Part 24

“Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers— Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains, Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains. Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between ’em; Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour; Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that screen ’em— Saw the plant to feed a people—up and waiting for the power!”

XIII

CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE

Darkness had fallen on the Oregonian forest when our forward tire exploded with a report which sounded in that eerie stillness like a bursting shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blowout—in the heart of a forest as large as many a European kingdom, with the nearest settlement half a hundred miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of the pines, however, I glimpsed a signal of human presence in the twinkling of a fire, and toward it I made my way through underbrush and over fallen trunks, while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his breath, busied himself at the maddening task of fitting on another tire in the darkness.

I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene which greeted me as I halted on the edge of a little clearing fitfully illuminated by a roaring camp-fire. Within the circle of warmth—for the summer nights are chilly in the north country—stood a canvas-topped wagon which appeared to be a half-brother to a prairie-schooner, an uncle to an army ambulance, and a cousin to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down, so that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated beside it on an upended soap box a plump little woman in a calico dress was preparing six small youngsters for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a New England farmhouse, with the neighbours’ lights twinkling through the trees, instead of in the middle of a primeval wilderness, a long day’s journey from anywhere. The horses had been outspanned, as they say in South Africa, and were placidly exploring the recesses of their nose-bags for the last stray grams of oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed man, who had been squatting beside the fire watching the slow progress of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet on my approach and slouched forward with outstretched hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality and an air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked him.

“Howdy, friend,” he drawled, with the unmistakable nasal twang of the Middle West. “I reckon you’ve had a little bad luck with your machine, ain’t you? We heard you a-comin’ chug-chuggin’ through the woods, hell bent for election, an’ all to once there was a noise ’s if some one had pulled the trigger of a shotgun. ‘There,’ says I to Arethusa, ‘some pore autermobile feller’s limpin’ ’round in the darkness on three legs,’ says I, ‘an’ as soon ’s I get this coffee to boilin’ I reckon I’ll stroll over with a lantern an’ see if I can’t give him some help.’”

“Just as much obliged,” said I, “but my man has the tire pretty well on by now. But we could do with a cup or so of that coffee if you’ve some to spare.”

[Illustration: This settler’s nearest neighbour was fifty miles away—

And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife.

OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION.]

“That’s what coffee’s for, friend—to drink,” he said cordially, reaching for a tin cup. “Where’ve you come from?” he added with polite curiosity.

“From the Mexican border,” said I, with, I suspect, a trace of self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen hundred miles of desert, forest, and mountains lay behind us. “And you?” I asked in turn.

“Us?” he answered. “Oh, we’ve come from Kansas.” (He said it as unconcernedly as a New Yorker might mention that he had just run over to Philadelphia for a day.) “Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago come Thursday and have averaged nigh on twenty-five miles a day ever since. An’ the horses ain’t in bad condition, neither.”

“And where, in the name of Heaven,” I exclaimed, “are you going?”

“Well,” was the reply, “we’re headed for British Columbia, but I reckon we’ll have to winter somewheres in Washington and push on across the line in the spring. You see, friend,” he continued, in his placid, easy-going manner, in reply to my rapid fire of inquiries, “it was this way. I was in the furniture business back in Kansas, furniture an’ undertakin’, but I didn’t much care for the business ’cause it kept me indoors so much, my folks always havin’ been farmers and such like. Well, one day a while back, I picked up one of them folders sent out by the Canadian Gov’ment, tellin’ ’bout the rich resources up in British Columbia, an’ how land was to be had for the askin’. So that night when I went home I says to Arethusa: ‘What’d you think of sellin’ out an’ packin’ up and goin’ up British Columbia way, an’ gettin’ a farm where we can live out o’ doors an’ make a decent livin’?’ ‘Sure,’ says she, ‘I’d like it fine. An’ it’ll be great for the kids.’ ‘All right,’ says I,’ it’s all decided. I’ll build a body for the delivery wagon that we can sleep in, an’ we’ll take Peter an’ Repeater, the delivery team, an’ it won’t take us more than six or eight months to make the trip if we keep movin’.’ You see, friend,” he added, “my paw moved out to Kansas when there warn’t nothin’ there but Indians an’ sage-brush, an’ hers did, too, so I reckon this movin’ on to new places is sort of in the blood.”

“But why British Columbia?” I queried. “Why Canada at all? What’s the reason that you, an American, don’t remain in the United States?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly, I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a man has a better chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’ the Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled an’ there ain’t the chances in it there was once; but up British Columbia way it’s still a frontier country, they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle down an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’ quicker’n anywhere else, I guess. It’s fine land up in the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’ in the Cariboo country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad that they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a pretty good country for a man to live in, too. Here in the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’ ’bout our laws, but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in wrong, of course, but from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a great country up there one of these days, when they get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta got the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers, like our paws were, an’ get in an’ help build the country, an’ let our kids grow up with it. You’ve got to be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’ coffee before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve met you. Good luck to you.”

“Good luck to _you_,” said I.

[Illustration: “Chopping a path to To-morrow—” Frontiersmen clearing a town site in the forests of British Columbia.

Law and order in the back country: the sheriff of the Cariboo—the only law-officer for three hundred miles.

BREAKING THE WILDERNESS.]

* * * * *

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

[Illustration: A heavy load but well packed.

Even the dogs have to carry their share.

A heavy load poorly packed.

PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG.]

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

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

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

[Illustration: The Upper Fraser: “Streams of threaded quicksilver hasten through the valleys as though anxious to escape from the solitude that reigns.”

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

IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND.]

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

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

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