 198 CANADA dairying, fruit, and such like. But this is anticipating a little. For, in spite of the railroad and immigration to the North-West, it was a long time before its new population had much visible success. The last links of the Canadian Pacific railroad, those through the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver, were completed in 1886, and by this time the North-West was an accepted fact. The aspect of the Dominion had now wholly changed. Suddenly, as it were, she had added to herself a territory that would carry, as soon as they could be put on it, an agricultural population larger than that of all the old provinces put together. So much seemed even then certain. How much under the mark this estimate is likely to prove has now been long understood. Above all there was here no laborious clearing. The prairie pioneer began at the point where the old backwoods settlers only arrived after about twenty years of work. He began, too, with generally better land, of almost inexhaustible fertility. The farmer of the old provinces had, this long time, almost everywhere been compelled to farm as in England, with manuring, rotation of crops, and so forth. A great deal of this North-West would grow grain for thirty years with unim- paired vitality. The lighter land would grow it for perhaps half that time before requiring, |  THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 199 like Ontario, Britain, and every other old country, the application of more costly methods. This, with the further knowledge of another valuable asset of a different kind in British Columbia, was the new horizon that broke on Canada when the Canadian Pacific railroad reached the prairies in 1881. For then the completion of the road so long doubted was a foregone conclusion. Though immigrants poured in from Old Canada and Great Britain tolerably fast for the next fifteen years, spread over Manitoba and more thinly over the territories that, with temporary governments, stretched to the Rocky Mountains, along the railroad and the few branches that were built from it, it cannot be said that the results satisfied expectation. Many reasons for this comparatively slow progress could be given, but a few will suffice. The grasshoppers, to be sure, quickly ceased their visitations. The wheat crops, the great staple then, as ever, of the country, answered all the expectations formed of them. In Old Canada the main crop is sown in the autumn, the deep snow protecting it through the winter. But in the North-West there was not enough snow for this purpose on the windy, open Prairies, while the frost was even harder. So the wheat is sown in the spring, which throws the harvest on into September, when night |
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