t very large tracts of
the Canadian plains also would raise wheat, quite as well as had the
prairies of Montana or Dakota. The Canadian railroads, with lands to
sell, began to advertise the wheat industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
The Canadian Government went into the publicity business on its own
part. To a certain extent European immigration was encouraged, but the
United States really was the country most combed out for settlers for
these Canadian lands. As by magic, millions of acres in western Canada
were settled.

The young American farmers of our near Northwest were especially coveted
as settlers, because they knew how to farm these upper lands far better
than any Europeans, and because each of them was able to bring a little
capital of ready money into Canada. The publicity campaign waged by
Canadians in our Western States in one season took away more than a
hundred and fifty thousand good young farmers, resolved to live under
another flag. In one year the State of Iowa lost over fifteen million
dollars of money withdrawn from bank deposits by farmers moving across
the line into Canada.

The story of these land rushes was much the same there as it had been
with us. Not all succeeded. The climatic conditions were far more
severe than any which we had endured, and if the soil for a time in some
regions seemed better than some of our poorest, at least there waited
for the one-crop man the same future which had been discovered for
similar methods within our own confines. But the great Canadian
land booms, carefully fostered and well developed, offered a curious
illustration of the tremendous pressure of all the populations of the
world for land and yet more land.

In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River Valley and
even in the neighborhood of the Little Slave Lake, the advance-guard
of wheat farmers crowding out even beyond the Canadian frontier in the
covetous search for yet more cheap land. In 1912 I talked with a
school teacher, who herself had homestead land in the Judith Basin
of Montana--once sacred to cows--and who was calmly discussing the
advisability of going up into the Peace River country to take up yet
more homestead land under the regulations of the Dominion Government!
In the year 1913 I saw an active business done in town lots at Fort
McMurray, five hundred miles north of the last railroad of Alberta, on
the ancient Athabasca waterway of the fur trade!

Who shall state the