Railways have pierced and
opened up lonely regions of the Sagalae, and there are two thriving towns
where, in the days of Pierre, only stood a Hudson's Bay Company's post
with its store. Now, as far as eye can see, vast fields of grain greet
the eye, and houses and barns speckle the greenish brown or Tuscan yellow
of the crop-covered lands, while towns like Lebanon and Manitou provide
for the modern settler all the modern conveniences which science has
given to civilized municipalities. Today the motor-car and the telephone
are as common in such places as they are in a thriving town of the United
Kingdom. After the first few days of settlement two things always
appear--a school-house and a church. Probably there is no country in the
world where elementary education commands the devotion and the cash of
the people as in English Canada; that is why the towns of Lebanon and
Manitou had from the first divergent views. Lebanon was English,
progressive, and brazenly modern; Manitou was slow, reactionary, more or
less indifferent to education, and strenuously Catholic, and was thus
opposed to the militant Protestantism of Lebanon.
It was my idea to picture a situation in the big new West where destiny
is being worked out in the making of a nation and the peopling of the
wastes.
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