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 limit of all this expansion? The farmer has
ever found more and more land on which he could make a living; he
is always taking land which his predecessor has scornfully
refused.
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