Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 15

From the piles of pelts dumped by Indians and hunters outside the old Hudson Bay stockade at Fort Garry, and the sacks of raw grain that the old prairie schooners brought in, Winnipeg of today has grown up.

And it has grown up with the astonishing, swift maturity of the West.

Fifty years ago there was not even a village. Forty years ago it was a mere spot on the world map, put there only to indicate the locality of Louis Kiel's Red River Rebellion, and Wolseley's march to Fort Garry, as its name was. In 1881 it became just Winnipeg, a townlet with less than 8,000 souls in it. Today it ranks with the greatest commercial cities in Canada, and its greatness can be felt in the tingling energy of its streets.

The wonder of that swift growth is a thing that can be brought directly home. I stood on the station with a man old but still active, and he said to me:

"Do you see that block of buildings over there? I had the piece of ground on which it was built. I sold it for a hundred dollars, it was prairie then. It's worth many thousands now. And that piece where that big factory stands, that was mine. I let that go for under three hundred, and the present owners bought in the end for twenty and more times that sum. Oh, we were all foolish then, how could we tell that Winnipeg was going to grow? It was a 'back-block' town, shacks along a dusty track. And the railway hadn't come. A three-story wooden house, that was a marvel to be sure; now we have skysc.r.a.pers."

And fast though Winnipeg has grown, or because she has grown at such a pace, one can still see the traces and feel the spirit of the old s.p.a.cious days in her streets. They are long streets and so planned that they seem to have been built by men who knew that there were no limits on the immense plains, and so broad that one knows that the designers had been conscious that there was no need to pinch the sidewalks and carriage-ways with all the prairie at the back of them.

Along these sumptuous avenues there still remain many of the low-built and casual houses that men put up in the early days, and it is these standing beside the modernity of the business buildings, soaring sky-high, the ma.s.sive grain elevators and the big brisk mills that give the city its curious blending of pioneer days and thrusting, twentieth-century virility.

It is a town like no other that we had visited, and where one had the feeling that up-to-date card-indexing systems were being worked by men in the woolly riding chaps of old plainsmen.

In the people of the streets one experienced the same curious sense of "difference." In splendid boulevards such as Main, and Portage, which turns from it, there are stores worthy of New York and London in size, smartness and glowing attraction. And the women crowds that make these streets busy are as crisply dressed in modern fashions as any on the Continent, but there is a definite individuality in the air of the men.

Canadian men dress with a conspicuous indifference. They wear anything from overalls and broad-banded sweaters to lounge suits that ever seem ill-fitting. In Winnipeg there is the same disregard for personal appearance plus a hat with a higher crown. As we went West the crown of the soft hat climbed higher, and the brim became both wider and more curly.

There is, too, on the sidewalks of Winnipeg the conglomeration of races that go to feed the West. The city is the great emigrant centre that serves the farmers, the fruit-growers of the Rockies, the ranchmen in the foothills, and even the industries on the Pacific Slopes.

Everywhere outside agencies there are great blackboards on which demands for farm labourers at five dollars a day and other workers are chalked.

To these agencies flow strange men in blouse-shirts, wearing strange caps--generally of fur--carrying strange-looking suit-cases and speaking the strange tongues of far European or Asiatic lands. Chinese and j.a.panese (whom the Canadian lumps under the general term "Orientals"), negroes, a few Indians, and a hotch-potch of races walk the streets of Winnipeg, and Winnipeg deals with them, houses them, gives them advice, and distributes them over the wide lands of Canada, where they will work and working will gradually fuse into the racial whole that is the Canadian race.

In the hotels, too, one notices that a change is taking place. The "Oriental"--the j.a.panese in this case--takes the place of the Canadian bell-boy and porter, and he takes this place more and more as one goes West. There are, of course, always Chinese "Chop Suey and Noodles'

Restaurants," as well as Chinese laundries in Canadian towns; we met them as early as St. John's, Newfoundland; but from Winnipeg to the Pacific Coast these establishments grow in numbers, until in Vancouver and Victoria there are big "Oriental" quarters--cities within the cities that harbour them.

The "Orientals" make good citizens, the Chinese particularly. They are industrious, clever workers, especially as agriculturists, and they give no trouble. The great drawback with them is that they do not stay in the country, but having made their money in Canada, go home to China to spend it.

Most of the alien element that goes to Canada is of good quality, and ultimately becomes a very valuable a.s.set. But the problem Canada is facing is that they are strangers, and, not having been brought up in the British tradition, they know nothing of it. The tendency of this influence is to produce a new race to which the ties of sentiment and blood have little meaning.

It is a problem which Britain must share also, if we do not wish to see Canada growing up a stranger to us in texture, ideals and thought. It is not an easy problem. Canada's chief need today is for agriculturists, yet the workers we wish to retain most in this country are agriculturists. Canada must have her supply, and if we cannot afford them, she must take what she can from Eastern Europe, or from America, and very many American farmers, indeed, are moving up to Canadian lands.

There is always room in a vast country such as Canada for skilled or willing workers, and we can send them. But the demand is not great at present, and will not be great until the agriculturist opens up the land. And the agriculturist is to come from where?

Certainly it is a matter which calls for a great deal of consideration.

IV

The Prince made the usual round of the usual program during his stay, but his visit to the Grain Exchange was an item that was unique.

He drove on Wednesday, September 10th, to this dramatic place, where brokers, apparently in a frenzy, shout and wave their hands, while the price of grain sinks and rises like a trembling balance at their gestures and shouts.

The pit at which all these hustling buyers and sellers are gathered has all the romantic qualities of fiction. It is, as far as I am concerned, one of the few places that live up to the written pictures of it, for it gave me the authentic thrill that had come to me when I first read of the Chicago wheat transactions in Frank Norris's novel, "The Pit."

The Prince drove to the Grain Exchange and was whirled aloft to the fourth story of the tall building. He entered a big hall in which babel with modern improvements and complications reigned.

In the centre of this room was the pit proper. It has nothing of the Stygian about it. It is a hexagon of shallow steps rising from the floor, and descending on the inner side.

On these steps was a crowd of super-men with voices of rolled steel.

They called out cabalistic formulae of which the most intelligible to the layman sounded something like:

"May--eighty-three--quarter."

Cold, high and terrible voices seemed to answer:

"Taken."

Hundreds of voices were doing this, amid a storm of cross shoutings, and under a cloud of tossing hands, that signalled with fingers or with papers. Cutting across this whirlpool of noise was the frantic clicking of telegraph instruments. These tickers were worked by four emotionless G.o.ds sitting high up in a judgment seat over the pit.

They had unerring ears. They caught the separate quotations from the seething maelstrom of sound beneath them, sifted the completed deal from the mere speculative offer in uncanny fashion, and with their unresting fingers ticked the message off on an instrument that carried it to a platform high up on one of the walls.

On this platform men in shirt-sleeves prowled backwards and forwards--as the tigers do about feeding time in the Zoo. They, too, had super-hearing. From little funnels that looked like electric light shades they caught the tick of the messages, and chalked the figures of the latest prices as they altered with the dealing on the floor upon a huge blackboard that made the wall behind them.

At the same time the G.o.ds on the rostrum were tapping messages to the four corners of the world. Even Chicago and Mark Lane altered their prices as the finger of one of these calm men worked his clicker.

When the Prince entered the room the gong sounded to close the market, and amid a hearty volume of cheering he was introduced to the pit, and some of its intricacies were explained to him. The gong sounded again, the market opened, and a storm of shouting broke over him, men making and accepting deals over his head.

Intrigued by the excitement, he agreed with the broker who had brought him in, to accept the experience of making a flutter in grain.

Immediately there were yells, "What is he, Bull or Bear?" and the Prince, thoroughly perplexed, turned to the broker and asked what type of financial mammal he might be.

He became a Bull and bought.

He did not endeavour to corner wheat in the manner of the heroes of the stories, for wheat was controlled; he bought, instead, fifty thousand bushels of oats. A fair deal, and he told those about him with a smile that he was going to make several thousand dollars out of Winnipeg in a very few moments.

An onlooker pointed to the blackboard, and cried:

"What about that? Oats are falling."

But the broker was a wise man. He had avoided a royal "crash." He had already sold at the same price, 83 1/2, and the Prince had accomplished what is called a "cross trade." That is he had squared the deal and only lost his commission.

While he stood in that frantic pit of whirling voices something of the vast transactions of the Grain Exchange was explained to him. It is the biggest centre for the receipt and sale of wheat directly off the land in the world. It handles grain by the million bushels. In the course of a day, so swift and thorough are its transactions, it can manipulate deals aggregating anything up to 150,000,000 bushels.

When these details had been put before him, the gong was again struck, and silence came magically.

Unseen by most in that pack of men on the steps the Prince was heard to say that he had come to the conclusion that to master the intricacies of the Exchange was a science rather beyond his grasp just then. He hoped that his trip westward would give him a more intimate knowledge of the facts about grain, and when he came back, as he hoped he would, he might have it in him to do something better than a "cross trade."

From the pit the lift took him aloft again to the big sampling and cla.s.sifying room on the tenth floor of the building. The long tables of this room were littered with small bags of grain, and with grain in piles undergoing tests. The floor was strewn with spilled wheat and oats and corn. Here he was shown how grain, carried to Winnipeg in the long trucks, was sampled and brought to this room in bags. Here it was cla.s.sified by experts, who, by touch, taste and smell, could gauge its quality unerringly.

It is the perfection of a system for handling grain in the raw ma.s.s.

The buyer never sees the grain he purchases. The cla.s.sification of the Exchange is so reliable that he accepts its certificates of quality and weight and buys on paper alone.

Nor are the dealers ever delayed by this wonderfully working organization. The Exchange has samplers down on the trucks at the railway sidings day and night. During the whole twenty-four hours of the day there are men digging specially constructed scoops that take samples from every level of the car-loads of grain, putting the grain into the small bags, and sending them along to the cla.s.sification department.

So swiftly is the work done that the train can pull into the immense range of special yards, such as those the C.P.R. have constructed for the accommodation of grain, change its engine and crew, and by the time the change is effected, samples of all the trucks have been taken, and the train can go on to the great elevators and mills at Fort William and Port Arthur.

This rapid handling in no way affects the efficiency of the Exchange.