Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (11)

Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, my acquaintance of the forest was a soldier in an army of invasion. This army had come from the south quietly, unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of drum, its weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe and the spade, its object the conquest, not of a people but of a wilderness. Have you any conception, I wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agricultural invasion of Canada has assumed? Did you know that last year upward of one hundred thousand Americans crossed the border to take up farms and carve out fortunes for themselves under another flag? These settlers who are trekking northward by rail and road are the very pick of the farming communities of our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid character and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty that is characteristic of those closely associated with the soil, they take with them a substantial amount of capital—probably a thousand dollars at least, on an average, either in cash, stock, or household goods. Moreover, they bring what is most valuable of all—experience. Coming from a region where the agricultural conditions are similar to those prevailing in the Canadian West, they quickly adapt themselves to the new life. Unlike the settlers from the mother country and from the Continent, to whom everything is strange and new, and who consequently require some time to adjust themselves to the changed conditions, the American wastes not a moment in contemplation but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and building a home. He is efficient, energetic, industrious, businesslike, adaptable, and quite frankly admits that he has come to the country because it offers him better prospects. So, though he may not sing “God Save the King” with the fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is none the less valuable to the land of his adoption.

Even the dogs have to carry their share.

A heavy load poorly packed.

PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG.]

Ask your average well-informed American what he knows about British Columbia, and it is dollars to doughnuts that he will remark rather dubiously: “Oh, yes, that’s the place where the tinned salmon comes from, isn’t it?” Take yourself, for example. Did you happen to be aware that, though it has barely as many inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area is equal to that of California, Oregon, and Washington put together, with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or, if the comparison is more graphic, that it is larger than the combined areas of Italy, Switzerland, and France? Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising the Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards of Washington and the mines of Idaho; eastward it ends where the cattle-ranges of Alberta begin; to its north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories and the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered by the heaving Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged coast which forms the panhandle of Alaska. Though clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two great cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one on the continent, by the way, which runs from tide-water to tide-water under the same management and the same name) hugs the province’s southern border and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast hinterland, larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms, with its network of unnamed rivers and its unguessed-at wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals, contains thousands upon thousands of square miles which have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Do you realise that, should you turn your horse’s head northwestward from the Kootenai, on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you could unsaddle beneath the Stars and Stripes at White Pass, on the frontier of Alaska? Did you know that the province contains the greatest compact area of merchantable timber in North America, its forests being greater in extent than those of the New England States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have heard naval experts and railway presidents and mining men talk ponderously of a future shortage in the coal supply—but they need not worry, for British Columbia’s coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion tons of bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite (100,000,000,000, tons in all, if so endless a caravan of ciphers means anything to you)—enough to run the engines of the world until Gabriel’s trumpet sounds “Cease working.” The output of its salmon canneries will provide those who order fish on Fridays with most excellent and inexpensive eating until the crack of doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hematite are so extensive that they bid fair to make the ironmasters of Pittsburg break that commandment (I forget which one it is) which says: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The province has enough pulpwood to supply the Hearst and Harmsworth presses with paper until the last “extra special edition” is issued on the morning of judgment day. The recently discovered petroleum deposits have proved so large that they promise to materially reduce the income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf on the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and fruit lands in the province is estimated at sixty million acres, of which less than one tenth has been taken up, much less put under cultivation. And scattered through the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din-like territory is a total population of less than four hundred thousand souls. Everything considered, it has, I suppose, greater natural resources than any area of the same size on the globe. So I don’t see how a young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little capital, and a speaking acquaintance with hard work could do better than to drop into the nearest railway ticket office and say to the clerk behind the counter: “A ticket to British Columbia—and step lively, if you please. I want to get there before it is too late to be a pioneer.”

Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles, sheltered from the winter blizzards of the prairie provinces by the high wall of the Rocky Mountains, its long western coast washed by the warm waves of the Japan current, its air tinctured with the balsamic fragrance of millions of acres of hemlock, spruce, and pine, British Columbia’s climate is, to use the phraseology of the real-estate boosters, “highly salubrious”; although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add that it is extremely wet during a considerable portion of the year. But it is a misty, drizzly sort of rain to which no one pays the slightest attention. You will see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets, and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs and hotels in a rain which would make a Chicagoan hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn up his collar and seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way: “Why, is it raining? By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn’t it? Really, you know, I hadn’t noticed it at all.” Then they will go on to tell you that it is the moistness of the climate which gives British Columbia its beautiful women and its beautiful flowers. And I can, and gladly do, vouch for the beauty of them both. They—particularly the women—are worth going a long way to see.

You mustn’t confuse British Columbia, you understand, with the flat, monotonous, grain-growing provinces which lie on the other side of the Rockies. It isn’t that sort of a country at all. It is too mountainous, too ravined, with many impassable chasms and nigh-impenetrable forests. Its plateaus are eroded by lake and river into gorges which are younger sisters of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. From a little distance the mountain slopes look as though they had been neatly upholstered in the green plush to which the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but, upon closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into dense forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thousands of brooks empty into the creeks and hundreds of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these mighty waterways, the Fraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the Columbia, go roaring and booming seaward through their rock-walled channels, wasting a million head of power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so many picturesque and interesting scenes combined with such sensational and impressive scenery as along the cañon of the Lower Fraser. Here the mountains of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles above the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls of the cañon being so precipitous and smooth that one marvels at the daring and ingenuity of the men who built a railway there. As the cañon widens, the traveller catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold on the river bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks guiding with their spike-shod poles the course of mile-long log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with poised salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like statues cast in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisation begin to appear in the form of hillsides which have been cleared and set out to fruit-trees, of Japanese truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the little yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills, and salmon canneries; and so through a region where neat hamlets alternate with stretches of primeval forest, until in the distance, looming above the smoke pall, the sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear.

“On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the bleak, barbarian pines.”

IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND.]

The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the commercial capital and a port and railway terminus of great industrial importance, and Victoria, the seat of government and the centre of provincial society. There are also several smaller cities: New Westminster, at the mouth of the Fraser and so close to Vancouver that it is almost impossible for the stranger to determine where the one ends and the other begins; Nanaimo, a coal-mining town of considerable importance on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni, famous for its salmon fisheries, at the head of an arm of the sea extending inland from the western coast; Nelson, the _chef-lieu_ of the prosperous fruit-growing district of the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern corner of the province; Bella Coola, on a fiord at the mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the gateway to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers; and Prince Rupert, the remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the coast of British Columbia, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, as the Pacific Coast terminus for the transcontinental system which has recently been completed.

Between Vancouver and Victoria the most intense rivalry exists. They are as jealous of each other as two prima donnas singing in the same opera. Vancouver is a great and prosperous city, with broad and teeming streets, clanging street-cars, rumbling traffic, belching factory chimneys, towering office-buildings, extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements, and attractive residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing very startling in all this, were it not for the fact that it is all new—twenty years ago there was no such place on the map. It is a busy, bustling place, where every one seems too much occupied in making fortunes overnight to have much time to spare for social amenities. There was a land boom on the last time I was in Vancouver—in fact, I gathered that it was a perennial condition—and prices were being asked (and paid!) for town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have made an American real-estate agent admit quite frankly that he had not progressed beyond the kindergarten stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying that within the city limits of Vancouver lots are being sold which are still covered with virgin forest. Within less than two miles of the city hall you can see gangs of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the primeval forest with which they are covered and blowing out and burning the stumps. This real-estate boom, with its consequent inflation of land values, has had a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however, for many ordinarily conservative business men, dazzled by visions of sudden wealth, have gone land mad; money is difficult to get, for Canadian banks are prohibited by law from loaning on real estate; and, like so many other towns which have been stimulated by artificial means, Vancouver is already beginning to show the effects of the inevitable reaction.

Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness counts in the Dominion. It was the seat of government when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach. It is the residential city of western Canada, and is much in vogue as a place of permanent abode for those who in any of the nearer provinces “have made their pile,” for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters and socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval officers who have retired and wish to get as much as possible out of their limited incomes. Victoria is as essentially English as Vancouver is American. It is, indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner of the empire. It has stately government buildings, broad, tree-shaded streets, endless rows of the beam-and-plaster villas which one sees in every London suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. Its people spend much of their time on the tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and golf-links, and are careful not to let business interfere with pleasure. That is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver has swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a horse and buggy. Vancouver might aptly be compared to a hustling, energetic business man who never lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is always on the job. Victoria, on the contrary, is a quietly prosperous, rather sportily inclined old gentleman who is fond of good living and believes that no time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has a whole-souled contempt for the other. The Victorian takes you aside and says: “Oh, yes, Vancouver is progressing quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the subject really doesn’t interest me. The people are so impossible, you know. Why, would you believe it, my dear fellow, most of them came there without a dollar to their names—fact, I assure you. Now they’re all bally millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it. Very worthy folk, no doubt, but scarcely in our class. Look here, let’s have a drink and then motor out and have a round of golf. What say, old chap? Right-o!”

The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back of his head, sticks a thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, and with the other hand gives you a resounding whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one takes Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the madam and the kids for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing doing—no business. Why, say, friend, do you know what they do down there? _They drink afternoon tea!_ Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, progressive, wide-awake, up-and-doing burg this side of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to spare? Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out and show you a piece of property that you can make a fortune on if you buy it quick. Yes, sirree, you can get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest your money in Vancouver.”

There are not more than ten harbours in the world, certainly not more than a dozen at the most, that have a right to be spoken of in the same breath with Victoria’s landlocked port. Picking her cautious way through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes the harbour of Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort, our vessel swept ahead with stately deliberation, while we leaned over the rail in the crispness of the early morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly spread themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled pleasure yachts, dainty as a débutante; impertinent, omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive noses everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of their paint; greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting like an expressman who has carried your trunk upstairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell ’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore masthead; rusty freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore, Heaven knows where; Japanese fishing-boats with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed descendants of the first inhabitants; huge twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners outward bound for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for Victoria boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take my word for it, it’s a sight worth seeing, is Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We forged ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and nearer, until we could make out the line of four-horsed brakes waiting to rattle those tourists whose time was limited to the customary “points of interest,” and the crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables with their helmet straps under their lower lips and blue-and-white-striped bands on their sleeves, exactly like their fellows in Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. At the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a result of the combined warmth and moisture the vegetation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the temperate zone; at the left the business portion of the city stretched away in stolid and uncompromising brick and stone; squarely ahead of us loomed the great bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into it had we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t, for the captain yanked a lever on the bridge and bells jangled noisily in the engine room, and the vessel, turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the berth that awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed stall.

What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed British. Unless you are observing enough to notice that the date-lines of the London papers in the Union Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never dream that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in Seattle. If you still have any lingering doubts as to the atmosphere of the place being completely and unreservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled if you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of the Empress Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and see the knickerbockered sons of Albion engaged in the national diversion of drinking tea. When an American is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give- you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it air, but your Britisher does it with all the matter-of-courseness with which a New Yorker orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the earliest impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought on, you suppose, by the dampness of the climate—but after a little it dawns on you that they are merely employing the broad A that they brought with them from the old country, along with their monocles and their beautifully cut riding clothes. In Vancouver, on the contrary, you never hear the broad A used at all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond Street fresh upon him. They have no time for it. They are too busy making money. The Victorians, on the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about the filthy lucre. _They_ are too busy having a good time. They have enough money to be comfortable, and that seems to be all they want. That’s the plan on which the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most of the Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks and champagne thirsts. For a man with a modest income and an unquenchable thirst for sport Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the sporting life, for game-preserves and salmon rivers and polo ponies run into a lot of money, but in Victoria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, for you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo for sixty or seventy dollars and a few miles back of the city lies one of the greatest fishing and shooting regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria I found all the banks and business houses closed, and flags were flying from every public building, and a procession, headed by mounted police and a band, was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I inquired of a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the King’s birthday or is there royalty in town, or what?” “Not on your life!” he answered witheringly. “It’s the prime minister on his way to open the baseball season.”

If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country without the expense and trouble of an ocean voyage, I doubt if you could do better than to put your car on a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with “Victoria” pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it, you will find Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I should say as un-American) as England; in many respects it is more English than England itself. Though the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very great, for civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the island’s edges, the roads that have been built are unsurpassed anywhere. If roads are judged not only by their smoothness but by the scenery through which they pass, then the highways of Vancouver Island are in a class by themselves. They are as smooth as the arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by scenery as alluring as Scherezade. The spinal column of Vancouver’s highway system is the splendid Island Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus, Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and Wellington, to Nanoose Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up the coast to Campbell River, which is the northernmost point that can be reached by road, while the other fork swings inland, skirting the shores of Cameron Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound, to Great Central Lake, which, as its name indicates, is in the very heart of the island, upward of a hundred and fifty miles from Victoria as the motor goes. The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known as the Malahat Drive, the road here climbing over a mountain range of considerable height by means of a splendidly surfaced but none too wide shelf, with many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky face of the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until the giant firs in the gloomy gorge below look no larger than hedge-plants, and the waters of the sound, with its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you drive with caution. But it is no place for joy riding. It is too narrow, in the first place, and the turns are too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the bottom that they would have to gather up your remains with a shovel, which is messy and inconvenient.

Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we were impressed with the universal politeness and good nature of the people we met, particularly in the back country, and by the courteous wording of the signs along the highways. The highway signs in the United States have a habit of shaking a fist in your face, metaphorically speaking, and shouting at you: “Go any faster if you dare!” But in Vancouver they assume that you are a gentleman and address you as such. Instead of curtly ordering you to “Go slow” without condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign like this: “Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for the children,” and, a little way beyond, another which says, “Thank you”—a little courtesy which costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush and leaves you permeated with a glow of good feeling.

When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining centre of considerable importance, we found one of the periodic strikes which serve to relieve the tedium of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets. When we speak of militia in the United States we usually think of slouch-hatted youths in rather slovenly uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in an instruction camp each summer, and parade down the main streets of their respective towns on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian militiamen were something quite different. I don’t suppose that they are a whit more efficient when it comes to the business of slaughter than their cousins south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you imagine several hundred young Americans dressed in plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an interim of bare knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping the upper hand in a strike-ridden American city? I can’t. These young men belonged, so I was told, to a “Highland” regiment, though after talking with a few of them I gathered that their acquaintance with the Highlands consisted in having occupied seats in the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder. But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they were running the show in Nanaimo and, from all indications, running it very well.

Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Vancouver Island, either from the view-point of an artist or a motorist, is that portion of the Island Highway between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first traversed it in the golden radiance of an October day, I thought it was the most beautiful road I had ever seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of memory, with a knowledge of most of the other beautiful highways of the world to compare it with, I am still of the same opinion. So impressive is the scenery, so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we were in the nave of a great cathedral. High above us the tree tops interlaced in a roof of translucent green through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the road into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the tree trunks into old-gold plush. The meadowed hillsides were so thickly strewn with lacy ferns and wild flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they use in ladies’ boudoirs; and scattered about, as might be expected in a lady’s boudoir, were silver mirrors—with rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering over the shoulders of other peaks like soldiers _en échelon_. They ran the gamut of the more sober colours; green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then the dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of scrub and underbrush, the violet and blue and purple of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a crown of dazzling white.

The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring folders that you find in racks in railway offices and hotel lobbies very cleverly play on the Anglo-Saxon love for sport by describing the region through which their particular system runs as “a sportsman’s paradise.” It makes small difference whether they are describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the Berkshire hills, they are all “sportsman’s paradises.” But the northern half of Vancouver Island is all that this much-abused term implies and more. It is, I suppose, the finest and most accessible fish and game country on the continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware that I may be accused of belonging to the Ananias Club when I say that certain of the smaller streams in Vancouver Island (and also in northern British Columbia) are at certain seasons of the year so choked with salmon that they can be, _and are_, speared with a pitchfork, and that ruffed grouse and Chinese pheasants are so plentiful and tame that they can be knocked over with a long-handled shovel. It’s true, just the same. We didn’t pitchfork any salmon ourselves, because it isn’t our conception of sport, but we saw natives tossing them out of a stream north of Alberni as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking hay. Nor did we assassinate any game-birds with a shovel; but more than once, during the run from Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve aside to avoid running down grouse, which were so tame that a Plymouth Rock would be wild in comparison; and once, near Cameron Lake, we actually did run over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese cock pheasant that insolently refused to get off the road.

Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni, occupy the anomalous position of being in the middle of the island and at the same time on its western coast. If you will take the trouble to look at the map you will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound reaches into the very heart of the island, thus permitting deep-sea merchantmen to tie up at Port Alberni’s wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and dried salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should have liked to linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is its Old-World atmosphere as it dozes the sunny days away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling with the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds it. Because it is so comparatively little visited, and because the waters of the sound are famous for their salmon runs, we expected that we would have an opportunity to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met with disappointment, for the salmon with which these waters swarm were, for strictly domestic reasons, not biting at the time we were there. So we kept on to Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni, through the forest.

A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of Vancouver Island.

SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND.]

Even though you do not know a trout from a turbot, a fly from a spoon; even though some of the finest scenery in the three Americas could not elicit an “Oh!” of admiration or an “Ah!” of pleasure, I hope that some day you will visit Great Central Lake, if for no other reason than to experience the novelty of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel. It is called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of twenty bedrooms built on a raft anchored in the lake. When the fishing becomes indifferent in the neighbourhood, the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up the engines of his launch, and tows his floating hotel elsewhere. The fish have a hard time keeping away from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It is patronised in the main by that world-wide brotherhood whose members believe that no place is too remote or too difficult of access if their journey is rewarded by the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce rod or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel. For that reason one is quite likely to run across some very interesting people at The Ark. While we were there a party of English notabilities arrived. There were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful daughter, Lady Marjorie What’s-her-Name, and a cousin, the Honourable So-and-So, and the earl’s mine manager, and one or two others. Now there isn’t anything very remarkable about meeting British nobility in the Colonies, for nowadays you find earls and marquises and dukes floating around everywhere. In fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations, you can’t escape them. The remarkable thing about this particular party was that they had tramped overland from the extreme northern end of the island, where some mining properties in which the earl was interested are situated, through unmapped and almost unknown forests, sleeping in the open with no covering save the blankets they carried on their backs, and with the Lady Marjorie for their cook. She was as slim and trim and pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with her curly hair creeping out from under her soft hat, her Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom figure, her smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings, she might have stepped out of one of those novels by the Williamsons.

* * * * *

The chief factor in the colonisation of British Columbia and in the development of its resources is the remarkable railway expansion which is now taking place. No region in the world has witnessed such extraordinary progress in railway construction during the past five years. Until the spring of 1914 the “C. P. R.,” as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called throughout the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and passenger transportation in the province, being scarcely less autocratic in its attitude and methods than the Standard Oil Company before it was curbed by Federal legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of the Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of Fort George and the last spike driven, the “C. P. R.” suddenly found its hitherto undisputed supremacy challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped system, which, owing to its more northerly route and easier gradients, is able to make considerably faster running time from ocean to ocean than its long-established rival. Moreover, another great transcontinental system, the Canadian Northern, is already in partial operation and is rapidly nearing completion, while the construction gangs have begun work on the Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Pacific, over whose rails the latter plans to reach tide-water at Vancouver, thus invading territory which the Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as peculiarly its own. In another year or so, therefore, British Columbia will not only have a more complete railway system than either Washington or Oregon, but it will be the terminus of three great transcontinental systems, each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water, under the same management and the same name.

If you will glance at the map at the back of this volume you will see that the railway systems of British Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic Z. The lower right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse Pass, near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific crosses the Rockies; the lower left-hand corner may stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus of the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the Pacific Great Eastern; the upper right-hand corner of the Z we will designate as Yellowhead (or Tête Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the upper left-hand corner is the great terminal port which the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to order at Prince Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately represents the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the diagonal the Canadian Northern.

The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the province at Kicking Horse Pass and, dropping southward in a series of sweeping curves, strikes the Fraser at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver. From the main line numerous branches straggle southward to the American border, thus giving access to the rich country lying between the Kootenai and the Okanogan. Entering British Columbia far to the northward, through the Tête Jaune Pass, where the mountains are much lower, the Canadian Northern lays its course southwestward in almost a straight line, crossing the Thompson just above its junction with the Fraser and thence paralleling the Canadian Pacific through the cañon of the Fraser, though on the opposite side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian Northern is, I might add, spending a large sum in the construction of railway shops and yards at Port Mann, a place which it is building to order amid the virgin forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The Grand Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tête Jaune Pass as a gateway. Instead of turning southward after crossing the mountains, however, it swings far to the north, following the east fork of the Fraser to Fort George and thence up the level and fertile valleys of the Nechako and the Bulkley to New Hazelton and so down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising the necessity of having a means of direct access to Vancouver, which is the metropolis of western Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific now has under construction a subsidiary system, to be known as the Pacific Great Eastern, which, leaving the main line at Fort George, will follow the Fraser due southward to Lillooet and then strike directly across a virgin country to Vancouver, thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific engineers have also drawn plans for a line running due north from New Hazelton toward the Yukon, which would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of the Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost British Columbia, the idea being, of course, to ultimately effect a junction with the proposed Federal railway in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway communication with the outside world.

Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country.

An Indian bridge near New Hazelton.

LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND.]

Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver Island has not yet had its share of railway expansion, its only system of transportation at present being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs from Victoria to Alberni, in the heart of the island. The Canadian Northern, however, proposes to build a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival one better, has obtained a concession for building a railway from one end of the island to the other, thus opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately before them, it seems to me that the British Columbians are quite justified in looking at the future through rose-coloured glasses.

The dog train: taking in supplies to the miners of the Groundhog coal-fields.

TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]

Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert, for example. A city literally made to order, just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes, is something of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent and slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built in a day,” but that was because it had no transcontinental railway system to finance and superintend and push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine, & Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its directors knew their business, they would have turned loose their engineers, architects, and builders and, after staking out and draining a town site beside the Tiberian marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and auctioned off the building lots along the Via Appia as expeditiously as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has brought into being the west-coast terminus which it has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine prince, nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a cavalry leader, a naval commander, and the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your family atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully observed that most of them were purchased at about the period of Stanley’s explorations) you will search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made municipality came into existence about the same time as the tango and the turkey-trot. The easiest way to locate it, then, is to trace with your finger parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war with England) until it reaches the Pacific Coast of North America. There, five hundred and fifty miles north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, set on a range of hills overlooking one of the finest deep-water harbours in the world, is Prince Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and has a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a Londoner feel very much at home. Probably never before have there been so much time and money expended in the planning and preliminary work of a new city. The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection of the entire British Columbia coast-line and was laid out by a famous firm of Boston landscape engineers with the same attention to detail which they would have given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have studied the plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert that in time it will be one of the most beautiful cities on the continent. The site is a picturesque one, for, from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around the front of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that on clear days—which, by the way, are far from common—a magnificent view may be had from the heights of the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, known as the “Holy City,” and, on rare occasions, of the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is conversant with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one has seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Pedro, San Diego—spring into being almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the possibilities and potentialities of this new city with the unfamiliar name. To begin with, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama by way of Prince Rupert is eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and San Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the Orient than any other Pacific port. Nothing illustrates more graphically the strategic value of its position than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New York from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train at Prince Rupert and be as far as Winnipeg, or virtually half across the continent, before the steamer from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. In addition to the shorter distance across the Pacific must be added the much faster time that can be made by rail over the practically level grades (four tenths of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has obtained through the lower mountains to the north, which will enable trains to be moved at the rate of two miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival systems. What is most important of all, however, Prince Rupert has at its back probably the potentially richest hinterland in the world—a veritable commercial empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. The mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest products, the gold, the coal, the copper, the iron ore of northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the food products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and fur of the far North—in short, all the westbound export wealth of this resourceful region—will find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert as surely and as true to natural laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.

The wagon-train: a settler on his way into the interior over the Cariboo Trail.

TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]

You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon, just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West, trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets, under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon, on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back, living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel, cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold. Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great province—travelling on duty through its wildest parts, amid dangers and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.

XIV

BACK OF BEYOND

“I hear the tread of pioneers,
Of millions yet to be;
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The elements of empire here
Are plastic yet and warm,
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form.”

XIV

BACK OF BEYOND

Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called “The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains, trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer. This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will replace the _chaparejos_ and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being carried in the boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the pack-train.

Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion, you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would? I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the wheat-field—the Pioneers.

There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune Cache to Fort George; or from the country of the Kootenai overland through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the _Imperial Limited_ goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness begins.

What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail, passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser. Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace “jerky” to a six-horse Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the Upper Fraser and the Nechako.