Do you notice another change? The “bald-headed prairie” is not so bald now. It was not always so bald as we saw it a few years ago, but the Indians took to setting the prairie on fire to drive the buffalo. Where this was checked and the trees had a chance, they spread fast.
Most of the pioneer settlers were too busy at first to think of planting trees to beautify their new homes. Many, unfortunately, had no intention of making permanent homes here; they would make just enough “improvements” to get their patents, and then sell their homesteads and go off to repeat the process farther afield; they were “land speculators” just as truly as those who bought large tracts to hold it for high prices. Some of the real home-makers, however, had enough foresight to plant trees around their shacks at the very start.
Look at that charming picture. A neat white farmhouse, with a wide veranda, green lawns and flower-beds, divided from the barnyard by a hedge of blue spruce and lilac. The whole range of buildings is sheltered on the north, west and east, by a thick grove of maples and poplars thirty or forty feet high. That has all grown up in twenty years. The farmer began planting trees the year after he reaped his first crop.
Westerners discovered after a while, and especially after soil drifting had become a nuisance, that trees were needed to protect our fields from the wind. The Dominion Government and the Canadian Pacific both started tree nurseries, distributing millions of seedlings and cuttings to farmers, who plant them in shelter belts along their fences. In 1924 the Government Forestry Stations supplied 5,215,800 of these young trees, to 4,593 applicants.
This Province grows more wheat than any other in the Dominion, than any State in the Union to the south. But listen!
There is a grain-grower speaking. “I had a hard time at first,” he says, “and left for the States. I found things worse in the farming line there, as indeed they are to-day. Thousands quit this country, like me; we didn’t know how to get a crop. We had thought of the West as a sort of big ready-made farm. ‘All you have to do is tickle the earth with a plow and she laughs with a harvest,’ we used to think. We were too new to the country; and we were mostly young men, and in too much of a hurry. We hadn’t a lot of old farmers around us, as people have in older countries, to tell us that hard times were always followed by good times.”