Part 25

The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back of his head, sticks a thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, and with the other hand gives you a resounding whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one takes Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the madam and the kids for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing doing—no business. Why, say, friend, do you know what they do down there? _They drink afternoon tea!_ Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, progressive, wide-awake, up-and-doing burg this side of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to spare? Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out and show you a piece of property that you can make a fortune on if you buy it quick. Yes, sirree, you can get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest your money in Vancouver.”

There are not more than ten harbours in the world, certainly not more than a dozen at the most, that have a right to be spoken of in the same breath with Victoria’s landlocked port. Picking her cautious way through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes the harbour of Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort, our vessel swept ahead with stately deliberation, while we leaned over the rail in the crispness of the early morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly spread themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled pleasure yachts, dainty as a débutante; impertinent, omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive noses everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of their paint; greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting like an expressman who has carried your trunk upstairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell ’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore masthead; rusty freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore, Heaven knows where; Japanese fishing-boats with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed descendants of the first inhabitants; huge twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners outward bound for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for Victoria boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take my word for it, it’s a sight worth seeing, is Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We forged ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and nearer, until we could make out the line of four-horsed brakes waiting to rattle those tourists whose time was limited to the customary “points of interest,” and the crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables with their helmet straps under their lower lips and blue-and-white-striped bands on their sleeves, exactly like their fellows in Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. At the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a result of the combined warmth and moisture the vegetation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the temperate zone; at the left the business portion of the city stretched away in stolid and uncompromising brick and stone; squarely ahead of us loomed the great bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into it had we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t, for the captain yanked a lever on the bridge and bells jangled noisily in the engine room, and the vessel, turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the berth that awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed stall.

What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed British. Unless you are observing enough to notice that the date-lines of the London papers in the Union Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never dream that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in Seattle. If you still have any lingering doubts as to the atmosphere of the place being completely and unreservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled if you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of the Empress Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and see the knickerbockered sons of Albion engaged in the national diversion of drinking tea. When an American is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give- you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it air, but your Britisher does it with all the matter-of-courseness with which a New Yorker orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the earliest impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought on, you suppose, by the dampness of the climate—but after a little it dawns on you that they are merely employing the broad A that they brought with them from the old country, along with their monocles and their beautifully cut riding clothes. In Vancouver, on the contrary, you never hear the broad A used at all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond Street fresh upon him. They have no time for it. They are too busy making money. The Victorians, on the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about the filthy lucre. _They_ are too busy having a good time. They have enough money to be comfortable, and that seems to be all they want. That’s the plan on which the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most of the Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks and champagne thirsts. For a man with a modest income and an unquenchable thirst for sport Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the sporting life, for game-preserves and salmon rivers and polo ponies run into a lot of money, but in Victoria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, for you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo for sixty or seventy dollars and a few miles back of the city lies one of the greatest fishing and shooting regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria I found all the banks and business houses closed, and flags were flying from every public building, and a procession, headed by mounted police and a band, was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I inquired of a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the King’s birthday or is there royalty in town, or what?” “Not on your life!” he answered witheringly. “It’s the prime minister on his way to open the baseball season.”

If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country without the expense and trouble of an ocean voyage, I doubt if you could do better than to put your car on a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with “Victoria” pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it, you will find Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I should say as un-American) as England; in many respects it is more English than England itself. Though the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very great, for civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the island’s edges, the roads that have been built are unsurpassed anywhere. If roads are judged not only by their smoothness but by the scenery through which they pass, then the highways of Vancouver Island are in a class by themselves. They are as smooth as the arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by scenery as alluring as Scherezade. The spinal column of Vancouver’s highway system is the splendid Island Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus, Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and Wellington, to Nanoose Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up the coast to Campbell River, which is the northernmost point that can be reached by road, while the other fork swings inland, skirting the shores of Cameron Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound, to Great Central Lake, which, as its name indicates, is in the very heart of the island, upward of a hundred and fifty miles from Victoria as the motor goes. The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known as the Malahat Drive, the road here climbing over a mountain range of considerable height by means of a splendidly surfaced but none too wide shelf, with many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky face of the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until the giant firs in the gloomy gorge below look no larger than hedge-plants, and the waters of the sound, with its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you drive with caution. But it is no place for joy riding. It is too narrow, in the first place, and the turns are too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the bottom that they would have to gather up your remains with a shovel, which is messy and inconvenient.

Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we were impressed with the universal politeness and good nature of the people we met, particularly in the back country, and by the courteous wording of the signs along the highways. The highway signs in the United States have a habit of shaking a fist in your face, metaphorically speaking, and shouting at you: “Go any faster if you dare!” But in Vancouver they assume that you are a gentleman and address you as such. Instead of curtly ordering you to “Go slow” without condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign like this: “Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for the children,” and, a little way beyond, another which says, “Thank you”—a little courtesy which costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush and leaves you permeated with a glow of good feeling.

When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining centre of considerable importance, we found one of the periodic strikes which serve to relieve the tedium of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets. When we speak of militia in the United States we usually think of slouch-hatted youths in rather slovenly uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in an instruction camp each summer, and parade down the main streets of their respective towns on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian militiamen were something quite different. I don’t suppose that they are a whit more efficient when it comes to the business of slaughter than their cousins south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you imagine several hundred young Americans dressed in plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an interim of bare knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping the upper hand in a strike-ridden American city? I can’t. These young men belonged, so I was told, to a “Highland” regiment, though after talking with a few of them I gathered that their acquaintance with the Highlands consisted in having occupied seats in the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder. But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they were running the show in Nanaimo and, from all indications, running it very well.

Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Vancouver Island, either from the view-point of an artist or a motorist, is that portion of the Island Highway between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first traversed it in the golden radiance of an October day, I thought it was the most beautiful road I had ever seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of memory, with a knowledge of most of the other beautiful highways of the world to compare it with, I am still of the same opinion. So impressive is the scenery, so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we were in the nave of a great cathedral. High above us the tree tops interlaced in a roof of translucent green through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the road into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the tree trunks into old-gold plush. The meadowed hillsides were so thickly strewn with lacy ferns and wild flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they use in ladies’ boudoirs; and scattered about, as might be expected in a lady’s boudoir, were silver mirrors—with rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering over the shoulders of other peaks like soldiers _en échelon_. They ran the gamut of the more sober colours; green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then the dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of scrub and underbrush, the violet and blue and purple of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a crown of dazzling white.

The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring folders that you find in racks in railway offices and hotel lobbies very cleverly play on the Anglo-Saxon love for sport by describing the region through which their particular system runs as “a sportsman’s paradise.” It makes small difference whether they are describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the Berkshire hills, they are all “sportsman’s paradises.” But the northern half of Vancouver Island is all that this much-abused term implies and more. It is, I suppose, the finest and most accessible fish and game country on the continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware that I may be accused of belonging to the Ananias Club when I say that certain of the smaller streams in Vancouver Island (and also in northern British Columbia) are at certain seasons of the year so choked with salmon that they can be, _and are_, speared with a pitchfork, and that ruffed grouse and Chinese pheasants are so plentiful and tame that they can be knocked over with a long-handled shovel. It’s true, just the same. We didn’t pitchfork any salmon ourselves, because it isn’t our conception of sport, but we saw natives tossing them out of a stream north of Alberni as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking hay. Nor did we assassinate any game-birds with a shovel; but more than once, during the run from Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve aside to avoid running down grouse, which were so tame that a Plymouth Rock would be wild in comparison; and once, near Cameron Lake, we actually did run over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese cock pheasant that insolently refused to get off the road.

Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni, occupy the anomalous position of being in the middle of the island and at the same time on its western coast. If you will take the trouble to look at the map you will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound reaches into the very heart of the island, thus permitting deep-sea merchantmen to tie up at Port Alberni’s wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and dried salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should have liked to linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is its Old-World atmosphere as it dozes the sunny days away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling with the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds it. Because it is so comparatively little visited, and because the waters of the sound are famous for their salmon runs, we expected that we would have an opportunity to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met with disappointment, for the salmon with which these waters swarm were, for strictly domestic reasons, not biting at the time we were there. So we kept on to Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni, through the forest.

[Illustration: The Ark, on Great Central Lake. “Like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary.”

A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of Vancouver Island.

SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND.]

Even though you do not know a trout from a turbot, a fly from a spoon; even though some of the finest scenery in the three Americas could not elicit an “Oh!” of admiration or an “Ah!” of pleasure, I hope that some day you will visit Great Central Lake, if for no other reason than to experience the novelty of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel. It is called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of twenty bedrooms built on a raft anchored in the lake. When the fishing becomes indifferent in the neighbourhood, the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up the engines of his launch, and tows his floating hotel elsewhere. The fish have a hard time keeping away from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It is patronised in the main by that world-wide brotherhood whose members believe that no place is too remote or too difficult of access if their journey is rewarded by the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce rod or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel. For that reason one is quite likely to run across some very interesting people at The Ark. While we were there a party of English notabilities arrived. There were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful daughter, Lady Marjorie What’s-her-Name, and a cousin, the Honourable So-and-So, and the earl’s mine manager, and one or two others. Now there isn’t anything very remarkable about meeting British nobility in the Colonies, for nowadays you find earls and marquises and dukes floating around everywhere. In fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations, you can’t escape them. The remarkable thing about this particular party was that they had tramped overland from the extreme northern end of the island, where some mining properties in which the earl was interested are situated, through unmapped and almost unknown forests, sleeping in the open with no covering save the blankets they carried on their backs, and with the Lady Marjorie for their cook. She was as slim and trim and pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with her curly hair creeping out from under her soft hat, her Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom figure, her smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings, she might have stepped out of one of those novels by the Williamsons.

* * * * *

The chief factor in the colonisation of British Columbia and in the development of its resources is the remarkable railway expansion which is now taking place. No region in the world has witnessed such extraordinary progress in railway construction during the past five years. Until the spring of 1914 the “C. P. R.,” as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called throughout the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and passenger transportation in the province, being scarcely less autocratic in its attitude and methods than the Standard Oil Company before it was curbed by Federal legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of the Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of Fort George and the last spike driven, the “C. P. R.” suddenly found its hitherto undisputed supremacy challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped system, which, owing to its more northerly route and easier gradients, is able to make considerably faster running time from ocean to ocean than its long-established rival. Moreover, another great transcontinental system, the Canadian Northern, is already in partial operation and is rapidly nearing completion, while the construction gangs have begun work on the Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Pacific, over whose rails the latter plans to reach tide-water at Vancouver, thus invading territory which the Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as peculiarly its own. In another year or so, therefore, British Columbia will not only have a more complete railway system than either Washington or Oregon, but it will be the terminus of three great transcontinental systems, each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water, under the same management and the same name.

If you will glance at the map at the back of this volume you will see that the railway systems of British Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic Z. The lower right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse Pass, near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific crosses the Rockies; the lower left-hand corner may stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus of the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the Pacific Great Eastern; the upper right-hand corner of the Z we will designate as Yellowhead (or Tête Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the upper left-hand corner is the great terminal port which the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to order at Prince Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately represents the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the diagonal the Canadian Northern.

The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the province at Kicking Horse Pass and, dropping southward in a series of sweeping curves, strikes the Fraser at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver. From the main line numerous branches straggle southward to the American border, thus giving access to the rich country lying between the Kootenai and the Okanogan. Entering British Columbia far to the northward, through the Tête Jaune Pass, where the mountains are much lower, the Canadian Northern lays its course southwestward in almost a straight line, crossing the Thompson just above its junction with the Fraser and thence paralleling the Canadian Pacific through the cañon of the Fraser, though on the opposite side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian Northern is, I might add, spending a large sum in the construction of railway shops and yards at Port Mann, a place which it is building to order amid the virgin forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The Grand Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tête Jaune Pass as a gateway. Instead of turning southward after crossing the mountains, however, it swings far to the north, following the east fork of the Fraser to Fort George and thence up the level and fertile valleys of the Nechako and the Bulkley to New Hazelton and so down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising the necessity of having a means of direct access to Vancouver, which is the metropolis of western Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific now has under construction a subsidiary system, to be known as the Pacific Great Eastern, which, leaving the main line at Fort George, will follow the Fraser due southward to Lillooet and then strike directly across a virgin country to Vancouver, thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific engineers have also drawn plans for a line running due north from New Hazelton toward the Yukon, which would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of the Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost British Columbia, the idea being, of course, to ultimately effect a junction with the proposed Federal railway in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway communication with the outside world.

[Illustration: Indians breaking camp.

Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country.

An Indian bridge near New Hazelton.

LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND.]