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THROUGH THE HEART OF CANADA
THROUGH THE
HEART OF CANADA
BY
FRANK YEIGH
AUTHOR OF " ONTARIO S PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS; A CENTURY OF
LEGISLATION," COMPILER OF ** FIVE THOUSAND FACTS
ABOUT CANADA," ETC.
WITH THIRTY-EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS
TORONTO
HENRY FROWDE
1910
-7 ^
!>^
O / ;
cop. 7.
(All rights reservea.)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
IDOWN NOVA SCOTIA WAY
PACK
9
CHAPTER n
[NEW BRUNSWICK AND ITS NEIGHBOURS
. 29
CHAPTER III
iMONG THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS
CHAPTER IV
[QUEBEC: THE BRITTANY OF BRITAIN
47
. 65
CHAPTER V
[QUEBEC: THE CITADEL CITY OF THE ST. LAWRENCE 83
CHAPTER VI
[ONTREAL: CANADA'S COMMERCIAL METROPOLIS . lOI
CHAPTER VII
ONTARIO: THE CENTRAL PROVINCE OF THE DOMINION II 5
CHAPTER VIII
fEW ONTARIO: ITS SCENERY AND RESOURCES
5
137
Contents
CHAPTER IX
PAGE
ACROSS CANADA'S THOUSAND-MILE FARM . .155
CHAPTER X
THE FOREIGNER IN CANADA . . . .173
CHAPTER XI
THE POLICE PATROL OF HALF A CONTINENT . 193
CHAPTER XII
THE LAND OF THE RANCHER . . . . 213
CHAPTER XIII
MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAIN CLIMBING . .231
CHAPTER XIV
SCENES IN THE SELKIRKS . . . .255
CHAPTER XV
ALONG THE FRASER AND THE CARIBOO . . 2/3
CHAPTER XVI
SOUTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA AND THE COASTAL
CITIES . . . . . .291
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CANADIAN PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, OTTAWA
THE CITY OF HALIFAX ....
SYDNEY, CAPE BRETON, AND ITS HARBOUR .
A NOVA SCOTIA APPLE ORCHARD AT BLOSSOM TIME
ST. JOHN, NEW BRUNSWICK
A TYPICAL NEW BRUNSWICK VALLEY AND SALMON
RIVER ....
AMHERST ISLAND, MAGDALEN ISLANDS
TADOUSSAC, QUEBEC, AT THE JUNCTION OF THE
ST. LAWRENCE AND SAGUENAY RIVERS
BUCKINGHAM FALLS, QUEBEC .
[IN OLD QUEBEC .
:SOUS-LE-CAP, LOWER TOWN, QUEBEC
LOWER CHAMPLAIN MARKET, QUEBEC
MCGILL UNIVERSITY, MONTREAL
:HE CHATEAU DE RAMEZAY, MONTREAL
ONTARIO PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS, TORONTO
CHAUDIERE FALLS AND MILLS, OTTAWA
CAMP LIFE IN ALGONQUIN PARK, NORTHERN ONTARIO
INTERIOR OF A COBALT SILVER MINE
MAIN STREET, WINNIPEG
PUNNICHY, SASKATCHEWAN, ONE OF WESTERN
CANADA'S NEWEST TOWNS .
A SETTLER'S HOMESTEAD IN MANITOBA
7
Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
12
Illustrations
FACING PAGE
A HARVESTING SCENE IN SASKATCHEWAN . . 167
INDIAN HEAD, SASKATCHEWAN, AND ITS PRAIRIE
SURROUNDINGS . . . • . 17O
A WEDDING GROUP OF RUSSIAN GERMANS IN WESTERN
CANADA . . . . . -175
ROYAL NORTH-WEST MOUNTED POLICE SCOUTING
PARTY, WITH INDIAN GUIDES . . .195
HORSE RANCH IN ALBERTA . . . . 215
CATTLE ROUND-UP ON A SASKATCHEWAN RANCH . 221
VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS AND MORAINE LAKE,
CANADIAN ROCKIES .... 233
CAMP OF THE ALPINE CLUB OF CANADA, IN PARA-
DISE VALLEY, ROCKY MOUNTAINS. . . 249
CLIMBING MOUNT ABERDEEN, ROCKY MOUNTAINS . 25 1
MOUNT SIR DONALD AND THE ILLECILLEWAET
GLACIER, CANADIAN SELKIRKS . . .257
INTERIOR OF THE COUGAR CAVES, CANADIAN
SELKIRKS . . . . . .265
A MOUNTAIN ROAD ON THE UPPER ERASER RIVER,
BRITISH COLUMBIA . . . . .275
YALE, B.C., AT ENTRANCE TO ERASER CA5^0N . 282
A BRITISH COLUMBIA SAW-MILL, AT COAL CREEK . 293
HARBOUR AND STATION AT VANCOUVER, BRITISH
COLUMBIA . . . . . . 300
VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, WITH LEGISLATIVE
BUILDINGS TO THE LEFT . . . . 306
A TYPICAL FOREST SCENE, VANCOUVER ISLAND . 308
hrough the Heart of Canada
CHAPTER I
DOWN NOVA SCOTIA WAY
'O a native born, Canada is a name with which
CO conjure.
Homeland it is to him, nation-land, empire-land
[—a land rich in historic perspective, absorbing in
its present life, alluring in a future bounded only
fby the capacity and faith of its people.
Time is a relative term when applied to a
:ountry like the Dominion. England is old enough
measure her history by a millennium or more ;
Canada by centuries — four since the hardy French
Jailors made their way up the St. Lawrence when
their search for China they discovered Canada ;
three since Champlain founded in Quebec the first
irmanent settlement in North America.
Canada's life is covered by three outstanding
9
Through the Heart of Canada
periods — in the successive rule of Indian, French,
and English, as its history falls into three divisions
— the conquest of the country by England, the
war of 1812-14, and the forming of Confederation
in 1867, all epochal events.
Preceding Confederation there was no nine-
province Dominion, no Greater Britain in the
twentieth-century sense, no all-Canadian sentiment,
no Empire spirit. The provinces by the Atlantic
were looking askance at plans for federation.
Upper and Lower Canada (as Ontario and Quebec
were called) were antagonistic, Manitoba was not
even a name, Saskatchewan and Alberta were in
the womb of the future, and British Columbia was
an isolated Pacific territory.
A vastly different country is the Canada of to-
day. East and West are becoming one in national
•:^./^ spirit and aims. The Rocky Mountains are no
longer an impassable barrier between the plains
of the prairie provinces and the plains of the
Pacific coast. Halifax is interested in Victoria,
Montreal in Vancouver, Toronto in Winnipeg.
Confederation has done its work well ; it has
made of its union of provinces a continent -wide
land that is growing in wealth and influence jas
it grows in years.
10
Down Nova Scotia Way
There are two Canadas in one within the
boundary-lines of the Dominion : the Golden West
and the Silver East— the Golden West, with its
realth of grain lands and ranges of mineralised
lountains, its forested valleys and fish-stocked
streams ; the Silver East — the ancient Canada —
tde up of the provinces by the sea, whose silver
Chores are lapped by the Atlantic tides and whose
liffs face the older world of Europe whence came
le first pathfinders.
On this historic soil of Nova Scotia stepped
le adventurous sons of Old France in their search
►r a new Erance beyond the waters, followed by
le equally aggressive sons of Old England in
leir .quest for the site of another Britain. And
jcause Gaul and Saxon and Celt thus met on
pie shores of an unappropriated continent, the
Ltter became a theatre of war for the titanic
rtruggle between old-world powers for supremacy
a new land. Within the area of ancient Acadia
lany a page of Canadian history has been written
in the annals of Louisbourg, of Halifax, of
innapolis, of Beausejour. The fight for Acadia
ras an epitome of the larger contest for a
Continent .
The heart and nerve centre of this eastern end
II
Through the Heart of Canada
of Canada is Halifax : the City of the Citadel, and
the successor of Louisbourg. Once again out of
death came life. The levelling of the walls of
Louisbourg fortress led to the founding of Halifax ;
the once mighty stronghold of a French king on
the western main of the Atlantic was destroyed
in order that another fortress centre might rise
at the word of an English king.
So Halifax was born, and Cornwallis was its
father. On a June day of 1749 one of the first
streams of English-speaking emigration landed in
the Bay of Chebucto — the Pilgrim Fathers of a
greater Britain to be. During the thrilling war
year of 1758 the fleet and army that effected
the first capture of Louisbourg foregathered in the
harbour of the new town of Halifax, and in the
more decisive war year of 1759 Wolfe's arma-
ment filled its twin harbours both before and after
the siege of Quebec.
Other stirring days came with the American
Revolution and the war of 18 12-14, and, inci-
dentally, through the American Civil War of 1860-
65. Thus for over a century Halifax has heard
the martial strain, the defiant bugle -note, the
reverberating cannon echo, the march of armed
men. It chanced, therefore, that of necessity
12
I
Down Nova Scotia Way
Halifax early had a citadel crowning the peninsula,
the Cronstadt of Canada it might have been termed,
and for long it filled the position of the chief
British naval and military headquarters in America.
For many a year Tommy Atkins of England stood
guard over the citadel entrance. In 1906 the
Canadian Government undertook the maintenance
of the old stronghold, and now Tommy Atkins of
Canada represents the soldiery of the Empire at
«ie ancient gateway.
Along the water front of the harbours a marine
anorama of rare interest is unfolded in the
shipping from the four quarters of the globe, in
the men-of-war sometimes anchored there, in the
ocean-going craft that utilise this all -the -year-
round port . In the outer harbour are the important
defences on George's Island, whose guns face the
sea entrance, the fire of which may be interlaced
with that of Fort Clarence on the opposite shore,
while the cannon mounted on Macnab*s Island and
York Redoubt, combined with submarine mines
and torpedoes, form an effectual bar to the mouth
of the haven.
Little wonder that the men of Halifax pride
themselves on their city. Not only for its unique
history, its strategic situation, and commercial
13
Through the Heart of Canada
solidarity does it stand in the foremost rank among
Canadian centres of population, but equally so for
its wealth of natural beauty. A superb seaside
park, intersected by picturesque driveways and a
tangle of tree-arched avenues, is one of its glories.
One of the best botanical gardens in the country,
with a variety of sub -tropical growths indicative
of the climatic possibilities of the land, vies in
attractiveness with the North-West Arm, on the
banks of which many handsome villas are situated.
In Halifax proper there is striking evidence on
every hand of its solid prosperity and commercial
importance. There is, moreover, equally impres-
sive evidence, in stately churches and spacious
collegiate halls, of the attention paid to the higher
life of spirit and mind, for it has long been an
accepted axiom in Canada that Nova Scotia
and her neighbouring provinces are one of the
chief sources of brain supply for the whole
Dominion, and the honour roll of Canadian
statesmen and leaders supports the assertion.
Halifax is the centre of one of the most interest-
ing sections of Canada, especially in its historic,
scenic, and agricultural aspects. To the east lies
the ocean end of the Dominion in Cape Breton,
thrusting its granite coast-line far into the Atlantic ;
Down Nova Scotia Way
to the west, Annapolis attracts with its ancient
French fortress and fertile valley and penetrating
sea arm, and to the north, Acadia — the land of
Evangeline — lures the traveller. What a glamour
' is cast over the whole region by the fiction-created
Acadian maiden ! Here is the site of the farm-
stead ; there the old well, with its broad sweep
of pole from which Evangeline supposedly drew
the freshest of water. The gnarled French willows
are in a state of decrepitude, scarce able to hold
up their ageing branches. Hard by stood the
smithy, the glow from whose forge lighted up the
faces of Gabriel and his sweetheart as they watched
the labouring bellows. Hereabouts the little
church must have raised its humble spire, and
over yonder, less than a stone's -throw away, the
home of the good priest helped to fill in the
picture. Indeed, much of Longfellow's descrip-
tion of the long-ago village of Grand Pre applies
equally well to-day. Perfect is his etching of this
idyllic corner of Acadia. Nestling in the fruitful
valley, bounded by the red-lipped shores of Minas,
lies the village of Grand Pr6 — " distant, secluded,
still " ; the perfumed meadows still stretch to the
eastward as the dykes still border the sea — " dykes
(at the hands of the farmers had raised with
Through the Heart of Canada
labour incessant, shutting out the turbulent tides.'*
Far away rises the mass of Blomidon Cape, on the
summit of which sea-fogs continue to pitch their
tents and to receive the baptism of the mists from
the mighty Atlantic. In the dyked meadows wave
the luxuriant grasses, and the quaint old hamlet,
with its handful of houses, its orchards, its flocks,
might easily be the old Grand Pre, so quiet and
peaceful is it, so shut in from the turmoil of the
world. The restless waves of Fundy continue to
wash the beach, Evangeline's beach, and the
refluent ocean has never ceased to cover the sands
with waifs of the tide, with pungent kelp and
slippery seaweed.
How curious it is that so many places are
famous for events or incidents that never hap-
pened ! How often it is that fiction is so much
more real that fact ! How sad that of all who have
lived and loved and died in the Gaspereau Valley,
none are more fondly held in remembrance than
the dream-child of a poet's brain. But though
Longfellow's legend lends charm to the scene, it
does not create it. It is in truth a fair country
that lies outspread before one who gazes from the
Blomidon bastion or from the brow of the hill of
Wolfville. Near by is the old French burial -
i6
Down Nova Scotia Way
ground. The Gaspereau River wanders placidly
among fragrant meadows towards the obliterating
sea, and on every hill -slope the ripening grain -
fields and richly-laden orchards seem to smile
I gratefully under the summer sun. Beyond, and
I ever beyond, the blue waters of the Basin
\ of Minas gleam, and the farther shore-line
\ encloses the matchless view.
It is a delight to bowl over the smooth red
roads, through the valley of the Cornwallis, among
the sea ineadows where the sad-eyed oxen stand
while the hayricks are laden. Muddy banks ever
show themselves where the slow tide creeps up
the sea arms, and sailboats lie tilted on their sides
waiting for water to refloat them. Then there is
the stiff climb up North Mountain, and the fine
I view from the Look -off to distant New Brunswick
across the Bay of Eundy, and to the far-stretching
I Nova Scotian shore.
Annapolis, like Wolfville, is a peaceful village
in a valley, an old and sleepy village in an old
and sleepy valley. Its denizens claim it to be the
garden of the province, but he would be a rash
judge who would venture to render a verdict as
ttween the trio of vales — Cornwallis, Gaspereau,
Annapolis. But the valley of the Annapolis —
Through the Heart of Canada
fifty miles in length — walled in by the north and
south mountain ridges, as seen in early summer,
can scarcely be overpraised for its exquisite setting
and pastoral beauty. The squares of orchards out-
lined on the hills, the succession of bright little
towns, the beds of old streams converted into
courses of clover, the willow groups by the winding
creeks, all these enter into the composition of the
rare nature picture, set in a framework of perfect
fitness and taste.
Nova Scotia is especially rich in its connecting
links with the past. As the oldest European
settlement on the continent of America, north of
Florida, Annapolis alone merits attention, but the
ruins of its seventeenth-century fortress speak of
the fierce Franco -British conflict for supremacy in
Acadia. The remnants of the grassy ramparts and
the stone barracks tell of French occupation when
the spot was known as Port Royal, and of the
visits of Champlain and De Monts at an even
earlier day. For over a century it was a strong-
hold for the possessors of New France. 17 lo
saw a change of ownership, however, when a com-
pany of New Englanders captured the fort, and!
renamed it Annapolis in honour of Queen Anne.
The last warlike scene — one of many during the
i8
Down Nova Scotia Way
long years of strife — was witnessed in 1781, when
two American armies captured the fortress and
plundered the little town.
The Port Royal of former days is beautiful for
situation, fronting the Annapolis basin, which lies
in its bed like a wide river, extending to Digby,
sixteen miles to the west. The railway skirts the
shore of the basin, bringing to view many a little
creek or cove most inviting in its wild setting.
One soon learns that he is in cherry-land. Cherry
1 festivals and cherry excursions from far-away
points are widely advertised, and tempting baskets
of the red-coated fruit are offered the traveller at
every wayside station. Later in the season, Nova
Scotia becomes apple-land, a million barrels being
the yield in an average year, a goodly proportion
thereof finding their way to the British piarket.
! And if Nova Scotia is a land of delight in cherry
or wheat or apple time, even more so is it in the
early blossom-time, when the earth is flecked with
the delicately-coloured flowers of fruit, giving rich
' promise of an abundant yield.
But the ocean ever allures the traveller in this
^ maritime land. It is only within recent years that
' the south shore of the province has been !made
^ accessible by the railway, the journey from Halifax
19
Through the Heart of Canada
to Yarmouth revealing wonderful glimpses of the
limitless Atlantic as bays and coves and seaward-
rushing streams come into view, while the rolling
breakers on the white -sanded shores further arouse
the wander -lust of man.
There is much that is quaint and rustic ialong
the way. On one side a fishing hamlet marks the
head of an ocean inlet, with a fleet of boats waiting
to be called into service. On the other hand are
farms and fields ranging to the high northern hills.
A single glance will include an old tarpaulined
mariner, looking as if he had been forgotten by
Father Time, and across the roadway a sturdy
toiler who is hauling in his crops with the aid of
a lumbering yoke of oxen.
To thfe right, inviting roads skirt the water-
basins toward the outer sea ; to the left, other
roads, just as erratic in their curves, lead to little
rustic communities unknown to the wider world.
Infinite variety, therefore, marks the way of this
Nova Scotian ocean shore. Rounding St.
Margaret's Bay the sea-coast scenery gives
foretaste of the rich panorama Nature has in store.
Mahone Bay, with its scattered island groups, wit!
its iron-bound rocks facing the fury of the surf
casts its spell over the wanderer, luring him U
20 ;:
\
Down Nova Scotia Way
its picturesque water channels and its wilder world
of rock as the open ocean is reached. Chester
exercises its spell too, the dear little town with
its magnificent marine and landscape views, with
its matchless pictures of the sun-rising and sun-
setting and the after-shadows on the placid waters .
Farther westward is Lunenburg — the town of
homes — founded by German and Swiss settlers in
1750. It is a corner of the old Fatherland trans-
ferred to Canadian shores, and all the qualities of
thrift and diligence that mark the Germanic races
are found in the people of this ancient town by the
Atlantic. Bridgewater neighbours Lunenburg, the
log-crowded stream that intersects the town adver-
tising its basic lumbering interest. And as the
Germans founded Lunenburg, so descendants of
the Mayflower Pilgrim Fathers founded Liverpool ;
the French predominate in the Pubnico country,
and settlers of Scotch extraction give a distinctive
I note to the Argyles, amid scenery reminiscent of
the western Highlands. In old Shelbourne the
scions of United Empire Loyalists predominate,
while in Yarmouth is found a marine centre of
unique interest. Once the stronghold of privateers,
who were the terror of New England in the old
Ighting days, its inhabitants of to-day are repre-
1
Through the Heart of Canada
sentative of the many different types that are found
in Eastern Canada.
Cape Breton is now an integral part of Nova
Scotia, though it once upon a time had its own
life as a separate State and its own capital city
on the site of Sydney. The Cape narrowly escaped
dismemberment when land and sea were made.
Only a narrow neck of rock holds its parts together,
and even that has been severed by man in the
construction of St. Peter's Canal.
The all-day sail over the tideless sea-arms of
the Great and Little Bras d'Or Lakes furnishes
a delightful picture of well -tilled farms, of distant
mist-veiled hills, and of restful hamlets unafflicted
by the fever haste of the world. In miniature
coves lobster -fishers are busy with creels and pots,
along the northern and eastern coast coal-miners
are digging the black diamonds from a rich earth,
where the veins sometimes stretch a mile under
the sea. The annual coal output of Nova Scotia
is nearing the twenty million dollar mark. This
industry makes Sydney one of the chief coaling,
harbours of the Atlantic seaboard, as well as the
centre of a great steel and iron plant, the product
of which almost equals that of the coal-mines.
A transatlantic Birmingham is Sydney.
22
\
'^^-■m'^^wj#!i^ •'
A NOVA SCOTIA APPLE ORCHARD AT BLOSSOM TIME.
SYDNEY, CAPE BRETON, AND ITS HARBOUR.
To face p. 22.
Down Nova Scotia Way
A few miles from Sydney a skeleton-like
structure stands on the shore of Glace Bay, tell-
ing of the twentieth-century miracle of wireless
telegraphy. From the cliff -height Canada talks
with the British Isles, and with the ships that pass
between. The Canadian Government conducts
twenty wireless telegraph-stations on her eastern
seaboard and on the Pacific coast, constituting a
benefit to navigation difficult to estimate.
Farther along shore and beyond Glace Bay lies
Louisbourg. A thriving little town borders the
deep-water harbour, and on the western outskirts
lies all that is left of Louisbourg Fortress. It is
not until one walks over the mile -and-a -half circuit
of the ruined earthworks that one comprehends its
original extent and strength. When it is remem-
bered that the original structure cost France a
million pounds, and that it took thirty years to
build, it is not surprising that Louisbourg was
looked upon as one of the most impregnable
defences of its day, guarding the Gulf of St.
Lawrence and serving as the key to the posses-
sions of France in the New World.
The fortress occupied a remarkable position,
facing the Atlantic on the south, the harbour on
the east, and forests and marsh-lands on north and
23
Through the Heart of Canada
west. Mighty bastions reared their grim' headis
from the walls, and between three and four
hundred cannon frowned upon any foe that might
dare to approach. Tried and tested soldiers
formed a garrison of undoubted strength. Little
wonder, therefore, that its commander regarded -
Louisbourg as safe from attack, but history showed
his mistake. Twice it underwent severe sieges at
the hands of the British, and twice the white flag
of surrender was unfurled.
To-day all that is left of the fortress are the
long lines of earthworks and four casements of
the King's Bastion, beneath which the women and
children took refuge during the sieges. Within
the spacious enclosure can be traced the founda-
tions of the chapel, the governor's headquarters, j
and the ofiicers' well, bricked down to a depth
of twenty-five feet.
It was in the year 1745 that an army of four
thousand farmers and fishermen was organised in
Massachussetts . A small fleet was also raised in
the same province, and together they dared to
attack mighty Louisbourg, with its massive walls,
heavy armaments, and trained soldiery. Eor
forty-seven days the siege lasted, each day marked
by furious fighting and severe loss of life ; but
Down Nova Scotia Way
on the forty-seventh day the garrison marched out
and the keys were delivered to General Pepperill
who commanded the army. Together with Com-
modore Warren of the fleet, he held a great banquet
in honour of the event. The news of the victory
stirred all England, as it alarmed all France.
A few years later England gave Louisbourg
back to France, in exchange for the Island of
Madras, greatly to the indignation of the colonial
men who had captured it against such great odds.
Once again in the hands of the French, they made
it stronger than ever, mounted additional cannon,
and increased the garrison to four thousand men.
I' The scene changes to a day in 1758. Once
! again the sentries saw an ominous sight. Twenty-
two vessels, carrying an army of twelve thousand
men, and mounting no less than eighteen hundred
guns, loomed up through the mist. Well might
Drucour, the Governor, become alarmed at the
prospect. Among the first to land, in a dangerous
surf and under a galling fire, was James Wolfe,
the point being still known as Wolfe's Cove,
where the remnants of the earthworks then thrown
up can be traced. He and his guard soon took a
battery at the point of the bayonet, and erected
I another of their own at a more strategic point.
35
Through the Heart of Canada
Then followed a succession of terrific combats,
in which the heroism on both sides was most
marked. Soon the island battery of the French
was silenced ; then followed a sudden attack by the
English ships on the fourteen French men-of-war
anchored within the harbour. One by one the
French boats caught fire, burned to the water's
edge, and sank in their grave beneath the waves.
Weeks of assaults and repulses ensued, until Louis-
bourg once more surrendered, and with the
sinking of the last ship and the firing of the last
shot at the battlements, French rule in Canada
received its death-blow.
Now all is peaceful and quiet. In the place
of the belching cannon and the burning ships of
the eighteenth century is a pasture -land where the
clover thrives on the deserted earthworks and the
waves of ocean chant a requiem over the graves
of the soldier dead on Black Point. Birds nest in
the crumbling walls, sea-fowl sail o'erhead, while
the ear catches sounds of life from the wharves
and mills and from the homes of the sailors and!
fishermen whose humble cottages line the road.
The population of Nova Scotia comprises, indeed,!
a goodly proportion of seafaring folk. The fishery]
products have a value of eight million dollars
26
Down Nova Scotia Way
annually, giving Nova Scotia the first place in this
regard among the nine provinces of the Dominion.
The shipbuilding industry of former years has,
however, declined to a point where it is not a
marked factor in the industrial life of the com-
munity. Agriculturally, the province contributes
over twenty million dollars of the total field-crop
value of Canada, or, if the entire production of
the province be taken, it will be found to reach
the goodly total of 115 million dollars .
The population of Nova Scotia is made up of
many varying types of peoples. Scattered through
the land are a few settlements of Erench-speaking
Acadians, survivors of the original band that
peopled the Grand Pr6 district. Every part of
the British Isles is represented. Halifax contains
a large number of English, as Cape Breton does
|i of Scotch, whose settlements in the latter section
are composed of inhabitants of Highland Scotch
extraction, where the Gaelic tongue is still spoken
and where, until recently, a newspaper was
[ published in that language.
No part of the broad Dominion is better fitted
to sustain its population than Nova Scotia, no
^ section contains a more contented people, no
Irovince has a nobler past or a brighter future.
NEW BRUNSWICK AND ITS
NEIGHBOURS
CHAPTER II
NEW BRUNSWICK AND ITS NEIGHBOURS
New Brunswick is another province-title with
which to conjure in the realm of romance and
history, in the rule and reign of red man and
white, in the part it has played in the develop-
ment of Canada. Any story of the Dominion must
include the chapter contributed by this sea-bound
area and its hardy population. With a square
mileage two -thirds that of Great Britain, and with
four hundred miles of coast. New Brunswick is
of no mean dimensions, and within its irregular
boundaries are to be found natural resources of
incomputable value.
One of the routes from Nova Scotia to New
Brunswick leads through the extensive salt sea-
marshes of Tantramar, bordering the Cumberland
Basin. It is not difficult to follow the gaze of
the Canadian poet, Charles G. D. Roberts, when
he pictures Tantramar as " wearing a cloak of
31
k
Through the Heart of Canada
mystery and awe under a storm-torn sky," or when
under a sun-sky " the gossiping grass takes on
its real garmenture of green." It is easy to
inhale " the salty scent of the reedy margin," it
is easy to sweep the tawny waters of the Bay of
Eundy, the low blue hills of Coboquid. One
wonders, however, at the place-name of Coboquid.
And why Memramcook ? and Shepody ? and Ken-
nebecasis ? and many another queer title. Perhaps
the local historian can explain or the Indian tell.
Nor is it difficult to recall the struggles between
French and British near this very stretch of
Tantramar meadows when, on a hilltop to the east,
the eye catches a glimpse of the ruined Fort
Beausejour, on the boundary-line between the two^
provinces — the spot where the fighting priest ol
France, La Loutre, made his unavailing stan<
against the English a century and a half ago.
century and a half I How long^ it sounds t(
man, whose whole span is half its length, but ho^
brief a pulse-beat to the restless tide of Fund]
that has bored its resistless way up bay and rivei
and cove for cycles of time ! Perhaps it is truef
that we are the victims of the clocks we have
made. The petrified forests along the ladjoining
Joggins shore would affirm we are.
32
New Brunswick and its Neighbours
The commercial centre of New Brunswick is
St. John, whose very name suggests the romantic
history of its beginnings. Like Quebec, it owes
its name to the indomitable Champlain and his
fellow -explorer De Monts, who first visited the
harbour on the day of St. John the Baptist,
June 24, 1604— four years before Quebec was
founded. Here the voyageurs found a settlement
of Micmac Indians, whose descendants still inhabit
parts of the maritime provinces. Over a quarter
of a century then elapsed before La Tour appeared
on the scene to enter upon his grant of Acadia,
which included the site of St. John. Here the
grantee carried on a lucrative fur trade with the
red men until the battle royal began between
him and Charnisay — rivals and enemies both.
Many other stirring incidents occurred — the
capture of the fort by a CromWellian force
in 1654, and naval encounters between jErench
and English or New Englanders. An even more
thrilling scene was witnessed at a later date when,
[ in 1783, a company of nearly ten thousand United
E Empire Loyalists landed in the harbour and con-
f stituted themselves the pioneers of a province and
I city yet to be, founding and making St. John the
oldest incorporated city in Canada.
33 c
Through the Heart of Canada
France left no permanent settlement on the
shores of Fundy. True, she captured many an
island and fort, but England recaptured and
colonised. That the sturdy refugees from New
England proved to be of good settling stock is
seen in the New Brunswick and the St. John of
to-day — in the successful agricultural, lumbering,
and fishing industries of the province, and in the
commercial importance of St. John, though the
latter has suffered from a series of destructive fires
that might well have blocked its advance had its
citizens been less easily disheartened. These
disasters culminated in the great fire of June 20,
1877, when one-third of the city was swept away,
fifteen thousand people were rendered homeless,
and property valued at nearly thirty million dollars
went up in the flames.
The city is substantially built on ridgy hill-
slopes, many of the roadways having been cut
with infinite toil through the naked rock, great
masses of which often lie beside the walls of
masonry. At the top of these cliff -like ridges are
perched rows of houses, accessible only by ladder -
like steps. In the suburbs, where the wealthier
citizens have their homes, these rocky outlines are
rendered charming by being levelled off and
34
New Brunswick and its Neighbours
bordered with flower-boxes and beds, with igreen
lawns sloping upward or rising in graceful terraces .
King's Square, with its unique fountain and
monuments, its fine shade-trees and flower-gardens,
is situated in the very heart of the town. Adjoin-
ing, and forming part of it, is the old graveyard,
now made into a little park, the moss-grown stones
of older date telling their own story of the early
inhabitants of this ancient city of the Loyalists.
Fort Howe Hill affords a splendid view-point.
From this limestone mass, crowned by the remains
of an old fort, may be seen the contour of the
city, the busy suburb of Carleton, the salmon weirs,
showing at low tide, the deep, spacious harbour
which, like that of Halifax, is open during the
entire year. Anchored within its area or tied up
at the extensive system of wharves lie a wide
range of craft, sea-going and coastal, and a
glimpse of their cargoes strikingly reveals the
varied nature of the trade and commerce of the
province. Many a deck is loaded with the high-
grade lumber of the northern woods, for the timber
resources of New Brunswick are amongst its most
valuable assets. Other cargoes of fishery products
speak of the harvest of the sea, while the imtmense
elevators indicate that St. John is an important
35
Through the Heart of Canada
grain -exporting centre. Passenger steamers also
use the port for transatlantic and coastal traffic.
Not only is the situation of St. John a strategic
and striking one, at the head of the Bay of Eundy,
but its environs present many .points pf interest.
The famous reversible falls of the St. John River,
on the outskirts of the city, are best viewed from'
the suspension bridge, seventy feet above high-
water and covering the great stream by a span
640 feet long. It is a truly remarkable phenome
non. The river winds its way to the sea through
a narrow channel, hemmed in by precipitous lime-
stone cliffs over a hundred feet high. At low
tide the waters fall some fifteen feet into the
harbour, but soon the never-decided battle is being
again fought between the river current and the tide
of the invincible Eundy, the rise of which to ai
height of forty feet not only evens up, so to speak
the fifteen-foot fall of the streams, but reverses i
for a timfe. Then occurs the strange sight of th(
outer waters forcing their way up-stream. A
half -tide, when the waters are levelled, boats ma;
pass under the bridge in safety.
A companion phenomenon in tidal action is th
equally famous Moncton Bore, the inrush of th
Petitcodiac River between the red banks of th
36
1
New Brunswick and its Neighbours
estuary in the fortn' of a: bore, or tidal wave, rang-
ing from three to five feet in height. In few other
places in the world is a similar exhibition of tidal
power so graphically presented, only a few Chinese
rivers affording the same spectacle.
St. John is the starting-point for many attrac-
tive river and road trips into the interior. Of
these, the steamer trip up the eighty-four miles
of the St. John River to Eredericton, the quaint
old provincial capital, is one of the most delight-
ful. The journey commences above the reversible
falls, the first mile or two of the boat's course
being through a rocky gorge which opens into
an island-studded and lakelike expansion. It in
turn leads to a tortuous course, whose very
windings constitute one of the elements of
varied beauty. The frequent stops to disembark
passengers into smaller boats have an interest of
their own and a friendly neighbourliness as well,
affording the onlooker many a glimpse into the
quiet life of the riverside country.
Midway along the course the large fleet of the
,St. John Yacht Club is passed, and the procession
3f white sails rounding a distant promontory forms
,1 panorama of charming effect. Thus one pro-
Ksses until Eredericton is reached, another quiet,
I
Through the Heart of Canada
nerve-soothing centre from which the demon of
haste has been exorcised.
Well worthy of a visit is Eredericton, with its
interesting river -front, its groups of stately elms,
its well-kept park, and its exquisite Gothic cathe-
dral hidden in an old-world close. The five main
streets, running parallel with the river, were laid
out in 1785, and named King, Queen, Brunswick,
George, and Charlotte in honour of the then
reigning family of Great Britain. The public
buildings of the capital are in keeping with the
richness of the province. On one side are the
legislative buildings, while the University of New
Brunswick, from whose halls have graduated many
who have tnade their mark in Canadian life, crowns
the wooded heights at the north of the city.
If the sojourner to the Canadian east would
learn yet more of New Brunswick and feel more
fully its charm and spell, let him wander farther
afield than its cities. Eet him make his way to
the trio of great salmon streams — the Metapedia,
Restigouche, and Miramichi — that penetrate the
northern wilds. One should add the Nipisiguit,
and thus make a quartette of rivers. There h
may live days of real life in the open along their
cool banks, whipping the clear, rushing waters for|
38
New Brunswick and its Neighbours
the finny beauties that therein lurk or hunting in
the far-stretching forests.
While Canada is pre-eminently a land for the
hunter and fisherman, with big game to be found
in every province, New Brunswick is specially rich
in its wild life. Such a game preserve is the
Restigouche country, cotnprising the river courses
through the uplands of Quebec and New
Brunswick. Fane moose grounds are found along
its banks, while caribou, deer, and bear inhabit
the remoter forests almost as thickly as the fish
fill the waterways. So in the Nipisiguit district,
where the hunter may follow the ancient trails of
the Micmac Indians amid scenery suggestive of
a mountain land. One of the great caribou
districts of Canada is in this locality, east of
Bathurst and Newcastle. One magnificent moose
head secured here had a spread of antlers of
S8| inches, with twenty-nine points, but the
record moose of New Brunswick, killed in 1907,
had a spread of 68^ inches. The valley of ,the
Miramichi is another region where big game
abounds, the extensive and almost unexplored
areas of its northern portion being stocked (with
lordly animals in abundance. Erom Miscou, on
the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to the Miramichi, there
39
Through the Heart of Canada
is also some of the finest ,wild-fowl shooting to
be found on the continent.
Historic is the Chaleur country of NeW'
Brunswick, the northern part of which is in
the province of Quebec. Handing upon the high
cliff walls of Gaspe one summer day long ago,
Jacques Cartier found it so hot, after the colder
shores of Newfoundland, that he christened the
inlet " La Baie de Chaleur."
Thus was Gaspe the first spot in the new land
on which France erected the cross and unfurled the
fleur-de-lis. Hot days are, as a matter of fact,
rare during the summer along the shores of
Chaleur, for the salt-scented breezes of the
Atlantic moderate the sun's rays to a delightful
average of temperature. Gaspe town is an ideal
starting-point for a jaunt along the northern coast
of the bay. Guarding the entrance to Gaspe Basin —
one of the safest and fairest havens in all America
— are Cape Gaspe and Point St. Peter, and along
the sixteen miles of shore are many human types :
Irish at Seal Cove, United Empire Loyalist stoc
at Douglastown, Isle of Jersey people in the fisher
houses, Erench Canadians everywhere, and Britis
Canadians scattered here and there. During th
drive one has glimpses of rivers, bays, and gul
40
New Brunswick and its Neighbours
of long sea-beaches and lonely marshes, of little
farming Arcadias and .quaint fishing hamlets, of
cliffs and hills and mountains and of island rocks,
the haunts of myriad sea-birds.
From the moment the ferry crosses the outlets
of the Dartmouth and York Rivers at Gaspe one
scenic picture follows another. On one side of
the road are fertile stretches of land, on the other
Bie shimmering waters of the open sea. What
^drilling scenes these same waters have witnessed !
Away back in 1 7 1 1 a stately fleet sailed up the
Basin in command of Sir Hovenden Walker pn
his way to attempt the capture of Quebec, but
destined never to reach the fortress town. A
Erench merchant -ship is put to the flames, the
houses of Gaspe are destroyed, and Sir Hovenden
Walker sails away discomfited.
Nearly half a century later another fleet called
at Gaspe, also on its way to Quebec, but this time
to succeed and thereby to make history and change
maps and flags, for James Wolfe paced the deck
of one of the vessels I Journeying farther along
shore towards Dalhousie and the head of the bay,
the first part of the route leads up hill and down
dale in bewildering fashion, through stretches of
forest greenery and over tidal rivers on ferry-rafts,
41
Through the Heart of Canada
swinging their way acrt)ss with the current. Then
ensues a many-mile course over a beach, where
the sand means heavy travelling, but the nearness j
of the waves makes delightful companionship
The scenery increases in impressiveness at Perc6
Sheltering it on the north is the red limeston
mass of Mount ;Ste Anne, 1,230 feet high, and
facing it on the south, Ee Rocher Perce — the fame
Pierced Rock, 300 feet high and 1,500 feet long*,
deriving its name from the arch or tunnel, 50 feet
high, by which it is pierced.
The best view of Perce Rock is from the nearest
mainland cliff of Mount Joly, on the summit of
which stands a great wooden cross — the symbol
of Calvary facing leagues of sea. Partially hidden
in the lank grass lies a small cannon of ancient
mould. The cannon and the cross, symbols of
war and peace, are thus in strange proximity on
this far eastern point of Canada.
The bed of the sea is easily discernible through
the opalescent waters. But a seeming stone's-
throw away is the Pierced Rock itself, its prow-
like edge defiantly facing the north, majestic in
its granite bulk, inscrutable in its age-long mystery;
of existence. Countless sea-fowl people its roof
or perch on its narrow ledges. Birds below one,
42
New Brunswick and its Neighbours
birds above one, birds around one circle and
shriek, and when a storm is brewing on land or
sea the denizens of the rock set up such a warning
cry as to give full notice to the mariners of Perce.
The face of the rock is marked with curious
caves and fissures, in addition to the great arch
cut through the stony mass by the ceaseless
chiselling of the sea. There are portals of
mosques, Gothic arches, Norman recesses, Saracen
pillars, leaning towers, and giant cracks, making
ready for other disintegrations, such as the Split
Rock, at the farther end of the pile. Great must
have been the crash when its connecting arch fell ;
the titanic masses of rock, piled high at the base,
still bear witness to this mighty dislocation.
It is a picture of unending interest to watch
the cod or herring fleets run up their sails, and, as
the tide serves, glide out in single file to the open
sea until the curtain of night hides them from
sight. It is an equally picturesque scene when
the morning light reveals them sailing home again,
after hours of strenuous labour if the catch
chances to be a good one. Then the scene shifts
to the beach and the fish-tables, and to the quick
landing of the captured cod until it ends its career
in the salting -vat or on the drying platform.
43
Through the Heart of Canada
Such is the round of life, the routine of the day
and the night, of the Ferc6 fisherfolk during all
the months when winter has not the world of Gaspe
in its grip. Such is the charming little hamlet of
Perce-by-the-Sea, ever watched by its giant
sentinel rock.
New Brunswick's eastern neighbour is Prince
Edward Island — Canada's smallest province,
Canada's million -acre farm. Separated from New
Brunswick by the Strait of Northumberland, " the
Island," as it is affectionately called by its people,
lies broadside to the sea, stretching out its arm as if
to protect the mainland from the fury of the surge.
Though wave -washed on every side. Prince Edward
Island is a peaceful, placid land, with a rich soil
that makes farming a pastime and a climate that
begets health and long life. The scenery
throughout the length and breadth of the island
is reminiscent of rural Britain, and is varied by
the sea arms and rivers that show their red-soil
banks at low tide. In lieu of the century-old
hedges of the motherland, the typical Canadian
fence marks boundary-lines, and in place of the
stone structures of England are the shingled
houses and bams of a new land.
Charlottetown and Summerside are the two chieff
44
New Brunswick and its Neighbours
centres of population. In the former the fine
public square is surrounded by a notable group
of edifices in legislative buildings, court-house,
post-ofifice, and market. The seaside park of the
city is well worthy of the pride of its citizens, with
its vista of the wide harbour, the little river, and
the rolling land of the farther shore.
Summerside is also a thriving seaport, with an
export trade in farm produce and the famous
Malpeque oysters. With an agricultural and
fishing production of ten million dollars a year,
the island province of only 2,133 square miles
proves its own claim as the garden of the Gulf of
St. Lawrence. If and when the pccasional dif^fi-
culties of winter navigation with the mainland are
overcome by a tunnel, it is predicted that a new
lease of life will be entered upon in this fertile
corner of the great Dominion.
45
MONO THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS
CHAPTER III
AMONG THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS
One of the quaintest corners of Canada is the
Magdalen Islands. The thirteen rocky isles, with
their connecting sand-bars, lie stranded in the very
centre of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, receiving the
angry surf of the Atlantic from every side. Fifty
miles to the west lies the island province of Prince
Edward ; ninety miles to the east, the King's oldest
colony of Newfoundland.
One is apt to forget the existence of the
Magdalens, with their six thousand souls, in count-
ing up the territorial assets of the Dominion ;
indeed, it almost requires a magnifying -glass to
discern the tiny spots that represent them on the
map.
Their history is an interesting one, for they were
involved in the various conflicts between England
and France, and were frequently the subject of
treaties and conventions between the two Powers.
49. i>
Through the Heart of Canada
After being bandied backward and forward, they
were ceded to England, and, in 1763, annexed
to Newfoundland. To this colony they re-
mained attached until, under the Quebec Act, they
were joined to Canada and to the Province of
Quebec, and part of that province they still remain.
Previous to this cession to England the islands
were, during the reign of L'ouis XV., set apart for
the fishing trade of Erance, when they were in-
habited only during the brief fishing season of the
summer months. There was no permanent popula-
tion, therefore, at the time of their passing into
the hands of England.
A new chapter in the varied history of the islands
was opened when, in 1798, they were given by
George III., under letters patent granted by
Lord Dorchester, to Sir Isaac Coffin, an admiral
of the fleet, who had won the goodwill of his
Sovereign by his bravery in defending the American
coasts from invasion. It is reported that the old
sea captain, in command of a man-of-war, carried
Sir Guy Carleton (afterward Lord Dorchester) to
Quebec, there to become the Governor of Canada
Sailing by the scattered isles of the Magdale
group, the captain hinted to his influential pas
senger that they might well be granted to him i
Among the Magdalen Islands
recognition of his long services for King and
country. Therefrom came the royal grant, with
certain reservations, amongst others that they
should be held in free and common socage as
lands held by Great Britain, and that every English
subject should be at liberty to fish in their waters.
So it was that the Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin
became the proprietor of the Magdalen Islands,
creating a system of feudalism that sat ill on the
sturdy and independent settlers who there made
their home. The first permanent settlers were ten
families of Acadians, who had made their way from
Acadia, from which they had been exiled, in 1755.
The ten families soon increased to one hundred, as
others found their way to the shores of the islands,
and as they regarded themselves as a sovereign
people, with no laws to obey, and no means of
enforcing them if they existed, they naturally grew
restive under the efforts of the proprietor to collect
his rents. Eor a century the old records are full
of com,plaints of high rents for bits of beach used
in fish-curing, of the exorbitant price of salt, of
the absence of roads, of having to send their grain
Erince Edward Island to be ground, and the
like . A government report of fifty years ago says :
iormerly more or less of the people were so
Through the Heart of Canada
pure that no law or judicial institution was known
or required. By the decision of the missionaries or
a few of the older inhabitants every difficulty was
settled and determined, but the increase of popula-
tion makes us stand in need of a gaol as a means
of securing due respect for justice and good order.*'
Thus the crying need of a prison came with the
growth of population, though it is pleasant to state
that the gaol of Amherst is more frequently empty
than occupied, and the hardy toilers by sea and
land are, as a whole, a law-abiding, sober, and
peaceful folk.
As the inhabitants arrived from the Nova Scotian
mainland, they settled wherever they liked, despite
the wishes of the proprietor, and it was only in
1830 that any of them consented to pass title deeds.
Up to that time they paid what they pleased by
way of rent, but their tenure remained undeter-
mined. Two kinds of titles were offered : a ninety**^
nine year lease, and a concession, without any
fixed term, at a perpetual and unredeemable ground
rent, the rents averaging about twenty cents an'
acre. Trial succeeded trial between the people
and their overlord before the authority of the]
latter was recognised. Because of the original
squatting, the lands occupied to-day are of a)
52
Among the Magdalen Islands
possible shapes and sizes, and in many cases the
holdings overlap. It is now reported that the Coffin
Estate has sold or is about to sell its remaining)
rights in the islands. They are attached to the
County of Gaspe, Quebec Province, for judicial
and other purposes, and a representative is sent
by the islanders to the Quebec Legislature.
The Magdalen Islands will repay a visit. They
are best reached by boat from Pictou, Nova Scotia,
from which port a mail steamer plies twice a week
during the summer. The red shores of Prince
Edward Island are passed as the sun goes down,
and by daylight the outlines of Entry Island are
discerned through the mists. This is the doorway
to the queer island world beyond, and a dangerous
marine route it is. The Magdalens, like the
Channel Islands, are guarded by nature with
sunken reefs, dangerous sandbars, low and
treacherous morasses, and untrammelled tidal
forces. The uneasy sea dashes madly against the
bases of great cliffs, or the (morning sunlight glints
through the sheets of spray flying up the face
of the rocks in all the fury of their storm-stirred
spirit.
Entry Island, like most of its scattered neigh-
bours, is harbour less. It is the loftiest bit of rock
53
Through the Heart of Canada
of them all, rising sheer from the sea to a height
of six hundred feet. Grey and ghostly it suddenly
looked as a filmy mist embraced it, and
mysteriously large and ominously close, as the
atmosphere played tricks with the distances.
There it stood like a massive sentinel at the
eastern entrance of Pleasant Bay. Huge as it is
in bulk, geologists claim that it was once much
larger than it is now, and that it may yet be pounded
into oblivion.
It was well that the man at the wheel was keenly
alert. With startling suddenness a fishing craft
loomed up alarmingly near on the port side, the
dark sail proclaiming it an alien, for had it not
sailed from a Newfoundland cove? Earther afield
the eye caught sight of a strange streak of white
breakers, telling of the ominous Eearl Reef, only^
eight feet below the surface at low tide, and thus
showing its teeth in the breakers that are born
above its submerged base.
Due ahead lay Amherst Island, the first stop-
ping-place. The island resembles a human foot,
with its great heel stretching toward the west andj
its long toes of sandhills lying to the north-east.
Demoiselle Hill is the dominant physical feature,
and from its summit a wonderful sea picture was
54
Among the Magdalen Islands
unfolded. Eleven miles east and west stretched
the island, though but a few miles wide. On the
south-west the cliffs rose abruptly from the sea.
In the interior lay low marshes and shallow lakes,
bordered by treacherous quicksands . Pleasant Bay
was dotted with the little crafts of the fisher -folk,
the low shelving beaches covered with nets drying
in the sun. In the nearer distance a group of
^bmen were digging for clams, and a company
of lads were romping with a mangy, wolf like dog.
Around the village of whitewashed houses were
the fish-curing flakes, from which many a pungent
odour was wafted.
From Amherst and its grey old village, nest-
ling in a cleft of the hills, runs a wonderful sea
road, for the thirteen islands of the gulf group
are connected at low tide by sandbars. These
can be driven over if one chooses to charter a
charette — a quaint wooden cart, without springs
or paint, and drawn by a shaggy little beast who
negotiates the hills at a trot. The journey is not
altogether safe without a pilot, for dangerous quick-
sands abound, and woe betide the traveller who
is caught therein or who, wanders from the path
in the night 1 Every receding tide changes the
course of the way, and fresh sea-pools have to
55
Through the Heart of Canada
be avoided with each day's journeying. It is a
unique drive nevertheless, for the surf beats along
one side and wreaths of wild sea grasses are swept
around the horse's feet. Delicate mosses and
dainty shells strew the route, and the wonders of
the ocean world are revealed at every mile.
But he who travels by steamer will the more
quickly reach Grindstone Island. The dodging of
the boat from isle to isle fairly upsets one's mental
compass, until it seems as if the sun were careering
madly around the heavens. It is only possible to I
anchor some distance from the shore, for there
are practically no wharves, or very few, among |
the islands, and wha^t may be a safe anchorage
with the wind in one direction is acutely dangerous
with the wind from an opposite quarter. A strik-
ing instance of this fact is proved by the famous i
August gale of 1873 — as " the Lord's Day Gale "
it will go down to history. The Gloucester fishing-
fleet lay, as the men thought, safe in Pleasant Bay,
sheltered from the north-east gale, but when the
wind shifted to due east, forty-two of the craft
were driven ashore at Amherst like so many chips.
The old inhabitant will tell you that they lay so
close on the beach that he walked over the decks of
twelve of them, stepping from the one to the other g
56
Among the Magdalen Islands
without the need of a gang-plank. One vessel
was landed high and dry in a field.
" On reef and bar our schooners drove
Before the wind, before the swell ;
By the steep sand cliff their ribs were stove, —
Long, long their crews the tale shall tell ;
Of the Gloucester fleet are wrecks threescore;
Of the Province sail two hundred more
Were stranded in that tempest fell."
Grindstone is shaped like a millstone. Its red
cliffs, bold in their defiant height, are ever a menace
to the luckless mariner, and worn into countless
caverns and arches they present further evidences
of the power of ocean in its work of disintegra-
tion. The base of the high hills of the island
shows masses of crumbling lava that have accumu-
lated from the outlets of volcanic action. The
town itself is relatively an important centre of trade,
especially as a fishing port. There one finds
Augustine Le Bourdais, the weather-observer and
telegraph operator. This legless man will tell you
as thrilling a tale of the sea as one could hear —
an experience of the tragic North Beach. He
was mate of the brig Wasp, of Quebec, which went
to pieces among the islands in a blinding snow-
storm in November of 1871. Le Bourdais was
57
Through the Heart of Canada
the only survivor of a crew of eleven, and having
gained the shore as by a miracle, wandered help-
lessly for five days, eating snow and finally taking
shelter in an old hut, where he fell into a deep
sleep until accidentally found by some fishermen.
Both feet were so badly frozen that they came off
at the ankles. There was no doctor on the islands
at the time to amputate the limbs properly, but
Le Bourdais had a strong constitution and lives
to tell his story.
No less than thirty wrecks can be traced to the
North Beach and East Cape alone during the
memory of the present generation. It was at the
latter point that, fifty years ago, the emigrant ship
Miracle was wrecked, with a loss of 350 lives
out of the 678 on board, and the bones of two
hundred lie buried in the sands on which they
were cast.
A weird tale is told of a wreck on North Beach
in more recent years, or rather of a coming ashore
of a derelict, the English brig Joseph. In broad
daylight, with all sails set, the vessel ran straight
on North Beach. The inhabitants went on board
only to find five men lying dead in the cabin with
their throats cut. The vessel's papers were miss-
ing and the name had been scraped off in mosi
58
„ Among the Magdalen Islands
places. By a slight clue its identity was dis-
covered. The mutineers had landed on Newfound-
land and then cast adrift their boat with its grim
freight .
There was plenty of material, therefore, for
Stedman's poem and for his lines : —
"Woe, woe to those whom the Islands pen,
In vain they shun the double capes;
I Cruel are the reefs of Magdalen;
The Wolfs white fang what prey escapes ?
The Grindstone grinds the bones of some,
And Coffin Island is craped with foam;
On Deadman's shores are fearful shapes."
ther islands there are, each with its history.
,Wolf Island bears a grim name, but not more
grim than the dreary waste of shifting sand
deserves, for it has been the scene of many ship-
wrecks. Coffin Island, with its steep rocks and
menacing shores, is honoured by the name of
the Admiral Proprietor. Alright Island is a
deserted stretch of sand-dune and coarse grass —
the grass on which the cattle and sheep of tha
Islands largely subsist.
There, too, lies Deadman's Island, bearing its
gruesome name from a fancied resemblance to a
giant human corpse shrouded for burial. The
59
Through the Heart of Canada
imagination is assisted by three rocky protuber-
ances that stand for the head, chest, and feet of
the leviathan of rock half a mile long. Here again
scores of cruel shipwrecks have been witnessed
by the elements. Many a shipwrecked sailor has
been cast up on the unfriendly shores of Deadman's
Island, many a life has been battered away against
its relentless walls. Tom Moore sailed past the
isle one dark September night in 1804, and there-
after penned his poem based on the sight of the
lonely place, but he made a trifling geographical
error in placing it near Labrador, for some two
hundred miles intervene.
Deadman's Island was once a great resort for
the walrus, which the fishermen would drive to
the sand beaches and there capture and kill them.
Jacques Cartier noted their presence when he dis-*
covered the Magdalens in 1534. *' About these
islands," he wrote, ** there are several large
animals resembling an elephant, which live as well
in the sea as on land." All traces of the walrus J
however, have disappeared, as have practically thr
seals. Whereas in former years twenty thousanc
seals would be caught in a season, now but i
few hundred are captured and correspondingly few
fishers are engaged in the industry.
60
Among the Magdalen Islands
Farther afield in the Gulf rises the bl^-ck and
inhospitable cliffs of Byron Island. It received its
name from Jacques Cartier in honour of an admiral
of that name who sailed with him on his first
voyage to America. Only half a score of families
live on this lonely bit of rock, amid its wild waste
of waters, with neighbours a score of miles away
in the Bird Rocks. The Little Bird Rock is steadily
disappearing, and the same end may come to the
Great Bird, but as yet it stands a mighty mass
three hundred feet high, encircled by wicked and
erratic currents and swept by fierce autumnal and
winter gales. The ten acres of its summit is a
sky parlour for millions of sea-birds, chiefly gan-
nets. Here, again, Cartier observed the feathered
throng. To him '* the rocks were covered with
more birds than a meadow with grass," and thirty
years later Champlain, passing by their inacces-
sible cliffs, recorded that " vessels sailing by the
islands send their boats ashore in calm weather,
and a great number of birds are killed with sticks.
They are as large as geese. Their beaks are very
dangerous. They are perfectly white, with the
exception of the tip of the wings, which are black.
They are very expert in catching fish, which they
carry on their wings to the top of the islands, where
6i
Through the Heart of Canada
they eat them/' So chronicled this observant
explorer of three hundred years ago.
To-day the birds are apparently as numerous,
though the Great Bird Rock has been occupied
for thirty years past as a Canadian lighthouse
station* Standing on the main thoroughfare
between Canada and Europe, the rock was long a
menace to the mariner, but with a light throwing
its rays twenty-one miles, and equipped with fog-
horns and explosives, it has no doubt saved many
a craft from destruction by warning off the sailor
who approached too close to its precipitous sides.
The Bird Rock is, too, a rock of tragedy, apart
from the wrecks it witnessed before the building^^
of the lighthouse. The most recent episode was
in March of 1897. Damion Cormier was in
charge of the light. With his two assistants,
Charles and Arsene Turbide, Cormier was left on
the ice to hunt seals, leaving Mrs. Cormier alone
on the rock. .When they were ready to return, a
sudden shift of the wind caused a break in the
ice floe, and their means of escape was thus cut
off. Suddenly a storm of snow and sleet aros
and the current miade it impossible to launch theii
boat. Thus they faced a terrible death. The next
morning Charles Turbide became exhausted anc
62
Among the Magdalen Islands
died, though he had fed on the warm blood of
a captured seal. Damion Cormier succumbed the
next day, and his body was afterwards found by
a sealer on the ice between Bird Rock and Cape
Breton. Arsene Turbide kept on the ice and
drifted with it for days, until, almost dead, he
was cast ashore near North Cape in Cape Breton,
nearly a hundred miles away. Climbing, or rather
crawling some miles to the nearest house, he was
in a dying condition, and only survived a few days.
In the meantime the almost distracted woman
realised the worst. Days elapsed before help came
to her from Bryon Island, but she kept the light
going and proved herself a true heroine.
These are a few of the islands in the Magdalen
Group. It is a kingdom of fish, and its inhabitants
are naturally fisher-farmers. The cod forms the
staple harvest of the sea, but the herring and
mackerel are no less valuable, and the presence
in many coves of lobster factories, and the piles
of lobster traps along the shores, tell of their
presence in large numbers. The skate and dog-
fish come with the herring as their enemies, and
the porpoise pursues them as well. The fisheries,
as a whole, are relatively as sure and profitable
as those of Newfoundland, but the scarcity of bait
63
I
Through the Heart of Canada
at times seriously hampers the industry. Some
farming is done, though the soil is not of the
best. While wheat is grown, the coarser grains
and vegetables do better. Considerable numbers
of cattle and sheep are pastured, but most of th^
staple food in the way of flour and pork is imported
from the mainland.
A simple, honest, and temperate folk are the
island fishermen, and content and happy as well,
they will tell you when asked, though toiling hard
for their livelihood during the summer days, and
imprisoned in the heart of the stormy gulf during
the long winter nights.
QUEBEC
THE BRITTANY OF BRITAIN
I
CHAPTER IV
QUEBEC : THE BRITTANY OF BRITAIN
The province of Quebec is a reproduction of old
Brittany in the Britain of the New World. Many
a habitant can trace his ancestry to the Erench
of the Norman and Breton cantons, and many a
custom and legend survives the centuries and
connects the two lands.
The gateway of this wide -stretching portion of
Canada (for jQuebec is nearly three times as large
as the British Isles) is the kingly St. Lawrence.
As the traveller sails over the thousand-mile
stream he must wonder if the world contains its
peer in noble breadth and leagues of length, or
if any fairer scene can be found than the shimmer
of its blue waters under a bright sky, the fertile
slopes of its southern shore, the granite giants of
the Laurentian range, and the little white habita-
tions of its farmers and fisherfolk.
Viewed from the deck of an ocean liner, on
67
Through the Heart of Canada
its journey from the Gulf to its port, the river
shore, with its fringe of settlements, looks like a
town of a single street stretching for hundreds
of miles from Little Metis to big Montreal. Almost
every centre of population — Murray Bay, Les
Eboulements, Cacouna, Riviere du IIoup — no
matter how restricted numerically, has its individual
civic life and its local interests and aims. Such
a place is Bic — beautiful little Bic, huddled close
to the river, shielded on either side by curiously
rounded hills, and guarded in front by foliaged
islands .
One of the latter is L' Islet au Massacre, which
may be reached by boat at high tide, or on foot
at low tide over a path picked out among the
stranded clams and shells that are the pet relish
of hungry crows. After a scramble over a wild
tumble of boulders, the sea-carved grotto is entered
— a cave in which history asserts two hundred
Micmac redmen were massacred in the olden days
of Indian warfare by the Iroquois — the tigers oi
the forest. Building a fire at the mouth of ihi
cavern, into which their victims had fled, th(
pursuing enemy suffocated those that remained ii
the enclosure and tomahawked such as attempted
to escape. The account was later more evenl
68
' Quebec : The Brittany of Britain
balanced when other Micmacs in revenge ambushed
\ a band of their foes, and thus exacted life for
1 life for the loss of their kindred.
At every point of village life and in every deep-
j set cove one feels the magnetism of the river.
i As at Rimouski and Bic, so at Cacouna, where
; the yonder shore line, though twenty-five miles
I distant, seems at times to draw wondrously near,
I only mysteriously to recede. When the world is
I immersed in a ghostly fog bank, cloud-mountains
are made ; while one gazes, the mists play curious
pranks with the earth and sky, or with a passing
steamer, now lifting her in the air, now cutting
off her masts, and then in a trice causing her
to float an infinite distance away like a phantom
ship on a phantom sea.
The tributaries of the St. Lawrence are dis-
tinctive in their setting and surroundings. Such
is the fjord-like Saguenay as it flows, deep and
gloomy, between almost vertical cliffs, and under
the frowning escarpments of the twin capes of
Trinity and Eternity. For hour after hour the
steamer glides through a silent world, and silence
belongs to such an upheaved realm of rock and
river bank. Then comes the emergence into the
St. Lawrence and to the historic town of Tadousac,
69
Through the Heart of Canada
bordering the confluent streams and giving its
benediction to the matchless scene from the Httle
Jesuit mission church of 1750, which still contains
the original bell of an earlier edifice. Thus three
and a half centuries of history have passed over
Tadousac, from the time when Cartier landed on
its untenanted beach. Memorable days they were,
too, when " the Black Robes," as the Indians called
the priests, served a parish whose boundaries
reached to Hudson Bay. Basque, Norman, and
Breton mariners also found their way to the spot,
as did soldiers of Erance, whose garrison in 1661
met the fate of so many companion pioneers ati
the hands of the Iroquois — red men of the blood
lust. Succeeding the explorer and soldier, the
adventurous traders of the Hudson Bay Company
made of Tadousac one of their prosperous though
remote trade centres. jj
It is but natural that legends abound in this
legend-land of Quebec. One of the most charac-
teristic is that of Tadousac and its old bell. Thus
the story runs : —
One of the good priests of the church of th(
Jesuit Mission was Rather Labrosse, who died a
Tadousac in 1782. He had had a hard day*s work
and at its close sat talking with his friends aroun*
70
Quebec : The Brittany of Britain
a blazing log fire. But when he said good-night,
he bade them goodbye for ever. ** At midnight
I shall be dead I *' was his startling announcement,
" and the bell of the chapel will toll for my pass-
ing soul at that hour I " Then he left full instruc-
tions about his burial to the little company, who
were too speechless to utter a word. They sat
under a great fear until the midnight hour when,
hearing the chapel bell begin to toll, they rushed
to the church where, prostrate before the altar and
alone, lay the dead body of R^re Eabrosse !
Then they remembered that the p^re while with
them had also said that Messire Compain would
be waiting for them the next day on Isle-aux-
Coudres. Thereupon four of the men of the
village, risking their lives in a raging storm, sailed
for the isle in their canoes, where true enough they
found Messire Compain who, unsurprised at their
errand, told that he had been forev/arned of the
priest's death. The night before the bell of his
island church had been tolled by invisible hands
at the same time as the Tadousac bell was rung
by other invisible hands. In all the missions
ministered to by E^re Labrosse, and they were
many, all the bells, so it is declared, tolled for
his passing soul that stormy night of long ago I
71
Through the Heart of Canada
For years afterward, continues the story, the
Indians never sailed up the Saguenay without
throwing themselves over Pere Labrosse's tomb,
and, placing their mouths at an opening in the floor,
talking to him as if he were alive, and as they were
wont to converse with him. Then they would bend
the ear and listen until they were sure he answered
their questions and transmitted their prayers to
God. At Chicoutimi, at the headwaters of the
Saguenay, one may see Father Labrosse*s grave^
his body having been taken there some years ago.
It is in the realm of legend and lore, as has
been said, that the link between French Canada
and French Brittany is best shown. In the
Christmas Eve celebration, on the night of Noel,
there is the massive log, baptized before being
put to the burning, and by its flaring light there
is the carol -singing, the jovial feasting, the dancing,
and the gift distribution from the Wonder Tree,
the benefactor not being, the Santa Claus of
England but le petit Jesu.
Then follows the story telling : of la chasse
galerie, of the bad men who, refusing to pray to
le bon Dieu, are in the grip of Satan, of the
mysterious canoe, manned by reprobates, who are
compelled to paddle through the air like demons,
72
Quebec : The Brittany of Britain
with the devil himself steering the strange air craft .
Or the tale of the loup garou, of other evil men
who, turned into wolves, are condemned to rove
at night in the skin and shape of that ravenous
animal as a punishment for their sins. Only by
receiving a bloody wound can they be released
from their servitude to Satan.
No less than the Saguenay does the Richelieu
River invite exploration as one of the historic
tributaries of the main waterway — the majestic St.
Lawrence. To sail up the sinuous length of the
Richelieu from Sorel to Chambly, in the quiet of
a summer evening, to see the herds pasturing on
the rich uplands, to pass village after village, each
with its dominating church spire, to view all this
is to behold a rare scene of prosperity and con-
tentment .
On either bank the busy housewife is drawing
the weekly baking of bread from the curious open-
air oven, with its domed plaster roof, while the
old habitant, still clinging to his homespun, is per-
forming the evening tasks around the thatched
barn. Thrifty, industrious, well-living is the
French-Canadian farmer.
Hour after hour the steamer winds its way up-
stream until, under the spell' of the stillness, broken
73
Through the Heart of Canada
only by a distant church chime, the imagination
may easily people the watery highway with its
voyagers of former centuries — men red and men
white, soldiers of the transatlantic kings, diplo-
mats and spies, priest, peasant, warrior and hunter.
Champlain made the Richelieu the route to the
lake that bears his name . Indians canoed in secret
up its length, gathering scalps of victims or seizing
prisoners for later torture.
What a wealth of Canadian history is suggested
at Chambly. The crumbling fortress ruin of to-
day, itself two centuries old, is a reminder of the
original fort of 1665, built by the French to protect
the river against the Iroquois. In revolutionary
times as well, Chambly echoed to the marching
troops of Carleton and Burgoyne, and now in
these twentieth-century days the footsteps of the
wandering tourist are traceable on grass -clothed
earthwork and areas enclosed by tottering walls.
Another great riverway is the Ottawa, whose
brown flood retains its colour for many a mile after
flowing into the St. Lawrence. Here, as elsewhere,
in the picturesque old land of the habitant, the
village centre is the parish church, often a sub-
stantial structure with towering spire, glistening;
roof of tin and an interior rich in white and gold,
74
Quebec : The Brittany of Britain
Every few miles along the country road is a way-
side cross, or on the summit of a hill, a white -
walled shrine attracts the eye of the passer-by,
as on a certain day it will attract thousands of
praying pilgrims.
If the wayfarer is landed at the village wharf
of Oka on the Ottawa, and drives a few miles into
the interior, he will reach one of the three Canadian
settlements of the Trappist monks. This monastic
body is a branch of the Cistercian Order, and is
named from the village of Soligny-la-Trappe, in
the Department of Orne, France, where the Abbey
of La Trappe was founded in 1 140.
The rules of the Order are noted for their
extreme austerity, with long fasts, hard manual
labour, self-imposed silence, and an abstinence
from many of the so-called good things of the
world. In the Oka monastery the Trappists are
clad in white robes that reach to the feet, with
a rope girdle as a belt. On their feet are sandals,
while their heads are clean shaven, except for a
tonsure. The novices are garbed in brown, work-
ing eight hours daily on the farm as against the
four hours' field work of the monks.
The day begins at 2 a.m. Rising from his straw
Lttress, laid on the floor or on the plainest of
75
Through the Heart of Canada
pallets, the Trappist commences his round of
duties and of worship long before the sun rises.
Weird in the extreme is the sight of the monks
gliding ghost-like in single file to their chapel,
where for the first hours of the long day they
engage in prayer. On the choir seats are found
very fine specimens of books of service, splendidly
bound and richly illuminated in colours. The
chants sound peculiarly impressive in the still morn,
the effect being accentuated when the monastery
bells peal forth their rich notes.
But all the time of the Trappist is not given to
prayer and meditation, although the major part
of the day is devoted to spiritual exercises. He is
a farmer as well as a priest, and the Oka farm of
eight hundred acres is one of the best tilled in the
district. All kinds of grain are grown, an excellent
vegetable garden is maintained, and a large orchard!
and vineyard add pictures queness to the rura
scene. When the hour for farm work comes, the
Trappist dons a working gown and marches to
his labour. Some are allotted to the garden, where>
again on their knees, they devote themselves to th<
more secular occupation of weeding or hoeing the
vegetables .
Another detachment of workers is assigned t^
76
Quebec : The Brittany of Britain
the large bam, for the brother -in -white is a stock
grower as well as a farmer. Rarely will one see
finer thoroughbred stock than their Percheron
stallions or pure -bred cattle and sheep. Adjoining
the bam is the dairy, where is manufactured a
fancy cheese which has a high reputation in the
market, as have the clarets and wines of the vine-
yards .
The most exacting prohibition among the Trap-
pists is that of speech. Silence is a stern law that
is not broken except under necessity, although this
rule applies to the full members of the Order rather
than to the novices. Exception to the rule of
silence is of course made during the religious ser-
vices. The inevitableness of death is ever present
in the minds of these ascetic recluses . Their motto
is " Memento mori," and the presence of the burial-
ground near the monastery and the sight of an ever-
open grave is still another reminder to them and
to the chance visitor of the mutability of all things
earthly.
Though Quebec is the second largest province in
the Dominion, its population of two millions is to
be found within a comparatively limited area, and
that along the water-courses. The old-world
attachment of the habitant to his home makes him
77
I
Through the Heart of Canada
less inclined to push into the new country, vast
tracts of which await settlement. Such a region
is that of Lake St. John, lying some two hundred
miles northerly from the city of Quebec. The line
of railway has opened up a fine stretch of arable
country as well as rich timber tracts and lakes and
rivers well stocked with fish. Surrounding Lake
St. John is an extensive area of farm lands under
high cultivation.
Upon the completion of the new National Trans-
continental Railway through Northern Quebec, it is
confidently expected that other tracts of land suit-
able for agriculture will be toade accessible to
settlers who will not be slow to take advantage of
these boundless new land opportunities. The pos-
sible productivity, of Quebec, with increased popula-
tion and enlarged areas under cultivation, bids fair
to total an annual value far beyond the hundred
million dollars that now represent the field and live
stock products alone. A government estimate of
the timber of the province places it at the large
sum of four hundred and fifty million dollars . Eif ty
thousand lumbermen are annually employed, and
the provincial revenue from woods and forests
exceeds a million dollars a year. The forest area
alone covers one hundred and twenty million acres,
78
o
«
w
D
Oi
<
o
o
1
Quebec : The Brittany of Britain
while no less than seven million acres of crown
lands are open for settlement.
The Eastern Townships, lying south of Montreal
i and Quebec, are held to be the most fertile, the
' best cultivated, and the richest stock-raising por-
tion of the province. Nestling in sheltered valleys
are prosperous villages and towns, many of the
latter being substantial manufacturing centres
owing to the proximity of valuable water powers.
The population of this section contains a larger
percentage of English-speaking farmers than any
other district of Quebec, but the percentage is
gradually decreasing, as French Canadians acquire
holdings in the fertile region. There is no fairer
portion of the Dominion, none more worthy of
calling forth the fervent love for and pardonable
pride in his native province that is felt by the
habitant of Quebec and his English-speaking
neighbour.
One needs to meet the French Canadian indi-
vidually to know him and to appreciate his qualities
—to visit him in his village or hamlet and to be
the recipient of his fine courtesy and generous
hospitality. A native shrewdness is combined with
a child-like simplicity as charming as his inbred
politeness. He is, moreover, an optimist, whose
79
Through the Heart of Canada
gospel of contentment is well summed up in the
sentence : ** When one is contented there is no
more to be desired, and when there is no more
to be desired, there's an end of it.*'
Dr. Drummond, the poet of the French
Canadian, depicted the habitant to the life : —
" De fader of me, he was habitant farmer,
Ma grad' fader too, an' hees fader also,
Dey don't mak' no monee, but dat isn't fonny
For it's not easy get ev'ryting, you mus' know —
All de sam' dere is someting dey get ev'rybody
Dat's plaintee good healt', what de monee can't geev,
So I'm workin' away dere, an' happy for stay dere.
On farm by de reever, so long as I was leev."
" On de farm by de reever " is the ideal situa-
tion of the habitant farmer, with a ribbon of farm
half a mile long, though but a few furlongs wide,
sweeping up the swell of a hillside from the water's
edge. Here is the modest little house, dwarfed as
to size by the spacious bam and by the home-
made windmill towering high above the roof.
Simple in its furnishings is the home, with the
largest apartment used as the living-room, the only
place where the numerous members of the family
can foregather around the big stove or the biggei
table. The whitewashed exterior is matched b}
the clean-scrubbed floor and furniture, and amic
80
Quebec : The Brittany of Britain
these humble surroundings the French Canadian,
or the Canadien as he names himself, lives his
^ life of frugality and thrift, living beyond and above
the world of financial hazard. The government
savings bank having won his confidence, still holds
it, and speculation tempts him in vain.
Sunday is the day of days in the calendar of the
habitant, primarily because his is a deeply religious
nature. The alien can with difficulty estimate the
place of the church in a Quebec community. Mas-
sive stone structures they are as a rule, built to
serve m^ny generations of worshippers. No less
difficult would it be to have a proper appreciation
of the cure. As pastor, friend, counsellor, and
arbitrator he is indispensable to the life of his
parishioners. Church -going is not an abandoned
practice in this Catholic land. Rarely are the
spacious churches less than filled at the Sunday
morning services, and after the religious duties are
faithfully performed, the joys of social intercourse
; follow. Neighbourly visitation is the order of the
day, when everything on wheels and every beast
1, capable of bearing harness are brought into
^ requisition ; when the highways are alive with the
^traffic of springless cart or stylish carriage, of
; quaint caleche or planquette. Nor is the speed limit
8i F
Through the Heart of Canada
too tightly drawn. If the Quebec peasant is fond
of neighbourliness and given to hospitality, he has
a greater weakness for a horse race, and a horse
race if needs must be on a Sunday afternoon, with
the turnpike as an improvised Derby course and
rival swains perchance as the drivers.
A happy, hard-working, law-abiding citizen is
the habitant of Quebec, temperate in habits, loyal
as a citizen of his country and Empire, and bringing
to the development and upbuilding of his land
qualities that are essential if the structure is to be
abiding.
62
QUEBEC
THE CITADEL CITY OF THE ST. LAWRENCE
CHAPTER V
QUEBEC : THE CITADEL CITY OF THE
ST. LAWRENCE
IThe Quebec of Cartier and Champlain is the portal
«)f the Canada of a half -continent.
The ancient city on a rock still attracts as power-
'ully as ever Lurlei lured the mariner to her Rhine
launt. It still works its spell: the spell of its
listory written on grey wall and grassy moat and
Irenerable houses, the spell of its Gallic life, the
intithesis in many respects of that of the Saxon
)r Celt, the spell of its streets that run from every-
vhere to nowhere, rendering null and void the
)oints of the compass.
Dear, dreamy, dignified Quebec, age -steeped and
ime-softened, it is easy to fall a victim to its
:harms, it is difficult to tear one's self away from
ts ramparts and terraces and ancient byways in
jfower and Upper Town.
As in Halifax, so in Quebec, the citadel crowns
85
Through the Heart of Canada
the highest height, affording from its walls the
widest panorama of city, sea, and distant shores.
What pyrotechnics have been witnessed by the old
stronghold of the King's Bastion, dominating the
street and stream far below, while the westerning
sun rests a brief tnoment on the peak of a L'auren-
tian hill, gilding steeple and dome in the town,
and painting the Levis cliffs with a wealth of golden
colour. What sights by night-light, when the eyes
of the houses on the yonder height shine like stars, ,
when the firefly lamps on Little Champlain Street
outline the sinuosities of that historic highway,
once trodden by men now resting for aye in Mount
Hermon or St. Patrick's populous cities of the J
dead. The citadel commands, by day or night, such
an expanse as Edinburgh exhibits from the Salis-
bury Crags, or Florence from the San Miniato
Hill.
What sounds, too, have been heard from the'^
same high vantage ground : the sullen mutterings
of a north -bom storm, the vicious sweep of the
October wind down channel, the roar of the shot
and shell from the Levis batteries of Wolfe during
the siege of 1759, the wild cheer from the thin red
line that faced Montcalm's white-coated men on
the Plains of Abraham on the early morn of a
86
I
SOUS-LE-CAP, LOWER TOWN, QUEBEC.
To face p. 87,
Quebec : Citadel City of St. Lawrence
September day, the close of which saw a memorable
exchange of flags on the citadel walls and an
epochal change of maps and boundaries.
It is so easy to dream of the past in Quebec.
It is so easy to re-live it, when standing by the
age-crusted walls of the Church of Notre Dame
des Victoires, telling in marble tablet and stained-
glass window of successful deliverances in 1690
and 1 7 1 1 from the dreaded old-world enemies of
France in the new continent. A solemn, homely
little chapel it is, squeezed in a tight fit between
warehouse and market-place and trolley-invaded
street.
It is easy to dream of the dead days vividly
recalled by the original wall of Intendant Bigot's
Palace, or parts of it, but this dream is rudely
shattered when further investigation reveals the fact
that the remnants of the palace are now part of
a brewery — most prosaic and uninteresting of all
the buildings of men. But far from prosaic is
near-by Sous4e-Cap, the narrowest, oddest,
quaintest freak of a street to be seen in old world
or new, where the tall houses nod together up
toward the strip of sky-line as they have nodded
for many a decade.
Emerging from this little lane of humanity,
87
Through the Heart of Canada
crowded against the black-faced cliff, one experi-
ences a sudden awakening with the clang of a
modern electric car. As it twists and curves to
adapt itself to the erratic higjiway, as it zigzags
in a bewildering manner, the impudence of the
lightning-harnessed car strikes the mind. No spot
is sacred from its tracks, the hum of its electrical
energy is a laugh of derision at the awakening
of echoes in quiet convent gardens, hidden behind
high walls from the gaze of the passer-by, in
incense -filled churches with their kneeling worship-
pers, in cloister and corridor where the Silent
Sisters dwell, in buildings overbent with age, and
in dusty, scholastic halls . Does the noble Erangois
de Montmorency Laval hear the distant rumbling,
though so soundly asleep these two hundred years
in his massive sarcophagus in the University that
bears his name, and if he hears does he marvel
at it all ? One wonders, too, if the defeated Mont-
calm, resting in his grave, hollowed out by a shell
that burst in the Ursuline Convent during the siege
of 1759, hears the distant rumbling of the
twentieth -century trolley. Perhaps not, for his
skull, so poor and shrivelled a bit of human shell,
has been separated from its bed of bones and grins
pathetically from under a glass case.
88
Quebec : Citadel City of St. Lawrence
Thus in time, and brief time at that, the grey
walls of the citadel are again reached by the cir-
cuitous route of the city walls. What a fine
thrill courses through the veins when crossing
a mediaeval drawbridge over a real moat and
entering a real old iron -plated door with rusty
hinges and enormous bars, guarded by King
George's defender's I Within the enclosure, to
which admittance is not easily obtained, the un-
adorned walls of the stone barracks are in solemn
harmony with the ramparts and the old cannon.
In the centre of the citadel area is mounted a minia-
ture brass gun, nicknamed a " grasshopper " in
the fighting days of 1812. As this rusty piece of
armament once saw service at Bunker Hill, it could
tell an interesting story of the famous Boston en-
gagement. Other rusty old cannon, derelicts on
the sea of war, share the space with the latest death-
dealing guns in a strange juxtaposition of old and
new.
Viewed once again from the ramparts, the houses
of Lower Town cling like barnacles to the steep
sides of Cape Diamond, not a few braced in
front to hold them in position against the rock
wall in the rear. Immediately below is the track
of the landslide of a few years ago, in which 30
89
Through the Heart of Canada
many met a horrible death. A caleche driver spent
six hours pinned under the beams of a collapsed
house, the six hours seeming six eternities to him
before he was rescued. Even then an old dame
kept on living contentedly in a humble home next
to a demolished row of houses, though her own
dwelling was injured in the catastrophe and is in
the direct line of any succeeding avalanche of rock.
The constant menace of the overhanging cliff has
had the effect of lowering the values of the re-
maining structures in the locality, and many a
house, down at the heels and shabby of front,
grieves its owner with its empty rooms and deserted
dormer windows.
And what would Quebec be without its dormer
windows? Such striking frames they make for
la belle Canadienne, whose happy face smiles a
welcome to the passer-by. On the family doorstep
of a summer evening sit Frangois and Marie, old
and happy, he smoking the best " tabac " in the
world in his own pungent native -grown weed, she
knitting coarse yarn footwear. The children, in
bewildering confusion of numbers, are not confined
to doorstep or window-sill. Their field is the street-
way, a playground that is yielded to your pony at
the last critical moment, on the very verge of an
Quebec : Citadel City of St. Lawrence
apparent catastrophe. While one is catching a
quick breath with a tremor of fear, the little urchins
scatter on either side with a ringing laugh that
sings itself into the memory.
The same Pegasus that hauls one through the
narrow thoroughfares of the old town will, for a
corresponding fare, trot down Palace Hill, over
the St. Charles Bridge, and thus on to the Beauport
turnpike that stretches its long and narrow length
up the hills that lead to Montmorency. The habi-
tants, driving to or from market with their two-
wheeled carts, are polite enough to return every
passing salutation with Gallic interest. Milkmaids
in poke bonnets, short skirts, and utility shoes,
may spare a shy glance, and the children, as in
the city, constitute themselves a committee of
welcome. The very air is impregnated with good
cheer and a fine spirit of camaraderie marks the
worthy people of Beauport.
The road cuts through a landscape of rich
beauty. Old manor houses stand in dignified
retirement far back from the dusty highway ; big
bams, flanked by little old-fashioned cottages,
crowd closer to the street to miss nothing of the
passing life ; other homes, a degree more pre-
tentious, and occupying a middle social position
91
Through the Heart of Canada
between the two extremes, put on airs with freshly-
painted blue window frames against a background
of unpainted or whitewashed walls. If it be haying
time, the full blossomed clover exhales its richest
perfume, the bluebells cuddle in the fence corners,
the birds sing their chansons, and all is as merry as
a marriage. The only really sober element in the
landscape is the smallest of chapels, perched on a
make-believe hill, with but two windows to a side
and an entrance in keeping with its diminutive size.
So the mile-posts are checked off as the journey
proceeds. To the right the ever -beautiful St.
Lawrence hastens to the sea, to the left the country
slopes back from the narrow fringe of houses to
where the dark woods form a boundary. Then
comes the return trip down a succession of hills
and between the tree -lined turnpike until a final
curve brings a new vision of the city of Champ -
lain, regally crowning the height like a great giant
on a granite throne.
Caliche journeys in any one or all of three
directions from Quebec will yield rich results . One
of these jaunts will lead to the oldest house in
Canada — oldest in the sense of being continuously
occupied — hidden away in the little village of
Sillery. There is probably no other structure in
92
Quebec : Citadel City of St. Lawrence
the Dominion still existing that has had more
famous folk within its thick fortress -like walls, or
that witnessed more stirring events in the old days
of New France than the Sillery Mansion. The
mind needs to revert once more to the long ago,
therefore, to 1636, to recall the early history of
the old place. The father and founder of Sillery
and its Mission was the Com.tnandeur de Sillery,
a great Frenchman of his time, a favourite of the
Court and an ambassador of his King. But a
day came when he forsook the work of a diplo-
matist and statesman and entered upon the religious
life by taking holy orders.
Among his first acts of benevolence was the gift
of twelve thousand livres from his wealth to Father
Charles Lalemont, the renowned Jesuit missionary
of the seventeenth century, with which to start a
mission on the St. Lawrence. Thus Sillery was
founded, being named after the man who made it
possible by his generous gift. Associated with
Father Lalemont was Father Le Jeune, the names
of both of whom figure prominently in the annals
of New France as martyrs of the faith they pro-
claimed to the red man. These two priests superin-
I tended the erection of the mission buildings, con-
iBisting of a church, a convent, and a missionaries'
! 93
Through the Heart of Canada
house. It is this last -mentioned edifice that yet
survives the passing centuries.
Owing to the repeated attacks of the Iroquois
and the unsettled state of the new colony, the!
mission was surrounded for protection by rude
palisades and redoubts, and for many a long day
and longer night a ceaseless watch had to be kept
on the prowling red men who sought the scalps
of its inmates . Many a sudden alarm did the little
band undergo, and frequent attacks were thril-
lingly and bravely repelled.
Other scenes Sillery witnessed, of dramatic and
historic interest, in the grand councils of Indian,
voyageur, priest, and official, constituting the primi-
tive parliament of the time, when compacts were
entered into, campaigns planned, or peace procla-
mations issued. Not a few of the decisive episodes
of Canadian history were enacted around the same
Sillery camp-fires, amid uncouth and even bar-
baric surroundings. The stone walls of the old
house, the centre of all this pioneer life, are as
perfect and massive as ever. The steep roof and
pointed gables are a true index of the old French
architecture. To-day the house, which is ap-
parently good for many a decade to come, is used
for commercial purposes, and where once the
94
Quebec : Citadel City of St. Lawrence
orisons of the black-robed Fathers were chanted,
now the prosaic language of trade is heard.
Surrounding Sillery is other historic ground.
Hard by are the remnants of the cribs recalling
the day when the Cove was one of the great
lumber-shipping depots in Canada. Following the
shore -line eastward, the road leads to Wolfe's Cove
and the path up which the British army made its
way. Again, beyond, lie the Plains of Abraham,
the field where Wolfe and Montcalm met in mortal
conflict. He who visits the battlefield of the
Plains, as a pilgrim finds his way to a shrine, will
discover that the philistine has been there before
him. Canada has heretofore been somewhat
neglectful of this historic battle-ground. A con-
siderable section of the Plains has been carved into
streets, and is already covered with dwelling-
houses. An inartistic gaol, and an unpicturesque
observatory further impinge on the original area,
while an ugly red-brick factory occupies a promi-
. nent position, with an unsightly water -tank perched
J on the top of an old martello tower 1
|K All that suggests to the eye the struggle there
■Witnessed a century and a half ago is embodied
^ in the modest shaft marking the spot where Wolfe
g fell, with its eloquently simple inscription of ' Here
95
Through the Heart of Canada
died Wolfe victorious/' he who, in the language
of Pitt, had with a handful of men added an empire
to English rule. While a hero's fame does not rest
on neglect or care of the spot where he made his
final sacrifice, yet his memory deserves something
of respect. No less proper is some commemoration
of the brave part played by the vanquished
soldier of Erance. It is peculiarly fitting, there-
fore, that this theatre of one of the most important
dramas enacted on the American continent is
henceforth to be a national park, and thus to be
saved from all further depredation.
The most famous suburb of Quebec is Ste. Anne
de Beaupre, the village home of the greatest
miracle church in North America. A million
pilgrims have journeyed, during the last ten years,
to the Shrine of " Our Lady of Perpetual Health,"
as the good Ste. Anne is called by her devotees.!
Over a million pious Catholics have there kissedj
the wonder-working relic of the saint, in the shapei
of a fragment of her finger-bone, and they havej
there knelt and prayed at the altar over whic
her statue rises.
And the results.^ You are pointed to the grea
pyramids of crutches, canes, and body supports]
that tower high above your head inside the mai
96
Quebec : Citadel City of St. Lawrence
entrance. You are shown, too, the more recent
accumulations of these articles at the altar itself,
left there by the grateful beneficiaries of the good
saint. You are taken, moreover, to a room in the
rear of the great building, where case after case
is filled with watches, rings, bracelets, and orna-
ments of all kinds, donated to the church by other
pilgrims .
It is a noted place, historically as well as
religiously. Eor nearly three hundred years
miracles have here been performed, so it is
claimed, through the intercession of this ** Mother
of Canada." In the long-ago days of the Erench
regime, the loyal subjects of the grand monarch
of France, as well as the dusky red men of the
North, made their way in annual pilgrimage to
the saintly shrine, and among the historic trophies
possessed by the church is a crucifix given by
d' Iberville three centuries ago— the d' Iberville
ivho conquered Hudson Bay on the north and
founded Louisiana on the south. Alongside of
' ;he crucifix is a mass vestment, given by Anne of
I Austria, the mother of Louis XIV.— a wonderful
^ Diece of work, of pure silk, gold, and silver, made
V>y Queen Anne^s own hands.
But the pilgrim of to-day is the one in whom
97 G
Through the Heart of Canada
we are most interested. The 26th of July in each
year is the great day at Ste. Anne, and on that
day train -loads of pilgrims flock into the little
village on the banks of the St. Lawrence from all
jparts of Canada and the United States. There
they mingle with the equally large crowds of
Erench-Canadian habitants, who have driven in
from the surrounding country in their curious
caliches or planquettes, as their primitive vehicles
are called.
It is truly a wonderful sight, merely as a gather-
ing of human beings. In the distance may be seen
the towering cliff of old Quebec, and in front the
fertile Isle of Orleans. But one has few eyes for
these surroundings, for the interest centres in the
great Basilica. Under its star-painted ceiling three
thousand worshippers crowd into a space intended
for a lesser number. The majority seem to be
profoundly moved by the inspiring music of the
great organ and the fine choir. Then a seemingly
never-ending line makes its way to the beautiful
marble altar rail to partake of the communion
and to kiss a circular disk of glass behind whict
is kept the precious and efficacious relic. Onl>
at the continental pilgrimage -centres of Llourdes oi
Auray is such a scene possible.
98
Quebec : Citadel City of St. Lawrence
Outside the church, and in connection with it,
are other sights no less interesting. Ste. Anne de
Beaupre is a village of but one street, and that
as winding as the usual Quebec hamlet. Bewilder-
ing lines of hotels and boarding-houses have been
built for the accommodation of the pilgrim travellers.
Large monasteries and convents also accommodate
the public. Bordering the narrow sidewalks are
long lines of booths, in which beads and candles
and miniature statues are for sale.
Near by is the Sacred Fountain, with another
statue of Ste. Anne surmounting it, the water pro-
ceeding from a spring in the hillside. Nearly all
the pilgrims visit the Holy Well, as it is called,
for its waters have a high reputation for their
curative qualities. A little farther along the road,
and perched half-way up the steep hillside, stands
the Holy Staircase, or Scala Sancta, of twenty-
eight steps, in imitation of those in Rome, which
are claimed to have been brought up from Jeru-
salem. Here again there is a continuous procession
^! of pious folk, making their way up the sacred stairs
on their knees.
In Ste. Anne de Beaupre, as in Sillery, as in
jQuebec, the past intrudes itself at every turn ; it
insists on being recalled, and rightly so, but not to
99
Through the Heart of Canada
the exclusion of the present. As there is an old
Quebec, so there is a new one. The city of Cham-
plain, after its three centuries of varied history, is
entering upon a new era of prosperity and growth.
As one views the ocean vessels and river craft lining
the extensive new docks, or notes the elevators
with their large grain-holding capacity, or traces
the expansion of the residential and manufacturing
parts of the city, the evidence is convincingly clear
that Quebec is growing apace.
Upon the completion of the Quebec Bridge, and
the entrance of the National Transcontinental Rail-
way into the Lower Town, all the great railway
systems of Canada will have tapped the trade of
old Quebec. With the reascendancy of the city as
an ocean port, its marine importance is increasingly
established, and with the fine civic spirit existing
in the people Quebec is coming to her own. It I
is more than a cradle of national history, or the
birthplace of Canada's oldest city. Quebec to-
day ranks high among the commercial and in-
dustrial centres of the Dominion.
100
MONTREAL
CANADA'S COMMERCIAL METROPOLIS
I
CHAPTER VI
MONTREAL: CANADA'S COMMERCIAL METROPOLIS
A CENTURY after Jacques Gartier had claimed
Canada for the King of Erance, and thirty-four
years after Champlain had built the first house in
Quebec, another Erenchman, Maisonneuve, made
his way up the St. L!awrence to the Isle of
Ville-Marie. On May i8, 1642, surrounded by a
little company of less than half a hundred, who
were known as *' The Association of Montreal,"
Maisonneuve laid the foundations of a great city
by felling with his own hands the first tree, building
on the clearing the first altar, and offering up the
first prayers of thanksgiving.
Strangely prophetic were the words of the priest
at the forest service : " You are a grain of mustard-
seed that shall rise and grow till its branches
overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work
is the work of God." And yet had he foreseen
that the little colony of 1642 would grow in two
Jiundred and fifty years to a city of half a million,
I
Through the Heart of Canada
even his faith might have not stood the test. Could
he have seen in vision the transformation of the
forest-lined shores into a great ocean port, could
he have seen the mighty stream spanned by colossal
(bridges, could he have viewed the harnessed
wonders of steam and electricity — the old
seventeenth-century padre would have wondered
at it all.
Maisonneuve, like all his fellow-explorers, was
warned of the dangers that would beset him, not
the least being the presence of hostile red men,
** It is my duty to found a colony on this island
of Ville -Marie," replied the adventurous coloniser,
** and I would go if every tree were an Iroquois."
The intrepid leader soon had occasion to show his
courage. Only a few months elapsed before the
Indians laid an ambush for the little band of whites.
Maisonneuve, though greatly outnumbered, led his
force against the enemy, only to be left practically I
alone to face a horde of savages. Walking |
backwards as they pressed him hard, the plucky
Frenchman kept them at bay, and thus saved his
own life and the lives of his less courageous
followers .
This stirring incident early in his career in New
Erance is supposed to have taken place almost
104
Canada's Commercial Metropolis
on the spot where the parish church of Notre Dame
stands, and near the site of the fine monument
erected to the memory of the founder of Montreal,
where the bronze figure gazes upon the throngs
of a great centre of humanity.
One can readily understand the intense local
loyalty of the Montrealer of to-day as he surveys
his beautiful city from river, mount or tower.
Where, in any country, or on any continent, will
one see a duplicate of the panorama viewed from
the hill-top of Mount Royal? On the slopes and
levels to the south rests the grey old city, with
' its two nationalities and its sharply divided lines
of streets and wards. There is more than the
width of a ward between St. Denis Street on the
east and University Street on the west ; the English
Channel still separates them'.
What noble lines of tree -fronted homes come
within the range of vision, what a notable group
of educational buildings are included in the picture,
with stately McGill standing back on her campus
like an old-fashioned and aged parent, flanked by
newer fashioned and stylish children.
What a magnificent waterway is the St.
Iwrence, bearing the commerce of millions, and
)resenting millions in value I What a noble
105
Through the Heart of Canada
horizon line of mystic hill summits rise beyond
the far shore of the wide river, veiled in an earth
blue beneath the sky blue I Truly the centuries
have effected a marvellous transformation since the
far-off day when Cartier climbed the slopes and
christened the royal mount. The thrill that Cartier
and Champlain and Maisonneuve experienced as
each viewed the scene must have been akin to the
sensations of Father Hennepin when he first heard
the distant bass of Niagara's note and first cam^
in sight of the twin cataracts. Since those early
days of beginnings, Montreal
" Has grown in her strength like a northern queen,
'Neath her crown of light and her robe of snow,
And stands in her beauty fair, between
The royal mount and the river below."
Another period of the early life of Montreal
is epitomised in the Chiteau de Ramezay, facing
the City Hall, and bordering the Bonsecours
Market and the Nelson Monument. Thanks to the
Numismatic and Antiquarian Society of Montreal,
the Chateau has been saved from threatened
destruction by being converted into an historical
museum. The history connected with the Chateau,
during the two centuries of its existence, has been
of the most varied character. Like many of it
io6
I
^ Canada's Commercial Metropolis
occupants it can boast of a checkered career. It
was in 1703 that Claude de Ramezay, Sieur de
Lagesse, having been transferred from the
governorship of Three Rivers to that of Montreal,
erected the Chateau as it stands to-day on a parcel
of land, the deed of which dates from about the
time when Ville-Marie was founded. For two
decades the Governor and his family made their
then palatial residence a social as well as an official
centre.
From the de Ramezay family the old stone
stronghold passed into the possession of the great
French fur trading company — the Compagnie des
Indes — thus becoming the entrepot of the fur trade
of Canada. After the conquest of Canada, the
Chateau was bought by the Baron de Longueuil
and, in 1770, it was again made the official resi-
dence of the Governors under British rule. Sir
Guy Carleton was in occupation when the Conti-
nental army captured Montreal, making the old
building their headquarters for the winter.
Franklin, Chase, and Carroll were the American
Commissioners in charge, Franklin setting up a
printing-press in the spacious cellar -kitchen where
the power of the press was vainly used to woo
the inhabitants to the invaders' cause.
107
Through the Heart of Canada
After Montgomery's defeat at Quebec, the
British Governors— Haldimand, Metcalfe, Durham,
and the Earl of Elgin— were in turn the official
occupants of the Chateau. Erom 1 84 1 to 1 849 the
old pile was the headquarters of the Government
of Upper and Lower Canada under the Act of
Union, the Cabinet meetings of those eventful
days being held in the council-room of the Chateau.
With the removal of the seat of government to
Toronto and Quebec respectively, until the Con-
federation of the Provinces in 1867, the glory of
Montreal's Government House in large measure
departed, the old palace being thereafter put to
a succession of less important uses.
The Chateau now contains many valuable historic
relics and treasures. The old bell that hung in
Louisbourg Church shortly after the completion
of the fortifications in 1720 has an honoured place.
The inscription on the bell reads : ** Bazin m'a
fait." A pair of scales of 1682, used by the Jesuits
for weighing iron at the Three Rivers forges, speaks
of the long established iron industry in the country.
A hand-organ presented by George III. to the
Indian chief Tecumseh recalls England's diplo-
matic success in retaining the friendship of the
red men during the revolutionary period.
108 ^
^mM
1
Canada's Commercial Metropolis
The walls of the Chateau are hung with the
portraits of nearly one hundred of the early
French -Canadian explorers, governors and
missionaries, as well as the British commanders
and governors, while the series of prints of early
Canadian scenes are of inestimable value. No less
than eight thousand books, pamphlets, and manu-
scripts, hundreds of coins, and many ancient deeds
and other legal documents, not a few bearing the
signature of Napoleon, connect the present with
the past.
The cellar, with the spacious fireplace and ovens,
the cool wine-vaults, and the servants' quarters,
shows the massive structure of the strong founda-
tions and the stone partitions of castle-like thick-
ness, so constructed that the establishment might
be converted into a fortress, the windows still dis-
closing the loopholes and double bars ready for a
siege or attack.
Other historic spots in Montreal are marked by
marble tablets — such as the walls of the seminary
of St. Sulpice, a reminder of Dollard, the hero
of the Battle of the Ottawa ; and the site of Forti-
fication Lane, when the town huddled close to
the river. Another marks the site of ancient
Kochelaga, the Indian village of Cartier's day.
Through the Heart of Canada
the museum of the Chateau containing a collection
of Indian relics found on the same spot. Thus
at every turn, in the modern Montreal, its historic
and romantic past is brought to mind.
The Montreal of to-day has risen to the rank
of a great cosmopolitan centre. The population,
including the suburbs, is gradually reaching the
half-million mark, with a corresponding increase
in its trade and commerce, its shipping and its
manufactures. The city of Maisonneuve ranks not
only as Canada's largest centre of population, but
as third in size among the cities of the sister
Dominions, being exceeded only by Melbourne and
Sydney.
Montreal is, moreover, an important banking
centre, and the headquarters of the Bank of
Montreal. It leads all its sister cities in the amount
of its bank clearings, which in 1909 reached
$1,866,649,000, placing it high among the clear-
ing houses of America.
The extent of the manufacturing industry is
chiefly responsible for the satisfactory monetary
status of the city. According to the census of
1905, its manufactured products amounted to one
hundred and eighteen million dollars, an increase
of 40 per cent, in five years, representing an
no
Canada's Commercial Metropolis
invested capital of one hundred and twelve
millions. Busy hives of industry are found in
many sections of the city, while other large
manufacturing concerns have established them-
selves in the outskirts, bringing into existence
goodly sized towns peopled by their employees.
The great railway corporations also have extended
Iborks, employing thousands of men.
I Montreal's prosperity is still further accounted
or by the fact that nearly one -third of the trade
of the Dominion passes through its port. It out-
rivals New York as a grain -exporting port, and is
the chief centre of the export trade of the dairy
products of the continent.
Now that a thirty-foot channel has been com-
pleted, enabling the largest ocean vessels to reach
the water front, Montreal's marine importance is
being vastly enhanced. It is one of the great
ocean ports of the Atlantic seaboard, though nearly
a thousand miles from the ocean. Being 315
miles nearer Liverpool than New York, it has,
moreover, a day's advantage on a sailing schedule,
and with three transcontinental railroads at its
back as feeders, and a canal and river system
extending 1,400 miles inland and tapping the
Kde (Of the continent, it is prophesied that
Through the Heart of Canada
Montreal will yet become the foremost shipping
centre of America.
An extensive system of harbour improvements
is in process o^ construction, and, when finished,
there will be fourteen ocean berths and as many
double-decked steel concrete freight sheds, capable
of accommodating a vast amount of traffic. The
export shipments of 1909 included nearly thirty
million bushels of grain, besides several hundred
thousand head of live stock .
The city as a whole represents wealth of vast
extent, though its tax exemptions reach the large
sum of over sixty million dollars. But even more
valuable than statistics of trade or the fortunes of
its leading citizens, are the citizens themselves,
Public spirited they are to a degree, as evidenced
in their acceptance of public responsibilities. The
great educational and philanthropic edifices of
Montreal are monuments to their generosity and
large -mindedness .
The peculiar charm of Montreal is further found
in its environs. As the city has been described
as a happy combination of New York, Paris, and
St. Petersburg, with a dash of New Orleans giving
spice and flavour, so the surrounding villages and
country present features both English and Frenchj
112
Canada's Commercial Metropolis
in their nature. There is no other large city in
America where a brief journey will include so
many scenes of varied natural beauty, or places of
historic interest, or where a shcH't railway trip will
take one to more picturesque solitudes of mountain
and forest, of placid lake and unfettered stream.
At the western gate of the city are the Lachine
Rapids, the river road possessing many reminders,
in old stone houses and windmills, of early French
occupation, and of La Salle and many another
worthy of the Old Regime. The steamer runs
through the rapids, under the great Lachine and
Victoria Bridges, and provides as thrilling an hour's
experience as one could wish. Starting in Lake
St. Louis, on which have taken place some pf
America's greatest aquatic contests, the boat soon
feels the focusing of the current toward the white-
capped waters, and the keen-eyed Indian pilot
steers the craft into and through the swirling
stream, makes sharp turns to avoid dangerous
reefs and rocks, and finally succeeds in navigating
the difficult channel in perfect safety.
On the southern shore is passed the Indian
village of Caughnawaga, where dwells the remnant
of a once-powerful tribe, just as, on the outskirts
of Quebec, the village of Indian Lorette is popu-
113 H
Through the Heart of Canada
lated by the few hundred Hurons whose forefathers
once held sway over the vast northern region of
the upper Ottawa River and Lake Huron.
South and north of Montreal lie other inviting
regions. Southward, along the course of the
Richelieu River, Beloeil Mountain comes into view,
rising dome -like from a plain of surpassing fertility.
Northward lie the Laurentian Hills, holding in
their recesses lakes beyond number, with scores
of charming rural resorts, like Ste. Agathe des
Monts, where the city dweller may live away the
happy summer days. Montreal is, indeed, set in;
a garden of beauty, where Nature exhibits all her
charms.
114
ONTARIO
THE CENTRAL PROVINCE OF THE
DOMINION
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CHAPTER VII
ONTARIO : THE CENTRAL PROVINCE OF THE
DOMINION
As there are two Canadas in one, in East and West,
so there are two Ontarios, Old and New. The Old
relates to the settled parts along the frontiers and
shores of the great inland lakes of Ontario, Erie,
and Huron ; the New to the vast hinterland
stretching to James Bay and the boundaries pf
Manitoba.
Yet the age of Old Ontario is, as has already,
been pointed out, relative only. Scarcely more
than a century has elapsed since the first stream
of settlers entered Upper Canada, as the pro-
vince was first known, crossing the St. Lawrence
and the Niagara Rivers on their way. Among the
inflow were pathfinders from the British Isles,
United Empire Loyalists from the seceding colonies
of America, Dutch, and Germans from the heart
lof Europe or the wilds of Pennsylvania, and many
another racial type.
117
Through the Heart of Canada
In course of time settlements were planted and
cities born, highways were cut through the woods,
and the forest itself felled for the use of man*.
In course of further time the foundations of Ottawa
and Kingston, of Toronto, Hamilton, London, and
other centres of population were laid. The growth
of the province during this span of a century may
be measured by these thriving cities of to-day
Toronto has long since emerged from its infancy
stage as " Muddy York '* into the fine capital of a
rich province. The comparative handful of four
thousand who constituted its population at its in
corporation as a city in 1834 have grown to three
hundred and fifty thousand, while the industri
expansion of the city has been in proportion. Wi
bank clearings in 1909 of a million and a ha
dollars, with an assessment roll of three hundrec
and nine millions, with building operations aggre
gating eighteen million dollars annually, and witl
customs receipts of ten million dollars a yea;
Toronto's commercial importance is beyon
dispute.
It is, moreover, a city of fine schools ai
churches — 78 of the former and 254 of the latte
Eorty-one parks and public gardens comprise
total area of 1,640 acres, and 407 miles of stree
118
The Central Province of the Dominion
make a splendid system of thoroughfares, many
of which are lined with handsome private resi-
dences. Ontario's capital is emphatically a city
of homes, a city of substantial prosperity.
The city ranks high industrially, with seven
hundred manufactures possessing a capital of
seventy-five million dollars. Seventy thousand
operatives are employed, their annual wage bill
thirty millions, according to the census of 1908.
Ottawa is correspondingly prosperous, while
possessing the advantage of being the capital of
Canada. The population has passed the eighty
thousand mark, despite the reverses of a succession
of disastrous fires that might well have seriously
set back its development. As in its sister cities,
a commendable civic pride marks the citizens of
the federal capital. The formation of a govern-
ment-aided Civic Improvement Commission since
the last conflagration is producing excellent results
in an improved system of streets, parks, and boule-
vards which, aided by the fine natural advantages
of the city, is making of it the Washington of the
North.
The dominating architectural feature of Ottawa
is the Parliament Buildings, commandingly situated
on a high bluff overlooking the Ottawa River. The
119
Through the Heart of Canada
beautiful polygonal library, with a noble dome sup-
ported by graceful flying buttresses, adds to the
pictures queness of the group of edifices. Anthony
Trollope's verdict that he " knew no site for such
a set of buildings so happy as regards both beauty
and grandeur " is one in which all will concur.
No Dominion of the Empire has housed its Parlia-
ment so sumptuously.
On the outskirts of the city is Rideau Hall,
the official residence of the Governor -General of
Canada. It is a large, rambling, but comfort-
able edifice, surrounded by well-kept grounds and
overlooking a superb stretch of the Lower Ottawa,
with the Laurentian Hills to the north forming a
striking background. An excellent trolley system
connects the city and it? environs, many of which
are charming summer resorts.
Several parks afford breathing spaces for the
capital. The city is also the gateway for a wide
area of attractive country on the Ottawa, Rideau,
and Gatineau Rivers, rich in scenic beauty as well
as soil productiveness and natural resources. From
the northern woods come immense rafts of timber
to feed the enormous mills that lie between Ottawa
and Hull. Their annual production in lumber has
reached the large total of two hundred and seventy-
120
The Central Province of the Dominion
five million feet, at a value of four million dollars.
Another natural asset of incalculable value is found
in the water powers, estimated at a million horse-
power within a radius of fifty miles of the city,
and of this only a small proportion is as yet utilised.
There is, indeed, no reason to doubt the optimistic
belief of the citizens of the capital in its still more
prosperous future.
Kingston — Ottawa's nearest neighbour — is well-
named the Limestone City, the grey white walls
of its public buildings giving a pleasing air of
solidity to the old historic centre. For historic
Kingston is, with two outstanding dates in her local
calendar — July 12th and August 27th — represent-
ing two commanding events in Canadian history :
the coming of the Frenchman in his territorial
conquest, and the coming of the Englishman to
supplant him as the ruler of North America. The
one recalls the colonial empire dream of Old
France, the other speaks of the colonial empire
reality of Old England.
The July date takes one back to 1673, when the
beginnings were made of a settlement that was
later to take form as Fort Frontenac, and later
still as Kingston. The first of many marine pro-
cessions made its way, in that year of long ago,
121
Through the Heart of Canada
from Lachine towards the then almost unknown
west. Threading the maze of a thousand isles,
a fleet of one hundred and twenty canoes silently
stole shoreward, led by two brilliantly decorated
barges, bearing aloft a potent symbol of sovereignty
in the fleur-de-lis of Erance. Prominent on the
deck of the foremost craft stood Count de Eron-
tenac, the representative of the French monarch,
little less imposing in his grandeur and state than
his most august sovereign.
Erom behind the forest sentinels on the shore
eager eyes peered in wonder and alarm : Iroquois
eyes, wonderfully keen of vision, though even they
failed to see all the portent of the event. They
witnessed the martial manoeuvres of the canoes
formed in flanking lines and squadrons, with
advance and rear guards. The Erench leader, with
his miniature army, disembarked in a sheltered cove
of the Cataraqui River. That night the sound
of the lapping waves fell upon the ears of the
Erench sentries as they walked their beats, and for
over two hundred and thirty years after, with but
two short interruptions, the tread of the guard
answered back the sound of the waters, for the
landing was the actual beginning of permanent
settlement upon the site of Kingston.
122
The Central Province of the Dominion
Yet another historic scene was witnessed on the
night of Frontenac's arrival. La Salle had gathered
a party of two hundred chiefs of the Five Nations
— the warriors of the red race — who met in conclave
the Governor of New France, forming the first
rf innumerable camp-fires around which weighty
latters of war and peace were discussed. The
Indians met on the same spot at a later date, when
>enonville, one of Frontenac's successors, invited
le chiefs to a feast. But when their host
•eacherously made ninety of them prisoners,
ending them as such to Europe, vengeance was
jmanded by their tribes. It came two years
iter in the Lachine massacre, when the whites
rere taken completely by surprise by the Iroquois.
a spirit of well-calculated irony the raiding red
len, as they paddled away after the massacre, gave
dnety fiendish yells — one for each of the ninety
captives who were to be tortured and killed at
their pleasure. Thus the raid of Denonville was
matched man for man ; thus the massacre of
Eachine wiped out the old scores at Cataraqui.
The first chapter in the history of Kingston was
closed on August 27, 1758, when Bradstreet, the
New England militia officer, captured Eott Fron-
tenac from the French garrison. The wilderness
123
Through the Heart of Canada
again spread over the site of the destroyed fortress.
But the records of the past on the Cataraqui were
written too large to be thus obliterated, even by,
Nature. In the language of a local historian,
" Neither wilderness nor foe could obliterate the
memory of a fortress that Frontenac had planned,
that La Salle had built and owned, that Denonville
had wrecked, that Montcalm had held, that Shirley
had threatened, that Bradstreet had taken, destroy-
ing at the same time the naval supremacy of the
French on Lake Ontario."
We pass to a June day of 1784 when the van-
guard of the United Empire Loyalists landed on
the shores of Kingston, as the town was called
after the British Conquest.
In 1792 John Graves Simcoe arrived at
Kingston from England, charged with the
organisation of a new government for Upper
Canada, the first legislative council of which was
convened in the Limestone City. The same city
played an important part in the war of 18 12-14
as military and naval headquarters, with a dock-
yard employing thousands of men, and a shipyard
where a fleet of war vessels was built. The ruined
walls of Fort 'Henry, the martello towers, and the
modern Tete du Pont barracks, as well as the Royal
124
The Central Province of the Dominion
ilitary College, combine to give a martial aspect
Kingston in keeping with its romantic and
rilling history.
The St. Lawrence River and its gateway city of
ingston must share the honour of historic fame
ith the Niagara, for along its banks the three -
entury history of Canada is epitomised. The
ree epochs of its national life are recalled in the
uccessive reigns of the red man, the Frenchman,
e Englishman.
The Niagara peninsula was the recognised
erritory of the Neutral Indian, and on the site
f Niagara town one stood the capital of the tawny
rest folk who were condemned to be crushed
tween the upper and nether millstones of
roquois and Huron. These forgotten people
f the early Niagara have disappeajred from the
orld as absolutely as the Hittites of old from
eir Syrian stronghold. Scarce a trace of the
or Neutral is observable, beyond an occasional
rave -mound.
Another reminder of the red tribes of a later
te than the Neutrals is seen in the site of the
old council-house that long: stood on Niagara
Common. The cellar is all that is left to suggest
fe stirring scenes there enacted in the former days
125
Through the Heart of Canada
when the dusky sons of the open air from thirty
different tribes foregathered in parliament, and
drove hard bargains with the representatives of
France or England.
Following the Neutral came the Frenchmen,
came La Salle and Hennepin, and many another
distinguished bearer of the fleur-de-lis. Follow-
ing the transitory tepee came the stockade of La
Salle at the mouth of the river, and later, in 1757,
the stone castle of Fort Niagara which to-day is
the oldest surviving structure on either bank of
the Niagara. The rule of the Frenchman is also
brought to mind in the lines of hawthorns that
fringe Niagara Common, the supposition being that
they were planted by French officers during their
eighty years' occupation of the district.
Echoes, too, of the American Revolution are
heard along the Canadian Niagara. Standing
solitary on the Common are the barracks and
blockhouses of Butler's Rangers, tinaie -rusted,
weather-painted. One or more of the deserted old
wooden piles probably dates from revolutionary
times. Farther afield, hidden under a clump of
trees, is Butler's graveyard, with its tottering head-
stones and decrepit palings— a lonely God's acre,
forgotten and neglected; and, on the walls of St.
126
The Central Province of the Dominion
Mark's Church, in Niagara, may be seen a tablet
to the memory of John Butler, commemorating his
services for England in the Revolution.
The struggle ended between mother and
daughter, and separation of the Thirteen Colonies
for good or ill effected in 1775, other scenes were
then witnessed in and aroimd historic Niagara.
Processions there were of United Empire Loyalists,
who, for conscience sake, preferred to live under
the protection of King George III. in his Canadian
colony rather than under the paternal care of
President Washington. The children of these early
immigrants form to-day the sturdy yeomanry of the
Niagara part of Canada.
English rule along the western shore of the
Niagara has made the most definite impress upon
the country. As the stormy days of 1775 drew
near on the calendar of time. Sir William Johnson,
on behalf of England, played the game of diplo-
macy for the friendship of the red men at the
Niagara council -fires as they parleyed for power
and presents. Then it was that Butler and his
band wrote the chapters of their guerilla warfare ;
then it was that the Niagara shore became a great
trade route.
In 1792 a fleet of sailing-vessels approached
127
■
Through the Heart of Canada
the quiet hamlet, landing John Graves Simcoe, the
soldier -statesman sent out by a beneficent power
across the Atlantic to start the machinery of a new
province in Upper Canada. Incident thereto the
first legislature of the new-bom state was con-
vened. Niagara is, therefore, not only one of the
mother-towns of Canada, but of Ontario as its
first capital.
The inauiguration of the new order of things
in 1792 was a memorable and a peaceful event,
but, later, the harsh note of war was heard again,
and again, and yet again.
The war alarln' was heard along the Niagara
in the early morn of October 1 3, 1 8 1 3 . A cannon-
shot was fired from a Lewiston fort ; an officer in j
Niagara's Eort George, Sir Isaac Brock, hearing f
its ominous echoes, galloped to the battlefield of
Queenston Heights— galloped to his death. He is
to the Canadians the hero of Queenston Heights,
because he there faced an invading foe with ja
handful of men, and because he there bravely gave
his life for king and country in the first real testj
of supremacy 'between the United States an<
England since 1775. Two monuments have beei
raised on the Queenston escarpment to the memor]
of Brock. The first stood from 1824 till 1840^
128
The Central Province of the Dominion
when a miscreant destroyed it by the use of gun-
powder ; the second took its place and stands
to-day in all its noble dignity, overlooking the fair
scene of farm' and river and distant lake.
Other reminders of Brock mark the Niagara
district : in the ruins of Fort George, and the
stately sycamore -tree within the bastion near where
his body lay from 1813 to 1824 ; in old St. Mark's
Church ; in the old stone house at Queenston where
j his body was hidden during the battle ; in the
trenches of the dead half-way down the hill, and
in the Brock Memorial Church, with its fine stained-
glass windows, decorated with the armorial bear-
ings of the Brock family.
\ From Queenston to Lundy's Lane is a natural
step in our historic pilgrimage. The battle of
Lundy's Lane marked the end of the conflict of
18 1 2-14. One may stand on the ridge where the
full fury of the battle raged during the hours
of a July night of 18 14, and where the English
battery was captured and recaptured. All is quiet
now— the quiet of a field full of dead men, and
the names of some of them — friend and foe — may,
yet be read on the tottering headstones. In the
crypt of the monument erected by the Canadian
fGovernment are some scattered human bones
129 I
Through the Heart of Canada
found on the battlefield, and specimens of shot
and shell as grim memorials of the unfortunate
strife between Anglo-Sax^on brothers.
Journeying southward, traces of earthworks still
exist near Chippewa, and at Fort Erie the
crumbling walls of the stronghold of a century
ago tell their own tale of the roar of battle and
the duel of death.
The western bank of the international river
is rich in its historic suggestiveness, covering all
the outstanding periods of the dominion — the
vanished day of the Indian, the end of the French
regime, the British conquest — and later, the war
of 1 8 1 2, the uprising of 1837, and the Fenian Raid
of 1866. The story of each period is told in
battlefield and fortress, in monument and cairn,
and in decaying structures. Every mile of the
Canadian Niagara is a mile of historic association,
and in the heart of it the Falls of Niagara
present to the world one of Nature's greatest
marvels .
The entire Niagara district, reaching from the
river to the city of Hamilton on the west,
is one of the many gardens in a land of
gardens. It is not only a garden but a granary,
where wide acres of the finest lands produce the
130
The Central Province of the Dominion
best of grain, with miles of peach and apple
orchards, and leagues of luxuriant vineyards.
The sight of a prosperous farm and a comfort-
able homestead such as abound in the land
invariably suggest the pioneer who, a hundred
years ago, travelled in his canvas -covered wagon
over primitive roads and through forest depths to
found a home in ** the bush," as the untilled areas
were called. Homespun in character as in clothes,
the Canadian settler of 1800 was a man for a*
that ; he who built the log-ribbed home, and blazed
the forest trail, and graded the first highways ;
he who, while building a home, built concurrently
a church and a school. There were giants in
those birth days of a province, the days when the
sickle was used to lay low the grain, and the flail
threshed it.
One goes to the graves of these path-finders
of empire as a pilgrim to a shrine. Their names
can with difficulty be made out on the moss-
coated headstones, but their lives have produced
results that endure ; they have left memories of
high character and fidelity to duty worth more than
marble -cut jepitaphs.
Thus they toiled ; here a furrow, there a furrow ;
here a trail, a path, there a king's highway ; here
131
Through the Heart of Canada
a cabin, there a statelier home of later days ; here
a hamlet, there a town, a city. What a tale could
be written if all the details were to be filled in —
of the hardships bravely endured, of the oft-time
sufferings, of the patient endurance of these pilgrim
fathers of Canada's early national life.
Let us take a peep in imagination into a typical
backwoods cabin. Encircling it, and close at hand,
is the silent forest — silent even though thickly
populated with bird and animal life. The clear-
ing opens on the winding road, miles remote from
the nearest neighbour.
Inside the rude but warm and comfortable
structure, is revealed a truly homely scene : the
deep and spacious fireplace, piled high with logs
that will burn for days, the broad fireplace shelf
lined with old-fashioned heirlooms in crockery, or
with the brass candlesticks shining mirror -like
under the light of the tallow candles. The long-
armed cranes, and the big pots and kettles made
to swing there have their place in the rude
interior.
In the evening time the fireplace circle makes
a picture of peace and contentment . All are busy ;
grandmother knitting, mother darning, the girls
spinning, father and the big boys whittling! out
132
The Central Province of the Dominion
some tool or household utensil ; for there were
no idle hours in the pioneer days, else the men
of to-day would not have entered into such a goodly
heritage.
We have travelled a long distance since a cen-
tury ago. The farmer of to-day, if within the
range of a centre of population, has many of the
modern comforts of life. A trolley line may pass
by his door, connecting him with the outside world.
The daily paper is delivered at his home, the latest
implements and machinery make lighter the labour
of the fields and the harvesting of the grain and
the way of life is made correspondingly easier.
The smallest of settlements have developed into
the most prosperous of cities. The little centre
of population at the head of Lake Ontario has
grown into the fine city of Hamilton — one of the
thriving industrial and commercial cities of Canada,
occupying a strategic position in a garden land
and on the highway of traffic through Western
Ontario and between Detroit and Buffalo as the
gateway cities of the American west and east.
Where Brant's ford marked an Indian crossing
on the Grand River, the city of Brantford is pic-
turesquely situated on its banks. Within a few
miles' distance, stands one of the oldest Protestant
133
Through the Heart of Canada
churches erected in the province — the Mohawk
Church, dating from 1785, containing a communion
service presented by Queen Anne and a bell by
King George III. Under the shadow of the church
walls reposes the dust of the famous Indian chief
Thayendenagai — Joseph Brant — who rendered such
invaluable assistance to English occupation and
conquest of America during the long struggle pre-
ceding the American Revolution.
A fertile stretch of country borders the shores
of Lake Erie. Midway along its banks lies the
Talbot Settlement, comprising the tier of town-
ships granted to Thomas Talbot, an Irishman of
high birth, who emigrated to Canada nearly a
century ago and who made for himself a name
as an eccentric and arbitrary landowner. Ontario
can show no finer farms than those founded by
the Talbot pioneers . Contiguous thereto is the fc
pretty city of St. Thomas, one of the most impor-
tant railway centres of the country, and but a |i
few miles away the larger city of London borders i
the Thames, with many of the street and place
names reminiscent of Old Uondon.
What may be termed the heart of Ontario in-
cludes the rich counties of Wellington, Perth,
Bruce, and Huron, where the rural conditions indi-
134
The Central Province of the Dominion
cate a high degree of prosperity and where
agriculture is pursued with scientific skill. It is
true, indeed, of practically all of Old Ontario that
it is a garden country, sustaining an educated,
prosperous, and contented population, and repre-
senting Canadian life and civilisation at its best.
IS*;
NEW ONTARIO
ITS SCENERY AND RESOURCES
CHAPTER VIII
NEW ONTARIO : ITS SCENERY AND RESOURCES
Nature has been truly prodigal in her good
gifts to Canada as a land of scenery and resources.
The Dominion is one vast playground. From the
picturesque coves of Cape Breton, from the sylvan
valleys of Nova Scotia, from the game -haunted
forests of northern New Brunswick and the sweep-
ing wilds of Quebec, to the northland stretches
of Ontario, the billowy plains of the West, and
the snow-crowned peaks of British Columbia, each
province of Canada is a land of scenic beauty, each
has its own charm of sea or lake or clear -watered
river, of hill or mountain, of rock-ribbed coast
or smiling fertile valley.
Ontario is especially rich in her heritage of
natural scenery. Between the island-fringed shores
of Lake Huron and Lake Superior and the upper
waters of the picturesque Ottawa River lies a vast
area of territory that Rudyard Kipling has described
as " the land of little lakes." So extensive and
139
Through the Heart of Canada
intricate is the network of waterways that probably
no one man has ever more than touched a corner
or penetrated a part of its trails. Even the roving
Indian pf a former day — Algonquin or Huron —
perchance knew little of the wonderland all about
him except alongi the few watery pathways over
which his bark canoe glided like a spirit of silence.
To-day it is a land awaiting the invasion of the
twentieth -century white man, awaiting him with
health for his ills, with rest for his throbbing nerves,
with youth for age. It is, in a word, a great open-
air sanatorium, a paradise of lake and stream, of
forest and island, where, far from the haunts of
men, one may
" and in the heart of things
And the woods are round him heaped and dim."
It is also a land of natural wealth whose store-
houses of minerals are being tapped, whose timber
is one of the rich assets of a rich province, and;
where deep alluvial soil is ready to yield up its
bounty for the feeding of men.
The entrance to this wonderland of Northern
or New Ontario leads to the Muskoka Lake region.
A hundred miles north of Toronto lie noble sheetJ
of water, chief of which is Lake Muskoka itself.
140
New Ontario : its Scenery and Resources
[he transition on a hot summer day from the
stifling city to the ozone-filled air of the North
is more than worth all the toil of the journey.
As the vessel winds in and out of a maze of islands
and channels, seeming to involve a constant boxing
of the compass, scenes of delight meet the view.
The trio of lakes — Muskoka, Rosseau, and Joseph
—the *' Three Graces " as they are called — alone
constitute a summer route of over fifty miles of
surpassing charm. Muskoka is connected with
Rosseau by the dark and narrow Indian River, and
all three lakes are lined Hvith the cottages of
fortunate summer residents. Islands abound, from
a tiny one-tree speck of earth or a bare cone of
rock, to a thousand-acre isle stranded mid-lake in
beautiful Rosseau. Each turn of steamer or canoe
reveals a new vista ; no two views are alike, for the
perspective changes with every dip of the paddle.
The Muskoka Lake district is not, however, con-
fined to the area described. The Highlands of
Ontario comprise no less than eight hundred
waterways, including lakes, rivers, and smaller
streams, once forming the happy hunting-grounds
of the ill-fated Huron Indians, who roamed through
s| the primeval forests and over lands not even yet
ajdeared and tilled. Hundreds of the islands retain
IB 141
Through the Heart of Canada
their original wildness, and nature is undisturbed
in many a corner of Muskoka-land where the deer
follows the trail, where the varied bird-life finds
a joyous home, and where the fish in the cool
waters have never seen the spectre of a human
angler. Many a tributary sweeps along in its
solitude towards the larger river and the broader
sea, the brown waters singing a song set to a
tune beyond human capture. Or at times the
stream appears to loiter on the way, resting under
spreading branches, lapping the bases of granite
banks, or resting so motionless as to reflect every
twig and leaf.
The seeker for summer rest may enter this
delectable land through the inner channel of
Georgian Bay, where the Creator with lavish
hand has scattered thirty thousand islands over its
clear, deep waters. A series of apparently land-
locked channels afford a course for the steamer to
Parry Sound and the more northern shore of Lake
Huron. This route will also lead to the unique
Maganetewan River, its iron-impregnated waters
winding in such tortuous fashion that the little
craft is equipped with both propeller and paddle-
wheels. The forest giants overarch the narrower
stretches, where one may sail under a roof of
142
New Ontario : its Scenery and Resources
greenery and between banks so clothed with
vegetation as to resemble a Florida everglade.
Due eastward lies another land of beauty in
the Algonquin National Park, where an area of over
a million acres of the Crown domain has been set
apart in perpetuity as a forest, game, and fish
preserve. Already it has proved a sanctuary for
wild life, where moose, deer, and beaver are rapidly
increasing under the protection of the Government.
It is one of the most remarkable regions of lake
and stream, of primeval forest and rolling hills to
be found in Canada. Over one thousand lakes
are included within its bounds, reminders of
Lomond and Katrine, of Windermere and Killar-
ney, in their setting of tree and rock and mossy
bank. This extensive retreat is not only, main-
taining the north-eastern areas of Ontario as a
game preserve, but is conserving the great water
sources of an extensive region to the southward.
Temagami is one of the more recently discovered
playgrounds of Ontario. He who reaches it by
the Government railway from North Bay must
needs utilise the North-East Arm as the gateway.
The first glimpse of the Lake-of-a-thousand-isles
is one that stirs the blood and sets the nerves
a-tingling with the joy of life. After an hour's
143
Through the Heart of Canada
sail, the sight of the main basin of Temagami
provides another sensation — that of being in a,
corner of the world with elbow-room to spare,
True it is, for Temagami is a body of water with
a shore -line of thousands of miles and with longi
outstretched arms in every direction inviting ex-
ploration .
Here one may see the deer-runs, where man)/
an antlered beauty has made its way to the Lake
of Deep Waters (as the word ** Temagami "
means) to dine off succulent water-lily roots. Ci
the sound of oar or paddle may startle a beaver,
busy with its dam-building, or a muskrat or othei
waterside dweller, while a stray eagle may sail high
overhead or a lonely loon may shriek its maniac
cry. Eew signs of human life are as yet observ-
able in Temagami's wilds, beyond the outstanding
whiteness of a camper's tented home, sheltered in a
cosy cove and backed by a line of protecting pines.
'He who is privileged to penetrate this great
northland of a province that is in itself as large
as many a European state, will not only revel
in its land- and water-scapes, but will realise its
inexhaustible riches of resource. Everywhere the
lumberman is at work. The timber industry of
Ontario represents millions in capital invested,
144
New Ontario : its Scenery and Resources
giving employment to thousands. The rivers are
so many highways for the transportation of the
logs to the sawmills. Such a stream is the Ottawa.
For half a century its bordering forests have un-
stintedly yielded up their wealth and are still giving
their stalwart giants of pine for the needs of man.
The Ottawa may be taken as typical of a hundred
other tree-lined streams in New Ontario, and a
glimpse of the timber industry along its banks will
be suggestive of all the others. There one meets
the lumber-jack, as the hardy toiler among the
trees is known. iBound together in rafts or cribs,
the logs are sent on their millward journey. Many
a time have rapids to be negotiated, when the
strength of the raft is tested as well as the steer-
ing abilities of the men at the oars. Such
a journey is an experience long to be remembered.
Tied to the steep river-bank is the crib, built of
fifteen square timbers lashed together. Built
thereon is a rude cabin, with its hard plank
bunkers for the housing of the crew. Ahead lie
the Long Sault Rapids of the Ottawa — seven
tumbling masses of rock-churned waters, through
which it would seem impossible to guide any man-
built craft. The pilot shouts the command to cast
off the ropes. Six brawny men are stationed at
Through the Heart of Canada
the six long sweep oars, three fore, three aft.
Slowly at first the unwieldy mass clears the shore
until it is caught by the current that swings it
toward midstream and the first of the cascades.
Sheer ahead are the teeth of the ridge of waters,
gleaming wicked but beautiful in the sunlight.
Farther recedes the shore, nearer come the foam-
ing waves, faster sweep the tawny waters in their,
impetuous rush. Every man of the crew is keenlyj
alert with eyes a -glitter and muscles tense. Joe,
the dark-skinned Erench Canadian, repeats thej
orders of the boss. For a moment it seems as il
crib and cabin were climbing up-hill, preparatory to
the downward plunge. Huge waves dash against
the stout timbers and surge up through the inter-
stices, until the floor of the raft is deluged and
the long rubber boots of the men prove their value.
Although rudderless and keelless and without regu-
lation bow or stern, the crib heaves in true marine
fashion as it takes the plunge into a mad swirl
of rock-torn cross currents. On the right is an
ugly mass of rocks, piled high with stranded logs ;
to the left is a dreaded eddy, making a veritable
whirlpool in which hundreds of individual logs are
spinning in circles before being shot down the
natural chute. One feels the thrill of the plunging
X46
New Ontario : its Scenery and Resources
log ship beneath him. There is the joy of swift
movement, the nearness of the galloping waters
eager to engulf, the pulsating heart of nature and
the electric current of her power.
Then it is all over I Behind are the conquered
rapids, ahead a restful bay, where the river catches
[ its breath for another series of leaps in the voyage
of the log from the forest to the mills that line
the great timber stream within sight of the spires
of Ottawa city.
If the echo of the axe and the ring of the saw
are heard in this land of Ontario, so are the sounds
of the miner's pick and drill. The two place-names
that epitomise the stored mineral richness of the
province are Cobalt and Sudbury. The former
lies in the north-eastern part of the province,
where, within a comparatively small area, there were
discovered in 1903 the silver veins that show it to
be one of the richest mineralised districts in the
world. Already, in the few years that have
elapsed, over thirty million dollars' worth of silver
has been produced. Already the boundaries of
the silver -bearing veins are being extended, and
evidences are increasing that the riches of this
newest camp in the world's mining realms are far
beyond what was at first estimated.
147
Through the Heart of Canada
Sudbury is to the nickel industry what Cobalt
is to the silver industry, Sudbury, from whose
nickel mines come 57 per cent, of the
world's output, fifty million dollars' worth having
been mined since its discovery in 1882. But
Cobalt and Sudbury pnly speak for two districts.
The total mineral production of the province
reached in 1909 nearly thirty million dollars'
worth of the eighty-seven millions constituting the
value of the total mineral products of Canada.
Not only is the more unsettled portion of Ontario
rich in timber, minerals, and fisheries, but its agri-
cultural possibilities are assuming unexpected pro-
portions. Rich areas of soil and extensive arable
belts are to be found in every part of New Ontario
In the north-eastern section, a sixteen -million acre
clay belt is tapped by the Temiscaming and
Northern Ontario Railway and the National Trans-
continental Line, to which pioneer settlers arei
already making their way. All through the great
northern districts of Nipissing, Algoma, Thundei
Bay and Rainy River large tracts of fertile lands
are yet in the Crown. These are to be had atl
prices averaging only fifty cents per acre, whilej
the homesteading conditions are made easy foi
bona -fide settlers, based upon the clearing ol
148
New Ontario : its Scenery and Resources
a limited acreage each year for five years, and
actual occupation during six months of each year.
Not a few of the successful settlers are English
farmers who have exchanged a small rented farm
in the Motherland for a hundred and sixty acre
lot in this Britain beyond the sea. When it
is recalled that Ontario produces nearly one -half
of all Canada's grain, one is impressed anew with
the agricultural importance of the province. The
gradual opening up of new townships in the more
remote parts will soon materially increase the total
yield.
A glimpse of a pioneer settlement will indicate
the process of homesteading that is going on all
through New Ontario. A typical north-country
stream is the Blanche, or White River, flowing
into Lake Temiscaming. Sailing over the
navigable portion of the stream in a little craft
of the tug family, one may view from its circum-
I scribed deck the evolution of the primeval country,
in its virgin state of nature, to its cultivation and
subjugation by man. Here a pioneer is making
his first clearing and felling the first score of trees .
Most of the timber is of a comparatively small
size, for forest fires have destroyed the larger trees,
thus facilitating the work of clearing. Yonder the
149
Through the Heart of Canada
original clearing has given place to a ten-acre
field, bearing every evidence of its fertility in the
luxuriant growth of grass and vegetables. At one
point the settler's home is primitive enough, while
a sod-roofed cabin serves as bam and stable for
horses or oxen. At another point a pioneer iof
longer standing has built his family a pretentious
two -storey frame structure, with pathetic hints at
architectural frills in home-made gables and
verandahs .
For many a stretch the second growth of soft
woods make a modest riverside forest, unbroken
by the present generation of settlers, save wher
cordwood, pulpwood and ties have been cut,
good local market existing for all such products
Succeeding the bush comes a single straggling line
of cedars or poplars, through which extends a farm
of such relative size as to mark its owner as a man
of wealth.
So one may steam through the yellow waters of
the swift current, the frequent windings revealing
charming vistas. Evidences of spring floods are
observable at many points, having submerged or
stranded trees that sometimes block the path of the
steamer. The Government has a unique dredge
at work extracting the obstructions from the river.
150
i
New Ontario : its Scenery and Resources
A huge clay landslide down the eastern bank has
thrust a tongue of grey-yellow earth half-way
across the channel, forming yet another obstruction
to navigation.
Canadian, English, and Irish settlers pre-
dominate along the Blanche, with an occasional
French Canadian. All the Government free-
grant land thereabouts is taken up, and a
goodly number of settlers are, in performing the
necessary Government duties as to clearing, laying
the foundation for their own prosperity. One such
has a hundred and fifty acres so well cleared of
stumps as to be able to use an up-to-date binder,
while many utilise mowing and other machines.
The soil is clay, with a surface of black vegetable
mould — rich in phosphoric acid and potash, and
with a subsoil equally rich in nitrogen. Such a
soil may be cropped for a succession of years before
f its productivity will be materially lessened. The
land is easily worked, being almost entirely free
from rocks or stones. The river-banks sustain this
character all the way to the village of Tomstown
and beyond. Saw and grist mills line the shore
i convenient points, and numerous little settle -
ents further indicate nation -making.
Farther west lie other large areas. Travellers
«5x
Through the Heart of Canada
by rail from eastern to western Canada find them-
selves being rushed along the rugged and rocky
north shore of Lake Superior for hundreds of
miles, from Heron Bay to Port Arthur. At first
glance one would think the stretch of country as
destitute of natural resources as it is sparsely
peopled. Wide areas reveal the sad picture of
fire -destroyed timber, the charred trunks and life-
less 'branches deepening the note of desolation ;
other regions are marked by boulder-strewn land
and gigantic outcroppings of granite, with charm-
ing lakes and inlets giving a welcome note to the
landscape. But when the coast -line of the great
inland sea is reached — a sea wide enough to
swallow up two Switzerlands and yet have rooni
to spare — increasing evidences of human occupa-
tion occur in the quaint little fishing-hamlets that
nestle in their protected coves. Protected they
need to be, as Superior has an evil reputation for
storms. Year by year it exacts its human toll
among the toilers of the deep.
Many of the fishery villages have their silver
strand, with scores of boats beached thereon, if
they are not tossing on the lake gathering in the
sea harvest. Stretching aimlessly from the shore
are the whitewashed cottages of the fisherfolk, for,
15^
New Ontario : its Scenery and Resources
like the French -Canadian habitant, they dearly love
a fresh coat of paint on their unpretentious
homes. More dignified are the fish warehouses,
glorying in two stories and possibly a flagpole,
and up and down the unpaved highway pass the
worthy citizens who are helping to build up
Canada's great fishery industry.
Virile and hardy are the fishermen of Superior.
Many nationalities are represented among them,
numerous French names appearing among those
licensed by the Provincial Government to use nets.
Poles, Finns, and other foreigners have also found
their way to these Canadian fishing-grounds, making
a cosmopolitan community in such a village as
Jackfish. Jackfish is appropriately named, for the
captured beauties of the deep lie in glittering heaps
on the wharves, where they are dexterously
dressed. Then, packed in ice, they are hurried
to the wholesale dealers in American cities.
Farther along the shore are the rude reels on which
the nets are dried. Two kinds of nets are used
I -pound nets, for the inshore fishing, so called
because they make a trap, or pound, into which
he fish find it easy to enter, but from which
iscape is impossible ; the gill nets are those used
arther out to sea.
Through the Heart of Canada
Dangers frequently threaten these hard-working
labourers. When a heavy surf is running along the
coast, as it so often does, the seamanship of both
sailors and boats is severely tested, and there are
times when the risks run end in disaster, leaving
widows and orphans to the mercy of the world.
Exposure in all kinds of weather is also one of
the handicaps imposed on those who gain a living
from the deep, and when the suddenly-born squall
strikes the fishing fleet, woe betide the little craft
that fails to make its harbour 1 The grim, red
rocks and mighty ramparts of shore are merciless,
as is Superior itself when the storm king is abroad.
At the head of the lake are the two thriving
centres of Port Arthur and Fort William. With
three railways, and river and lake transportation,
the carrying trade of the twin cities is assuming
large proportions. North and west lie the great
districts of Thunder Bay and Rainy River, rich
to a degree in natural resources, and by the time
the boundary of Ontario is reached, at the Mani- -
toba line, the fact that a distance of a thousand
miles intervenes between it and the boundary \
on the east, illustrates the princely area not j
only of New Ontario, but of the province as |
a whole.
154
ACROSS CANADA'S THOUSAND-MILE
FARM
CHAPTER IX
ACROSS CANADA'S THOUSAND-MILE FARM
Canada's thousand-mile farm stretches from
Winnipeg to Calgary, from the United States
boundary line to the northern borders of Manitoba,
Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Within this ample
area is land enough, if tilled, to feed every mouth
in Europe. Such is the prophecy of James J.
Hill, the railway magnate of the American West.
A conservative estimate of the grain -growing
portion of the three prairie provinces is placed by
Professor Saunders, the Director of the Government
Experimental Farms, at one hundred and seventy-
one million acres. As yet only one out of every
twenty acres, or 5 per cent., is under cultivation,
or only 3 per cent, in actual wheat tillage. The
Canadian Government estimate of crop values for
1:909, covering the three provinces mentioned,
eached the substantial total of one hundred and
ixty-eight million dollars.
If the cultivation of only 5 per cent, of the
I
Through the Heart of Canada
fertile area of the West produces such satisfactory
totals in yield and values, it is an easy problem
to arrive at the corresponding yield and values
of a I o or 20 per cent, tillage. Such fore-
casts, based upon a ten -year wheat yield average
of 18*95 bushels per acre, makes reasonably sure
the prophecies of a two hundred million bushel
wheat harvest alone, and of a relative degree of
expansion in the general prosperity of the country.
It tnakes equally sure and safe the claim that
Canada is the paramount country of the world
in the area of its unoccupied fertile soil.
Winnipeg is the portal of the prairie. The
Fort Garry village of the ^seventies, with its two
hundred souls clustered around a rude wooden
fortress, has grown into a great urban centre with
an estimated population in 19 10, based upon the
assessment roll, of 140,000.
The rapid rise of this city of the plains is illus-
trated, not only by the evidence of streets and
avenues, of factories and stores, of churches,
schools, and homes, but by the multiplication table.
While it is easy to fall into extravagant speech
concerning Winnipeg, the statistical data tell a
presumably honest tale and one that is most im-
pressive. The 1 9 10 assessment of the city at one
158
I
I
Across Canada's Thousand-mile Farm
hundred and fifty-seven million dollars is almost
as much as the crop values of the entire West for
that year. Building permits increased from
$1,708,557, spent on 796 buildings, in 1901, to
$9,226,325 expended on 2,942 buildings in 1909.
In the same period the bank clearings have risen
from one hundred and six millions to seven
hundred and seventy millions, and the annual
customs revenue from nearly a million to
$3,343,520.
In 1870 there were no banks in the embryo city,
now forty-one branches serve the community. Then,
the town was practically churchless and schoolless,
and even newspaperless . To-day, one hundred and
fifteen churches represent the religious life of the
community, thirty-two schools accommodate twenty
thousand pupils, and forty-five publications are
issued in the variety of tongues that are spoken in
the West.
The Hudson's Bay trading post of thirty-five
years ^go now ranks fourth among Canada's
industrial centres, with one hundred and fifty
factories and shops (in 1905), having a capital
of twenty millions, a number that has since grown
to two hundred and forty-one.
Then, the prairie trails were the only highways,
159
Through the Heart of Canada
and the springless Red River cart, made entirely
of wood, was the chief and only vehicle of trans -
poration. The former have been replaced, so far
as Winnipeg is concerned, by four hundred miles
of graded streets, and the latter by the aristocratic
automobile and the democratic street car.
Then, the nearest railway was hundreds of miles
to the south, now Winnipeg is on the main lines of
three great Canadian railway systems . It possesses
the largest railway yard in the world controlled
by a single corporation, the Canadian Pacific Rail-
way having one hundred and ten miles of sidings.
At that time of beginnings, so comparatively near,
the entire Canadian West did not have a single
mile of railway, whereas in 1910, one -third of the
thirty thousand miles of railway of the Dominion
was north of Lake Superior.
Growth is indeed the dominant note of this new
city of men. On its far-flung outskirts the tar-
paper shack — a mere squatter on the prairie — is
the forerunner of a neat frame house on a tree-
lined avenue. Where to-day is a helter-skelter
group of humble houses and sod cabins, to-morrow
may see an orderly array of substantial homes.
Thus the development of the West is being reflected
in its capital centre. But the chronicle of to-day
160
Across Canada's Thousand-mile Farm
will be surpassed by the tale of to-morrow, and
the Winnipeg yet to be will as far outstrip the
city of to-day as the latter outstrips the village of
Fort Garry from which it sprang.
The real West lies west of Winnipeg, if that
city will permit the heresy. It takes us into
Saskatchewan, with its fine capital city, Regina,
and across Alberta to the foot-hills and the coast.
It is the land of the toiler and the tiller, a country
of beginnings, a part of the continent where the
foundation -laying process is still under way. In
traversing a new line of railway, such as the
Canadian Northern, from Winnipeg to Edmonton,
or the Grand Trunk Pacific between the same
terminals, every few miles will reveal a new centre
of population. It is on this wise: a switch, a
station, a settler, a store, a real-estate office, an
hotel — a town I The station may at first be but a
freight car on stilts, but ere many months shall
have passed by, a Main Street and rival hotels
will have appeared. The general store will have
its lean-to and its tie posts, to which the bronchos
are lassoed ; the land-agent's office will put on a
bold front literally, an enormous signboard hiding
a diminutive shack, and all the signs of a city
will be seen.
i6i L
Through the Heart of Canada
Ponies and caynses stir up as much dust in
the new towns as the prairie schooners with their
loads of land seekers. Fields full of agricultural
implements, gaudy in fresh paint, seduce the
buyer, and a branch bank awaits the deposits of
the transaction. Almost invariably these miniature
Winnipegs evince a spirit of life and growth, and
a belief in their own corporate importance in
amusing disproportion to their present size, but
significantly prophetic of their ultimate destiny.
As the leagues are run off by the train, ever
journeying westward and northward, new settle-
ments by the score are passed, their place-names
often proving a guide to the class of settlers
surrounding them. Foreign titles denote foreign
occupation. The Hungarians have remembered
Esterhazy ; a band of United States settlers have
affixed Roosevelt to their market town ; Marakoff,
Kamsack, and Veregin have a Russian flavour.
South Africa and its last war are recalled in Lady-
smith and Kimberley, in Maf eking and Rhodes.
Kitchener and Curzon have post-offices in their
honour, as have Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Earl Grey,
and Mr. Chamberlain, as have too Sullivan and
Murphy, and even Tam O'Shanter I
The population of the West is scattered far
162
Across Canada's Thousand-mile Farm
more widely than the centres would indicate. The
little clusters of homes and shops, huddled together
for companionship on the great unfenced prairie,
give place to the shack of the settler as it comes
into distant view. A very small speck it is in
a very large world. Richly suggestive is such an
isolated farmstead in this vast empire space. It
speaks of a migration of peoples, Anglo-Saxon and
foreign -tongued, to this last great wheat -field of
the continent ; it spells success for the man -who -
will -work, it predicts a centre of civilisation where
the task of helping to feed a world full of hungry
people is under way.
The seas of waving grain at the harvest time
are eloquent too of the rich soil that a beneficent
Creator long ages ago prepared for man's use.
So fertile is it in all its virginal power that
western Canada shows a ten-year average of wheat
per acre of i8'95 bushels as against 12 bushels
of the wheat -growing states of the American West,
such as Kansas or Dakota.
Of the 776,896 farms, of 160 acres each, sur-
veyed in Western Canada, the census of 1906
showed the number of occupied farms to be only
122,398. There is, therefore, plenty of land
I waiting the settler, though the free-grant sections
Through the Heart of Canada
of the Government are of necessity becoming in-
creasingly remote from the railways. Railway
lands and those in the possession of corporations
or private companies have doubled in value in seven
years, or from an average of four dollars per acre
to eight dollars, while some of the choicer sections
bring as high as twenty dollars per acre.
According to the opinion of an eminent agricul-
turist, the first foot of soil in the three provinces
of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta is its
greatest natural heritage. It is worth more than
all the mines in the mountains from Alaska to
Mexico, and more than all the forests from the
United States boundary to the Arctic Sea, vast
as these are. And next in value to this heritage
is the three feet of soil which lies underneath
the first. The subsoil is only secondary in value
to the soil, for without a good subsoil the value
of a good surface soil is neutralised in proportion
as the subsoil is inferior. The worth of a soil
and subsoil cannot be measured in acres. The
measure of its value is the amount of nitrogen,
phosphoric acid, and potash which it contains — in
other words, its producing power. Viewed from
this standpoint, these lands are a heritage of un-
told value. One acre of average soil in the North-
164
Across Canada's Thousand-mile Farm
West is worth more than twenty acres of average
soil along the Atlantic seaboard. The man who
tills the former can grow twenty successive crops
without much diminution in the yields, whereas
the person who tills the latter must, in order to
grow a single remunerative crop, pay the vendor
of fertilisers half as much for materials to fertilise
an acre as would buy the same in the Canadian
North- West.
The immigration into Canada from the United
Kingdom for the ten -year period ending March
31, 19 10, reached a million and a half. Most
of these settlers found their way to the West,
becoming as a rule successful homesteaders or
ranchers. The prospective settler, having Canada
m view, should possess a small capital. The selec-
tion of his homestead is a matter of primary
importance. If the choice be a quarter section
of Government land, a location fee of ten dollars
is paid upon the filing of the entry, when the
claimant is free to commence operations, having
six months in which to do so. During this time
he may, as many have done, earn enough in other
work to meet some of the preliminary expenses
t connection with his farm.
The first shelter may be a sod one, if neces-
165
Through the Heart of Canada
sity so demands . For forty or fifty dollars a shack
can be built which will house the pioneer for the
first year. During the second year he may build
a stable and outhouse, and, with a span of horses
or yoke of oxen, start to break sod. By exchanging
work a homesteader may arrange to have his land
broken by a farmer neighbour or plan to have his
first crop put in on shares. Or again, a modern
disk machine may be hired, by means of which a
large acreage can be turned in a minimum of time .
Three years of occupation with residence during
six months of each year and with the breaking
of a few acres annually, will entitle the homesteader
to his patent, and if his capital be limited, he
is now in a position to borrow enough from a loan
company to purchase an equipment for more ex-
tensive operations. A settler can, in a compara-
tively few years, establish his independence and
lay the foundations for a comparatively prosperous
career in this new land. On the one hand there
may be toil and drudgery, set-backs and disap-
pointments ; on the other, there is the incentive
of freedom and independence, the recompense of
a larger life in home and nation, and, in the end,
material prosperity.
In the year 1883 a young mjan took up a home-
z66
A SETTLER S HOMESTEAD IN MANITOBA.
A HARVESTING SCENE IN SASKATCHEWAN.
To face p. 167.
\
I
Across Canada's Thousand-mile Farm
stead not far from the southern boundary of
Manitoba. This was in the early days of the
province, when opportunities were not so numerous
as now, and wheat only brought forty cents a
bushel, compared with nearly three times that
amount to-day.
After locating his quarter section and paying
the land fee, the settler in question had scarcely
a cent left. By working for a neighbouring farmer,
enough money was earned to build a shack and buy
a supply of provisions. During the first year, five
acres of land were broken, a neighbour's horses
being borrowed for the task. The second year
the would-be farmer was able to buy a yoke of
oxen, working during the summer for the same
farmer. By the third year, however, he put in all
his time on his own homestead ; at the en,d of
the year his patent was secured and he thus started
on a career of independence. Now the settler is
worth seventy-five thousand dollars, all made on
his quarter section homestead that cost him
originally but the ten dollar Government fee.
Essential, however, to his success was a deter-
mination to win, a pluck that overcame obstacles
and a spirit that refused to be daunted by disap-
pointments and discouragements. This type of
167
Through the Heart of Canada
settler will always win a competence in Western
Canada.
In the early days of Manitoba, another young
man settled in the Riding Mountain district, where
the land is notably rich and productive, though
the thick growth of scrub, as the bushes and shrubs
are termed, made the clearing of the soil a difficult
operation. Neighbours assisted in the erection of
the little structures that did duty as house and
barn for the first season, for the settler in this
case was practically penniless, besides carrying the
burden of a large and growing family. The
successive years involved struggle and endurance,
but happily in ever-lessening degree, until pros-
perity had fully come, making him the owner of
six hundred and forty acres of choice land, and a
splendid brick house with suitable outbuildings,
a property valued at twenty-five thousand dollars.
One of the daughters has won honours in a Western
college, which she entered from the little prairie
public school. Before this particular homesteader
came to Canada, he was a huckster in an English
city, where he earned a most precarious living,
with absolutely no prospects for an improved con-
dition. But possessing the qualities of frugality,
industry, and perseverance, and with no capital
i68
Across Canada's Thousand-mile Farm
but health and strength and a determination to
win out, he has proved what is within the range
of possibility for others similarly situated.
These instances would indicate that, while a
small capital has its obvious advantages, cutting
short the time required to arrive at a competence,
the success of the pioneer prairie farmer does not
always depend upon his financial standing. Every-
thing depends upon the type of man. He who
is seized with a spirit of thrift, who is quickly
adaptable to the changing conditions of a new
country, who is not crushed by a crop failure or
other set-back, is reasonably sure to succeed. This
is not to say that the conditions will not sometimes
be onerous, that changes of climate will not
seriously interfere with the crops, that grain
blockades will not tie up the wheat and embarrass
the owners, but even allowing for such contin-
gencies, the Western wheat -farm of Canada con-
tinues to present unparalleled opportunities to the
man who will unflinchingly face his task and adhere
to it to the end. Where the prairie holds its
thousands now, there is room for thousands more.
For it is a vast expanse — this Canadian prairie -
land, the billowy, mysterious, lonely prairie, swal-
lowing up the little habitations of men in its
169
Through the Heart of Canada
immensity. These plains of God, stretching from
the distant sky-line to the far-off horizon, have
their own allurement, though to some they may
be dreary and depressing. Wonderfully carpeted
with flower -life is its floor; rich in animal and
bird-life are its great spaces. It is a sea of level
where there are mysteries of atmosphere in the
morning miracle of the sunrise, in the vividness
of the noon -day sun, in the weird twilight hours
that linger long into the night, in the night itself
where the stars shine strangely bright and the moon
has a great white world to itself; and when to
the succession of ever-changing nature pictures
there is added a display of the aurora borealis —
the dancing spirits of the red men's fancy — the
impress on mind and memory is one never to be
effaced .
During the daylight there will be much to see
for those who have eyes to see. In the farther
distance may be discerned the circle of smoke-
tipped tepees that tell of a peripatetic Indian
village, here to-day, in a far-away valley to-
morrow, changing position as silently as the moc-
casined feet fall on the soft earth in this land
of silence. The eye will also be riveted by the
stately approach of a summer storm — a cloud no
170
i
Across Canada's Thousand-mile Farm
larger than a man's hand swelling into magnificent
proportions and darkening half of the sky. With
incredible swiftness it travels over the plains, sud-
denly submerging the world where one stands in
a deluge of rain, and after the storm, what glorious
sunshine bursts forth, what perfumes exhale from
mother earth, how the trail-side wild-flowers
brighten and all nature renews its life 1
Under a summer sky, the rolling billows of earth
are brown with the tan of summer, or green with
the growing of grass or grain. Then the carpet
of the earth is many shaded. But with the winter
comes the winter change of garb. The fields are
then white not unto harvest, but with the cloak
of the snow, when trails are for the time obliterated
and the checker-boards of the homesteads lose
their dividing-lines. And as the summer winds
gallop unobstructed over the borderless spaces, so
the winter winds race with wilder shriek and
greater significance of danger. The spirit of the
prairie winter storm whistles into the tented home
of the Cree, where the blanketed occupants huddle
closer to the central fire ; it shrieks at the corners
of lonely cabins, or shakes windows and doors in
an effort to break its way in. So the; storm hurries
to the south, and to its death.
171
Through the Heart of Canada
But with the spring all the life of the plains is
renewed, the grass grows as it has for long ages,
the flowers spring into their brief hour of life, the
gopher reappears from his burrowed home, the
wild-fowl fly northward to their feeding-grounds,
and man, along with the revivifying of Nature,
takes up his task of the toiler anew — he sows in
the hope that he may reap, he partakes of the
bounty of Nature and lives.
172
THE FOREIGNER IN CANADA
I
CHAPTER X
THE FOREIGNER IN CANADA
IBRD MiLNER tersely stated a truth when he
escribed Canada as a nation growing up from
seed gathered from all parts of the earth. De
Tocqueville's axiom of a century ago, that popu-
lation moves westward as if driven by the mighty
hand of God, is also being demonstrated in the
^ Dominion. There was a time, previous to the last
decade, when the Canadian people were mainly
: composed of the two great racial families of
t English and French speech, when the migratory
ii streams came chiefly from the British Isles or
'■ France. From 1897 to 19 10, of the 1,57 5,445
immigrants entering Canada, 600,411 came from
the British Isles; 445,766 from the Continent of
Europe, and 528,368 from the United States. No
less than fifty-eight different nationalities and
iuntries are now annually represented in the total
imigration into the Dominion.
175
:
Through the Heart of Canada
Canada has, therefore, a foreign element whose
presence is markedly felt in the North-West, and
which constitutes a serious problem of population
and racial assimilation. Canada is becoming cos-
mopolitan. Men have come and are coming from
the ends of the earth attracted by the allurements
of a land of freedom and free lands, of educational
privileges and religious liberty, of civil rights and
immunity from the burdens of war. Every
continent and almost every country is contributing
its quota to the human upbuilding of this new
land of the West.
The Government tables are illuminating in this
respect. They are like a map of the world. Immi-
grants have come from every one of the British
Dominions and colonies — from South Africa and
Australia, from Bermuda and Jamaica and West
Indies, from New Zealand and Australia and
ancient India until Canada has become " one pf
the melting-pots of the world."
Continental Europe is represented in many a
town and on many a homestead in the Western
provinces : Bohemian and Bukowinian, Croatian
and Dalmatian, Galician and Hungarian, Magyar
and Ruthenian, Slovak and Styrian — surely here is
a medley of peoples and tongues, relating the
176
Wk, The Foreigner in Canada
Dominion to monarchies and dynasties of ideals
of government and life far different from her
own. Alsatian, Bavarian, Prussian have a place
in the ethnological roll-call, as well as Scandi-
navian, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, and German.
Spain sends a small yearly quota, and Italy con-
tributes an increasingly large number. Turks and
Armenians represent the storm-centre of the Black
Sea and Asia Minor, Chinese and Japanese speak
of the Orient and the yellow races, while the
Hindoo represents the Asiatic.
Of this heterogeneous foreign inflow, the most
numerous are the Austro-Hungarians, including the
Galicians and their neighbours of the babel -land
of Austria-Hungary, where there are seventeen
countries in one. It is estimated that there are
nearly one hundred thousand thus designated as
Galicians, though they include many different
nationalities, marked in their native lands by
sharply defined distinctions that are not so easily
traced in their new environment.
Galician communities are found in each of the
three western provinces, all the way from the Red
River of Manitoba to the western fringe of settle-
ment in Alberta.
Who are these Galicians, or Ruthenians, who have
177 M
Through the Heart of Canada
flocked in such large numbers to a land thousands
of miles distant from their own? They belong
to the Slav family, found in the Austrian provinces
of Galicia and Bukowinia, being closely allied
to the " Little Russians " of Southern Russia.
Illiterate and ignorant to a degree, these foreign
elements, while constituting a serious problem in
race assimilation, are contributing the rough, un-
skilled labour so much in demand in a new country.
They are, for the most part, the railway and con-
tract workers for the country, labouring with a
physical endurance the result of generations of
peasant life and peasant hardships. But while
thousands are thus engaged, other thousands
have become actual settlers on the land,
forming large and prosperous colonies scattered
over the entire West. Over five thousand constitute
a settlement in the Shoal Lake district of Manitoba.
Saskatchewan has Galician communities at Ros-
thern, Canora, and Beaver Hills. Alberta also has
many such ^oups between Edmonton and Calgary,
while a few hundreds have found their way into
British Columbia.
A typical Galician village is to be found at
Conor, Manitoba, opposite Upper Eort Garry on
the Red River, where the man of English speech
178
i The Foreigner in Canada
:: and manner of dress and life will find himself in
f a world of different folk. As the black loam trails
and farms are crossed, groups of bare-footed
I peasant women are found at work in the potato-
i fields . Clad in the plain linen garments spun in their
\^ homeland, these toilers form a picturesque feature
f of the open-air scene, producing earth's bounty
\ on the fertile shores of a great Canadian river far
removed from the Danube and the Black Sea — on
a great Canadian stream where the Indian and the
Hudson Bay factor once had the world to them-
selves. If a pantomime invitation to inspect the
interior of a modest home-made cabin be accepted,
the household treasures will be brought to view
from extraordinary hiding-places in rafters and
under beds and tables, or from huge wooden trunks
bearing the marks of steerage travel. Pathetically
few are the household gods, but inestimably
valuable in the eyes of their owners. The
gorgeously lined sheepskin coats, once universally
worn but now generally discarded, the elaborately
woven blankets, and the neatly embroidered bodices
are among the heirlooms and treasures -trove.
Children, too, will be discovered in large
numbers, the bright lads and lassies speedily
^ picking up sufficient English to enable them to
179
Through the Heart of Canada
act as interpreters. And if the full confidence of
these quiet people is won — and that is not done on
the instant — the visitor to their village may be asked
to partake of the dinner -table hospitality, when he
will enjoy a unique meal, drinking very strong
tea from a very strong tumbler, dipping up white
squares of curds with generous squares of bread,
and eating as many hard-boiled eggs as he dare.
The swarms of fowl around the doorway point to
an unlimited source of supply, as the fine herds of
milch-cows ensure bountiful supplies of milk and
milk products.
The house of the Galician peasant is simplicity
itself, with its walls of roughly plastered logs, the
hard-packed clay floor, the hand hewn chairs and
benches, table and bed, and the rough rafters of
the ceiling, from which is suspended a home-made
canvas cradle holding the tiniest of little mortals.
And the little interpreter lad succeeds in making
the stranger understand that the baby was born
on the ship that brought the parents to Canada,
and that in commemoration of the fact one
of its names is *' Canada.'*
\^Txat a far cry it must seem to these erstwhile
subjects of Franz Joseph to find themselves trans-
ferred from conditions of comparative oppression,
i8o
The Foreigner in Canada
of feudal servitude and burdensome taxation, to
the fertile plains of the Canadian wheat-fields ; to
be removed from the small tenant holdings of their
former home to the rich prairies of their adopted
country, where they are the proprietors instead of
the tillers only, and where in lieu of a few poor
acres, they possess a homestead of magnificent
proportions.
Bordering the highways for miles are these
Galician farmsteads. Hard-working are their
owners. Rising before sunrise and labouring till
dark, they shun not labour, and their labour brings
its due reward in remunerative crops and valuable
herds and flocks that roam at large on the wide
roadways. Prominently situated in the centre of
the community stands the little white Russian
church of Conor, built by the settlers in a spirit
of true communism, where the hand-made altar is
as truly dignified by its environment as the marble
marvel in great St. Peter's. Surmounting the
quaintly gabled structure is a miniature dome,
suggestive of the mosques of the East and the
dominant religious system of Russia.
Not far afield is the schoolhouse, the contri-
bution of the Covernment to the education and
uplift of the children of foreign speech ; and as
i8i
Through the Heart of Canada
one sees the children of Anglo-Saxon stock and
those of Southern European parentage studying
side by side, the problem of assimilation has a
suggested solution. Erom an educational stand-
point the Galician children are making satisfac-
tory progress, while the parents are succeeding
as agriculturists to a hopeful degree.
The ten thousand Doukhobors found in Canada
present a totally different human problem. One of
the most remarkable migratory movements of early
or modern times was this transfer of practically an
entire people or tribe from the steppes of Russia
to the plains of Canada, involving a sea and land
journey of over six thousand miles. It was during
the winter of 1898-99 that the first shipload pf
the ** Spirit Wrestlers *' landed at Saint John, New
Brunswick, after their long voyage from the Black
Sea, the event being celebrated by a prayer -meeting
held on the wharf, when the strangely garbed com-
munists chanted in monotone their psalms of
thanksgiving. More than a decade has, therefore,
passed since the Doukhobors settled in the West
in a series of communes. They are to-day as
peculiar a people as on their arrival, little less
understood, and with but a slight impact made
upon them by English thought and civilisation.
182
is '^^^ Foreigner in Canada
IB The majority of their number are found in
l^laskatchewan, in the colonies of Thunder Hill,
Yorkton, and Rosthern. A majority continue to
till the land in common, all living in the little
villages, with their streets of earth-roofed houses.
The efforts of the Government to bring about the
holding of land in severalty has been only partially
successful, but the recent throwing open of large
areas hitherto held by the colonies as a whole
will probably tend to disintegrate the communities.
The entire community is practically under the
control of Peter Veregin who, at the time of the
Doukhobor migration, was an exile in Siberia.
Since joining his people in Canada, he has become
their virtual leader, exercising an extraordinary
influence over them and ruling as an autocrat.
Two or three times a year Veregin makes a state
visit to the Doukhobor settlements, when he is
received with the distinction of one in authority.
Although the Doukhobors were in a prac-
tically penniless condition when they made their
reat trek, they now have many thousand acres
nder cultivation and own thousands of horses,
ttle and sheep. Living with the utmost fru-
ality and having but few needs, it is an easy
sk for them to amass comparative wealth. Their
183
Through the Heart of Canada
degree of success has not, however, militated
against their simple pastoral life. They are still
of the Quaker spirit, living a contented life in
the narrow sphere of their faith and interests.
While their whole plan of life has its idealistic
side, there is a darker phase to it. Their satis-
faction with illiteracy is not reassuring. Attempts
to educate some of their young people have
signally failed and the charge is made that their
leaders are averse to the enlightenment that educa-
tion will bring. They are, moreover, discouraged
from mixing with English-speaking people, and
the ambitions of their aspiring youth for a wider
knowledge of life seem to meet with disapproval.
They have no priests and no churches, and yet
through the whole warp and woof of their lives
religion is closely interwoven. Their tenacity of
faith cannot but be admired, for they have shown
that they possess the martyr spirit ; but along with
a faith of absolute trust and a dogged holding
to its tenets, loose ideas of social life and marriage
are said to prevail. The fact is plain that these
strange people, thus transplanted from a totally
different environment, are still as illiterate as when
they left their native steppes, still as steeped in
their ancient traditions, still foreign in the extreme.
184
The Foreigner in Canada
Some redeeming qualities are, however, observ-
able— among them cleanliness and industry. With
few exceptions they are willing and hard workers,
a strong race physically, the reverse indeed of
degenerates ; sober, thrifty, and religious . While the
children of the Galicians are being Canadianised
through the little red schoolhouse, the young spirit-
wrestler of the plains is being kept in the darkness
of ignorance.
A brighter chapter may be written concerning
the Scandinavians in Canada. During the past
few years there has been an increasingly large
inflow of these hardy people of Northern Europe
into the Dominion, some coming by way of the
Western States. Hardly an immigrant train enters
Winnipeg without its percentage of Norwegians and
Swedes — big, broad-shouldered men, healthy,
fair-haired wotnen, and children the duplicate in
miniature of their parents in dress and manners.
The large number of Finns included in the im-
migration returns should also be counted among
the Scandinavians ; they have proved themselves
to be of the same self-reliant law-abiding peasantry.
All these classes make good farmers, but the
majority of the men are forced by circumstances
to do some preliminary work on railways and roads
185
Through the Heart of Canada
or in lumbering and mining. Fifty thousand of
this class of settlers are scattered throughout the
Canadian West, constituting a valuable element in
the population. Not a few of their leaders have
risen to the highest positions in the Western Pro-
vinces ; their children make the best of students
in the schools, often carrying away the honours
from those of British or Canadian birth ; while their
farming settlements bear evidence of the prosperity
that follows honest toil and clean-living. Winni-
peg alone has a Swedish colony of over three
thousand, with its own churches and newspapers.
Quickly mastering English, and easily mingling
with other races, these hardy folk make the best
of settlers and in many cases the best of adopted
Canadians. Those who have come in by way of
Minnesota or other States of the Union have readily
adapted themselves to Canadian institutions and
ideals, and no more prosperous farmers are to be
found within the boundaries of the three provinces]
Nor must the twenty thousand Icelanders hi
overlooked. The qualities attributed to the Norj
wegian and Swede, the Pole and the Dane, ar(
observable also in these sons of the North. The]
too are in the legislative halls and municipal
chambers of the West. They too supply th<
i86
|K The Foreigner in Canada
country with professional men of all ranks and
I conditions, and whether as farmers or business men,
as merchants or editors, as teachers or preachers,
the Icelanders have long been a nation-making
factor in their new home.
The Germanic element in Canadian immigra-
tion has always been an important one. Pros-
perous German communities are found in many
parts of the older settled provinces of the
Dominion, while nearly one hundred thousand (in-
cluding Mennonites ) have settled in the Western
Provinces. The majority are farmers, and excellent
farmers at that. On the main line of the Canadian
Pacific Railway there are many German commu-
nities, and while they do not form the solid colonies
of the Galician or Doukhobor, yet they predomi-
nate in the regions where they have located,
where German societies and German papers accen-
tuate their parent nationality, and where the
German vote is a disturbing factor to the poli-
ticians at election times. The German settler soon
takes his part in the life of his locality, soon sees
that churches and schools are erected, and soon
adapts himself to Anglo-Saxon conditions, though
there are evidences that he has sometimes suc-
ceeded in Germanising his English-speaking
187
Through the Heart of Canada
neighbour. Like the Scandinavian, the German
is a good settler and a good citizen.
The twenty thousand Mennonites among their
number, while of the Germanic family, came
originally to Canada from Russia some thirty years
ago. Forced to render military service in Russia,
they withdrew, like the Doukhobors, rather than
submit, seeking their new homes in Kansas and
Southern Manitoba. The original Mennonite,
when he spied out the promised land in Canada,
wore the garb of a European peasant — but his
thirty years of residence under different conditions
have worked a radical change. To-day it is
difficult to distinguish his children from those of
the English race ; he has turned his Red River
allotments into a garden land, and substantial
prosperity has been his portion. And while the
pioneers adhere to their original farms, as they
do in part to their religious beliefs and social
practices, the younger generation are not only less
strict and less German, but are hiving off to the
lands of Saskatchewan and Alberta, there setting
up homes and communities for themselves.
The peoples thus far described as making up
the foreign population of Western Canada are not,
however, the only ones. The son of sunny Italy
i88
The Foreigner in Canada
has discovered Canada, though the majority have
; centred in the large cities from which numbers
j make their way to the places where the contractors
I have work for the navvy. In Canada, of all the
j non -English immigrants, the Italians stand second,
1 with probably fifty thousand all told. With an
I ever-increasing momentum of inflow, they come
from the Neapolitan zone of the south, the Roman
zone of classic ground, and the sturdier land of
Lombardy on the north. The Italian of Canada
is a labourer, and not a farmer or settler. He
helps to form the pick-and-shovel army of the
Dominion, and who shall say that his work is un-
important or to be despised. But outside of
assisting in the construction of the Western rail-
ways, the man from Italy is not as yet a factor in
the settlement of the West as is the immigrant
from other countries of Europe.
Cousin to the Italian is the man of the Levant.
Ten thousand have journeyed from the eastern
shores of the Mediterranean to the eastern shores
of Canada, constituting, in the opinion of students
of immigration, one of the least desirable classes
of immigrants. A comparatively few Greeks have
seized upon certain lines of business in the cities,
hundreds of Turks form the guild of pedlars or
189
Through the Heart of Canada
small shopkeepers, while as many Armenians as
there are Turks are glad to escape the bondage
of their rulers in the East. But the Syrian out-
numbers all his brothers of the Levantine races
who help to make up the seven and a half millions
of Canada's population. Pedlars too, they are,
confining their attention for the most part chiefly
to the cities. It is a suggestive fact that in
Winnipeg there are enough of this race to form
two rival political clubs. Then, too, a colony of
Persians will be found in the far north of Saskatche-
wan, led there by a missionary in order to escape
religious persecution in their own land.
There remains the Oriental. A recent Cana-
dian Government return states that British
Columbia had 38,258 Orientals, viz., 16,000 each
of Chinese and Japanese, and 5,131 Hindoos;
7,442 of this far-eastern population have become
naturalised. In consequence of the Chinese head
tax of five hundred dollars, immigration from that
source has become an inconsiderable factor ; the
Japanese inflow has likewise lessened owing to
popular agitation against it, and the arrival of
Hindoos from India has practically been ended.
But in British Columbia, where one out of every
ten is an Oriental, the immigration problem has
190
I
The Foreigner in Canada
phase peculiarly its own. It seems certain that
i' the Oriental cannot be assimilated. He has his
own virtues and vices, his own ineradicable beliefs
and manners, his own set ppint of view. How far
such a people will be a source of strength to a
■ land so alien to their own is a question not easily
solved.
There remains the Frenchman in Western
Canada — as distinct from the French-Canadian. A
' few thousand have drifted into the West from
France and Belgium, forming compact communi-
, ties and holding to the Roman Catholic faith and
ministered to through separate public schools, as
are the people of Quebec, who, trekking westward
from the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa, have
settled in other small communities in Northern
Ontario and the prairie provinces.
There is also a Jewish element among the
foreigners in Canada. They, too, are increasing
numerically, not only in the cities of Canada, but
in the West, where there are one or more purely
Jewish agricultural colonies working out an experi-
ment that is in the nature of the case bound to
be interesting and suggestive.
The foreigner in Canada — what a conglomeration
of tongues and races, of ideals and beliefs, of
191
Through the Heart of Canada
prejudices and superstitions he represents ! When
the Bible Society finds it necessiary to have the
Bible or parts thereof printed in eighty tongues
and dialects for actual distribution and sale in the
Dominion, an evidence of the curious mixture of
humanity is strikingly afforded. The Canada of
but two or three tongues of a former day is no
more ; the foreigner has made it cosmopolitan .
The Churches of Canada, both Protestant and
Roman Catholic, are facing the religious and
educational problems created by an inflow of im-
migration representing one -fifth of the population.
Large sums of money — millions in the aggregate
—are being contributed toward the building of
churches and missions, of colleges and schools,
and for the support of hundreds of missionaries
and teachers. The process of Canadianising such
a mass of human beings will tax Governments and
people to their fullest capacity, and in this national
task the Churches of the Dominion are rising to
the obligations and responsibilities thus cast upon
them .
192
THE POLICE PATROL OF HALF A
CONTINENT
CHAPTER XI
THE POLICE PATROL OF HALF A CONTINENT
The most unique police force in the world is the
Royal North-West Mounted Police of the Canadian
West. It consists of 665 officers and men, who
patrol an area five times the size of Great Britain,
or as large as Central Europe, extending a
thousand miles from south to north, and double that
distance from east to west.
Twelve divisional posts and one hundred and
fifty detachments are found throughout the
northern end of the continent, from Hudson Bay
to the Rockies, and from the international boun-
dary to the Arctic Ocean and the Yukon. Rarely,
in the history of national policing, has such a com-
paratively small body of men exercised control over
such a large area or over so many diversified
peoples, and rarely have the results been so bene-
ficial in the establishment of law and order, where
lawless elements could easily control the situation.
195
Through the Heart of Canada
It is thirty-seven years since the force was
organised, as the instrument by which the " Pax
Britannica " was to be carried into the great
Canadian West, which was then an almost No-
man's Land, known to few save the Hudson Bay
factors and the red men. On July 8, 1874, two
hundred and seventy-four men commenced their
celebrated march toward the Rocky Mountains.
The immediate effect of the arrival of these Govern-
ment troops is well expressed in the words of an
old Indian, who, addressing them at a council meet-
ing of his tribe, said : " Before you came, the
Indian crept along ; now he is not afraid to walk
erect." For thirty-seven years, therefore, neither
white or red man has been afraid to walk erect,
whether across the great plains and the mountains,
in the far Northland, or the Yukon.
So far is this true that upon the organisation
of the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan
the Commissioner was able to report that they]
were, from a police point of view, in a satisfactor;
condition, and that notwithstanding the influx oi
foreign peoples they began their career as orderly
and law-abiding as any in the Dominion.
The force may be said to have largely com-
pleted the work it originally set out to do, so far
196
tThe Police Patrol of Half a Continent
,s the frontier provinces are concerned — a work
hat has been worth many times its cost as an
bject -lesson of the power and authority of govern-
ment existing behind all real civilisation. But the
task of the mounted patroUer is by ho means over,
though it has been the policy of the Government
to reduce the number gradually. The present force
costs the country nearly three-quarters of a million
dollars a year. Their outposts are being set
farther afield. Thus from the promontory of Cape
Chidley, at almost the most northerly point of
Labrador, the barracks overlook Hudson Straits,
another guards Hudson Bay, a third the Arctic
seaboard from Herschell Island, while the most
western one serves to protect the gold land of
the Yukon. It is a fact that on the three-hundred-
mile road from White Horse to Dawson, the
traveller is as safe as in any part of Canada.
The stories of the daily life of these rough-
riders of the plains are the very essence of
romance, of high courage, of herculean tasks per-
formed, and great difficulties overcome. The
mounted police kept down lawlessness when the
Canadian Pacific Railway was being built, they
fought bravely during the Riel Rebellion of 1885,
they kept well in hand the gold rush to the
197
Through the Heart of Canada
It is thirty -seven years since the force was
organised, as the instrument by which the ** Pax
Britannica " was to be carried into the great
Canadian West, which was then an almost No-
man's Land, known to few save the Hudson Bay
factors and the red men. On July 8, 1874, two
hundred and seventy-four men commenced their
celebrated march toward the Rocky Mountains.
The immediate effect of the arrival of these Govern-
ment troops is well expressed in the words of an
old Indian, who, addressing them at a council meet-
ing of his tribe, said : " Before you came, the
Indian crept along ; now he is not afraid to walk
erect." For thirty-seven years, therefore, neither
white or red man has been afraid to walk erect,
whether across the great plains and the mountains,
in the far Northland, or the Yukon.
So far is this true that upon the organisation
of the new provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan
the Commissioner was able to report that they
were, from a police point of view, in a satisfactory
condition, and that notwithstanding the influx of
foreign peoples they began their career as orderly
and law-abiding as any in the Dominion.
The force may be said to have largely com-
pleted the work it originally set out to do, so far
196
tThe Police Patrol of Half a Continent
,s the frontier provinces are concerned — a work
hat has been worth many times its cost as an
•bject -lesson of the power and authority of govern-
ment existing behind all real civilisation. But the
task of the mounted patroUer is by ino means over,
though it has been the policy of the Government
to reduce the number gradually. The present force
costs the country nearly three-quarters of a million
dollars a year. Their outposts are being set
farther afield. Thus from the promontory of Cape
Chidley, at almost the most northerly point of
Labrador, the barracks overlook Hudson Straits,
another guards Hudson Bay, a third the Arctic
seaboard from Herschell Island, while the most
western one serves to protect the gold land of
the Yukon. It is a fact that on the three -hundred-
mile road from White Horse to Dawson, the
traveller is as safe as in any part of Canada.
The stories of the daily life of these rough-
riders of the plains are the very essence of
romance, of high courage, of herculean tasks per-
formed, and great difficulties overcome. The
mounted police kept down lawlessness when the
Canadian Pacific Railway was being built, they
fought bravely during the Riel Rebellion of 1885,
they kept well in hand the gold rush to the
197
Through the Heart of Canada
Klondyke in 1889-90, and not a few served in
South Africa during the Boer War.
But the deeds of the individual men call for
high praise. Their qualities of fidelity, devotion
to duty, and fearlessness are constantly being
exemplified. A thousand miles on the ice,
" mushing *' by dog -team and komatik, through
unexplored haunts of bear and wolf, is a common
marching order for these splendid pioneers.
One such journey was made during the winter
of 1906 by Constable Sellers, a trip of 995 miles,
in company with an interpre,ter and an Eskimo, in
order to trace a Scottish ship plying in the x\rctic
waters, and to collect the customs duties. With
his two companions and a dog-team. Sellers left
the west coast of Hudson Bay in February, and
returned on April 19th, having been exposed for
two months to the full rigours of an Arctic winter.
Blizzard after blizzard was encountered, the men
taking shelter in the Eskimo igloos or ice huts,
and feeding on wild deer. Even then the meat
had very often to be eaten frozen, because the
alcohol and wood gave out.
Sellers' diary, a typically modest report, only
hints at what lay behind the arduous journey :
" We have only fifty pounds of deer meat, two
198
The Police Patrol of Half a Continent
pounds of pemmican, and six pounds of boiled
meat for ourselves and the ten dogs, so we must
find natives. Very cold day; I had both my feet
badly frozen. My footgear is in a very bad state —
wet and worn out. We were compelled to break
up some barrels to cook food, as we had been
subsisting on frozen meat for the last three days.'*
** Terrible snowstorm. Impossible to go out
looking for natives. Our dogs are getting hungry,
as they have had nothing for three days. We
cannot possibly give them anything out of what
small supply we have for ourselves. My feet are
very sore, the result of frost burns."
*' Bad storm, but not nearly so bad as yesterday.
I sent Ford and Tupealock out to look for natives.
They returned at 5 p.m. bringing us information
that cheered us quite a little. The ship, they
learned, was at Melachuseetuck — the place where
ghosts chase women. They brought some meat
for the dogs, and said the natives, who belonged
to the Nitulick tribe, would come in the morning
with as much meat as they could spare."
** Still storming. Finished up all our meat for
breakfast. About noon the natives came in,
bringing about four hundred pounds of meat,
which I purchased from them. It was nearly all
199
Through the Heart of Canada
seal meat. We found it rather high all by itself,
but hunger is a great sauce."
In due course the party reached the vessel for
which they were searching, and received a hearty
Scottish welcome from her commander, Captain
Murray, who fitted them out with stores for the
return journey.
Another remarkable journey was that made by
Corporal Field, of the Fort Chipewyan Post. One
day he received a summons to attend to a case
of lunacy farther north. It only takes a few lines
of type to chnonicle the fact, but it took Field
six weeks of travel for a distance of thirteen hun-
dred miles, through the snowy wastes of winter.
On the way down country, the maniac became
so violent that he had to be strapped to the
sleigh, fighting his keeper, refusing food, and other-
wise adding to the difficulties of the plucky
corporal. Not an hour of the day or night was
the keeper free from his charge, as he battled no
less with unreason than with the angry elements.
Yet the Government report merely states that the
demented man was safely handed over to the
asylum authorities. Field had done his duty —
that was all.
Or, take the case of Inspector Generoux, of
200
^The Police Patrol of Half a Continent
^fcrince Albert, who travelled seventeen hundred
j^ftid fifty miles by canoe and dog-train through
I the farther north to inquire into a case of alleged
murder. He was absent one hundred and thirty-
two days. At the inquest he, as coroner, found
that the death was accidental ; but the trip is an
illustration of what lies in the programme of these
hardy men of the North, showing that supposed
crime will be dealt with, no matter what the cost
or how dangerous the case. One such murder
case cost the country nearly one hundred thousand
dollars .
On December 27, 1905, Corporal Mapley left
Dawson City with a detachment of police destined
for Fort McPherson, on the Peel River, five
hundred miles distant, across mountain ranges
totally unknown to the travellers. These plucky
pathfinders were entrusted with his Majesty's mail,
travelling by dog -team. The party arrived back
on March 9th, having successfully covered a
thousand miles of trailless territory. The corporal's
modest report on this great journey well repre-
sents the best traditions of the force.
Arriving at Fort McPherson, what did they find ?
A police post in the land of the midnight sim,
with a native population of Eskimos, and a handful
201
Through the Heart of Canada
of Hudson Bay men. Two hundred miles farther
north lies Herschell Island, occupied by the police
since 1904, where toll is taken from the United
States sealers and whalers, and where the British
flag flies at its most northern point, within twelve
hundred miles of the North Pole. These far-flung
lines of police power strikingly illustrate the vast-
ness of the domain under Canadian control.
The life of the mounted policeman on Herschell
Island presents many features of interest.
Stranded in this far-off corner of the Dominion,
in the Canadian " Land of the midnight sun," he
lives as near the North Pole as is possible. It
is a circumscribed island home, moreover, with
a shore -line of only twenty-three miles, and with
cliffs rising five hundred feet from the 'Arctic Sea.
Though so far north, in latitude 69, Herschell Island
is covered with a luxuriant growth of grass, and
carpeted with innumerable wild-flowers. The
island possesses the one safe harbour in all these
northern waters — a harbour in which fifty ships
could safely winter.
The island is, furthermore, in the centre of the
whaling grounds of the Arctic country. The
reports of the mounted police are a surprise as to
the extent of the whaling industry. From 1891
202
I The Police Patrol of Half a Continent
h 1907 no less than 1,345 whales were caught in
Canadian waters. Adding the value of the fur
trade to that of the whaling industry, the total
amount during the six years mentioned would reach
the large total of $14,850,000.
The report of Inspector Jar vis for 1908 gives
an interesting picture of the Arctic natives. On
one of the islands there are fifty Eskimos, or
" Kogmollicks," as they are called, while two
hundred and fifty '* Nunatalmutes " are also found
in the vicinity. The latter are represented as a
clean, well-set-up tribe, much superior to the
Indians along the Mackenzie River. The former
tribe subsist chiefly on fish, seal, and white whale,
while the latter are inshore natives, and live chiefly
on the game killed in the mountains, such as
mountain sheep and deer.
Inspector Jarvis further says of the Nunatal-
mutes :—
** They are quite religious, holding service on
Sunday and doing no work on that day. There
is no missionary here. They carry their religion
into their every-day lives. They neither beg nor
steal, and slander is unknown among them. They
are as near ' God*s Chosen People ' as any I have
ever seen. After my experience of this world,
203
Through the Heart of Canada
I could almost wish I had been born an Eskimo !
They are very fond of their children and
take the greatest care of them. They never
require to be chastised and are very obedient. One
never sees any quarrelling or bickering amongst
them. They show the true sport in their games
of football and baseball, and play these games
on the hard snow when the thermometer registers
25 degrees below zero. The other day I noticed
a crowd of little tots, in their skin clothes, play-
ing on the snow for several hours as though they
were in a bed of roses. The thermometer was
1 8 degrees below, and it would have been the same
had it registered 30 degrees below. ... It was
with a sincere feeling of regret that I took leave
of these * younger brothers of the race.' The
shores of Britain's Seven Seas can show no more
intelligent or gently-kind people than the Eskimos
of Northern Canada, none that so readily
respond to courtesy and goodwill. These Eskimos
are Canadians and British subjects, and some
official acknowledgment of the fact by the British
or Canadian authorities would be seed cast on
good ground."
The work of the police nearer the United States
boundary is certainly marked by variety. In the
204
The Police Patrol of Half a Continent
ranching country, where prairie fires are a menace,
the lonely soldier in khaki must needs act as
fire warden. One October day, Constable Conradi
was having his dinner at an Alberta ranch, when
he noticed a terrific prairie fire sweeping across
the country from the south-east. '* Are there any
settlers in danger?" was his instant inquiry.
" Young has a wife and ten children, but I
would not try to make his place, the fire is coming
up at such a pace," replies the rancher.
Then Conradi knew his duty. Fighting the
flames with the utmost heroism, for the wind was
blowing a gale, and the fire was fierce in th^
extreme, at last Conradi actually ran through the
wall of flames, emerging nearly suffocated, with
his hair singed, and his coat on fire. Finding
Young through the thick smoke, where he had
taken refuge beside a slough, Conradi seized two
of the youngest children, the others followed, and
all were saved, though their brave rescuer was
rather badly burned. ** My wife and family owe
their lives to Mr. Conradi, and I feel, with them,
we shall never be able to repay him for his brave
conduct," writes the rescued man.
Horse and cattle thieves are sometimes found
near the boundary. A message came to the force
205
Through the Heart of Canada
headquarters one New Year's Day that a band
of horse thieves were operating the country beyond
Saskatoon. It was a meagre clue, but three men
set out in a raging snowstorm, and on the follow-
ing day found the ringleader in a half-breed
settlement sixty miles out. They were three
against eight, some of whom showed fight, but the
moral effect of the King's uniform helped to make
the arrest. The prisoner's friends offered a bribe
for his release, but a Mounted Policeman cannot
be bought.
One journey led, however, to fatal results. In
the middle of winter it was imperative to send
a message to a distant post. A corporal volun-
teered, and set forth in a blizzard, with the ther-
mometer registering thirty degrees below zero. The
despatch was never delivered ; the policeman never
returned I After the snow had gone in the spring,
an Indian found a skeleton clad in a faded red
uniform. The fatal despatch was in the pocket,
and on it were written the words : " Lost. Horse
dead. Am trying to push on. Have done m'y
best ! *' His dying hand had written a better
epitaph than any that " storied urn or animated
bust " could proclaim to his memory.
The Mounted Police are, moreover, of neces-
206
^The Police Patrol of Half a Continent
^pty, great explorers and travellers. One detach -
j^Bient has been at work opening up a pack trail
I from Edmonton to the Yukon, a distance of nearly
, a thousand miles. ** The men worked very hard
under very trying circumstances," is the testimony
of the officer in command of the work. Unfore-
seen difficulties in the nature of unfordable
streams, which had to be bridged, steep banks
which had to be graded, and extensive windfalls,
through which the trail had to be literally sawn,
were encountered, as well as blizzards and storms
many, and consequent exposure to the elements.
Rest-houses are being built every thirty miles,
and the distances are marked every two miles.
The trail is being made so that it may later be
widened into a wagon trail if necessary. A trail
from the Peace River to the Yukon, several hun-
dred miles in length, is also nearing construction,
the work of a small detachment of twenty-nine
police .
The obstacles encountered were such as are in-
cidental to road-making in a mountainous country,
steep ascents and descents, rivers and streams,
muskegs and soft places, forests and fallen timber ;
the difficulties were the shortness of the season,
work being only possible for four months, the
207
Through the Heart of Canada
forwarding of supplies, and the necessity of h'aste ;
the discomforts were from flies, rain, and cold.
Owing to the luxuriant growth being saturated with
a heavy dew, the men were scarcely ever dry, even
if the day were fine. However, there were
few accidents, and little sickness. The horses
suffered most because of the hard work and the
scarcity of feed at times, but no fatalities
ensued.
In their capacity as postmen, the policemen cover
beats of unheard-of length. One is of a thousand -
mile length, covering a mid-winter trip from the
Yukon to Eort McPherson, on the Mackenzie River
within the Arctic Circle, and through a no-man's
mountain -land.
" For a third time/' reports the Commissioner,
" a patrol carrying mail was sent to Fort
McPherson, leaving Dawson in December, 1906,
and returning in February. I have in previous
reports called your attention to this very arduous
patrol of a thousand miles, which was again carried
out so successfully by Constable Forrest. It means
a great deal to our far-flung posts that they
should send and receive news from their people.
I might here observe that whether bringing relief
to isolated settlers in bitter cold and over the deep
208
The Police Patrol of Half a Continent
snow of the open plains, carrying mail to distant
'Hudson Bay posts, to the Arctic Seas, or to de-
tachments interned in Northern British Columbia,
or hurrying to the relief of unfortunate persons
in remote parts, our men do not fail us. They
undertake the work with cheerfulness and carry
it out indifferent to difficulties and hardships."
Another long Arctic mail route is a mid-winter
one to Hudson Bay, where the service is described
as '* lonely, monotonous, and dangerous." And
these journeys are thus briefly disposed of in the
official report : *' On December i ith Inspector
Pelletier and Corporal Reeves left Mafeking, a
station on the Canadian Northern Railway, for Eort
Churchill with mail and despatches, and returned
to that point on March 2nd, having made a most
successful journey, with dogs, of fourteen hundred
miles in mid-winter without mishap."
This officer made another journey by water
during the succeeding summer. L'eaving Norway
House on July 25th, with three canoes, he pro-
ceeded by Split Lake, Little Churchill River, Deer
River, and Churchill River to Eort Churchill,
arriving there on August 20th. Returning, he left
Fort Churchill on August 31st in a coast boat
for York Factory ; here leaving the coast boat, he
209 o
Through the Heart of Canada
took canoes up the Nelson River, and arrived at
Norway House on September 26th. He estimates
that the round trip was twelve hundred and forty
miles .
These mounted men of a vast area of the
North-West have many duties to perform besides
acting as policemen. They exercise an oversight
over the Indian tribes — no small task in itself, and
one calling for the best tact and patience. They
are customs collectors in the more remote posts.
They form a boundary patrol, with special refer-
ence to the smuggling of animals across the border .
They are expected to watch the timber, to relieve
distress among the settlers, to act, in a word, in a
paternal attitude toward the scattered dwellings
of their patrol. And where in all Arctic America
will you find " mushers," paddlers, or rough-riders
like the North-West Mounted Police? They are
men of many parts, who may to-day be officially
registering a marriage or a death out in the lonely
wastes, and to-morrow starting to hunt down a
murderer, warn rebellious Indians, or visit a sick
miner fallen by the way five hundred miles from
anywhere. Two men, horses and guns ; two men,
dog -team and guns ; two men, canoe and guns —
such are the units of this unique police force.
I
The Police Patrol of Half a Continent
b them distance is literally no object, obstacles
no bar, difficulties no deterrent.
The great point aimed at is to instil into the
lawless the fact that life and property shall be
respected in this far -stretching wilderness just as
in any great city on the American continent, and,
moreover, that the offender shall be secured and
brought to justice at any cost whatever.
Truly, they have a half-continent for their parish,
and truly, too, these public guardians are one of
the best assets of the British Empire and of the
Canadian people. The Royal North -West Mounted
Police of Canada occupies an eminent position
in the annals of national policing.
211
I
THE LAND OF THE RANCHER
I
CHAPTER XII
THE LAND OF THE RANCHER
Alberta is the great ranching province of Canada,
hugging the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and
spreading itself over an area twice that of Great
Britain and as large as that of Erance. It has been
said by a facetious observer to be bounded on the
west by the mountains, on the south by the United
States, on the east by circumstances, and on the
north by climate, but a boundary line more definite
than that of circumstance or climate marks the
limit of this great western comer of Canada. For
seven hundred miles it reaches from the United
States border to the heart of the Peace River
country. Within this area are one hundred and
sixty-two million acres, of which one hundred and
twenty millions are claimed to be arable. And
when it is remembered that of this one hundred
and twenty million acre farm, only one million
acres are under cultivation, the possibilities of
215
Through the Heart of Canada
Alberta, from a farming and stock-raising point of
view, are seen to be overwhelming in their im-
mensity.
This newest province of the Dominion boasts
of two thriving civic centres in Calgary and
Edmonton, the commercial and legislative capitals
respectively.
Calgary dates its beginnings from a com-
paratively recent time . -Where once stood the cabin
home of old Sam Livingstone, mountaineer, ex-
plorer, and wanderer, a prosperous city now
borders the shores of the Bow River, with no com-
mercial rival within hundreds of miles. Drawing
trade from a wide agricultural area, occupying a
position in the heart of the ranching country and
situated at the gateway of the Rockies, Calgary is
assured of its future. Glimpses of the varied and
picturesque life of the plains and foothills are
afforded in this lively Western metropolis. Stray
groups of Indians parade the streets, gay in
blankets and gowns of the primary hues, the men
proud of their long black braided hair, the women
proud of the copper-tinted papooses strapped to
their backs. But the white man predominates, as
does his civilisation. Cosmopolitan are the throngs
that crowd the station platforms and the wide
ai6
The Land of the Rancher
streets. Along with types of almost every racial
family of Europe — Slavonic, Teutonic, Latin— are
the men of English speech, many of whom have
migrated across the borders from the United States,
and the men of English speech are the rulers. In
no Canadian centre may be seen a more virile
representation of humanity, and in no other city of
its size are finer churches and schools, shops, and
homes. Calgary is essentially of the twentieth
Ipntury, seized of its spirit, impregnated with its
ptimism, and marked by its bigness of plans,
bt so much for the distant future as for to-morrow.
Two hundred miles due north, toward the upper
nd of the province, is Edmonton, perched on the
edge of the high banks of the Saskatchewan. Ever
since the first railway train rumbled into its borders
a few years ago, Edmonton has felt its importance
more surely and with every reason. It is no in-
significant moment in the history of a town when
the isolation of a generation is ended and it is
linked with the outside world. It is interesting to
hear an old timer (though he may be only a five
years* resident) tell the story of Edmonton. The
new timer is the one who arrived yesterday. The
old timer will assert that Edmonton is the real
centre of the West, instead of its being the farthest
317
Through the Heart of Canada
outpost ; that it is the half-way house between
Winnipeg and the Mackenzie River, and the gateway
to a thousand miles of Canada straight north. He
will describe it as the Mecca towards which all the
great transcontinental railways are hurrying their
main lines as fast as the rails can be laid, and
bridges flung across the Battle and the Saskatchewan
— a part of the Dominion around which both winter
and spring wheat and the best of every
other kind of grain is grown, and the choicest
of live stock raised. It is the entrepot of the
north-western fur trade, the centre of a rich coal-
bearing area, and an important station on the new
Grand Trunk Pacific line through the Yellowhead
Pass to the Pacific.
Changes are taking place in these western cities
with startling rapidity. The earth trails of
Edmonton that long knew only the tread of the
horse and the creak of the Red River cart, now
know the warning cry of the automobile and the
clang of the electric car. What was not so long ago
an outpost of empire is now an inpost of Canada.
Handsome new legislative buildings of Alberta are
being erected in Edmonton, and a state provincial
university has been started in the neighbouring
town of Strathcona.
218
The Land of the Rancher
Alberta is also the land where may be heard
the song of the cowboy : —
*'I want free life, and I want fresh air,
And I sigh for the canter after the cattle,
The crack of the whips like shot in the air,
The medley of horns, and hoofs and heads,
That wars, and wrangles, and scatters and spreads;
The green beneath and the blue above.
The dash and danger, and life and love."
It is only thirty years since the first herd of
twenty-five cattle made the initial round-up in
Alberta ; to-day more than a million cattle, horses,
and sheep are dining off the succulent grasses a
bountiful Nature has there provided. To care for
these, hundreds of men are required — a group of
toilers who constitute a class by themselves. A
wide domain is theirs, and a fairer land one could
not find in all the broad Dominion, sweeping in
rank after rank of ever-heightening foothills to the
foundations of the mighty Rockies, whose snow-
shrouded summits, outlined against a clear sky, can
be seen seventy-five miles away. These swelling
prairies form no pent-up country, but one within
whose confines cowboy, cattle-raiser, and farmer
will have elbow-room and to spare for many years
to come.
The equable climate adds to the attractions of
219
Through the Heart of Canada
the foothill country. The warm chinook winds
from the Pacific temper the cold during the winter,
preventing the snow from accumulating, with the
result that the horses and cattle are, as a rule,
able to forage for themselves ; although an occa-
sional blizzard, of extra severity, may cause the
suffering and death of many animals.
There comes a party of cowboys, away in the
distance, looking as small as coyotes. Clouds of
dust further locate the galloping group, making
its way over the winding trail. Through the
dust loom up the sturdy little ponies, whose riders
are thoroughly at home in the saddle. Many a
long mile will be covered in a day, especially
through the half-yearly round-up, when all the
cattle are gathered in corrals to be sorted out,
branded anew, and either sent to the market, turned
loose again on the prairies, or driven to the ranches
of their respective owners.
The round-up is, in fact, the event of the season
in the cow-country. Toward the end of May the
ranchers collect, with their tents, ponies, and
wagons, at a central point, from which to " work
the range.'* The cowboys " cruise," or scout, the
surrounding territory, gradually driving in the scat-
tered heads to the corral, where a count is made,
220
i
k
V
'H
I
^
'M
The Land of the Rancher
the losses by death or straying ascertained, the
necessary branding done, and the herds re-sorted.
An Alberta round-up forms a most interesting
prairie picture. Dozens of ranching helpers are
present, each booted and spurred, and wearing the
inevitable slouch hat, and a serviceable suit of
clothes, tanned by storm' and sun to the tawny
complexion of the man himself. Indeed, so far as
bronzed features are concerned, it would be difficult
to distinguish between a typical cattle -tender and
a Cree or Blackfeet Indian.
Eor the first few nights after the cattle are
corralled, and especially after the calves are
weaned, it is said that no one is able to sleep
within a hundred miles of the spot, with both
mothers and calves bellowing mightily and in-
cessantly. The sorting out of the cattle, too, is
often a lively experience, calling for the coolest
of heads and the utmost vigilance to prevent
accidents. The keen -eyed riders move among the
restless herd. The special cow chosen is cleverly
made to edge her way to the outer circle of the
drove, where she is quickly lassoed, and stretched
head and tail on her side. In this work the wise
little cow -ponies are invaluable, as they hold the
ropes taut while the beast receives the red-hot iron
221
Through the Heart of Canada
that burns in the mark of the owner's brand —
such as Seven U, Bar U, Anchor P, O. H., and
similar letters and designs. Thirteen thousand
different brands are registered in Alberta alone,
giving some idea of the extent of the industry.
A horse corral is even more interesting than
a cattle one, as the ponies, objecting to having their
liberty curtailed, fill the air with squealing and
kicking protests. The excitement is fully equal
to that produced by a solid mass of frightened,
bellowing cows. Such is the life of the Canadian
cowboy — often an arduous one, involving hardship
and exposure, and calling for pluck and grit. But
to him it is an ideal employment ; he learns to
love the sweeping hills and green -floored valleys,
and to enjoy his cabin home and the welcome rest
it affords.
The ranching industry is, however, undergoing a
change of conditions. The big companies, holding
thousands of acres, and carrying on their business
in a wholesale way, are becoming fewer, and more
and more the cowboys themselves are becoming
their own employers, though in a more limited
field. The farmer is making his appearance in the
province, crowding the rancher farther afield — as
far north, it may be, as the Peace River Valley,
222
The Land of the Rancher
or the vast regions north of Saskatchewan, where
excellent ranching conditions are said to exist. A
readaptation of conflicting interests will no doubt
be reached between the Alberta wheat producer
and the cattle -grower. It may be found that there
is room for both in this highly-favoured section of
the Dominion.
The farmer is fast becoming an increasing
factor in Alberta, over thirty thousand farms being
shown in the census of 1906. With the discovery
that winter wheat can be successfully grown in this
region, once declared to be unfitted for grain
cultivation of any kind, a new avenue of prosperity
was opened up. The wheat yield increased forty-
fold in three years, running as high as forty bushels
per acre. The prospective market for this surplus
winter wheat and flour is China and Japan, the
Orientals, it is claimed, preferring the bread made
from it to that made from the harder wheat pf
Manitoba. The Mormon farmers of Southern
Alberta are, in fact, already shipping winter wheat
direct to the Far East.
This Mormon colony in Southern Alberta con-
stitutes an unusual settlement in the population of
Western Canada. The Mormon policy of ex-
pansion led a small band of eight or ten families
223
Through the Heart of Canada
to leave Utah twenty years ago, under the leader-
ship of C . O . Card, an experienced pioneer . Some
fifteen miles from the international boundary and
near the foothills of the Rockies, this advance
guard staked out their prairie homes in Canada —
the first farmers to invade what had hitherto been
regarded as only a stockman's paradise. These
hardy, energetic westerners knew how to develop
the virgin soil of their new home, as they had
developed the resources of Utah and Idaho. Thus
they prospered from the first, despite the fact that
the changed conditions as to climate and soil made
farming almost a new art to them.
It is estimated that there are now seven thousand
adherents of Utah Mormonism in iWestern
Canada, and many more are annually trekking
northward, joining their brethren under the British
flag. Four towns were started that have since
become thriving centres ; farming, ranching, and
the raising of beet sugar being carried on in
their respective localities.
Lethbridge is the northern gateway of this
Canadian Mormonland . Into what was long known
as the arid belt of the western plains, there has
thus been projected the agricultural interest, and
where it was once foretold that grain could not
224
The Land of the Rancher
be grown, now widespread fields of wheat may be
seen. Raymond lies twenty miles south of Leth-
bridge. It is one of the newest of the Mormon
towns, dating from 1901. One year the tenantless
plains, the next a group of pioneer farmhouses, a
town in the making ; to-day a population of several
hundred. A large beet-sugar factory, costing half
a million dollars, has been built at this point, for
the beet-sugar industry promises to become as
relatively important as that of wheat -growing and
stock-raising. Raymond has been incorporated,
has numerous business houses, banks, a roller mill,
an elevator, and a fine school and town hall.
Cardston is the creation of Joseph Card, a son-
in-law of Brigham Young. Mr. Card is the ex-
president of this Canadian State of Zion, and
conducts a large co-operative store, for co-
operation is effective throughout Mormondom in
the purchase and communal use of steam
threshers, and in the erection of grist mills and
cheese and other factories. Surrounding Cardston
are a number of smaller settlements.
A majority of the ** Saints " live in village com-
nunities for the sake of the social life and the
educational and religious privileges involved in
iuch an arrangement, for the church and the school
225 p
Through the Heart of Canada
constitute an important part in the economy of
the sect. A deep interest is taken in the schools.
Excellent buildings are provided for the purpose,
and fairly well-trained teachers are secured.
Wisely, too, the trustees take a more than per-
functory interest in the duty entrusted to them,
by frequently visiting the schools and inspecting
the work of the teachers .
In the matter of land tenures, the holdings are
arranged so that the owners may live in a village
or town. A small piece of ground is attached
to each dwelling, in which garden produce is
grown. Orchards, too, are being planted, with
good prospects of reaching maturity. The main
farm, averaging about eighty acres, lies in the
territory around the settlements, and a drive in
this direction will reveal what has already been
accomplished by irrigation.
The Mormons who have settled in Canada gave
a pledge to the Canadian Government that they
would refrain from the practice of polygamy.
Complaints were soon made that they were
violating the compact, but investigation at the time
proved the charges to be groundless. In 1890,
however, to quiet the public unrest regarding the
matter, an amendment to the Criminal Law of the
226
I
The Land of the Rancher
Dominion " made any person guilty of a mis-
demeanour who practised polygamy and liable to
imprisonment for five years and a fine of five
hundred dollars. This applies to any one who
practises polygamy or spiritual marriage, or assists
in any such ceremony."
" Will these Mormon immigrants be Canadians
and British?" many a Canadian anxiously asks.
Time is necessary in which to reply. Meanwhile,
a good sign is observable in the Mormon cele-
bration of Canada's national holiday, the first of
July. Let us look in on a Mormon town on a
Dominion Day, and take part in a ranching cele-
bration. Horse -races, of course, take first place
in a land where the broncho is man's best friend,
except when he bucks, but the very characteristics
of the animal supply another item on the programme
in ** broncho-busting," a process during which the
shaggy little quadruped humps its back, straightens
its legs as a preliminary to a series of acrobatic
bounds, with a view to throwing his rider. Or,
tired of the bouncing, he may go on strike and
refuse to move until the cowboy's whip leads to
a change of mind.
Steer-roping follows. Again the mounted cow-
boy, with a lariat coiled on the horn of the Mexican
227
Through the Heart of Canada
saddle, gallops dramatically into the arena, and
starts in pursuit of a chosen steer, which has a
start of fifty yards. A swing of the noose for
thirty feet or more, and the rope is over the head
or around the legs of the now frightened beast.
Then something else happens, for the broncho
comes to a sudden standstill, and so does the steer,
which is thrown to the ground, and while the
trained broncho keeps the lasso taut, the rider com-
pletes the discomfiture of the stranded cow by
tying it into an even more helpless condition. The
man who captures and ties his steer in the shortest
time is the winner.
Among the cheering crowd the Mormons, of
course, predominate. Gentiles are as scarce as
tenderfeet. Crowded in prairie schooners are the
Saintly onlookers. Placid-faced matrons, each with
a goodly quiver of children, composedly watch the
sports until the last event is run off, and the race-
course is soon abandoned to the coyotes for the
night.
The extensive nature of the irrigation works
inaugurated and carried out by the Mormon colony
and private capitalists, is only a small part of the
irrigation undertakings in the province. The
scheme of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the
228
The Land of the Rancher
Bow River Valley is the greatest enterprise of
its kind now under way on the American continent .
Millions of dollars will be spent in the five hundred
mile plan in process of construction, affecting a
tract of country almost as great in area as all the
irrigated lands of Colorado or California, and twice
as large as that of Utah. When the system is
completed, three million acres, extending eastward
from Calgary one hundred and fifty miles, will be
made available for wheat -growing and ranching.
One-third of the project is already finished.
The main canal, radiating from the Bow River
near Calgary, is sixty feet wide and ten feet deep,
and courses for many miles across country, while
a sinuous line of secondary canals, with a lesser
flow of water, will reach a wider radius of territory.
Already settlers are occupying these irrigated lands,
and are growing crops that prove the undoubted
productivity of the soil when its thirst is assuaged.
An English company has also undertaken the
irrigation of three himdred thousand acres on the
Bow and Belly Rivers, lying between the Canadian
Pacific Railway and the Crow's Nest Pass, west and
south of Medicine Hat. A million and a half
dollars are involved in the carrying out of this
scheme. Irrigation is, therefore, closely bound up,
with the future welfare of the Foothill Province.
229
MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAIN
CLIMBING
I
CHAPTER XIII
MOUNTAINS AND MOUNTAIN CLIMBING
The transition from the rolling sea of fertile lands
to the rolling sea of mountains — from God's plains
to God's hills — is dramatic in the extreme. For
hundreds of miles from north to south the vast
Cordillerean range faces the plateau that stretches
to Hudson Bay. A generation ago it might well
have been regarded as an impassable barrier
between the prairies and the Pacific coast, but even
the mountains have to yield their supremacy to the
railway engineer. As the rivers have cut a way
for themselves through the intervening ranges, so
the ocean to ocean railways on Canadian soil have
utilised the river-beds and their valleys for the
paths of the tracks of steel between Calgary and
Vancouver, between Edmonton and Prince Rupert.
Erom the foothills of the Rockies to the mouth
of the Eraser Canon the expresses of the Canadian
Pacific Railway twist and curve to the tune the
233
Through the Heart of Canada
streams have set — along the circuitous Bow, along
the turbulent floods of the Kicking Horse, along
and across the broad-breasted Columbia, along the
glacial waters of the lUecillewaet, along the blue-
green Thompson until its identity is lost in the
yellow Eraser. For six hundred miles the river-
banks and beds have provided free right of way
for the path of the railway.
As the train thunders on its western course the
vanguard of mountains slowly rise to meet the
gaze. A storm may rest for a time on the rugged
crests of the first range of peaks, and then
majestically journey northward, exhibiting as it
passes an electrical display of terrifying force.
Defiantly the locomotive plunges into the
Kananaskis Gap, and with the plunge the world
of the plains is forgotten, the Switzerland of
hills is entered in the Banff National Park.
High above tower the Three Sisters and Wind
Mountains, a chaos of clouds playing hide and seek
with their jagged peaks, or the massive Cascade
become suffused in a saffron -coloured storm cloud,
through which the setting sun vainly tries to break.
Only the mystical outlines of the rugged old pile
can be traced until the sun wins in its struggle
for light, and fashions such a rainbow as only
234
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
the mountains can show, with its intangible bases
resting on two of the Banff giants.
Charles Lamb had no use for mountains. To
him they were but dead nature. Give him one hour
of the thrill of life on Fleet Street, and others might
climb the hills for aught he cared. One can join
with Elia in being fascinated with the throb of life
in London town, with its human ebb and flow, its
never-ceasing passing show, but he never knew
the mountains ! He never stood at the base of a
Selkirk pyramid of granite and there worshipped
as at an altar ; he never achieved the summit of a
king of the Rockies, and from the exalted plat-
form let the eye sweep the wondrous world on every
hand.
Dead nature? Why, there's life everywhere in
and on and around the hills. Alpine flowers, sing-
ing birds, game, little and large, from the marmot
whistling at the door of his retreat among the rocks,
to the mountain goat and the grizzly bear. There
is abundant life in the green-white river, rushing
to the ocean from the glacier that gave it birth.
Even the glacier is a thing of life, for it is born
of the snows of heaven, and it dies in melting away
into moraines and streams.
No life among the hills? One would wish that
335
Through the Heart of Canada
Elia might come back from the shades long enough
to stand on a ridge of rock overlooking Paradise
Valley and the Valley of the Ten Peaks, there to
view the life around the sublime palisades of Mount
Temple — the life of the clouds as they swirl and
sweep amid these towering pinnacles, now re-
vealing them' for a rare moment of time, then with-
drawing them from mortal vision. There is life
of majestic movement, of chaotic winds, of torn
masses of black clouds — noiseless life though it
may be, and yet the echoing thunders bombarding
the cliffs contribute awesome music. There is life
in the aftermath of the rainbow. It is made before
one's eyes : the first diaphanous framework, the
filling in of the primary colours, the filling out
of each to its maximum of glowing beauty. So it
is displayed in all its transcendent art, resting on
the floor of the valley and leaning against the
northern precipices.
A wondrous hour is the twilight one in this realm
of peaks. The shadows begin to blot out the
shining streak of white in the Kicking Horse River
far below, as the gathering darkness fills the canon
to its brim. Slowly and laboriously the locomotive
toils up the steep grade on the way to the Great
Divide, only to creep down the other slope to the
236
i Mountains and Mountain Climbing
|Hittle station at Field, nestling under the shadow of
^jVIount Stephen. A mile sheer above the track the
shattered Cathedral Peak lifts its gendarmes of
rock, the rails being laid over the debris of ancient
landslides, and scattered along the way are giant
boulders that have rolled down the declivity. Some
remain poised on the brink of the canon ; others,
in their cannon-ball journey, have leaped to the
bottom of the yawning depths in the valley.
As the train draws away from the Cathedral a
miracle seems to be performed. The great jagged
time-creased peak is apparently born as one gazes.
While rounding its flank the summit is obscured,
but with the shrinking into distance of the foothills,
the massive pyramid swings into the line of vision,
above track and foothill and avalanche bed, above
tumbling torrent and glacial stream, higher than
the highest tree line. So the Cathedral ever
enlarges as the intervening distance increases, until
it stands revealed in all its majesty and might.
The roof of the Canadian Rockies is strikingly
uneven. So one discovers when gazing skyward
from the valley of the Bow or the Illecillewaet ; so
one realises in ever-increasing degree when the
buttressing foothills of the mountain giants are
surmounted, and an ascent is made of the steep
237
Through the Heart of Canada
slopes that end in cloud-piercing pinnacles. As
the world of the valley recedes, and lake and glacial
stream and dark green forest shrink in size, the
continental watershed gradually unfolds to the
wondering eye, from Mount Assiniboine on the
south to the Presidential range on the north.
So it proved to be in the climb from Laggan
to the chalet of Lake Louise, and who will ever
forget, with a sudden bend in the road, the first
startling revelation of the hill -encased tarn, or of
the white -robed ridge of Mount Victoria closing
the matchless view on the side of the setting sun !
So it proved to be in greater degree when the
ever -ascending journey, over the mossy trail,
was taken to the sister lakes of queenly Louise —
to higher Mirror Lake, sleeping a sleep of vast
content in its deep granite bowl among the trees ;
to highest Agnes, its waters imprisoned in a cleft
of the hills, and forming a great natural reservoir,
dammed back by a narrow wall of rock. From the
border of the basin, the eye would fain sweep earth-
ward and over the devious way traversed, and
along the narrow, goat -like path cut from the pre-
cipitous wall of the Beehive.
But the greater vision lay around and above
one ; the awe -aspiring masses of Whyte and
238
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
Niblock and Pechee, rising to the north and west ;
to the cliffs and crags of Fairview, seen on the
yonder side of Lake Louise ; the mighty prow
of Lefroy, cutting in from the south ; to the bold
snow face of Victoria, sending its avalanches
thundering to the glacier below ; the lofty
summit of the Rockies, the ridge-pole of the Cor-
dillerean range, the vertebrae of the American
continent .
Standing high above the realm of men, and
literally among the clouds, one can understand the
excelsior spirit that spurs the mountain-climber to
attack after attack upon the unsealed heights ;
one feels the challenge to conquer the cliffs that
yet confront him, and stand in triumph on the very
topmost pinnacle of this upheaved world of rock
and snow and ice.
The love of the kingly sport has been
steadily spreading of recent years, and Alpinists
from many lands have wielded the ice-axe and
the alpenstock among the Canadian peaks.
Many a conquest has been made, and early among
them was the climbing of Mount Victoria, which
was first ascended by Charles E . Fay, an American,
in 1897. The view of Victoria from Lake Louise
shows a seemingly impassable rock wall, capped
239
Through the Heart of Canada
by snow deposits hundreds of feet deep. It had
to be attacked, therefore, by Abbot Pass, between
Lefroy and Victoria, and near the spot where young
Abbot met his tragic death in 1896 by falling
down a precipice. The approach to the summit
of Victoria was, as may readily be imagined, most
difficult and dangerous. In one place the actual
crest was exceedingly narrow — in spots not <over
a foot wide. " The snow under our right foot
might one day be tossing in the waves of Hudson
Bay : that under the left foot might soon be-
come a part of the Columbia's sweep to the Pacific
Ocean." Thus chronicles the intrepid mountaineer.
At last the full glory of the scene burst upon
Mr. Fay and his companions — a view ranging from
the eastern line of the Rockies to the central peaks
of the Selkirks on the west. At 11.45 a.m., after
eight hours of strenuous effort, the white throne of
Victoria was conquered by man for the first time.
The summit they found to be scarcely large enough
for the party of four. Unlike the neighbouring
Lefroy, no rock pierced the virgin snow-field. To
the north the mountain fell away suddenly into a
gorge of appalling depth. Majestic and awesome
they found the view to be in every direction from
this lofty platform, 1 1,400 feet above the sea-level,
240
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
and the only near-by rival in height was the grand
snow -crested pyramid of Mount Temple.
Mountain-climbing in Canada has received a
decided impetus through the formation of the
Alpine Club of Canada in the spring of 1906. In
the following July the first camp gathering of the
new organisation was held in the region of the
Yoho, the camp site being an enchanted spot on
the Saddle Back between Emerald Lake and the
Yoho Valley, eleven miles north of Field. No-
where is there a spot so rare for a tented home
as an Alpine meadow, and, in the Yoho meadow,
the picture was a perfect one. There were fifty
tents, arranged in avenues and crescents, bordering
the incomparably beautiful Summit Lake, the haunt
of the mountain goat and bear — the Alpine realm
in the heart of the Rockies, a realm^ of crags and
canons, and of encircling and over-towering peaks.
Among the objects of the Club is the making
known, not only to Canadians, but to the world,
of this vast Canadian mountain region, comprising
an area as large as twenty-five Switzerlands, and
holding within its wide -flung boundaries an infinite
variety of Alpine scenery of the grandest and
wildest description. Mountain-climbing is there-
fore the chief feature of camp life, the ascent of
241 Q
Through the Heart of Canada
a peak at least ten thousand feet above sea-level
being the basis of active membership.
The Vice-President was chosen as the qualifying
mountain — a fine four -peaked giant, slightly over
ten thousand feet high, dominating Emerald Lake,
the Yoho Valley, and the Vanhorne Range. A
four o'clock call was preliminary to the twelve-
hour tramp. An hour later the climbing party for
the day lined up in military order, garbed, accord-
ing to the regulations, in full climbing canonicals,
and provided with ice-axes and alpenstocks.
Edouard Eeuz, the young Swiss guide, led the
single file procession that, after the roll-call, at
once hit the trail and disappeared in the spruce
and balsam forest near the camp.
Eor the first hour or more the path led through
moss -carpeted woods and past meadow stretches
of purple and white heather. This initial up-hill
stretch soon put a strain on the amateur climbers,
but over against fatigue and breathlessness, nature
provided a compensating air, wonderfully exhilara-
ting and bracing. Above the tree-line a long and
wearisome way led at steep inclines over boulders
and rocks and rotten shale, alternating with cliffs
and ledges that were an earnest of what lay ahead.
Finally, the ascending path became so steep as to
242
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
require the first roping together, with occasional
bits of level rock floor serving most acceptably
as resting-places. Peering over the edge of one,
a sheer drop of a thousand feet or more to the
Emerald Glacier, tested head-steadiness and cool
nerves — a cliff " whose high and bending head
looks fearfully in the confined deep." A group
of campers climbing the glacier looked like little
black specks amid the white sea.
In a north-westerly direction Eeuz guided his
party across gravel moraines and over snow-fields
to other and narrower ledges. Pinnacle after
pinnacle was successfully mastered, each one loftier
than the other, until the highest point of the moun-
tain was reached, the event being celebrated by
adding a quota of stones to the cairn and by
singing the National Anthem.
There on the lofty platform a beatific vision
was unfolded of two hundred miles of mountain
peaks. For fifty miles in every direction, the eye
took in the mighty sweep of the hills . Northward,
the upper Yoho River raced to its destiny. Beyond
and beyond, range upon range sloped to the sky,
where the continental watershed feeds the sources
of the Columbia, the Athabasca, the Saskatchewan,
and many another life-giving stream.
243
Through the Heart of Canada
Eastward stretched the Yoho Valley, with its
tumbling Niagaras and its canon depths ; south-
ward, the overshadowing Cathedral Peak formed
a boundary of granite ; while westward, the kingly
crown of Sir Donald, in the Selkirks, proclaimed
its majesty by its supreme height. Under the spell
of the rare sight, the mind recalled the lines of
Goldsmith : —
"Even now where Alpine's solitudes ascend,
I sit me down a pensive hour to spend;
And, placed on high above the storm's career,
Look downward where a hundred realms appear;
Lakes, forests, cities, plains, extending wide.
The pomp of kings, the shepherds' humble pride."
The homeward journey was made in half the
time taken in the ascent. Glissading down steep
snow slopes the glacial sheet was reached, with
its dangerous crevasses and treacherous snow
bridges. It was the time and place to recall the
president's directions to obey the guide implicitly,
and this every one was ready to do as he
carefully cut a series of ladder-like steps in the
ice face and as carefully showed his followers how
to creep doiwn hill safely.
At long last the tree -line was again reached,
just at supper time, when the proud mountain
244
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
conquerors hallooed their return to camp, where the
welcome accorded them by the stay-at-homes was
no less appreciated than the joy of a safe return
and the happy consciousness of having attained.
A two-days* trail trip up the Yoho Valley was
one of the attractive features of this Alpine Club
programme. The party of ten (with guides,
cooks, ponies, and food supplies) took the path
from camp that leads by the shore of Summit
Lake . A corkscrew descent of nearly two thousand
feet ensued, charming glimpses of the valley being
revealed at many a turn of the road. At one
of the open spaces, the first thrilling view was
had of the famous Takkakaw Falls, though echoes
from its tumbling waters had already been heard.
The sight of this king of Canadian Niagaras, with
its series of white flood leaps, is a never-to-be-
forgotten one. Emerging from the caverns of the
Daly ice-field, the Takkakaw makes an initial
plunge of two hundred feet, to try itself, as it
were, and after a moment's breath, gathers its
waters for the great plunge of nearly a thousand
feet to another platform of rock, whence it hastens
on in an ever-broadening flood over the shelving
rocks to the Wapta River, itself hastening through
cleft and canon on its journey to the sea.
245
Through the Heart of Canada
Unforgettable, too, were the glimpses of the
other gigantic cascades in this wondrous temple
of nature. The Laughing Falls leap in joyous
abandon from a narrow -walled gorge into a wild
freedom of space that ends in a wilder cauldron,
e*er it speeds like a racehorse to the same river
that swallows up all its sister streams. Farther
north, the Twin Falls tumble from their rocky
clefts over a precipice five hundred feet high, to
a rock-encased flume. The bridge over this flood
is often under water, and from it a trail pony
had recently been swept by the irresistible tide.
The body of the poor beast was found hundreds
of feet below, and the saddle that went with it
on its wild journey of death hangs in the little
shelter shack by the upper trail.
Northward was the trend of the winding trail,
through cathedral aisles of stately trees, up foot-
hills that would have qualified as mountains else-
where, and amid a riotous wealth of wild -flowers,
heather and ferns. Nature does nothing by halves
in her mountain gardens.
When the northern end of the fifteen-mile valley
was traversed, there came with it one of those
impressive revelations of nature that often reward
the mountain visitor. Emerging from the dense
246
Mountains and Mountain Climbi
ng
forest, with its path alive with fat porcupines, the
traveller suddenly beholds the entire front of the
•Wapta Glacier, glittering in all its icy glory, thrust-
ing its nose deep into the valley, and sending forth
its frosted breath. Thousands of feet in depth,
miles in width at its ridge, and sloping thirty miles
northward, the Wapta is one of the great remnants
of the Ice Age. What an inconceivable marvel it
is that such a frozen mass should yet move — move
with the leisurely slowness of eternity, for a
thousand years in the life of a glacier is as a
day in the life of brief -spanned man I And as
it slowly slips valleyward it is shrinking to its death
as well.
And now the trail leaves the valley, climbing
up and up, and still up, far above the track
of the valley floor, above the Yoho Canon, above
forested benches and mountain tarns, along ladder-
like paths cut in the black cliffs, leading to heights
where, in the language of Stevenson, the open-
air drunkenness grows upon one.
This upper trail of the Yoho had as many
surprises as it had charms. Mountain meadows
were hidden between forest stretches ; these were
in turn succeeded by extensive boulder beds and
glacial moraines, where rock slides could easily have
247
Through the Heart of Canada
been started, and where countless torrents of melted
snow from the over -hanging Emerald Glacier gave
no little trouble in their crossings. Angry they
were in their untrammelled sweep, too wide and
deep to be trifled with. This new difliculty only
served to reveal our guide in a new role, that of
a bridge and dam builder, dexterously placing great
stones in mid -stream, so as to provide safe
passageways for man and beast, where a misstep
might have led to a downhill slide of a quarter-
mile.
The upper path is, moreover, marked by many
look-out points. From one such spot was revealed
the entire sweep of the Yoho Valley, as a vast cleft
among the hills, with its green carpet of trees
and roof of sky, with its widespread coatings of
ice and its singing cascades, and with yet more
distant mountain ranges walling in the scene. It
was a replica of the Naerodal of Norway, of the
Schlennan Gorge of Switzerland, of the Yosemite
of the United States. Surely the wide world, with
all its scenic marvels, has nothing more wonderful
to feast the gaze of a mortal than Canada's mar-
vellous Yoho ! Such a vast canvas it is on which
the Mountain -maker has spread the scene ; such a
wondrous box of colours has been used in its
248
i
iLlriJiil
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
painting, producing such a picture as only the
Creator can portray.
The campers and climbers of 1906 thought there
could not be found a more charming site than that
by Summit Lake, under the wing of old Wapta
and at the gateway of the Yoho. But when
Paradise Valley was explored, during a week in
July of 1907, it would have been difficult to decide
between the two.
The trail from Laggan and Lake Louise led
one around the base of Fairview and past the
forbidding cliffs of Sheol to the portals of Para-
dise Valley. The place -namer must have been
a humourist to thus select Sheol to guard a valley
of Paradise, and then to arrange for a Bishop's
Mitre farther up the valley to look down upon
the scene in benediction, and to face the opposite
Mount Temple as a fitting neighbour.
Our entrance into camp on the opening* day
was celebrated on the part of nature by a blind-
ing blizzard and wintry winds that cruelly found
us, clothed were we ever so warmly. Never did
a cookery-tent look so welcome as when its
Chinese masters gazed curiously at the new arrivals ;
never did the glow of a camp-fire feel so grate-
ful, even on a July day, as we hugged the blazing
249
Through the Heart of Canada
logs to the scorching point ; and never did sleep-
ing bags and thick blankets fit in with the scheme
of things so perfectly as when we crawled into
or under them in the endeavour to escape from
a frosty world.
Another week of climbing experiences fell to
our lot, for monster hills hemmed us in on every
side, Mount Temple dominating his fellows
at the lordly height of i i,6oo feet, Hungabee
("The Chieftain") enclosing the western end of
the valley, Lefroy and Aberdeen and Pinnacle
in between, and alluring glimpses of the Ten
Peaks leaning against the farther -away southern
sky. Peak after peak was conquered — all except
Pinnacle, on whose summit of steeple rocks no^
human foot had ever stood. A quartette of our
best mountaineers attacked the massive pile, but
were compelled to beat a retreat, after scaling its
gendarmes and cliffs to within a few hundred feet
of the top and after adventures that were ominously
near the danger point. But Temple, the moun-
tain that turned Wilcox back on his first attempt
and only opened up its way to him the following,
year, was ascended by a score of the hardier
alpinists. So was Aberdeen, an imposing peak
10,340 feet high, overlooking the camp on the
250
i
CLIMBING MOUNT ABERDEEN, ROCKY MOUNTAINS.
To face p. 251.
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
north. It was a steep way of iascent up Aberdeen
via cliff, couloir, and cornice, up until the valley
shrunk to a mere streak of colour and the silver
of its glacial stream turned into the narrowest of
ribbons and then was swallowed up in the vast
perspective.
Around us was the snow -world of the upper
air, pure as the white-winged clouds or the deep-
hearted lakes beneath. A vagrant storm swished
past us on its way to the yonder side of the valley.
Wind currents, seemingly direct from the Arctic
cir<:le, effectually cooled us off whenever the sun
overheated the blood. In single file the climbers,
following the guide, negotiated cliff faces, skirted
projecting buttresses, with the narrowest of ledges
for a foothold and the loosest of rocks for a pre-
carious hand-hold. The rope that made us one
felt like a friend, steadying the nerve and giving
heart to the timid. Human company is an appre-
ciated factor in a bad spot on a high hill. Hour
after hour the up -climb continued, with the summit
seemingly leading us a fool's dance. Here the
ridge, gained at so much cost of effort, overlooked
the depth of a neighbouring valley, necessitating
a wearisome detour; there a steep snow incline
sent us back defeated, forcing the guide to find
251
Through the Heart of Canada
a totally new path. Miniature canons succeeded
overhanging cliffs, loose scree slipped under the
feet toward a disconcerting precipice edge, and
hard by a welcome circumscribed area, under the
shelter of a rocky protuberance, provided a brief
resting-place for disposing of a Spartan lunch.
But with the final effort and the conquest
of the actual peak of the mountain, there came
such a sense of victory, of achievement, as to repay
for all the breathless exertions, for all the aching
muscles and bones. The conquering spirit in man
is supreme at such a moment ; he rejoices that
he has overcome. His reward also comes with
the panorama that Nature has spread out for his
delectation. No mask of cloud shut out the marvel
of the scene, no curtain of rain or sheet of storm
enshrouded the companion peaks. One was in an
elemental world, sombre, mysterious, sublime.
One stood in Nature's mightiest workshop, where
the sculpturing and chiselling effects of ages of
time are revealed in the process of mountain-
making and destroying. For the everlasting hills
are dying hills, and the Rockies are being worn
down from their infinite heights.
It seemed a long way from the man -stifled city,
from the battlefields of human endeavour and
252
Mountains and Mountain Climbing
warring strife. We thanked the God of the Hills
for the wander-lust that He put in one's heart,
for the gipsy hunger for the out-of-door world
that brought one to this platform of earth from
which hundreds of miles of peaks were seen.
Standing on the crest of a continent, the onlooker
felt a degree nearer the sky and the stars, he was
even at times above the clouds and their discharg-
ing elements, the earth the meanwhile submerged
in a billowy world of vapour.
A brief half -hour on the summit served to chill
us to the marrow and cause more unplanned
dancing than had been indulged in for many a
year, for it were dangerous to stand still and receive
the icy breath of the upper air currents without
a protest. Chill and cold were, however, soon
forgotten on the downward journey. A toboggan
slide, many hundred feet long, at an angle of sixty
degrees, provided the pathway over which we glis-
saded at a furious pace. What took hours of time
in ascending was covered in as many minutes,
descending on the snow -slope between Aberdeen
and the Mitre. With shout and cheer each member
of the climbing party set forth on the thrilling
ride, with only an alpenstock or ice-axe to act
as a restraining force or as a rudder, and even
253
Through the Heart o Canada
these ofttimes failed of their purpose. In such
a case nothing was left but to take the declivity
with as much grace as possible and to prevent
one's body from performing too many revolutions
on the way. But the very ease and quickness
of the snow trip made more difficult the less
exciting portion of the journey through the endless
avenues of the forest, through underbrush and over
windfalls and across deep gullies. Tired to the
limit of human strength, we returned to camp
hungry as bears and happy as children. We
had started out on the day's work, twelve hours
before, mere novices as mountaineers, and had
returned as full-fledged active members of the
Alpine Club of Canada.
In succeeding summers this *' School of Moun-
taineering " has held its camp sessions in the
beautiful region of Roger's Pass (at the entrance
to the Selkirks), and O'Hara Lake and Consolation
Valley in the Rockies, where the surrounding peaks
tested the endurance of old members and initiated
many new ones. The Alpine Club of Canada,
although one of the newest additions to the world's
mountain organisations is, with its membership of
six hundred, rapidly attaining an enviable position
among them, and become a decided factor in the
natural life of Canada.
254
SCENES IN THE SELKIRKS
CHAPTER XIV
SCENES IN THE SELKIRKS
Some day a writer will appear who will do justice
to the trails of Canada— the trails that wind through
the wilds of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario,
up lonely waterways and over heights of land to
other heights and streams, across the unpeopled
areas of the far west and the farther north to
the rim of the Arctic, and among the world full
of hills within the bounds of British Columbia.
Of all the trails of this new land, the mountain
ones are the most alluring, the most wonderful,
the most fascinating. Who shall adequately sing
of the joy, the freedom, the exhilaration of the
journey over their sinuous length, where the breath
of the mountain air is revivifying, where the scent of
the wild -flowers perfumes the air, where the aroma
of Nature in all her bewilderment of luxuriant
growth sweetens the out-of-doors. Once again one
discovers that the real life is the life of the open-
257 R
Through the Heart of Canada
air, whether the tent be struck on the valley bed,
the sloping hillside, or the mountain summit.
Such a trail is to be found in the Selkirks—
from Glacier to the Cougar Caves. Down by the
Great Glacier and the Illecillewaet River, where a
mountain hotel is situated in a cleft between
the peaks, the pony train is packed securely with
the aid of the diamond hitch, and saddled with
the explorers. The lead horse starts the line,
without other guidance or direction than his own
knowledge of the route, bearing on his patient back
a precious cargo of blankets, provisions, ice-axes,
ropes and endless impedimenta. The destination
is Deutschman*s cabin, away up the Cougar Valley
to the north. Can there be such another ten-
mile trail in Rockies or Selkirks, in Cascades or
Coastal Range ? It is a way of charm and delight,
of never-ending change, of ever-unfolding
panorama .
The first few yards of the course follow the rail-
way track, the ponies dodging Imperial Limiteds
and Pacific Expresses and nameless freights as only
bronchos can, for they are born dodgers. Then
a plunge into the Selkirk forest, where the moun-
tain sides are a mass of verdure, a tangle of leaf
and bush and flower. The course is full of ups
258
Scenes in the Selkirks
I] and downs, crossed every few feet by a galloping
little rivulet fussing along on its way to the river
and the ultimate ocean. For a space the way
I leads over the old tote road of Canadian Pacific
, Railway construction days of over twenty years
I ago. For another space, remnants of snow sheds
in the shape of huge timbers strew the side, telling
i their story of avalanche or snow-slide power when
swept away by the on -rushing mass.
Down and down toward the ever -lowering
Illecillewaet we drop, until Mount Sir Donald and
all his satellites are lost to view. So does a cluster
of trees in a dip of the valley hide a giant among
hills, just as the foothill on our right blots out
Mount Cheops.
Ferns, mosses, huge-leaved plants, webs of
vegetable growths crowd all the areas between the
forest monarchs, for monarchs they are, clean-
limbed, erect as grenadier guards, seeking the sun
with ne'er a distorted branch. Clean -hearted, too,
judging by a recently -felled specimen, and not even
cross-grained — excellent qualities in tree or man.
On the left are the railway loops, hugging the
base of Mount Abbott, nearing Bonney's ice-field,
and ^11 but colliding with Ross Peak. Even the
abiding hills must have marvelled at the audacity
259
Through the Heart of Canada
of man in finding footholds for the tracks of steel
over which crawl the snake-like trains.
And the life on the trail too — alarmed partridges
lying to us as to the whereabouts of their young,
gophers making faces at us, and marmots, perched
on the boulders along the narrow path, whistling
their challenge and alarm. There are birds, too
— though none too many, but one cannot be an
ornithologist when geology and botany demand
attention, and when matchless scenery holds the
eye in its thrall.
If you follow the Cougar trail long enough,
the trees will be left huddled in the valley depths,
the tallest specimens having shrunken to the dimen-
sions of saplings. Alpine meadows will come into
view, where mountain sheep find rich browsing,
and where your strong-minded mount will fre-
quently halt to dine unless persuaded to the con-
trary. Patches of snow, remnants of the spring's
snow-slides, run their white tongues between the
meadows. The next turn leads to another cork-
screw way, with surprisingly sharp corners and
correspondingly narrow footholds . Waterfalls, too,
are decorating the entire sides with their white
ribbons, and some careful navigating through
tumbling streams is made by the keen -eyed ponies.
260
Scenes in the Selkirks
But ever the trail-hitting brings the higher peaks
nearer. It makes the hitherto hidden ways reveal
themselves, it penetrates natural Eldoradoes and
lifts the climber, physically and spiritually, high
above the valley bed. /
At last Deutschman's cabin is reached, the home
of the discoverer of the Cougar caves. Deutsch-
man is not at home when we cry a halt, but pre-
suming on old acquaintance, an entrance is
forced, a fire started, a dish of tea brewed, a
rasher of bacon fried and a pot of jam opened.
Then follows a feast of rare satisfaction, with a
night's sleep of real soundness, despite the efforts
of porcupines, gophers and mountain rats to gnaw
their way in. Only the two latter succeed, and
they kindly scamper over the old timers in the
lower bunks.
Nature sings us to sleep with many voices —
with the songs of the cascades high above us, that
never stop for breath ; with the nearer song of
the Cougar River right at our cabin door, and
with the weirder muffle of the river that reaches
us from the cave world directly below, with its
inferno of pits and flumes and cafion depths steeped
in the darkness of blackest night.
The early morning glimpse of the world reveals
261
Through the Heart of Canada
a wonder corner of Canada, surrounded by
V-shaped lines of peaks, with vast snow-fields
crowded in between. Here we leave the ponies
to the enjoyment of a pasture banquet, and hit
another trail up the Cougar snow -slope, passing
a line of trees cut off clean near their bases by an
early spring snow-slide.
The river is roofed in by snow bridges, over
which we carefully pick our devious way, noting
many a fresh footprint of mountain animals.
Where the snow roof had fallen into the stream
through the watery undermining, miniature ice-
bergs floating in narrow fjords, are marked by
rarest colour effects.
Up and up the snow -slope we puff our way. On
every hand we tread upon the strange red snow —
an unsolved riddle to the scientist, though he has
identified it as the algae of nature. To the red
man the coloured spots represent billions of snow-
fleas. Snow-spiders and snow-flies of unusual size
and blackness dot the white surface. Later, a
[mountain goat -run gives us the best of routes to
the peaks above the summit of the pass.
The hours of up-grade toil in the mountains
have their exceeding great reward. The first peep
over the roof of the Cougar ridge is worth all
262
Scenes in the Selkirks
the breath and strength spent in reaching it, for
the eyes rest for the first time upon other valleys,
other peaks are marshalled in military line, other
glacial masses are wedged in between towering
rock walls whose depths make the mind dizzy in
an effort to measure them. Extensive snow areas
give a note of white grandeur under the blue sky
and above the blue mists of the valley beds.
•High above our heads, the six peaks of Cougar
Mountain dare us to scale their boulder -strewn
shoulders. The challenge is accepted, in a spirit
of ascendancy that seizes upon the climber. Peak
No. I is reached— No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 — each
higher than its neighbour, and on those without
cairns stone men are duly built and records of the
ascent deposited. Along narrow ridges of rock
we creep, now rounding a snow cornice of uncertain
security, now encircling a buttress of rock that
throws the upper part of the body over indefinite
depths, now scaling a sky-aspiring wall.
'Hitting the trail is rare sport, but hitting the
summit of a dignified and aristocratic old mountain,
for the first time, is rarer sport still. It is some-
thing to challenge effort, and to test nerve and
wits and self-control.
Then the vision ! The fifty miles of the Ille-
263
k
Through the Heart of Canada
cille^waet Canon lie in full view, bordered on the
west by Mount Begbie and the Columbia River ;
Mount Sir Donald and his family loom up grander
than ever; the Hermits stand forth in startling
majesty; the world is full of mountains.
Already several hours have slipped by since
the breakfast in the cabin, but before hunger can
be satisfied there must be many an unsuccessful
effort to find short cuts to camp down the almost
perpendicular walls of Cougar No. 4, involving the
descent of chimneys too long for the longest rope,
the crossing of dangerous rock slides, and the test-
ing of rotten rocks and slippery snow.
Back the way we came, traversing again the
quartette of peaks, glissading down the snow-fields,
until the arduous day's work ends with the sight
of the hospitable cabin hidden in the forest, the
blue spiral of its smoke guiding the tired and
hungry wayfarers to its hearth and table, and, later,
to its rustic bunks.
Canada heretofore has been able to boast of
almost everything in the realm of natural
phenomena except volcanoes, geysers and caves,
but now the last mentioned may be added to the
list of scenic assets. The discovery of the Selkirk
Caves was made in October of 1904, by Charles
264
INTERIOR OF THE COUGAR CAVES, CANADIAN SELKIRKS.
To face p. 265.
Scenes in the Selkirks
Deutschman, a typical prospector and mountaineer,
whose intrepidity was clearly proved by his initial
exploration of the caves alone and without any
proper equipment for the dangerous task.
Under the guidance of this fearless mountaineer,
the party set out on this underground journey.
It seemed sacrilegious to leave the marvellous arena
of snow-shrouded summits and ice-filled crevices,
of deep-cut valleys looking up to blue-arched
heavens, for the Stygian recesses below ; to
lexchange, even for a few brief hours, the glory
of the sunlit scene, with its Alpine meadows and
deep -hearted forests, for sunless spaces unrelieved
by any ray of moon or star.
The cave -making river is born of a glacier high
up on the flanks of the Cougar range of peaks.
In its steep and impetuous descent, the waters have
encountered massive strata of limestone rocks,
through which they have forced themselves with
the infinite patience of Nature, forming the caves
thus far discovered, and doubtless many another
strange and weird abode of darkness where human
foot has never intruded, and in which human voice
has never broken the age-long silence.
Deutschman's discoveries have led to the open-
ing up of three distinct cave sections, on three
different levels. After the first wild plunge of the
365
Through the Heart of Canada
river into the hillside, it emerges to the light lower
down, preparatory to making another underground
journey, marked by twists and turns of a bewilder-
ing nature. A second time it seeks the light, at
the bottom of a canon of unnerving depth, where
it makes a final leap into the hidden haunts jof
the hills, and no man knows its ultimate course
beyond the eight or ten thousand feet of cave
corridors thus far mapped out.
The rocks in which the caves occur are of hard
crystalline limestone, whose thick beds are com-
posed of alternate bands of white, mottled and
grey marble, with other shades and colours in the
lower levels. The caves have, no doubt, been made
by water erosion . Evidences are had on every hand
of the persistency of Nature's methods. There is
no rock so dense that through it water will not
pass ; no union of particles so closely related but
the chemical processes of the world beneath can
sever them. iWater is the world's greatest sculptor.
Cougar River is entirely made up of glacial and
snow-water. The fine grains of sharp sand
loosened from the lime rock and caught and
rushed forward in the racehorse current have given
the water an unusual erosive power, especially
where it has found a shrinkage crack. Thus the
mountain torrent has for an estimated period of
266
Scenes in the Selkirks
forty thousand years been ceaselessly at work, as
it still is, carving out a labyrinth of extraordinary
channels in the limestone and marble region it
has encountered.
As the channel passages grew deeper and wider,
huge masses of rock fell from the overhanging
walls, and now constitute the obstructions that
divide the current and force it at times into
enormous pot-holes, with their deposits of sand
particles whirling the rock away in the ceaseless
grinding process. Straight and narrow ways are
succeeded by crooked and narrower ways. Abysses
lie below one where the sounding depths of rushing
waters strike the ear with indescribable awe ;
galleries radiate in every direction, natural bridges
spring into and out of space, and the confusing
twistings of the river's course make up what
Deutschman aptly terms " the snake route."
The first descent is made into and along an
old river channel via a series of perpendicular
ladders. It does not take long for the last glint
of sunlight to give way to such a degree of darkness
as can be felt, if not seen. Even the flickering rays
of the carbide lanterns could only force their way
a few yards into the opaque walls of gloom that
menacingly engulfed us on every hand. Their rays,
hpwever, are sufficient to reveal the wonders of
267
Through the Heart of Canada
the subterranean place. Under the fefet are
uncertain paths sloping towards potholes of un-
known depths, or trying to trick the intruder into
bewildering byways ; overhead, titanic arches of
rock, pierced with Gothic windows, appear in
ghostly outline ; to right and left, overlapping
walls of rock, like scenery shifts in a theatre, mark
the strange way.
The sublimity of the place is beyond description .
It is a realm where the centuries are as a day and
millenniums as a year, where the processes of time
are measured by countless decades, a region that
mocks our estimate of time.
The flash of a Bengal light, or the burning of
a magnesium wire, thrusts back, temporarily, the
bands of blackness, unveiling the weird witchery
of the cavern, showing up vividly the white marble
streaks in the rock cracks, revealing the com-
paratively few baby stalactites that will need a few
more aeons before reaching a respectable length,
and showing as well the uncanny imitations in
limestone encrustations of human faces and
animals, of birds and fish and flowers. A natural
carving of a horse's head with an alligator's tail
may be succeeded by strange serpentine forms or
uncouth gargoyles. It is a stone -sculptured zoo.
But more impressive than even the rock wonders
268
Scenes in the Sclkirks
of this buried wonder-land is the imprisoned cry
of the mad-rushing stream, for the Cougar is as
strenuously at work in cave-making as in the long-
lost ages when the worlds were young. The river
drops a thousand feet in its meandering course.
Thrilling is this deep-throated song of the stream,
increasing in volume as the Auditorium is neared,
where the foam of the tortured waters shows
strangely white against their black enclosing
barriers .
The bystander in ** the chamber of irrevocable
dark " feels more assured when he actually sees
the tumbling waters ; it is more fearsome when
he can only hear the mysterious swish of the sub-
terranean stream in some yet deeper abyss. It
then becomes a positive relief to halt by a pool
of limpid water, stranded in its rocky basin, and
resting in soothing quietude in contrast to the
turmoil of the river itself.
One of the three series of caves is, curiously
enough, partially filled with ice, and this fact
produces some striking effects. Instead of lime-
stone stalactites, as in the Mammoth or Luray
caverns of the United States, here there are
stalactites of purest ice and of wondrous beauty,
especially when illumined with the magnesium
light. Ice deposits fill the crevices of the rocks,
269
Through the Heart of Canada
making other strange animal and bird forms . One
such ice -bank resembled a gigantic sea -lion vainly
trying to scale the dark wall overhead. From a
cavernous opening there hung suspended an ice
Niagara — a fall transfixed in the grasp of the frost
king, and a more beautiful object could not well be
imagined in the thick darkness beneath or in the
sunlit world above. One ice -filled gallery ended
in a perfect fireplace, as if to mock the chill of
the glacial interior. Nor was the walking of the
best. Treacherous slopes of ice invited unpleasant
plunges into potholes, filled to the brim and over-
running, and the guide could probably tell a
truthful tale of how at least one cave visitor hung
nervously to his coat-tails as ticklish bits of pro-
truding rocks were rounded where the ice floor
was as slippery as glass. The utilitarian possi-
bilities of the place were brought strikingly to mind
when Deutschman filled a pail with the clearest
of ice and carried it back to his tent for domestic
use.
Then came the Inferno. It proved to be no
more inviting as a pleasant parlour than the
Judgment Hall or the water-filled turbines. To
reach it one crawled and crept or backed up in
order to go ahead, or walked very discreetly over
uncertain boulders. Glimpses overhead showed
270
Scenes in the Selkirks
other mighty arches and natural bridges and eerie
prongs of rock on which the devil might spit an
enemy. Tiers of Gothic arches were placed as if
by man's handiwork ; fan-shaped canopies and
lace -like perforations in the limestone crust
alternated with fluted columns and exquisite
draperies. Nature's freakish arts were everywhere
displayed in this great chamber of eternal night,
and here again the sepulchral notes of far-away
torrents reached the ear, and crystal drops on pro-
jections of rock sent back glittering scintillations
as they caught the light of the lanterns.
The entrance to the last series of cave apart-
ments and to the pit was not easily gained. A
canon with a sheer depth of nearly one hundred
feet held the river in its bed before it dashed with
wicked venom into the black world for the last
time. With ropes tied around the waist and under
the arms, the tenderfoot must have made a sight
for the gods as he dangled on his way down the
cliff wall, wildly clutching the while for a hand-
hold that was never found. And it was with
ruffled feelings, as well as clothes, that he found
himself, breathless and nearly distraught, standing
on a bit of snow bank that bordered the Cougar.
From that point the guide led the way by the
only available path— in mid-stream — with the
271
Through the Heart of Canada
impact of the water threatening at every step to
s\veep one's feet from under one. The region
next explored proved to be the most remark-
able of all. Down a distance of nearly five
hundred feet the stream tumbles in rapids and
falls to fearsome depths. At one point of
the decensas averni there is a weird view of an
opening in the roof of the rock, through which the
sky may be seen as if mocking the pit of darkness
around. Down the Steeps of Time one may walk,
a series of steps kindly cut by Nature, through vast
high-roofed caves hundreds of feet long, through
the Witches' Dancing Hall, and the Brocken and
the Bridal Chamber, with its draperies of creamy-
white, down and ever down, until the high water
of the snow-swollen stream forbade further pro-
gress unless an unwise risk were taken.
Thus far and no farther we went — but what lies
beyond? Deutschman thinks a vast underground
lake will be found. The unexplored region along
the lower courses of the Cougar may easily reveal
cavernous depths and nature wonders far more
wonderful than what has already been discovered.
But even as it is, with nearly ten thousand feet of
cave corridors mapped out, the Caves of the
Selkirks are fairly entitled to be regarded as among
Canada's scenic wonders.
272
ALONG THE ERASER AND THE
CARIBOO
CHAPTER XV
ALONG THE FRASER AND THE CARIBOO
The year 1906 marked the centenary of the
discovery of the Eraser River, or rather of the
fact that it was not the Columbia, as had been
supposed.
One hundred years ago Simon Eraser started
on his perilous voyage down the long and turbulent
stream, and because he was the first white man
to attempt the dangerous feat and come out alive,
the river has ever since borne his name. He was
one of the band of early fur -traders who were the
real pioneers of the Ear West and North-West —
men whom no obstacles thwarted, no difficulties
overcame. Simon Eraser was born in 1776, at
Bennington-on-the-Hudson, New York. His
father was a United Empire Loyalist of Scottish
stock, who died in prison after his capture by the
revolutionary army at Burgoyne's surrender. The
^ad spent his early years near Cornwall, in Upper
275
Through the Heart of Canada
Canada. At the age of sixteen he became a clerk
in the North-West P\ir Trading Company,
earning a partnership ten years later. Then it was
that he entered upon his life in the Ear West at
Grand Portage and Lake Athabasca. When his
Company in its strenuous fight with the Hudson
Bay Company resolved to occupy the country west
of the Rockies, young Eraser was chosen as the
leader, a position for which he had been preparing
himself. In 1805 he set up on the Pack River the
first permanent post built within the boundaries of
what is now British Columbia, and from that point
started on his journey towards the Eraser, or the
Columbia, as it was thought to be, catching his
first glimpse of the great six -hundred-mile artery
in 1806.
Now, a century after Eraser's voyage, the
traveller is carried in a luxurious train through
the gloomiest and grandest part of the canon. And
as he gazes down upon the swirling waters from
the narrow parapet of rock which forms a pre-
carious bed for the track, the wonder grows at
the temerity of the man in daring their angry
strength. The course of the Eraser is through one
of the deepest of the tnountain canons of the west,
Suddenly contracted in its narrow bed, as it forces
276
Along the Fraser and the Cariboo
its way through the coast range, it is a seething
rock-torn torrent. 'High above tower the mighty
peaks ; far below the river rushes on its down-
grade journey to the coastal plain and the sea.
Long before Simon Eraser navigated the river,
many a life had been lost in the attempt to run its
dangerous rapids. It would seem as if the gods
of the mountains resented human intrusion; indeed,
the intrepid fur-trader has probably had few, if
any, successors in what must have been a thrilling
journey.
The narrowest channel is at Hell Gate, where
an enormous rock has fallen from the upper cliflfs
and all but blocked the way of the waters. At
such a point as this the intrepidity of the explorer
must have been put to its severest test, but this
and all other tests were successfully met, and fame
has rewarded him with an undying name.
The trip through the Eraser Canon comes as a
climax to the scenic wonders of the C.E.R. route.
Tunnels succeed each other in quick succession,
trestles and bridges many are crossed, and all the
while the twisting train closely borders the river-
bank. Every mile of the coastward journey is
crowded with interest ; apart from the scenic
setting, the human note includes the lone Chinaman
277
Through the Heart of Canada
or Indian fishing for salmon from some protruding
platform or rock, or spreading the catch on the
drying-frames. 'Here and there, too, are the
deserted shacks of the navvies of twenty years ago
or more when the C.P.R. was being built. Lone-
some little graveyards are also seen, with an
occasional mound where sleeps the nameless and
forgotten dead. One such grave bears, however,
an epitaph, that of the Headless Indian. It reads
as follows : '* Here lies the remains of the Head-
less Indian, discovered by Lou Milton and Dr.
Cheadle, A.D. 1863. One hundred and fifty yards
up the bank of the river was also found the skull
which was sought for in vain by the above gentle-
men. (Signed) T. Party, Canadian Pacific
Survey. June 5, 1872." The imagination has
fine scope in thinking out the possible details of
the tragedy amid the solitary hills when the un-
fortunate red man lost his head.
There are glimpses as well of the Cariboo tote, or
mining road, built by the British Columbia Govern-
ment ^early half a century ago. Gold was first
found on the Upper Eraser in 1857, and in the
succeeding years ensued one of the greatest and
wildest of modern gold rushes to this remote and
almost inaccessible region, four hundred miles from
278
Along the Eraser and the Cariboo
the se^,. It is said that thirty thousand men left
the United States alone for the gold-fields, few
of whom succeeded in their search. It was to
accommodate these gold-hunters of the 'fifties and
'sixties that the Cariboo trail was constructed at
enormous cost. Its remains give a slight idea of
the dangers of travel over such a route. Crossing
the turbulent river or ricketty bridges, clinging pre-
cariously to rocky ledges, now high above the
water, then nearer the brink, involving dangerous
grades, rounding sharp bends on rude cribbings
— such was the highway over which hundreds of
wagons and thousands of travellers journeyed.
Many died on the way or in an attempt to escape
from the perils of the interior, and thus the old
Cariboo trail, now falling into decay and deserted
for the railway, was in the olden days verily a
trail of disappointment and death.
Of all highways within the boundaries of the
Dominion, the Cariboo road is the most interesting
in its picturesque past, its cosmopolitan life of
to-day, its variety of scenery, and its romantic
winding way, constituting the longest remaining
stage line in America, operated by the famous
" B.X.,'* as the British Columbia Express Company
is locally known.
279
Through the Heart of Canada
The Cariboo country is one of the many spacious
parishes of British Columbia, stretching from
Ashcroft and Kamloops to Barkerville and
Quesnelle and beyond on the north. For nearly
seven hundred miles the stage route extends,
making accessible an area as large as many a
state in the American Union.
Ashcroft is the southern gateway for a cruise
over the Cariboo trail. The town possesses the
advantage of calling the west -bound traveller from
his train at an hour long preceding the break o'
day against the Bonaparte Hills, when the stars
give just enough light to guide the sleepy tourist
across the wide main street to the dimly lighted
inn. One is conscious only of a bit of a place
set in a hollow of hills, and of the unceasing roar
of the gteen-watered Thompson River as it rushes
to its effacement in the swirling current of the
Fraser. Daylight reveals a typical Western centre
of population, hemmed in between the river and
the railway. Anchored along its chief avenue of
business are lines of ponderous freight schooners,
with their canvas canopies and cavernous holes, in
which departmental stores of freight will be stowed
away for the long up-country haul.
Facing the freighters — the plebeians of the trail
280
Along the Eraser and the Cariboo
—are the big stages, aristocratic in their coats of
paint and architectural adornments. In the
huge barns, where the hundreds of horses of the
company are stabled, the passenger-to-be is shown
a coach of special gaiety, in red attire, still enjoying
the fame that came to it for carrying Lord an.'d
Lady Dufferin over the road away back in the
'seventies. Hobnobbing with this dignified old
vehicle, but not presuming on an acquaintance of
equality, are ranged a row of *' jerkies " — an
eminently suitable name applied to carriages for
private parties.
A group of Ashcrofters, leaning against the
balcony posts of the hostelry, speed the departure
of the stage on its long ten-days* run, as the driver
cracks the whip, loosens the brakes, and heads his
four-in-hand team for the bridge that spans the
Thompson. The dip to the bridge level involves
an immediate climb through the canon made in
the grey hills by Bonaparte Creek, tumbling in
a foam of whitecaps so far below that its voice of
tumult is not heard. Cut out of the steep clay
slopes, the road winds in serpentine fashion
higher and higher, each turn bringing within the
sweep of vision distant ranges bathed in blue
mists .
281
Through the Heart of Canada
The very place-names along the way illustrate
its natural features. Rattlesnake Hill, an isolated
rock mass, looms up in its loneliness as if an out-
cast among its neighbours. There is Cache Creek,
too, where many a store of food has no doubt
been placed in older journeying days. And
Boston Ditch, which, in the tabloid language of
the West country, once upon a time " went bust '*
— a phrase that fits into many another place along
the Cariboo since the first gold-searchers trekked
over it nearly half a century ago. Eor the trail
has a history — history made up of the tragedies
of unfulfilled dreams, of unrealised hopes, of the
men who '* went bust I "
It was in 1857-58 that the Eraser River country
first attracted the gold-seeker. In 1862 the rush
to Cariboo was at its flow tide, arid it was then
that Governor Douglas built the famous highway
at a cost of two million dollars — a road that even
to-day requires forty thousand dollars a year to
keep in repair. Those were the good old days
when, far up the trail, flour was fifty cents a pound ;
bacon, eighty cents ; beans, eighty cents ; and
meals, two dollars and a half each. Prices even
now in some lines are not on a bargain -day basis,
with hay $160 a ton at Barkerville, and oats ^ve
282
I
Along the Fraser and the Cariboo
cents a pound at One Hundred and Eifty Mile
Station .
Every few miles a collection of primitive log
huts, scattered promiscuously on either side of the
road, bespeak a rancherie, or Indian village.
Everywhere in the West the red man appeals to
one's sympathy. He is so shorn of the dignity
that legend says was once his ; he looks so dis-
possessed and beaten in the cruel racial struggle
for supremacy ; he falls so far short in real life
of the ideal Indian usually pictured. And in the
cabins of the Cariboo rancheries, where some live
amid surroundings apparently inimical to a healthy
existence, there is evidence of the dethrone-
ment of the original American.
Pure -bred cayuses are tethered to the Indian
tie-posts or are mounted by the chubby-faced boys
of the reserve, while down the road and past the
little church and its surrounding graves ambles
a retinue of old folks, two to a pony, the women
flaunting bright bits of red colour against the sky-
line of grey and blue.
Succeeding the Indian hamlet, looking lonely
and ,unkempt in a land of sage-bushes and sun-
baked hills, come the irrigated oases. Blessed be
water in a parched land I No wonder the Eastern
283
Through the Heart of Canada
vendor cries out, as he sells the sweetened water,
that it is the gift of Allah. And amid the barren
desolation of the semi -arid region of the Lower
Cariboo, the soil, with its germinating life
seemingly burnt out, is ready to burst into a luxuri-
ance of growth when its deep thirst is slaked.
Striking is the contrast : a circle of swelling
hills, grey to their summits, with the dull garb of a
parched vegetation, and in the bed of the valley
a garden of trees and flowers and sweet-smelling
fields of hay, through which runs a clear-hearted
stream, lined with cottonwood-trees and rushes
having the first drink thereof. Nothing fairer can
be seen in all British Columbia than these water-
won ranches, whether in the Okanagan and
Kootenay valleys of the south, or the Kamloops
and Cariboo areas of the north and west.
More water will mean more ranches, more farms
and orchards, more tillers of the soil, more wealth
and prosperity, just in proportion as capital is
applied to its transition from the reservoirs of the
mountains to the thirsty lands of the benches and
walls. To be told the actual annual yield value
from a single acre of an irrigated fruit ranch in
British Columbia is to tax an Easterner's credulity
to the straining-point.
284
Along the Fraser and the Cariboo
The enclosing hills of the trail indicate their
suggestions of untold wealth. Eor miles the eye
may trace the copper tints in the slopes, as in
the bed of Marble Eake— that wonderful trans-
lucent pool of royal blue, sleeping the centuries
away at the base of the equally wonderful Marble
Canon. Farther to the north miners have been
experimenting by hydraulic processes with the long
unworked mines at Bullion, while along the flood-
rent gorges of the Eraser the individual gold-
seeker still washes out a living in pay-dirt ; and
monster steam dredges are anchored to its banks,
awaiting the order of their owners to resume
operations. And as British Columbia has yielded
up a hundred millions in gold in the past, so no
doubt as many millions* worth more are awaiting
their discovery and recovery.
Every twenty miles or so the character of the
country changes. After a day's driving from
Ashcroft, the belt of aridity is left behind and a
different scene unfolds not unlike a bit of Scotland,
with tree-covered hills guarding a chain of long,
narrow lakes at their base . Herds of cattle and flocks
of sheep give the pastoral note to the landscape ;
comfortable homes come into view with greater
frequency, and nature is fair to look upon all the
285
Through the Heart of Canada
way to Clinton and beyond. By the roadside is
a bit of architecture that tells of the makeshifts
of the pioneers. An old piano-box stands on
end, and the rusty stove-pipe emerging therefrom
advertises the fact that it had been the one -room
home of an old-timer. The rude habitation is in
the same class as the ruined cabins along the way,
half cellar and half log and mud huts. One's
curiosity is aroused, however, regarding the piano.
What was its history? who was the millionaire
who could afford to pay the freight upon it, and
is it still doing duty as a dispenser of music ?
Incidents of the trail are as numerous as the
mile posts. Always picturesque are the freight
caravans slowly but surely creeping their way up
hills and down grades, each drawn by several
teams of horses. Perched high on the box-seat
will be a grizzled survivor of the reckless days of
the past, holding in his memory a rich store of
yarns. Or the driver may be a solemn Indian
or an equally immovable Chinaman, the latter
trekking goods to his own merchant countrymen
up the trail.
The journey from Clinton leads to and up and
over and down Pavilion Mountain. There are
many corkscrews on its heavy grades ; there are,
286
Along the Eraser and the Cariboo
moreover, numerous opportunities for mountain -
climbing while the panting horses are making the
ascent. But when the plateau is reached, a
wondrous vision bursts upon the eye : far below,
a pear-shaped lake, hidden away in a tangle of
trees ; to the west, glimpses of the Eraser's
northern course ; to the farther west, the snow-
crowned peaks of the Cascades ; and immediately
below, a fertile valley, dotted with farm-houses—
a fair picture of peace and plenty.
The Fraser and its environing hills of many
colours can be seen long before the first sight
is had of the yellow stream itself, hundreds of feet
below, and many a descent, of startling steepness,
has to be warily made before coming to close
quarters with the historic waterway. The place
of meetings is at the Fountain, where the Fraser
takes an acute turn, and where the scenery is of
the wildest and grandest description.^ It is a vast
amphitheatre, the lofty river-hills showing strange
sculptures in clay amid the titanic clefts and gullies
and buttes. All the colours of the rainbow are
visible in the weird earth walls on every hand.
Wine-coloured masses here, red blood-stained
masses there, silver on the waters, gold on the
mountains and blue overhead.
287
Through the Heart of Canada
It is overwhelming I The mind can scarce find!
a place for the lonely Shuswap grave, standing on
a high bluff above the stormy stream ; or for the
stray Indians, astride diminutive ponies, gazing im-
passively into one's face as they pass by.
But it is the river and the river's mighty bed
that fascinate the human onlookers. With iwhat
infinity of patience nature carries the yellow soil
of the northland to the making of a delta hundreds
of imiles to the west, and to the shifting of the
gravels to the rich gold bars farther down-
stream .
One party of tourists has reason to remember
the last stage of the day's journey from the
Fountain to Lillooet. Darkness overtook them
many a league from the only possible destination,
and this on a road that clings sensationally to the
forbidding defiles of the Eraser, now creeping
around a promontory of rock, now hanging
suspended over an unnerving depth.
The way to Lillooet was mostly downhill, and
it seemed the longest downhill road ever built.
Not for an instant dare the brakes be relaxed, nor
the watchful eye of the driver allowed off its guard .
It was a strange world, in which could be heard
the roar of the river, and it had a savage sound ;
288
Along the Eraser and the Cariboo
after nightfall the waters were traced by a ghostly
light, the same that lingered on the overtopping
peaks until a thunderstorm drove them away and
filled the cafion with spirit mists.
The route lay
"Where the mountain pass is narrow,
And the torrent white and strong."
It was a course through a chaos of shades, but
at last a bridge was reached; at long last the
river came nearer, and beyond it, Lillooet, where
in the midnight hours the tired and hungry, but
thankful, wayfarers forgot the perils of the night
ride in the joys of a dreamless sleep.
Continuing the journey northward, two hundred
miles of additional travelling take the stage-coach
passenger though a variety of country, alternating,
as in the region near Ashcroft, from semi-arid areas
to mountainous country, from dusty levels to
forested heights and well-watered valleys. One
Hundred and Fifty Mile House, Soda Creek,
Quesnelle, are among the familiar stopping -places
along the winding route, until Barkerville is
reached. As the centre of the gold-mining excite-
ment of the 'sixties, Barkerville has witnessed not
a little of the life of a typical back-country mining
289 T
Through the Heart of Canada
region. Where thousands formed the transient
population of over a quarter of a century ago, a
more fixed population of hundreds is now engaged
in farming and mining.
Still farther north are trail and water routes lead-
ing into Northern British Columbia, intersecting the
proposed transcontinental line of the Grand Trunk
Pacific Railway. Over these routes during the past
few years, immense quantities of freight and
material for railway construction have been taken,
and this great overland road and its extension trails
may yet see a branch railway connecting the Grand
Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Pacific Railways
for the intervening five hundred miles — even though
it must needs pass through a mountainous region.
290
SOUTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA AND
THE COASTAL CITIES
CHARTER XVI
SOUTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA AND THE COASTAL
CITIES
The lake districts of Southern British Columbia
are incomparable in their beauty. Kootenay,
Arrows, Shuswap, Okanagan exhibit in turn
entrancing glimpses of blue-green waters, hemmed
in by billowy hills and lofty mountain peaks ; of
orchards and farms, ranches and mines ; of lonely
cabins and thriving towns. One is impressed with
the colossal scale on which Nature exhibits her
wonders in this westland province. Hundreds of
miles in the aggregate are traversed by fine
steamers on the four great stretches named, and
on sunshiny summer days, with banks of fleecy
clouds making friends with the snow-tipped
summits, with cool and soft winds coursing down
the deep valleys, the journeys are ideal ones.
Nelson is the water gateway of the Kootenay
Lakes. A bright, bustling centre it is, boasting of
daily papers, a street-car line, and municipal light-
293
Through the Heart of Canada
ing and waterworks plants, and possessing excellent
schools and churches and handsome homes ; while
its citizens wax eloquent over the mineral and
timber wealth of the surrounding hills, and the
fruit-growing possibilities of adjacent bench lands.
Nelson's fruit took first prize at one of the Royal
Horticultural Exhibitions in London. Thousands
of crates of strawberries, apples, and other fruits
are annually shipped from the district to the
Canadian North-West, and the coast also. One
Kootenay fruit-grower claims a net profit of a
thousand dollars from five acres of strawberries.
This is matched by a dweller in the Okanagan
Valley, who is said to have made $150 from the
product of a single cherry-tree. Nelson has a
" 20,000 Club," whose business it is to advertise
the present importance and the prospective great-
ness of the '* Capital of the Kootenays."
The dramatic passage from the Narrows of the
Kootenay River to the main lake on the sail from
Nelson to Kaslo makes a striking scene, with the
overlapping Selkirks narrowing in the northern
distance until lost in a blue haze. The boat calls
at smelters and mines, at prospectors' shacks, and
embryo towns, at summer pleasure camps and
houseboat anchorages. Wharves are not always
294
Southern British Columbia
an essential in this deep-water country, the crafts
nosing their bows on beach or rocks as necessity
requires. 'Hills to the right, hills to the left, hills
encircling one, rise high above the lake — hills
that are mineralised to a yet unknown degree.
Corundum and nickel seem to be the only mineral
products that are not found in this highly
metalliferous region. The attractive ore exhibits,
to be seen on boats and in hotels, are most
suggestive of the mineral riches of the Kootenay
country.
On the Arrow Lakes trip, a ten-hour panorama
of rare beauty is unfolded. The waters of the
Columbia, in their hastening rush to the sea, pour
into the Lakes from the north, giving them a
yellowish tint. On the lake benches, fertile areas
are to be found where bachelor ranchers live in
lonely cabins. The term " ranch " is applied in
British Columbia to farms and orchards, no matter
how small in area. A holding may be comprised
of only a meadow and a small and newly-planted
orchard, in striking contrast to the prairie idea of
a ranch.
On the Arrow, as on the Kootenay Lakes, the
scenery is of the finest description, ranging from
giants of the north to the lesser peaks of the south.
295
i
Through the Heart of Canada
At times, when the mists cHng to the slopes and
clouds form wreaths around the summits, the effect
is most suggestive of the Scottish Highlands. It
needs only a little village of stone cottages nestling
in a nook of rock, or the sight of a flock of sheep
herded by a tartaned shepherd, to make the resem-
blance complete.
Southern British Columbia is a region of timber
houses, some of them ready-to -put -up ones, made
in Vancouver and shipped in sections. In the town
of Arrowhead, frame hotels and stores are afloat
on rafts, and the rest of the houses cling by their
eyebrows to the mountain-sides. Near by are two
of the many great sawmills of the country, and
yet the munerous mills, scattered from Vancouver
and the mainland to the Crow's Nest Pass, cannot
meet the ever-increasing demands of British
Columbia itself and the adjoining prairie
provinces .
At the southern end of the Arrow Lakes, where
the waters again narrow to a river. Trail forms
a door to the Rossland and Boundary districts.
Trail itself, with an immense smelting plant and a
lead and silver refinery, is a busy little town, only
fourteen miles from Rossland, whose mines are
famous the world over, and whose permanency has
296
Southern British Columbia
been fully proved. Grand Forks, with its great
Granby smelter — the largest and most complete
plant of its kind in America — and Greenwood, are
among the important commercial and mining
cities of Southern British Columbia, as Fernie and
Cranbrook are of the Crow's Nest Pass.
The Okanagan Lake District is yet another
Arcadia in this Canadian Switzerland. The scenic
surroundings are softer than among its eastern
lake neighbours. On the way to Vernon from
Sicamous, the valley looks like a bit of old Ontario
in the Far West, with the fields of ripening grain,
the comfortable farmsteads and the general air of
long cultivation and settled prosperity. The
richly laden orchards duplicate the Niagara
peninsula, while the ranches in the connecting
valleys are more on the prairie scale as to area and
stock .
Along the beautiful sheet of water lie the new
fruit-growing centres of Kelowna, Peachland,
Summerland, and Eenticton — musical names all.
To be privileged to eat real apples from a British
Columbia orchard, and to pick real rosy-cheeked
peaches from a Eeachland tree, to see pear- and
plum-trees laden to their limit, and flourishing amid
their irrigation channels, is to be impressed with
297
Through the Heart of Canada
the fact that in this great timber and mining
province of Canada fruit-growing is already an
established industry, where you may pay up to
$500 dollars an acre for choice orchard lands.
It was only in 1903 that the first carload
of British Columbia apples was shipped to
Glasgow — three thousand miles by land, three
thousand miles by sea — where they sold well
and profitably. Another shipment carried safely
to Australia, while a third won a gold medal
in London. British Columbia need not, however,
search for foreign markets for its fruits ; the men
of the western plains stand ready to buy all that
is grown for many a year to come.
The Pacific coast has as yet only one way of
approach — that of the Canadian Pacific Railway,
via the valleys of the Thompson and Eraser Rivers.
Although lines are projected from the Boundary
District westward by way of Penticton, Prince-
town, ^nd the Nicola Valley, the main line
of the Canadian Pacific Railway must still be
used.
As the entrance into the mountain world from
the prairie on the east is strikingly impressive, so
is the exit from the depths of the Eraser Canon to
the plain, reaching for two hundred miles to the
2^
Southern British Columbia
coast. The Fraser River, released from its prison
walls of rock, and broadened by spacious room,
flows more leisurely but none the less surely to
its delta. The face of nature has taken on a
kindlier look as fertile farms and gardens succeed
each other. Attractive branching valleys lure to
their fastnesses, as tributary streams invite explora-
tion to their sources. At Agassiz is situated one
of the Government experimental farms.
Long before Vancouver marks the end of the
across -continent journey, the head of Burrard*s
Inlet provides the first glimpse of salt water, and
the first odour of the sea. The train halts for
the briefest moment at a city that failed to
materialise — at old Port Moody — the -Town -of -
Might -Have -Been. Chosen in the early days of
railway construction to be the western terminal,
the rustic little settlement of shacks had visions
of greatness and wealth. But with the later choice
•of Vancouver, Port Moody relapsed into the
obscurity from which it only momentarily emerged,
leaving behind toredo -eaten piles, deserted and
decaying wharves, and tenantless buildings.
Its successor furnishes a suggestive contrast, for
Vancouver is throbbing with life, and as hopeful
for its future as it is proud of its past. Though
299
Through the Heart of Canada
little less than a quarter of a century old, it is
a commercial and marine metropolis, with a popu-
lation over one hundred thousand. Its commerce
may be measured by the fact that it ranks fourth
among the cities of Canada, as tested by its bank
clearings, which have increased loo per cent, in
only three years.
Possessing one of the finest and roomiest land-
locked harbours in the world, and being the
distributing point for a wide range of coast country,
it is but natural that the shipping interests of Van-
couver are paramount. It is not only the home of
several transpacific and coastal lines, but freighters
from many parts of the world sail through
the tidal narrows, bringing silks and teas from the
Orient and taking away the lumber and fish of
British Columbia and the wheat and flour of the
western plains. The harbour often presents a scene
of rare interest — ocean liners from China and
Japan, Australia and Newi Zealand, vessels from
Mexico and California on the south, and Alaska'
on the north, a great variety of local craft plying
in Euget Sound and the inner channel leading to
Prince Rupert and Skagway, with an occasional
British warship joining the floating company, pr
a fleet of yachts or a flotilla of Indian canoes
300
Southern British Columbia
adding variety to the picture. A half-mile of
vessels are not infrequently berthed closely together
along the water front. Such a scene reveals
the fact that the Empire is being bound together
by cables of commerce as never before. Its steam-
ships bridge every sea, and vessels from Orient
and Occident are anchored in the harbour of
Vancouver — one of the King's great ocean-
gateways.
The crowning! glory of this fine western city of
the Pacific is Stanley Park. In its primeval depths
are to be found magnificent specimens of the giant
cedars and Douglas firs of the coast, towering as
straight as arrows to a maximum height of three
hundred feet. Well-kept roads and endless paths
intersect the sylvan woods, amid a dense under-
growth of ferns and shrubs. At every turn the
sea comes into view, and over it the watery pathway
to Victoria and Vancouver Island.
Vancouver's life really began when, in May of
1887, the first train entered it from the East. Just
a year before occurred the great fire which sweprt
out of existence the little town of Granville, as
Vancouver was then called. Only one house was
left standing. It is interesting to recall the story
of the conflagration as told by an eye-witness,
301
Through the Heart of Canada
Hon. D. W. Higgins, Ex-speaker of the British
Columbia Legislature : —
'* While the struggle was going on between
Vancouver and Port Moody," he says, '* for the
terminus of the C.P.R., a terrible event happened.
On June 1 1 , 1886, I *was playing with my brother
in the road near where Cambie and Cordova Streets
come together. Lots were being cleared, and bush
fires were burningi. Suddenly a high wind sprang
up, and smoke and flames were carried directly
toward the lightly constructed buildings. The at-
mosphere grew so hot that I could scarcely breathe,
and a dense cloud of smoke swept along Water
Street. Sotne one cried, * Fire I ' and there was
a rush of people towards the spot where we boys
were playing. Then I saw a great tongue of flame
shoot out of the cloud of smoke and cast itself like
a fiery monster upon a small wooden hotel that
stood in its way. The guests fled, barely escaping
•with their lives, leaving all their effects behind
them. We were paralysed with fear, and stood
looking at the fire as it swept towards us, until a
man dragged us away. Then we began to cry.
Men were shouting, and women wailing and
shrieking. Some who lingered too long in their
houses were burned to death. The hungry flames
302
Southern British Columbia
swept on, the frenzied inhabitants fleeing before
them, and in less than three hours the town site
was swept almost clean. Thirteen bodies were
found on the streets or among the dying embers.
Three men who had sought refuge in a store were
burnt to a crisp. A mother and her young son
whose retreat was cut off, descended into a well,
but they were suffocated. Such a calamity would
have paralysed most communities. But not so
here, for at four o'clock the next morning, while
the ashes of their buildings were still glowing, Pat
Carey and Duncan McPherson began to rebuild.
Others followed their example. Relief was sent
from all quarters, and the town soon recovered
itself."
The spirit of enterprise that characterised Pat
and Donald over twenty years ago, continues to be
the spirit of this modern city of the West. One
of its ancient landmarks — a dilapidated frame
building on the comer of its two principal streets
—was recently torn down to make way for a
handsome stone bank structure, and this was but
typical of the transformation that is taking place
in every part of the city. While the fine business
section is steadily improving and building up,
the excellent street -car system is assisting in a
303
I
Through the Heart of Canada
rapid suburban expansion. The trolley line to
Steveston, for instance, shows the battle that is
being waged against forests and stumps by the
makers of homes. On one lot will be seen a neat
frame cottage, with a bit of lawn, a profusion of
flowers, and a kitchen garden, while adjoining it
is the once fire -swept forest awaiting a more
complete subjugation at the hands of man. More
room, more homes for more people is the cry
of Vancouver, and the homes of the new city are
models of architectural style, all embowered in a
wealth of flowers and vines.
The line to Steveston affords, moreover, a most
interesting hour's ride, as it carries one over the
north arm of the Eraser River, and across the
fertile fields of Lulu Island to the main channel
of the great salmon river. There one is landed
in as strange a town as all Canada can show. A
down -at -the -heel Chinatown Street, with erratic
sidewalks on rickety props, runs towards the river
where, to right and left stretch the ugly rambling
canneries, interspersed with masses of piling.
Hauled high on shore, and above tide water,
are the elaborately carved canoes of the Indians,
dug out of a single log. Eor two months of the
summer the red folk of the coast flock to the salmon
304
Southern British Columbia
; fisheries, the men helping in the fishing and their
squaws serving in the canneries.
Long lines of rough huts and cabins shelter these
, children of the coast, and if the Mongolian tene-
ments are unattractive, those of the Siwashes are
' even more so . When off duty the women busy
themselves with baking bannock, splitting, curing
and smoking salmon, or making baskets, the men
being engaged in superintending the tasks.
In one of the Steveston canneries, the Scottish-
Canadian, there is shown a wonderful invention
by means of which three men are able to do the
work of thirty ! With almost human ingenuity, the
machine cuts off the head and tail of the salmon,
cuts it open, cleans it, and finally slices it ready
for packing!. Great pyramids of the canned pro-
duct, awaiting shipment to the uttermost parts of
the earth, tell of the importance and extent of the
industry, which has reached an annual value of a
million dollars. The sight of the salmon fleet with
all sails set, scattered over the three river mouths,
is a striking one as seen from the deck of the
Vancouver-Victoria steamer on the sail across the
Straits of Georgia to the most western limit of
the continent -wide Dominion.
Victoria is the portal of the Pacific, the ocean
305 u
Through the Heart of Canada
gateway to the Orient, the half-way house on
Britain's great world trade route between London
and Hongkong, the most westerly link in Canada's
chain of cities.
The Victorian is pardonably proud of his pro-
vincial capital and of the isle that shelters it,
and as the sojourner from the east approaches this
city by the sea, through a picturesque channel of
wooded islands, the thought ever thrills him that
he is still in Canada. Though nearly four thousand
miles from Halifax, the sister city of the Atlantic ;
though nine provinces have been traversed in the
westward journey, the traveller is within the bounds
of the vast dominion, that stretch for many a league
farther to the northern end of Vancouver Island
and its smaller island satellites.
The charm of Victoria is easily understood,
especially by an Englishman. With flowers and
shrubs and trees to remind him of his motherland,
with gardens of roses, with trees of holly, andj
hedges of laurel, and bushes of sweet briar, little!
vwonder that Victoria is the new home -centre of
hundreds of English folk. A reminder of the
British Isles in new Canada, it possesses a
delightful climate, always equable and most
invigorating, with an average daily sunshine of
306
•.#l^g
1
Southern British Columbia
seven hours for six months of the year, with a
temperature rarely over 80 degrees in summer
or below 40 degrees in winter, and with an air
surcharged with the purest of sea ozone. So
healthful are the climatic conditions that the visitor
on hearing them recited, and truthfully so, is some-
times led to suspect that the good citizens must
find it necessary to leave the place, as is said of
Ilfracombe, in order to die I
As Vancouver glories in Stanley Park, so Victoria
is happy in the possession of Beacon Hill Park.
Under its gnarled oaks, and on the moorland
stretches bordered by the rocky coast -line, there is
unfolded a matchless panorama. In front, to the
right and to the left, is the sweep of the sea, the
never resting sea, as blue -coloured as the blue sky
overhead . Farther in front, resting against the sky-
line, is the sixty-mile range of the snow-sheathed
Olympic Mountains . Yet farther south-by-east, the
great white throne -like peak of Mount Baker makes
pigmy in height all the rest of the visible world.
urning northward, other mountains, tree -covered
to their summits, invite the beholder to revel in
leir hidden scenic beauty.
In the near distance, looking cityward, rise the
jautiful homes of its leading citizens— the stately
307
Through the Heart of Canada
Dunsmuir Castle, the picturesque Government
House, and the residences of bankers, capitalists
and commercial magnates.
The echoes of the tally-ho horn ring through
the avenues of trees as party after party of tourists
" do *' the town in that modem abbreviated time-
table fashion. For Victoria has long since become
one of the favourit,e tourist centres of the Pacific
coast, and since California has indulged in ominous
and disastrous ague fits, an increasing number of
residents from that part of the United States are
making Victoria their home.
The harbour scenes are full of interest, and they
are as suggestive as they are interesting. There
one may touch the alluring world beyond the
Pacific. A stately Japanese liner, swarming with
little brown Japs, sails in from Yokohama or
Nagasaki ; a steam whaler, with modem
harpooning machinery, comes in laden with the
spoils of the huge crustacean in barrels of sperm
oil and sacks of fertilising material, while a sealing
craft is anchored over against the time when it
will sail northward. Herring from Nanaimo and
cured salmon from other coastal points help to
form the freight of the long wharves, with ship-
ments of lumber and coal telling of other rich
resources of Vancouver Island.
308
A TYPICAL FOREST SCENE, VANCOUVER ISLAND.
ToaK»p.3<«.
Southern British Columbia
I
■ Not the least important part of British Columbia
is Vancouver Island. From its commanding
position on the Pacific coast, and its wealth of
natural resources in coal, mining, lumbering and
(fisheries, the island is rich beyond estimate. But
in this it is only typical of the entire province,
in which the trade is the largest in the world per
head of the population. Nearly every mineral is
found within its boundaries, the mines having
produced all told over three hundred million
dollars' worth. The fisheries yield an annual
average value of seven millions. The total lumber
cut is nearing a billion feet from the greatest com-
pact area of merchantable timber in North
America.
With the gradual opening up of British Columbia
by means of new railway lines, the undoubted
resources of the mountain province will be in-
creasingly developed along the lines predicted by
its Einance Minister. The construction of the
Grand Trunk Pacific across its northern end will
open up an entirely new section, and the founding
of the terminal of Prince Rupert may mean a
second Vancouver, six hundred miles north of
Burrard's Inlet. The projected building of inter-
secting lines between the Grand Tnmk Pacific and
309
Through the Heart of Canada
southern and central British Columbia will open
the way to further settlement, as will the con-
templated extensions pf the Canadian Pacific
Railway system and the Canadian Northern
Railway. No part of Canada has a more hopeful
outlook than its western state ; no part has richer
possibilities or greater wealth hidden in its granite
hills, its deep-hearted rivers, and its forested areas .
An integral part of '* the heart of Canada " is its
Alpine province.
The creation of a Dominion forty-three years
ago gave birth to the thought of dominion, of
self-reliance, of a deep-seated faith in home and
native land : —
"They love their land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why."
And this love of land and coimtry is as marked
in British Columbia as in the maritime provinces,
in the far East by. the Atlantic as in the far West
by the Pacific, and the far North by the Arctic.
But what of the Canada of the future — a
Dominion swiftly passing] into an Empire?
Complex problems will continue to demand
solution, perils will arise as in the past to tax the
wisdom of the statesmen who hold the helm.
310
Southern British Columbia
Patience will still be needed, and with patience
the knowledge that men cannot hurry history nor
can the wisest of human laws solve every problem
of State, or cure every ill by merely being placed
on a statute-book.
The upbuilding of the Dominion, in every depart-
ment of its national life, in the material as well
as in the spiritual realms, will require faith,
courage, and time — and the greatest of these is
faith . More heartily and earnestly than ever, more
truly than the men of former generations, can
the Canadian sons of the Empire sing with
'' Eidelis " :— -
" Four nations welded into one, with long historic past,
Have found, in these our western wilds, one common life at
last;
Through the young giant's mighty limbs, that stretch from sea
to sea
There runs the throb of conscious life, of waking energy.
From Nova Scotia's misty coast to far Columbia's shore.
She wakes, a band of scattered homes and colonies no more,
But a young nation, with her life full beating in her breast,
A noble future in her eyes, the Britain of the West ! "
I
311
INDEX
Agriculture... 27, 44, 64, 78, 130, 148, 157, 158,
163-65, 223
Alberta 164-66, 215-229
Algonquin National Park 143
Alpine Club of Canada 241, 254
Annapolis ... ... ... ... ... 17, 18
Arrow Lakes 295, 296
Banff National Park
...
...
... 234
Banking
...
...
... no, I]
t8, 159) 300
Bic
...
...
...
... 68
Brant, Joseph
...
...
...
... 134
Brantford
...
...
...
. • 133
Bras d'Or Lakes
••.
... ...
22
British Columbia
...
...
...
257-311
Brock, Sir Isaac
•
...
...
128, 129
Calgary
216, 217
Cariboo Road
...
...
...
278-290
Cartier, Jacques
...
...
...
... 60
Chaleur Bay
...
...
...
... 40
Chambly
...
...
... 74
Champlain, Samuel
de
...
...
33. 61, 74
Charlottetown
...
313
...
- 45
Index
I06--09
...
21
50
, 51
258-
-260
18
33
123,
124
182-
-185
...
79
217,
218
203,
204
Chateau de Ramezay
Chester
Coffin, Sir Isaac
Cougar Valley
De Monts, Sieur ...
Denonville, Marquis de
Doukhobors
Eastern Townships
Edmonton
Eskimos
Fisheries ... 26, 35, 43, 44, 63, 152-54, 305, 309
Foreigners 175-192
Fort Beausejour 32
Fort McPherson 201, 208
Fort William 154
Eraser, Simon 275, 276
Eraser Caiion 277
Eraser River 276, 287, 299
Eredericton ... 38
Erontenac, Count de 122
Fruit-growing 19, 131, 297, 298
Galicians 177-182
Gaspe 40, 41
Georgian Bay 142
Germans 187
Glaciers 247, 248, 258
Grand Pre 15
Greeks 189
314
Index
Habitant 79-82, 90, 91
Halifax 12-14
Hamilton
I
133
Herschell Island 197, 202
Hudson Bay 70, 97, 197, 209
Hunting 39
Icelanders 186
Immigration 165, 175
Indians —
Algonquins ... 140
Caughnawagas 113
Five Nations 123
Hurons 114, 140, 141,
Iroquois... 68, 70, 94, 104, 122, 123
Micmacs 33, 68
Mohawks 134
Neutrals 125
Siwashes 305
Irrigation 228, 229, 284
Italians 189
Jesuits 70
Kingston
Kootenay Lakes
Labrosse
Lachine Rapids
Lakes Among the Clouds
Lake Superior
Lalemont, Pere
La Loutre, Pere
La Salle, Sieur de
315
12
1-24
...
294
7c
, 72
...
113
...
238
152,
153
...
93
...
32
123,
126
Inde:
La Tour, Charles de
Le Jeune, Pere
Levis
L' Islet au Massacre
London
Louisbourg
Lumbering
Lundy's Lane
Lunenburg
33
93
86
68
134
12, 23-26
35, 78, 120, 144-147, 309
129
21
Magdalen Islands
Mahone Bay
Maisonneuve, Chomedey de
Manitoba
Manufacturing
Mennonites ...
Mining
Missions
Moncton Bore
Montcalm, Louise de
Montreal
Mormons
Mountain ranges —
Rockies
Selkirks
Coastal
Cascades
Mountain Peaks —
Mount Aberdeen
Mount Assiniboine
Mount Baker
Cathedral Peak
Cougar Mountain
Mount Sir Donald
316
22, 147, 148, 285,
49-64
20
103, 104
161-68
no, 119
... 188
295-97, 309
... 192
... 36
88, 95
103-114
223-27
233-254
257-272
... 258
... 258
251-54
... 238
... 307
237, 244
262, 263
244, 359
Index
Mountain Peaks (continued)
— -
Mount Temple
241,250
Mount Vice-President
242-44
Mount Victoria
239,240
Mounted Police
195-211
Muskoka T/akes
140-42
Nelson
293
New Brunswick
31-43
Newfoundland
49
Niagara Falls
130
Niagara Peninsula ...
125-130
Niagara River
125
Norwegians. See under Scandinavians
Notre Dame des Victoires
87
Nova Scotia
9-27
Oka
75
Okanagan Lakes
297
Ontario —
Old Ontario
117-135
New Ontario ...
139-154
Orientals
190
Ottawa
"9
Ottawa River
74
Paradise Valley ...
249
Perce Rock
42,43
Pioneers
131,132
Plains of Abraham ...
95
Port Arthur
154
Prairies
169-172
Prince Edward Island
44,45
Prince Rupert
309
317
Index
Quebec City 85-100
Quebec Province 67-82
Queenston Heights 128
Ranching 219-222
Regina i6i
Richelieu River 73
Rocky Mountains. See under Mountain Ranges
Saguenay River 69
St. Anne de Beaupre 96-99
St. John 33-35
St. John River 36, 37
St. Lawrence River 67-69, 105
St. Thomas 134
Saskatchewan 164-66
Scandinavians 185, 186
Selkirk Caves 264-272
Selkirk Mountains. See under Mountain Ranges
Settlers 149-151, 165-69
Shipping 35, 100, 300, 308
Sillery 92-94
Simcoe, John Graves 1 124, 128
Sous-le-Cap 87
Steveston 304
Summerside «. ... 45
Swedes. See under Scandinavians
Tadousac 69, 70
Takkakaw Falls 245
Talbot Settlement 134
Temagami 143, 144
Toronto n8
Trappists 75-77
318
Index
United Empire Loyalists 21, 33, 40, 117, 124, 127
Vancouver ...
Vancouver Island
Victoria
Whaling
Winnipeg
Wolfe, James
Yarmouth ...
Yoho Valley ...
Yukon
299-303
306-09
305
202
158-160
25, 41, 86, 95
21
245-48
197
319
I
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WOKHfG AND LONDON.
BINDING SECT. MAY 9 1973
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