Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (10)

Imagine a four-hundred-thousand-acre valley, every foot of which is tilled or tillable, protected on every side by mountain walls—on the east by the Cascades, on the west by the Coast Range, on the north by the Umpqua chain, and on the south by the Siskiyous; and meandering through this garden valley, watering its every corner, the winding, mischievous, inquisitive Rogue. It is indeed a beckoning land. But mind you, it is not a get-rich-quick land. It is a work-like-the-devil-and-you’ll-become-prosperous country. The soil and the climate will do as much for the farmer, perhaps more, than anywhere else in the world, but he must do his share. And no one should buy a ticket to Oregon expecting to find immediate employment in any line. Jobs are not lying loose on the streets, waiting for some one to come along and pick them up, any more than they are in Chicago or New York. I doubt very much, indeed, if the workingman with no other capital than his two hands has much to gain by emigrating to Oregon. Large projects, it is true, require many labourers, and these openings often present themselves; but the means of bringing in workmen are just as cheap and rapid as in other sections of the country, so it need not be expected that there would be any great difference in wages. The chief advantages that Oregon offers to labouring people without sufficient accumulations to give them a start are: a mild and equable climate, an absence of damaging storms, a certainty of crops, and opportunities as good, though perhaps no better, than any other State. If, however, he has been able to accumulate anywhere from a thousand to three thousand dollars, he is then in a position to avail himself of the innumerable opportunities which exist for men of small capital. Such men will find their best opportunities in buying a few acres of land, building a modest home upon it, and then “going in,” as the English say, for fruit growing or poultry raising or dairying or market-gardening. As sawmills are as plentiful in Oregon as pretty women are on Fifth Avenue, and as the State contains one fifth of all the standing timber in the country (you didn’t know that, did you?) lumber is extraordinarily cheap, the cost of the material for a comfortable four-room farmhouse, for example, not running to more than one hundred and fifty dollars. It is a mistake for the intending emigrant to count on getting a farm under the terms of the Homestead Act, for, though the total government lands open to homestead entry in Oregon are greater in area than the entire State of West Virginia, they are, for the most part, in the least desirable portions of the State and the settler who occupied them would have to pay the price incident to life in a remote and semicivilised region. On the other hand, excellent land, within easy reach of towns and railroads, can be had in the valleys of western Oregon all the way from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars an acre, and this would, I am convinced, prove the best investment in the end.

There is no space to dwell at any length on the towns of western Oregon—Salem, Eugene, Roseburg, Drain, Grant’s Pass, Medford, Ashland. All of these towns have paved streets lined with comfortable and homelike residences and remarkably well-stocked shops; up-to-the-minute educational, lighting, and sewage systems; about double the number of parks, hotels, garages, and moving-picture houses that you would find in towns of similar size in the East; and boards of trade and chambers of commerce with enough surplus energy and enthusiasm to make a booster out of an Egyptian mummy. In most of these towns prohibition reigns, and, though, to be quite truthful, I am not accustomed to raise an admonishing hand when some one uncorks a gilt-topped bottle, I repeatedly remarked the fact that they were cleaner, quieter, more orderly—in short, pleasanter places to live—than those whose streets are dotted by the familiar swinging half-doors. That prohibition has done no harm to business is best proved by the fact that the very merchants who in the beginning were its most bitter assailants have become its most ardent advocates. After comparing the “dry” towns of Oregon to the “wet” ones—say, in the vicinity of Bakersfield, in California—it seems to me that, so far as the smaller rural communities are concerned, at least, there is only one side to the prohibition question.

Thirty miles from Grant’s Pass, in the fastnesses of the Siskiyous, are the recently discovered mammoth caves, which some genius in the art of appellation has christened “The Marble Halls of Oregon.” It needed an inspiration to conceive a name like that! Such a name would induce one to make a trip to see a hole in a sand-bank. As a matter of fact, these Oregonian caverns are decidedly worth the journey. Though they are very far from having been completely explored, sufficient investigations have been made to prove conclusively that they are much superior, both in size and beauty, to the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, a visit to which was considered as essential for every well-travelled American half a century ago as to have seen the Virginia Natural Bridge and Niagara Falls.

Salmon fishing in a Northwestern river.

WHERE RODS BEND DOUBLE AND REELS GO WHIR-R-R-R.]

* * * * *

Oregon, with its fish-filled streams, its game-filled forests, and its coast-line rich in bays and coves and beaches, possesses all the requisites for one of the world’s great playgrounds, but some years must pass before it will possess the luxuries demanded by that class of summer vacationists who travel with wardrobe trunks. With less than one fifteenth of its sixty odd million acres under cultivation, it is still to a great extent a frontier region, with many of a frontier’s crudities and discomforts and, for a man who knows and loves the open, with all of a frontier country’s charm. I am perfectly aware, of course, that the farmers who are growing such amazing quantities of big, red apples in the valleys of the Hood and the Rogue and the real-estate boosters who are so frantically chopping town sites out of the primeval forest within cannon-shot of Portland will resent the statement that this is still a frontier country; but it is, nevertheless, and will be for a number of years to come. Barring the system which parallels the coast from north to south and the one which cuts across its northeast corner, there are no railways in Oregon; the scantiness of population and the peculiarly savage nature of a great portion of the country having offered few inducements to the railroad builders. This condition is changing rapidly, however, for the transcontinental systems which enter the State are working overtime to give it population, cities and towns and villages are springing up like mushrooms along its many waterways, the vast grants held by the railway and trading companies and by the pioneers are gradually being cut up into small farms, and a rural situation is being slowly created which is bound to effect a marked change in the conditions which have heretofore prevailed. But it has not yet, thank Heaven, reached that stage of civilisation which is characterised by summer hotels with miles of piazzas and acres of green lawns and oceans of red-and-white striped awnings. Taking the place of these sophisticated and ostentatious summer resorts are the unpretentious inns and camps and summer colonies which are sprinkled along the Oregon shore from the mouth of the Columbia to the California line.

The easiest way to reach this summer land is to take the little jerk-water railroad which meanders eastward from Hillsboro, a main-line townlet fifty miles or so south of Portland, through Tillamook County to the sea. For many miles the train follows the tumultuous Nehalem, stopping every now and then, as the fancy seems to strike it, at shrieking sawmills or at groups of slab-walled loggers’ shacks set down in clearings in the forest, where bearded, flannel-shirted men come out and swap stories and tobacco with the engineer. After a time the woods begin to dwindle into tracts of stumps and second-growths, and these merge gradually into farms, with neat white houses and orderly rows of fruit-trees and herds of sleek cattle grazing contentedly in clover meadows. Quite soon Nehalem Bay comes in sight and the lush meadows give way to wire-grass and the wire-grass runs out in beaches of yellow sand so much like those which border Cape Cod and Buzzard’s Bay that it is hard to believe that one is not on the coast of New England. From the names of the towns and from the types of faces that I saw, I gathered that much of this country was settled by New Englanders, who must have found in its hills and forests and fertile farm lands and alternate stretches of sandy beach and rock-bound shore much to remind them of home. Oregon is, as a glance at the map will show you, in exactly the same latitude as the New England States and has the same cool, invigorating summer weather that one finds in Maine, though its winters, thanks to the warm Japan current which sweeps along its shores, are characterised by rains instead of snow. From Nehalem to Tillamook the railroad hugs the coast. On one side the bosom of the Pacific rises and falls languorously under a genial sun; on the other the line of rugged hills, in their shaggy mantles of green, go up to meet the sky. Here and there some placid lake mirrors the crags and wind-bent trees, or a river, complaining noisily at the delay to which it has been subjected, finds a devious way through the hindering hill range to the waiting ocean. Nor are the attractions of the Tillamook country those of the sea alone, for within a dozen miles of the coast bear, panther, wildcats, deer, partridge, pheasant, duck, and geese are to be found, while the mountain streams are alive with trout waiting to be lured by the fly. It is a storied region, too, for thousands of moccasined feet have trod the famous Indian trail which was once the only route from the wilds of southern Oregon to the fur-post which the first Astor established at the mouth of the Columbia and which still bears his name, and here and there along the coast are the remains of the forts and trading stations which the Russians, in their campaign for the commercial mastery of the Pacific half a century ago, pushed southward even to the Bay of San Francisco. The lives led by those who summer along this shore would delight such rugged apostles of the simple life as John Muir and John Burroughs and Colonel Roosevelt, for there is a gratifying absence of fashionable hotels and luxurious camps and cottages, though there is an abundance of unpretentious but comfortable tent colonies and inns. The people whom I met in Portland and elsewhere apologised profusely for Oregon’s deficiencies in this respect and assured me very earnestly that in two or three years more the State would have a complete assortment of summer hotels “as good as anything you’ll find at Atlantic City or Narragansett Pier, by George.” All I have to say is that when their promises are realised, Oregon’s chiefest and most distinctive charm—its near-to-nature simplicity—will have disappeared, and, so far as the traveller and the pleasure seeker are concerned, it will be merely an indifferent imitation of the humdrum and prosaic East. At present, however, it is still a big, free, unfenced, keep-on-the-grass, do-as-you-please, happy-go-lucky, flannel-shirt-and-slouch-hat land. Even as I write I can hear its insistent, subtle summons in my ears: the whisper of the forests, the chatter of the rivers, the murmur of the ocean, the snarling of the sawmills, the chunk-a-chunk of paddles, the creak of saddle gear, all seeming to say: “Cut loose from towns and men; pack your kit and come again.” And that’s precisely what I’m going to do.

XII

BREAKING THE WILDERNESS

“They rise to mastery of wind and snow;
They go like soldiers grimly into strife
To colonise the plain. They plough and sow,
And fertilise the sod with their own life,
As did the Indian and the buffalo.”

XII

BREAKING THE WILDERNESS

When white men in Africa make long desert journeys on camel-back, they follow the example of the Arabs and wind themselves tightly from chest to hips with bandages like those with which trainers wrap the legs of race-horses. This, to put it inelegantly but plainly, is done to prevent their bursting from the violent and sustained shaking to which they are subjected by the roughness of the camel’s gait. When I said good-bye to the Sudan, taking it for granted that I would have no further use for my spiral corselet in the presumably civilised country to which I was going, I left it behind me in Khartoum. How was I to know that I would need it far more than I ever had in Africa while journeying in so essentially Occidental a conveyance as a motor-car through a region where camels are confined to circuses and Turkish-rug advertisements? But long before we had traversed the forty atrocious miles which make the distance between Portland, Ore., and Kalama, Wash., seem more like four hundred, I would have given a good deal to have had my racked and aching body snugly wrapped in it again. I have had more than a speaking acquaintance with some roads so bad that they ought to have been in jail—in Asiatic Turkey and in Baja California and in other places—but to the Portland-Kalama road I present the red-white-and-blue championship ribbon. Roll down a rocky hillside in a barrel; climb into an electric churn and tell the dairyman to turn on the power; ride a bicycle across a railroad trestle and you will have had but the caviare course of the dinner of discomfort that was served to us. As, after five hours of this sort of thing, we bumped our way down a particularly vicious bit of hill road, every joint and bolt in the car squealing in agonised complaint, I saw a prosperous-looking farmer in his shirt-sleeves leaning comfortably over the front gate, interestedly watching our progress.

“St-t-t-op a m-m-m-inute,” I chattered to the chauffeur, as we jounced into the thank-ye-marms and rattled over the loose stones, “I w-w-want to t-t-t-t-ell this m-m-m-an-n-n w-what I think of the r-r-r-oad.”

As we drew up in front of the gate, the farmer, taking a straw out of his mouth, drawled:

“Say, stranger, you might like to know that you’ve just come over the most gol-damnedest piece of road north o’ Panama.”

So, unless the gentlemen who have the say in this portion of the State of Washington have repaired the road since we passed over it, I would advise those automobilists who are Seattle-bound to keep on the Oregon side of the Columbia as far as Goble (I think that is the name of the tiny hamlet), where they can put their car on a barge and hire the ferryman to tow them across the river to Kalama. This will cost them five dollars, but it’s worth it.

A road near the Columbia as it is.

WHAT THE ROAD-BUILDERS HAVE DONE IN WASHINGTON.]

Were one to prejudge a country by the names of its villages and towns and counties he would form a peculiar conception of Washington, for I do not recall ever having heard anything quite so outlandish as the names which some one—the Siwash aborigine, presumably—has wished upon it. How would you like to get this sort of a reply to your question as to some one’s antecedents? “Me? Oh, I was born near Wahkiacus, down in Klickitat County, and I met my wife, whose folks live up Snohomish way, in Walla Walla, and later on we moved to Puyallup, but I’ve a sort of notion of goin’ into the cannery business at Skamokawa, over in Wahkiakum County, though the wife, she’s been a-pesterin’ me to buy an apple orchard up in the Okanogan.” Still, it’s more interesting to motor through a country like that, always wondering what bizarre, heathenish name is going to turn up next, than to tour through a region sprinkled with Simpson’s Centres and Cranberry Crossroads and New Carthages and Hickory Hollows until you feel as though you were an actor in “The Old Homestead.”

Throughout our trip through Washington we were caused untold annoyance, and in several instances were compelled to travel many weary and needless miles, because of the wanton destruction of the sign-posts by amateur marksmen. Up in that country every boy gets a gun with his first pair of pants, and, when there is nothing else to shoot, he makes a target of the enamelled guide-posts which have been erected for the benefit of tourists. More than once, coming to a crossroads in the forest, we found these placards so riddled with bullets that we were compelled to guess which road to take—and we usually guessed wrong. “I wish to goodness,” said my friend in exasperation, after we had gone half a dozen miles out of our way on one of these occasions, “that they would declare a close season on sign-posts, just as they have on elk, and then give the man the limit who is caught shooting them.”

It would be a grave injustice to place undue emphasis upon the crudities and inconveniences which annoy the traveller in certain portions of Washington, for, when you get down to bed-rock facts, its farmers are still wrestling with the wilderness—and in most instances they have had to put up a desperate resistance to keep the wilderness from shoving them off the mat. We passed through many a community, far removed from the railway (for the railway builders have done little more than nibble at the crust of the Washington pie) where the people were living under conditions almost identical with those which confronted the Pilgrim settlers of New England. Many a farmstead that we passed was chopped out of the virgin forest, the house being built from the trees that had grown upon its site. Cleared land, as an Eastern or Middle Western farmer knows the term, seemed almost non-existent. Black and massive stumps rose everywhere, like gravestones to the dead forest. “There’s so danged many stumps in this country,” one of these pioneer farmers remarked, “that sometimes I think that the Lord never intended for it to be cleared at all.” The problem of getting rid of these stumps is one of the most perplexing with which the Northwestern farmer has to contend, the expense of clearing land averaging in the neighbourhood of seventy-five dollars an acre. So inimical to colonisation has the question of land clearing become, indeed, that the State has found it necessary to step in and finance the stump-pullers in districts established in accordance with recent legislation. Though Washington is a country of hustle and hard work, no one who spends any length of time in it can fail to be impressed with the belief that it has a promising future. The climate is, as a whole, attractive. Though the cold is never extreme, the climate does not lack vigour, and, as a result of the Oregon mists, there is plenty of moisture. “We call ’em Oregon mists,” a farmer explained to me, “because they missed Oregon and hit here.” They are really more of a fog than a rain, and no one pays the slightest attention to them, even the womenfolk scorning to use umbrellas. These mists, taken with the verdancy of the vegetation and the pink-and-white complexions of the women, constantly reminded me of Ireland and the south of England. In striking contrast to the _arroyos secos_ to which we became accustomed in many parts of California are the streams of Washington, which flow throughout the year, enough water-power going to waste annually to run a plant that would supply the nation.

As the Pacific Highway goes, it is close to a hundred and fifty miles from Portland to Tacoma, but we made a slight detour so as to see Olympia, which is the capital of the State. Beyond its rococo State-house, which is surmounted by a statue of a female—it might be Justice and it might be Mrs. Pankhurst in her peignoir—there is nothing to distinguish Olympia from any one of a score of other pretty little towns whose back doors open onto the primeval forest. Because there was a moon in the heavens as big and yellow as a Stilton cheese, we decided to push on to Tacoma, which is thirty miles from Olympia, that night. I’ll not soon forget the beauty of that ride. With our engines purring like a contented cat we boomed down the radiant path that our headlights cut out of the darkness; the night air, charged with balsamic fragrance, beat in our faces; the black walls of the forest rose skyward on either hand, the tree tops bordering with ghostly hedges a star-sprinkled lane of sky. I wish you might have been there ... it was so enchanting and mysterious.

The theatres were vomiting their throngs of playgoers when we rolled under the row of electric arches which turns Tacoma’s chief thoroughfare into an avenue of dazzling light and drew up beneath the grotesque and towering totem-pole in the square in front of our hotel. Tacoma is as up-and-doing a city as you will find in a week’s journey through a busy land. It does not need to be rapped on the feet with a night-stick to be kept awake. Magnificently situated on a series of terraces rising above an arm of Puget Sound, its streets, instead of defying the steepness of the hills, as do those of San Francisco and Seattle, sweep up them in long diagonals, like the ramps at the Grand Central Terminal in New York. Tacoma is peculiarly fortunate in being girdled by a series of so-called natural parks, a zone ten miles in width in which the landscape architect has not been permitted to improve on the lakes and woods and wild-flower-carpeted glades provided by the Creator. But Tacoma’s chief boast and glory is, of course, a mountain whose graceful, snow-capped cone, which bears an astonishing resemblance to Fujiyama, rises like an ermine-mantled monarch above the encircling forest. The name of the mountain is Rainier or Tacoma, according to whether you live in Seattle or Tacoma, an acrimonious dispute having been in progress between the people of the two cities over the question for some time, the citizens of Seattle claiming that the mountain is far too beautiful to be used as an asset in Tacoma’s municipal advertising campaign, while the people of the latter city assert that, as the British Admiral Rainier, for whom the peak was originally named, fought against the Americans in the Revolution, he does not deserve to have his name tacked onto an American mountain.

For thirty miles or more the road from Tacoma to Mount Rainier (for that is the name to which the Federal Government has given its approval) strikes across a wooded country as level as the top of a table, until, reaching the base of the mountain, it sweeps upward in long and graceful spirals which were laid out by army engineers, for the region has been taken over by the government under its new and admirable policy of protecting the beauty-spots of the country through the formation of national parks. Nowhere, not even in the Alps, have I driven over a finer mountain road, the gradients being so gradual and the curves so skilfully designed that one scarcely appreciates, upon reaching National Park Inn, in the heart of the reservation, that he has climbed upward of five thousand feet since leaving tide-water at Tacoma. We spent the night at the Inn, a low-roofed, big-fireplaced tavern which has an air of cosiness and comfort in keeping with the surroundings. Everything about it reminded us of hotels we knew in the Alpine valleys, and when I drew up the shade in the morning the illusion was complete, for the great peak, its snow-clad flanks all sparkling in the morning sunlight, towered above us, just as Mont Blanc towers above Chamonix, dazzling, majestic, sublime. Leaving the Inn after an early breakfast, we motored up the mountain road as far as the snout of the great Nisqually Glacier, which is as far as automobiles are permitted to go. Take my word for it, this glacier—the largest on the continent outside of Alaska—is one of the most worth-while sights in all America. A river of ice, seven miles long and half a mile wide, it coils down the slope of the mountain like a mammoth boa-constrictor whose progress has been barred in other directions by the encircling wall of forest. We left the car at the glacier’s snout, and, after an hour’s hard climbing over loose rubble and slippery rock, succeeded, in defiance of the danger signs, in reaching a flat shelf of rock from which we could look directly down upon the ice torrent, and there we ate the lunch that we had brought with us to the accompaniment of the intermittent crashes which marked the glacial torrent’s slow advance.

We descended to the road in time to catch the four-horse stage which runs twice daily from the Inn to Paradise Valley, which the Lady insisted that we must visit, “because,” she said, “there are snow-fields and fields of wild flowers side by side.”

“But you’ve seen much the same sort of thing in Switzerland,” I objected. “Don’t you remember that place above the Lake of Geneva, Territet, I think it was, where people in furs were skating on one side of the hotel and other people were having tea under big red parasols on the other?”

“I remember it, of course,” she answered, “but that was in Switzerland and this is in my own country, which makes all the difference in the world. Evidently you have forgotten that German baron we met at Grindelwald, who asked us if we didn’t think that the view from Paradise Valley was finer than the one from Andermatt, and we had to admit that we didn’t know where Paradise Valley was. I’m not going to let that sort of thing happen again. The next time I meet a foreigner I’m not going to be embarrassed to death by finding that he knows more about my own country than I know myself.”

So she had her way and, leaving the car behind us, we took the creaking stage up the steep and narrow road to the valley, where we gathered armfuls of wild flowers one minute and pelted each other with snowballs the next, and peered through the telescope—at a quarter a look—at the thirteen glaciers which radiate from the mountain’s summit, and aroused perfectly shameless appetites for supper, and slept as only healthily tired people can sleep, and the next morning, half intoxicated with the combination of blazing sunlight and sparkling mountain air, we rattled down again to the Inn and the waiting car.

The run from Rainier National Park, through Tacoma, to Seattle is as smooth and exhilarating as sliding down the banisters of the front stairs. Auto-intoxicated by the perfection of the roads, I stepped on the accelerator and in obedience to the signal the car suddenly leaped into its stride and hurtled down the highway at express-train speed, while farmhouses and barns and fields and orchards swept by us in an indistinguishable blur. It was glorious while it lasted. But out of the distance came racing toward us a big white placard, “City Limits of Seattle,” and I slowed down to a pace more conformable with the law and rolled over the miles of trestles which span the swamps and lowlands adjacent to Seattle as sedately as though a motor-cycle policeman had his eye upon us. The builders of Seattle must have been men of resource as well as courage, for those portions of the city that have not been reclaimed from the tide-lands have been blasted out of the rocky hillsides, so that the city gives one the impression of clinging precariously to a slippery mountain slope midway between sea and sky. Instead of propitiating the hills, as is the case in Tacoma, the streets go storming up them at angles which give a motorist much the same sensation a rider has when his horse rears and threatens to fall over backward. Though Seattle is very big and very busy, with teeming streets and huge department stores and miles of harbour frontage and one of the tallest sky-scrapers in existence and a park and boulevard system probably unequalled anywhere, it gave me the impression of being a little crude, a trifle _nouveau riche_, and not yet entirely at home in its resplendent garments. Between Seattle and Portland the most intense rivalry exists, the two cities running almost neck-and-neck as regards population, although this assertion will be indignantly denied by the citizens of both of them. Standing at one of the world’s crossways, the terminus of several transcontinental railways and several trans-Pacific steamship lines, with a superb harbour and the recognised gateway to Alaska, Seattle has a tremendous commercial advantage over her Oregonian rival, but from a residential standpoint Portland, exquisitely situated on the Willamette near its junction with the Columbia, with its milder climate, its greater number of theatres and hotels, and its older society, has rather a more metropolitan atmosphere, a more assured air than its northern neighbour.

Seattle is the natural portal to the Puget Sound country, that wilderness of mountains, glaciers, forests, lakes, lagoons, islands, bays, and inlets which makes the upper left-hand corner of the map of the United States look like a ragged fringe. It is not an easy country to describe. Southward from the Straits of Juan de Fuca, an eighty-mile-long arm of the Pacific penetrates the State of Washington—that is Puget Sound. On its eastern shore are the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, at the head of the sound is Olympia, the capital of the State, and bordering the western shore rise the splendid peaks of the unexplored Olympic Range. If your imagination will stand the further strain of picturing an archipelago four times the size of the Thousand Islands, clothed with forests of cedar, fir, and pine, and indented with countless bays, harbours, coves, and inlets, dropped down in this body of water, you will have a hazy conception of the island labyrinth of Puget Sound, which is generally admitted, I believe, to be the most beautiful salt-water estuary in the world. Despite the narrowness of many of its channels, the water is so deep and the banks so precipitous that at many points a ship’s side would touch the shore before its keel would touch the ground, which, taken in conjunction with its innumerable excellent harbours, makes it the most ideal cruising ground for power-boats on our coasts.

I can conceive, indeed, of no more enchanting summer than one spent in a well-powered, well-stocked motor-boat cruising in and about this archipelago, loitering from island to island as the fancy seized one, dropping anchor in inviting harbours for a day or a week, as one pleased. There are deer and bear in the forests and trout in the rivers and salmon in the deeper waters, and, if those did not provide sufficient recreation, one could run across to the mainland and get the stiffest kind of mountain climbing on Mount Olympus or Mount Rainier. During the summer months scores of small steamers, the “mosquito fleet,” ply out of Seattle and Tacoma, hurrying backward and forward between the city wharfs and the fishing villages, farming communities, lumber camps, sawmills, and summer resorts that are scattered everywhere about the archipelago’s inland waterways, so that the camper on their shores, seemingly far off in the wilds, need never be without his daily paper, his fresh vegetables, or his mail.

Let us give ourselves the luxury of imagining—for, to my way of thinking, there is about as much enjoyment to be had in imagination as in realisation—that we have a fortnight at our disposal on which no business worries shall be permitted to intrude, that we have the deck of a sturdy power-boat beneath our feet, and that the placid, island-dotted waters of Puget Sound lie before us, asparkle on a summer’s morning. Leaving Seattle, seated on her stately hills, astern, and the grim, grey fighting ships across the Sound at the Bremerton Navy Yard abeam, we will push the wheel to starboard and point the nose of our craft toward Admiralty Inlet, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, and the open sea. Our first port of call will be, I think, at Dungeness, whose waters are the habitat of those Dungeness crabs which tickle the palates and deplete the pocketbooks of gourmets from Vancouver to San Diego. At the back of Dungeness is Sequim Prairie, whose seventy odd thousand acres of irrigated lands produce “those great big baked potatoes” which are so prominent an item on dining-car menus in the Northwest. It is nothing of a run from Dungeness to Port Angeles, which is the most convenient gateway to the unexplored Olympics. A score or so of miles southward from Port Angeles by automobile, a portion of which is by ferry across the beautiful mountain Lake Crescent, and over a road which is a marvel of mountain engineering, are the Sol Duc Hot Springs, whose great modern hotel is in startling contrast to the savagery of the region which surrounds it. Laying our course from Port Angeles straight into the setting sun, we coast along the rock-bound, heavily timbered shores of the Olympic Peninsula to Neah Bay, where a crew of Macah Indians will take us in one of their frail canoes close around the harsh face of Cape Flattery, which is the extreme northwest corner of the United States. Westward of Cape Flattery we may not go, for beyond it lies the open sea; but, steering eastward again, we can nose about at will, loitering through the romantic scenery of Deception Pass and Rosario Straits, dropping in at Anacortes, whose canneries supply a considerable portion of the world with salmon, and coming thus to Friday Harbour, the county-seat of the San Juan Islands, which, despite the Robinson Crusoe-ness of its name, looks exactly like one of those quaint, old-fashioned seaport towns which dot the coast of Maine. The San Juan Islands, which are a less civilised and more beautiful edition of the Thousand Islands of the Saint Lawrence, like their counterparts on the other side of the continent, lie midway between the American and the Canadian shores. They were the scene of numerous exciting incidents in the boundary dispute of the late fifties, being for a number of years jointly occupied by British and American troops; but, though several crumbling British blockhouses still rise above the island harbours, the nearest British soil is Vancouver Island, across the Strait of Georgia. That the Stars and Stripes, and not the Union Jack, fly to-day over this picturesque archipelago is due, curiously enough, to the Emperor Frederick, father of the present Kaiser, who was asked to act as arbitrator between England and the United States and decided in favour of the latter.

A forest fire sweeping across the flanks of the Olympic range near Lake Chelan. In the foreground is a sea of glacial ice.]

Did you ever, by any chance, drop into a sporting-goods store only to find yourself so bewildered by the amazing number and variety of implements for sports and recreations displayed upon its shelves that you scarcely knew what to choose? Well, that is precisely the sensation I had the first time I visited the Puget Sound country. I felt as though I had been turned loose in a gigantic sporting-goods store with so many things to choose from that I couldn’t make up my mind which to take first. And, mark you, everything is comparatively close at hand. If a Londoner wants to get some mountain climbing he has to go to Chamonix or Zermatt, which means a journey of at least two days. If, getting his fill of precipices and glaciers and crevasses, he wishes some bear shooting, he must turn his face toward the Caucasus, to reach which will require seven or eight days more. Should he suddenly take it into his head that he would like some salmon fishing he will have to spend ten days and several hundred dollars in recrossing Europe to reach the fishing streams of Norway—and then pay a good round sum for the privilege of fishing in them when he gets there. On the other hand, one can leave Tacoma by train or motor-car and reach the slopes of the second highest peak in the United States, a mountain higher and more difficult of ascent than the Jungfrau, as quickly and as easily as one can go from New York to Poughkeepsie. From Seattle one can reach the country of the big grizzlies as easily as a Boston sportsman can reach the Maine woods. From Victoria, the island capital of British Columbia, a gallon of gasoline and a road as smooth as a billiard-table will take one to the banks of a stream where the salmon are too large to be weighed on pocket scales in less time than a Chicagoan spends in getting out to the golf-links at Onwentsia.

There is no other region of equal size, so far as I am aware, which offers so many worth-while things in a superlative degree for red-blooded people to do. Where else, pray, can you climb a mountain which is higher than any peak in Europe save one (Mount Hooker, in British Columbia, is only eighty feet lower than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the Alps, while Mount Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Tacoma’s front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than the Jungfrau); where else can you look along your rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly, elk, panther, mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest of all North American big game; where else can you have your fly-rod bent like a sapling in a storm and hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a sixty-pound salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise, for weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago more beautiful than those of Georgian Bay and more numerous than those of the Ægean, without the necessity of ever dropping anchor twice in the same harbour; where else can you canoe by day and camp by night along rivers which have their sources on the roof of a continent and, after taking their course through a thousand miles of wilderness, empty into the greatest of the oceans; where else can you throw open the throttle of your motor on a macadamised highway which, in another year or two, will stretch its length across twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking Mexico with Alaska? Where else can you find such amusements as these, I ask? Answer me that.

* * * * *

Were it not for the complicated customs formalities that a motorist has, perforce, to go through at the Canadian border, one could, by getting an early start and not lingering over his lunch, make the one-hundred-and-seventy-mile journey from Seattle to Vancouver between dawn and dark of the same day. But the red tape which the American officials insist upon unwinding before you can leave the land of the beef trust and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal amount of red tape which the Canadian officials wind up before you are permitted to enter the dominions of his gracious Majesty King George make a one-day trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably in two and spent the intervening night in the seaport town of Bellingham. It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face. Twenty miles farther on, at a hamlet called Blaine, we were greeted by a huge sign whose staring letters read: “International Boundary.” On one side the Stars and Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty; on the other side of this imaginary but significant line the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over a shanty a trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British customs officials, and when they had finished with our car there wasn’t much they didn’t know about it. They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir is inspected when he knocks off work in a South African diamond mine. Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain from the American authorities at the border a certificate containing a description of your car and all that it contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumerable formalities upon entering the country again, while the Canadian laws require that a tourist desiring to remain more than eight days in the Dominion must provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make in addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of which will be returned to him when he leaves the country. There is a grocer in Blaine—I forget his name, but he is a most obliging fellow—who makes a specialty of providing bonds for motorists, and by going to him we saved ourselves much trouble. It was all very informal. He simply called up the Canadian customs house on the phone and said: “Say, Bill, there’s some folks here that’s motorin’ into Canada. I ain’t got time to make out a bond just now, ’cause there’s an old lady here waitin’ to buy some potatoes, but you just let ’em skip through and I’ll fix it up the next time I see you.” Careless and informal, just like that. So all they did was to take the pedigree of the car for four generations, note the numbers of the spare tires, inventory the extra parts, go through our belongings with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what the E. in my name stood for, and was I unfortunate enough to have to pay taxes; and, after presenting me with a list of the pains and penalties which I would incur if I broke any of his Majesty’s orders in council, permitted us to enter the territory of the Dominion.

“It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; I should think the residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.”]

I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire tracks, that the fifty miles of highway between Blaine and Vancouver has been materially improved since we went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in the world, they had constructed a “crowned” road, which, as its name implies, is one that is rounded upward in the middle so as to drain the more readily; but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty that I kept the car from sliding into the ditch. There is one thing that the motorist must bear constantly in mind from the moment his front tires roll across the Canadian border, and that is _keep to the left_. Barring New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, British Columbia is the only Canadian province which retains the English system of turning to the left and passing to the right, and it takes an American some time to become habituated to it.

After seemingly endless miles of slippery going through dripping woods, we entered the outskirts of New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near the mouth of the Fraser and the oldest place in this region, as age is counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard, twenty-five miles long, connects New Westminster with Vancouver, and the car fled along it as swiftly as an aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where gangs of men were still at work dynamiting and burning the stumps; and on the cleared land neat cottages of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed gradually to two-storied, frame houses, and these again to the increasingly ornate mansions of the well-to-do, the wealthy, and the _rich_. Through the murk beyond them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot skyward—memorials to the men who have roped and tied and tamed a savage land.

XIII

CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE

“Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers—
Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains,
Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers
And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains.
Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between ’em;
Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour;
Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that
screen ’em—
Saw the plant to feed a people—up and waiting for the power!”

XIII

CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE

Darkness had fallen on the Oregonian forest when our forward tire exploded with a report which sounded in that eerie stillness like a bursting shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blowout—in the heart of a forest as large as many a European kingdom, with the nearest settlement half a hundred miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of the pines, however, I glimpsed a signal of human presence in the twinkling of a fire, and toward it I made my way through underbrush and over fallen trunks, while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his breath, busied himself at the maddening task of fitting on another tire in the darkness.

I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene which greeted me as I halted on the edge of a little clearing fitfully illuminated by a roaring camp-fire. Within the circle of warmth—for the summer nights are chilly in the north country—stood a canvas-topped wagon which appeared to be a half-brother to a prairie-schooner, an uncle to an army ambulance, and a cousin to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down, so that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated beside it on an upended soap box a plump little woman in a calico dress was preparing six small youngsters for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a New England farmhouse, with the neighbours’ lights twinkling through the trees, instead of in the middle of a primeval wilderness, a long day’s journey from anywhere. The horses had been outspanned, as they say in South Africa, and were placidly exploring the recesses of their nose-bags for the last stray grams of oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed man, who had been squatting beside the fire watching the slow progress of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet on my approach and slouched forward with outstretched hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality and an air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked him.

“Howdy, friend,” he drawled, with the unmistakable nasal twang of the Middle West. “I reckon you’ve had a little bad luck with your machine, ain’t you? We heard you a-comin’ chug-chuggin’ through the woods, hell bent for election, an’ all to once there was a noise ’s if some one had pulled the trigger of a shotgun. ‘There,’ says I to Arethusa, ‘some pore autermobile feller’s limpin’ ’round in the darkness on three legs,’ says I, ‘an’ as soon ’s I get this coffee to boilin’ I reckon I’ll stroll over with a lantern an’ see if I can’t give him some help.’”

“Just as much obliged,” said I, “but my man has the tire pretty well on by now. But we could do with a cup or so of that coffee if you’ve some to spare.”

And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife.

OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION.]

“That’s what coffee’s for, friend—to drink,” he said cordially, reaching for a tin cup. “Where’ve you come from?” he added with polite curiosity.

“From the Mexican border,” said I, with, I suspect, a trace of self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen hundred miles of desert, forest, and mountains lay behind us. “And you?” I asked in turn.

“Us?” he answered. “Oh, we’ve come from Kansas.” (He said it as unconcernedly as a New Yorker might mention that he had just run over to Philadelphia for a day.) “Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago come Thursday and have averaged nigh on twenty-five miles a day ever since. An’ the horses ain’t in bad condition, neither.”

“And where, in the name of Heaven,” I exclaimed, “are you going?”

“Well,” was the reply, “we’re headed for British Columbia, but I reckon we’ll have to winter somewheres in Washington and push on across the line in the spring. You see, friend,” he continued, in his placid, easy-going manner, in reply to my rapid fire of inquiries, “it was this way. I was in the furniture business back in Kansas, furniture an’ undertakin’, but I didn’t much care for the business ’cause it kept me indoors so much, my folks always havin’ been farmers and such like. Well, one day a while back, I picked up one of them folders sent out by the Canadian Gov’ment, tellin’ ’bout the rich resources up in British Columbia, an’ how land was to be had for the askin’. So that night when I went home I says to Arethusa: ‘What’d you think of sellin’ out an’ packin’ up and goin’ up British Columbia way, an’ gettin’ a farm where we can live out o’ doors an’ make a decent livin’?’ ‘Sure,’ says she, ‘I’d like it fine. An’ it’ll be great for the kids.’ ‘All right,’ says I,’ it’s all decided. I’ll build a body for the delivery wagon that we can sleep in, an’ we’ll take Peter an’ Repeater, the delivery team, an’ it won’t take us more than six or eight months to make the trip if we keep movin’.’ You see, friend,” he added, “my paw moved out to Kansas when there warn’t nothin’ there but Indians an’ sage-brush, an’ hers did, too, so I reckon this movin’ on to new places is sort of in the blood.”

“But why British Columbia?” I queried. “Why Canada at all? What’s the reason that you, an American, don’t remain in the United States?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly, I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a man has a better chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’ the Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled an’ there ain’t the chances in it there was once; but up British Columbia way it’s still a frontier country, they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle down an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’ quicker’n anywhere else, I guess. It’s fine land up in the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’ in the Cariboo country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad that they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a pretty good country for a man to live in, too. Here in the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’ ’bout our laws, but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in wrong, of course, but from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a great country up there one of these days, when they get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta got the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers, like our paws were, an’ get in an’ help build the country, an’ let our kids grow up with it. You’ve got to be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’ coffee before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve met you. Good luck to you.”

“Good luck to _you_,” said I.

Law and order in the back country: the sheriff of the Cariboo—the only law-officer for three hundred miles.

BREAKING THE WILDERNESS.]

* * * * *