17 Next-door Neighbors

there is a saying that “Good fences make good neighbors,”but that depends on the neighbors. North of the United States is a country bigger than the United States called Canada. It stretches across America from sea to sea, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and there would have to be a fence 3,000 miles long if there were a fence, but there is none—nothing but an imaginary line. An imaginary line is a line on the map but not on the ground. On this imaginary line the two countries set up a stone on which they said something like this, “Canada and the United States agree never to fight”; that’s all—a gentlemen’s agreement. It is called the “Peace Stone.”

Boys often say “findings is keepings.” The French people found Canada, but England thought she had a better right to it, so she fought for it and took it away from the French.That was a long time ago, but there are a great many French still in Canada, and in the city of Quebec more people speak French than English.

I once had a Newfoundland dog. He was woolly and big and ate as much as a man. Newfoundland dogs came from an island on the At-lantic side of Canada which an Englishman found, and so he called it New-found-land. Newfoundland is now a part of Canada.

Just off the coast of Newfoundland is a shallow part of the sea called the Grand Banks. But the Banks are under the water. It is a great fishing ground, but men go fishing there,not for pleasure, but for business. Thousands of small boats go off and stay off and do not return until they have caught all the fish they can carry. It is often very foggy on the Grand Banks, and sometimes big ocean steamships coming over from across the Atlantic Ocean cannot see the small fishing boats and run into them and sink them with all on board.

Canada is big in size but small in number of people. There are not as many people in all of Canada as there are in the State of New York. Most of the people in Canada live as close along the edge of the United States as they can, because it gets very cold in winter farther north than that. Close to the United States people do pretty nearly the same things and raise the same things as people south of the border in the United States. For instance, Canada raises more wheat than any other country in the World except the United States.

One of the biggest concerns in Canada is a railroad company called the Canadian Pacific. The railroad runs all the way across Canada from the Atlantic Ocean to Vancouver on the west coast of Canada. But it doesn’t stop at the Oceans. It has big steamers that cross the Atlantic Ocean and it has big steamers that cross the Pacific Ocean.The Canadian Pacific owns all the hotels along the railroad,too. Along one part of the railroad there is very wonderful scenery—beautiful mountains and lakes. Lake Louise, in the Rocky Mountains, is so beautiful that many people go there on their vacations or on their wedding journeys.

No woman likes a wild animal such as a fox or wolf close to her, but as soon as the animals are dead she loves their skins close to her and will pay high prices to get them.There is a big bay in Canada, almost as big as the Gulf of Mexico; it is called Hudson Bay and named after the man who discovered it. He is the same man who discovered the Hudson River, but Hudson Bay and Hudson River have no other connection. Hudson Bay is filled with ice all winter long, and all around Hudson Bay the winters are so cold that men do not live there unless they have to. The chief reason some men do live there is to hunt animals. The animals in that cold country can’t buy overcoats, so they grow overcoats on themselves—fur overcoats, which are the very best kind of overcoats. Hunters trap and kill wolves, foxes, and other animals, skin them of their overcoats, and sell them to ladies who can pay big prices for them. This company of people who trap animals and sell furs is called the Hudson’s Bay Company.

As we have States, Canada has provinces, but there are only ten provinces in Canada. The chief one is called Ontario, after Lake Ontario. Ontario, however, borders all the other Great Lakes too, except Michigan. In Ontario is the capital of Canada. It is called Ottawa. England sends a man across the ocean to Canada, called the Governor-General,but the people in Canada send men to Ottawa to make their own laws.

As you go north in Canada the country gets colder and colder, till at last it gets so cold that it is too cold even for trees to grow. The trees that grow farthest north hold their leaves and stay green the year round like the pine and spruce.They are called “evergreens.” The wood of evergreens is soft.The trees that cannot grow as far north as evergreens drop their leaves in the winter, like the oak and maple. Their wood is usually hard. The hard-wood trees are used chiefly to make furniture, but the soft-wood trees are ground up to make paper.

The paper on which this book and almost every other book is printed and all the paper used for newspapers is made from wood. A great city newspaper will use up many acres of trees in a single day. It takes as many trees as grow in a space the size of a city block to feed a single paper a single day. So you see how fast trees are being cut down in Canada to keep the presses in the United States going. Day after day miles upon miles of trees are cut down, ground into pulp,made into paper, and shipped to us in large rolls, that we may have the news—only to be burned up the day after. As people are fed wheat, and animals corn, printing presses must be fed trees for their daily meal, year in and year out, without ceasing.

One of the first geography lessons I ever had was about Eskimos, who lived in snow houses and fished through a hole in the ice. One of the homes of the Eskimos is Labrador on the northeastern corner of Canada. The Eskimos are related to the Indians, and both are very distantly related to the Chinese, but I’ll tell you more about them later.