worked for my brothers in the lumber woods of Wisconsin down among the
yellow pines of the Arizona Desert. All that was back in the decrepit
and languid and hopesick nineties. It was then you could see the skies
of Southern Manitoba luridly aflame at night with wheat stacks it
didn't pay to thresh.

Came a turn of the wheel! Was it Destiny or Providence? We talk
mistily of Cause and Effect, but who drops the Cause that turns the
Wheel? Who of us that witnessed the crazy gold stampede to Kootenay
and the crazier stampede to Klondike could guess that the backwash of
those foolish tidal waves of gold-mad humanity would people the
Northwest? Why, we were mad with alarm over the gold stampede! Men
pitched their homesteads to the winds and trekked penniless for the
mines. Women bought mining shares for a dollar that were not worth ten
cents. Clerks, railroad hands, seamstresses, waitresses--all were
infected by the mania. In vain the wheat provinces pointed out that
one single year's wheat crop would exceed in value all the gold mined
in the North in fifty years. Nothing could stem the madness. You
could pave Kootenay with the fortunes lost there or go to Klondike by
the bones of the dead bleaching the trail.

But behold the unexpected Effect! Adventurers from all the earth
rushing to the gold mines passed over unpeopled plains of seeming
boundlessness. Land in the western states was selling at this time at
from seventeen dollars in the remote sections to seventy-five dollars
an acre near markets. Here was land in these Canadian plains to be had
for nothing but the preemption fee of ten dollars and three years'
residence.

"I didn't take up a homestead meaning to farm it," said a disappointed