On the journey of 300 miles odd from Winnipeg to Regina, the capital of the central Prairie Province of Saskatchewan, the traveller sees the prairie stretching out on either side of the line to the horizon. Early in the summer it is a sea of green growing wheat; towards harvest time it is a sea of gold, with the wheat to the height of a man; after harvest the prairie presents the appearance of a vast encampment with the wheat stooks waiting for the threshing. The threshing over, the prairie glows at night with conflagrations as if a hostile army was marching through the land destroying as it went, but all that is happening is the burning of waste straw and refuse from the threshing, the ashes being the only fertiliser that the soil has so far received. There are brand-new towns and villages at every three or four miles, each the centre of a rapidly-growing trade with the farmers and other settlers in the district. What will most strike the English visitor, however, is the succession of elevators along the line, resembling huge square or oblong towers with a turret on the top. The elevators are the receptacles of the corn ready for the market. Each will hold an enormous quantity, ranging from scores of thousands to millions of bushels. Many of the elevators belong to the wholesale buyers or to great milling firms. A large number have been built, however, by the railway companies to hold the grain until transport is available to convey it to the markets. So great is the pressure between the harvest and Christmas time that all the freightage rolling stock of the companies is called into service, and all the elevators are crammed to bursting point with the wheat and oats, and even then the farmers complain that wheat has to remain in the fields week after week because the elevator accommodation is insufficient. It is a revelation to the travelling visitor of the inconceivable food-growing capacity of Central Canada, of which as yet scarcely the half of the cultivable soil has been broken. It is easy to understand and to believe the boast that Canada, when its cornlands are fully cultivated, will be able to feed four-hundred-millions of the world’s population.
This enormous agricultural production means, of course, great and expanding demands for the products of manufacturing industries. In the early years of the Prairie Provinces’ development the needs were all supplied from the East, but the Prairie Provinces, like the Eastern Provinces, have their own industrial ambitions, and they are setting to work to become as far as possible manufacturing suppliers of their own necessities. Let me describe as illustrations what is taking place at Moose Jaw and Regina, the latter the capital of Saskatchewan Province.