‘You will find Moose Jaw a very pretty place,’ said a gentleman to me as I left Winnipeg; and certainly it is a pretty place, though not exactly according to an Englishman’s idea of prettiness.
It consists of a railway-station and an assemblage of wooden huts and shops, which have all been called into existence within the last twelve months. It boasts a weekly organ (such as it is), two or three places of worship, one or two billiard-rooms, and a post-office—not a tent, as in some parts of the country in which I have been, but a real wooden-house. The shopkeepers seem to have nothing to do, and the pigs perambulate the streets, evidently enjoying the fine freedom allowed them in this part of the world. There are at this time about 700 or 800 settlers, some of the farmers who came out last year having moved further west.
I am writing in the railway-station, in the waiting-rooms of which are many farmers, all on their way to Calgary—for which place, also, I am bound, expecting to start at the very inconvenient hour of two p.m.
The scene, as I sit, is not cheering. Far as the eye can reach there is the prairie. It was the same all the way from Winnipeg. It will be the same all the way to Calgary, some 400 or 500 miles hence. It is intensely hot, and men and women sit in the open air, under such shade as the wooden houses afford. It is intensely cold in the winter. Not a tree is to be seen, or a hill, or a farmhouse; nothing to relieve the monotony of the sea of grass land on every side, except here and there a prairie fire—the first step to be taken before the farmer commences the cultivation of the soil; and I must own a prairie fire by night is rather a pretty sight.
I parted last night with a General and his wife, who have come to settle about forty miles off. At present he and his family have no fresh meat, and he has to make an arrangement with a Brandon butcher, about a hundred and fifty miles off, to supply him with a Sunday joint. Tinned meats his family have tried, and he has got with him a fresh joint of meat, which he purchased in Winnipeg; but there are prairie chickens always to be had, and in some places, as we came along, we saw an abundance of wild ducks on the Assiniboine River, and in swamps, over which we rushed in the Pullman car.