the Great Lakes the Wide West
ess ions of a Tour between TO and t h \ c r F i c
Bernard McEvoy
101 of "AWAY FROM NEWSPAPERDOM " Etc
WILLIAM. B R I G G S
'*. O N T ' O : : MDCCCCII
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Impressions of a Tour between TORONTO and the PACIFIC
By Bernard McEvoy
Author of " AWAY FROM NEWSPAPERDOM " Etc
WILLIAM BRIGGS TORONTO : : MDCCCCII
Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand nine hundred and two, by BERNARD McEvov, at the Depart- ment of Agriculture.
3-0 I
Pr eface
THE end of May, last year, found me pre- paring to make a trip across Canada to the Pacific. One of the things I was to do on that tour was to write some descriptive letters for the Toronto Mail and Empire. Now that these letters are to be introduced a second time to a kind public, I do not think it well to make much change in them. The reader who cares for them at all will not mind the careless colloquialism that characterizes them, in common with other specimens of rapid writing by newspaper men in various places and at odd times. My object was, and is, to enable stay-at-home people to see with my eyes and hear with my ears some of the sights and sounds of the western half of our
great Dominion.
BERNARD McEvov.
TORONTO, January, 1902.
Contents
CHAPTER PACK
I. Owen Sound and its big Chair-making
Factory 7
II. From Owen Sound to Sault Ste. Marie 15
III. Sault Ste. Marie and its Enterprises . 23
IV. Sault Ste. Marie Enterprises — Lake
Superior 32
V. Port Arthur and Fort William — Rat
Portage 42
VI. Rat Portage and Rainy River ... 52
VII. First Impressions of Winnipeg ... 65
VIII. More about Winnipeg — A Manitoba
Farm 75
IX. The Prairies— Calgary 87
X. Edmonton and the North Country . 100
XI. The Splendid Panorama of the Rockies 114
XII. Mountains and Again Mountains . .126
XIII. Kamloops and Vancouver . . . .137
XIV. Salmon-canning 144
3
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
XV. Vancouver — Saw-mills and the Assay
Office 155
XVI. New Westminster — The Commercial Traveller's Story — Siwashes and Chinese 169
XVII. Victoria, B.C 183
XVIII. The Quarantine Station at William Head — Warships and Fortifica- tions at Esquimalt . . . . 197
XIX. The Coal Mines of Vancouver
Island, B.C 209
XX. Nanaimo to the Gold Country via
Victoria and Vancouver . . 222
XXI. Rossland and the Gold Mines . . 234
XXII. The Smelter at Trail and the Bound- ary Country 249
XXIII. The Crow's Nest Pass— Macleod—
Lethbridge 261
XXIV. Regina— The late Mr. Davin— Con-
clusion 272
Illustrations
OPPOSITE PAGE
SPREY VALLEY, FROM TUNNEL MOUNTAIN, BANFF,
ALBERTA Frontispiece
STEAMER APPROACHING FORT WILLIAM .... 40
RAT PORTAGE BAY 52
THE " DEVIL'S GAP," LAKE OF THE WOODS . . 58
A PASSING CLOUD ON RAINY RIVER 60
KOOCHICHING FALLS, AT FORT FRANCES .... 64
THRESHING SCENE, MANITOBA 84
RANCHING NEAR CALGARY 98
THE LOOPS, IN THE SELKIRKS 114
NEAR THE GAP, ALBERTA 116
THE C. P. R. HOTEL, BANFF 120
Bow FALLS, BANFF 122
FIELD, AND MOUNT STEPHEN 130
VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS, NEAR LAKE LOUISE,
LAKES IN THE CLOUDS 134
Bow RIVER, BANFF, ALBERTA 154
STEAMER Empress of India AT VANCOUVER . . . 162
PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, VICTORIA, B.C 184
ROSSLAND, B.C 232
NELSON, B.C 262
FERNIB, CROW'S NEST PASS 274
5
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
CHAPTER I
OWEN SOUND AND ITS BIG CHAIR- MAKING FACTORY
OWEN SOUND, ONT., May 29th " WESTWARD the Mail and Empire takes its way." This is not exactly what Bishop Berkeley wrote in 1727 in that poem of his, "On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America," but it is near enough. I am going westward, and, as a representative of the Mail and Empire, I am to record some of my impressions. Repeated injunctions to "Go West, young man," have at length had their effect, and I am going — a living testi- mony to the effectual force of reiterated counsels. My friends at starting were very kind. They told me what to do. Some of them had been West, and had ridden bucking bronchos. I told them that any advice on 7
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
this subject would be superfluous, as I did not propose to take exactly that form of exercise. But they persisted in giving it. They also loaded me up with preservatives against all kinds of untoward happenings. That sort of affectionate solicitude always touches me, and I thanked them with tears in my eyes. Then they told me how to write letters to the news- papers while I was away, and at the feet of these Gamaliels I listened humbly. I hope I shall be able to put some of their precepts into practice. But at last the train drew out and bore me from the protection of the Mayor and the Board of Control, so that I felt a sense of orphanhood.
It was a full train of many cars, for an ex- cursion rate of travel prevailed. There is no doubt that the country people come in and buy goods at Toronto stores. Our car looked like the shipping-room of a mercantile estab- lishment at a busy time. Parcels of all sizes filled up every available nook, and bulged out into the aisle. I got a seat at last by the side of a man who had a bad cough. It was a sort of cough that lasted a couple of miles or so at a bout, but it appeared to trouble him less than it did me. Between his lengthened par- oxysms he made pleasing observations in- stead of objurgating his cough. He was
A Cheerful Invalid
knowing on the subject of crops, and said the spring ones looked very good. " Look at that ! " he would say, pointing to a glorious field of spring wheat, coming up in regular and abundant luxuriance. Even when he was doubled up and speechless he would point. The crops are indeed good. The overflowing promise of Manitoba reaches right down to Ontario. Everywhere things look " kind," despite the weather. It will be a good year. Yet there was a grumbler in the next seat, though he had no cough. This worthy maintained that the fruit was suffering for want of sunshine. The bees and flies had not been able to get their work in on the blos- soms of the apple-trees. As a consequence there would be only half the fruit that would otherwise have developed. My coughing friend argued otherwise — in his moments of respite. He seemed disposed to defend Nature against all comers. When he got out at a wayside station it was with a Parthian observation to the effect that " the fruit would be all right," and as the train passed on through the twilight I saw him leaning against a fence paying for his pertinacity with a cough like a repeating decimal. At Card- well Junction there was a longish wait for the local train, and a regular parade on the plat- 9
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
form. It is impossible not to be struck by the healthy and prosperous average of the Ontario people one sees on such occasions — an average of which any democracy might be proud. They are a strong, ruddy, well-fed- looking people. If their faces are not " sick- lied o'er with the pale cast of thought," they certainly are not marred by sickness or anx- iety. There is much prosperity abroad. It is a good time. The people are doing well. At every station there was a procession of those plethoric parcels homeward. When it became too dark any longer to admire the colour- symphony of fresh green poplars and aspens against dark pines, which was one of the features of the Junction, the other train came up, and we thundered on to Owen Sound " lickety-split"
The recent census reveals the fact that the population of Owen Sound is 9,255. It is a comfortable, well-to-do town, and it already rejoices in granolithic sidewalks on its main street. Its very well-equipped Collegiate In- stitute occupies a site of unparalleled beauty on the side of a hill, where it is embosomed in trees and verdure, and it seems to have churches enough to hold the entire popula- tion. The court-house and gaol have rural and arboreal surroundings of considerable
10
Trees Transmogrified
beauty, and its water supply descends from springs on a neighbouring hill by gravitation, which is enough to give adequate fire pres- sure. The town derives importance not only from its shipping connection with Georgian Bay and the lakes, but from considerable manufactures. There is a chair factory here that is perhaps bigger than anything else of the kind on the continent, where one sees great elm saw-logs brought in dripping wet from the river and converted into chairs be- fore his eyes in a way that is altogether mar- vellous. Strong men grapple hold of a 15 or 2O-foot length of the bole of a tree with the rough, picturesque bark of years on it. In a moment it is on the bed of the sawing machine and falls into slabs. Then it is passed to other saws that further divide it, and to machines that steam, shape and bend it ; to others that bore, turn, smooth and further shape it, until you follow it to the workshops, where men are putting chairs together for dear life, or are staining, varnish- ing, polishing or packing them. The output is about 2,000 chairs per day, and there appear to be enough finished chairs in the vast warehouses to seat the whole Ontario electorate. I have seen many manufactories in various parts of the world, but I must ii
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
confess that I do not remember one that seemed packed so full of live energy and all agog. There was something that touched the imagination in the ruthless determination — the irresistible force — with which the dismem- bered monarch of the forest was turned into chairs. One stood in the shadows of the saw- mill, a place of half-lights and gloom that cloudy afternoon, and looked out through openings on to glancing water, where many logs lay waiting on the lapping waves. Then Titanic men grappled one of them with hooks and chain, and it began slowly to drag in. It seemed like the tragic beginning of a final scene. Perhaps there was a bit of greenest moss on the trunk that gleamed like an emerald in the light that was reflected from the water ; or there might be even the veriest little bud on some fatuous little twig the old tree had put out like a fool in its last days, as if it could not forget that it was once a sap- ling. Everything about the great rough- barked, massive log breathed of the recent days of the forest, where this tree — three feet in diameter at the base — stood up sturdy and strong, its branching head reaching up towards the sky. A moment, and the steam-devil has got hold of it, and with a scream it loses a slab from its side. This is jerked away, and
The Furniture of Long Ago
again and again it is pressed against the saw, losing piece after piece of its heart, each of which at once begins its lengthened and tor- tuous journey through the factory, and is fur- ther and further dismembered and split up and torn and heated and varnished, till at last the bole of the forest-tree stands in the ware- house in the transmogrified shape of several scores of chairs, like one sees in the furniture departments of the departmental stores.
I remember many years ago visiting a furniture-maker's of the old-fashioned kind, who lived and worked in an old English vil- lage in Worcestershire. He made furniture just as his father and grandfather had made it before him, bestowing loving care on each piece, and working as though he thought that, as Longfellow says, "the gods see every- where." I think it used to take him about a week to make a chair. That was the time his grandfather used to take, and he would have thought it unfilial to exceed him in speed. They did very good work, those men. Even the grandfather's chairs are being used to-day and are thought more of than ever. Of course, wearing out or going to pieces are both out of the question with chairs of that kind. But, then, they cost, about ten times what you can get chairs for now ! That is the difference. 13
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
The world to-day demands cheap chairs, and they must have them made in ten minutes. And wonderfully good chairs they are for the money they cost and for the time it takes to produce them. But as I stood watching the wonderful machinery that could disintegrate the bole of an elm tree, and send it helter- skeltering through a series of workshops till it emerged — breathless, as it were — in the shape of newly-polished, genteel chairs, ready to go into any of the million houses that are waiting for them, I could not help thinking of the old Worcestershire furniture-maker, who some- times took orders for a set of dining-room chairs, " to be delivered in two years," or for a mahogany dining-table that was to be " ready in three years, without fail ! " The whole change results from the rise of that great middle class, which is now such an important part of the world, and which, from Britain, from Australia, from New Zealand, from the Cape and elsewhere, calls out to this corner of Canada for chairs to sit upon, that shall be at least genteel, even if they do not last quite so long as those that were made for big houses in the olden time.
CHAPTER II
FROM OWEN SOUND TO SAULT STE. MARIE
SAULT STE. MARIE, ONT., June ist ALEXANDER HENRY, that cool and thrifty fur trader, who has left us perhaps the most interesting account of the condition of things in this part of the country in the early days of its settlement, left Montreal in 1760 with four 3 5 -foot canoes and a little band of voya- geurs to attend to them, and especially to porter them over the portages — killing work that, by his report. They paddled by lake and river, and ultimately came by way of the Georgian Bay to Sault Ste. Marie. Since that time much has been said and written about our inland seas. Scribblers have scribbled, and stump speakers have exploited their vibrant voices on the theme ; premiers have perorated and poets have sung, but when you sail on them you feel that the half has not been told. It is all true. You feel that even 15
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
a permanent orchestra of eloquent premiers, with the best stump speaker in the country to beat the big drum, and a poet or two thrown in to do the " frills," couldn't begin to tell all, because it is fresh every day, and Nature in these great spaces of silence and beauty reveals herself to her worshippers as she is, and car- ries the mind back to a time when those awful things called civilization and progress had not begun to give men swelled heads. I came here from Owen Sound on the Athabasca, one of the three C. P. R. steamships that ply be- tween Owen Sound and Fort William, and drop passengers at this place. These boats appear to the eye that is not nautical so much alike that you can scarcely " tell t'other from which " till you read the name. While there are many people that know these boats by pleasant experience, there are thousands who don't, and for their benefit a word or two about them may be in order. The Athabasca, her twin sister the Alberta, and the Manitoba take it in turns to slip into Owen Sound when the shades of evening are falling, and to lie at the wharf all next day until half-past five o'clock, when the train from Toronto comes ringing in with much noise and fuss and speed, and passengers rush across the wharf to the open gangway, and emit grunts or pious 16
A Drizzling Start
ejaculations of gratitude for that at last they are on board. The boat has been for some time venting its impatience through its fog- horn, but now it thrums with a brutally joy- ful earnestness till the ropes are cast off, and we are moving away from the wharf with the satisfactory feeling that there is now no stop till we get to the " Soo," as Sault Ste. Marie is abbreviatively called.
On that drizzling, inhospitably cold evening, it was a joy to get into the embrace of the warm steamship. One felt the neighbourhood of the engines to be full of welcome, though by the hundreds and thousands who will take this trip during the coming months, the ship will be valued as the haunt of cool breezes, and on her upper deck they will feel that they can breathe and live once more. But on that even- ing there was not a soul on the upper deck, and hot July seemed as far away as Mars or Venus. A few adventurous ones, with their coat collars turned up, paced along the prom- enade that runs outside the cabins on either side of the lower deck, but these were only the exceptionally strong and healthy, or the exceptionally devout nature-worshippers. But even these warm-blooded and pious ones heard without regret the sound of the dinner bell, and were soon seated with a grateful look 2 17
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
on their faces at one or other of the multitude of beautifully white tablecloths that cover the tables in the dining saloon. Good white napery is able to cover a multitude of culin- ary sins, but the C. P. R. provides the luxury, and a faultless cuisine into the bargain. White, indeed, is the prevailing note of the interior. The deft and polite waiters are in the whitest of white jackets. The woodwork walls, perfor- ated with innumerable doors with bright brass handles that open into the state-rooms, are painted white. The elegantly carved rafters that support the roof and form a pleasant vista are white. Everything is spick and span, and the flowers on the tables give a note of colour that is delightful. One-half of the long saloon is dining-room, and the other half — well, just saloon — thickly carpeted with a crimson carpet, into which the foot slips noise- lessly, besprinkled with crimson velvet sofas and easy chairs. A piano is there, too, on which some kind amateur is sure to perform, probably pounding out harmonies that are as mechanically regular as the thud of the engine. When the guests had experimented on the pretty menu card from various points of view, and found it satisfactory, there seemed to grow up a more general sentiment of courage as to the outside, and many promenaded on 18
Beauty on the Lake
the lower deck, while two or three rash ones ventured on the upper.
The green shores were yet in full view, showing rounded masses of tenderest foliage, against the gray, rain-charged sky, or masses of dark pines against which were displayed traceries of emerald verdure. Here and there was a lonely house or a light-station, passing which the fog-horn thrummed. Around us the gulls wheeled in a ghostly silence, or gave a faint, querulous call. We were sailing right into the sunset, and the sunset was a glory of silver grays and lightest blues and greens. Long bands of gray vapour stretched across it. On the water lay an illimitable bank of silvery mist, like a bed of lightest down prepared for the sun. The effect of the brilliant light of departing day on this cloud that had descended on the bosom of the water was indescribably beautiful. When we came up to it the two oil-coated, sou'-westered men on the bridge looked out with as much anxiety as could appear on their calm statuesque faces, on which these solitudes have imprinted some- thing of their everlasting peace. Anon, and again, and again, the fog-horn blew its warn- ing, and, night falling, we descended to our state-rooms.
Comfortable and cosy are these little cabins, 19
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
as anyone could wish. Their two notes are cleanliness and convenience. What do you want more? There are your two berths — though you are only going to occupy one — your lounge, your washstand, your water- bottle, your bright brass hooks to hang things on, your little window, with its little shutter, lowering which you can look out across the water ; your door that shuts you in and gives you the feeling of a householder at large. As you look around on these comforts, and know that it is but a step to the well-supplied, white- naperied table outside, you don't mind much how long it is going to take to get to your next stopping place. You are in a very com- fortable, floating, electric-lighted hotel. Yes, I forgot the electric light that is made on board, and that you can have in your state- room in great effulgence by touching that modernity, the latest species of button, so that your page is flooded with radiance as you sit down to read. You open the door, and, hey, presto ! the white cloths have vanished, and there is a comfortable room with any number of tables at which you can write or read or play cards or feel at home at in any way you like. For " the ship is steady in the ocean," as the ballad says, and there is nothing to remind you that you are afloat except the 20
The Wonderful "Soo"
thud, thud, thud of the good Clyde-built engines as they whirl the screw in the green water outside.
We all slept like babies, and got to Sault Ste. Marie after lunch on the following day. We had been passing great barges, United States-bound, laden with ore and manufactured lumber, all morning. The reign of fine weather had begun, and the waves were dancing in golden light. The sun was making magical effects among the foliage of the emerald shores. Ozone ? I should think so ! Life in every waft of the breeze ! We came at last in sight of this wonderful " Soo," that is to be the scene, that has been the scene already, of such marvellous business projects. When I was here seven years ago the pulp mills were not begun, though I saw the water let into the Canadian canal, having previously walked through its entire length dry-shod. The great mill now stands, big and castellated, built of the red variegated sandstone of the excava- tion of that canal. The town that is talking about being a city in the near future has increased marvellously. It seems to be going ahead in a flurry of yellow pine all over the place. There are sidewalks of which Toronto might be proud, and a general air of expec- tation on every new-comer's face. You hear
21
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
various languages on the streets. The news- papers are " alive and kicking." There is even a great wooden theatre where an audience of five or six hundred witness innocuous but vivid melodrama with the most unfeigned delight.
22
CHAPTER III
SAULT STE. MARIE AND ITS ENTERPRISES
SAULT STE. MARIE, ONT., June 4th I WENT down into the comfortable cabin of a trading steamer yesterday, lying off the new steel works that are being built here of solid masonry, in the Roman style of archi- tecture. She is one of six that form the fleet of the Clergue concern, 2,500 tons, a steel boat and well found, built at Newcastle-on- Tyne. She had just come out from England with a cargo of Portland cement, several thousand barrels of which were being un- loaded with as much noise and circumstance as if we were at Liverpool or Thames side, instead of amidst these tree-girt shores that come down to the dancing water and where, getting upon an eminence, you can see mile . after mile of " second growth " pulp wood and other timber. The skipper had a fine Nor- thumbrian burr to his tongue, and the story 23
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
of a storm he had weathered, on his last voy- age out, was very interesting. Both he and his first engineer knew their Kipling, and testified to the zest with which they had read about Mr. Andrew, the Scotch engineer. It seems, by the way, that there is an odd jeal- ousy of the salt-water sailors on the part of the fresh-water sailors of the lakes — a sort of professional distaste for these sons of Neptune who plough the ocean and then venture to bring their sea-going craft a thousand or two miles inland. The salts get here neverthe- less, and there is nothing that makes me feel that the " Soo " trades with the world like going aboard one of these ships and talking with their crew about foreign ports and British seas. Some of these Clergue ships are actually carrying iron ore from Lake Superior down to United States ports. The Portland cement this ship had brought from England is to be used in concrete foundations for the great steel works, the building of which was begun in February and is now far advanced. No fewer than 550 men are at work on the job, and there is a grand and lavish pomp of contractor's machinery and thrumming steam-engines, temporary tram- ways, and big derricks. Everything is on a large scale : heaps of sandstone for the solid 24
Modern Titans
walls — as thick as those of a mediaeval cath- edral— hills of sand, scores of waiting carloads of granite to be chewed up into chips by the irresistible grinder to make concrete. I saw the men throwing hefty, irregular lumps of this stone, that had lain asleep in its com- fortable stratum for millions of years, into the mouth of the strong-jawed monster, and heard his teeth crunch on it, and pause and crunch again — as a dog crunches a bone — till it came out as little fragments for making concrete that may be depended upon for a thousand years or more. The whole " outfit," as they call it, is Titanic. Make a railway to that hill where there is granite, and blast your thunder- ing way into it with dynamite ; rend the rocks and load them on to cars. Let your ships bring the unrivalled Portland cement from the south of England. When your laden ships go to Ohio ports let them ballast with sand for the return voyage, and hey ! for the solid concrete, on beds of which we are going to lay these steel-producing monsters for their long travail. The monsters bestrew the side of the track for a mile or more ; they are all ready, when the building shall be finished, to be put into their places ; ponder- ous cogwheels, massive levers, heavy founda- tion-plates, pipes, cylinders, Bessemer steel 25
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
furnaces ; they lie around on the grass like big antediluvian fauna on the boulder-strewn waste, where here and there stick up the stumps of trees that are sending out their tender shoots of foliage after their kind.
Here lies the iron where grew the tree, O Sault, what changes thou hast seen!
Canada has reason to be proud of this lusty young town, so vigorous in its new hopeful energy, that stretches itself bravely along by the St. Mary River. Every yard of it is of historical interest, and recalls the days of the first Jesuit missionaries, the suppositions of a new route to China and to countries of gold — realized now, by the way — the days of the early pioneers and fur traders. But now it is to the future that the Ontario " Soo " turns her eyes. There seems every reason to sup- pose that this place will, in time to come, be- come a vast centre of wealth-producing in- dustry. To some extent it is that now, but the possibilities of the future look very bright. There was the hectic flush and fever of a " boom " here fourteen years ago, when the sanguine townspeople took great spaces of bush into their municipality and trafficked in this forest real estate as town lots. But even the inflated ideas of that period of epidemic 26
Healthy Activity
as to the amount of room required will be scarcely adequate to what good judges think will be the ultimate needs of the population. What is going on now is healthy growth, con- ducted with earnest purpose and a calm pulse, and as one climbs the high ground at the north of the town and looks out over the un- rivalled prospect of land and water, breathes the clear, exhilarating air, and looks out to where the great Clergue works tower in their solidity and might at the west end, by the side of our wonderful ship canal and those famous foaming rapids that give the place its name, one cannot but feel that here are surround- ings that in some respects- cannot be equalled in the world. Of course, even now there are incidents which show that the real estate market is lively, but still no signs that are unhealthy. Lots that a couple of years ago could be had for $200 cannot now be bought for $1,000, and people who were bitten by the former boom have found in the conditions of to-day something to alleviate their sores. The business atmosphere is bracing, and the Im- perial Bank and the Bank of Commerce have live branches here that are full of bud and fruit, and are attended by wide-awake husbandmen — in fact, to go into either of them is to recall the style of their head offices. You can buy 27
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
furniture and dry-goods and hardware here as well as anywhere, but there is a sensation everywhere of newness, and of the fact that a very moderate walk will take you right into the midst of foliage and trees and grass. The hotels are full ; everybody has some business that he is pushing ; the people are good- natured, friendly and alive.
THE CLERGUE WORKS.
The industrial enterprises that go under the Clergue cognomen are at the west end of the " Soo," while the best residences are at the east, a reversal of the ordinary locations which this original place has made without a qualm. Much has been told about the big pulp mills and the new steel works, but people must see them before they are quite competent to judge of their vast extent, and of the brain and brawn that have gone to their making. The pulp mill, the sulphite pulp mill, the machine shops, the foundry, the ore-roasting works, the office building, are like castles of solid masonry. The red variegated sandstone that had been excavated from the canals was there, and it was as well to build it up in these solid walls as to cart it away. The buildings look like great forts that might readily be made strong places of defence, and their 28
Pulp-wood Stew
castellated tops would afford abundant oppor- tunities for sharp-shooters. You see the big sulphite mill silhouetted against the sunset by the side of the water, as you look from the veranda of the International hotel, and it looks like some strong fortress on the Rhine. When you enter it you know that there is nothing more massive, more overpoweringly Brobdingnagian, more scientifically economi- cal in the adaptation of means to ends in the whole world. I saw there two great digesters, something like gigantic steel bottles, made of inch-and-a-quarter plates. They were fifty- four feet high, and their inside diameter was seventeen feet. They weighed 750 tons each, and each of them will hold and stew thirty- five cords of pulp wood as a charge. Beneath them were great pits into which the hot stewed mass would go with a rush when it was cooked, and where it would have the acid washed out of it. I looked out to where the roasting of nickel ore was to be done, and where the sulphur smoke, instead of being allowed to escape into the air and kill every- thing around it, will be made into useful sulphurous acid to do the stewing with. I saw great wooden cylinders, 130 feet high, where this gas will be passed through broken limestone and water-jets to cool it, and other- 29
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
ise prepare it for use. " Use everything, waste nothing," seems to be the motto of this enterprise. Then there were roomy " rifflers " over which the pulp will be passed and fur- ther washed, and enormous screens of brass — flat troughs of many square yards' extent — through the fine slits of which it will be sucked. Why, it looked as if half a world's paper material would be prepared here ! The mechanical pulp mill has been in operation for some time, and also the alkali works, and there the same notes of bigness and economy, solidity and adaptation, are visible. There is a foundry that is possibly as big as anything of the kind in Toronto, and a machine shop where there are the finest lathes, shaping machines, planers, and all the usual appurten- ances of such an establishment, besides many things that have been invented and made, as occasion required, on the spot. The whole is the product of highly educated brains, officered by the quiet, calm, far-seeing, quick-thinking, Napoleonic man who is at the head of these vast concerns, and his gifted brothers. Not far off is an extensive hotel-like wooden building, where the small army of scientists, engineers, chemists, mathematicians, that Mr. F. H. Clergue has gathered from the world, is boarded in great comfort Here are Swedes, 3°
Scientific Business
Russians, Germans, Poles, Frenchmen, Cana- dians and English. Mr. Clergue has skimmed the cream of the great technical colleges of the world. He has brought science to the help of commerce ; intellect to the problem of how best to deal with manufacturing. Regarded as a fine philosophical experiment, and altogether apart from its commercial aspect, this concern is among the greatest of the day. It makes one proud that this thing has been done in Canada. There is also the consciousness in the beholder that this is how to do business, this is how to turn natural resources to their best account — to escape from waste, to imitate the economy and design of Nature, to bring to a focus and concentrate on the object in hand all available powers. There are 4,000 or 5,000 men at work around here, and apparently no women. It is a haunt of masculine energy. Mr. Clergue, at this end of the nineteenth century, looks like the First Consul who made such a stir at its beginning, and he possesses many of the great Corsican's characteristics.
CHAPTER IV
SAULT STE. MARIE ENTERPRISES- LAKE SUPERIOR
STEAMSHIP Athabasca,
LAKE SUPERIOR, June 8th THE storm signals were out when I crossed the river at Sault Ste. Marie to come on board this vessel, which, since I left her on Friday last, has been up to Fort William and down to Owen Sound again for another lot of passengers. She was now lying at the dock on the Michigan side, previous to ascending the United States lock on her way to the watery expanses of Lake Superior. Rough weather afterwards came on, and it mani- fests itself on Lake Superior much as it does on the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or any other little old ocean. Of course, " the ship creaks and the cordage strains," and after the shock of a great wave " she bounds forward like a thing of life," as they say in the nautical novels. You feel constrained to get "abaft the binnacle," or do something seamanlike, if 32
Ho! for Superior
you knew how. As for the ladies, they retire from the table with a sickly, deprecating smile on their faces, and do not reappear, so that the waiters clear away many dainty uneaten dinners. The Mail and Empire ruled the waves, however, and ate its dinner with appetite and gratitude, though strong, bronzed men lay prone in the state-rooms. But I am over-running my story somewhat. It was interesting coming through the lock and seeing a great tank of masonry about as large as King Street between Bay and Victoria streets — reckoning from front to front of the buildings — and with great swinging gates at either end of it, alternately -filled and emptied. Taking the asphalt pavement as the level of the water on which we entered, we were raised as high, perhaps, as the second row of window-sills in the Mail and Empire building — eighteen feet. Yet it is just this eighteen feet — small as it looks — with Lake Superior behind it, that produces the many thousands of horse-power that are being used, and will be used in the future, at Sault Ste. Marie.
One has time, as the boat is ploughing her way through the roughening water of the estuary of the St. Mary River, under a gray, threatening sky and past tree-girt shores, to think over the items that go to make up the 3 33
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
outlook of the future, so far as the great in- dustrial and commercial enterprises in pro- gress at the " Soo " are concerned. The tall sulphite mill and the group of large buildings near it, the rising walls of the great steel works, wreathed with the smoke and steam of the contractor's busy engines, are now lessen- ing in the distance. The items of the Sault Ste. Marie lookout assort themselves in my mind as follows :
1. Mr. F. H. Clergue.
2. The new Bessemer steel works.
3. The Algoma Central Railway and the country it is tapping on its route to Hudson Bay.
4. The pulp industry.
5. The new power canals now in course of construction, both on the Canadian and United States sides of the river. They will produce a total horse-power of 1 1 5,000.
6. The nickel and chemical industries.
7. The iron foundry and machine shops.
The foregoing undertakings are being con- ducted by the Lake Superior Consolidated Power Company, Limited, under which title are federated the various Clergue enterprises that have sprung into existence during the past seven years, and which has a share capital of $117,000,000, or thereabouts.
34
Mr. Clergue
It is in consequence of these things that an increasing population of a cosmopolitan sort is gathering at the Sault, that new buildings are going up, that the hotels are full of pro- jectors who are going to do likewise, and other people. The Algoma Central Railway, with its connected line of steamships trading to Windsor, and the wonderfully rich country it opens up, north, would demand a whole chapter for itself, were there space for it. At Michipicoten, thirty miles away on this line, is the great Helen mine, where millions of tons of ore are in full view, and an inexhaust- ible hoard of nature is waiting development. This is the country of big things. The hour has come, and it has brought the man. I was right in placing Mr. F. H. Clergue as the first of the items of the Sault's outlook. I regard him as one of the pivotal men of Canada ; well-born, naturally gifted, cool, intellectual, a student of books and of men, a rapid thinker, a man who does nothing until he is ready, and then does it like fate. Mr. Clergue forms an interesting study. He lives close to the great works, in the snug little bachelor home that he has made out of the old Hudson's Bay Company blockhouse of a hundred years ago, retaining the very form of it, so that he veri- tably " holds the fort." But as you look down 35
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
from the lofty towers of the sulphite mill on this little house it looks small indeed.
Mr. Clergue has none of the modern striv- ing after a millionaire establishment. He devotes his great intellect and his carefully husbanded vitality to his business. An odd thought occurred to me as I contemplated his refined and purposeful face, so full of reserve, and restraint, and inscrutable dominance, and that was that if he had gone into the church he would have made a prince of ecclesiastics. I had the great pleasure of seeing Mr. Clergue's father, a polite French gentleman of the old school. I heard of his mother, a New England woman, of fine endowments. Not without reason, therefore, did I say that Mr. Clergue was well born. There is a finish and a style about him that only come in that way. He is a gentleman who has gone into business, rather than a business man who has become a gentleman.
Many Toronto people will be pleased to 'hear of the success at Sault Ste. Marie of Rev. E. H. Capp, formerly curate of St. Stephen's, in Toronto, and now rector of the pro-Cathedral at the Sault, where also is the seat of the Bishop of Algoma — Rev. H. G. Thorneloe, D.D. Bishop Thorneloe has done a great work in this diocese, and has steered 36
Church and Post-office
it through many difficulties. Besides being a devout and earnest Anglican prelate and an eloquent preacher, he is an admirable finan- cier, and in this regard has done wonders in his diocese, his vigorous handling of affairs having lifted a load of anxiety from many hearts, both clerical and lay. Mr. Capp preaches to crowded congregations sermons that last twenty minutes, every word of which is listened to. I discovered that he is exceed- ingly popular in the town, and that " Father Ted," as he is called, was as great a power among the young people as he was in Toronto. The pro-cathedral, where he min- isters, is a well-appointed Gothic structure of red sandstone, and its chancel is well designed and satisfactory.
Not too soon has the Government made an appropriation of $20,000 for the " Soo " post- office. It is rather worse than it was seven years ago, and even then it was only suitable to the exigencies of a small village. I do not say a word against the staff of officials, who do their best to cope with the vastly increased mail they have to handle, but if the staff were to be doubled, and the size of the build- ing quadrupled, it might begin to be adequate to the requirements of the town. As it is, the post-office occupies a small room or two in a 37
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
building devoted to town purposes, tax-col- lecting, etc.; it is filled most of the time by a polyglot inquiring crowd, and at busy times, just after the mail has come in, they have to wait half an hour for their letters.
The wind was strong and cold, with a sting- ing lash of rain in it that blew in our faces as we got nearer to the spot where the watery horizon of Lake Superior is stretched across in front of the ship's nose, and you see a dis- tant vessel hull down against the sky line. We had overhauled and passed two steamers of less capacity for speed than ours, and against their black sides we had seen the waves length- ening and deepening from crest to crest, and dashing up now and then with a head of angry foam. The sky darkens, and our white top- works and masts begin to show up with more emphasis against its purple grays, and as we stand at the rear end of the upper deck, that graceful and mighty swaying pitch begins that gladdens the heart of a true salt, and makes that of the land-lubber sink within him. It is not much of a movement yet — just a majestic, periodical rise and fall, to slow fiddling, as it were. But the shores are sinking off to dim outlines in the mist, and the great horizon of waters is widening, and the waves are becoming deeper and grander and more various in their 38
The Cradle of the Deep
ever-changing surfaces. The ship tosses them haughtily from her bows, and their crests sink into the deep with an angry hiss ; but she has to dip her prow deeper and deeper in her dig- nified obeisance to the storm.
At length we looked out on either side of us to a wilderness waste of tossing waves. It was like being on the Atlantic with half a gale blowing, so that a good proportion of the pas- sengers began to have " that tired feeling," and crept away to their berths. Most of the night we were " rocked in the cradle of the deep," in good earnest, and the last thing I remember before going to sleep is that I men- tally hummed over the old air, and called to mind how a friend of mine used to sing it in far-off years. I half woke in the dead of night, and heard the waves lashing against the side, but that mighty, slow, gently-powerful rocking soon put me to sleep again — this time with the thought : " I must see the sun rise." So at 4.30 a.m. I rose and looked out of my little window, and saw that the grand ceremony was to take place just opposite.
The storm had gone down ; there was not more motion than one experiences on an Island ferry. Far away was the hard, steel-gray hori- zon of water ; above it an orange sky, fading through gentle gradations of salmon-colour 39
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
into deepest blue. Where was to be the cen- tral point of illumination ? Very near the horizon were some narrow strips of dark-gray cloud, with here and there a snippet floating by itself. These gradually told with a blush that the sun was near. Then they became incandescent ; they were burnt up in fervent worship. Then very slowly two glittering pin- points of light appear on the hard horizon line, and remain so long that one wonders if they are not electric-lighted buoys. But the irre- sistible monarch of day is coming up ; between the two gleaming dots rises the arc of his splendid circle, with that unique glory that no painter can pourtray, that no pigment can tell, that no electrician can rival. And he beams a majestic smile over the sleeping waves.
We had sunshine all the time after that till we came in sight of that low, long mountain that looks like a man lying on his back ; a shrine of the aborigines, for there, or near it, was the grave of Nanibozhu — their "hero- god," as Mr. James Bain calls him in his notes to Henry's "Travels" — till we came by rocky headlands and bleak bluffs to Thunder Bay, and at noon tied up at Port Arthur for a time, a spreading town on a gently rising hill ; then through greenest foreground shores and
40
The Great West Land
distant hills of deepest blue to Fort William, Port Arthur's sister town. The air is begin- ning to be exhilarating and sweet, and I feel that I have passed through the gateway of the Great West Land.
CHAPTER V
PORT ARTHUR AND FORT WILLIAM- RAT PORTAGE
FORT WILLIAM, June i3th NANIBOZHU, calm, gray, miles long, lies peacefully in storm and shine, guarding these two new thriving towns of Port Arthur and Fort William, the lake-and-rail outposts of the C. P. R. Nanibozhu, in his stony sleep, cares not. A thousand times ancienter than the Sphinx, Palmyra is a child to him, Rome a baby, Stonehenge a weanling. Whensoever the aborigines came to these Western wilds, they saw in Nanibozhu that which struck their spirits with awe. That great, calm figure, lying on his back asleep, his arms folded on his breast, as though he were taking a nap until the Day of Judgment, was evidently a great Somebody. To him, therefore, they made offerings, so that up to 1 50 years ago, and perhaps later, you might find tobacco, tomahawks, pipes, bead-embroideries lying 42
What Nanibozhu Sees
upon his rocky ledges. They crept up in their canoes — brown, stalwart, aquiline — and trem- bled as they laid their gifts before him. Nanibozhu commanded the lightning, or if not, perchance had weight with Those who did ; Nanibozhu ruled the storm. Perhaps he had his word to say about the crop of maize — who might tell ? Then, silently, they paddled back to their hunting, their fishing, their council- fire, their long stories, in the evening, of the mighty deeds of Nanibozhu. Now, he slept ; but let all men take heed when he should arise !
I could not but think of these things when, yesterday, I climbed the "long sloping hill on which Port Arthur is situated, and looked out on the magnificent harbourage of Thunder Bay. Not content with its natural advan- tages, the Port Arthurians have built a sub- stantial breakwater of cribwork, so that to a seaman's eye Port Arthur must look a very proper port indeed. Looking out seaward you see old Nanibozhu, and Thunder Cape, grayish blue silhouettes against a dappled sky of floating clouds ; while, on your right, Mount McKay watches over Fort William. The two towns are about two and a half miles apart, and are connected by a street-car line oper- ated by Port Arthur as a municipal institu- 43
From the Great Lakes to the "Wide West
tion ; for in Port Arthur they are ambitious, and with a population of 3,500 are imitating Glasgow, and getting hold of the public franchises for the public weal.
As the early franchises are bent, so the resi- dential advantages are inclined, think the Port Arthurians. One enthusiastic man told me, indeed, that in a year or two, what with the power they are going to develop at the Cur- rent River to run their street-car line, and their water- works, and their electric light, the happy Arthurians would pay no taxes. Port Arthur is a lusty, independent youngster ; Lake Superior is its washpot ; over the adjacent rich mineral prospects it casts out its shoe. It is the eastern terminus of the Canadian Northern Railway, and has been the headquarters of the contractors who have been building that road. Its Mayor, Mr. Matthews, is a busy man and a great fighter for the town's interests, but if ever he leans back in his chair and indulges in a day-dream it may be presumed that the sub- ject of the vision is the time when Port Arthur will be the shipping-point for the grain of the tributary Western prairie districts that the Canadian Northern will tap.
" New docks are under construction, and elevators will follow," says the Industrial Re- view, a promising little semi-monthly which
44
Fort William
has its cradle at Fort William, and has just cut its first tooth.
The C. P. R. steamships stop at Port Arthur on their way up. But I didn't get off the Athabasca, partly because there was such a magnificent view from the upper deck, and partly also because I wanted to go as far as the gallant boat went. So we pulled out of the spacious harbour, and in a short time entered the mouth of the Kaministiquia River, on which Fort William lies, with its four big C. P. R. elevators. The green water we had been looking down into changed here to a brown tint, attributable to iron, the obliging hotelkeeper said when -the usual Toronto thirst for this natural product developed itself. That was the first I heard of iron fin this neighbourhood, though I subsequently heard a great deal more, for on many a bronzed face in this neighbourhood there is a mark of inter- rogation, and the question behind it is, Any iron ore here ? The bronzed men repeat the question over miles of lumpy country, with theodolites in their hands, camp outfits, Indian guides. Broad - shouldered, knotty - handed farmers come into the hotels with stories of it, and sit there with a look on their faces of " they could an' if they would " give informa- tion that might be valuable. You see specimen 45
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
lumps of rich and heavy iron ore lying about in hotels and offices, which everybody feels the heft of and pronounces very fine, whether they know anything about it or not. Iron is what they are seeking in these parts — not gold or silver.
At Fort William I had an idea I should see a fort, but I didn't, at least not much of one, only a strong-built, four-square stone building, thirty or forty feet square, perhaps — all that remains of the original Hudson's Bay Com- pany's post. There is a big store at Fort William with the company's name over it, but the first was the stronghold of the Indian days. It now lies in the midst of the C. P. R. sheds, and is used for some unimportant railway use — or has been. This is emblematical of what has really taken place — the wave of rail- way progress has enveloped and now domi- nates the town — it is what it gets its living by. It is here that you first hear of Manitoba wheat, and of the mighty influence of " No. i hard." The talk of the people on the street is of the crops.
" There was snow last night, but was there frost?"
" No ? — that's all right then — snow in early June is good ; it backens the wheat at the right time. Yes, sir."
46
The Aboriginal Inhabitants
" I never knowed snow in early June, but what there was a large crop," says a third man.
" You bet we'll have fifty million bushel through these elevators this year if we have one," says another.
The fifth of the group says nothing, and as you note his dark skin and coal-black hair you know that he is an Indian. Here and there, not very often perhaps — on street-car or street — you meet a man or a woman of aboriginal descent, quiet, patient, inscrutable. But on the Indian reserve near this place — farther up on the banks of the Kaministiquia — there are numbers of them.
On Sunday last, while I was making a vain attempt to get within speaking distance of Mount McKay, which forms a poetic back- ground to this rather prosaic town, I came opposite to the Jesuit mission there, and though the river was between, I saw their Corpus Christi procession headed by two aco- lytes and a priest bearing a great cross. Then followed Indian women and girls, the latter dressed in white. Then a priest, under a canopy held by four Indians, intoning the Te Deum. After him followed perhaps 150 In- dians, all singing, and bearing banners in the sunshine.
47
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Most of the passengers by the Athabasca were going to board the C. P. R. train west, and waited at the hotel for it till late in the afternoon. And the Kaministiquia hotel is comfortable. There you hear talk of fishing, and the square " rotunda " is decorated with birch-bark-framed skins of the lordliest trout. At table you see sunburned men who have been fishing, and are full of strange stories that are truer than usual. They know places accessible by yacht or tramp, where the shy speckled beauties lie waiting for the expe- rienced hand of the sportsman. In the store windows there is the appropriate tackle. You hear clergymen making appointments with regard to the " gentle art," and your imagina- tion points to all kinds of wild, beautiful places in the neighbourhood, where the shad- owed river runs over big stones, murmuring or singing, and where wheat and iron and busi- ness seem far away.
I wanted to see Port Arthur and to look about, so I waited a day or so. As you leave Fort William to go to the former town by the street-car, it dwarfs to a scattered group of low-lying buildings, over which the big C. P. R. elevators tower in dominance. But Mount McKay, blue-shadowed and wreathed with cloud, towers over them. For the rest you 48
A Talkative Scrivener
have comparatively treeless, vast expanses, bounded by low blue hills. The street-car line winds, however, through a pretty young growth of larches, firs, nut-bushes, and the like. It does not take long to get to Port Arthur, where " before the end of the season the town will have three miles of granolithic sidewalks completed."
I left Fort William for Rat Portage by the Imperial Limited, which has just begun to run for the season. There was a man in the car whose great idea was " ten per cent, for small loans" — in the neighbourhood of Calgary I think. Mr. David Mills, jr., son of the Minis- ter of Justice, who is a lawyer in Port Arthur, had told me that there was an opportunity for good safe loans in Port Arthur, on new prop- erty, at seven per cent. But the Calgary man talked of his ten per cent, for small loans, for 1 50 miles. " Say, two thousand — one thousand to two. Why, it gave you as much trouble as a five or a ten thousand. Didn't it now ?" " Of course it did," I said, to pacify him, "but I never bothered with anythingunder$ioo,ooo myself." Then he followed me about the cars, and sat opposite to me at dinner, and wanted to put me on to a Good Thing. So I had to tell him I was a newspaper man, and recommended him to take plenty of salad oil — it was a whole-
4 49
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
some thing. He said, with some shortness, that he never took it, and after that he left me in peace. The train thundered on through lovely scenery, and the witchery of the sunset. How big this Ontario of ours is ! There was a considerable length of rails from Toronto to Owen Sound. Then two steamer trips, in- cluding two nights " rocked in the cradle of," etc. And now the coloured porter grabs my arm, after apparently interminable slumbers, and says, " Rat Portage, sir ! " It is between two and three in the morning. Yes, Ontario is very big — who says anything against the Parliament Buildings ? And I have been sleeping through miles and miles of it.
As I sit writing, I look across the street and see, sitting on the steps of an adjacent store, an unmistakable squaw, a shawl over her head. She is just such a one as might have been the savage wife of one of those savages who laid gifts on the ledges -of Nanibozhu. Calmly impassive she sits, one of the survivors of a race that is passing away. Nanibozhu lies sleeping still, but there is a sleeping giant that is stirring in his sleep. He moves, he wakes, he stretches himself, he will arise. It is this great Dominion, over which, in daylight and in dark, thunders the irresistible monster of steam and brain. And yet as I think of 50
Does Nanibozhw Wink?
Nanibozhu, calm, gray, miles long, lying in such peaceful sleep, I fancy I hear him say, " For a time, perhaps ; for a time. After all, what are a million years?" And is that a half-wink I see in his stony eye ?
CHAPTER VI RAT PORTAGE AND RAINY RIVER
RAT PORTAGE, June i6th THERE are many dogs at Rat Portage, but they do not bark at the visitor — possibly be- cause there are so many rocks lying around that might be thrown at them if they did. The rocks are of all sizes and enter into the scen- ery. Some of them contain gold, and that is one reason why Rat Portage grew, a few years ago, into a thriving town, that from this out, through good and evil fortunes, will be an im- portant centre of this corner of wide Ontario. Besides being interested in the precious metal, it is concerned in extensive lumbering opera- tions, and a pulp mill is hopefully whispered about. Moreover, the C. P. R. runs through it, and it is at the head of Rainy Lake and Rainy River navigation, and thus commands 200 miles of one of the finest waterways in Canada. The legend about the name of the place is that near its former site of Keewatin — three 52
Gaudaur, the Famous Oarsman
miles off and reached by boat — was a portage that was much used by a colony of muskrats. There is enough good scenery about Rat Portage to talk about for a year. The town is most delightfully situated on ground of vari- ous levels that rises from a large bay, into which jut rocky, wooded headlands of great beauty. This spacious sheet of water is the place par excellence for aquatic sports, and it is natural to find living here that straight sports- man and famous oarsman, Jacob Gaudaur, who holds * the championship of the world for professional sculling. His triumphant pair of sculls and the great silver cup which he now permanently holds — having" won it three years in succession — decorate his hotel, also many pictures of famous oarsmen that recall the prowess of days that are fast fading into the past. I called on Mr. Gaudaur and found him big, modest and dignified ; as hard as nails, and with calm purpose in his eye. He is a fine specimen of athletic manhood, but he is more — he is a well-balanced, capable human being. He confers an interest on athletic sports that is entirely apart from his aspect as a rowing human organization, and I do not wonder at the many friends he has made. Self-
* The championship is now (1902) in the keeping of Towns. 53
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
command is one of his salient features. French and German blood have gone to his make-up, and his fine face and bearing are indicative of a character that is a credit to his Orillian origin and to Canada, that, through him, holds one of the respectable distinctions of the world. Gaudaur is in capital condition, and is training systematically and thoroughly. His challenge to George Towns, of London, Eng., to come to Rat Portage and row him on the waters of Lake of the Woods will naturally draw much attention to this place. A better opportunity for the purpose or a finer sheet of water cannot be conceived. Rat Portag- ians who see Gaudaur every day implicitly be- lieve in the power of their champion to hold the distinctions he has attained, and the Rat Portage Miner, of Saturday, in publishing the articles of the forthcoming race, took occasion to give emphatic utterance to this confidence. Said the Miner : " He has never allowed adulation or the applause of the multitude to cause him to swerve from the path that should be followed by all true manhood, nor has ex- cess or dissipation on his part ever been per- mitted to work deterioration of his magnificent physical powers. He has always known that success meant hard work and self-denial, and he has always followed this course." 54
The Lake of the Woods Trip
I think that to most Ontario people it would be a surprise could they come to this place and take the trip across the Lake of the Woods and up Rainy River. Of course, these localities are down on maps, and very much has been written about them. Now that the Ontario and Rainy River Railway is being so rapidly made; attention will be still further called to the district, ^ut you must see it to understand its charm. When you have taken the trip to Fort Frances, or Francis — it is spe.lt both ways hereabout — on the steamship Keenora, as I had the pleasure of doing re- cently, you find that you have stored up mem- ories of beauty that will serve you for a life- time, and, moreover, that you have seen many interesting features connected with the open- ing up of a new section of country. To go 1 68 miles and back on a magnificent water- way, much of it through solitudes, and the remainder through the homes of pioneers, whose farms come down to the water's edge, and who are carving their homesteads out of the bush, is an experience to be remembered. It was about eight o'clock on Saturday even- ing when I went down to the Keenora, lying at her wharf at the foot of a hilly street, at the top of which is Gaudaur's hotel. She is a staunch, well-fitted, modern boat, with 55
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
two screws ; a pleasant and comfortable boat to travel in ; her berths, cooking, and attend- ance leaving nothing to be desired, and I write these commonplace words sincerely — they are not prospectus-English.
It was a perfect evening, and across the water you saw the lovely wooded scenery and the C. P. R. bridge over an arm of the bay leading to the falls, where the electric light plant for the city is situated, and the compact works of the Gold Reduction Company, or something of that sort, the head office of which, as it says on the sign, is in " Leaden - hall Street, London." But on the wharf, be- sides people, there was the greatest conglom- eration of things to go aboard that boat that could be imagined. It was a mountainous heap of miscellaneous freight, for always bear in mind that we are going up the Rainy River, and that, following the course of that river, 1,600 men are at work making the O. and R. R. Railway ; moreover, that settlers are rushing in to build houses and take up grants, and " shove up " towns of yellow pine boards. Many things are therefore wanted, and the Keenora at present affords the chief route for them. Consequently there were cows and horses, crates of live chickens, also a fine, young black pig in a crate, whose eye 56
A Miscellaneous Cargo
was philosophical and meditative, and whose grunt was positively human in its question- ings. There were rolls of tar paper, number- less boxes of provisions, canned and other- wise, bags of flour and rolled oats, ploughs, cooking stoves, a child's cot, household furni- ture, lots of bags of potatoes, and a buggy. In fact, I tried to think of something that wasn't there, and found it difficult. Men of the kind commonly called " husky " began to handle this freight, and from time to time more " huskiness " was developed. Amid such incidents as a cow stopping to think on the gang-plank as to the wisdom of the step she was taking, and having " co boss " said to her by about six men and three boys at once, each of whom laid a caressing hand on some part of her lumpy anatomy, the loading went forward. As for the young calves, they skipped up the plank thoughtlessly, half side- ways, as if undetermined as to which end of them ought to go first. But one felt it would take some time, and went up on the upper deck and looked at the sunset over that delightful, still, mirror-like water. Here and there a canoe was paddling over the calm surface, with a man and a woman in it. By and by a racing skiff came by, propelled at a fine rate by two athletes in rowing costume, sitting in 57
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
all their glory on sliding seats. Above all, the ineffable splendour of clouds, rose-tinted and glorious. Darker grew the colours of the islands, and the wooded points slowly passed from green to sepia, and from sepia to Indian ink, and from Indian ink to the sharp sil- houetted blackness of a dark photograph. Then the hoarse whistle of the steamer blew ; Captain Thompson ascended his watch-tower and took hold of the fateful wheel ; while Mr. Graham, the busy manager of the Rainy River Navigation Company, mopped his brow and scratched his head at the amount of freight that it was impossible to get on, and we started.
It soon looked to my inexperienced eye as though we had got no sea-room at all. We began twisting and turning our way through islands with a sinuosity that was as remark- able as it seemed perilous. We came to a place called the " Devil's Gap," where rocky promontories approached so close to us on either side that to get through it took steering as clever as that of the London cabby, who " gets through " if there is the thickness of a coat of paint to spare between the hub of his wheels and that of the vehicle next to him. The speed of the boat was slackened, and all the passengers on the prow helped by holding 58
1 »*
•• - • ,
; . \ * '
s-
Up the Rainy River
their breath and assuming a certain muscular rigidity. We did it, and then we relaxed the tension, and felt we had doubted whether we could. Lovely waters and lovely islands, but all growing darker and more mysterious under the black clouds. Then a great thun- derstorm broke over us till there came a time when the engines stopped and the electric lights went out suddenly, and there was a crunch and a universal " What's the matter?" through the ship. The fact was that it was too dark to go on, and we had tied up at an island. So we went to bed and slept, and in the morning, lo ! we had passed through the archipelago of islands and were out in the middle of what is called the Big Traverse, which is the widest part of the Lake of the Woods, where you may get out of sight of land. After that we entered the mouth of Rainy River, and soon we came to the regular run of it with, on the Minnesota side, woods down to the water's edge, and on the Canadian side settlers' farms with their log huts, shacks, frame houses, besides plenty of bush.
Even on the Minnesota side I heard that all the farm lots are taken up, so that a man who had been prospecting them and had jotted five down as being desirable, thinking that he would be sure at any rate to get one of them, 59
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
found on going to the land office that they were all arranged for. This Rainy River was a great surprise to me. There was a man on board with whom I had some conversation, who was born on the banks of the St. Law- rence. I said that I had seen no river that put me so much in mind of that noble stream, arid he said he had been thinking the same thing. But the channel is not so available for navi- gating purposes as that of the St. Lawrence, and careful piloting is necessary. Steadily all the day we ploughed our course up the wide waterway. In the morning a caribou had been seen swimming diagonally across in front of our bows, and the woods on the Minnesota side looked primitive enough to be the haunt of numbers of them. Here and there we saw Indians squatting by their teepees or posing in aboriginal attitudes as we went by, and all the way as we passed were the clearings of the Canadian pioneers, their log houses in some cases turned into stables or barns because a more pretentious frame residence had been built, their rough docks made of logs with the bark on them, their heaps of cordwood neatly built up for sale on the edge of the river, and all the signs of their strenuous beginnings.
A hundred miles we went up this beautiful river, coming every now and again to the dock 60
A Settler's Household Gear
of a rising village that had its hotel and post- office, or perhaps its roughly built church. At one place there was a store, built of yellow boards, with a sign over it, " Men's Furnish- ings," the bush coming up very close to it at the back. And we saw hardware stores and provision stores of an equally primitive char- acter. At each of these docks there were things to be unloaded and the post-bag to be delivered and received. We came to the Sault and Manitou rapids, up which we had to be tugged by a strong little steamer, and latish in the afternoon we came to a farm dock where we put off a farmer who had come to settle there, and saw all his household and farm things unloaded before us, to our great content. We saw his horse and his cows taken off, and watched them begin at once to munch the green grass, and his chickens, and his plough, and his churn, and his drawing- room furniture swathed up in wrappages, and all his household gear. We all stood and looked unabashed at everything, and specu- lated as to what was insomeof the odd-shaped boxes, for when you have been going up a river for a hundred miles, however beautiful, you are instantly absorbed by an event of such human interest as this. And was the man married ? Yes, he must be — there was the sewing- 61
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
machine. His wife had come on ahead, per- haps, or she had said she would not come till he had got straight. How in the world was he going to get all those things to his farm, and was that new yellow house his, or the one in the distance ? But we had to leave him standing in the midst of the heap of his household stuff on the rough dock of pine logs. It was more than half-past eight in the evening when we got to Fort Frances, where are the great Koochiching Falls, which look like the Chau- diere at Ottawa, and are nearly as big, the water tumbling with great grandeur over a wild disarray of primeval rocks. It is the spray from these falls, dispersing in showers, that in sunshine displays rainbows, that gives to Rainy River and Rainy Lake their names. The site of the rising town of Fort Frances is admirable. It rises high above the water. Before you, as you stand upon it, lies the glorious river. On the left the great falls, with their perpetual thunder, and beyond them the quiet woods. Above the falls is the entrance to Rainy Lake, where another steamer waits to take passengers on a further stage of their voyage, viz., across Rainy Lake to Mine Centre. I have never seen any place that seemed quite so new and quite so go-ahead as Fort Frances. This, again, is a post of the 62
A Summer Play-ground
Hudson's Bay Company, and the buildings of that great business organization are among the first things you see as you make your ap- proach up the river. Wooden buildings are going up in all directions, and merchandise is being rammed in. I went into a lawyer's office, built of rough pine boards, against which the " sheep " bound law-books and the Remington typewriter looked strange, but the occupant was a young man of nerve, who, having got through Osgoode Hall, came to this far corner of Ontario so as to give the other fellows room. I found that the man born on the banks of the St. Lawrence was going to start a shoe sho-p, and I felt half in- clined to stop off myself and start a news- paper. You do everything in about a day at Fort Frances. But, after a couple of hours, the hoarse whistle of the boat blew, and by mid- night we were thud-thudding down the river on our way back. I never saw such sky- splendour as was over us all the next day, or such varying scenes of beauty as surrounded us. You may talk of Muskoka, and you may mention the Thousand Islands. But before you conclude your Judgment of Paris you must see the Lake of the Woods and Rainy River. Already these are the summer play- ground of the people of Winnipeg, southern 63
Ffom the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Manitoba, and the adjacent places. About 1,200 Winnipeg people come to their summer cottages in Rat Portage every year. Numbers of them have islands to themselves. As to the number of these islands, it is legion — I heard figures quoted that seemed to me impossible. But look on the map, and if you want a very enjoyable trip come to Rat Portage and take the voyage on the Keenora.
64
CHAPTER VII
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF WINNIPEG
WINNIPEG, June 25th
THE Imperial Limited is timed to arrive at Rat Portage at 2.30 in the morning, but it was 3.20 before it came grandly around the curve into the station, so that one had time to observe the yellow light of the growing dawn come into the sky and make the adjacent buildings stand in black relief against a back- ground of luminous lemon-colour. Even the prose of a railway station has no chance against the dawn. A young Englishman came up and asked, in a very English voice, what was the fare to Winnipeg. He was evidently just out from the Old Country, and travelled without baggage, like many another. He was a dollar short, but he went away and speedily returned with it, awaking one's respect ; for a man who can raise a dollar in a strange place at three o'clock in the morn- ing must have gifts. I thought afterwards, 5 65
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
however, that perhaps he had money secreted in various parts of his apparel, as a provision against need, and only retired to extract it unseen. He appeared to be of the sort that come out prepared to do " anything " — par- ticularly anything that they have not been at all accustomed to. Thus a clerk is naturally attracted to farming ; and a watchmaker's apprentice looks forward to navvy work on a new railway. There is a feeling that in the New Land all must be different, and that in some miraculous way new strength and capacity will be theirs. They all " get there " in time, bless them, or most of them do — for there is at least food and some sort of shelter for all. It is a queer thing that in nine cases out of ten the English emigrant comes by himself — Scotchmen and Irishmen are usually in twos and threes — Galicians and Doukhobors in scores or hundreds. A few days before I had seen a train-load of Galicians come through. It was a Sunday evening, and the preliminaries of a service were being conducted by a detachment of the Salvation Army just outside the station. The brass instruments ceased their blare, the big drum its vibrant throbbing, and the captain knelt in the midst of a kneeling circle and uttered an impassioned prayer in a loud voice. The wonder that was 66
Galicians and Dookhobortsi
exhibited on the scores of Galician faces that filled the windows was very interesting. It was the most vivid expression of questioning awe one could imagine. They knew it was prayer, but who could these uniformed men and women be who knelt and prayed in the open street ? What was the drum for ? Were they going to battle? A man in a queer sheepskin coat rushed out to buy a loaf, being urged thereto by his wife, who had a small Galician baby and also kept the purse. Marks of hard toil and hard living were on the faces of these resigned women, wondering if ever they should get to the end of this terrible journey. But of all the strange people I have seen, so far, in the West, the Doukhobors are the most massive and unique. A detachment of these men has found its way to the new Rainy River Railway, and as we passed up the river the other day I saw six of them standing near one of the little wharves at which we tied up. They were in long, brown camel's-hair cloaks, that descended to their heels, and they seemed to rather like being out in the rain — it could never get through that thick coarse cloth. Fine big men they were, and exceeding grave.
The telegraph instruments click out that the train will be here in twenty minutes. I walk to 67
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
where I can look over Rat Portage Bay, a stretch of miles of white water. This makes me think of Jake Gaudaur again, for I called on him yesterday, and saw the three framed addresses, all ornamented by the art of the illuminator, that hang up in his hotel. One of them is from Toronto, and is signed, " R. J. Fleming, Mayor," and there is Mr. Little- John's signature, and many other familiar ones. Jake confers on that exploited mining neighbourhood an interest that it would not otherwise have. Everybody must hope that Towns will be a man and come out and row him. He ought to. Jake went all over the world to get his own distinctions.
The train is full when it comes, for every- body seems to be going West these days. We are soon slipping along through a rocky landscape, for the spare ribs of the old earth stick up effusively for the first third of the journey between Rat Portage and Winnipeg. We pass many a lonely lake where gray rocks jut into the mist-wreathed waters. We rattle through rock cuttings, where, when the road was blasted through, the impotent teeth of antediluvianism were left grinning. Then miles of half-grown bush and waste places of the wilderness that only want John the Baptist to be the wilderness of Judea. What 68
En cKpuie to Winnipeg
if one should get off here and live lonely, as people did that went into the wilderness? Surely one might live here for years without seeing a human face. What a place for a hermitage! Simon Stylites wasn't in it I stick up for Canada. We've got patches of wilderness that for ragged, unadulterated solitude beat the world. Those Old Testa- ment places have been over-estimated.
But from time to time we are ascending, for Winnipeg is seven hundred feet above Lake Superior, and we have to reach the flat and level plain on which it stands. We leave the small firs and larches and other conifers be- hind. We leave the ragged and insistent rocks, and the lonely mist- wreathed lakes. It is broadest daylight, and we come at last to where the trees are smallish poplars with an elm or two, and one begins to have glimpses of a far-away flat horizon, the plain diversified only with clumps of small bushes. Then we come to a few small white homesteads, and see a ploughman driving a very long furrow. But what strikes you more than anything else is that the soil is becoming sweeter and kinder, and more adapted to grow things — you can tell it as soon as you look out of the rapidly moving train ; it bears the inscription " Home of Agriculture " all over it. And 69
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
there, at last, is the wheat ! Yes, standing up bravely in the sunshine are square miles of it — none of your little patchy fields, but long stretches into blue, level distance. And here are cows feeding on rich lush grass — milk producers, every one of them. There are no big barns — when the wheat is ready it is threshed and sent to the elevators, and the farmer gets his cheque. But there are occa- sional comfortable frame homesteads, with their group of trees, and other familiar sur- roundings that give them an Old Country look. These get more numerous as we go on, and at last the train is sliding along through a semi-suburban belt ; then we dash across a long bridge over the Red River, and are on the outskirts of Winnipeg, for the most part small frame houses, on widish, ploughed-up- looking, dirt streets. Then we pass a big pork-packing establishment, and a gasometer, and some shops at the corners of streets, and draw up at the long Winnipeg platform that is on the same level as the street, and wide open to it — and I stroll forth to get impres- sions with a fresh eye.
I thought at first that things looked like
London, especially in the neighbourhood of
the railway station, which bears marks of an
everlasting crowd coming through it, and
70
Main Street, Winnipeg
which has a somewhat begrimed and much- used aspect — as though there had always been too much helter-skelter business to bother with architecture and things. The railway platform is of plank, and so are the adjacent sidewalks, and when I saw this I gave up the notion of London and thought of Chicago, especially as I could count ten one-dollar-a- day hotels as soon as I came round the corner of the station building. Still there was cer- tainly a touch of Liverpool and a dash of the east end of Toronto about one side of the street — which was more higgledy-piggledy than the other. But of all the places for signs, Winnipeg holds the record. As soon as you get out of the station you know that the sign painter is abroad, and you are not allowed to forget it until you get far away into the sub- urbs, where there are tree-shaded boulevards and highly attractive houses. The Winni- peggers like the letters on their signs as large as possible, and as a rule they are not satisfied till they have covered every available spot on their premises with some legend in immense block-letter characters. There is no art, as a rule, in this lettering — a brutal legibility is all that is required ; so that the first impression a stranger gets is one of signs and telegraph poles and wires, and a very wide roadway,
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
block-paved. This is one end of the principal street we have emerged upon, and it is called Main Street. It is not perfectly straight, but, roughly speaking, it lies north and south, and the railway station is at the northern end. Down at this end of it, on the eastern side, are the beloved miscellaneous shops, some only one storey high, some two. There are fruit- erers' shops here, and shops where they sell overalls and other ready-made garments that make you hot to look at them ; and these shops are all rammed close together side by side in the true metropolitan way in thorough- fares, but as the street is about three times as wide as King Street, Toronto, there is room and verge enough in front of them. " Old Country Second-hand Shop " is on one sign here, and there are several of that character, where you can pick up the impedimenta which some inexperienced immigrants have turned into money at a sacrifice.
As you walk south on Main Street, how- ever, the aspect changes ; the buildings become larger and more important, and you feel that you are in no mean city. The pavements are stone or granolithic ; you pass the City Hall — a considerable building with a cupola, and a flagstaff with the Jack flying, in front of it a monument to dead soldiers, and a bust of Queen Victoria. There is a sort of 72
Many Banks and Shops
bend in the street here, and you come in view of its most important part. There, at the corner of the street, is the massive post- office, and you can now count as many banks as you previously could count hotels. And with few exceptions the banks seem to have given their architects the hint that they had to do something out of the common. Per- haps the palm is taken by the Bank of Com- merce, a white stone building in the Italian style, designed by Mr. Frank Darling, of Toronto, which is worthy of any metropolis in the world. The Dominion Bank, which makes an attractive corner of another street, is a building of red sandstone in very good taste and of dignified proportions. But there are numbers of business blocks, with elevators and multitudinous offices in them, and there are silversmiths' shops with things in them that are apparently too beautiful and precious for anybody to buy, unless they are connected with Wheat — and it is a good season — or con- nected with Trusts, or Banks, and things of that sort. What I feel is that I am in a city again, after being nearly a month without seeing one ; that the air is wonderfully clear, and that there are shops where you can get almost anything ; also, that the streets are laid out on a wide and generous plan, and that they are full of business ; that prospects 73
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
are good, and that everybody is looking for- ward to the wheat crop that is going to be so enormously overpowering. Winnipeg is the most enterprising phenomenon in the way of a juvenile city ever known. It has beaten the record of the continent for sudden and substantial growth. Building permits for $1,000,000 have already been issued this season.
Although Winnipeg is 700 feet above the sea, it is not a city set on a hill. It is set on an ever-widening plain. Build, toy fashion, with tiny dice, in the middle of a billiard table, a sketch-model of a city. Arrange a skein of drab-coloured silk in sinuous fashion on one side of it, to represent the Red River, and a smaller one, also sinuous, branching out of it, to indicate the Assiniboine. Turn a big punch bowl over it for the sky, and you have an idea of Winnipeg and its surroundings.
But it is a grand sky. Last night, after a most oppressive day, it was continuously bright with lightning for hours. Thunder and rain were of corresponding vehemence. But the heat, and the moisture, and the long, level stretches of flat prairie are all necessary for the Wheat. And it is in an atmosphere of Wheat that Winnipeggers live, move, and have their being.
74
CHAPTER VIII
MORE ABOUT WINNIPEG— A MANITOBA FARM
WINNIPEG, July 3rd
WINNIPEG reveals itself, if you stay in it for a few days, as a city of very considerable actualities, and very great possibilities. As a commercial, educational, governmental, and social centre it is a capital city that holds a distinct and unique place. Its wide streets are typical of the breadth of its notions. Winnipeggers have not the slightest doubt about their city. They have heard of New York and London, and they have some dim remembrance that there is a city called Tor- onto, and one called Montreal — also that on the west coast there are a couple of thriving communities that some people call cities. But, O pshaw ! People will do these things. But look around you. Ask some of the old fellows what this was twenty years ago. Very well, then. There you are. 75
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
I am disposed to be tolerant and respect- ful to this attitude as I walk down Main Street, with its banks and business blocks and stores, or board a street-car and ride to some of the pleasantest streets, boulevarded and with growing shade trees, whereon are the pleasant homes — each in its little garden or larger grounds — of the well-to-do. Well designed, comfortable, elegant houses of white brick or frame they are, for the most part. There are streets, too, where there are smaller homes ; down to the little three or four-roomed, white- painted, neatly-kept frame cottages, tempting to people of small means, and which are no doubt the adequate castles of many a thriving and worthy couple. There are six Baptist churches, ten Anglican, two Congregational, nine Methodist, nine Presbyterian, five Roman Catholic, five Lutheran, and seven " miscel- laneous"— half a hundred in all. What would you have in twenty-five years? There are colleges with grave and reverend doctors of divinity immersed in theology — the theologi- cal element has the upper hand in the colleges — and there are summer schools where bud- ding divines perspire over the problems of the Infinite. There are also alert and capable men of mathematics and science, a university with its separate building, a Normal school, a 76
A Vigorous Young City
collegiate school, and there is a medical col- lege that turns out, on the whole, a very good provincial sort of doctor, of whom some have the mark of intellect, and some the mere ox-like, sheep-brained determination to bluff their way through, in this differing no whit from medical men that are to be found in other parts of the world. The Government buildings on Broadway — which is a sort of Spadina Avenue, but has the queer effect of being nearer the sky — are several sizes less than those in Toronto, but they have all the parts and members proper to such places, and no lack of intelligent and approachable of- ficials. The chamber in- which the Provincial Legislature sits is comfortable and unpretend- ing. Everything seems a little newer than things down in Ontario, as of course it is, and one feels in Winnipeg as one does when going over the new menage of a young couple just setting up housekeeping, and with whom one is on familiar terms. " So this is your dining- room, and your drawing-room — very nice ; and your kitchen ? Yes. All the things look so spick and span, don't they ? Why, you have really everything ! What a dear little stove — a No. 8 ? Hot and cold water, of course. Why, there isn't a thing you haven't got. You might have been married for years ! " 77
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
But for a determination against giving any suspicious touch of the guide-book to these letters, I might enlarge on the law courts and drill-shed. Connected with the military out- fit of the city are two companies of dragoons, similar to those we have in Toronto, the QOth Regiment being the highly creditable volun- teer stand-by. The parks of the city would also deserve notice, especially River Park, to which full trains of street-cars — three or four coupled together — go every evening. The habit of street-car riding is as prevalent here as in Toronto.
Winnipeg is not a picturesque city — very few cities are. But, fortunately, Main Street is not quite straight, but bends about somewhat, fol- lowing faintly the bends of the Red River, which winds eastward of it. And in the even- ing the skyline of the various piles of building is by no means uninteresting from an artistic point of view. The other night I slipped down the street, on the corner of which the big post- office stands, and in a few moments found myself in the midst of unfinished surroundings of vacant land, where there were grass, and a tree or two, and stables, and small houses, with a few good blocks of commercial buildings — Winnipeg's waterfront and backyard. But there was a great view of a river as big as old 78
The Picturesque in Winnipeg
Father Thames, on the other side of which was a sparsely-inhabited region, showing much vacant land, and, in the distance, on the north- east, Ogilvie's flouring mills, which, they say, are the biggest in the world. It was the sort of view that is glorified by moonlight or the sunset sky. A railway runs along the river bank, which is twelve or fourteen feet above the water, and standing on this, the spacious- ness of the prospect is very striking. I wan- dered along southward till I came to a toll- bridge across the river, and from the middle of this the view was as picturesque as most things you can see in cities : the mass of the buildings and houses black along the river bank, the sky glorious with light and colour, and the great breadth of water reflecting it All it wanted was a barge or two with brown sails, but these you don't find here. The bridge ended at the French settlement of St. Boni- face, where is the Archbishop's house lying back from the road among trees ; the cathe- dral church, the St. Boniface Hospital, and the convent. About 2,000 French Canadians live here, and take Le Manitoba, the office of which is at the corner as you come off the bridge. The church is undergoing repairs, but about 150 labouring men knelt at their prayers in an area near the door, where there 79
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
were no scaffold poles, and the responses to the priest's rapid French sentences were like the wind among the trees. Then the bells chimed sweetly thrice, and thrice again, and the men came out and lit their pipes and walked home happily. At the corner, by the bridge, stood Pierre, who had been fishing, and from one of his hands hung a quivering four- teen-pound finny specimen, and from the other four or five of a pound and a half. There was about as much difference in the general look and atmosphere of the two sides of the river as it would be possible to get.
A MANITOBA FARM.
I have seen for myself a Manitoba farm, and stayed at it a couple of days. It was a good way from Winnipeg, and I had to drive six miles from the railway station across the prairie before I got to it, and the mosquitoes accompanied me every step of the way, and were decidedly affectionate. Even they did not prevent admiration of the glorious sky, under which the green spaces of these won- derfully fertile plains are stretched, diversified by " bluffs " of poplar and small bushes here and there. "That's the house," said my driver, when we were within about three miles of it. There was no possibility of mistake, as 80
Mosquitoes and Farm-yard " Smudges "
there was no other in sight. It resolved itself, ultimately, into a considerable group of farm buildings, and a decidedly comfortable house, with 480 acres of land about it, that now belongs to the once pioneer, now sub- stantial and settled farmer. Moreover, there was the small log shanty in which he and his wife had lived when first they came out to try their fortune on the prairie. In the adjacent farmyard were seventeen cows, which the farmer and his sons were milking. In the stables were ten or twelve horses, while in the barn some calves called loudly to be fed, and well-bred black pigs came round corners and squinted up at us with inquisitive eyes and interrogative grunts. The cows were standing contentedly amid the smoke of " smudges." To make a smudge you put down a little heap of dry wood, hay, or stubble, set it alight, and then cover it up with damp straw or manure. The cattle will crowd round these smudges with delight — they give them relief from their pesky little foes, the mosquitoes ; indeed, without the "smudges" milking would be difficult. As we had already partaken of our evening meal in a shack on the way, where two manly young farmers are taking the first steps towards independence, if not wealth, we 6 81
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
did not get to the farm in question until supper was over, and, in the wide kitchen we entered, everything was swept up and put away for the night. There was a great zinc- lined vat used for cheese-making, and a cheese-press, besides the ordinary kitchen utensils, and chairs and tables. The family stove, in which wood was burned, was in evi- dence, and looked as though it was kept going pretty fairly — for the Manitoba farmers' houses are houses of plenty. A stair led up to the boys' bedrooms above. Out of the kitchen opened a dining-room of comfortable dimensions, and from this you entered a good-sized sitting-room with a very handsome piano in it, on which the daughter of the house plays, while beyond this was a drawing-room that was quite modern in its elegant comfort and knick-knacks, and hung around with flower-pieces painted by the deft hand of the farmer's wife, who can turn from making a cheese to making a picture. At present, how- ever, she was at work at her sewing-machine. Soon, the farmer, looking hearty and strong, and with work-worn hands, came in and con- versed. The family are of Scottish origin, and the farmer and his wife came years ago from Ontario. They have worked hard and prospered ; have husbanded their resources, 82
Piety Allied with Industry
and been careful of expenditure. He has now two or three hundred acres of wheat that looks as though it were going to produce twenty-five bushels to the acre. Some of his land has not had the " breaking plough " put into it. He has his large patch of potatoes, his onion patch, his fertile, " careless-ordered " vegetable garden. There are enough trees about to take off any aspect of bareness, though from my bedroom window, before retiring, the moonlit prairie looked vast and unbroken. When you are living on it, how- ever, there is no sense of monotony. The fertile soil has a charm of its own — the mag- nificent stretch of overarching sky, the occasional clump of brushwood. They did not feel so cold on the prairie in winter, they said, as they did when they paid a winter visit to Toronto two years ago. They could keep the house quite warm ; they had a large furnace, and pipes all over the dwelling.
When it neared bedtime the wife brought the husband the " big ha' Bible," and he con- ducted family worship, reading with great expressiveness, and praying with a certain dignified simplicity and propriety of phrase reminiscent of the kirk services of by-gone days. In the life of these worthy people it was to be seen that their religion lifted them 83
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
above sordidness. They felt that the earth they cultivated was the Lord's, and the ful- ness thereof ; and the horizon of their prairie home was heaven. Hard work, courage and faith had been theirs ; they had followed Cromwell's advice to his soldiers, " Trust in God and keep your powder dry." The man, when he took up this agricultural life in Manitoba, was an expert carpenter, the wife a woman of energy and ability, gentle withal, and in the best sense well bred. They saved a little money and they have done well. There is room in Manitoba for people like these — of the right sort — to go and do likewise ; room for tens of thousands of them. The abundant stretches of fertile soil and the opportunities of living wholesome, independent and happy lives have not been over-estimated. But the land demands people of grit and sterling worth, and not unstable fools. As for oppor- tunities of education, the boys had done well at the neighbouring school, where, in a school- house of twenty feet square or thereabouts, a " clever young man " was doing his best towards nation-building, and one of the daughters was taking there her High School course.
They had very good water on the place 84
and Cons
from a five-inch tube well, 40 feet deep. The Provincial Government provides an expert with proper tackle for well-boring, the only charge being for the tubes and the fetching of the apparatus for driving them into the ground from the last place at which it was used. Ploughs and most other implements are worked with four horses each ; in fact, a man wants four horses at least to begin with, and if he has an extra one, so much the better. There are no apple-trees, but there are small fruits, some of them growing wild. Tomatoes do not, as a rule, ripen. Roots do well, but everybody goes in for as much wheat as he can grow, and has not much time to bother with root crops beyond those required for per- sonal use.
Per contra, there are the dry seasons, which mean a failure of the crop, and there are also the dangers of hail and frost If the crop is too good there is danger of it " lying down," so as to be difficult to cut. It costs $7.50 to put in and take off an acre of wheat, and last year the average crop did not produce more than $5 or $5.50 per acre, so many farmers went behind. This year it looks as if the crop would be worth $12.50 per acre. And, of course, thrifty people get their victuals off the 85
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
farm, somehow, what with poultry and one thing or another. Taken altogether, the chances are in favour of the Manitoba farmer. But he must be of the right sort, and if he has some money to begin with, so much the better.
86
CHAPTER IX THE PRAIRIES— CALGARY
CALGARY, July i5th
IT was half-past nine in the morning of the immortal and glorious twelfth of July when we pulled out of the Winnipeg station for a bout of prairie-crossing. . Here and there we had seen a ramping and decorated horse ; here and there an Orange decoration. When, however, we got past the advanced guard of scattered houses that Winnipeg is throwing out in all directions, we found the prairies de- fying the Day, and wearing green instead of orange. I suppose it is allowable to allude to prairies in the plural. In no other way can you arrive at any method of speaking about them to friends who have not seen them. If they are just ordinary persons, tell them to imagine the biggest plain they can — not any of your little plains, such as the Plains of Abraham (or if they have been to England, 87
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Salisbury Plain), but a real good big plain about the size of the Sahara, as we think of it, or that stretch of country that Moses looked over when he went up on Pisgah. Then, when they have got their imagination-focus good and definite, tell them to think of about nineteen of those spaces joined together, edge to edge. If they look incredulous, you are justified in assuming the attitude of meritori- ous veracity. Tell them to wait till they travel from Winnipeg to the purlieus of the Rockies — say, to this good town of Calgary from which I am writing — and they will ulti- mately confess, with the Queen of Sheba, that " the half was not told them." A few years ago a man wrote an article in one of the re- views— was it the Fortnightly ? — in which he spoke of the entire occupation of the whole area of this earth by its population, if the in- crease of that population went on at the pres- ent rate. He said that in 169 years there would be barely enough land to give each per- son two square feet. That writer could never have seen the boundless stretch of the prairies. Why, you could put all the cities you ever heard of on them, and they would hardly be within shouting distance of each other ! Well, the prairies were " wearing the green " with a vengeance ; it was the green of wheat, that 88
The C P. R. Dining-car
spread its multitudinous acres of promise in the sun, and made glad the heart of the ex- pectant farmer.
We got so hungry, looking at this over- powering area of bread in preparation, that the dining-car presented attractions, and the knife and fork symphony, played by a number of capable artists, was soon heard above the rattle of the train. 'Twas a hot day, but a prairie appetite is proverbial, or should be. The cooks and waiters of a dining-car always put me in mind of those performers who do things at theatres and circuses, or on tight- rope wires stretched across gorges. Now, playing a violin is attainable, with persever- ance, even by persons of limited powers, but when a man bends himself backwards into a letter O and plays " Home, Sweet Home " between his ankles, of course it brings down the house. Smoking a pipe is common enough, but he who can do it under water is a hero to the populace — for a minute. So is the tight-rope performer when he gets to the middle of the perilous wire, and with his little cooking-stove prepares an omelet. There is all that sort of thing and more about a C. P. R. dining-car, and it must be confessed that though the railroad has cost the country a million or two, it gives you good meals. I 89
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
always expect to hear the band start up slow music, with a little staccato picking at the string, when the smart linen-clothed, fat, clean- shaved little waiter makes his appearance, with six glasses of iced water, two napkins and a teaspoon in his bare hands, and deftly dabs the six tumblers in front of six people, and in a twink distributes said napkins and teaspoons in the place where they ought to go. Why don't they clap, as he does this so cleverly in the rocking forty-mile-an-hour car, when at the end of the performance he calmly draws a menu card from somewhere — in much the same manner as the circus performer draws the invisible hair from between his teeth at the end of a great act — and presents it with a polite bow to the sixth man ? Of course, he knows that he is an artist, but there is a calm and pious meritoriousness on his face that abjures conceit. Only on pictures of saints have I seen such a transcendent peace — that of him who has attained. A waiter that knows his business is better than a Prime Minister that doesn't. But there is more con- juring. It was reported some time ago that a famous " wizard " of the stage had shuffled off his mortal coil. But we may well believe that it was only a canard. They really keep him in C. P. R. trains, getting things out of hats. 90
The Guests and Waiters
He is up in that mysterious corner whence everything you ask for comes.
And besides the conjuring, which is great — for the quality of these magically-produced things is quite as good, and in fact a little bet- ter than those you buy in shops and cook in your stoves — there is so much to entertain that the band ought really to play. Why don't they strike up the intermezzo from " Caval- leria Rusticana," for instance, when the chic little French-woman — her voluminous hair also a thaumaturgical wonder, when you con- sider that it was done up in that style in the confined recesses of the ladies' toilet — comes prettily tottering in with her little girl, who speaks such entrancing broken English ? The waiter, with his hand on his heart, you can see, is promising eternal fidelity. There is the California lawyer, whose talk has been of the excellence of the hotels and railroads of his country for the last fifty miles, but who confesses that the roast meat is "elegant." There is the amazingly adipose man to whom any more eating at all for the term of his natural life would seem to be a superfluity. There is the young child of thirteen, travel- ling alone, in care of the conductor, on whose pure, young sweet face is the expressed hope that she is behaving just as her mother would 91
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
like to see her. There is the very old lady, all in her best blacks, in whom patience has worked experience, and experience hope. A fine old face she has, and the waiter knows she is the old mother of somebody and attends to her as if she were his own, to her simple gratitude and gratification, nor is there a man in the car who isn't pleased that the prairie air has given her " quite an appetite." There is the Cabinet Minister and his daughters, who are quite enfamille at one of the larger tables. Outside, the everlasting prairie on which Nature is spreading her table abundantly for millions. Inside, the naperies, the glass, the silver and cutlery, and the victuals of Art, with human nature to study into the bargain. The band ought really to play.
I was reminded as I looked out of the win- dow at the perpetual prairie, of that ridiculous old chestnut of a conundrum : " If you were at the theatre, and the curtain drew up and revealed a wooden horse, what ancient Grecian place would it remind you of?" Answer, " Delos " (deal 'oss). " And now the curtain is let down, and is drawn up again, and there is no change in the stage properties — now what ancient place?" Answer, " Samos" (same 'oss). Readers will excuse the doddering old joke, but there seemed to be a good deal of 92
The Boundless Prairie
" Samos " about the prairie. I fell asleep try- ing to discover some difference between one mile and another. My subconsciousness told me that I was sure to see it looking exactly the same when I woke again. In the smok- ing-car we tried to talk the prairie out, like they talk a bill out in the House of Commons, and though we had the Minister to help us it did not come to much. The Californian made a speech on California, sixty-five miles long, and we agreed that everything in that State was taller and bigger round than anywhere else. Yet, when we looked out, there was the prairie. We saw that we had got pretty well past the wheat, though." The Minister made a series of speeches in answer to leading ques- tions, and never said anything that would make half a line of political copy — so you can tell what length they would be, especially as in answer to the last question he confessed himself a great admirer of Mr. Gladstone. Yet at the end there was the prairie, the same everlasting expanse of dull green, stretching to the horizon, with just a little shading of yellows and browns here and there. The doc- tor made a longish speech on " Specialism in the Profession, its Aims and Ends." I fancy he had been giving it at some convention. Yet there was the prairie. If it had not been for 93
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
a hypochondriac who began telling us about his symptoms, like a patent medicine testi- monial, it's my belief we should be there now. He had not got to the end of his first chapter, when we all said simultaneously, " There's a coyote ! " — pointing so vigorously at it with one accord that we nearly broke the glass, let alone half-killing the dogified-looking mongrel with fright. We settled down now to hear more symptoms with an eager interest that rather flattered the hypo., and it was not long before we had a snapshot at a " bunch " of cattle. The Minister said, " Ah, now we are getting to the grazing country," and the effort to extract some political significance from the remark took us twenty miles. But we settled that statesmanship wasn't " in it " with symp- toms, and turning on our friend again, he not only got us a pair of antelope scouring over the plain, but any number of little " prairie dogs " or gophers, and at last a ranch all set out for the opening of a week's starring, with real cowboys, all the accessories, and a herd of cattle that the Californian immediately de- clared worth $30,000, and he was ready to take ten to one on it. And with the ingratitude of human nature, though we had crossed the previous part of the prairie, we forgot all about the kind symptomatic friend who had tided 94
In the Ranching Country
us over it. He went away soon, and I am afraid had more symptoms.
As for ourselves, we began to revel in " bunches " of cattle and " bunches " of horses as though they were bunches of radishes. A man came in with a kodak, and said, " You had not to wait an hour now before you could get anything to take." He shot six ranches and an Indian " dugout " habitation in succes- sion, and then, after dipping into various light literature, we went to bed. And as if to punish us for our ingratitude to old Symp- toms, as we dubbed him, when we woke there was the prairie again ! It was a little browner, a little more undulating, but it was there. We had come into a zone of utter loneliness. So we settled down to a practical considera- tion of the essentials of happiness in a popu- lation of one-tenth of a person to the square mile. Of course, we had passed towns on the way, some of them of considerable preten- sions, and at which I mean to get out on my way back and apologize for not mentioning them before. But what we were studying was prairie, and we did it thoroughly. I should mention that before we went to bed, as already mentioned, the evening had ended with the grandest sunset it was ever my privi- lege to see — a splendid riot of rose colour and 95
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
crimsons, and grays and light greens and blues, that made one wish to cow-punch the Californian when he barely conceded that it was " elegant."
At last, late in the evening, we came to Cal- gary. We had been steadily climbing, for whereas Winnipeg's altitude is but 700 feet above the sea, Calgary's is 3,388. And it is the most attractive little city, for many reasons, that I have seen in Canada. There is an in- describable Western freshness and freedom about its people, and its situation is exquisite, lying in a spacious valley as it does, with the beautiful fast-running Bow River winding on one side of it. Then one sees Indians about — Blackfeet and Sarceys — in their picturesque attitudes, and with their often striking coun- tenances, their free, moccasined gait. And there are cowboys, too, and ranchers, the former riding their wiry little ponies with the inevitable cowboy sixty-dollar saddle — lariat rope at their side — the latter (many of them) Englishmen of good family, who have the delightful but indescribable air of well-bred men. And there are gentlewomen who look nice and talk with an English accent. There is an absence of boastfulness, an utter and complete dearth of "blow." The men talk horse honestly day in and day out. They 96
Calgary and the Rockies
may well do it now, for Colonel Dent is here, attended by his clever vet., buying horses for the British army. He is a typical English officer, a gentleman from his boots up, and as the last time he was here he left $30,000 be- hind him, his visit naturally awakens interest. Calgary itself is well built — there is capital building stone within a few stone's-throw, and lumber mills that turn out timber. The air of the place makes young again the elderly, and the child as merry as the kidling of the hills. There are shops where you can buy anything you have a right to have.
I confess that I was excited to learn that the far-famed and often-dreamed-of Rockies could be glimpsed from this place, and it was not long before I climbed one of the hillsides that surrounded the city and looked over to the west. There, far-off, sixty or eighty miles away, they lay in all their cloud-like splendour, their snowy peaks dazzling white, an inspir- ing image of everlasting steadfastness. They were defined with blue shadows and glittering white, and their peaks and shoulders form the skyline between that quarter of the horizon that lies between due west and due south. When one has not seen mountains for a long time, there is something in the first sight of them that is very overpowering, yet that fills 7 97
From the Great Lakes to the "Wide West
the soul with a quiet peace. In the presence of the immovable majesty of those solemn heights — distant, yet awful — one ceases to speak. The triviality of speech and of most other mortal things is too apparent t6 allow of anything but silence.
Of all the towns I have seen on my west- ward progress, Calgary has an honoured place in my recollections. It is a thriving, pleasant place — a city, by the way, now, by legislative enactment. As excellent building stone is to be found very near to it, this material is em- ployed in many of the edifices with great advantage, though it is found that its quality is not suitable for the salt air of the coast towns. As a ranching and farming centre Calgary has many attractions, and the most decided " Old Country " atmosphere I have yet " struck." There are numbers of pleasant residences, excellent stores, pretty women and manly men. The bronzed rancher, wearing a cowboy hat, roomy riding breeches and leather leggings, is in constant evidence on the streets or at hotel tables, and proves on further acquaintance to be a fine gentlemanly fellow. The picturesque Indian and his squaw canter by on their hardy little ponies, the latter invariably riding man-fashion like her spouse, and using, like him, a cowboy saddle. As a rule the aborigines conduct 98
The North-West Mounted Police
themselves very well on their reserves, but when they go out of the straight path of rectitude it is the duty of the " N. W. M. P." to bring them back again. I visited the ex- tensive barracks of the Mounted Police, which are at the east end of Calgary. The white buildings and grounds occupy a considerable number of acres, and there is quite a Govern- ment look about them, all of them being airy, rather bare, and kept scrupulously clean. About fifty-eight men are stationed here, and their horses are kept in capital condition. To see a detachment of them riding out or com- ing in, clothed as they are in khaki and wearing broad-brimmed hats, puts one in mind of what one has read of South African experiences. More than one of these men had been out to the war, and I saw a Boer rifle and a sword that had been brought back from South Africa. A good reading-room and an excellent billiard-table are among the accompaniments of the place, and the men are uncommonly bright fellows, who look very military in their full-dress scarlet tunics and smart forage-caps tilted at the proper soldierly angle over one ear. They show here not only a considerable outfit of field-waggons, which are used for carrying men and supplies to field outposts, but the two field-guns which were used in the 1885 rebellion. 99
CHAPTER X EDMONTON AND THE NORTH COUNTRY
EDMONTON, ALTA., July aist IF one may believe what he sees on station platforms and hears in railway cars, there is a considerable influx of settlers from the Western United States toward the Canadian North- West. A number of these were on the train on which I travelled from Calgary north, on Saturday, a distance of about two hundred miles. They talked of their affairs with a free- dom that was very informing. It is the first requisite of a settler that he be an egotist, and that his affairs shall appear to be the most important things in the world. This inclines him to give you every particular about them, and when he gets started he doesn't stop short at a trifle. I begged one man to remember that I myself was not asking him about his birth, his parentage, his early days, his courtship and marriage, his wife's merits and defects, and the way he was bringing up his children. He 100
Homes of the Pioneers
said if I would excuse him he would keep on — he liked to tell the whole story — he did not always have a chance. And he was a good talker and had notions about things that did credit to his long cogitations about them as he drove the long furrow hour after hour on- his South Dakota farm. Not often had he such a chance of unburdening himself to an impartial listener. He blew off upon me the accumulated thought of years, and his talk was an accompaniment that enabled me to understand the life upon these boundless fertile prairies, to which settlers are always coming in bravely with their savings, their oddments of stock, and their tremendous determination to make themselves a home. That white dot three miles off is a settler's shack that he has built of boards, and the small excrescences near it are the beginnings of his farm build- ings. A mile away on one side of it is an- other shack, and there is positively nothing else in sight on the vast green stretch of the prairie but these two human habitations, ex- cept a few cattle. Not a tree diversifies the prospect But there is rich virgin soil, and if the settlers plough it and sow it, it yields an immediate crop. They have not the prelim- inary toil of clearing, and there is the " town " within a few miles also — a beginning — con-
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
sisting of a dozen board houses and a store or two, built courageously in the middle of the lonely prairie. There is Bill who is not more than a mile off, and Tom who is not more than two. Above all, there is the rail- way, as an available avenue with the world of business and humanity.
But as you get more north the country im- proves, and you have trees and occasional water, and greater variety, a land indeed of considerable beauty and charm. The soil, moreover, is of the best description. In places it looks very much like England, and if you leave the railway and drive ten miles or so you will come to a well-settled and happy-looking neighbourhood. This country to the north of Calgary is being opened up by a very desirable class of settlers. There are perhaps a dozen stations between Calgary and Ed- monton, and nearly every one of them is the centre of the trade of the neighbourhood and contains the general store and the inevitable agricultural implement agency. You start on a long, slow, miscellaneous worm of a train whose eye is its headlight, and the parasites of which are not only people, but cattle. It rubs these off here and there, and sometimes de- taches a joint of its tail bodily. The daily train is the link with existence. In the even- 102
Edmonton on the Saskatchewan
ing people come down to the platform to see it come in. You wait long enough sometimes to become acquainted with the people of the settlement. We left Calgary at about 1.30 in the afternoon and reached Edmonton at three o'clock Sunday morning ; that is, we reached Strathcona, the terminus of the rail- way. We still had three miles to go, and this was accomplished behind a team of the gamest horses any man might wish to drive. Seven or eight of us mounted one of the rigs of the district to which these honest horses were harnessed, and we soon had cause to be thankful that our driver was an experienced and able whip. Edmonton was on the other side of the gorge of the Saskatchewan. This we had to descend by a steep incline, to cross the river by a suspension bridge, and to climb the two-hundred-foot ascent on the other side. Moreover, the road was of the " dirt " descrip- tion and there had been frequent rains. It was not getting through one Slough of De- spond— there were scores of them. Rapid change of level on the part of the occupants of the vehicle was inseparable from this sort of road. At one time you were apologizing to your neighbour for sitting on the top of him, and at another three or four were sitting on you without apologizing. I never knew 103
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
before how far a rig will topple without going over. On either side were the solemn woods, seen dimly in the faintly-breaking dawn. At last we came to the descent, and our driver clapped on the brake, and we prayed that nothing might snap. Then a long bridge across the rapid river, and after that the tre- mendous climb, during which the horses had to stop three times and breathe, and only the good little brake kept us from going over the river bank backwards. Edmonton, electric- lighted, with its two thousand inhabitants (in their beds) was at the top, and we found a surprisingly good hotel and went to bed by daylight. A handbill in the rotunda an- nounces that a weekly stage for Athabaska Landing leaves every Tuesday morning at eight o'clock and reaches its destination at six o'clock on Wednesday evening. We are at the jumping-off place for the Yukon, and there are advertisements of miners' stores.
Edmonton is one of the many instances of towns in north-western Canada the origin of which is to be traced to the existence of Hud- son's Bay Company trading-posts. A fort and trading establishment were placed here by that enterprising organization about a hundred years ago. I went to see the substantial, old- fashioned buildings. They occupy a command- 104
Packing-box Architecture
ing and romantic site on the west bank of the Saskatchewan Riyer, a mile and a half from the centre of the town. Let it be confessed that the architecture of these new Western towns — and I need make no invidious com- parisons, for with very few exceptions they are all " much of a muchness " — is principally governed, in the main streets, by commercial considerations and by the exigencies of neces- sity. On the way from Calgary to Edmonton you can see, at one or other of the score of stations that intervene, the whole process of town-building. The unit, the primal cell — the germ, as it were — is the store, and the store, in most instances, is simply a magnified packing- box. A man sends a few carloads of lumber to a township site, gets hold of a carpenter, and the big packing-box for commodities is built. Nowhere is the adventurous spirit of trade more manifest. A few oblong holes are punched in for windows in the upstairs department, and of course there are the large store-win- dows below. Something in the way of nice architecture might be done with the gable end of the roof, but the merchant likes to have the front boarding carried up square and high to hide the roof; in fact, he likes it ugly. A plain boarded parallelogram, reaching seven or eight feet above the ridge, strikes him as 105
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
about the thing. You can't see the roof then ; in fact, you would not know there was a roof. What could be better? The spirit of com- petition soon attracts another merchant, and we may be very sure that he will make an effort to outdo the first man in ugly utility. He will, perhaps, have no apertures or break of any kind in the vast square of boarding above his store windows. By and by people build houses to live in, and an hotel ; and naturally the same conditions prevail. The packing-box style of architecture is established for the buildings of the early years of every settlement. The people would consider it a waste of money to employ an architect, and the packing-box style of architecture needs none. The object is to get a place to store goods, or to live in, that will cost as little as possible ; and it must be owned that there is but little native appreciation of beauty in the colonizing Anglo-Saxon. The trail of " Early Commercial " is over all these new towns, and it takes scores of years before they appre- ciate Early English or any other more beautiful style of building. Even the Doukhobors build better than your prosaic and pushing Anglo- Saxon, whose imaginative soul and shrewd intelligence are set on dollars to the exclusion of everything else, and who thinks nothing 106
A Hudson's Bay Post
of desecrating a beautiful landscape with the most detestably ugly buildings that can pos- sibly be erected. Thereby much bad taste is nurtured among children, and necessarily prosaic lives are made still more prosaic and featureless. When the people in these towns " get up " a little, they travel, see better build- ings, and by degrees a better style of archi- tecture creeps in. They begin to acquire what are called " residential streets," and the pack- ing-box architecture gives place to something much more tolerable, so that you may see both at Edmonton and Calgary, notably in the latter place, buildings of most satisfactory and pleasing design.
But this is a digression. I was saying that at the ancient trading-post of the Hudson's Bay Company at Edmonton, you are away from the modernity of the new town, and are conscious of a certain atmosphere of historical romance. From the front of the massive whitewashed buildings, which have more than once been attacked by hostile foes, you have a fine prospect of river and woodland and fertile plains, stretching away to the blue distance. The Saskatchewan runs in a deep gorge below you, and on the farther bank there is a diver- sity of outline and foliage that is very delight- ful. But I don't suppose the Hudson's Bay 107
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
people used to think much of the beauty of the scenery in the midst of which their trad- ing-post happened to be situated. Their eyes were set on " the main chance " rather too in- tently for that When the Indian came for a sack of flour, they stood his gun upright and made him pile skins up to its muzzle from the ground, as the price of it. Well, of course, it had taken considerable trouble and expense to get the flour there, and there was no com- petition.
The fur trade is still pursued at Edmonton, and on the main street one sees more than one sign on which is painted in legible letters, " Furs bought here for cash." Bears are to be seen occasionally within a few miles of the town, and it was not long ago that a Galician farmer of the neighbourhood, seeing a cub roaming near his stock, fetched his gun and fired at it. Thereupon its mother appeared and ran at him viciously, open-mouthed, and wishful to tear his vitals. The man, having powder but no more slugs, felt that a Gali- cian's house is his castle, and retiring therein barricaded himself as well as he could. Till the day broke the she-bear clawed all over the place in the endeavour to get at him. But the daylight enabled the farmer to find a couple more slugs, with which he despatched his 1 08
The Trade in Furs
assailant, afterwards coming up to Edmonton triumphantly with her skin and that of the cub for sale. Only the other day a bear was seen by a townsman prowling around his backyard, though it decamped with rapidity, warned apparently by the increasing daylight and by the noise the Edmontonian made in opening his backdoor, that the environment was unsuitable for an animal of its type. If you go forty or fifty miles north or north-west you may " load for b'ar " with reasonable hope of bagging a specimen. Other fur-bearing animals are correspondingly numerous, and many a Mooswa and his companions roam in the vast wilderness. >
I went into the principal fur warehouse — that of MacDougall & Secord — and saw heaps of furs just as they are brought in by the half- breeds and Indians and traders, or collected at the branch trading-posts which the larger firms have established in various parts of the country. There were skins of beaver and bear, of fox and wolf and coon, the smaller skins folded up inside-out, looking stiff and flat just as they had come out of the packs in which they had been brought over the long trail from the forest. Hanging up by them- selves were two fine skins which I was told were silver fox, and which were worth $100 109
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
apiece. The ordinary yellow fox skins are worth $3 or $4. It was in this place that the famous silver fox skin was sold a year or two ago — unrivalled in the history of the fur trade — that brought the extraordinary price of $1,740. It was the only one of its kind to be had in the world, and someone who had a good deal of money wanted it.
These heaps of furs give evidence enough of the constant warfare that is carried on against the wild animals of the forest ; the stealthy creep of the hunter, and the long watch and careful machinations of the trapper. To the north lies a vast wild country of forest and wilderness, which, in the opinion of traders, will always remain so, and will con- tinue to produce a sufficient quantity of the precious pelts. In reckoning, therefore, the resources of Canada, it is plain that there is the primitive forest to be accounted for as well as that which produces lumber, and, in addition to the wealth of the mine, the fishery and the field. We have electricity and rail- roads, and educational centres, but still on the fringes of our half-continent are to be found those who carry on one of the pursuits of primal man. We say, " How d'ye do ? " to Edison on one side of our territory, and shake hands with Adam on the other. The
The Galician Settlers
great zoologic world still for the most part holds good, though we have exterminated the buffalo. No doubt those skins I saw in the fur warehouse were about the same in quality as those with which our first parent clothed himself when he was driven from the Garden of Eden, and I suppose that one reason of the survival of the fur trade is the fact that the quality of the commodity is kept up, a condi- tion that is not always observed in manufac- tured goods, our ingenious workers being always on the hunt for further methods of adulterating their product without being found out.
THE GALICIAN SETTLERS.
I heard a good deal of talk about the Galicians, of whom there is a settlement of some eight or ten thousand not far from Edmonton, but as the weather was very much unsettled and rainy while I was there I had no chance of visiting them. They are said to make very good farmers, and they are extra good workers, "far better than the Douks," said more than one. They seem likely to conform to Canadian conditions, and to be a valuable addition to our tribe of settlers. They speedily discard their sheepskins and other distinctive clothing, and wish to be
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
" allee samee as Clanadian man," as Jack Chinaman says. Especially is this the case with the girls, many of whom are in domestic service in Edmonton, and whose taste for the millinery and dry-goods of the Far West is undoubted. They are usually shorter and of heavier build than our slim Canadian girls, and such is their desire to assimilate with their new surroundings that they may even soon hold the conviction that typewriting and the business college are the chief end of woman. At present, however, they afford a valued solution of the problem that is a familiar one to every householder — that which is presented by the difficulty of getting goddesses for the kitchen. Meanwhile, the question of who will get hold of the Galician vote is one that is exercising some minds. The Roman Catholic archbishop has, I under- stand, put forward the claim that as they were associated with that Church in Europe, they naturally come under his jurisdiction, although they had not entirely thrown off their hereditary connection with the Ortho- dox Greek Church. The majority of the Galicians appear, however, to think that their exodus to this new free country should enable them to revive their ancient allegiance to the Greek Church as it is in Russia. But they
A Government Grant
are, to a great extent, ignorant and super- stitious, and therefore little fitted to fight their battle of theological freedom. Already there is trouble over a Government grant of forty acres for church purposes, of which a good deal will no doubt be heard in the immediate future.
CHAPTER XI
THE SPLENDID PANORAMA OF THE ROCKIES
FIELD, B.C., July 3151
THE comfortable and daring C. P. R. hotel at Banff, perched high up on the side of a lofty mountain, in the midst of the greatest grandeurs and beauties to be found in Canada, is essentially a pleasure and recreation place. Not there do you meet, unless he is on a holi- day, the industrious drummer or the pushing business man " with a scheme on." The only business at Banff is to enjoy one's self, to recreate, to loaf in the sunshine and worship nature. You sit at dinner in style, and eat your fried chicken a la Maryland to the " March El Capitan " or a " Fantaisie from Der Freischutz," played by the Melrose Trio — three clever young ladies who are great on the piano, the violin, and the seductive 'cello. You look out on the mountains from any or every window, and are only fetched back 114
The Banff C P. R. Hotel
from a reverie by an American female at your table ordering green tea. The hotel is in a measure unique. I have spoken of it as dar- ing, and so it is — a piece of good engineer- ing as to its foundations, and of ingenious architecture as to its construction. Light stained and varnished pine is in evidence in its spacious and comfortable interior. Succes- sive galleries overtop one another in the octagonal rotunda, so that you can come out of your bedroom and gaze down at the company assembled there " from all lands," as the rail- way prospectus says. Not only is good music played at dinner, but there is a charming little instrumental concert in the evening by the three ladies aforesaid. There is nothing that takes the hotelishness off an hotel like nice music. Under its influence the young begin to sentimentalize and the elderly to be retrospective. Another atmosphere is created and a new note is given to the surroundings. You are introduced to the mountains gradu- ally, as you are able to bear it. Not with a too precipitate haste does the railroad usher you into the presence-chamber of these king- like majesties. We had been looking at them from afar, at Calgary, for days, and had been awed by their calm and regal nobility. True, they were miles and miles away, a mere "5
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
dream, sometimes, of snow-capped peaks and purple shadows. Not less were they the one august thing in the surroundings of the new and thriving western town. And now we had boarded the "Limited" in the hot evening sunshine, and should not leave it again till we had been taken right into the heart of the Rockies. At first our way lay through the rounded " foot-hills " that circumferentiate Calgary, and ever nearer us was the busy talk- ing Bow River that was to be our companion till we got to Banff, and after. Now, the Bow River has its origin in the mountains, and is fed by their everlasting snows and myriad trick- ling streams. Fancy transformed its voices into those of a crowded procession of pilgrims returning from the wondrous region, and talking about what they had seen. There were the voices of old and young, of gentle and 'simple, the prophetic and prosaic, the roar of the undistinguished voices of the multitude. But all were in accord as to the greatness of the mountains. I caught that of an old man, who was sententiously quoting Scripture as the only thing that could properly express his feelings on the occasion ; while near him marched one who was by no means Scrip- tural in his objurgatory remarks on the general effect of the Rockies upon his feel-
116
The Dream-chorus of a Crowd
ings. Still another said, "You bet your bottom dollar they're great." An Imperialist, with a very emphatic tone of utterance, said that "nothing but the British Empire could have produced such mountains," and the ever- present witling said they had made him feel " decidedly rocky," and called for a " B. and S." Then a bold promontory came between us and the river, and I could hear the voices no longer. But soon afterwards that procession wound about and in and out so much that we heard it again and again at intervals like the " chorus of five hundred voices " coming in en masse at an oratorio. " They are ! " they shouted ; " they are ! " — which under the cir- cumstances and at the moment seemed very satisfactory, although of the nature of a dream. It may be that it is the property and attribute of all great things in nature to seem like a dream, whether the vastness of mountains or the widespread wonder of the tossing sea, or the colour of a purple moorland at sunset when the orb of day grows crimson and hides in the foliage of a few lonely trees. So now it seemed like a dream when the gray and rugged top of one of the mountains rose in its distant height and serenity above the rounded green of the foot-hills, and when, a few moments afterwards, we came round a curve and saw 117
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
the Great Ones for the first time, in all their grandeur, from purple base to snow-streaked summit, and stretching up to them the fring- ing growth of silent and dark-coloured pines. By this time the brilliant sunlight which had accompanied us and burnished every blade of grass and flower and leaf of the land- scape, and in which insects had gaily flut- tered and gambolled, was dying down, and as we went along, the rocky heights were painted in divine purples and grays, sometimes ap- pearing as undefined purplish-gray back- grounds for multitudinous pines, and again, for the moment, sharply defined in every feature of their abrupt complexity by the rays of the sinking sun. From now onwards for fifty miles we had a series of the most inspiring pictures, which, though no two of them were alike, retained the main features of mountains, pines, river and foreground. In fact, so great is the variety in this Alpine district of 763,000 square miles, that you might almost think that a competent artist who had spent some time here and imbibed the spirit of the moun- tains might safely go home and paint any picture of the kind that his fancy dictated, assured that somewhere in this region he would find the scene he had depicted. You begin to feel the unmitigated vastness of it all US
A Paradise for Painters
very soon after you come into the enchanted area of eternal steadfastness. The unalterable immobility and repose of it ; the consciousness that no march of science or feat of puny man can ever by any possibility change it ; that it will remain until the next cosmic cataclysm just as it is now ; that it can never be " util- ized," even by the most pushing and purseful of stock companies, consequently that it is an inheritance for mankind till mankind is wiped off the earth — these are some of the ideas that come into one's head when the train stops at a wayside station and you look up through the fresh, cool mountain air to the summits of the great peaks.
And yet these are not the biggest of the mountains. They are some of the ordinary, every-day, don't-care-a-cent mountains, with- out even a name. Subjects for the painter abound without stint, and the whole Ontario Society of Artists and Royal Canadian Academy might be turned loose here without treading on each other's toes. Nor need the pictures produced have too much sameness about them. There is endless variety of form and mood, and even our best painters of this part of the Dominion will be the first to con- fess that there is an ideal that has at present eluded them. Yet only the painter can give 119
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
anything like a due impression of them. I respect the photographer's art, but it falls lamentably short. To those who have seen the mouri'tains, photographs reproduce to a faint extent their vivid impressions, but, some- how, they do not give you the far-away gran- deur, the sublime height and distance, the eltisive dream-like splendour of the reality.
I have said that there is great variety of scene. Now and again we come to places where life seems to be almost extinct, and from the track to the summit all is unmitigated rockiness, the whitened stems of blasted trees looking drearier than if there were no organic remains at all. They seem like the abodes of the despairing lost. Yet in a few minutes you come, perhaps, to a scene of beauty where the river widens to a glassy lake, marged by lush grass, among which grow gayest flowers ; while mirrored in the water the graceful pines stand in lovely masses, or pose apart like beauties conscious of their charms. The trees clothe part of the mountain with verdure, and above the belt of vegetation towers the snow- capped height. Through a variety of pictures like this we came at last to Banff, and saw the electric lights of the hotel twinkling on the mountain side, two miles from the station. At this hotel, which is a wonder of art and
120
THE C. P. R. HOTEL, BANFF
Dignitaries and Millionaires Galore
invention in the wilderness, growing like an air-fern up at that considerable height, without any root or soil, as it were, you can have everything that you can expect at a mountain resort of the first class. There is also hot sulphurous water gushing from the earth for hypochondriacs to drink, and for the halt, lame, and withered to bathe in — well, the baths are really very nice for anybody, whether needing brimstone or not. In this lovely place you find Church and State digni- taries on their holidays, and American million- aires and their wives, some of whom are very plain people, and tell the story of how they became rich with much naivet^ disowning the idea of their possessing any special faculty (in which the hearer is disposed to agree with them) ; and confessing also that they don't know what to do with their money now they've got it, which seems also easily understandable. For the present they are going to every place they ever heard of, irrespective of expense or distance, and not much enjoying it either. And you can walk out or drive out, and make intimate acquaintance with the mountains, *>., as intimate as they will allow, and wander by the Bow River, whose translucent sea-green flows over white stones and makes you rave as to its colour. And ever rising high into the
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
blue sky are the serene snow-capped peaks, from which the snow is melting in little run- nels— at least, they look like little runnels. They are in reality good-sized streams, but they are so many thousand feet up in the air that they look little. And very near the hotel are the Bow River Falls, which in every way are most satisfactory — a tumbling snow- white mass of foaming water going down a noble gorge, regardless of appearances and altogether reckless. There is so much of it, and it roars so loudly and shows such over- mastering power, that it fills the demands of the imagination and you sit and look at the wonder with placid awe. The delightful air ; the pleasant roads cut for miles along the mountain sides ; the balsamic odour of pines in sunshine ; the peeps into the quiet mossy woods ; the gorgeous colour of the mountain ranges in varying states of the atmosphere, and the accompanying murmur of the Bow River — all these things, that look so common- place in print, are there in their bewitching reality. One could not help thinking how it had all been there for ages before the railway came. You have a sense of loneliness now, if you get a mile or two from the hotel ; but what must it have been a bare thirty or forty years ago, when for months not a human foot trod
122
Christening the Mountain Peaks
these stony solitudes ? And you know per- fectly well that there are hundreds of square miles of this lone territory that are unvisited still. The great railway is a mere thread running through a vast district where grandeur towers over grandeur, and where only the bear or the mountain goat know the way.
Of course, people have named a number of these mountains, and the extraordinary satis- faction it gives to a certain class of tourists to know that they are named, and to be able to point them out, is highly amusing. That seems to be about everything they want. Guide- book in hand, they sit looking out of the win- dow, and dispute as to which is Mount Field and which Mount Stephen. They will talk for miles about it, and when they have settled the point to their satisfaction, they are con- tent. That at any rate is something settled and done with. A mountain without a name is, in their eyes, hardly respectable. It is like a child found on a doorstep, and wants taking to the police department. It must be con- fessed that the self-constituted authorities have not been backward in supplying the pressing needs of these people. For one thing, there is nothing to prevent you or me from christen- ing them over again to our liking. As a rule, they were named hastily by over-enthusiastic 123
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
people, who assumed a right to which they had no claim ; and though these names are down on maps, we may still please our fancy by studying the appropriate in a private nomenclature of our own. Naming one of these grand mountains after any living person seems utterly ridiculous when you are looking at the mighty and everlasting masses. One is inclined to break the silence with irreverent laughter as one gazes. In truth, Alpine climbers and engineers and geologists should be restrained. So should astronomers. It was all very well to name planets after the good old mythological deities, but they are actually calling stars after Dick, Tom and Harry, which is surely the ne plus ultra of commonplace vulgarity.
The journey from Banff to Field in the observation car by moonlight gave us a con- tinuous panorama of mountain beauty. When the train had gone on round the shoulder of one of the castellated heights — it was a quarter past one a.m. — and left us in the middle of that small valley, solitary on the railway plat- form, and we looked up at the mysterious masses that rose high on all sides, and heard the ghostly river that pours through it ever murmuring, we felt like a little child that has been left in a strange place by its mother. 124
The Sleeping-car by the River
There was no room in the hotel, so the porter put us into a sleeping-car on a siding. We were the only occupant of this familiar vehicle, and could have slept in a dozen beds consecu- tively. As it was, however, we contented our- selves with summoning on to the rear platform those of our friends who we felt must have travelled on that car in days gone by, before it was relegated to be an appanage and auxiliary to the C. P. R. hotel.
So, united in spirit, we watched the moon sink out of sight behind the mountain, and shadow and hush creep over all mortal things. But still through the darkness came the muffled murmur of the turbid river.
125
CHAPTER XII
MOUNTAINS, AND AGAIN MOUNTAINS
VANCOUVER, August 9th YOU find mountain-climbers at Field, and are disposed at first to join with the jog-trot- ting critics who undervalue these youths
" . . . who bear through snow and ice, A banner with the strange device, Excelsior ! "
Strange, indeed ! quoth you. And some of them are not youths. The intelligent and mannerly lady-manager of the hotel tells you that Mr. Whymper has been gone over the mountains with his guides four whole days. Mr. Whymper can be a callow youth no longer — think of the number of years you have read of him in the Illustrated London News ! And this elderly professor, too, from a United States university, who is going about the veranda on crutches — palpably impro- vised by the village carpenter, which rustic 126
Some Typical Mountain-climbers
artisan must have exalted ideas of the quantity of cubic feet of lumber in the supports neces- sary to hold up a man of learning. You hear he has dislocated his ankle in the act of moun- tain-climbing, because the enthusiasm of the moment overcame him, and he disregarded the warnings and advice of his Swiss guide. And here are four men — one of them very fat, so that if his companions were beneath him on the ascent they might well cry, " Beware the awful avalanche ! " Why should these sober and industrious citizens, engaged usually in stocks and railways and other Wall Street things, thus court death ? Why should they receive their natty boots- from the hands of the guide, with soles perfectly encrusted with hobnails of abnormal size by the village shoe- maker, and begin to put. them on with glee, as if they were the magic slippers of legend ? Why should they depart whistling with an- ticipatory joy ? You take note of the gentle- man's crutches again, as they lean against the wall, for he has sat down in a reclining-chair. Are you going to place yourself in the way of circumstances like those ? No, quoth you ; not if you know it.
And then after a while you saunter across the bridge over the river to the foot of the mountain opposite, and you see a path — a 127
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
straight and narrow path. What is there in a path ? Of course, a path — a mere path — is all right, and that is the sort of path you have been always taught you should walk in. It is a pretty path. It leads, apparently, through arboreal shade, and the sun is hot. You walk therein. The path ascends a little ; that is natural at the foot of a mountain, where you don't expect anything to be exactly on a level. There are pines and an undergrowth of bram- ble and various foliage ; flowers also bloom there. Looking right and left, admiring and enjoying, you come to a turn. Well, it is per- haps a little steeper than the path you first entered. How soft and pine-needly it is. So quiet, too — nothing but the murmur of the river and the song of an occasional mosquito. And there is a quick rustle among the dry leaves of the undergrowth. What was that, a squirrel or a fox ? A bird flies out suddenly. The path turns again. It is a little steeper ; well, for certain this is not the facile path to Avernus, and no healthy man but likes an occasional effort. And suddenly you leave it, and catch hold of roots and stems of under- brush, and plant your feet on smallish boulders here and there. And now you come to a place where a new trail has evidently been made with picks and axes. Here a great 128
A Charge up Canadian Kopjes
pine tree has been felled, and there a fallen one has been yanked out of the way ; farther on a ten-ton boulder has been skirted. Are we to despise efforts like these ? What are trails made for but to travel in ? And where does this particular trail lead to ? There can be no harm in going on just a little farther. These are the pines of mossy eld. Who would have thought that these trees on the mountain side were so large? Bearded they are and festooned with creepers and moss and tangled growth of all kinds. The path grows palpa- bly steeper, and you pant a little. Oh, well, " in for a penny, in for a pound " ; water can't run up hill, but you can. -How awful it must have been charging up those kopjes ! They must have been about as steep as this. You will try how it is to charge up hill. The Boers are at the top, and you fancy you have your rifle in your hand. Now then, Charge ! And up you go with a rush, shouting insanely an improvised war-whoop that would have fright- ened a Cronje.
You can tell just how it was now, and you sit down to think -about it. A sedentary pos- ture is favourable to thinking. Why, here is a break in the foliage ! Who would have thought you had got up so far ? The hotel looks quite small down there, but everything 9 «9
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
is well defined. There is the professor sitting as you left him, and there are his crutches leaning against the wall. Wonder where it was he fell ; there is nothing dangerous here. Of course, if you lost your balance and fell down among those boulders it might be awkward, but who would think of doing that ? You begin to fancy you have a native instinct for mountain climbing. Strange, these natural gifts — perhaps a survival. Fol- lowing the association of ideas, you get up, unconsciously, and begin to climb. The primal ape climbed. Did he climb moun- tains ? You " reckon " he climbed anything he came up against. Rather handy to be an ape. An ape would be handy at a mountain, even with his feet. How naturally you catch hold of those roots and things ! You don't think about it, you just "nacherally ketch holt." Darwin was a trump. You can see the very same thing in babies. They always " ketch holt " — saw an essay about it some- where ; doctor had tried experiments ; baby an hour old caught hold of his finger like a monkey. Wanted to climb. Unnatural, in fact, not to want to climb.
You wonder why Longfellow said, " Beware the pine tree's withered branch." Hereabout are numerous pine trees' withered branches, 130
The Zfe-zag Mountain Trail
and there is nothing in them to beware of. He only brought it in, you presume, to rhyme with " avalanche." You wonder how that fat man is getting on. Meanwhile you are climb- ing in earnest, like a modern ape anxious to prove the truth of the Darwinian theory. Hello ! here is the trail again, and lo, another opening through the branches of these imme- morial pines. Far, far below you is the hotel now. The professor sitting on the veranda is a mere dot. The hotel itself is just a toy- house ; you could put three or four of it into a fair-sized Noah's ark ; an ordinary baby would have it all broken up to flinders in a minute or two. And -the great mountain opposite is actually leaning over to you — it almost overhangs you — its height seems even more august than from the valley. While you are gazing you hear the distant murmur of falling water, and you hasten up the trail. You are reckless now. You gaze down through the tangle of trees, through flecks of sunlight and purple shadows. Gaps occur through which you see the tops of hundred- foot pines below you, and ever upward leads the trail, winding, zig-zagging past obstacles. You get nearer and nearer to the falling water, and at last behold the mountain stream tum- bling, jumping, bounding over boulders, and
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
foaming and sparkling right across your path. Somebody has left a tomato-can on a boulder, and with the instincts of a tramp you seize it and drink, and you can tell by the taste of the water that it is melted snow from the heights above you. There are stepping-stones for you to cross the stream by, and having drunk of the enchanted draught you are naturally enchanted, and crutches or no crutches, dislo- cations or broken limbs defied, you are going on. You do lunatic Boer rushes ; you imitate your very earliest primeval ancestor — the one that used to play dibstones with live trilobites in the intervals between the acts of his Excel- sior business. You sometimes wish that there was a captive balloon in a convenient place above you, and a rope that you could take hold of. Where there is a perceptible trail, of course you use it, and there are generally marks where someone has slipped down and got up again, and there is always a root, or the stem of a young tree, or a bunch of grass to lay hold of. You get very near to mother earth, and kneel sometimes as though you were popping the question to her, and some- times you sit, panting and breathless, as though she had met you with her everlasting " No." She does so meet you after a time, even when you have scrabbled and grovelled to her, going 132
Alps, Pyrenees and Himalayas Combined
not only on your knees, but on all fours. You have left the trees behind you and come to bare rocks and soil without much depth, sparse in herbage ; and the path is scarcely worth calling a path — it is a mere occasional mark showing where others have scrabbled before you. At last these cease, and you come to an impassable face of rock, down a cleft in which falls the water that feeds the tumbling stream below. You are among the mountains, where the ages lie buried beneath miles of monu- mental stone, a region of distance, height and immensity. You know that above that wall of rock lie the deep drifts of everlasting snow, and if you could you would scale it.
After all, Swiss guides and climbing appa- ratus have their uses. You wish that you had them at hand now, and you know very well that if you had them you would not be content till you stood on the highest peak of this mountain, the climbing of which you were previously disposed to pooh-pooh. Time and space would fail me were I to attempt to tell all the wonders of these Canadian Alps, these Pyrenees of the Dominion, these Him- alayas of the land of the Maple Leaf. No- body knows all these mountains, and there is room for an army of explorers upon them. What with the Ottertail Range, and the
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Selkirks, and Mount Sir Donald, and Kick- ing Horse Pass and the Great Glacier, and heights, and depths, and torrents, you get bewildered. It is too hurried a proceeding to attempt to " do " them in a few days. I should like to go with a small well-appointed expedition and see some of those far-off lonely heights, and hunt the bear and big- horn that are frequent among their forests.
A drive of six miles from Field brings you to Emerald Lake, with its attendant peak of volcanic rock sticking sharply up into the blue above the solemn pines. There are few places where you may feel more absolutely at rest and removed from the dust and grind of life. Another still more beautiful piece of water is Lake Louise, where from the ver- anda of the Chalet hotel you look out on a picture of lake and mountain beauty that you are inclined to feel is quite unsurpassed in your experience.
Between Field and Revelstoke the gran- deurs of the mountains become almost oppres- sive in their sublimity. " The Great Glacier of the Selkirks — a vast plateau of gleaming ice extending as far as the eye can reach, is as large, it is said, as all those of Switzerland combined ; the ice-field of which the Great Glacier is one of a number of outlets, embrac-
Mountains You Pass in the Night
ing more than two hundred square miles." The railroad that climbs up and down and swings itself over chasms and creeps along perilous ledges is altogether too speedy. Your stock of adjectives runs out. You look up and see a massive height towering in granitic strength to the skies, and you say, " What, after all, is puny man ? " Then you rattle over some daring bridge across a- deep gorge, and are constrained to say that man is a very wonderful being, indeed. Darkness comes on and you seek your berth ; but when morning breaks and you look out of window, there, still, are the mountains. By and by, when you have passed through scores of miles of mountains you transfer your admiration from man in general to the engineers who so successfully carried the great railway through. Not till they have been westward along it can Canadians be said to know their Canada.
You see mountains with everlasting snow upon them here and there until you reach the coast, but there are also some very delightful lakes, and all about this region the fishing and hunting is very good. You hear lots of true fish stories and much talk of caribou, so that would-be Nimrods should pack up and pre- pare to come here at once. You begin also to meet mine prospectors on the train, for you
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
are approaching the land of gold. They tell of places they have seen on the mountains where game is so plentiful that they got tired of eating it, and longed to change venison, partridges and grouse for the usual city fare. Passing Revelstoke, the centre of much poten- tial mineral wealth, you come to three or four beautiful lakes in succession, and presently to the great Shuswap Lake, where for fifty miles the line skirts the bending shores. Then for many a league you begin to think that British Columbia is a place of sand. Big sandhills covered with dryish-looking grass, which you learn is bunch grass, and good for cattle, form the outlook on both sides and rather tire you, they look so dry, and are only relieved by the Thompson River, which begins to keep you company. Yet there are numerous ranches, and when you come to the thriving little town of Kamloops, beautifully situated on its lake, you see a lot of cattle being shipped west.
136
CHAPTER XIII KAMLOOPS AND VANCOUVER
VANCOUVER, B.C., August i5th I SPENT a day or two at Kamloops with a good deal of pleasure, though the hotels are by no means of a palatial quality. The town is beautifully situated on its lake in what is called the " dry belt," and it is a valued resort for those who are suffering from pulmonary affections. Perhaps it is from being in the dry belt that a well-developed thirst seems to be easily evolved there by some of its inhabi- tants. The town is the centre of a very prosperous ranching country, and a large number of Chinese are employed. I met there a man who told me that no one engaged in agricultural operations who had made the experiment of Chinese labour ever went back to white employees. Chinese labourers, he said, were always to be depended upon to go on with the work they were set to do, whether their employer's eye was upon them or not ;
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
while in all the operations of the farm their performance was so superior to that of the ordinary hired man as to leave no choice between them. Some of the Chinamen in Kamloops are decidedly well off. There is a populous Chinese end to the town, and the Mongolian settlement is under the domina- tion and control of a Tyee, who is a very important person indeed. I saw this portly man, and he has quite the air of mastery about him, and a rollicking, independent gait, very different to the curious shuffle of the rank and file of his countrymen of the in- dustrial class. He was the only Chinaman in Kamloops towards whom I felt any an- tipathy. The rest of them seemed to be such straightforward, amiable and satisfactory little fellows, that one did not wonder at the encomiums one had heard from the before- mentioned agriculturist.
Anything will grow in Kamloops if you supply it with water ; and I saw gardens and flowers there that were the very acme of luxuriant growth and colour. The town is built on both sides of a long street, down the middle of which the C. P. R. runs, but when passing through this thoroughfare the speed is limited to four miles an hour. There is a very nice little club here, at which I was 138
Speeding the Parting Guest
obligingly " put up " by one of the members, and which, for its size, has a remarkably com- plete collection of current newspapers and literature. When I was leaving this hos- pitable place I took advantage of the passing of the train slowly down the central street to board it while it was moving, as going to the railway station would have involved a walk which the hot weather made one deprecate. The only thing that made me doubt the safety of performing this feat on that hot, sunny morning, was the fact that I had three considerable pieces of baggage and an um- brella. But four of the thirsty habitues of the hotel were so anxious to do something meritorious and kindly that I had no diffi- culty. "You get on the train, boss, and we'll see to your things." And taking each an article of my impedimenta, they stationed themselves at intervals of half a dozen yards immediately beside the track. So that when I had boarded the train it was easy to suc- cessively receive the various items of my baggage. The only embarrassing thing about it was that each of them, after giving me the respective thing he had the care of, insisted on shaking hands with me and wishing me a pleasant journey ; but the experience on the whole was such a pleasing one that I could
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
not refrain from leaning out from the side of the train and waving persistent farewells to my row of kindly helpers.
After you leave Kamloops you come to the most God-forsaken-looking place of desola- tion— the Black Canyon. Treeless, arid, des- ert-like, it would take the pen of a Dante to fitly characterize its dour gloom. Hurry on, train, and bring us to the Eraser Canyon, with its wild rocks, its trees, its unparalleled gran- deur. The river swirls far beneath you through great masses of fallen rock, and every turn of the line shows you fresh beauty, for you are coming to the big British Columbia pines, to more luxuriant foliage, to a wealth of wild flowers, to richer vegetation of all kinds. The air is softer and more balmy, and you begin to see moss on the roofs of the cottages as you used to see it in the Old Country years ago. At length Mount Baker rears his snow- covered head on the left, and keeps you com- pany nearly all the way to Vancouver. His snows grow pink in the sunset glow, and on your right mysterious dark-blue, shadowy mountains are rising. Between you and them is placid water — the inlet from the Pacific. The train slips along rapidly and soon you are at the important and spacious Vancouver sta- tion, and, afterwards, at what your friends tell 140
The Problem of the Mongolian
you is the " best Canadian hotel west of Mont- real." You are inclined to believe it as one of the numerous Jap bellboys takes your bag- gage and conducts you through elevator and roomy corridors to a perfectly appointed and metropolitan-looking apartment.
Two of the things that strike the visitor to Vancouver are the exceeding beauty of its situation, in which land and water are com- bined in delightful proportion, and also the number of Chinese and Japs to be seen every- where. I do not see exactly what the British Columbians would do without the Chinese. A householder in Vancouver said : " For us it is either having Chinamen as servants, or hand- ing our wives and daughters over to drudgery. We cannot get girls, and if we could get them they would not stay with us." Consequently you find them as domestics in the houses you go to ; they are on hand in the hotels, and you see them peddling fruit and vegetables in the streets.
Vancouver is a charming city, and it has the makings in it of a great western emporium of trade. It is laid out on big lines. Its port, where the vessels from India, China, Japan and Australasia come in, is a scene of vivid interest, situated as it is on a splendid deep- water harbour that seems meant by nature to 141
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
be one of the principal trading localities of the world. Its business streets and street-cars are up-to-date, and business blocks and banks are visible on every hand. The snow-capped mountains on the other side of Burrard Inlet afford a background to the outlook that gives it an element of grandeur and dignity. They look down on a city of homes. Far away into the suburbs spread the streets of neat and attractive wooden houses, the great propor- tion of which are of most satisfactory design, while flowers and shrubs flourish everywhere. Close to the city is Stanley Park, nine miles round, which is a beautiful piece of the prim- eval forest, where you can see in all their glory the gigantic trees of British Columbia. Im- mense pine trees and cedars rise in columnar beauty, and underneath is every variety of tangled brushwood — ferns, moss, and what- ever goes to fill up woodland scenery. I measured one big cedar : it was forty-seven feet round, or about sixteen feet through, while trees of ten feet or twelve feet diameter are common, and they rise to mighty heights. There is a solemn silence in this woodland, and few bird-voices. Only an occasional caw from a crow breaks the stillness, and you have the feeling that nature is waiting for some- thing that is going to happen. You walk a 142
A Complacent Population
little way and gaze out over the sea, and look- ing back you see the avenues of the forest full of purple shadows and sun-gilded haze. There is a nobility and majesty about the scene that calms and exalts the mind.
The people are hospitable, democratic and good-natured. They believe in their province and think it the only place worth living in. At English Bay, where there is a fine bathing beach, and which is within a quarter of an hour's street-car ride of the centre of the city, you see numbers of them in the beautiful sea water, of all ages and both sexes, enjoying themselves with great freedom, and as happy as a school of porpoises. When they exchange the element for terra firma they are none the less disposed to make the best of their bless- ings. One of the minor ones is that their city is not on a dead level, but exhibits a pleasing diversity of grade, so that everywhere you can get views of sea and mountains by walking an inconsiderable distance. A greater is their soft Pacific climate that is never very cold and never very hot, and it is only in the winter that the soft fine rain becomes, perhaps, a little too persistent.
CHAPTER XIV SALMON- CANNING
IT is at the salmon canneries on the Eraser River that you see the greatest number of Chinamen at work. The date of my visit synchronized with the great annual rush of the fish from the sea up the river to deposit their spawn in the flowing water that has had the chill taken off it by the hot summer sun- shine. Helter-skelter, crowding together with an eagerness to obey natural law which is as cosmic as the daily rising and shining of the great luminary on the soft Pacific waves, they come with a rush. This, also, is the fourth year since the last specially enormous catch, and consequently I have the oppor- tunity of seeing the salmon fishery at the height of its activity. For this great harvest of the sea varies in its abundance. Next year the salmon will be fewer. The following
year's rush will be less — the next still less. 144
The Drive to Steveston Canneries
Four years from now will come again the " great multitude of fishes," bigger than that which " brake " Simon Peter's net. On these recurring fourth years it is impossible to cast the net on the wrong side of the ship. This season there are really more fish than the canneries can handle, and there is salmon going a-begging.
We drove seventeen miles to Steveston to see the canning. There are twenty-nine canneries at this queer town of plank streets, wooden houses and big canneries that strag- gle all along the river-front. It is alive and kicking for two or three months in the year — the rest of the time it sleeps, and the visitor then wanders through deserted thoroughfares and shut-up canneries. Our drive took us over the half-mile bridge that spans " False Creek," one of the waterways of Vancouver, and through miles of fire-swept bush, where the ruins of enormous pines stick up black- ened into the sunshine. Below all is brush and flowers ; a wilderness of green and pink, with the pink predominating in masses, for there is a pink flower that grows luxuriantly everywhere. Then we came to more long bridges over sea inlets, and to a region of fertile farms, off which a big hay harvest had just been reaped ; and at last, over a mile 10 145
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
and a half of the straightest and dustiest road it was ever my lot to travel, to the long straggling Steveston canneries. All the way it had been tolerably dusty, for when Van- couver and its neighbourhood are dry they go in for drought with a vengeance ; but that last piece of the drive was so dusty that when, owing to the superiority of your horseflesh, you passed any vehicle on the road, you felt that the language of the occupants was justifi- able. We gave orders that the horse should be put through the whole menu card at the feed-stables, and, having taken a mild snack ourselves — salmon was " off," by the way, but what could you expect ? — we sauntered to the canneries through odd streets where there were boats on dry ground here and there, and by back ways where we met Indian women and a fishy smell. The canneries are great sheds opening on one side on the river ; and going into their semi-darkness out of the sunshine we became conscious of the perform- ance of a great provision industry by the agency of blue-bloused, sallow Chinamen of all ages. First, however, let us walk to the river front, where the boats are coming in with their cargoes of fish. Soon we are look- ing out on the bright-glancing, drab water — for the Fraser is turbid. There are many 146
Salmon-fishing; Calls up Memories
sailboats — sixteen or eighteen Feet long, per- haps ; broadish in the beam, strongly built. They go out into the river, and from them nets are cast, into the meshes of which the eager fish rush and are caught by the gills. The principal work this year seems to be taking the fish out of the nets and knocking them on the head to stop tail-wagging. It would be a great place for an amateur sports- man to come to who likes to take home a full creel. He wouldn't have to go to the fish- monger's at all. The greatest fool of a fisher- man could get any number. Look at these boats waiting to discharge their cargo — there is a big cart-load in each of them ! You could load fish and dump it as Elias Rogers & Company's carts do coal in Toronto. I call to mind that salmon-fishing was the favourite recreation of John Bright and Millais, and think of the " Tribune of the People," the day, perhaps, after he had made a great speech at Manchester, plying his deft rod in the brown and sparkling waters of some Scotch river ; the artistic and sentient hand that had been raised to emphasize a point of oratory throwing the line with deli- cate skill, while Millais a little lower down the stream was enjoying both the scenery and the fishing. Well, that was recreation — this
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
is business ; there is no delicate handling necessary here — it is just shovelling up salmon out of Nature's abundant tank. Twelve and a half cents each the men get for their fish. A moment or two ago at the hotel you had seen one of them give the landlord $250 to take care of for him. He said he had earned it during the previous week.
We turn to the interior of the cannery, and find ourselves standing by a great heap of salmon. The heap is about forty feet long and ten wide. There may be ten or fifteen thousand salmon there. Flanking this is a long, wet, fishmongery-looking bench, at which a solemn old Chinaman is at work with a big sharp knife. It is rather wet and slippery everywhere, so that you walk carefully, and there is such an amphibious atmosphere about that you might expect to meet a mermaid. A fateful young Jap in rubber boots digs a hook into a fish and lays it on the bench. He has performed this process so often that a row of fish is lying there side by side. His job is to take care that the old Alice Knifee shall always have one to his hand. Alice Knifee is clever with that knife. He is an artist. It is the supreme peculiarity of the Chinese worker in any department that he does not " hustle." The man or the woman 148
The Clever Chinese Fish Carver
who " hustles " is not civilized. The Chinese brings to any task he has to do just the amount of nervous energy and muscular exertion required, and no more. Watch a Chinaman going down the street He doesn't hurry. The uncivilized barbarian rushes, pants, hustles, wastes nervous force " by the jugful." He wants everybody to do the same. Per- haps the Chinese did three or four thousand years ago. But watch Alice Knifee. Is it by magic that the fish's head comes off with a clean cut ; then his tail ; then his big back fin, and his side fins? The head is pitched through a hole in the board that fronts Alice Knifee, the tail through" another, the body through a third. Facing the old master of the knife, on the other side of the board, is a long tank of water, and here a dozen Indian squaws stand cleaning the fish — for Indian women clean salmon by immemorial instinct. Chinese labourers are perpetually carrying the cleaned fish to a most ingenious machine, that goes by power, and saws the salmon up into lengths just the height of the ordinary salmon tin. It is entertaining to watch the thin circular saws, gauged to the proper distance apart, on an axle, cut up the fish into short lengths, and roll it down a shoot. A score of China- men and Japs are packing these short lengths 149
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
of salmon into cans ; rolling the red fish into cylindrical form, and jamming it into the receptacles with much art. The cans are then weighed, and if they do not contain the pre- scribed quantity, more fish is jabbed in. These full cans are then carried in trays to another most ingenious machine, into one part of which they are fed, while into another part a supply of can-tops is kept going. The machine puts the tops on the cans ; that is, it pushes them on tight. If one of them misses getting its cover, a Chinaman or a Jap seizes a top and pushes it on by hand. Still, however, they require soldering. For this another clever arrangement is put into requisition, whereby a succession of cans roll down an incline. They roll a-tilt, on the circular edge of their tops, the cylindrical portion of the can being at an angle of forty-five degrees. They also roll through a thin stream of molten solder, which is kept hot by fires underneath it. Before they start to roll they pass under dropping acid (technically known as "fake") which acts as a flux for the solder. They emerge with their tops soldered on air-tight. Then they are placed in a boiling vat for an hour and ten minutes. On coming from this ordeal a small hole is pierced in the top of each can, which allows of the escape of the 150
The Consoling Power of Opium
imprisoned steam and moisture. This hole is immediately soldered up again and the packing is complete. When the cans are cold they will be japanned, labelled, and packed in cases.
There is a strange fascination about this haunt of industry — this assemblage of con- tinuously working Celestials and Japs and stolid, broad-faced Indian women. There is no chatter ; you scarcely hear a word spoken from the time you go in till you come out, for strict attention to business is characteristic of these Mongolian workers and their confreres. But here and there, leaning up against a bench, is a well-worn tin opium pipe. It is about two feet long and an inch in diameter. An inch or two from the bottom is the small bowl where the fragment of charcoal is placed, and the top of the long light cylinder is formed into a mouthpiece. While we stand looking at it a young sallow -faced Chinaman comes up to " hit the pipe." He ignites the char- coal with a match and takes a rapid pull or two to get it into a state of incandescence. Then he drops upon it a tiny bit of opium, enough to get three or four whiffs out of. He takes the whiffs — a little less quickly than the inspirations to get the charcoal hot, but the whole performance does not take much
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
more than a minute — and goes back to his monotonous work with a look of peace and satisfaction on his face. He will go on for a couple of hours, and then " hit the pipe " again.
Many of the first fish that come up the river are veritable " whoppers," some of them reach- ing sixty pounds in weight. They are called " spring salmon," and the impression prevails that the canners can these for their own priv- ate consumption and their purple-and-fine- linen friends. The great supply for the can- neries, however, is the tribe of " sockeyes," fish of ten pounds to fourteen pounds in weight, red in the flesh, and good in quality. After the sockeyes come the "humpbacks" — the late comers, who have been " humping them- selves " so vigorously to get there at all that they are like so many Richard III.'s, or like the average male young of the bicyclist. Last come the " echoes," an utterly plebeian fish who has scarcely the cheek to call himself a salmon, his flesh is so pale in colour ; a mere blush of shame at his place in the fish world removes him from utter whiteness. They don't can him — they can't. Some fish they can and some they can't, because importing Britishers would say they were not getting salmon at all. Yet everybody says that 152
Wonderful Resources of British Columbia
echoes are all right in their way, and perfectly good eating. It was lamentable to see the great overplus of salmon at the canneries this year. I saw heaps of fish that were refused by the canners simply because they had a greater supply than they could pack. If there had been anybody on hand with salt and barrels he could have sent off carload after carload of good sound salmon, which he could have purchased at five cents apiece. At pres- ent large quantities of fish have to be thrown away or used as manure. The abundant catch of this year means much to Vancouver. It is so much wealth cast up by the sea into the outstretched hands of these British Col- umbia workers.
Of the wonderful resources of this province it is impossible to speak in measured lan- guage. Its mineral, forest and fishery wealth is beyond calculation, and the British Col- umbians are tantalized by the slowness with which capital comes in to take advantage of them. The surface of the wealth only has been scratched, and it still awaits the hand of the capitalist and developer. Like other parts of Canada, British Columbia has suf- fered from the rapacity of the shark ex- ploiter and the conscienceless greed of the prospectus maker. There has been a flock of 153
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
the immoral people who want to be rich in ten minutes without working, and the sad in- fection of the epidemic that these people suffer from is visible everywhere. Many of the British Columbians appear to me to live, as it were, on tip-toe. They are expecting to make a lucky strike somehow. They find it difficult to settle down into that calm indus- trial activity by which alone a great province like this can be built up.
154
CHAPTER XV
VANCOUVER— SAW-MILLS AND THE ASSAY OFFICE
VANCOUVER, August 23rd A " COON " song that is occasionally sung here by the hilarious on their way home of a night may be taken as interpreting the feel- ings of a good many men who have come to British Columbia with the view of making their fortunes. Its absurd refrain is :
" My dear Lucy Jane, you done t'rowed me down, Oh, what have I done that is wrong? "
The bewilderment of the darkey lover at the tantrums of his sweetheart is not greater than that of these adventurers at their present for- lorn condition. The idea that people who have never been able to do anything at home will certainly fall on their feet if they go abroad, is responsible for the presence in British Columbia of a number of nice fellows whose only fault is that, while they are ready
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
to do anything in general, they never learned to do anything in particular. They don't know " what they have done that is wrong," and they never will know. They ought to have got rich in the land of gold, but they haven't. Their parents were well off; they never learned to dig, and to beg they are ashamed. With the manners and cultured voice of the well-bred, they live a life that is akin to the tramp's. They learn to bear with philosophy a certain amount of doubt as to where their next meal is to come from. When they get a remittance from home they are temporarily happy, and with the feeling of having a little money in their pockets their hopes revive, and an Eldorado dances once more before their eyes. But the mirage soon fades, and the uncertainty as to dinner again becomes a factor in their lives. Like the darkey lover they are continually being " t'rown down," and the process will go on to the end of the chapter. And they are, unfor- tunately, of no manner of use in advancing British Columbia.
Of little more value to the Province, in a business point of view, are the English gentle- folk whose incomes were too small for home expenditure, and who consequently have transported themselves and their effects here. 156
Mawkish Sentiments about Miners
They are everything to be desired socially, and they give a tone to local circles that other- wise they would not possess. But, as assist- ants to the progress of British Columbia, their value is almost nil. True, their money is spent here, and they live a more or less vege- tating sort of life. But they rather help than restrain an idea that is too prevalent here, viz., that to get rich without working is the chief end of life.
A land out of whose hills you may dig gold always attracts a number of greedy men who dislike work and yet are anxious to have the rewards of a laborious life. The miner has, in my humble opinion, been needlessly glori- fied. As a rule, he is no hero, but a sordid individual of low aims and shocking manners, whose occasional and spasmodic generous im- pulses have received an altogether unnecessary and too gushing apotheosis from mawkish writers. I am speaking, of course, of the heterogeneous army of roughs that is always mobilized by the discovery of gold, and that must always be distinguished from the genu- ine labourers, who are much more respectable, and who are the true backbone of the country. Why a loafer and a tough, who has been gal- vanized into temporary industry by the hope of getting rich in a week, should be wept over
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
because he occasionally shuts off the torrent of his drunken profanity in order that he may weep a tear or two over his dead mother, or lift a little child over a mud-puddle, I have never been able to understand. The world has, very sanely, got tired of sentimental stories of this class, which were surely written for the sort of people who take flowers to con- demned murderers, and have a morbid fancy for lurid and abandoned convicts. But there are plenty of men in British Columbia of whom such tales might be written still, were the market for such trash not already glutted. Also, there are the Micawbers of all sorts and classes, every one of whom expects to make a pot of money suddenly out of something or other. They wait with a patience that is usually moistened by frequent drinks. The commercial salvation of British Columbia will, however, be wrought neither by cultured nor vulgar loafers, but by the earnest business men who understand the magnificent resources of their province, and are steadily working away at their development. The froth and fever of speculation, which seem to be the inevitable accompaniment of mineral riches, will be clarified and transformed into steady energy, and British capital, which has been frightened away by the misguided efforts of 158
The Stately Douglas Fir
rapacious fools, may yet be employed in the development of what is, perhaps, the richest part of the Dominion. Meanwhile, it is inter- esting to observe the instances in which legiti- mate industrial activity is being exhibited.
I visited this afternoon the Hastings saw- mill, a busy hive of work, which is differenti- ated from similar enterprises in the East by the great size of the lumber that is handled. The Douglas fir — Oregon pine, it used to be called — is one of the possessions of British Col- umbia. It grows to an immense height and girth, and as you see the enormous logs that have been rafted down from the woods and now lie on the waters of'Burrard Inlet, on the bank of which the mill stands, you cannot help comparing them with those you have seen at the great saw-mills at Ottawa and other places. There are logs here 140 feet long and three or four feet in diameter. When I en- tered the immensely large saw-mill, which I suppose covers more ground than the Union Station, Toronto, with all its appurtenances, the men were handling a log 1 10 feet long and about three feet in diameter, that must have weighed many tons. It lay upon a frame that comprised a number of transverse girders, with a screw arrangement worked by power, that was capable of giving it a lateral movement,
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
while the whole frame could be made to travel on wheels in a longitudinal direction so as to bring the log up to the saws. These were cir- cular, very large in diameter, and two in num- ber, one being placed exactly over the other and a little in advance of it, and revolving at immense speed by means of leather belts of astonishing dimensions. The mere weight of the log seemed to be enough to keep it steady on the frame, and it was rapidly moved forward and a slab taken off its round side in a very short space of time. The clear surface of sound timber thus exposed was a wonder to behold, when, very rapidly, the travelling frame came back to the starting point. Not a knot or imperfection was to be seen in the entire length. By means of power apparatus the log was then pushed laterally and turned over on to the flat side thus made. It fell over with a bang that shook the building and gave full evidence of its enormous weight. Again and again it was made to walk up to the saws, and in a few minutes it was made into planks for scow-building, ninety-five feet long and twenty-two inches by five inches. Practical men will appreciate these figures, and if they could see the timber they would recognize its splendid and unique quality. I asked Mr. Beecher, one of the managers of the 1 60
The Supply of British Columbia Pine
mill — a nephew of Henry Ward Beecher, by the way — how long the tree had been grow- ing, to which he replied "about 300 years."
" And are there plenty of similar trees where that came from ? " I asked. " Yes," he replied, " there are all we want at present, though, of course, the number is limited." Well, I looked out on the water where about a square mile of big logs lay floating, close to- gether, and thought of the immense forests of this Douglas fir I had seen from the railway for hundreds of miles, and felt that my guide need not have been quite so cautious. Of course, he was thinking of the specially enormous logs. Of ordinary logs that in the East would be considered immense there is practically an unlimited supply, and the world need not stand still at present for British Columbia fir. I walked out to the dock where a fine four-masted brig was being loaded for San Francisco. Exclamatory ex- pressions of all kinds were called for by the tremendous cargo of really beautiful lumber they were loading her with. That magnificent harbour, the finest in the world, four or five miles wide, lay before me sparkling in the sun, and beyond it rose the glorious mountains — snow-streaked at their summits — which give to the situation of Vancouver such a unique u 161
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
charm. Away down eastward, less than a mile off, lay the great sugar refinery, which is an- other important enterprise of this city, while to the westward was one of the Australian steamers taking in the last of her cargo and preparing for another voyage to the Southern Seas. • One could not help feeling that this wonderful young city, stretching out to the Orient and to Australasia on the one hand, and vitally linked with Eastern Canada on the other, must in the course of years develop into a port that will be indispensable not only to Canada but to the Empire. Vancouver cannot help but grow and flourish, and every circling year will see additions to her trade and population that will ultimately make her the Liverpool of the West.
In other parts of this great mill all sorts of lumber were being manipulated, much of the labour employed being Japanese. The Japs are short, immensely strong, sturdy and quick. Some were chopping pine for household use at a chopping machine — hardwood is not used in this country. Others were taking boards away from planing machines. Some were bundling up laths. The only disadvantages about Jap labour are that they speak no Eng- lish, for the most part, and that in the summer they are disposed to run away to the canneries, 162
Japanese and Chinese Labour
where they make large wages for a few months. I conversed with the proprietor of a brickyard about 50 miles north of Vancouver, who told me that he employed Japs almost exclusively, and found them highly satisfac- tory with the before-noted exceptions. He said that when you gave an order to a Jap you were never quite certain whether he un- derstood it, and that when he tried to com- municate anything, you were never quite sure as to what he meant ; also, that a little know- ledge of the Jap language was worse than none at all, as it frequently led the ambitious linguist into sad pitfalls. You hear very con- trary opinions expressed as to Japanese and Chinese labour. One man will tell you that in British Columbia they cannot do without the Chinese, but that the Japs ought to be kept out, as they are ambitious and pushing, and will endeavour to supplant the whites in any avenue of trade or commerce to which they are admitted. Another man will say, " Keep out the Chinese and give us plenty of Japs. Japs afford the best solution of the cheap labour problem, and cheap labour we must have." So that you have to look round and form your own opinions, which will pro- bably be that both Japs and Chinese are abso- lutely necessary at the present time to the 163
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
development of British Columbia, and that they will be kept out at about the same time as the Eraser River begins to flow backward toward its source. Besides, no missionary operations can be quite so good as the free admission of them to our borders in order that they may see the effect of that religion on ourselves which our missionaries are desirous of proclaiming to them in their own land.
There are five large steam-engines at the Hastings mill, and any amount of steam to work them. " It is no object to us to save steam," said the manager, " we want to burn our sawdust." The sawdust, therefore, is dribbled into the furnaces of fourteen 24-foot x 5-foot boilers by automatic machinery, and nothing but sawdust is burned. They don't bother with cut-offs or condensers. All they want to do is to get rid of their overplus of steam, so their engines go slogging away at 140 revolutions a minute, which, with 2-foot cylinders, will do a lot of work. The engineer told me they had 1,3 50 horse-power. And all this without a single stoker, for the boilers worked themselves, and only needed the cast of an eye round the corner about twice an hour to see that the sawdust was dribbling on to the incandescent mass below properly. No clinkers to get out !
164
The Dominion Assay Office
I saw some clinkers at the next place I went to, though ; at least, they would pass for clink- ers. They were bits of slag the " chief melter " at the Dominion Assay Office knocked off a gold brick he had been casting. The Do- minion Government cannot be accused of ex- travagance in the " Assay Office of the Do- minion of Canada " they have started in Van- couver. The whole outfit is characterized by a cautious tentativeness. Some business pre- mises have been acquired next door to an auctioneer's, and as they are not particularly suitable to the requirements of an assay office, they have been " altered to suit the conveni- ence of tenants." But the area of the ground floor is only about half as large as is required for anything like the business that the Assay Office will do, and to any one who is familiar with similar establishments in the Old Coun- try the arrangements seem rather inadequate. The miner coming in from the country up north with his nuggets and gold-dust might be in doubt whether to have it assayed or to auction it off at the mart which is so closely adjacent. On entering the shop door you find a space reserved for the public, which is divided off from the office and melting-room by a strong iron grille, through which the per- son bringing gold to be assayed can see it 165
From the Great Lakes to the "Wide "West
weighed and transferred to a tin box. He can also watch the entire operation of melting it down in one of the two gas furnaces available, which are worked with a forced draught operated by means of an electric motor. In the small melting-room a good deal of gold has already being melted. There is no doubt that it was a capital idea to start the Assay Office in Vancouver, and miners and others from the Yukon are now bringing their gold here instead of taking it down to Seattle as they did formerly. Mr. McCaffery, the super- intendent, kindly showed me a great brick of gold, weighing 693 oz., which tested even his muscularity to bring it from the safe and deposit it on the counter before me — inside the grille, of course. It looked about as yellow as brass, and might have passed for the meaner metal. When the gold is thus cast into a brick two opposite corners are chipped off it, and the assayers go to work upon it and de- termine its value. This particular brick was worth between $16 and $17 per ounce, and its value would therefore verge on $11,000. I also saw a small brick from Edmonton, which looked a good deal more like gold, being of a rich orange tinge. I see by the local press that about $35,00x3 worth of gold found its way to the Assay Office yesterday, as the 1 66
Left-handed Street-Cars
ship Hating was in from Skagway, with a number of people on board who carried gold. At the Assay Office the Dominion Govern- ment buys the gold from whomsoever brings it in, and the value of the institution to Van- couver is at once obvious. A large amount of money will thereby be kept in the country that formerly went to the United States.
Among the minor things one observes in Vancouver is the fact that all the street-cars run on the wrong side of the road. I wondered at first why they were so difficult for a To- rontonian to board and leave, but soon dis- covered that it was because one had to use his left hand instead of his right. The cars follow the custom of driving which obtains here, which is to go to the left when meeting another vehicle — the British plan. This city and Victoria are, I believe, the only places in the West where this is done.
The considerable number of Chinese one sees on the street, with their felt-soled shoes and peculiarly insouciant gait, is another feature. The inscrutable countenance of the Mongolian is a study, and one often wonders what lies behind it. Many of the Chinamen are well dressed, and display a taste for neat apparel and a certain dignity of demeanour which carries off with honour even a three-foot 167
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
pig-tail. But, for the most part, they are in blue or white cotton blouses, which seem to be a good attire for this season of the year in Vancouver, when the sun blazes down out of cloudless skies. When it rains in Vancouver it rains for weeks together, and you know it ; but when it is fine you would hardly believe that rain was ever possible.
168
CHAPTER XVI
NEW WESTMINSTER— THE COMMERCIAL
TRAVELLERS STORY— SI WASHES
AND CHINESE
NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C., August 3ist THE amount of trade that Ontario does with Western Canada is illustrated everywhere by the presence of commercial travellers from that province, not only in important centres, but in smaller places. My respect for the commer- cial traveller has been growing ever since I started on my tour. As a geographer H. M. Stanley could not hold a candle to him, and he could give pointers to Columbus were he alive. I have explored considerably on this trip, and have seen infantile communities starting to grow in all sorts of places. My experience leads me to say that if any enter- prising man began to build a store in a remote place on the prairie, or in the midst of primeval bush — miles from everywhere, and 169
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
far from the usual avenues of travel — he would have three or four Ontario commercial travel- lers waiting on him with samples before he got the shingles on his roof, and by the time he had his floors laid and his shelving con- structed, the goods would be there to fill them ; providing, of course, that he seemed a sound and likely addition to the commercial world. In towns of medium size the drummer is per- sistent, patient and polite, and, as a rule, he displays an absorption in his business that is highly creditable to him, and would be reas- suring to his employers could they see him. It is impossible always to judge of a traveller by results, except in the long run. He may display quite as much ability and do as much hard work over a slim order book as over a fat one. As a matter of fact, his fat order books are much easier in the compiling than the slim ones, for to get a few orders under adverse conditions is much more of a test of a man than to get some bumping ones when things are good.
Commercial representatives do not open out effusively to strangers except in the way of business. This is not, however, because they are deficient in human geniality. On the con- trary, it indicates a self-respecting reticence. I happened to meet recently, however, one of 170
A Humble Commercial Beginning
them with whom I had been intimately acquainted a dozen years ago or more, when as a young man from the Old Country he came out to Canada to try his fortune. We were soon mutually recounting experiences, and his were certainly interesting. The son of parents in affluent circumstances, they came to the rare and wise decision that their boy should learn to work for his living as though they were poor. Accordingly, he was sent from school and apprenticed for three years to a storekeeper in a large country town north of the Tweed. His duties here were, at first, of the most menial and humble description, and it was certainly rather disgusting to a boy who had distinguished himself in Latin and been prominent in mathematics, to have to be at the store early to sweep it out, and during market days to protect the goods put out in front from the attacks of bipeds and quadru- peds. In a week or two, however, he was trusted to sell brooms, papers of pins and potatoes, not to mention oatmeal and hucka- back, and he gradually went through the whole gamut of the store as an Old Country boy does who keeps his eyes open, learning more about various kinds of merchandise than he could in any other way. It was a proud time for him when he was put to sell ribbons and dry goods. 171
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
It was here, I imagine, that his nimble tongue and pleasant manners began to stand him in good stead. There is, no doubt, a way of sell- ing a yard or two of ribbon to a customer, even though she be a plain country dairy- maid, who trips a couple of miles over the moor to get her finery, that induces her to come again, and our friend knew just the way to do it When the three years' apprenticeship came to an end, his employer was anxious to keep him. The heart of the boy was, however, set on going to London. " You may go," said his stern and singularly Spartan parent, " but you must go on your own resources. Don't expect to get any remittances from me." He determined, notwithstanding, to risk the future, and with two other Scotch boys arrived at the Mecca of the mercantile. They had very little money amongst them, but they determined to share and share alike to the last gasp, and ultimately all of them obtained em- ployment in large wholesale houses. Our friend received .£50 per year as his salary. The sum of £20 per year was, however, re- tained by his employers to pay for his dinner and tea, which, according to London custom, was provided within the walls of the house. He had to find his lodging, breakfast and Sunday's meals out of the remaining £50. 172
Frugal Fare for Three
Here, then, was a boy of eighteen with a very healthy appetite and the sum of about $3 per week to find all his expenses out of, with the exception of his six days' dinner and tea. It was the custom of the house in which he was to make their employees work for their wages, and the meals were provided, not only that time might not be lost, but that each day's work might be done in the day. Accordingly, the workers were often at the warehouse after the usual hours, and they had, therefore, every opportunity of learning their business and of acquiring habits of industry. Sometimes the three boys got home feeling very hungry, and if it was towards the end of the month they would often be very short of money to buy anything with, for salaries were paid monthly. There were occasions when, if they could " scare up " threepence between them, they felt like princes. Then would they descend to those wonderful London streets, and with two big roasted potatoes and a pen'north of fried fish, cold, they would return and make their supper of it with gusto. Sometimes one potato and the screw of salt which the itiner- ant dealer supplied, had to do for the three, and often on Sundays they kept a Lenten fast when it was not the season of Lent, sus- taining themselves as well as they could by
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
attending the kirk and partaking of spiritual food.
At any rate, during three years of hard work these purposeful youths learnt to do with little, and learnt many things about business besides. And now came a visitor to the wholesale warehouse in which our par- ticular boy was employed, in the shape of a buyer from Canada — a member of the firm he represented. He seemed to "take to" our young friend at once, and told him about the cities of the Dominion and their prospects. It was one of the one-potato days, and the boy wondered if a little better fare was to be got in Canada. Would there be likely to be employment for him if he went over ? Yes, the Canadian thought so — a young man so smart and attentive as he was ought to find no difficulty. But the fare to the Canadian city — he could not go without money. And how smartly the Canadian dressed ! The poor boy looked disconsolately at his own patched and well-darned clothes — tailored and re-tailored by himself in the recesses of their lodgings while one of the other boys read aloud from some book they had obtained the loan of — for they had wits and brains, these beginners, and kept themselves abreast of things as far as they could. He had never 174
A New Yorker's Spendthrift Sons
asked his father for a penny since he left home. Supposing he wrote him now and begged the loan of money for clothes and passage? He determined to do it. The pater sent the money, again putting the boy on his own responsibility, and saying that the cash was to be regarded strictly as a loan. So eventually he came to Canada. He has been connected with one firm since he set foot on our shores, and he is now a member of it. He was speaking of these things to a wealthy New York manufacturer a short time ago, who said, " I wish you would narrate your history to my three boys. They keep me poor, those boys of mine. • Of course, I spent a lot of money on their education. Now they are, respectively, 22, 24, and 26 years old, and not one of them has ever earned a penny. They were too swell to go to work, and now they have to have a big allowance, which they spend on automobiles, and theatres, and clothes, and all sorts of things, and they expect me to live in great style for them on Fifth Avenue, but, by Jove, it keeps me working sixteen hours a day to do it. Of course, the lads are in the swim, but it comes expensive. It wouldn't do for me to say anything to them, but I wish you'd come to dinner some night, and when I tip you the
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
wink just open out about young men making their way in the world."
So our friend went to the grand house, and was received by one footman and waited upon by another, and when the opportunity arrived he complied with the father's request. The gilded youths listened attentively, and then one of them said :
" Do you mean to say that you went through all that hard work in London when your old man had plenty of money at home ? "
" Yes."
" Then you must have been a slob"
So the lesson on self-help was utterly thrown away.
It is an interesting thing in connection with my friend's history to narrate that, a year or two ago, an old gentleman began to talk to him during the course of a Western journey as they occupied contiguous seats in a railway car, and, as was natural, the talk came round to business. His white-haired interlocutor began to " speer " at him as to his early his- tory— for he, too, was a Scotchman — and as the various details came out, he would ex- claim, " Just like me," " My ain verra ex- peerience!" " I know it. I've done the verra thing ! " — all the time displaying the greatest interest in the story. When it was concluded 176
Through a Burnt District
he clapped my friend on the back and said, " You've just told my own life. That is exactly what I did mysel' ! " So interested was he that the broad Scotch of him came out naturally. It goes without saying that my friend, whose story I have thought worth putting in black and white, was very much interested to learn, when the old gentleman got off at a wayside station, that he was no other than the present Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal.
The foregoing story had occupied the time during a journey by trolley car from Van- couver to New Westminster — about fifteen miles. For most of the hour we had been passing through the usual British Columbian surroundings of a city — fire-swept bush, in which nature has been doing her best to repair the ravages of flame. The great trees were cut down years ago, and their gigantic stumps are visible everywhere at intervals. Forest fires seem inseparable from this part of the British Columbian year, when little or no rain falls and a conflagration easily spreads. Even now the hot sunshine comes through a smoky haze, and there is the heavy stifling smell of burning woods. In Howe Sound, a few miles off, the fires are said to be devas- tating a vast area. As we look out we see 12 177
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
the black and columnar remains of former fires around us, and it cannot be said that black and charcoal pillars everywhere at all add to the beauty of the prospect. Thick brush and vegetation fill up the interspaces, however, and the growth is wild and rampant. On the seats in front of us were two Siwash women and their husbands. These Indians of the coast are very different from the typi- cal North American Indian of the sculptor, the painter, and Fenimore Cooper's novels. They are fat, squat, broad -faced, good- humoured and well fed. Moreover, they have money. There is the Indian quietness about them and the absence of chatter, and their babies are as fat and quiet and broad-faced as themselves. They have dark and somewhat expressive eyes, and for the most part are dressed in ordinary costume, except that the women wear brighter colours than ordinary, and no hats. Their thick coal-black hair is neatly arranged, however, quite plain in front and made up in a heavy plait at their backs. They carry their babies in a basket-cradle, supported by a band that goes round the mother's forehead in the old style. The men are employed in the fisheries at New West- minster and other places, for New Westmin- ster is also the abode of salmon canneries, and 178
New Westminster and its Fishermen
lives principally by that industry and lumber mills. It is a town of 6,300 population on the broad part of the Fraser River, near its open- ing to the sea. To-day all the fishermen have been paid off, for the season is closing. When we come to the trolley car terminus, we find a broad, busy street, and an active commercial aspect that is wonderful, when one remembers that the whole town was reduced to ashes two years ago. Hotels are numerous, and the shops have huge miscellaneous stores. We pass the end of one street that is evidently the Chinese quarter ; it is full of pig-tailed Chinamen sitting on chairs, or otherwise taking their ease, to-day being an off" day at the canneries. Fishermen's races have also been arranged on the mile-wide river, and a band of music is perambulating the town. We walk to the long wharf and look down on numberless Siwash two-masted boats, roomy, and most of them containing a miscellaneous family. The occupants are either sleeping or eating, or looking out lazily at the fishermen's boats that, with all sails crowded, are contend- ing for the prizes. Many of the Siwash Indians live in these boats and go about from place to place where money and work are stirring. The old grandmother squaw looks after the brown children, while the younger women 179
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
gravely and persistently clean fish in the canneries, and meditate on what bright- coloured fineries they will buy at the store.
While the Indian female world is much in evidence, you see very few Chinese women. I have only seen two during my whole trip. The Chinaman seems able to solace himself without the society of the fair sex. You see him reading a letter over and over again, and as you glance over his shoulder you cannot help wondering at the learning of him who indited those strange, intricate characters, and the reading-power of him who can interpret them. Strange, deft, silent, inscrutable race! They seem to regard the world with a placid equanimity, but with little active interest
Nothing can be more diverse than the Chinese and Japanese. I had some conver- sation this week with Mr. Shimizu, the Japan- ese Consul at Vancouver, a highly intelligent and cultivated gentleman — alert, intellectual, perceptive. He told me that there were about 4,000 Japs in British Columbia, but that their Government had now stopped emigration here. " They say," said Mr. Shimizu, "that we have done it because we want our young men for military purposes. Nothing of the sort. We could afford to lose 10,000 of them, or 50,000 for that matter. It i So
An Impenetrable Wall of Separation
is simply because we have no wish for our people to go anywhere where they are not wanted. There seemed to be a disinclination to receive them on equal terms, so we stopped them coming." Nothing could exceed the cool, gentlemanly independence of this utter- ance. The Japanese meet us on our own ground. There is something about them that makes you feel they have adopted many of our ideals. But the Chinese are separated by an impenetrable wall of dissimilarity. You cannot tell what they are thinking of or what are their purposes. As business men they can give us miles of a start and beat us. You see a Chinaman at the bank pick up the frame of wooden beads that is always kept there for his use and calculate the rate of exchange on a given sum in a way that makes you stare. You see them paying over and receiving large sums. You find they understand the financial market as well as anybody, and that numbers of the lower orders are absolutely subject to their "tyee," who lords it over them. You visit a large house and are met by a spotlessly clean Chinese servant in white raiment that is equally spotless, and as he takes your card you are conscious of a certain veiled contempt for you and your race in his eye. He is more like a priest than a servant, and his dignity is 181
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
undoubted — his gravity more so. But why is he so grave, and dignified, and philosophical — as though all things were the same to him, and there was no joy and no sorrow in life : neither sweet nor bitter ; love nor hate ? Ah, this you will never know.
182
CHAPTER XVII VICTORIA.
VICTORIA, B.C., September 6th THERE are two questions that people al- ways ask in the West. The first is, "Is this your first trip ?" and the second, " How do you like the country ?" I suppose it is the proximity of the Orient that is the source of this style of interrogatory salutation. I know that if I went to China by one of these fine Empress boats, and saw Li-Hung-Chang, that he would ask me the same' questions. He would also add, " How old are you ?" We are obliged, by the way, to fall back on that convenient word "Orient," because that which, by immemorial English usage, has been called the East, lies eastward no longer, so that when you speak of " the East " you are taken to mean Toronto, and Montreal, and Hamilton, and other great cities from which wise men come. The wise men, by the way, do not return, unless they are past the first hey-day 183
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
and flush of youth. They remain and exalt the census of British Columbia at the expense of that of Ontario.
But Ontario is in many respects the pro- genitor of British Columbia, and from Ontario's broad shoulders the lusty and vigorous child has looked on to the future. Meanwhile there is a flavour and a finish about the East which the West will catch up to in the course of years, naturally. Nor is the child quite like its parents of the East, who might sometimes regard it as an enfant terrible. On the whole, however, affection triumphs, and we say in the words of the song, " He gets more like his dad every day."
The sail from Vancouver to Victoria is a very enjoyable experience. The Charmer, a well-found and staunch C. P. N. steamship, leaves the former city every day at one o'clock, and makes the trip in about six and a half hours, during the whole of which you pass through a panorama of beauty that makes you inclined to say that the name of the steamer was not ill-chosen. Dim outlines of mountains mysterious in their grandeur ; bold headlands looming up out of the horizon and proving, as you get nearer, to be scenic with rocks and trees ; wide spaces of tossing green water where the tide is coming in through 184
Victoria and its Noisy Hotel-toots
" the narrows " ; wider spaces where the sea is calm, and the light winds play with the sur- face and diversify it with a smile like that of a sleeping infant; Plumper's Pass, a narrow passage through rock-bound, tree-crowned islands — these are some of the details of scenes that live long in the memory of those who pass through them.
By and by when the sun is sinking in the midst of roseate cloudlets and an amber glory, Victoria heaves in sight, beautiful for situation, and you see its noble Government buildings, and its fine post-office, one of the finest in the Dominion ; its churches, and its dwelling- houses streaming out on all sides into the surrounding beauty of landscape. A little while, and we swing around into the harbour and tie up, and by that time the sky is dusk- ing with night. The babel of hotel-shouting touts that meets you on landing passes belief. I never heard such a row. I think the hotel- keepers hire savages from the Andaman Islands and other cannibal resorts, not to mention a dozen or two Indians, as wild as you can now catch them, and used to the war-whoop. An aged lady clings to you tremulously and begs you to see her through it ; of course, you comply, swing a couple of heavy grips viciously, use the French kick, 185
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
and for once give way to language that is not quite parliamentary. It is battling through a human surf; and if it were not for the fears of your trembling companion, you would be interested in it as the wildest, loudest and most diversified noise you have ever heard. I am going to-night for the purpose of listening to it again. It has the diapason of a great organ, and if it is the " lost chord " it had better stay lost to the majority of people.
But in some ways Victoria is delightfully old-timish, and, perhaps, this is one of the things of the past they preserve here. Where are the stocks and the ducking-stool, I wonder? I must inquire.
I arrived at last, without the assistance of any touts, at a nice, quiet hotel, where you could shake salt out of the salt-castor without slamming it on the table or getting the top off. Ex pede Herculem. From the salt-cellar you can judge the house. I was content. I began to be sensible of the good old English style of the place. Wandering out into the street after dinner, numerous jack-tars were in evidence — man-o'-war's men from the ships in the Esquimalt harbour, three miles off. Jolly, clean, healthy fellows they are, swing- ing down the street with a rolling gait, their wide trousers sitting with a nautical nattiness 1 86
Jolly British Tars
over the shoe, their broad collars seaman-like on their shoulders. They seem to go, gener- ally, three or four abreast, and you can see that it is a treat for them to be on land. Very often the first thing they do is to hire bicycles, which they mean to ride or die, and their attempts are very interesting illustrations of their bull-dog pertinacity. They curse the thing up and down when it throws them off, but they are on it again like a flash, and in the end they are always triumphant. Also, they have a penchant for five-cent beer, a harmless and exhilarating drink which is sold here in considerable quantities, and is much better for them than -spirits. A drunken sailor I have not seen.
THE GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS.
Government Street looked very homelike and natural in the morning sunshine, with its shops and buildings so much like those of the Old Country, its English-looking people wear- ing gloves, or at least carrying them. At the end of it you come to an arm of the harbour called James Bay and beyond this, at the end of a longish bridge, are the Government buildings with a sizable lawn in front of them coming to the water's edge. They are built of gray stone, and are very handsome and pala- 187
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
tial, having a central tower and cupola and numerous smaller cupolas. They present a long front, and at each end is a semi-detached building connected with the main structure by a colonnade. The style is classic-Italian, I suppose, and the utmost cavil of criticism is, perhaps, that they have too many features for the size of them ; but I speak with diffidence, for I cannot but respect the genius of Mr. Rattenbury in designing this, his chef (fceuvre. They are as much more beautiful than our Toronto Parliament Buildings as the Parthe- non is than our old City Hall at the back of the market, and how the B. C. Government got them built and fitted for $950,000 is a mystery that would strike Toronto aldermen dumb. Nor is their superiority confined to their exterior ; the inside of them is equally admirable. Architectural beauty confronts one at every turn. The central circular hall, with its lofty dome and its beautiful mosaic floor, forms a fitting approach to the legis- lative chamber, which has a dignity that is worthy of its functions, while the corridors and offices are admirably planned. One of the things that strikes you about these build- ings is their high degree of finish. Many of the windows in the halls, corridors and stair- cases, which are beautifully lighted, are filled 1 88
Palatial Interior of Government Buildings
with stained glass of appropriate design and inscriptions. Here and there are beautiful brass gates. In front there is a grand flight of steps to the central entrance. When one regards all these features and notes the excel- lence with which they are carried out, one wonders again how it was all done for that $950,000. As was to be expected, the wood- work of the buildings is a feature of great merit, the splendid British Columbia woods being exploited with great skill. In her tim- ber British Columbia has a great possession. There are cedar fittings in these buildings, that not only please a practical eye by their excellent craftsmanship, but exhibit a delight- ful variety of texture and grain and colour in the material of which they are constructed.
The semi-detached building at one end of the range is the printing department. That at the other end is the museum. The press- room in the basement of the printing depart- ment is the cleanest and lightest I ever saw, and every press works like a seven-jewelled watch. There are two cylinder presses and a number of " Gordons " ; also, there is the very latest embossing machine, made in Lon- don, England, and doing its work with a clean, slick deftness that is surprising. Here, also, are some clever wire-binding machines for 189
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
pamphlets, and a capable folding machine. Ascending to the composing-room — well, I found it nearly as good as that of the Mail and Empire. Adjoining it was the bindery, where the employees were busy binding up the B. C. Year-Book. The whole department is under the care of Lieut-Colonel Wolfenden, who was the pioneer newspaper man in the province, having started a newspaper here in the very early days of its settlement.
The museum, which, as I have said, is at the other end of the range of buildings, is a compact but spacious structure of several floors. It was very instructive to examine here stuffed specimens of the wild animals and birds of this great province. I had heard numerous sportsmen's stories of cougars and bears, wolves and deer of various kinds. There is so much of dense forest in British Columbia yet, that within a comparatively short distance of civilization the hunter may well look to his weapons and see that his rifle is in good order. Here is a great grizzly bear, for instance, and the date when he fell to the sportsman's gun seems so recent, and the locality in which his course was arrested so close, that the observer determines to keep a sharp lookout when he goes anywhere near that neighbourhood again. And what more 190
Natural History and Archaeology
can the sportsman ask than the magnifi- cent moose represented by the fine specimen on view, the lordly caribou, the black-tailed deer, the big-horn sheep of the mountains, not to mention an array of birds and fishes, the variety and development of which strike one as extraordinary? I can imagine a man visit- ing this museum and starting off to buy a gun at once. Here, too, was our ancient friend, the pelican, a native of this province ; while the list of web-footed inhabitants of the soli- tudes is a long one indeed. As for wild ducks, I have heard that there is such an extensive crowd of them in some places that the sports- man can make any sized "bag he wants to, and that in very short order. Of Indian remains and curiosities the collection on the upper floor of the museum is very complete and interesting, while at the entrance to the museum are some particularly good totem poles. I noticed an interesting collection of masks used by the Indians in their ceremonial dances, also a complete assortment of Indian pots and utensils, while pipes, tomahawks, axes and various other things of the sort were arranged with an order and a system that would have done Mr. David Boyle's heart good to see. The fact is that the B. C. Gov- ernment is convinced of the value of museums 191
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
and has laid itself out to have good ones. In addition to the institution I have been attempt- ing to describe, they have a museum of flora and plants and grasses in the Agricultural Department, not to mention a complete col- lection of cereals. Everything that can be exhibited in such a museum is there, and a view is thus presented of the products of the country that cannot fail to impress the visitor and to be useful to him in many ways. Here, too, are specimens of the various woods of the province, showing a wealth in fine timber unequalled on the globe. But this is not all. In another part of the grounds, in a separate annex, is a well-appointed mineral museum, a place of vital importance to the development of the splendid resources which the Govern- ment has to administer. In these buildings you find, as it were, the microcosm of the whole province. When we reflect that there is no place that is more constantly visited by people with whom it is important for a pro- vince to keep in touch than Victoria, the importance of these efforts comes into view. In her Government buildings British Columbia has made great progress towards the adult stage, and she may be forgiven an occasional mix-up in politics so long as she keeps before 192
British Columbia Politics
her so admirably the responsibility of her great resources.
As for those same politics, it would seem to be necessary for a neophyte from the East to sit up studying late at nights with a wet towel round his brow in order to understand them. So far as I can make out, the Province is trying at the happy-family business, such as we see occasionally illustrated in side- shows, where the cat is comfortable with the parrot, and the rat strokes the terrier's nose. An effort has been made to obliterate party lines by stamping on them when they have shown, and asseverating that they are not there. The lion has lain "down with the lamb, and care has been taken from time to time that the lamb shall not be inside him. Of course, keepers have had to come round now and again with red-hot pokers and shot-guns, and the electoral spectators of the show have often raised a vast hub-bub, and some of them have rather wanted the original instincts of the animals to have full sway. Such a periodic convulsion seems now to be passing over the electorate. Taking it altogether, though, the happy-family business seems to have answered tolerably well, and the Pro- vince can point to substantial results. There are some, however, who hold that the usual 13 !93
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Rugby football of parties is the proper thing, and who opine that the Happy Family will be put into the museum. Nous verrons.
Meanwhile the Province numbers some men who have striven with patriotic impulse for its good, and prominent among these must be reckoned Hon. J. H. Turner, who was for some time the Premier. He has now re- signed office, and has been appointed Agent- General in London, an appropriation of $10,000 having been voted for that purpose. Having been seventeen years in active busi- ness in Victoria, and understanding well, as he does, the needs of the Province, Mr. Turner will no doubt be able to do valuable work in London. He is a sound man, of much ability, and possessed of great personal magnetism. His idea is that Canada should have an im- portant building in London, with a depart- ment for each province, and a thoroughly representative man in it, the whole working under the supervision of Lord Strathcona as chief. He thinks that in this way the re- sources and status of Canada would be brought before the central world of London in a way that could not fail to be beneficial to the Dominion and to the various provinces of which it is composed. The Canadian head- quarters at present is not in the very best 194
In Touch with the Mother Land
place for it, nor is it entirely commensurate with our best interests of various kinds. It has been shown that London is the me- tropolis of the commercial activity of the world. Let Canada make such a showing there that those who conduct the commerce of the world cannot fail to know of her, not only in the bulk but in detail. It would help not only our exports but our imports, and especially our imports of the precious human material we so much need. Mr. Turner makes a strong point of the necessity of such agents-general returning to Canada at least once a year in order that they may keep in sympathetic touch with" that part of the Dominion they represent.
To-night there has been a band concert at Beacon Hill Park, an open space of wide common and firs, overlooking the matchless prospect of sea and mountain which is such a distinguishing characteristic of this lovely place. When the usual melange of airs and pieces had been finely rendered by the band of the Fifth Regiment there was a slight pause, and then the strains of " God Save the King " floated out over the sea, and lost themselves among the firs. One could not help remem- bering the tune when it was not " God Save the King," but " God Save the Queen," and
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
thinking of the loyalty and love that, sixty years ago, named this place after her who was destined, from that time to her death, to be the First Lady of the World.
It was Victoria when it was but a settle- ment of ten square miles with a house or two and a few business places upon it.
It is Victoria now that it is a beautiful city of twenty thousand inhabitants, and the capi- tal of one of the most thriving provinces of our great federation.
Here forever the capital of British Co- lumbia will be, for in addition to the over- whelming reasons which now determine this position for it, there is the sentimental one that is found in the fact that this city commemorates the name of the Great, Good Queen.
196
CHAPTER XVIII
THE QUARANTINE STATION AT WILLIAM HEAD— WARSHIPS AND FORTIFICA- TIONS AT ESQUIMALT
VICTORIA, B.C., September i2th IT is many a year since I was in Thames Street, London — street of broad-wheeled drays delivering heavy 'merchandise to dim and vast warehouses there. Rosy-cheeked draymen rolled barrels of untold weight into dark arches, at the end of which gleamed the river that is filled, not with water, but with tincture of the history of England. We used to slip down alleyways to rudimentary wharves built on piles, and wait for one of the dear old tubs or side-wheel steamers that would take us to " Grinnige," with a fiddle and harp on board, the performers on which wore top hats the worse for wear, though nothing could exceed the sentimentality of their eyes as the violinist nursed his instrument between his chin and his shoulder, and the harpist was 197
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
perpetually drawing the strings of his instru- ment to his bosom, a hand on either side, and his head inclined at the true virtuoso angle.
And you may be sure that there is many a cockney inhabitant of this city who thinks of London as he steps down from the main street — Government Street — which runs parallel to the wharves on the bay, down to the piers on piles covered with barnacles, where the water laps and the tide comes in and out The water is not so reminiscent and historical as that of Old Father Thames, but when you have got into a boat and are pulling out into the har- bour you revel in its green translucency. You pass the big white steamer that plies to Seattle, and the ditto that connects with Van- couver, and every old boat that goes any- where else, and soon you are rowing steadily up the " Arm " towards the Gorge. Quieter and quieter gets the water, and more and more charming becomes the scenery, for the Arm is a four-mile inlet from the bay, with a subterranean connection with the sea at the end of it, and you pass over water now broad- ening to a mile and now narrowing to an eighth of one, past hills and rocky promon- tories, beautiful with oak and arbutus and lovely with underbrush, and trailing briers and bush and mossy delights. Here and there 198
Quarantine Station Steamer
a fine country-house stands in its retired and turfy grounds, that come down to the water's edge, and now and again a gray and pictur- esque rock juts out into the quiet water. Take care that the tide does not catch you at the Gorge, the narrowest part of the course, for your utmost efforts will not suffice to stem its force ; it will be better to land and be a lotus-eater under the shade of an arbutus until the moon-drawn waters once more retire. It was not to row up the Arm, however, that I dropped down to the Custom- House wharf, bright and early, the other morning. The taut little steamer Earl, of the William Head Quarantine Station, was waiting there, and I was to be the only passenger. The Earl is not a boat to be sneezed at ; she has enginefe that you can look down upon from a skylight in the upper deck as you look down on those of an Atlantic steamer, and she can make a sufficient number of knots per hour on occasion. She has the nicest little cabin in the stern that anyone could desire, fitted up with lounges and knowing little lockers, and, moreover, her captain wears a uniform with gold lace upon it, and even the engineer wears a decorated cap, for this is a Government ship. William Head, where I was going, is only ten miles or so from Victoria, but when our crew 199
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
had cast off, and we began to leave a fine bubbling and foamy trail behind us on the dancing water, I wished we were going a longer voyage, for there is something about a well-found boat, throbbing with energy, that makes you feel like that. The morning, too, was full of the lovely feeling of early autumn. The air was charged with ozone and sunshine. The captain was in his wheel-house aloft, the engineer was regarding his rapidly-moving engines with a scientific eye, the fireman was at his boiler, and the general-utility seaman, an experienced Scotchman, as wise and canny as they make them, had no thoughts of mutiny. The crowd in the cabin, consisting of me, enjoyed existence as much as absence of company permitted. But one could not keep to the cabin on such a morning, and soon the engineer was pointing out to me the barracks, where a detachment of regulars is kept, and the position of the concealed fortifications and disappearing guns that no civilian may see and live. These fortifications, combined with powerful electric search-lights, effectually guard Victoria from the ships of a foreign foe, even were not the five or six seadogs of the Pacific Squadron always lurking round the corner in Esquimalt harbour. The engineer also pointed out several large ranches that
Landing at the Quarantine Wharf
came down to the water's edge, while, above, rose the tree-clothed hills where wild animals in abundance may be found by the adventur- ous hunter, including the dreaded cougar or mountain lion, who is very fond of sheep, and does not turn back from man if he is hungry and man is alone. Recently a boy of sixteen had shot one of these carnivora who had shown himself rather too fond of the farmer's sheep.
But the Quarantine Station is coming in sight with its wharves and buildings, and we are soon alongside one of the former and tie up, just as the engineer has been telling me about how difficult it is to board a ship in rough weather. Sometimes the Earl is used for this purpose, and, if the water is very lumpy, a naphtha launch that can shoot near the side of the big steamer, allow a moment for the doctor to jump, and shoot away again. The superintendent who has to perform this athletic nautical feat is Dr. Alfred T. Watt, who presently came forward to meet me, and who looked capable of anything of the kind. In fact, in many ways Dr. Watt seems to be " the right man in the right place," and as the governor of this little lonely settlement on the rocky coast he exercises manifold func- tions. All the big eastern ships that come to
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
British Columbia have to pass his inspection, and if there is any suspicious case of disease on board, all the passengers are landed, and occupy large buildings provided for the pur- pose, in order that the " suspects " may be put into hospital and possible latent cases develop themselves. Not only is there here a hospital of sixty beds, but there are two large dwellings, one for the saloon and the other for the steerage passengers. And truly there could not be a nicer place to be detained in. The sixty acres fenced in for the quarantine station is like a natural park, and one of the most picturesque spots I was ever privileged to see. Arbutus trees and oak trees grow to a great size in it, and exhibit every artistic form of gnarl, bend and foliage. Scenes for the painter abound, for there are the gray old rocks, fringed by the dry and yellow grass on which Dr. Watt's fat lambs are feeding, the beautiful sea, the distant hills, and the far- away mountains. At every turn you see a picture, while the purity of the air is most exhilarating. No one could want a more delightful place at which to live, and as a health resort it would make a fortune.
Down by the wharf, however, things look very business-like and functionary. Here there are large sheds and very complete machinery
The Shower-bath for Mongolians
for fumigating and disinfecting. There is a sulphur apparatus by which brimstone fumes can be forced into a vessel's hold with great rapidity ; a formaldehyde plant for produc- ing another disinfecting gas, and a big steam disinfector for killing germs in clothes and bedding ; also, there is a bathing arrange- ment of great effectiveness, through which incoming Chinamen, nude and shivering, are always put. It consists of a very strong and effusive shower-bath that plays on the subject all ways at once. On the hither side they leave their clothes to be put through the dis- infecting machine. When they emerge from their bath they are given a blanket. A ship- load of 250 of them came from China the other day, and everyone, of course, had to pass through the ordeal and to be examined as to the state of his health. If it becomes necessary to detain a number of passengers in the buildings provided for that purpose, the ship sends up cooks and waiters and sees to feeding them — kitchens being a part of the outfit of the dwellings. In such cases the Chinamen bring their mats, take the space allotted to them, and are soon reconciled and comfortable. They wander out on to the rocks and fish, or gather seaweed to cook in their own queer way, and they are prepared 203
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
to stay for life. They don't want to move. The Japanese, on the other hand, while they are more impatient, display a greater faculty for organization. Dr. Watt told me that on the first night they select a head man and an executive committee, so that everything may be conducted in due order.
Last year a ship came for examination that contained a posse of newspaper men. The ship was suspected of smallpox, and as the weather was fine they were put into tents. The scribes erected a flag-pole and immedi- ately began to run a daily paper, which they called The Microbe. I saw their flag-pole ; I would very much have liked to see a copy of their sheet. The name of it need not go a-begging — one would think that there are papers to which it might be legitimately applied to-day. Not far from the fence which divides the sixty acres from the mainland is Dr. Watt's pleasant home, every window of which seems to look out on a beautiful view, and which is presided over by his talented wife, well-known as a writer on New York magazines and newspapers under her maiden name of Madge Robertson, and still a con- tributor to the local press. Dr. Watt has an able assistant in the person of Dr. Ander- son, and at times when two or three big ships 204
Village and Harbour of Esquimalt
follow each other in pretty close succession, the two medical men have enough to do. What strikes one in this comparatively iso- lated spot, where for the time the medical officer has autocratic powers over the vessels that come to be examined, is that much ability and power of rapid decision are required, and these qualities Dr. Watt appears to possess in a high degree.
Esquimalt is one of the show places to which all visitors to Victoria are taken, and the street-car ride there is through one of its most pleasant suburbs. You come at last to a quaint, old-timish, waterside village of wooden houses, where there are several taverns, and at the end of the main street a little wharf, from which you can take a boat to board one of the big ships that lie in the land-locked bay. There are the Warspite, the Amphion, and the Phaeton ; also, there is a determined-looking torpedo-boat-destroyer with four funnels, that looks capable of no end of execution. We determine to go aboard the Warspite, which is the flagship, and are soon being pulled over the quiet water by a boatman whose speech is the speech of London. Very solid and big does this iron war-castle look as we come near to it, and when we clamber up the ladder and 205
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
step over the side we are in a new world. An intelligent corporal of marines is detailed to show us over the ship, and he also is a cockney of the most agreeable and pro- nounced description. In fact, the visit to the warship is really a visit to a bit of England floating on these far-away waters. You can close your eyes, and as you listen to the seamen's talk you can fancy yourself once more in the " right little, tight little island." There is a business-like air about a modern man-of-war that constrains one's respect for the brain-power and industry that have gone to her construction. We examine one of the big six-inch guns, such as the blue-jackets mounted on carriages and used with such effect in South Africa. The movable breech is swung round and we look through the rifled barrel, and in imagination see the great shell rushing on its path of destruction. Then we are taken to the conning tower, whence, when the ship goes into action, the captain directs the fight. Here are numbers of speak- ing tubes for communicating with the various guns, and a small wheel which enables the captain " to work the 'elm," our guide tells us. He explains the various pieces of apparatus for directing the engines, and bids us mark the solid nine-inch steel walls by which we are 206
Blue-jackets and Torpedo Tubes
surrounded, and the steel dome overhead which comes down to within about a foot of the top of the walls, which are about five and a half feet high, or perhaps a little higher. There is room for half a dozen people easily in the conning tower, and it is on the level of the main deck, and well forward. It seems so secure and invulnerable that you feel you might stand there and witness a naval battle unharmed. By and by we go below, where between decks there are more guns and a great number of blue-jackets lying about in all directions, sound asleep. They are lying principally on the bare planks, and a very little boy of the party says : "Are they dead ?" They might easily be supposed to be so in the dim light, and so silent as they are. And we see a couple of big torpedo tubes, and have the mechanism of that deadly thing they discharge explained to us — that sort of mechanical fish with a potentiality for destruc- tion in its snout and a screw propeller for its tail, that drops into the water and silently makes its way to its object like a thing of sense. Space would fail, however, to make a list of the wonderful machinery one sees on a man-of-war. The impression it all leaves on one is of immense solidity and impregnable strength. The half-light that prevails shows 207
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
you that everything is beautifully clean and in " apple-pie order." You descend to a yet deeper depth, far below the water-line. There are the magazines of shells and shot and cordite, behind iron doors. There also are the giant engines that propel this mighty mass of metal. The tremendous costliness of the whole machine comes home to you with great effect, and you do not wonder that the Chan- cellor of the Exchequer has to ask for big sums. Afterwards we are shown through the navy yard, where stores are kept, and where there are repairing shops. We see, too, the dry-dock and its beautiful pumping machinery and neatly arranged hills of coal. And we come away with a clearly-defined sense that here on this far Western coast is a big chunk of Britain's power, where the strong watch- dog sleeps with one eye open and ready to spring to his feet with a growl should occasion arise.
208
CHAPTER XIX
THE COAL MINES OF VANCOUVER ISLAND, B.C.
NANAIMO, B.C., September 2oth WHEREVER you go in British Columbia you find the institution of Chinese labour. I called the other day in Victoria, on Mr. Lee Mong Kow, the Chinese interpreter at the Customs House, who is a gentleman of much intelli- gence. I had heard a rather good story about him before I called, to the effect that one day some bustling man went into his office and began to address him, brusquely, in that sort of mixed patter that a Chinaman is supposed to understand. But all his "savvys" and "allee samee" failed to elicit any response from the grave Oriental, who was sitting at his desk. The visitor became at last some- what obstreperous and angry, when, suddenly, Lee Mong Kow arose, drew himself up and said in the purest English :
" Sir, are you an Englishman ? " 14 209
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
" Why, yes," said the astonished questioner.
" Then, why in the world don't you speak your own language, instead of coming in here calling out a jargon that no reasonable man can tolerate?"
Which made the visitor feel somewhat cheap and apologetic.
I saw on Mr. Lee Mong Kow's mantelpiece a fine photograph of a distinguished Toronto judge. " That makes me think of home," I remarked.
" Indeed ! Do you know Mr. Justice ?
He is a friend of mine also. I like to keep his portrait there. He has mine, too," he observed with charming simplicity.
He told me that there were about 14,000 Chinese in British Columbia, of whom 137 were women, and 200 children who had been born here. On my remarking on the small propor- tion of women, he said, " Very few can afford to bring their wives — only a few of the richer merchants. That is one thing that makes a Chinaman go back to China when he can — his wife and family are there."
I saw a sample of Chinese femininity one
evening. There is a permanent show of
moving pictures on one of the Victoria streets,
where through the ever-open doors you can
. hear the lecturer talking about his " fillum "
Chinese Women and the Graphophone
(film), and over a vista of chairs you can see the familiar white sheet. As a further attraction, a phonograph is placed near the door, that gives out through a big trumpet-shaped funnel such strident concert-hall ditties as the pro- prietor thinks will be attractive to the crowd. But the favourite selection seems to be a song sung by a highly-gifted baritone-robusto, who has apparently swallowed a saw, and who is evidently singing to a very large audience. At the end of each verse there is a laughing chorus that is very loud and definite. In front of the machine, and listening to it with signs of pleasure, were three small, slim, Chinese women, two girls about fourteen, and three little Chinese babies. They were all very clean, very neatly dressed, and the women and girls wore wide trousers, and coats that a friend called " automobile " — well, I suppose they were the Mongolian ana- logue of that modern garment. Nothing could exceed the rare neatness of their black, smooth hair, around which they wore some sort of Oriental bead arrangement, very severe in pattern. Their faces expressed a happy placidity while each verse of the absurd song was proceeding, but when it came to the rather long " Ha ! ha ! ha ! " Mephistophelian sort of chorus, their faces beamed with a delight as
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
of children. It was very curious to see the doll-like babies laughing — laughing with their mouths and their chubby cheeks, and their bright little eyes. Any old parental sort of person would feel inclined to take them in his arms, for children are children all the world over, and the Chinese babies are the " cutest " on record. There was a certain petite, lady- like dignity about the women, so small and strong. It was like looking at an ordinary woman of our race through the wrong end of a telescope, so that she appeared a new type of condensed womanhood. Nor was the expression of their merriment devoid of a tinge of tolerating amused scorn, as if they would say, " To think that we should laugh at such a ridiculous thing ! "
When you have exhausted all your adjec- tives on the general greatness of Canada and its immense resources, you still feel, in British Columbia, that you want a special set. It almost needs an expletive added to every adjective and descriptive term you can think of or find in the dictionary. Even then the effect is as poor as that of a simian solo on an organ fit for the hand of a Sebastian Bach. The British Columbia people are as proud of their province as if they had made it, and well
Opportunities for Capital and Labour
they may be. If there were a population in it of twenty millions, instead of two hundred thousand, there would be lots of room for them. You could drop the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland into the middle of it, and still have a good many thousand square miles to spare. And it is very much richer in natural resources than ever the United Kingdom was. Of course, the entire population of the Dominion could move in here and put up "To Be Let " signs in the other provinces, and in either case it could not be said that British Columbia was over-populated.
There is room for persistent missionary effort among the congested and crowded centres of the whole world, where the gospel of emigration to Canada needs preaching in season and out of season. For, as one travels through it and begins to understand its mag- nificent distances and wide areas, its capacities for support, its endless openings for capital and labour, it is impossible to avoid feeling that all the efforts of the Immigration Depart- ments are but as a drop in the bucket. Take, for instance, this Vancouver Island, from which I am writing. It is a land of beauty and wealth. The extreme length of it is 285 miles; its greatest breadth, 80 miles. It con- 213
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
tains 16,400 square miles, or about 10,000,000 acres, and of this more than one-third is practically unexplored.
I came up to Nanaimo from Victoria, on the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, in a north-easterly by north direction, and the seventy-three miles I thus travelled formed a continuous panorama of beautiful scenery — woods and hills and deep gorges, grand coloury rocks, and glimpses of the surrounding sea through the tall firs. There is not so much fire-swept bush here as there is on the mainland, and the mountains are less awful. Occasionally, across the water you glimpse those vast heights, and very beautiful they look in the vaporous distance, mysteriously impressive, giving a note of sublimity to the landscape that nothing else could. The vege- tation is very luxuriant, and the glades of the woodland are bosky with bracken. It was so in the long-ago ages when the immense coal deposits of the island were formed, after several great cataclysms that flung mountains over the bush, and then, after aeons of time, upheaved them with volcanic force, so that in one of the coal mines the tunnel, a mile and a half long, whereby the black mineral is extracted, goes straight into the side of a hill. The fallen trees in these woods 214
Ladysmith and Nanaimo
grow mossy, and there is a smell such as you only get in a country where there is plenty of moisture. As you come along through the sylvan scenery, the thought of busy coal and copper mines is far from you. But at last you are at Ladysmith, fifty-nine miles above Victoria, and see long coal trains drawn by powerfully-puffing locomotives, and the usual big trestle arrangement for loading ships. Vancouver Island is specially fitted for the shipping coal trade. Nowhere is the sea far off, and the great ships come up and take off their supplies with great convenience. Chinese brakesmen were handily manipulat- ing these trains, and on* one of them I saw a Chinese fireman. A dollar and "two bits" (25 cents) is the wage of a Chinaman per day in these supplementary above-ground indus- tries of the coal region. Only in one pit on the Island is he employed to get the coal out of the mines.
Nanaimo is a thriving coal town — I beg its pardon, I should have said city — of five or six thousand inhabitants. Its surroundings are very beautiful, and there is an air of sound prosperity about it. The arm of the sea on which it is situated is irregular in shape, and there is considerable variation of level in the land on which it is built, so that it is easy to 215
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
look far out to sea where there are tree-clothed islands and distant mountains. There is some- thing in the irregularity of its streets that reminds one of the Old Country towns. Its main thoroughfare is said to follow the line of an old deer-trail, just as one or two of the streets of Boston grew out of cow-paths. N an- aimo has some very good stores, and it sup- ports a number of hotels, banks, lawyers, eight churches and two newspapers. It, in turn, is supported by the coal industry, as represented by the very extensive enterprise of that great commercial aggregation, the New Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Company, an English concern, among the first promoters of which were Mr. Charles Fitzwilliam, a scion of an old Yorkshire family, and brother of Earl Fitzwilliam, Sir William Cunard, and Judge Haliburton, author of " Sam Slick." The latter famous litterateur was chairman of the company until his death. Among other original shareholders also was Agnes Strick- land, the well-known author of " The Queens of England," an old-time work that in its day had a great vogue. This important company and the great Dunsmuir concern divide be- tween them at present the vast coal resources of Vancouver Island, and both were started long before the advent of the great transcon- 216
Productive Coal-mining; Industry
tinental railway that now links coast with coast. Not without much perseverance and the expenditure of vast capital has the New Vancouver Coal Mining Company reached its present status and output. Although there are very extensive and rich beds of coal in Vancouver Island, the deposits are much less continuous than those, for instance, of Nova Scotia, and consequently much more capital has had to be expended in exploring and locating seams. The works, which are under the able management of Mr. Samuel Robins, who is a very popular magnate at Nanaimo, comprise five mines, but coal is only being raised from three.
I walked about a mile out of the town and came to the mouth of the great shaft, 650 feet deep, around which are grouped the various buildings necessary to the industry. There is the engine-house, containing a double-cylinder winding engine of the most massive propor- tions, the great drum of which reels up and unwinds the i^-inch steel ropes which let one cage down and bring another up. It is quick work, about one load a minute being brought out of the pit. I looked down into the black and awful depth, but having been down coal pits before, and time being of value, I did not ask the privilege of descending. It 217
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
seemed dreadful to think of a large number of men and a hundred mules being down so far from the light of day, but it was gratifying to find when, later, I saw the men come up from their " shift " — they work eight hours a day — that they were fine, strapping, well-fed fellows. They are well paid, too, their wages ranging from $100 to $140 per month ; and as they are paid piecework and have their slices of luck, when a good shot brings down a large quan- tity of coal without much rock in it, and that can be got out with comparative ease, their lot is by no means hopeless, and they seem to thrive on it. They are superior in physique to the coal miners of the Old Country. Many of them are from Great Britain, but there is a considerable mixture of nationalities ; there are Finns and Belgians, Poles and Swedes. Looking away across the water to Protection Island, about two miles off, I was told that the underground work extended to that spot, where there is an upcast shaft. The tram- ways, which are the arteries of ingress and exit, and which form a regular railway system down in the mine, are worked for the most part by electricity, on the trolley system, though, as I have before said, a considerable number of mules are also employed. These animals are well looked after and are kept in 218
Loading Ships with Coal
admirable stables. Fodder is raised on the company's farm near by, which is several hundred acres in extent, and in which Mr. Robins, with the instincts of an Englishman of the old school, takes a deep interest. The electrical power-house is large and well- equipped. Interesting also it was to inspect the immense fan, worked by its separate large steam-engine, by which the ventilation of the mine is kept up — a great wheel, with vanes on it like a paddle-wheel. It is 37 feet in diam- eter, and 12 feet across it. This never stops night or day, for the work in the pit is con- tinuous— three shifts of eight hours each. The machinery for weighing the coal, sieving it into different sizes and loading it into cars is all very ingenious and up-to-date. It is handled by Chinamen. Then the cars are pulled out by locomotives up a stiff incline to the loading trestle, to which the big ships come. I walked out to the end of the line and saw the steamer Titania lying there being loaded. She carries coal to San Francisco, and her cargo is 5,800 tons. Such is the effectiveness of the machinery that they can put this immense quantity of coal aboard of her in eleven hours. It always looks as though there was another ship waiting to be loaded, and when one contemplates this great thick 219
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
stream of coal going out, not only here, but in two other places on Vancouver Island, it gives one some idea of the extent of the coal industry.
When the monthly pay-day comes round things hum at Nanaimo. There is about $200,000 to be distributed among the stores and other avenues of expense. At no time does money seem to be very scarce. They are having a great celebration of the annual fall fair here, which is to be opened by his Honour the Lieutenant-Governor, and one of the features of it is the election of a Queen of the Fair. The queen has been elected amid considerable excitement, as each popular girl had her adherents. Voting was by tickets, which cost ten cents each, and the total sum taken in was $1,100. People seemed to think nothing of spending $10 or $20 in tickets. At one boarding-house at which coal miners lived, there was a young lady that the lodgers thought should hold the coveted position. They were determined to secure the election of their favourite, if possible, so they clubbed together and raised $140, which they brought down with the intention of buying tickets, and casting 1,400 votes for her. Tickets had given out, but the officials of the fair gave them a document certifying 220
Miners in Easy Circumstances
that it was equal to that number, and I saw them just after they had deposited it in the proper quarter. Their candidate did not win after all, but the incident shows that at Nanaimo the grimy coal miners have money to spend. And when they have " cleaned themselves," and put on very well-made clothes and smart collars and neckties, you would not know that they were coal miners at all. They have opinions about politics, too, and some of them are rather advanced Socialists.
CHAPTER XX
NANA1MO TO THE GOLD COUNTRY VIA VICTORIA AND VANCOUVER
GRAND FORKS, B.C., October ist THE place from which I date this letter shows that I have left Vancouver Island and its coal, four or five hundred miles to the west, and that I have to some extent retraced my tracks on the C. P. R. I have been in the gold country of British Columbia for several days, but of that more anon.
In my last I said something about the working of the great coal deposits of Van- couver Island, especially with reference to the extensive works of the New Vancouver Coal Mining and Land Co. But there is also the great Dunsmuir coal interest, which gets out the black mineral and loads ships to an even greater extent. Ships seem to be always waiting for coal, and a perpetual stream of it is being poured into their dark holds. Of the vast deposits of British Columbia
Coal Deposits in the Forest
the top has only been scratched, and there appears to be enough to last a good deal longer than for ever. The Dunsmuir in- terest on Vancouver Island is very large indeed. The railway from Victoria to Wel- lington belongs to it, and also the Govern- ment concession of ten miles on either side of it. Dunsmuir pere was a practical coal miner, who prospected long in the forest, and at last found coal near the upturned roots of a great tree. From this discovery grew many millions for him and his family. His son is now Premier of the Province, and in taking that position Mr. James Dunsmuir has shown a creditable public spirit; and has somewhat departed from the traditions of the great enterprise of which he is now the head.
• The Dunsmuir coal mines are at Welling- ton, at Extension, and at Comox. I went to Extension from Nanaimo by a stage-waggon, the distance being six or seven miles, part of it through the woods, where there are great firs and cedars. A notion of the sort of country it is is afforded by the fact that a couple of days afterwards two commercial travellers were driving thither in a buggy, and at a turn of the road through the trees, they came upon a big black bear and her two cubs, which ambled away very quickly as the 223
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
travellers came up, and made them regret that they had not guns with them. " Exten- sion " is not a mere noun of the " common " variety, but a village of pine-board houses among the hills, and you soon see the build- ings of the coal mines. I walked up to the mouth of a low tunnel, which is driven straight into the heart of one of the hills. A trolley wire, suspended at a level of six or seven feet from the ground, passes into its darkness. Soon I heard an approaching rumble, and, presently, a very strong-built, dwarfish motor locomotive came out, drawing behind it thirty or forty small box-cars, each containing about 1,600 pounds of coal of fine quality. Lying on top of the coal, on fifteen or twenty of the cars, were coal miners coming off their " shift " — big, strapping fellows, each wearing a cap with a lamp in the front of it, which they extinguished when they got off the cars. The road goes down a slope for about a mile before it comes to the workings, and after that the numerous avenues go for miles into the bowels of the mineral moun- tain. The coal is loaded into railway cars and taken by rail to Ladysmith, about a dozen miles off, where it is poured into ships. Ladysmith is a city, and is a remarkable in- stance of quick growth, as is evidenced by its 224
Educated English Settlers
name, which originated in the present South African campaign. Now it has five or six hotels, a departmental store or two, and a smart, up-to-date newspaper. Both this place and Extension live on the coal industry.
Getting on board the train at Nanaimo, I proceeded to Victoria, passing on the way the settlement called Duncans, a locality which is the abode of many English ranchers. Near it, also, is a most hopeful and paying copper mine. The people who get into the train about here speak out-and-out English, and some of them are going back to the Old Country on a visit. From conversing with one or two of them I learn that they lead very pleasant lives, but make no money to speak of. One fine young fellow of three or four and twenty told me he had come out here immediately after leaving one of the principal great schools of England. He had been farming for eight years, and finding that it opened no career, he had determined to " chuck it " and to go to McGill and take a four years' course in engin- eering. He said he knew a good many young fellows who had come out here in the same way, and after some years of unsuccess had gravitated to the gold mines, where they were working as labourers in a hopeless sort of way, without special knowledge and without pros- is 225
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
pects. There is nothing more pathetic than the history of some of these young men, who have been used to comfort and even luxury, and who, without any special training, are packed off to this country to sink or swim. That the greater proportion of them sink is a fact that illustrates the difficulty of finding careers for educated boys. The only way out of it seems to be to teach every boy of merely ordinary faculty some respectable trade, and to see that he learns it thoroughly and is not a mere "gentleman apprentice." The men who get on in new countries are generally those who begin very low down on the ladder, and thus obtain a basic experience that serves them all their lives. It is difficult to see how our nice, gentlemanly, well-edu- cated boys are to get exactly this foundation- knowledge that their less favored compeers have to pay for with such bitter discipline. It is true that if they are content to forego the expectation of material success of an ambitious order, and are willing to live simple, hard- working lives, this great country offers them a pleasant home. I have visited such homes of late, where educated and refined people were found amid frugal surroundings, and doing things which once they never thought they would have to do. There is probably 226
Victoria and its Trade Prospects
more poor gentility in British Columbia than in any country under the sun.
There were evidences at Victoria that the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York were coming. Artificers were at work build- ing arches and fixing Venetian masts along the long bridge that leads to the Government Buildings. But I was going away, and con- sequently I looked around me with a some- what valedictory eye.
Victoria is a capital of which any province might be proud. Moreover, it shares with Vancouver those highly respectable pros- pects of trade with the Orient which probably indicate the direction from which British Columbia's expansion will come. The trade it is after is that which has built up Seattle, San Francisco, and the other American cities to the south ; and which is sure to go on increasing. No doubt it owes some restric- tions to its insular position. A city of homes, there does not seem to be the continual round of amusements and evening engagements that are the questionable advantages of some of our other cities. But it has a solid respect- ability, without overmuch display, that to many minds presents undoubted attractions.
The boat leaves Victoria an hour after mid- night. It was a damp evening, and the tears 227
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
of autumn dimpled the dimly-lighted expanse of harbour. Afar off the disappearing lamp of the lighthouse alternately threw its beams over the water and withdrew them. Among the piles of the pier the waves gently lapped. A Chinaman sat motionless in the smoking cabin, with the placid passivity which only a Chinaman can exhibit. A cockney woman with a child alternately swore at Victoria as compared with London, and told her infant that she would " knock him silly " if he didn't stop his whimpering. Below, the men were taking in cargo with much rumbling and roll- ing. At last that stopped, and the passen- gers began to come in to take up their berths. Here and there a man or a woman lay sleep- ing in the large, comfortably furnished saloon. Nothing more desolate than the prow of the ship on that misty night can be imagined. At last the ropes were cast off, and we glided out into the harbour towards the black night of waters beyond, past the winking light and out to where, by the aid of the young moon, the dim outlines of black rocks and headlands were visible. At length the lights of Victoria were left far astern, and we were in the midst of a wild gray waste of waves.
Vancouver presents a somewhat imposing appearance as you approach it from the sea 228
Beauties of the Fraser Canyon
in the morning light, with its accompaniments of big ships lying at anchor, and its busy, smoking haunts of industry. Moreover, it is a city set on a hill, or rather hills, which adds to its spectacular effect, while its neighbouring mountains give it dignity.
There is really so much to write about in British Columbia that selection is difficult. The afternoon train-ride along the Fraser canyon was matchlessly beautiful. There was no sun, but the soft play of light and shadow was overpoweringly charming. One could look out freely with wide-open eyes at the picturesque rocks, the green river swirling below, the grand mountains rising to their snow-capped peaks, the solemn woods, with their wealth of luxuriant undergrowth touched with the tints of autumn. The pity of it was that the train went so fast : there were num- berless spots where one wanted to linger and gaze. I do not think anything can be more awe-inspiring and grand than this Fraser canyon seen on an autumn afternoon. There is a silent majesty about it that hushes one to silence, and its beauties alone are worth a trip to the West. There is so much of it !
I got to Arrowhead at half-past eight in the morning of the day after leaving Vancouver. This is the head of navigation southwards 229
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
towards the land of gold. A big stern-wheel steamer was waiting on the other side of the platform, and if I had not known that I was approaching the gold country, various signs would have told of it, such as the men who came slowly down from the hotel to the boat, and the packs they carried. Taking one of these packs as a sample, all we see as it lies on the cabin floor is that it is a bundle done up in canvas, with rope, and that it looks as if its interior was miscellaneous. Across the top of it lies a miner's pick — a very natty tool with a three-foot handle — the head of which is a hammer at one end and a pick at the other. Below the bundle is an ordinary gold-washing pan of thin steel, in which lie two good-sized frying-pans. I dare say if we were to open the bundle we would find, in addition to food, the rest of a prospector's culinary outfit, and, certainly, a pair of heavy blankets. The whole kit weighs fifty or sixty pounds, perhaps, and this the gold-seeker packs over the mountains. Here and there, on the side of one of these rocky heights, we see a thin blue smoke curling among the pines. It comes from a prospector's fire — he has been cooking his breakfast before starting for another day on his everlasting quest. The green and pellucid waters of Arrow 230
The Sail Down Arrow Lake
Lake are shallow, but they afford a convenient means of communication between the main C. P. R. line and the gold settlements. We are to reach Robson, at the lower end of the lake, at half-past five in the evening, or there- about. We pass through ranges of dark gray mountains, covered with a growth of pines, their topmost peaks snow-capped. At about one-third of their height lie long lines of white clouds, soft and fleecy. Sometimes even the tops of the mountains are half-hidden by clouds, for it is a gray day. The feeling of autumn is everywhere ; the heats and the mosquitoes are over. At about three o'clock in the afternoon the s'un shone. We had been passing since morning through a con- tinuous panorama of mountains whose soli- tary heights lift themselves thousands of feet above the calm surface of the lake. We had left two sanatoriums behind us — "hot springs," as their signs stated — big hotels built high up on the mountain sides and look- ing the very places to recuperate in. We had discharged considerable cargo at Nakusp, which is a railway terminus. Down below in the hold were fifty head of cattle that the boat was carrying for transhipment to Ross- land. Let no one think he quite knows his Canada till he has taken this trip down the 231
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Arrow Lake. It is an entrance to the gold country that is full of beauty — a scene of lonely grandeur that one will never forget.
On the steamer there are a dozen men whose pursuit is gold, and they might be divided into two classes, the talkers and the non-talkers. I think those who talk are chiefly successful in that occupation of their powers. It is the others who find the gold. There was one man on board who talked continuously all day, and another who was a good second. The first had a tenor larynx, the other was a basso. I gather that they took to mining because it affords an opportunity for effort that is not unremitting. They appeared to have been everywhere in the world, and to have tried many avenues to fortune, and each of them seemed to know everything about everything. By their own account they were scientists, mathematicians, explorers, his- torians, theologians, and they were at one time extensive capitalists. There seems to be a floating population of that kind in British Columbia.
We boarded the train at Robson, and were soon speeding through the mountains in the darkness. But when we got to Trail there was a great taking in of coal on the part of the locomotive, for we had before us one of 232
The Railway Climb to Rossland
the stififest railway ascents on the continent. Rossland is distant from Trail about seven miles, as the crow flies, but as there is a dif- ference of about 2,300 feet between the levels of the two places, it may be imagined that a very circuitous route is taken. The seven miles' direct distance takes about an hour and a half to accomplish. Very often the grade reaches four feet in one hundred feet, and on one part of the line there is a series of switchbacks up which the train is alternately pushed and pulled. The loud purring of the engine, which has eight coupled driving-wheels, showed the immense amount of work it was doing. At last, when we had got high up on the side of one mountain we saw the numer- ous electric lights of Rossland gleaming at the top of another. I had never realized that this city of gold was so near the sky. By a long detour we skirted the head of the valley and drew up at the platform of the station of one of the most remarkable places in the Domin- ion. We were in the midst of the gold-bearing mines, from which so much wealth has been extracted, and where such enormous amounts of capital have been expended. But of the wonders of the gold region I must speak in rny next.
CHAPTER XXI ROSSLAND AND THE GOLD MINES
TRAIL, B.C., September 3oth THE power that actuates the electric light system of Rossland is made at Bonnington Falls, about thirty-three miles off. The city is well lighted, and the interior of the hotel was a blaze of brilliance, while the neatness of one's bedroom, the absolute spotlessness of the bed, and the perfection with which it was " made," showed that Chinamen, rather than chambermaids, were employed in the upstairs work. It was not bedtime, however, and I strolled forth to see if newspaper editors had to work at nights in Rossland, as they do in Toronto. In the office of the Miner I found Mr. Houston, brother of Mr. William Houston, M. A., of our city, writing a powerful and tren- chant editorial, and Mr. Laird, son of a former minister of Elm Street Methodist Church, gaily rattling off three or four " scoops " on a type- writer. I knew they were scoops by the 234
A Long-lost Acquaintance
seraphic expression on his face. While I was there, Chief of Police Vaughan came in with another "scoop." A Chinaman had tried to smuggle himself across the line — which is fourteen or fifteen miles south of Rossland — into British territory without paying the tax. Chief Vaughan had caught him jumping like a rabbit from bush to bush in the dark. Mr. Laird introduced me to the Chief, a soldierly-looking man of forty or thereabout, and it soon transpired that I had known him as a boy in Birmingham, Eng., years and years ago. Since then he had been in the Soudan and Zulu wars. But this is only one instance of many, for I can scarcely meet anybody without finding that some relation of his married my grandmother's aunt's niece, or something of that sort. It is not the slightest use to try anywhere in the West to "get away from the bloomin' old rag " of acquaintance- ship or even relationship. The chief was so pleased with the rencontre that next day he brought round the smartest light waggon, with high yellow wheels, and the best team in Ross- land — and they have some good horses in that top-of-the-mountain town — and insisted on taking me a drive to show me the country. I noticed that there was a foot-brake on the vehicle, and it soon came into use, but first 235
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
my friend had to restrain the horses from galloping up a hill about as steep as the roof of a house. It was when we began to pick our tortuous way among boulders, between wood piles and over railway crossings, with puffing locomotives that made our steeds prick up their sensitive ears, that his skill as a whip was evidenced. Not that he used the whip ; it was all done by talking to the intelligent animals. But there were more triumphs to come. Our rig and its pair of fresh and danc- ing horses was proceeding along a very narrow and very indifferently made road that wound along the mountain side, and allowed about four inches between the outside of our outside wheels and a comfortably steep and boulder- strewn descent of 700 or 800 feet. I began to wonder whether it was better when pitched out under such circumstances to hold one's self tense or to relax any sort of purpose and leave matters to instinct. Should I close my eyes, when I was describing my forced parabola, or shut them? Again, what shape should I en- deavour to assume, and on what part of one's person would it be most satisfactory to fall ? It was while I was revolving these thoughts that we overtook a heavy dray and team pull- ing along an immense wooden drum, contain- ing wire for electrical purposes, while farther 236
An Inch of Roadway to Spare
along we saw an equally heavy team and waggon coming to meet us. I did not know at all what we should do, and our horses were impatient, making as though they would clear both obstacles in one leap. The on-coming team backed, however, till they came to a place where the road was wider, and where by placing our hubs close against those of the two waggons successively, we should have at least an inch of roadway to spare. Our horses rose to the occasion, and that they knew it was a close shave was perfectly evident. They went very gingerly past the tight place, with as much interrogation in their ears as could possibly be expressed, and, the obstacles clearly passed, they gave their heads a shake and swung into a trot down the hill, as much as to say, " a little thing like that does not unnerve us."
After that I grew less apprehensive, though we came to places where a precipice rose on one side and a sheer depth of 1,500 feet sank on the other. It was a lovely drive among the mountains, the vast masses of which gave sublimity to every turn. We passed far above the tops of giant Douglas firs, through groves of poplars " yellowing to the fall," and odorous brakes of fern and underbrush. We met nothing and nobody ; all was grandeur, 237
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
and beauty, and silence, and atmospheric wonders and mystery. Now and again we passed a heap of rock and waste on the moun- tain side, where a gold mine had been begun, or where a noisy rivulet dashed headlong down the mountain. Then by slow degrees and winding ways we reached the bottom of the gorge, and, after a mile or two along the level, saw at its end the Union Jack floating over the shed which does duty as a custom- house.
In Uncle Sam's country we came now and again to pioneer settlers who were beginning to hew themselves homes out of the forest. We pulled up to listen to the silence — that silence that is unbroken by voice of bird or rustle of beast — and through which you look down shadowed aisles of columnar forest.
The drive back was grander still, the vast mystery of the mountains more accentuated. But the moon rose, and the horses knew they were going home. When we had got to the stables they had taken us thirty miles, and they were " as fresh as daisies."
I suppose the Chief thought I might break my neck in that break-neck country, for when I was climbing up to the Le Roi mine the next morning, he came round a corner very naturally. The top works of this mine are very 238
Two Monster Driving Engines
extensive and lofty. They comprise a high pyramidal sort of erection over the mouths of the two shafts which contain the hoisting pulleys and the crushing machinery. They also comprise the most majestic pair of wind- ing engines I have ever seen. These look strong enough and big enough to pull the Toronto City Hall down Bay Street. They are in a fine spacious engine-house, very light, where everything is kept very clean. They control the up and down work of a 9OO-foot shaft which has three compartments, and an- other having five compartments, and which reaches to a depth of 1,150 feet. In these shafts stations are cut1 at approximately every 100 feet in depth to 900 feet, and from these stations "drives" are run out to the boundary limits of the property, which is about seventy acres, covering an irregular par- allelogram about 2,800 feet in length by 900 feet in width.
We saw the driver of the great winding engines aloft on a platform with his hands on the levers. Ting-tang ! went a bell, and instantly the great drum, carrying the 1^4- inch wire-rope, began to revolve. Then the engines came slowly to a stop, and we heard a five-ton lot of copper and gold ore being upset with a thunderous rumble into 239
From the Great Lakes to the Wick West
the hopper above. We climbed the stair lead- ing to the hopper, and saw the " Comet crusher" biting up the massive lumps of stone into convenient sizes. As the rocking jaw of this chewer cracks these nuts they fall on to three endless belts below, which are divided into compartments, and which are so arranged that you see a constant succession of trayfuls of ore passing slowly up an incline. The belts vary from 18 inches to 36 inches wide, and they travel 45 feet per minute, pass- ing a line of ore-sorters on either side. These men pick out the waste rock, while the belts carry on the ore to the sampling mill, where it is still further crushed, and a sample of the day's run, one-thousandth part of the amount hoisted, is taken automatically. This sample is supposed to be an exact representation in value of all the ore hoisted, and the mechanism by which it is taken from the bulk is very ingenious. The sample is sent to the assay office and assayed, and it thus gives the aver- age value of all the ore hoisted for that day. After being thus sampled, the ore is conveyed to ore " bunkers " at the railway siding, by an aerial tram-line, operated by gravity ; full buckets going down pulling empty ones back, the mechanism of this tramway being con- 240
The Northport Smelting Works
trolled by one man who by its means loads the buckets and governs the speed at which the train is allowed to run. From the ore bunkers at the railway the ore is loaded into cars through gates operated by compressed air, ten or fifteen minutes being sufficient to load a train of twenty 3O-ton cars. The ore is then hauled seventeen miles to the reduc- tion works at Northport, where the smelting works of the Le Roi Company are situated. The capacity of the mine is 1,000 to 1,200 tons per day, and the smelting works are capable of treating 1,500 tons daily. The treatment consists of fusing the rock to a copper matte, by which operation the metallic value of thirty tons of the crude ore is concentrated into one ton of matte. The matte is then shipped to the refining works of the American Smelting and Refining Company, of New Jersey, where the metals are separated from each other and turned out in a refined state, i.e., as copper, gold, and a small proportion of silver. There are as yet no refining works in Canada. The approximate percentage of metal in the crude ore is half an ounce of gold, thirty pounds to forty pounds of copper, and one ounce of silver to the ton.
16 241
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
DESCENDING THE SHAFT.
I gleaned the foregoing particulars while we were waiting for an opportunity to go down the QOO-foot shaft — say, twice as deep as To- ronto City Hall is high, and a good piece over. They were given to me by Mr. Bernard Macdonald, the capable and courteous man- ager of the mine. Mr. Bratnober, one of its earliest shareholders and a miner of life-long experience, was also with us, so that we made a party of four. Mr. Bratnober is a man of vast height and weight, and we therefore rejoiced in the strength of the steel cable. We each got a candle and lighted it, and then the four of us entered a box- like cage open on one side, pulled the bell, and down we began to move. It goes without saying that we packed ourselves as tightly as possible at the back of that box. We had no wish to "come to the front" on that occasion ; on the contrary we had a retiring tendency, and I for my part had a sort of feeling that if the back of the box were a little farther from the open front it would not be any the worse — seeing that from the open front you could step into black, vacant depth. It is true that the shaft slants a little, so that the box in which you descend is tipped slightly backwards ; but 242
Into the Bowels of the Earth
even so, you felt that you did not want to practise leap-frog or anything athletic of that kind. I wondered how it would be if the Chief, instead of accompanying three peaceable citizens on their descent, were bringing up a red-handed criminal who objected to extra- dition. What a theme for melodrama — " The Struggle in the Shaft ! "
But while I thus thought, we passed the first station and had a glimpse of electric- lighted avenues and busy figures of men working. Then blackness again for 100 feet, and then another station, till at length we were down the whole 900 feet, and got out in what seemed like a black railway-tunnel, so spacious are these cavernous cloisters in the heart of the mountain. Tram lines were laid there, and holding our candles and peering into the dark we proceeded in Indian file. The air was good, for the mine is ventilated by a tunnel that goes right out of it to the mountain side and the open air. But where we were all was weird night, and the gigantic sighs of a great pump, worked by compressed air at the end of one of the tunnels, sounded like the dying expirations of some cyclopean monster who felt very badly about our irrup- tion into his lair. This was behind us. In front of us we could hear two compressed air 243
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
drills at work, 240 strokes a minute, and there is nothing more noisily busy than a com- pressed air drill going into hard rock. What amazed me about the mine was the size and extent of these underground excavations. As for Mr. Bratnober, he got over big heaps of ore with the agility of the schoolboy he was forty-five years ago, and knocked off chunks of ore with a miner's pick. When he displayed them, with a knowing glance, we looked knowing, too, as much as to say it was the right kind of stuff ; for it was no use trying to make yourself heard anywhere near those compressed air drills. And by and by we wandered on and on through the chain of lofty caverns till we got to almost perfect silence. Then we could hear other drills going rapidly, but faintly. They sounded like "woodpeckers tapping the hollow elm tree," and Mr. Macdonald said they were 240 feet away on the other side of the rock wall, so conductive of sound are these ribs of Mother Earth.
Then we went up to the 8oo-foot level, and I was left alone with my guttering candle. It was grotesque to see the shadows of the party as they went along the cavern and dis- appeared around a curve. Then from the deep silence came a rumbling, and presently 244
A Friendly Irishman
a figure came in sight pushing a car loaded with ore. It was a strong, raw-boned mine- blackened man, and when he had dumped his ore into the " pocket " from which it is loaded into skips below, for ascent to the upper regions, he said :
" Ye'll be from the Quid Counthry ? "
" Yes," I replied.
" God bless ould Ireland ! " says he.
" And England, too," I replied.
" And Scotland as well," he said.
" They're all right," I remarked.
" Give us a shake o' yer hand," said he.
So we shook hands.
" Wherever we are, eh ? "
" Why, certainly," said 1.
This seemed to give him prodigious satis- faction, and he went off trolling an Irish ditty as well as his car. In about five minutes he was back with another load, and remarked that "it was all right." I appreciated the humour and humanity of him. I suppose my being down there was an event in the day's work that was a little out of the common, and he felt he must express some appreciation of it. So did his sunshiny spirit triumph over that Cimmerian gloom. Even when he came along with the third load he winked. And then we went up to the next level. But how sweet 245
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
the daylight looked when we came up after three hours in that eternal darkness !
After that we went down the mountain a couple of hundred feet and saw the big air- compressing plant, and the battery of boilers that supply steam for the engines. And seeing all this we could understand why the Le Roi Company needed a capital of $5,000,000. Most of the stock is held by English shareholders, and the head office of the enterprise is at Salisbury House, London.
In common with the numerous other min- ing properties at Rossland, the Le Roi is feeling the effects of the disastrous strike which recently occurred. The mine was but partially at work, a few hundred men only being engaged instead of eight or nine hundred. Numbers of idle men hung about the streets and watched the incoming trains with a view to disconcerting the influx of incoming labourers. As a matter of fact, the action of the labour unions is a little in advance of what is reasonable, and it has brought things pretty much to a standstill. The gold in British Columbia cannot be got out without the expenditure of a good deal of capital, but so long as labour prevents capital from getting any return on outlay, so long will progress be impeded. The wages the 246
Demands of the Labour Unions
employers are prepared to pay are $3.50 per day of eight hours, for miners, and $2.50 per day for " muckers," or unskilled labourers. But the union wants $3.00 a day for muckers, and $3.50 a day for blacksmith's helpers, and that carpenters should only work eight hours per day instead of ten ; moreover, that the officers of the labour union should have access to the mine at all times in order to obtain recruits. These demands not being supported by public opinion, the strike is gradually petering out, and many of the miners feel that they have been somewhat misled by their officers and demagogues. For among labour leaders wise and capable men are as rare as they are in any other department of affairs. Where you have one good man you have twenty rattlepates who cannot see an inch beyond their noses. As one looks around at Rossland, over all the valuable mining pro- perties— the Le Roi, which is the biggest in Canada, the Centre Star, the War Eagle, the Iron Mask, and all the rest of them — he cannot help feeling that up to the present they have been conducted in the face of difficulties which would have effectually damped the zeal of any but very enterprising managers.
Nevertheless, Rossland is a surprising city when it is considered that it is only seven 247
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
years old. The Montreal Bank block and the Court-house are very fine buildings. A second school is being built, and though fewer people go to church in Rossland than any- where else in Canada, there are several churches, besides thirty hotels. There is also a club, which for convenience and comfort ranks high among institutions of that kind in the West.
248
CHAPTER XXII
THE SMELTER AT TRAIL AND THE BO UNDAR Y CO UNTR Y
GREENWOOD, B.C., October ist I LEFT Rossland by the afternoon train, and, standing on the rear platform, much en- joyed the devious descent of 2,300 feet to Trail. Seeing it thus by daylight, it was impossible not to admire the engineering skill with which the railroading has been done, and not to hope, also, that nothing in the massive locomotive that was backing up against the train thus descending by its own weight, would give way. Previously to getting on the train, however, I had been struck by the brute strength of the evolutionary demon, as he stood at the station, the cylinders of his pump breathing stertorously. His four mas- sive coupled driving-wheels on each side, with enormously thick tires on them, meant busi- ness, and his immense bulk and weight were satisfying. I suppose our engineers are strong because they evolve slowly and are still. 249
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Much more brain and imagination and spinal marrow have been spent on this locomotive and this perilous descent from Rossland to Trail than ever were put into any novel in the world, yet few of the general public know who did it, nor was the portrait of the engineer in half the periodicals of the world. He did not even undertake a lecturing tour under the superintendence of Major Pond — prime mark of merit — or have his performance dramatized with the assistance of poster artists and an adulatory press. All the same, I can imagine him coming sometimes and sitting quietly on the side of the mountain, among these silent and towering trees, smoking a pipe with per- haps one friend, and watching the great black offspring of creative energy cautiously appear away up there in the high forest silences, and begin his astonishing descent, taking one after another the daring curves and inclines, and at last triumphantly disap- pearing far below. As for me, I stood at the back of the train and admired and enjoyed, and here is my humble tribute to the men who made that enjoyment possible. For the rails lead down among scenes the most sylvan and beautiful, and you look up through glades and gulches in which you want to linger. The changing colours of 250
A Country of Ups and Downs
autumn are being spilt about in patches, and every now and again come the odours of the woods that speak of calm and half melancholy decay.
Every sort of mountain and hill is to be found in British Columbia, and I say again, that let any artist draw a mountain scene from his imagination, it will be quite safe to label it B. C., because here, somewhere or other, he will find the very thing. The Gov- ernment might really take a census of moun- tains rather than population, and it might reasonably be expected to accomplish better results than appear to have attended the recent numbering of us, since the mountains would undoubtedly stand still to be counted. But you get used to every sort of elevation and incline when you are here. Conse- quently, when I got out at Trail, I was not surprised to find that the town lay in a valley about two hundred feet below the railway platform. Nor was I in the least disconcerted when being driven, with my impedimenta, down the winding and quite sandy descent that debouches in the main street, at being told half way down by my youthful Jehu, that " a rig went over there a bit ago and the horse was killed." I recognized with ap- preciation that the boy wished to give zest to 251
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
my drive. I saw Trail below me, spread out like a map, in the midst of the mountains that rise on all sides of it. On one side is the broad sweep of the Columbia River — its waters swift and mountain-born. These green and rapid waters and the somewhat barren heights give it character. Besides, some of the houses are on stilts, because in places the ground is low ; so that part of the main street is carried by a bridge. For the rest it is a collection of shacks and frame houses of various shapes and sizes, and, as is usual in all these mining towns, there are plenty of hotels ; for it would appear that not only does the prospector require the cheering cup in looking forward to his achievements, but also when he regards them as past his- tory. Still more does he demand it when his efforts have proved unsuccessful. I think there is a considerable floating population in British Columbia who regard life as a hard proposition, and who cannot face the con- templation of it without the assistance of a stimulant.
It is only the main street of Trail that is straight and has a building line ; the rest of the avenues are sandy by-ways, where a man puts up a more or less commodious shack, where he wants it, and with his own ideas as 252
Trail and its Big Smelter
to its aspect. Moreover, a good piece of the town is built in a gulch between two moun- tains, where it is sheltered from the winds of winter. All this gives a sense of freedom and a unique quality that are precious. You are near gold mines, and you get used to walking on the ties over a long trestle when the trains aren't coming through the town, and there is always the smelter, pouring out clouds of smoke that never seem to matter up there (for it is situated on the same level as the upper railway station), and the air is very good. Also, there is a newspaper and four churches, and you can get a pony and be in the heart of the mountains very soon, for there is the original trail from which the town takes its name.
The smelter, which is the property of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and is run on very scientific principles, dominates the town, being situated on the eminence before mentioned. It consists of a large group of buildings with two huge chimney-stacks, one of which is 200 feet high and has an inside measurement of twelve feet square or an area of 144 square feet ; practical men will know what sort of a chimney that is, and it is about the same width all the way up. From these two chim- neys pour, day and night, week-days and 253
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Sundays, continuous clouds of smoke that are soon dispersed in the clear mountain air.
In front of the works, facing the valley, is an immense mound of black slag-sand. This mound must be many acres in extent. It is the finely-divided waste of the ore. You see it tapped out of the furnaces — a molten, water- thin, white-hot liquid — and this highly-heated stream is poured into a small cataract of rushing water that not only disintegrates it immediately into sand-like grains, but bears it out on to the aforesaid big mound, and leav- ing it -stranded there, drains away into the river. But I am taking you to the bottom of the furnaces first. I should instead have climbed to the upper part of them, first show- ing you the immense fan worked by electricity that blows the enormous fires. In the upper part of these blast furnaces there is a wide opening into which the ore is cast, together with coke, and limestone for flux. You stand on the iron floor and look into the hungry maw of the thing, roaring, darting its angry flames, consuming whatever is given to it Two men are standing there, and a big barrow- ful of coke is brought and shovelled in, then another, and the monster chortles in its angry joy, and multitudinous crackling sparks fly up the flue to the great chimnev. Now a 254
Fiery Furnaces of the Smelter
car of ore — give him that ! He makes nothing of it. Now a barrowful of limestone — shovel it in ! Then more coke, and the valves of his great iron mouth are closed, but you can hear him roaring over his meal with insatiate glee. So they keep feeding him. Down below they are tapping off the slag first, and then they draw off the matte that contains the metals, and that will be sent to the United States to be refined. There are several of these furnaces.
And there are others which contain molten lakes of metallic material ; still others that slowly revolve and roast the ore to free it from sulphur. This is also done in another part of the works by the " open-hearth " pro- cess, which allows the sulphur to escape into the air, because in this remote part of the country there is no other use for it. And there are huge bins in which various sorts of gold and silver and copper ores are kept in bulk, as they are brought from the mines, until the proper sort of ore to mix with them comes along ; which means not only that much specialistic knowledge of chemistry is required, but that a vast amount of money is sometimes locked up in these ore-stocks. They have the same arrangement here for the automatic sampling of the ore, in order 255
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
that its average value may be accurately ob- tained, as they have at Rossland. The sample is assayed, and on that basis the ore is pur- chased from the mine sending it
What strikes the observer about all the gold mining and smelting of this neighbour- hood is the vastness of the operations under- taken and the immense amount of capital em- ployed. As you look at the extent of the Trail smelting works, see the many furnaces, roasting hearths, stocks, tramways, electric installations, laboratory, offices, and all the rest of the great establishment, you cannot help feeling how immense has been the de- velopment since the lonely prospectors among the mountains first began to sample the rocks and locate the various veins.
Gold mining seems to involve three pro- cesses. First, there is the adventurous ex- plorer who, with his pack, frying-pan and gun, goes a-hunting for the gold-bearing rock. He generally dies poor, frequently by the aid of whiskey and poker. Then there comes the wild-cat, wolfish middleman, who sees the chance of a "good thing" without doing much work for it. He is a rapacious animal, who should be shot on sight or hanged, but somehow this fate doesn't get to him. He goes to church on Sundays, eats the fat of 256
Heavy Capital Required
lambs, and is clothed in purple and fine linen. Instead of being hanged he may look forward to consolatory resolutions to his family, and a eulogium by the best orator to be had. Finally there are the hard-working managers and engineers and operatives of the com- panies, of large and widely-distributed capital, who recognize that gold extraction must be conducted on a commercial basis and com- mercial methods ; that there are profits to be had in gold mining, but not extravagant ones, and that very often a small percentage of precious metal means a large and continuous supply that may possibly make a fair return for a liberal and judicious expenditure of capital.
Even then the tendency of organized labour, which is to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, has to be borne in mind, as well as many contingencies which always await the oper- ations of enterprising commerce. Anybody can make a dollar a day by washing particles of gold out of the sand of the Fraser River, and the Chinamen do it Adventurous men, taking their lives in their hands, may go up to the Yukon and find nuggets. But in the mountainous regions of British Columbia you have to pay for scratching the back of the gold- bearing district, and only by the application 17 257
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
of commercial methods and large capital can a satisfactory consummation be arrived at.
Proceeding on my journey through what is called the Boundary Country, I got to Grand Forks about nine o'clock on a chill autumnal night, and found that we had about a mile and a half to drive to the town. The aggre- gation of houses near the station is called Columbia, and it and Grand Forks are about to amalgamate. Naturally there is a difficulty about the name — the Columbia people want- ing theirs, while Grand Forks folk think that theirs will answer every purpose, particularly as they are the larger community. The hotel accommodation of Grand Forks is very ample, and seven-eighths of the population consist of incomers from the United States who have been attracted to the gold mines in the vicinity. Four years ago, when the first mayor of the town was elected, there were only eight residents who were qualified by British citizen- ship and property qualification for the position, and when the town council was chosen only one of the qualified men was left outside. A considerable number of the citizens have, how- ever, since taken out their naturalization papers. The growth of the town has largely been due to the establishment here of a smelter on extensive lines, and which was 258
Grand Forks and Greenwood
completed rather more than a year ago. It is controlled by the Granby Mining and Smelt- ing Company, of which Mr. S. H. C. Miner, head of the Granby Rubber Company, of Granby, Quebec, is the financial backer. Grand Forks is a go-a-head and rather ambitious town, and will no doubt grow into a still more important place. It is beautifully situated, and near it there is twenty miles of good ranching country which is assisting in its development on lines broader than the merely metallic. The town is well watered by the Kettle River, from the forks of which it takes its name, and its pleasant surroundings and aspects are evidently attractive to the people over the line that separates Canada from the United States.
I got to Greenwood late at night, and under- went the usual varieties of level in the hotel 'bus between the station and its destination. In the West you get accustomed to these things, and the drivers make their horses go up or go down anything and everywhere. We were rewarded by a cordial reception at the hands of a most artistic landlord, who had reduced the business of a hostelry to a science. He welcomed us as though we were his long- lost blood relations, and he could not have been more solicitous for our comfort if we had 259
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
been princes. By the morning light I see that much that I have said about Grand Forks is applicable to Greenwood. It is a mining town that has grown up in this Boundary Country because gold has been found in the neigh- bourhood and a smelter has been erected in close proximity. Greenwood has its banks and churches and its main street, with highly respectable stores in it. In ten years' time it will, no doubt, be a very important place. To me, however, one of its features is that it is the point from which my eastward journey home will very shortly begin.
260
CHAPTER XXIII
THE CROW'S NEST PASS— MACLEOD— LETHBRIDGE
REGINA, N.W.T., October ;th THE railway journey from Greenwood to Nelson took from about 1 1.30 a.m. to 9 p.m., for there was a long wait at Robson, situate about half way. It was. through nearly one hundred miles of most uncommon beauty, even in British Columbia — the Switzerland, the Scotland, the Wales of Canada. When we got within a dozen miles of Robson the conductor suggested that I should come out on the back platform of the train, which then began to run along the sides of the mountains overhanging the lower end of Arrow Lake. View succeeded view of most entrancing mountain beauty, as we rattled along the road with a precipice rising on one side of us and a descent on the other to the very edge of the lake. On the opposite side a continu- ous panorama of mountains met the eye, now rising to snow-capped summits and again 261
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
opening a vista of many distant foldings of far-away heights. A long wait for the Arrow Lake steamer from Revelstoke occurred at Robson, so that the latter part of the jour- ney to Nelson was performed in the dark. The train goes straight to the waiting boat on the Kootenay River, a large stern-wheel steamer of the kind employed by the C. P. R. on these lakes, and very well appointed. We looked across the water at Nelson, and saw its numerous electric lights reflected in the still surface. It is a large and thriving town, and as metallic as the rest of these gold- searching communities, the number and size and activity of which strike one with astonish- ment. We decided, however, to take Nelson as "done," though its importance as one of the great Plutoesque fraternity entitles it, I suppose, to more adequate treatment. One of the best things about it is the beautiful river that leads away from it, and as the steamer pushed through its translucent waters, silvery in the moonlight, and the neighbouring hills showed gray and mysterious in the half light, one determined that the Kootenay country pos- sesses a great wealth of natural beauty as well as that which is merely metallic and pecuniary. They called us at five o'clock the next morn- ing, and we found our way in the dark to the 262
The CrowV Nest Pass
train that was to take us through the Crow's Nest Pass to Macleod, which it will be re- membered is in Alberta. All that day, till about four o'clock in the afternoon, we were thundering along that romantic and, in some senses, historical railway. I have said so much about the natural beauty of these places that I fear to repeat myself, and to become wearisome ; but I can only say that the scenery of the Crow's Nest Pass will be worthy of its painter when he shall arise, and of the most detailed study by any lover of nature.
I am aware, however, that the live interest of to-day is in the immense coal tracts that are being opened up at Coal Creek and at Fernie, the enterprising nature of which is being evidenced by rapidly rising towns all along the line. It would seem that on the whole coal is as valuable a find as gold ; and in the hundreds of coke-ovens at Fernie the coke is made which is found necessary in the ore-smelters of the Kootenay. Canada will grow to the adult stage, but, as you travel about, you cannot help feeling that the great Dominion is in its infancy. Everywhere the opening-up process is going on, and in the future the great influx of population will come. Canada's prairies and mines and forests fore- tell it. Nowhere do you have this feeling 263
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
more strongly than in the neighbourhood of the coal mines of the Crow's Nest The in- dustry is bringing the population, and the population is building the towns with a helter- skelter liveliness that is surprising. Mean- while long coal and coke trains thunder along the railways, and the fires of the coke-ovens gleam at night through the dark.
You leave the mountains at last and come to the wide cattle-feeding prairies again. There is almost a relief in it. Whether from the natural liking for variety, or from the attractive force of the storied and stable East, and the knowledge that every mile on the prairies brings one nearer home, it would be idle to inquire. There were the bunches of good cattle, however, and now and again there was a prairie dog, and you looked westward and backward at snow-capped mountains be- coming more and more ethereal in the blue distance.
Macleod is an incident on the great alluvial plain. It contains a couple of hotels, houses for half a thousand people or more, and the barracks of the Mounted Police. For the N. W. M. P. I have the greatest respect, as a fine body of men, well officered, and to the last degree useful. Whenever you drop into their barracks you find everything neat, 264
Maclcod and Neighbourhood
orderly, soldierly and manly. There are at the Macleod barracks ninety men, eight Indian scouts and two interpreters, eighty- seven horses and eight pack-ponies.
But Macleod is the centre of a wide ranch- ing and farming district that is being opened up with great success. I saw there samples of grain quite as good as anything that has been grown in Manitoba, to my thinking — and I have seen a large number of grain samples since I started on my trip. At a compara- tively short distance from here, at Cardston, there is a thriving Mormon settlement that is doing some surprising things in the way of farming. In fact, the whole district is on the tip-toe of expectation of great things in the agricultural line.
An almost impossibly fine morning found me on October the third (the date is worth spelling out), making my way over that part of the prairie that intervenes between Leth- bridge and the coal-mining works of the Al- berta Railway and Coal Company. It was a mile and a half varied by descents into coulees and climbs up on the other side. Even in this short distance one found that the prairie is by no means uninteresting or deficient in charac- teristics. The rolling surface gives to the dry grass a light and shade that are unique, and 265
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
always there is the far-off mysterious horizon meeting the sky. There are few things that remain common-place if you get enough of them, and this is the case with the prairie. An acre of prairie fenced off might be monot- onous, but a thousand square miles of it rises to grandeur. Very near the coal mines on this vast waste lie the two Lethbridge ceme- teries— one of them the Roman Catholic, with its large cross. They are quadrangular spaces with a neat paling around them. Not a vest- ige of a tree is in sight. I leave them on the left, and as I climb out of the last coulee, I find by the side of the track a bleached buffalo skull. There is ,,no mistaking the short, strong horn, the broad forehead of this relic of the past. Here, then, the aborigines pursued, and here their arrows sang the song of death as they left the twanging bowstring. But be- fore me are the rows of tall, black, iron chim- neys ; the miscellaneous roofs showing grimy against the Italian sky of blue ; the columns of black smoke rising high in the air ; the gaunt trestle work for loading coal into cars ; the great heaps of black mine-waste, the aggre- gate of years ; the scaffold work that upholds the quickly-turning pulleys over which the wire ropes run that pull up and lower the cages in the black mirk of the three-hundred- 266
Galicians as Coal-miners
foot shaft. A sound of work is everywhere. Almost every minute a cage comes up with its waggon of coal, and at the same time an empty one goes down. A long train of coal trucks for despatch north, south, east and west is being filled.
"Shall we send those Douks down and those Italians that came last night? " says Mr. Hardie, the mine foreman, to Mr. Nasmith, the manager.
" Yes, and the Frenchmen, too. How many are there of them ? "
" Nine have showed up out of the seven- teen ; the others will come in. Some of them haven't got caps and lamp? though. There's one of the Galicians hasn't."
It is arranged that this Slav shall get his outfit. "You have Doukhobors working in the mine, then ? " I interrogate.
" No, we haven't Douks. The fact is the Galicians are often called Douks."
" How do you find the Galicians as work- ers ? "
" Very good. The Galician is a decent, hard-working fellow. He wants to assimilate and be a good Canadian. The Douk wants to be by himself, and make his own laws and live in his own way."
" What wages do your miners get ? " 267
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
" It is a poor hand that does not make $100 a month. Some of them make $150 to $180."
" What is your output of coal ? "
" Ten or twelve hundred tons a day."
" And your market ? "
" As far as the Rockies on the west and Winnipeg in the east. Southward to the boundary. Then we supply our own railway down to the boundary, and a section of the C. P. R."
" What is coal worth in Lethbridge ? "
" Three and a quarter dollars a ton, deliv- ered into your bin."
Granted the freedom of the place, I wandered about the top works of the mine, peered down the black shaft, inspected the winding engines and those that compress the air to work the machine drills that make the holes into which the dynamite is put. All around is the prai- rie. They used to dig the coal out of the hills down by the winding St. Mary River, that flows a mile west of Lethbridge, but haul- ing the coal up the incline from that level was too expensive, so they sank the shaft. Coal is come at immediately under a thin super- imposed bed of crumbly shale. There is enough coal within a hundred miles of Leth- bridge to supply the entire continent for a 268
Prairie Wolves, Coyotes and Gophers
thousand years. The coal raised here is used for domestic purposes, and is of good hard quality.
Within a few yards of the compressor en- gines, where a little patch of prairie grass lay still untouched and primitive, a nimble little gopher was nibbling his lunch. I approached with wary step. He sat up alert, in the pretty way gophers have, and looked keenly round. Seeing that I did not move, he went on nib- bling, but when I took a step forward he darted into his hole.
"Are there any coyotes about here?" I asked of the tall young French Nova-Scotian, who runs the compressors.
" Oh, yes, and wolves, too. I hunt the wolves sometimes. The Government offers a pretty good bounty — $15 on a she and $10 on a he. You get a horse and run them down. Some you can run down in a mile, others will take two or three. They do a good deal of damage. A couple of them will pull down a big steer if they are hungry. Then they eat what they want and leave the carcass, and the coyotes get their turn. But the coyotes will kill a calf just born ; that's what they're fond of."
The day before I had seen a mean, slinking coyote from the train window. The coyote 269
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
can run. He soon took his long tail out of view.
The scattered houses and churches and plain public buildings of Lethbridge lay on the prairie in the sun. The town has the advantage of a big public square — a piece of the prairie that has been fenced in. Away on the west and south were the indescribably beautiful Rockies, their snow-capped peaks glittering, their mountainous forms defined with pale blue shadows. I passed the solitary and treeless graveyards and went across the drab, dry grass to the head of the coulee that led down to the river. Before me was a wide expanse of valley, through which the gleam- ing river wound, and on its flats were numbers of smallish poplar trees of the bushy kind, their foliage a bright yellow glory in the abundant sunshine. It was the third of October, but it was as hot as July. There was no sign of animal or human life, and the place was inexpressibly lonely. • Across the river the land rose in rounded green-gray hills. Coming down to the lower level, I saw the tunnel leading into the hill from which the coal used to be extracted, and wandering into its dark and cool depths I came to the coal, under the shale, and had the pleasure of detaching a fragment from the bed it had 270
A Deserted Prairie Valley
occupied for millions of years. Then I came out into the hot sunshine, and wondered at the broad-spread, silent valley. Not a bird- note broke the stillness. Only the grass- hopper rose snapping from one's footstep, displaying lemon-yellow or scarlet wings. Presently I passed the bleached skeleton of a horse. It was a strange, weird, silent place, for all the glorious sunshine. And overhead were the interminable depths of overarching blue.
271
CHAPTER XXIV
REGINA—THE LATE MR. DAVIN— CONCLUSION
WINNIPEG, October 2ist I BEGIN to write this last letter of a rather garrulous series in the city which is destined to be the pivotal centre of the Dominion. "We are here to stay" may be written on Winnipeg's walls, but not in the sense in which it was graved, by his own request, on the newspaper editor's tombstone. The more you see of Winnipeg the more you feel it is going to be a central heart of things, and whether Manitoba be increased by the addi- tion of a slice of the North- West Territories or not, the position and people of this city are going to make it one of importance and power. Not for nothing is it a confluence of railways and the capital of the richest wheat lands in the world. It is getting to be a metropolitan place, where you are always meeting someone you know. Branch offices 272
Prairie Fires Seen by Night
of distant firms are here, banks are much in evidence, in education it is forging ahead. Notwithstanding occasional bad times, Win- nipeg is bound to keep in the front rank of the procession.
A rather cloudy Sunday afternoon brought me to Regina from Lethbridge, after a night in a Pullman sleeper and a forenoon of prairie travel. Soon after we left Lethbridge on the previous evening we had seen the darkness of the prairie illuminated by a level line of fire a mile a half long — one of the many conflagra- tions that burn up the dry brown grass and go on till they come to a place where there is nothing to burn. The line could not have been straighter if you had ruled it with a straight-edge. Later on we had come to a place where the burning of a straw-pile lit up the heavens, for in these parts the farmer often burns the straw he does not want for his own use, though to ignorant eyes it seems waste to devote so commonly salable a thing to the flames.
Vast spaces of prairie, with occasional farms and little towns, had been the objects of our vision, and when we got to Regina, the capital of the North-West Territories — Al- berta, Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, etc. — we did not find it very striking. It straggles out from 18 273
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
the railway on to the surrounding prairie, and its streets are the primeval black prairie soil, than which nothing is better for producing a thick, rich, tenacious mud. The ruts in this mud are so deep that when they are sun-dried a little the crossing of a road is like traversing a piece of a ploughed field of stiff clay ; and should some of the seven inches of rain, which is all the Territories are favoured with during the year, come during your visit, you would stand in danger of being covered with mud from head to heel, as the Mounted Police were the other day during the visit of the Duke and Duchess. Under these circumstances one naturally clings to sidewalks, of which there are a fair number, and finds out, in time, that there are a few highly respectable stores and buildings, not to mention several churches, the court-house, and some schools, of which a larger city might be proud. There are no lights in the streets at night, and the water service is that of individual wells, with pumps worked by windmill or by hand.
I must here put down some record of an interview I had at Regina with one who was from many points of view the most remark- able man there, and whose recent tragic death gives a melancholy interest to the circumstances as I look back upon them. 274
Interview with the late Mr. Davin
I had been to the post-office for my mail on the morning after my arrival, and was walking towards the main street of the town, when I overtook a tall, well set-up figure in a black velvet coat, and wearing a white soft hat. I soon saw that it was Mr. Davin, and introduced myself, calling to mind an Irish journalists' dinner we both attended some years before. He was delighted to meet me again, and I went with him to his rooms; which were situated over the office of the Leader newspaper, with which he was formerly connected. There was a sign at the door, " N. F. Davin, Advocate," and we went upstairs to find a spacious room, very light and pleasant, and with windows that looked out over the somewhat scattered houses of Regina to the distant prairie. As for the interior of the room, what was not windows was books, and I congratulated Mr. Davin on their variety. True, on one side were law books, but on the other three you could browse among the literatures of the world.
He showed me his Shakespeare in several volumes — interleaved with writing paper for notes. We talked a good deal about poetry, and I reminded him that I knew he had written some.
"Ah!" he said, "don't say a word about 275
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
it The world will not believe that a man can write poetry and practise law, too. Keep quiet about my poetry, my friend."
" As for these books," continued Mr. Davin, "every book is a working book. Why, of course, every man who is worth anything is versatile, and every man who does intellectual work must draw inspiration from many sources. I don't mind taking the position that unless a man is versatile he cannot be great"
" Give me an instance," I said.
" Do you want to sit here all morning ? " said Mr. Davin, humorously. " How long will it take us to discuss Caesar, and Na- poleon, and Mr. Gladstone and a few others ?"
" How do you like living here ? " I said.
" Well, I can tell you that you don't know the prairies till you have lived on them. When I have been among the mountains I have felt somewhat ' cribbed, cabin'd and con- fined,' but here you can get on a horse and ride right away to the horizon and feel free."
He looked very well, and seemed full of spirit and energy. There was a wonderful simplicity and charm in his manner. He spoke like a man who had plans for the future, both literary and political.
He showed me a rare and very interesting portrait of Sir John A. Macdonald — an early 276
Davin's Remarkable Poem
photograph — also a later one that he called " the Kingston portrait." He wrote my name in a presentation copy of his poem, " Eos : An Epic of the Dawn," and kindly gave it to me, also copies of his speech on the opening of Lansdowne College, Portage la Prairie, and the one on the occasion of the first parade of the Strathcona Horse.
I told him when I afterwards saw him here in Winnipeg that I had read his poem in the train and that I thought there were some very good lines in it.
" The Saturday Review praised it," he said, " but it is very deficient in technique — deficient in technique."
" It is well worth writing about," said I. " I wish you would withdraw your embargo."
With some reluctance he consented to do this. I little thought that so soon and so sadly I should avail myself of it. I have just been looking at the book. Here are some lines :
" We are immortal ! Man's frail life, a whiff From swamp or river puffs out ; all the odds Against achievement ; his rewards, they grow Upon the precipice's ledge ; he toils, Fails, fights again for doubtful prizes, plucks His flowers with wide-mouthed ruin gaping far Below. He lives and sweats for other men, 277
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
Whose tardy praises will not reach his ears. He thinks, he acts, he laughs, he weeps, he loves, And always in death's shadow. Whatever house He builds, his destined lodging is the tomb ! "
Requiescat in pace.
The Government buildings are a mile away from Regina, on the bare prairie, and you go to them by a bleached sidewalk that runs parallel with one of the extra muddy roads of the district. You are thankful that there is a sidewalk, for you feel that if you had to cross the road there you would stick till they came to pull you out with the horse they keep in the town. And there is something fresh and novel in going to Parliamentary institutions along a path from which you can see to the horizon without the let or hindrance of even a cow or a tree. Perhaps with a telescope I might have seen a farm-house in the distance, but I hadn't one with me. As a matter of fact, I walked past the N. W. T. Government buildings, thinking they were a kindergarten school or an asylum, or something of that sort, for they are comparatively small and unim- portant. I saw ahead of me, some distance farther, on the other side of the straight road, a considerable block of buildings with half a tattered Union Jack flying, and that looked so 278
Headquarters of the N. W.M. P.
much more like Government institutions than the two-storey buildings in a garden on my right, that I kept mechanically on. It turned out, however, that the big building, which is about three times the size of the Government buildings, was the residence of Lieut-Governor Forget, as I found when I was received by his Honour's secretary, and signed my name in a visitor's book that had recently been dec- orated by the clear and beautiful signature, " Victoria May." The Lieutenant-Governor, however, was indisposed, and I could not see him. He has a beautiful house, and is build- ing what will be one of the finest conserva- tories in Canada.
From Government House I proceeded to the headquarters of the North-West Mounted Police. At Calgary and Macleod I had seen subsidiary barracks ; here is the place where recruits are received and trained, and from which the force is administered. The build- ings surround a spacious square, and com- prise barracks, officers' houses, a chapel, guard- room, and other administrative buildings. The deputy commissioner received me with a dignified military air, and turned me over to another highly military-looking warrior, who in turn consigned me to the kind care of Regimental Sergeant-Major Knight, a re- 279
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
turned South African hero, who a day or two before had received a medal from the hand of the King's son. As I was dying of thirst after that long, hot sidewalk, he took me to his room and gave me a drink of the best water I ever experienced, and it was there I saw his medal hanging up — he wouldn't have told me he was a decorated hero ; the big, manly fellow was far too modest. Under Sergeant-Major Knight's auspices I saw the stables, where he put his own horse through his paces. At a word the sagacious animal left his stall and came out on to the grass in the big square. At another word he stood, and at a sign he obediently lay down on his side as though he were dead, when his master sat on him. There he would have lain had the sergeant fired a gun over him, for this is what these horsss are trained to do. And, when bidden, he got up and went to his stall again. From the stables we went to the very fine riding-school, a spa- cious place, nearly as big as the Toronto Armouries, the floor covered deep with hay. Here the recruits are taught to ride and the horses are trained to stand fire. The building is of wood, and has a finely-designed roof, in which the material is most scientifically ap- plied. Attached to the riding-school is the gymnasium, with the usual outfit of apparatus. 280
Scene of the Execution of Rtel
The guard-room, in which prisoners are kept, is administered very much like a jail, having its separate kitchen and dining-room ; also a number of cells, each with its hinged, planked bed and pair of blankets. When I was there the prisoners were out working in the grounds. Outside of the guard-room is a little yard, perhaps 25 feet square. It has a high board fence around it. The fence is whitewashed, and it is surmounted by barbed wire. The door from the guard-room opens into it, and an upstairs window looks into it. Otherwise there is no entrance or exit. A clothes-line was stretched diagonally across it, and some clothes were drying upon it. It was in this narrow, commonplace area that Riel was hanged. He came out of that up- stairs window to meet his doom. Nor was he the first to whom this was the place of death. Now, however, criminals are only kept here pending their transference to the jail at Regina.
Leaving this gloomy place; I saw the con- cert-room, with its little stage at the end, where, in the winter, the officers and men get up amateur theatricals and other entertain- ments. I was also much pleased with the well-appointed chapel, where service is held by the Anglican clergyman from Regina, Rev. G. C. Hill, a man of much eloquence and 281
From the Great Lakes to the Wide "West
energy. And after that I sought my never- ending prairie sidewalk. This time the un- pretending character of the Government buildings did not prevent my entering and making a full inspection.
Looked at in connection with the vast area of the North- West Territories these modest edifices seem small, and it is only when one remembers that their whole population is less than that of Toronto that the appropriateness of their scale is apparent. I went first into the Legislative Chamber, which is about 50 feet by 25 feet, a one-storey building that put me in mind of the chapel of a very small sect I once saw in a garden. It is a sort of pocket edition of a Legislature that thus stands prairie-surrounded and dominant. Yet here the thunders of the Opposition reverberate, and Parliamentary tactics are carried out in all their glory. There is the beginning of a good library in an adjoining building, which is under the care of a lady librarian, and the administrative offices, which are on the front of the Legislative lot, are apparently large enough for their purpose.
But there is no doubt at all that these Ter- ritories, that are now seeking to receive full provincial rights, with their modest begin- nings of self-government, represent what will 282
The Territories as World beaters
be in the future one of the richest and most important parts of Canada. The visitor to Regina and the immediate neighbourhood is apt to go away thinking that it is a dead-alive and unprosperous district. Nothing could be a greater mistake. For ranching and farming purposes the Territories are going to beat the world. Within a square of ten miles of Regina there are 200 farmers, 1 50 of whom are estimated as being worth $5,000 apiece, while here and there are farmers who are worth $40,000 or $50,000. These agriculturists have learned how to make the best of their 7-inch rainfall. What are facts of the case ? They have a soil that is the result of thousands of years of prairie fires, and enriched, too, for thousands of years by wandering herds of buffalo. It is as black as your hat, and rich beyond parallel. Dig a well of 1 5 or 20 feet, and you find it the same all the way down. Now the farmers have discovered that the way to work this soil is to summer-fallow about half of their land at a time. A man in the neighbourhood had ploughed his land and found he had only seed enough to sow half of it As a matter of necessity, he deter- mined to leave the unsowed half fallow, and by keeping the top of it well stirred, light, and porous, a non-conductor of heat was created, 283
From the Great Lakes to the Wide West
which conserved the moisture below, and did not allow the sun's rays to penetrate. When next season he sowed this summer-fallowed land, in which also this treatment had com- pletely eradicated weeds, the crop he got alto- gether astonished him by its abundance. The method is spreading, and glorious harvests are being reaped.
Moreover, where the rainfall is still less, irrigation is being pushed with vigour. When I was at Lethbridge, I called on Mr. C. A. Magrath, who is the manager of the Canadian North-West Irrigation Company. This or- ganization has a canal in course of construc- tion, which is to bring water from the St. Mary's River, at the foot of the Rockies, right through a plain which only wants water to enable it to be in the highest degree fertile and productive. The canal will be 1 1 5 miles long, 25 feet wide, and 5 feet deep, and lateral channels will be provided, whereby its life- giving moisture can be diverted to the locali- ties in which it is required. This is a begin- ning that augurs well for the future, and should success attend the present endeavour, there is no doubt that the example will be widely fol- lowed in other parts of the Territories.
284
Aim and Moral of this Book
I have been West, and I have endeavoured to record some of my impressions. The theme is very vast, and I am sensible that in some parts of it I have only touched the fringe of my subject. It has been my aim, however, to avoid as much as possible the style of the guide-book, and to give a somewhat personal and human interest to my narration. If I have done anything towards increasing their knowledge of their country, I am thankful, because the better the various parts of Canada understand each other, the better it will be for all parties concerned. Union is strength, and the old parable of the bundle of sticks is fairly applicable to the case of the present inhabitants of the Dominion. And if in en- deavouring to perform this service I have at the same time ministered to their entertain- ment, and have even sometimes caused the healthy ripple of a smile, I am glad.
THE END.
285
Ind
ex
Aborigines, 42.
Alberta, C. P. R. steamship, 1 6.
American settlers, influx of, 100.
Arrowhead, 229.
Arrow Lake, 230.
Assay Office, Vancouver, 165.
Athabasca, C. P. R. steam- ship, 1 6.
Athabasca Landing, 104.
Banff", 114.
Banff, C. P. R. hotel, 115. Bears, 190, 223. Big Traverse, 59. Bishop of Algonia, 36. Black Canyon, 140. Boundary Country, 260. Bow River, 1 1 6. Bratnober, Mr. 242. British Columbia resources, 214.
Calgary, elevation of, 96.
Its inhabitants, 96.
Its characteristics, 98. Californian lawyer, 91,93,94,
96.
Canadian kopjes, 129. Capp, Rev. E. H., 36. Cardwell Junction, 9. Cardston, 265. Chair-making, 11-13.
Cheerful invalid, 9. Chinese, the, 137, 141, 167,
181.
Chinese women, 211. Clergue, F. H., 35. Clergue enterprises, 23. Commercial travellers, 169. Commercial traveller's story,
171.
Coal deposits, 223. Coal miners, 2 1 8. Coal Creek, 263. Copper, 215, 225, 241. Corpus Christi procession, 47. Crow's Nest Pass, 263.
Davin, the late N. F., 275. Devil's Gap, 58. Dining-car, 89. Doukhobors, 106. Douglas fir, 159. Drive at Rossland, 237. Dunsmuir, James, 223. Dunsmuir, coal mines, 222, 224.
Edmonton, 103, 107. Emerald Lake, 134. English Bay, Vancouver, 143. English immigrant, 65. English settlers, 155, 225. Esquimalt, fortifications of,
200. Esquimalt, warships, 205.
286
Index
Fernie, 263.
Field, 126.
Fishing, 48.
Fort Frances, 55, 63.
Fort William, 41, 42.
Franchises, Port Arthur, 44.
Fraser Canyon, 229.
Fraser River, 146.
Fur trade, 108.
Galicians, 66, in. Gaudaur, J., oarsman, 53, 68. Gold miners, 157. Gold mining, three aspects
of, 256.
Gorge, the Victoria, 198. Graham, Mr., 58. Grand Forks, 258. Greek Church, 112. Greenwood, 259.
Hastings saw-mill, Vancou- ver, 1 60.
Henry's Voyage, 15.
Hill, Rev. G. C., 281. '
Hudson's Bay Company, 46, 107.
Hunting, 135.
Indians —
Blackfeet, 96.
Offerings of, 42.
Sarcees, 96.
Siwashes, 178. Irrigation, 284.
Japanese labour, 162.
Kaministiquia River, 45. Kamloops, 136, 137. Keenora, steamship, 55. Keewatin, 52. Koochiching Falls, 62. Kootenay River, 262.
Lake Louise, 134.
Lee Mong Kow, 209. Le Roi mine, 238. Lethbridge, 265.
Coal mines, 265.
Coal miners, 267.
Macleod, 264.
Manitoba, C. P. R. steam- ship, 1 6.
Manitoba, 69.
Manitoba farm, 80.
Mine Centre, 62.
Miners' gold, 157.
Miners' strike, 246.
Minnesota, 59.
Mongolian labour, 137, 151, 164, 209.
Mormon settlement, 265.
Mountain climbing, 126.
Mountain district, 118.
Mount Baker, 140.
Mounted Police, 99, 264, 279.
Mount McKay, 48.
Nanaimo, 214, 220. Nanibozhu, 40, 42, 50. Nelson, 262. New Westminster, 177. North-West farming, 283. North-West Mounted Police,
99, 264, 279. North-West Territories, 273.
Ontario country people, 10. Ontario, crops of, 9. Organized labour, 257. Orient, the, 183. Ottertail Range, 133. Owen Sound, 10.
Packing-box architecture,
105. Port Arthur, 40, 43.
Franchises, 44.
Mortgage loans, 49. Prairie, crossing the, 87.
287
Index
Prairies, extent of, 88. Pulp mill, Sault, 28.
Quarantine station, 201.
Rainy River, 52, 56, 60. Rainy River Railway, 56. Rainy River Navigation Co.,
58.
Ranching district, 95.
Rat Portage, 49, 65.
Red River, 70, 78.
Regina, 273, 274.
Regina, Government build- ings, 278, 282.
Revelstoke, 134.
Riel, his execution, 281.
Robins, Mr. S., 217.
Robson, 232.
Rockies, the, 97.
Rossland, 233, 234.
Rossland, descent from, 250.
Salmon, 147.
Sockeyes, 152.
Humpbacks, 152.
Cohoes, 152. Salmon-canning, 144. Salvation Army, 66. St. Boniface, Winnipeg, 79. Saskatchewan River, 103. Sault Ste. Marie, 21.
Enterprises, 34.
Steel works, 24.
Land values, 27. Shimizu, Mr., Japanese Con- sul, 1 80.
Shuswap Lake, 136. Silver, 241. Silver fox skin, 1 10. Siwashes, 178. Smudges, 81.
Stanley Park,Vancouver, 142. Steveston, 145. Strathcona, Lord, 177. Street-cars. 167. Sunrise on Lake Superior, 40. Summer following, 283, Superior, Lake, voyage on, 32.
Thorneloe, Bishop, 36. Trail, 251. Trail, smelter, 253. Trees, gigantic, 142. Turner, Hon. J. H., 194.
Vancouver, 141.
Assay office, 165.
English Bay, 143.
Island, 215.
Mining and Land Co., 216.
Saw-mills, 160. Vaughan, Chief of Police,
Rossland, 235. Victoria, 183.
Government buildings, 187.
Museum, 191.
Printing department, 190.
Trade of, 227.
Warships, 205. Watt, Dr. A. T., 201. Wheat, talk of, 46.
Cost of production, 85. Wilderness, 69. Winnipeg, churches, 76.
Elevation of, 69.
First view of, 70.
Its future, 272.
Legislative buildings, 77.
Main Street, 71.
Red River, 70, 78. Wolves, 269.
288
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From the Great Lakes to the wide West