mony of successful farmers was bill-posted
from station platform to remotest barb-wire fence. The country was
literally combed by Sifton agents. Big land companies which had
already exploited colonization schemes in the western states pricked up
their ears and sent agents to spy out the land. Those agents may have
deluded themselves that they went to Canada secretly; it is a safe
wager that Sifton's agents prodded them to activity at one end and
Sifton's agents caught and piloted and plied them with facts at the
other end. I know of land that English colonization companies had
failed to sell at fifty cents an acre that was sold at this time to
these American companies at five dollars and resold by them at fourteen
dollars to thirty dollars.

Such profits are the best advertisement for a propaganda. There
followed a land boom compared to which the gold boom had been mild.
American settlers came in special cars, in special trains, in relays of
special trains. Before Canada had wakened up to it fifty thousand
American settlers had trekked across the border. You met them in Peace
River. You met them at Athabasca. You met them on far reaches of the
Saskatchewan. And land jumped in value from five dollars to fifteen
dollars, from fifteen dollars to thirty dollars an acre. When Canada's
yearly immigration reached the proportions of four hundred
thousand--half Americans--it is not exaggerating to say the prairie
took fire. Villages grew into cities overnight. Edmonton and Calgary
and Moose Jaw and Regina--formerly jumping-off places into a
no-man's-land--became metropolitan cities of twenty-five to fifty
thousand people. If every American settler averaged fifteen hundred
dollars on his person at this period--as customs entries prove--it may
be confidently set down that his value as a producer and worker was
another fifteen hundred dollars. Wheat exports jumped to over one
hundred million dollars a year. Flour mills and elevators financed by
western American capital strung across the prairie like beads on a
string.

If this was an "Americanizing of Canada," it was not a bad thing.
Every part of Canada felt the quickened pulse. Two more
transcontinental railroads had to be built. All-red routes of
round-the-globe steam ships were established; all-red round-the-world
cables were laid. The quickened pulse was Canada's passing from
hobble-de-hoy adolescence with a chip on the shoulder and a tremor in
the throat