Chapter XXVII

The Look-out Mountain.--A gigantic tree.--The Untiring retires
before superior numbers.--Fort St. James.--A strange sight
in the forest.--Lake Noola.--Quesnelle.--Cerf-vola in
civilized life.--Old dog, good-bye.

We marched that day over thirty miles, and halted in a valley of cotton-wood trees, amid green leaves again. We were yet distant about forty-five miles from the Fort St. James, but my friend Rufus declared that a rapid march on the morrow would take us to the half-way house by sun-down. Rapid marches had long since become familiar, and one more or less did not matter much.

Daybreak found us in motion; it was a fast walk, it was a faster walk, it was a run, and ere the mid-day sun hung over the rich undulating forest-land, we were thirty miles from our camp in the cotton-wood. Before noon, a lofty ridge rose before us; the trail wound up its long ascent, Rufus called it “the Look-out Mountain.” The top was bare of forest, the day was bright with sunshine; not a cloud lay over the vast plateau of Middle New Caledonia.

Five hundred snowy peaks rose up along the horizon: the Nation Lake Mountains, the further ranges of the Ominica, the ridges which lie between the many tributaries of the Peace and the countless lakes of the North Frazer. Babine, Tatla, Pinkley, Stuart’s, and far off to the west the old monarchs of the Rocky Mountains rose up to look a last farewell to the wanderer, who now carried away to distant lands a hundred memories of their lonely beauty. On the south slope of the Look-out Mountain, a gigantic pine-tree first attracts the traveller’s eye; its seamed trunk is dusky red, its dark and sombre head is lifted high above all other trees, and the music which the winds make through its branches seems to come from a great distance. It is the Douglas Pine of the Pacific coast, the monarch of Columbian forests, a tree which Turner must have seen in his dreams.

A few miles south of the mountain, the country opened out into pleasant prairies fringed with groves of cotton-wood; the grass was growing thick and green, the meadows were bright with flowers. Three fat horses were feeding upon one of these meadows; they were the property of Rufus. We caught them with some little difficulty, and turned our two poor thin animals adrift in peace and plenty; then mounting the fresh steeds, Rufus and I hurried on to Fort St. James.

The saddle was a pleasant change after the hard marching of the last few days. Mud and dust and stones, alternating with the snow of the mountains, had told heavily against our moccassined feet; but the worst was now over, and henceforth we would have horses to Quesnelle.

It was yet some time before sun-down when we cantered down the sloping trail which leads to the Fort St. James. Of course the Untiring was at his usual post--well to the front. Be it dog-train, or march on foot, or march with horses, the Untiring led the van, his tail like the plume of Henry of Navarre at Ivry, ever waving his followers to renewed exertions. It would be no easy matter for me to enumerate all the Hudson’s Bay forts which the Untiring had entered at the head of his train. Long and varied experience had made him familiar with every description of post, from the imposing array of wooden buildings which marked the residence of a chief factor, down to the little isolated hut wherein some half-breed servant carries on his winter traffic on the shore of a nameless lake.

Cerf-vola knew them all. Freed from his harness in the square of a fort--an event which he usually accelerated by dragging his sled and three other dogs to the doorway of the principal house--he at once made himself master of the situation, paying particular attention to two objective points. First, the intimidation of resident dogs; second, the topography of the provision store. Ten minutes after his entry into a previously unexplored fort, he knew to a nicety where the white fish were kept, and where the dry meat and pemmican lay. But on this occasion at Fort St. James a woful disaster awaited him.

With the memory of many triumphal entries full upon him, he now led the way into the square of the fort, totally forgetting that he was no longer a hauling-dog, but a free lance or a rover on his own account. In an instant four huge haulers espied him, and charging from every side ere I could force in upon the conflict to balance sides a little, they completely prostrated the hitherto invincible Esquimaux, and at his last Hudson Bay post, near the close of his 2500 mile march, he experienced his first defeat. We rescued him from his enemies before he had suffered much bodily hurt, but he looked considerably tail-fallen at this unlooked-for reception, and passed the remainder of the day in strict seclusion underneath my bed.

Stuart’s Lake is a very beautiful sheet of water. Tall mountains rise along its western and northern shores, and forest promontories stretch far into its deep blue waters. It is the favourite home of the salmon, when late in summer he has worked his long, toilsome way up the innumerable rapids of the Frazer, 500 miles from the Pacific.

Colossal sturgeon are also found in its waters, sometimes weighing as much as 800 pounds. With the exception of rabbits, game is scarce, along the shores, but at certain times rabbits are found in incredible numbers; the Indian women snare them by sacksful, and every one lives on rabbit, for when rabbits are numerous, salmon are scarce.

The daily rations of a man in the wide domain of the Hudson’s Bay Company are singularly varied.

On the south shores of Hudson’s Bay a _voyageur_ receives every day one wild goose; in the Saskatchewan he gets ten pounds of buffalo-meat; in Athabasca eight pounds of moose-meat; in English River three large white fish; in the North, half fish and reindeer; and here in New Caledonia he receives for his day’s food eight rabbits or one salmon. Start not, reader, at the last item! The salmon is a dried one, and does not weigh more than a pound and a half in its reduced form.

After a day’s delay at Fort St. James, we started again on our southern road. A canoe carried us to a point some five and twenty miles lower down the Stuart’s River--a rapid stream of considerable size, which bears the out-flow of the lake and of the long line of lakes lying north of Stuart’s, into the main Frazer River.

I here said good-bye to Kalder, who was to return to Peace River on the following day. A whisky saloon in the neighbourhood of the fort had proved too much for this hot-tempered half-breed, and he was in a state of hilarious grief when we parted. “He had been very hasty,” he said, “would I exsqueeze him, as he was sorry; he would always go with this master again if he ever came back to Peace River;” and then the dog caught his eye, and overpowered by his feelings he vanished into the saloon.

Guided by an old carrier Indian chief, the canoe swept out of the beautiful lake and ran swiftly down the Stuart’s River. By sun-down we had reached the spot where the trail crosses the stream, and here we camped for the night; our horses had arrived before us under convoy of Tom the Indian.

On the following morning, the 31st of May, we reached the banks of the Nacharcole River, a large stream flowing from the west; open prairies of rich land fringed the banks of this river, and far as the eye could reach to the west no mountain ridge barred the way to the Western Ocean.

This river has its source within twenty miles of the Pacific, and is without doubt the true line to the sea for a northern railroad, whenever Canada shall earnestly take in hand the work of riveting together the now widely-severed portions of her vast dominion; but to this subject I hope to have time to devote a special chapter in the Appendix to this book, now my long journey is drawing to a close, and these latter pages of its story are written amid stormy waves, where a southward-steering ship reels on beneath the shadow of Madeira’s mountains.

Crossing the wide Nacharcole River, and continuing south for a few miles, we reached a broadly cut trail which bore curious traces of past civilization. Old telegraph poles stood at intervals along the forest-cleared opening, and rusted wire hung in loose festoons down from their tops, or lay tangled amid the growing brushwood of the cleared space. A telegraph in the wilderness! What did it mean?

When civilization once grasps the wild, lone spaces of the earth it seldom releases its hold; yet here civilization had once advanced her footsteps, and apparently shrunk back again frightened at her boldness. It was even so; this trail, with its ruined wire, told of the wreck of a great enterprise. While yet the Atlantic cable was an unsettled question, a bold idea sprung to life in the brain of an American. It was to connect the Old World and the New, by a wire stretched through the vast forests of British Columbia and Alaska, to the Straits of Behring; thence across the Tundras of Kamtschatka, and around the shores of Okhotsk the wires would run to the Amoor River, to meet a line which the Russian Government would lay from Moscow to the Pacific.

It was a grand scheme, but it lacked the elements of success, because of ill-judged route and faulty execution. The great Telegraph Company of the United States entered warmly into the plan. Exploring parties were sent out; one pierced these silent forests; another surveyed the long line of the Yukon; another followed the wintry shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, and passed the Tundras of the black Gulf of Anadir.

Four millions of dollars were spent in these expeditions. Suddenly news came that the Atlantic cable was an accomplished fact. Brunel had died of a broken heart; but the New World and the Old had welded their thoughts together, with the same blow that broke his heart.

Europe spoke to America beneath the ocean, and the voice which men had sought to waft through the vast forests of the Wild North Land, and over the Tundras of Siberia, died away in utter desolation.

So the great enterprise was abandoned, and to-day from the lonely shores of Lake Babine to the bend of the Frazer at Quesnelle, the ruined wire hangs loosely through the forest.

During the first two days of June we journeyed through a wild, undulating country, filled with lakes and rolling hills; grassy openings were numerous, and many small streams stocked with fish intersected the land.

The lakes of this northern plateau are singularly beautiful. Many isles lie upon their surface; from tiny promontories the huge Douglas pine lifts his motionless head. The great northern diver, the loon, dips his white breast in the blue wavelets, and sounds his melancholy cry through the solitude. I do not think that I have ever listened to a sound which conveys a sense of indescribable loneliness so completely as this wail, which the loon sends at night over the forest shores. The man who wrote

“And on the mere the wailing died away”

must have heard it in his dreams.

We passed the noisy Indian village of Lake Noola and the silent Indian graves on the grassy shore of Lake Noolkai, and the evening of the 2nd of June found us camped in the green meadows of the West Road River, up which a white man first penetrated to the Pacific Ocean just eighty years ago.

A stray Indian came along with news of disaster. A canoe had upset near the cotton-wood cañon of the Frazer, and the Hudson’s Bay officer at Fort George had gone down beneath a pile of driftwood, in the whirlpools of the treacherous river. The Indian had been with him, but he had reached the shore with difficulty, and was now making his way to Fort St. James, carrying news of the catastrophe.

Forty more miles brought us to the summit of a ridge, from which a large river was seen flowing in the centre of a deep valley far into the south. Beyond, on the further shore, a few scattered wooden houses stood grouped upon a level bank; the wild rose-trees were in blossom; it was summer in the forest, and the evening air was fragrant with the scent of flowers.

I drew rein a moment on the ridge, and looked wistfully back along the forest trail.

Before me spread civilization and the waters of the Pacific; behind me, vague and vast, lay a hundred memories of the Wild North Land.

* * * * *

For many reasons it is fitting to end this story here. Between the ridge on the west shore of the Frazer and those scattered wooden houses on the east, lies a gulf wider than a score of valleys. On one side man--on the other the wilderness; on one side noise of steam and hammer--on the other voice of wild things and the silence of the solitude.

It is still many hundred miles ere I can hope to reach anything save a border civilization. The road which runs from Quesnelle to Victoria is 400 miles in length. Washington territory, Oregon, and California have yet to be traversed ere, 1500 miles from here, the golden gate of San Francisco opens on the sunset of the Pacific Ocean.

Many scenes of beauty lie in that long track hidden in the bosom of the Sierras. The Cascades Ranier, Hood, and Shasta will throw their shadows across my path as the Untiring dog and his now tired master, wander south towards the grim Yosemite; but to link these things into the story of a winter journey across the yet untamed wilds of the Great North would be an impossible task.

One evening I stood in a muddy street of New York. A crowd had gathered before the door of one of those immense buildings which our cousins rear along their city thoroughfares and call hotels. The door opened, and half a dozen dusky men came forth.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“They are the Sioux chiefs from the Yellowstone,” answered a bystander; “they’re a taking them to the the-a-ter, to see Lester Wallick.”

Out on the Great Prairie I had often seen the red man in his boundless home; savage if you will, but still a power in the land, and fitting in every way the wilds in which he dwells. The names of Red Cloud and his brother chiefs from the Yellowstone were household words to me. It was this same Red Cloud who led his 500 whooping warriors on Fetterman’s troops, when not one soldier escaped to tell the story of the fight in the foot-hills of the Wyoming Mountains; and here was Red Cloud now in semi-civilized dress, but still a giant ’midst the puny rabble that thronged to see him come forth; with the gaslight falling on his dusky features and his eyes staring in bewildered vacancy at the crowd around him.

Captain Jack was right: better, poor hunted savage, thy grave in the lava-beds, than this burlesque union of street and wilderness! But there was one denizen of the wilds who followed my footsteps into southern lands, and of him the reader might ask, “What more?”

Well, the Untiring took readily to civilization; he looked at Shasta, he sailed on the Columbia River, he climbed the dizzy ledges of the Yosemite, he gazed at the Golden Gate, and saw the sun sink beyond the blue waves of the great Salt Lake, but none of these scenes seemed to affect him in the slightest degree.

He journeyed in the boot or on the roof of a stage-coach for more than 800 miles; he was weighed once as extra baggage, and classified and charged as such; he conducted himself with all possible decorum in the rooms and corridors of the grand hotel at San Francisco; he crossed the continent in a railway carriage to Montreal and Boston, as though he had been a first-class passenger since childhood; he thought no more of the reception-room of Brigham Young in Utah, than had he been standing on a snow-drift in Athabasca Lake; he was duly photographed and petted and pampered, but he took it all as a matter of course.

There were, however, two facts in civilization which caused him unutterable astonishment--a brass band, and a butcher’s stall. He fled from the one; he howled with delight before the other.

I frequently endeavoured to find out the cause of his aversion to music. Although he was popularly supposed to belong to the species of savage beast, music had anything but a soothing effect upon him. Whenever he heard a band, he fled to my hotel; and once, when they were burying a renowned general of volunteers in San Francisco with full military honours, he caused no small confusion amidst the mournful cortége by charging full tilt through the entire crowd.

But the butcher’s stall was something to be long remembered. Six or eight sheep, and half as many fat oxen hung up by the heels, apparently all for his benefit, was something that no dog could understand. Planting himself full before it, he howled hilariously for some moments, and when with difficulty I succeeded in conducting him to the seclusion of my room, he took advantage of my absence to remove with the aid of his teeth the obnoxious door-panel which intervened between him and this paradise of mutton.

On the Atlantic shore I bid my old friend a long good-bye. It was night; and as the ship sailed away from the land, and I found myself separated for the first time during so many long months from the friend and servant and partner who

Thro’ every swift vicissitude
Of changeful time, unchanged had stood,

I strung together these few rhymes, which were not the less true because they were only

MORE DOGGEREL.

Old dog, good-bye, the parting time has come,
Hero on the verge of wild Atlantic foam;
He who would follow, when fast beats the drum,
Must have no place of rest, no dog, no home.

And yet I cannot leave thee even here,
Where toil and cold in peace and rest shall end,
Poor faithful partner of a wild career,
Through icy leagues my sole unceasing friend,

Without one word to mark our long good-bye,
Without a line to paint that wintry dream,
When day by day, old Husky, thou, and I,
Toiled o’er the great Unchagah’s frozen stream.

For now, when it is time to go, strange sights
Rise from the ocean of the vanish’d year,
And wail of pines, and sheen of northern lights,
Flash o’er the sight and float on mem’ry’s ear.

We cross again the lone, dim shrouded lake,
Where stunted cedars bend before the blast;
Again the camp is made amidst the brake,
The pine-log’s light upon thy face is cast.

We talk together, yes--we often spent
An hour in converse, while my bit thou shared.
One eye, a friendly one, on me was bent;
The other, on some comrade fiercely glared.

Deep slept the night, the owl had ceased his cry,
Unbroken stillness o’er the earth was shed;
And crouch’d beside me thou wert sure to lie,
Thy rest a watching, snow thy only bed.

The miles went on, the tens ’neath twenties lay;
The scores to hundreds slowly, slowly, roll’d;
And ere the winter wore itself away,
The hundreds turn’d to thousands doubly told.

But still thou wert the leader of the band,
And still thy step went on thro’ toil and pain;
Until like giants in the Wild North Land,
A thousand glittering peaks frown’d o’er the plain.

And yet we did not part; beside me still
Was seen thy bushy tail, thy well-known face;
Through cañon dark, and by the snow-clad hill,
Thou kept unchanged thy old familiar pace.

Why tell it all? through fifty scenes we went,
Where Shasta’s peak its lonely shadows cast;
Till now for Afric’s shore my steps are bent,
And thou and I, old friend, must part at last.

Thou wilt not miss me, home and care are thine,
And peace and rest will lull thee to the end;
But still, perchance with low and wistful whine,
Thou’lt sometimes scan the landscape for thy friend.

Or when the drowsy summer noon is nigh,
Or wintry moon upon the white snow shines,
From dreamy sleep will rise a muffled cry,
For him who led thee through the land of pines.

POSTSCRIPT

FOR THE EDITION OF 1907.

I have been asked to write a few new words for this old book, and it is not easy to do it. Most of the men and all the dogs of that wild time in the North are dead. I have never been able to understand why dogs should have short lives, and so many other things, such as tortoises, elephants, carp, and even men, should have long lives.

A few months ago I saw at St. Helena two tortoises which were said to have been at Plantation House for more than one hundred years. During a visit which I made to St. Helena in 1864 I became the owner of a picture of Plantation House, dated 1840. Two tortoises are shown in that picture on the lawn in front of the house, much smaller in size than the two now there. So it is probable that the legend of the hundred years on the Island is correct.

Strange! Napoleon, Bertrand, Montholon, Las Cases, Gourgaud, Hudson Lowe, O’Meara, all gone long ago--the two tortoises still there!

At the end of the Preface of 1873 I said that I was then about to proceed to Africa--a continent which appeared at the moment “to be offering adventure with a liberal hand.” That is thirty-four years ago; and, had Africa continued in her liberal mood, it might have been easier to write this Postscript to-day. Unfortunately the mood did not last. Africa proffered her adventures to me with a very conservative hand--so much so, indeed, that a great blank or void has arisen in my mind between these old days of the snow-shoe, the dog-sled, the buffalo, and the prairie of the Wild North Land and the present time. Over and above the lapse of years, Africa has intervened with rather more than a full share of her by-products--fever, ineffectual labour, and that eventual frustration of human effort which seems to have been the inevitable outcome of African adventure from the time of Hannibal the Carthaginian to Moneyball, the London Latitudinarian.

If you look at a map of the world you will see that what is, in a topographical sense, thickest and longest in Africa is thinnest and shortest in the rest of the globe. Africa, measured along the 10th degree of North latitude, gives about 4000 miles of land-line. The same latitude in all the other continents combined will give about 400 miles. We call the equator an imaginary line, but it is the only real live line that has lasting significance in relation to man’s life on earth.

The equator may be said to be the chest and heart of Africa. Elsewhere over the globe it is as a finger-tip or a toe-nail. That fact holds an immense human problem.

When the Great Divider of earth and ocean scooped out the central portion of the two Americas, forming the vast water receptacle now filled by the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, He laid the line of a good deal of man’s destiny in the world.

Run the eye from this great sea gap in America across the Atlantic to the west coast of Africa, and in the same latitudes you find a corresponding land protuberance, sufficient (if we could tow it across the ocean) to fill the opposite land vacuum in Central America. And it is strange to note that it was from this African protuberance that the vast majority of the negroes were taken in the days of the slave trade, and carried over the Atlantic to work as slaves among the islands and on the coasts of this same Mexican Gulf and Carib Sea. Were the slave-traders of Bristol and Liverpool, unconsciously, in this hideous traffic, reversing the after idea of Canning by calling the old world into American slavery in order to redress the balance of colour in the new? For what seems probable is that had these, say twenty degrees, of solid Equatorial Africa originally filled up that Central American sea space, the greater part of the entire continent would to-day have belonged to the negro race.

The Aztec has gone, the Indian is going, but the imported African black man is going ahead.

At the end of the Civil War less than three million negroes were in the United States. There are now, I am told, ten millions. In spite of old slavery and modern race-exclusion and outrage, the African is making his way in the new world. Emigration from Europe throws nearly a million virile whites annually into America. Africa sends no fresh blood to replenish the old slave stock; nevertheless, the ratio of black increase exceeds that of the white.

Herein a strange contrariety presents itself in the two colours. The white man fails to live and propagate himself in Equatorial Africa, but the black man thrives and multiplies in America. And meanwhile what about the Wild North Land? That, like the men and dogs, is also dead.

One of the old friends of that time still survives--the gentleman of the Hudson’s Bay Company who was my companion from Fort Carlton to Lake Athabasca in the winter of ’72–73. His letters still breathe the same unconquerable energy that characterised him in the far North. He tells me in a letter written from Winnipeg at Christmas last that my little village at Fort Garry is now a great city, “which will one day,” he writes, “be the greatest, and in short the Chicago of Canada.” He tells me also of booms and bridges and expansions, and he sends me newspapers with pictures of hotels, grain-elevators, and universities, all of approved American design, and of entirely up-to-date ugliness. He says that even “a more progressive city government is expected from a new mayor who has recently been elected by nearly double the largest majority ever obtained by any previous mayor.”

All this is no doubt quite as it should be; but it goes to prove, all the same, that the Wild North Land is dead and buried. I do not want to see its grave--I prefer to remember it as I saw it more than a generation ago; and I believe that one Chicago is amply sufficient for any one world.

Indeed, I can never be grateful enough that it was given me to see the old things of North America before the deluge. Prairies pure and unspotted; great herds of buffaloes moving; the sun setting over a silent wilderness.

W. F. B.

_January 1907._

APPENDIX.

ON THE PASSES THROUGH THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS IN BRITISH TERRITORY,

AND

THE BEST ROUTE FOR A CANADIAN RAILROAD TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN.