154 REPORT OF THE SCOTTISH COMMISSION 



value of land. One hears of winters when the calves died in the 

 corralls, from severe cold accompanied by deep snow covered by a 

 crust which prevented the stock grazing. In one of these winters the 

 losses amounted to 40 per cent, of the herds. Of course such seasons 

 are exceptional, but they have to be reckoned with. Then land is 

 now worth five or six times its original value. In such circumstances 

 shareholders think the present an opportune time for realising their 

 capital. And so those wide rolling plains are being cleared before 

 the advance of the homesteader and all the old romance of the 

 prairie is being blotted out by the hosts from the east and south who 

 are coming to this new land to fight for independence. 



One would naturally come to the conclusion that the cattle 

 industry of the west would vanish before this inrush of settlers. 

 Yet this is far from being the case. In a stock-raising country such 

 as this the carrying capabilities of the land are limited to the amount 

 of stock which it is capable of maintaining over winter. In the days 

 of the big ranches, when there was unlimited free range apart from 

 the ground actually owned or leased, it was the endeavour to run 

 as big a stock as possible with the minimum of attention. The 

 natural consequence was that it was utterly impossible to obtain 

 winter fodder for more than a small proportion of the stock, and the 

 older cattle were left to fend for themselves during the winter. 

 Given a few open seasons this worked well enough, but the inevitable 

 must happen, and periodically the tale of terrible losses came to 

 be told. 



Now, however, a new era is dawning. The settlers are daily 

 going further out and locating homesteads in the ranges. They 

 take up their quarter or half section and find that, with very little 

 extra trouble to that expended on their holdings, they can, if they 

 had sufficient capital to start with, run a bunch of forty to fifty 

 cows and their produce. They can make sufficient slough hay in 

 summer to ensure that they can carry their stock through the winter 

 in safety ; this system is being followed with considerable success 

 and we who fully expected to find that the cattle statistics would 

 show a steady decrease in the ranching provinces following on the 

 breaking up of the land, were astonished to find that the very 

 reverse is the case. 



There seems little doubt that this method will be greatly developed 

 in the near future and with good management it should be very 

 profitable. With the steady influx of settlers and the consequent 

 demand for horses, their breeding will pay exceedingly well for 

 many years to come. People say that steam will take the place 

 of the horse, but experience teaches that steam cultivation is but 

 the precursor of the horse. Horse breeding takes considerably 

 more capital to commence with than cattle raising, but it has also 

 considerable advantages. Horses require little or no attention 

 during the severest winter, as they can scrape away the snow and 

 get to their food when cattle would starve, and as regards monetary 

 return a four year old colt would, generally speaking, be worth 

 $100 as against $40 for a steer of the same age. 



There are vast areas in the ranching provinces, which, though 



