are members of Parliament.
It was a hard beginning, but it was a rebirth to a new life. They are
now among the nation builders of the West.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that Canada's nation builders
consisted entirely of poor people. The race movement has not been a
leaderless mob. Princes, nobles, adventurers, soldiers of fortune,
were the pathfinders who blazed the trail to Canada. Glory, pure and
simple, was the aim that lured the first comers across the trackless
seas. Adventurous young aristocrats, members of the Old Order, led the
first nation builders to America, and, all unconscious of destiny, laid
the foundations of the New Order. The story of their adventures and
work is the history of Canada.

It is a new experience in the world's history, this race movement that
has built up the United States and is now building up Canada. Other
great race movements have been a tearing down of high places, the
upward scramble of one class on the {xiv} backs of the deposed class.
Instead of leveling down, Canada's nation building is leveling up.

This, then, is the empire--the size of all the nations in Europe,
bigger than Napoleon's wildest dreams of conquest--to which Canada has
awakened.[1]

[1]COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF AREAS OF CANADA AND EUROPE

Canada . . 3,750,000 square miles Europe . . 3,797,410 square miles

Maritime Provinces Square Miles Square Miles
Nova Scotia . . . . . 20,600 England . . . . . 50,867
Prince Edward Island 2,000 Germany . . . . . 208,830
New Brunswick . . . . 28,200 France . . . . . 204,000
------ Italy . . . . . . 110,000
50,800 Spain . . . . . . 197,000
Quebec . . . . . . . . 347,350 Austria and Hungary 241,000
Ontario . . . . . . . . 222,000 Russia in Europe 2,000,000
Manitoba
Saskatchewan 204,000
Alberta . . . . . . . . 350,000
British Columbia . . . 383,000
Unorganized Territory of
Keewatin . . . . . . 756,000
Yukon . . . . . . . . 200,000
MacKenzie River and
Ungava . . . . . . 1,000,000

COMPARATIVE STATEMENT OF POPULATION IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES

United States Canada
In 1800 . . . 5,000,000 In 1881 . . . 4,300,000
" 1810 . . . 7,000,000 " 1891 . . . 5,000,000
" 1820 . . . 9,600,000 " 1901 . . . 5,500,000
" 1830 . . . 12,800,000 " 1906 . . . 6,500,000

It will be noticed that for twenty years Canada's population becomes
almost stagnant. The reason for this will be found as the story of
Canada is related. If she keeps up the increase at the pace she has
now set, or at the rate the United States' population went ahead during
the same period of industrial development, the results can be forecast
from the following table:

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