Gratifying as was 1920's emigration of 

 farmers from the United States, greater attention 

 was drawn in that year to the augury of the 1921 

 exodus as evidenced in the more general interest 

 taken in Canadian lands and agricultural affairs, 

 the harvest of which will be reaped this year and 

 for years to come. Whilst large numbers of 

 farmers came to settle with their families on 

 Western farm lands, there was an infinitely 

 greater number of scouts who, for themselves or 

 others, came to look over the situation, judge as 

 to locality, pick out the land, and perhaps 

 purchase, and then return to their homes to 

 clear up their affairs before making the final 

 move and settling in the newly chosen homes. 



Spy Out the Land 



During the summer, under the auspices of 

 the Dominion Government, special trains carry- 

 ing American editors and business men toured 

 the Canadian West, the trips being to many a 

 revelation. They were surprised and delighted. 

 They became boosters for the country. Many 

 could not withstand investing in the assured 

 future of the country. The consensus of opinion 

 among these men, all representative of thickly 

 settled agricultural districts and in close touch 

 with the economic conditions pertaining to them, 

 was that one hundred thousand Americans would 

 settle in Western Canada during the present 

 year. A great wave of immigration, they felt, 

 was inevitable, and this the first tide of the early 

 spring would seem to justify. 



American farmers come up to Canada when 

 it is borne upon them that as fine crops are 

 being raised upon the low-priced lands of Canada 

 as upon their own highly held holdings. They 

 see Canadian farmers carrying off the world's 

 premier honors in wheat and oats and successfully 

 competing in corn against the recognised corn 

 belt. They want to expand and secure larger 

 holdings for themselves or growing families of 

 boys, a development impracticable in their own 

 localities. 



The prevailing exchange situation has been 

 decidedly advantageous to United States farmers 

 purchasing in Canada, and instances have come 

 to light where the entire proceeding of acquiring 

 a new Canadian farm has been transacted on the 

 difference in the exchange of money, the farmer 

 at the conclusion of the deal being in possession 

 of land of possibly greater acreage and the sum 

 of money for which he sold his United States 

 property intact. 



High Productivity of Soil 



Many American purchasers of improved 

 farms have discovered a gratifying feature in the 

 high productivity of cheap Canadian land in the 

 fact that a farm may pay for itself in a single 

 year, returning from the proceeds of the first 

 harvest a revenue in excess of the purchase price 

 of the farm. 



United States farmers are bing attracted to 

 Canadian farms in increasing numbers yearly, 

 and even the upheaval which the war brought 

 about did not interfere with this category of the 

 United States exodus. In the first seven months 

 of 1920, nearly 7,000 United States farmers took 

 free Government homesteads in the Western 

 Canadian provinces, whilst thousands of others 

 purchased cheap, privately held lands or im- 

 proved farms. Canada's magnificent crop and 

 her numerous international agricultural successes 

 are going to attract more this year, whilst a sure 

 forecast of what Western Canada has to expect 

 from across the border this year and for years to 

 come, is contained in the tremendous interest 

 exhibited by United States farmers and others 

 throughout the whole of last year. 



The Wide Dominion 



By Frederick Niven, the well-known English Author. 

 (Copyright in Canada.) 



Many times now I have travelled the length of it, and 

 have wandered up and down through a considerable 

 portion of the depth of it; and here I sit down again, in 

 its extreme west, to rest a spell after my last journey 

 through it, to meditate on the thousands of miles I have 

 come and let my memory play with the collected pictures. 

 Some foolish fellow of the yellow press, that press that 

 dotes upon the shrill, the high-pitched, the superlative 

 phrase, is sure to rise up one day and ask for "the greatest 

 Canadian writer" to tell it all. The only way the narration 

 could be attempted, apart from a volume of history and 

 topography, would be in a series of volumes, Balzacian 

 in their design; and that "greatest author" who might 

 make the attempt (building his pyramid of tomes in 

 the manner of the ComSdie Humaine) would assuredly 

 die before his work was done. 



Consider what has to be told of the Newfoundland 

 banks, fished by Elizabethan fishermen and by fishers 

 from France centuries ago, when the great con'inent 

 behind them was but a Land Unknown; of the Gaelic- 

 speaking folk of a patch of Nova Scotia; of Acadia, a 

 little world apart; the Annapolis Valley and its apple 

 blossom; of the Labrador and the Moravians; of the old- 

 world towns of the province of Quebec, where it is almost 

 necessary for the visitor to go down where the sound of 

 the locomotive bell comes from, and see the name "Cana- 

 dian Pacific Railway," or the initials "C.P.R." on the 

 trucks, if he would assure himself he is not in some quaint 

 old village of Brittany; of the Quebec hinterland and the 

 habitant; of the Scots, "more loyal than the king," in the 

 Scots counties of Ontario (you may mispronounce a 

 Scots name in Scotland and be lightly corrected; in Scots 

 Ontario, if you do so, they roar in chorus, not unfriendly, 

 but they roar); of the butt-end of Ontario down toward 

 the Great Lakes, and its hard-working farmers; of that 

 other Ontario, northward, by Muskoka and beyond, where 

 the farms thin out and an apparent laziness begins. 



The Country of Birch-Bark Canoes 



"Ain't there anybody around?" the visitor hails on 

 summer days, dropped by the train, when there is no 

 sound but the crackle of June bugs in the street, and the 

 place seems deserted; and someone at last comes from 

 siesta in a shadow (surely siesta, by his rumpled hair, 

 albeit he carries a hammer or a pair of pliers in his hand) 

 and replies: "I guess they've all gone a-fishing." That 

 "greatest writer" would have to tell also of the Ontario 

 that becomes definitely north, where the little stores are 

 stocked with mosquito-net and snowshoes, with rifles 

 and fishing rods, steel traps and Mackinaw coats, the 



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