From the Great Lakes to the wide west : impressions of a tour between Toronto and the Pacific

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
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