Part 27

But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their six and eight and twelve horse teams straining at the huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the freight trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear a marked resemblance to the prairie-schooners of crossing-the-plains days, the British Columbian freight wagons are barely half as large as the enormous scow-bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked westward. Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated for, however, by the custom of linking them in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt to negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with vehicles having an unusually long wheel-base is but to invite disaster. In freighting parlance, five wagons with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers are known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the outfit is the “swing boss.” To meet one of these wagon-trains on a road that was uncomfortably narrow at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the freighter is always permitted to take the inside of the road, so that more than once we were compelled to pull so far to the outside, in order to give the huge vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between our outer wheels and the precipice’s brink for a starved greyhound to pass.

The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more infrequent become the mails, until, north of the Fraser, the settlers receive their letters and newspapers only once a month during the summer and frequently not for many months on end when the rains have turned the trails into impassable morasses. When we left Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible condition that the driver of the mail-stage would not even hazard a guess as to when he could start. At frequent intervals along the way men were camping in the rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection save the scant shelter afforded by a dog-tent or a bit of canvas stretched between two trees. At the sound of our approach they would run out and hail us and inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell them when the mail was likely to be along. These men were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the wilderness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that road for many days, straining their ears to catch the rattle of the wheels which would bring them word from the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut, clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside the road in a little shelter tent, told us that he had been there for fifteen days waiting for the postman.

“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,” he explained, “and I was so afraid that I might miss the mail that I tramped out and have been sleeping here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the kiddies are back in the old country, in Devonshire, waiting until I can get a home for them out here. I haven’t had a letter from them now for going on seven weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little girl was sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s bad news that the coach hasn’t started yet. I guess the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”

To such men as these I lift my hat in respect and admiration. Resolute, patient, persevering, facing with stout hearts and smiling lips all the hardships and discouragements that such a life has to bring, they are the real advance-guards of progress, the skirmishers of civilisation. In Rhodesia, the Sudan, West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping down the rivets of empire.

A great deal has been written about the brand of Englishman who goes by the name of remittance-man. With a few pounds a month to go to the devil on, he haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, working when he must, idling when he may. In Cape Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne, Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished bars, or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. As his long-suffering relatives generally send him as far from home as they can buy a ticket, he has become a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed in well-cut tweeds or flannels and smoking the inevitable brier, you can see him at almost any hour of any day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the Empress Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the Union Club. But you rarely find him in the British Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he ain’t a worker” and in consequence is cordially detested by the native-born no less than by those industrious settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out to his labour in the morning he is counted an undesirable addition to the population. Hence, though the hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack, comparatively few of them bear the despised label of remittance-man.

[Illustration: A meeting of the old and the new.

“The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.”

“The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded by stockades.”

SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL.]

But that is not saying that you do not find numbers of well-bred, well-educated young Englishmen chopping out careers for themselves up there in the forests of the North. We came across two such at a desolate and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel and Blackwater, three hundred miles from the nearest railway and thirty from the nearest house. We stopped at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed us as they would a certified cheque. One of them, I learned after considerable questioning, was the nephew of an earl and had stroked an Oxford crew; the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed me the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house in Hampshire which he called home, and remarked quite casually that he had been something of a cricketer before he came out to the Colonies and had played for the Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two youngsters, gently born and cleanly bred, “pigging it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a one-room cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens! how glad they were to see us—not for our own sakes, you understand, but because we were messengers from that great, gay world from which they had exiled themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, the other fried the bacon—“sow-belly” they called it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of them fired questions at us like shots from an automatic: what were the newest plays, the latest songs, how long since I had been in London, was the chorus at the Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he just a bally ass, did we think that there was anything to this talk about the Ulstermen revolting—and all the other questions that homesick exiles ask.

“What on earth induces you to stay on in this God-forsaken place?” I asked, when at length they paused in their questioning for lack of breath. “No neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a month if you are lucky, rain six months out of the twelve, and snow for four months more. Why don’t you try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t do much more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty poor one at that, eh?”

“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year, now that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get a hundred and fifty.”

“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity in my voice. “Heavens alive, man, what does that amount to?”

“It amounted to something over ten thousand dollars,” he answered. “Up here, you see, hay is a pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred dollars a ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit lonely, of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s all sort of fishin’ and shootin’—there’s a skin of a grizzly that I killed last week tacked up at the back of the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment, “this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’ around London and doin’ the society-Johnnie act. We feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit toward buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”

Though they probably didn’t know it, those two young fellows in flannel shirts and cord breeches, who had evidently left England because they were tired of living _à la métronome_, because they had wearied of garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, were members in good standing of the Brotherhood of Nation Builders.

Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty gallons of gasoline, the going had been so heavy that by the time we reached the telegraph hut at Bobtail Lake, where the development company of which I have already spoken had left the first of its drums of gasoline, our supply was seriously diminished. These relay telegraph stations are scattered at intervals of fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire, two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City with Vancouver. Many of them are so remotely situated that the only time the operators see a white man’s face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual pack-train brings them their supplies in the spring and fall. I can conceive of no more intolerable existence than the lives led by these men, sitting at deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing under the sun to do save listen to the ceaseless chatter of a telegraph instrument, day after day, week after week, month after month the same. Imagine the monotony of it! There were two young men at the Bobtail Lake hut, an operator and a linesman, and when they saw the little flag of stripes and stars fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their hats and cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered lives in offices or factories or stores, the flag may be nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue bunting, but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where it is rarely seen, it stands for home and country and family and friends, and is reverenced accordingly.

“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,” one of the young men remarked a trifle huskily. “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on it in more’n two years. When we heard you coming through the woods we thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to see an automobile up in this God-forsaken hole.”

“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.

“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee. Used to be a train-despatcher down in Texas, got tired of living in a box car with no trees but sage-brush and no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. And believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country again.”

That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. The English owner and his wife were absent in Vancouver, but the ranch hand in charge of the place was only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house, though built of logs, for up there there is nothing else to build with, was considerably more pretentious than the general run of frontier dwellings. Instead of the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room, it had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone fireplace and the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, and two sleeping rooms, while in front, in pathetic imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums and surrounded by an attempt at a picket fence. The floor of the house was of planks hand-hewn; cedar poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks in the log walls were stuffed with moss and clay and papered over with illustrations torn from the London weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and obviously home-made, with benches instead of chairs, for the freighters, who charge thirty cents a pound for hauling merchandise in from the railway, refuse to bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which require space out of all proportion to their weight. Lying on the table in the living-room, atop of a heap of year-old newspapers and magazines (for in the north country printed matter of any description is something to be read and reread and then read once again before it is passed on to a neighbour) were two much-thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was curious to see what sort of literature would appeal to people who lived their lives in such a place. One was the “Discourses of Epictetus,” the other “Manners and Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter entitled “The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the nearest neighbour, a Swedish rancher with a Siwash wife, lived fifty miles away.

If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the house, or only half as good, there would have been little left to be desired. The ranch hand who was in charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed the information that he had been a British soldier in India before coming to Canada to seek his fortune and wished to God that he was back in India again—made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough soda-biscuits the first of every month to last until the next month came round. As we were there about the twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite hard—like dog-biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; stone-cold boiled potatoes, a pan of the inevitable stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking coffee, which was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? This was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.

I was particularly impressed throughout our journey across British Columbia with the almost paternal interest the provincial government takes in the welfare of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything from the filing of homestead claims to the prevention of forest-fires. Rest-houses are maintained by the government along certain of the less-travelled routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness in every direction; forest-rangers and agricultural experts are constantly riding about the province with open eyes and ears; in every settlement is stationed a government agent from whom the settlers can obtain information and advice on every subject under the sun. Law and order prevail to an extraordinary degree. I was told that there are only three police constables between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of more than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and sparsely settled country, where a criminal would have comparatively little difficulty in making his escape. This remarkable absence of crime is due in large measure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquor within a certain distance of a public work, such as the building of a railway; in fact, the workman is debarred from intoxicants as rigorously as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities, and results have shown that they know what they are talking about. Not until the railway is completed and the construction gangs have moved on are the saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although this policy unquestionably makes for law and order, it is by no means popular with the workmen, who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name of town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and such a place is a hell of a fine town,” I was frequently assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!” Judged by this standard, Fort George, which is a division point on the Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers, and will unquestionably become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is a veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than its share of gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has vividly described it in a single couplet:

“The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a Mecca for the dry of throat, who make bacchanalian pilgrimages from incredible distances to its bottle-decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on a jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred miles or more, can prevent him from gratifying his desires. Indeed, it is by no means unusual for a man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing up his job, to tramp a hundred miles through the wilderness to Fort George and blow every last cent of his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What a sudden falling off in intemperance there would be in a civilised community if a man had to walk a hundred miles to get a drink! What? Yet this proscription of alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the men, being denied what might be described as legal liquors, resort to innumerable more or less efficient substitutes. Red ink they will swallow with avidity, for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, and the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another popular refreshment is lemon extract, such as is commonly used in civilised households for flavouring jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, which is to all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage champagne is to all other wines, is a certain patent medicine which contains _eighty per cent of pure alcohol_. This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the construction camps as cocktails are in a New York club, both workmen and Indians pouring it down like water. It is warranted to cure all pains, and it does, for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the world for at least a day.

As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones, Fort George might truthfully be described as a very lively town. In one of its saloons twelve white-aproned individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful man with a cocked revolver on his knees; while mingling with the crowd in front of the bar are three bull-necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.” Instead of throwing a patron who becomes obstreperous into the street, however, in which case he would stagger to the saloon opposite and get rid of the balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,” where he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects of his debauch, after which he is ready to start in all over again. As a result of this ingenious system of conservation, very little money gets away.

These frontier communities have handled the perplexing problem of the social evil in a novel manner. The bedecked and bedizened women who follow in the wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs, instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within the town, are forced to reside in colonies of their own well without the municipal limits, sometimes half a dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who wishes to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend a considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, though I regret to add that this did not appear to act as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn trails that I saw in the Northland being those which led from the settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.