A Trip to Manitoba
Excerpt
The Canada Pacific Railway, so frequently referred to in the
following
pages, is now almost an accomplished fact. It will, after
traversing for
over a thousand miles the great prairies of the Swan River
and
Saskatchewan territories, thread the Rocky Mountains and, running
through
British Columbia to Vancouver’s Island, unite the Pacific
with the
Atlantic. Of the value of this line to the Dominion and the
mother
country there cannot be two opinions. The system of granting
plots of
land on each side of the railway to the Company, with power to
re-sell or
give them to settlers, has been found most advantageous in, as it
were,
feeding the line and creating populations along its route.
The cars which
carry to distant markets the crops raised by the settlers, bring
back to
them the necessaries of civilized life.
