The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914
“Hour after hour, to Brooke’s astonishment, the two men disputed the merits of their rival communities, not on the basis of culture or achievement, but on size and wealth. Land, the Calgarian boasted, had risen in value in his city from five dollars a front foot to three hundred dollars a front foot. But in Edmonton, his companion retorted, land had risen from three dollars to five hundred dollars; and Edmonton had gone from a population of thirty to forty thousand in just twenty years! To which... the Calgarian responded that his city had gone from thirty to thirty thousand in just twelve years.Finally, the two were prompted to ask the poet where he hailed from.“I had to tell them,” Brooke recalled, “not without shame, that my town of Granchester, having numbered three hundred at the time of Julius Caesar’s landing, had risen rapidly to nearly four hundred by Doomsday Book but was now declined to three-fifty. They seemed perplexed and angry.”By that time, the lusty optimism of the West had deteriorated into something more flamboyant but less admirable.MoreLess
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