Wheat from Manitoba is
better than wheat from Georgia. Apples from Niagara have a quality not
found in apples--say from the Gulf states. All things will not grow in
northern latitudes. You can't raise corn. You can't raise peaches. I
doubt if any apple will ever be found suitable for the northwestern
prairie. At any rate, it has not yet been found.
Half a century ago the Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company in
perfectly good faith testified before a committee of the Imperial
Commons that farming could never be carried on in Rupert's Land, or
what are now known as Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. He proved
that grain could not be grown there. I recall the day when the idea of
fall wheat west of Lake Superior elicited a hoot of derision. I have
lived to wander through fields of six hundred acres north of the
Saskatchewan. Thirty years ago any one suggesting settlement on Peace
River, or at Athabasca, would have been regarded as a visionary fool.
Yet wheat is ground into flour on Peace River, and the settler is at
Athabasca; and soft Kansas fall wheat sent to Peace River has by a few
years' transplanting been transformed into Number One Hard spring
wheat. Canada's arctic belt has shrunk a little each year, and her
isothermal lines gone a little farther north. The only limit to growth
in the North Country is the nature of the soil. I am not, of course,
speaking of the Arctic slope, but I am of the great belt of wild land
north of Saskatchewan River.
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