 202 CANADA West by enlarging on its drawbacks. The Americans, eager for immigration to their own West, made great play with the Manitoba winter. British capital avoided the country as if it were not yet" proven," and immigrants of substantial capital from Great Britain went to the American West, to say nothing of other British colonies, at the rate of thirty or forty for one who went to the Canadian North-West. There is no doubt that for many years the country had a bad name, and that its well-wishers were disappointed at its slow progress. But this is comparative. A steady flow of immigrants, mostly of the less well endowed sort, went from Great Britain, and so did the farmers' sons and others from the Old Canadian provinces. These last were the most successful. They were used to working from daylight to dark, and knew how to work. The British were generally from classes unused to farm work, and though they did not necessarily fail, they took a long time to realize what the Ontario man took as a matter of course, that he was a pioneer, and only hard work was to be thought of. The Englishman in the last thirty years has lost something of his old reputation. He is apt to be on the alert for a grievance with his employer, if he has one, or if on his own account, with his surroundings, and is credited with an inclination to promote discontent. |  THE PRAIRIE PROVINCES 203 The Scotsman, somehow, steers clear of this reproach. For he is apt to keep his own counsel till he knows what he is talking about. In 1885 there was a serious rising in the North-West of half-breeds and Indians. The causes were complicated, but in effect it was the old story of civilization versus hunting grounds and savagery. Several thousand volunteers from Old and New Canada took the field, and there was some sharp fighting, with considerable loss of life, before the rising was suppressed. The leader was the old rebel, Riel, who had led the rebellion at Winnipeg in 1870. He was now captured and executed. The Indians throughout Canada, it should be stated here, have been treated with the utmost consideration and perfect good faith, from the earliest times, by the British and Canadian Governments. They are, after all, but few in number-some hundred thousand in the whole of the Dominion. In the old provinces they have been leading more or less civilized lives in" reserves," while in the west they live within ample bounds allotted to them, but lead a more nomadic existence. The city of Winnipeg, as the sole entrepôt, the Chicago of Western Canada, as it had been fondly styled, did not grow as a Chicago should. None of the small towns strung along the railroad increased as western towns in a rich country should increase. Population and |
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