Part 26

Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver Island has not yet had its share of railway expansion, its only system of transportation at present being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs from Victoria to Alberni, in the heart of the island. The Canadian Northern, however, proposes to build a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival one better, has obtained a concession for building a railway from one end of the island to the other, thus opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately before them, it seems to me that the British Columbians are quite justified in looking at the future through rose-coloured glasses.

[Illustration: The bull train: the last on the continent.

The dog train: taking in supplies to the miners of the Groundhog coal-fields.

TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]

Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert, for example. A city literally made to order, just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes, is something of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent and slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built in a day,” but that was because it had no transcontinental railway system to finance and superintend and push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine, & Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its directors knew their business, they would have turned loose their engineers, architects, and builders and, after staking out and draining a town site beside the Tiberian marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and auctioned off the building lots along the Via Appia as expeditiously as the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has brought into being the west-coast terminus which it has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine prince, nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a cavalry leader, a naval commander, and the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your family atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully observed that most of them were purchased at about the period of Stanley’s explorations) you will search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made municipality came into existence about the same time as the tango and the turkey-trot. The easiest way to locate it, then, is to trace with your finger parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war with England) until it reaches the Pacific Coast of North America. There, five hundred and fifty miles north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, set on a range of hills overlooking one of the finest deep-water harbours in the world, is Prince Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and has a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a Londoner feel very much at home. Probably never before have there been so much time and money expended in the planning and preliminary work of a new city. The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection of the entire British Columbia coast-line and was laid out by a famous firm of Boston landscape engineers with the same attention to detail which they would have given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have studied the plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert that in time it will be one of the most beautiful cities on the continent. The site is a picturesque one, for, from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around the front of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that on clear days—which, by the way, are far from common—a magnificent view may be had from the heights of the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, known as the “Holy City,” and, on rare occasions, of the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is conversant with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one has seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Pedro, San Diego—spring into being almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the possibilities and potentialities of this new city with the unfamiliar name. To begin with, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama by way of Prince Rupert is eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and San Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the Orient than any other Pacific port. Nothing illustrates more graphically the strategic value of its position than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New York from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train at Prince Rupert and be as far as Winnipeg, or virtually half across the continent, before the steamer from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. In addition to the shorter distance across the Pacific must be added the much faster time that can be made by rail over the practically level grades (four tenths of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has obtained through the lower mountains to the north, which will enable trains to be moved at the rate of two miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival systems. What is most important of all, however, Prince Rupert has at its back probably the potentially richest hinterland in the world—a veritable commercial empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. The mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest products, the gold, the coal, the copper, the iron ore of northern British Columbia and the Yukon, the food products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and fur of the far North—in short, all the westbound export wealth of this resourceful region—will find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert as surely and as true to natural laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.

[Illustration: The pack-train: crossing the prairies of northern British Columbia.

The wagon-train: a settler on his way into the interior over the Cariboo Trail.

TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]

You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon, just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West, trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets, under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon, on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back, living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel, cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold. Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great province—travelling on duty through its wildest parts, amid dangers and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.

XIV

BACK OF BEYOND

“I hear the tread of pioneers, Of millions yet to be; The first low wash of waves where soon Shall roll a human sea. The elements of empire here Are plastic yet and warm, The chaos of a mighty world Is rounding into form.”

XIV

BACK OF BEYOND

Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called “The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains, trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer. This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will replace the _chaparejos_ and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being carried in the boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the pack-train.

Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion, you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would? I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the wheat-field—the Pioneers.

There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune Cache to Fort George; or from the country of the Kootenai overland through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the _Imperial Limited_ goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness begins.

What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail, passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser. Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace “jerky” to a six-horse Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the Upper Fraser and the Nechako.

The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and, indeed, of all transportation in the British Columbian hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government post-road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the Royal Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the rush to the gold-fields on Williams Creek. Starting from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two hundred and twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where it abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus at Barkerville, once a famous mining-camp but now a quiet agricultural community in the heart of the Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of fifteen miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer can obtain surprisingly well-cooked meals at a uniform charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might explain for the benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to twelve and a half cents. For the same price the traveller can get a clean and moderately soft bed, although he must accept it as part and parcel of frontier life should he find that the room to which he is assigned already contains half a dozen snoring occupants. These rest-houses, which, with their out-buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely of logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and occasionally surrounded by stockades and constantly reminded me of the post stations which marked the end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road before Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. During the summer months the “up journey” of three hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars, stage-coaches, and river boats, and, if the roads are dry, is made in about four days. As a one-way ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, thus making it one of the most expensive journeys of its length in the world, being even costlier, if I remember rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian railway from Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of the fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a picturesqueness, an excitement, which cannot be duplicated on this continent. From the moment that you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft until your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert Harbour, southward bound, you are seeing with your own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, a nation in the cellar-digging stage of its existence; you are transported for a brief time to the Epoch of the Dawn.

In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we expected to encounter, I had had the car fitted with shock-absorbers and had brought with me from Vancouver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft we selected an equipment with as great care as though we were starting on an East African _safari_. A pick, a long-handled shovel, a pair of axes, a block and tackle, four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised the essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel a supply of tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of rubber sheets, and three of the largest-size Hudson Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this motoring in lands where motors have never gone before. The most important thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, the entire success of our venture depending upon our ability to carry a sufficient supply with us to get us through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing our personal belongings to a minimum, we succeeded in getting eight five-gallon tins into the tonneau of the car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically at least, should have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, it did not suffice to carry us half-way to the Skeena, so slow was the going and so terrible the condition of the road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an order from a British development company on its agents at several points in the interior, instructing them to supply us with gasoline from some drums which had been taken in at enormous expense a year or so before in a futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we should have been compelled to abandon the car in the wilderness for lack of fuel. Gasoline, like everything else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft I paid fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, until we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two dollars a gallon—which, so I was assured, was exactly what it had cost the company to freight it in. Briefly, our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, and follow the Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, thence striking through the unsettled and almost unexplored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to the Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail through Fort Fraser to New Hazleton, on the Skeena, which is barely half a hundred miles south of the Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft as to our chances of getting through, and the more people to whom I talked the slimmer they seemed to become.

One man assured us that there was no road whatever north of Fort Fraser and that, if we wanted to get through, we would have to take the car apart and pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile agent from Seattle had done the year before; another told us that there were no bridges and that we would be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make rafts to ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us up by assuring us that we could always get a team to haul us out.

“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in a fortnight,” he remarked cheeringly.

“What would it cost?” I inquired.

“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at bargaining you ought to get the outfit for about a hundred dollars a day.”

That cheered us up tremendously, of course.

We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn morning. The air was like sparkling Moselle, overhead was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between dun and barren hills, into the unknown. The entire population of the little town had turned out to see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low bonnet of the car pointed northward, they gave us a cheer and shouted after us, “Hope you’ll get through, fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left Seattle I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we flew from a metal rod at the front of the hood, and more than once, when we were mired in the mud below the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready to quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting fluttering bravely before us which spurred us on.

Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern States it would be described by the natives as “a fair to middlin’ road,” and it is all of that and more—in the dry season. When we traversed it, in the early fall, it had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn rains and heavy teaming and was as good a road as an automobile pioneer could ask for. In that journey up the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border life which most people think of as having passed with the pony express and the buffalo. A stage-coach rattled past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet body lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four horses at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash spasmodically between the ears of his leaders, for he carried his Majesty’s mails and must make his six miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the burdened mules plodding by dejectedly, long ears to shaven tails. Scattered along the line, like mounted officers beside a marching column, were the packers: wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the colour of their saddles; picturesque figures in their goatskin _chaparejos_, their vivid neckerchiefs, and their broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators of the Yukon Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the Groundhog, or, it might be, for the lonely trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake would plod a solitary prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin shirt glazed with grime, his tent, pick, shovel, and his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and Siwash ranchers—for the Indian of British Columbia takes more kindly to an agricultural life than do his brothers on the American side of the border—gaily clad squaws and bright-eyed children peering curiously at our strange vehicle from beneath the canvas covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to barter the produce of their holdings in the back country for cartridges, red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a phonograph.