WHEAT IN WESTERN CANADA 49 



how splendid is the view across the gently rolling stnbble 

 fields: stook beyond stook, stook beyond stook, for a quarter 

 of a mile, for half a mile, and still more stooks as far as 

 the eye can see, stooks cresting the distant horizon, ten 

 thousand stooks all waiting to be threshed and each with its 

 promise of bread, the gift of the New World to the Old. 

 The unbroken expanses of the prairie create within one a 

 sense of freedom which is best known only to those who 

 dwell far from crowded cities, who plow and sow and reap, 

 and whose daily toil causes them to commune uncon- 

 sciously with l^ature and thus to absorb something of her 

 simplicity and her charm. 



III. The Great Wheat Funnel 



In order to meet the ever-growing requirements of west- 

 ern Canada for travel and transportation, a complex sys- 

 tem of railways has grown up with ramifications extending 

 for many thousands of miles. The principal railroads 

 tapping the wheat-lands are the Canadian Pacific, the Ca- 

 nadian l^orthern, and the Grand Trunk Pacific. Their 

 main lines all focus upon Winnipeg so that this city has 

 become, as it were, the converging point of a great wheat 

 funnel, the spout of which leads to the water-front of Lake 

 Superior. Through Winnipeg, each working day of the 

 crop year 1915-16, on the average, there passed more than 

 one thousand cars of wheat. -^^ The accompanying dia- 

 gram (Pig. 8) shows the eastbound movement of western 

 Canada wheat in the calendar year 1913. An inspection 

 of it reveals the fact that most of the 1913 wheat, after 

 passing by rail from Winnipeg to Port Arthur and Fort 

 William, was conveved bv water to Montreal and Buffalo, 



15 W. E. Milner, President's Address in Eighth Annual Report of 

 the Winnipeg Grain Exchange, September, 1916, p. 26. 



) 



