Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 141, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 June 1913 — THE LURE OF THE WEST [ARTICLE]

THE LURE OF THE WEST

WESTERN CANADA ATTRACTING . THOUSANDS OF SETTLERS. Writing on the Canadian West, an eastern exchange truthfully says: i “The West still calls with imperative voice. To prairie and’ mountain, and for the Pacific Coast, Ontario’s young men and women are attracted i>y tens of thousands yearly. The great migration has pui an end to the fear, freely expressed not many years ago by those who knew the West from the lakeß to the farther coast of Vancouver Island, shat Canada would some day break in two because of-the predominance of Continental European and American settlers in the West.” This is true. While the immigration from the United States is large, running close to 150,000 a year, that of the British Isles and Continental Europe nearly twice that number, making a total of 400,000 per year, there is a strong Influx from Eastern Canada. It is not only into the prairie provinces that these people go, but many of them continue westward, the glory of British Columbia’s great trees and great mountains, the excellent agricultural valleys, where can be grown almost all kinds of agriculture and where fruit has already achieved prominence. Then the vast expanse of the plains attract hundreds of thousands, who at once set to work to cultivate their vast holdings. There is still room, and great opportunity in the West. The work of man’s hands, even in the cities with their recordbreaking building rush, is the smallest part of the great panorama that Is spread before the eye on a journey through the country. is still supreme, and man is still the divine pigmy audaciously seeking to Impose hjs will and stamp his mark upon an unconquered half continent The feature that most commends Itself in Western development today is the "home-making spirit.” The West will find happiness in planting trees and making gardens and/ building schools and colleges and udiversitles, and producing a- home environment so that there will be no disposition to regard the country as a temporary place of abode in which everyone is trying to make his pile preparatory to going back East or becoming a lotus-eater beside the Pacific. The lure of the West is strong.* It will be still stronger when the crude new towns and villages of the plains are embowered in trees and vocal with the song of birds.—Advertisement