Part 28

Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began to rain—not a sudden shower which comes and drenches and goes, but one of those steady, disheartening drizzles, which in this region sometimes last for a week. The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which had been atrocious from the moment we left the Fraser, quickly became worse. It was composed of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries, saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very sticky and very slippery material peculiar to British Columbia, known as “muskeg.” Though it looks substantial enough, with its top growth of stubble and moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of Virginia red clay, Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and New Orleans molasses. To make matters worse, a drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded us, so that the road, which was inconceivably bad under any circumstances, had been trampled into a black morass which no vehicle could by any possibility get through. There was only one thing for us to do and that was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst stretches of it. I have heard veterans of the Civil War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying roads for the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy, but I didn’t appreciate the truth of their remarks until I tried it myself. While camping in various parts of the world I had used an axe in a dilettante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping fire-wood, but there is a vast deal of difference between that sort of thing and cutting down enough trees to pave a road. In an hour our hands were so blistered that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating pain; but it was a question of corduroying that road or else abandoning the car and making our way to civilisation afoot through several hundred miles of forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance. At noon we paused long enough to light a fire and cook a meal of sorts, which we ate seated on logs amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting down and swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering about us. Five hours more of tree felling and we decided that our corduroy causeway was sufficiently solid to get over it with the car. As a matter of fact, we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that stage of exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t care what happened. If the car stuck in the mud, well and good. She could stay there and take root and sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing up so as to get a running start, our driver opened wide his throttle and the car tore at the stretch of home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck. Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s body were hurled a dozen feet away. The snapping of the limbs and the deafening explosions of the engines sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled and swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant I expected it to capsize; but our driver, clinging desperately to the wheel, contrived, with a skill in driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to tell it, we had traversed the morass we had spent an entire day in corduroying, and the car, trembling like a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground. The road over which we had passed looked as though it had been struck by a combined hurricane, cyclone, and tornado.

It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned by a Swede named Peter Rasmussen. What the man at Blackwater had described as “a swell place” consisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set down in the middle of a forest clearing. No smoke issued from the chimney, no dog barked a welcome, there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that no one was at home. Presently, however, we saw a fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon his shoulder, emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us across the pasture. I hailed him.

“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”

“Ay ban reckon ay am.”

“And can you put us up for the night?” I queried anxiously.

“Ay ban reckon ay can.”

A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in which Rasmussen and his single ranch-hand, a stolid and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked and ate and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by the light of a guttering candle was the bunk house. A bunk house, I might explain, is a building peculiar to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built against the wall. Here travellers may find a roof to shelter them and some hay on which to spread their blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted us when Rasmussen threw open the heavy door, this particular bunk house had evidently not been occupied for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, we found that the bunks were very much occupied indeed. But after Pete had started a roaring fire in the little sheet-iron stove and when we had spread our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound hay which served in lieu of mattresses and had scrubbed off some of the mud with which we were veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry ones, the complexion of things began to change from brunette to blonde. Between the intervals of corduroying the road in the morning, I had shot with my revolver half a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our way. They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we handed them over to Pete to pluck and cook for supper, which was still further eked out by a mess of lake trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region one may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the every-day necessities, such as salt and butter and bread, but he can surfeit himself on such luxuries as venison and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, like so many other settlers in British Columbia, had come from the American Northwest, lured by the glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial government. But he, like so many others, had found that the appalling cost of living had made it impossible, even with hay at a hundred dollars a ton, for him to clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he concluded, knocking the ashes from his pipe. And that’s precisely what a great many other discouraged Americans in western Canada are going to do.

For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s the road was rough, boggy, and exceedingly trying to the disposition, but it gradually improved until by the time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves running along a short stretch of road of which a New England board of supervisors need not have felt too much ashamed. The terrible condition of the roads throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely due to the fact that they run for great distances through dense forests where the sun cannot penetrate to dry them up; this, taken with the abnormally heavy rains, serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. At Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of some twoscore log cabins clustered about a mission church whose gaudy paint and bulging dome spoke of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the Russians. The interior tribes are known as “stick Indians,” referring, of course, to the fact that they dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to those living along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.” Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered moccasins sat sewing and gossiping before their cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their skins white or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world over; bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled like frisky puppies in the street; bearskins were stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear of every house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the Siwashes’ staple article of food. Though only one of the braves, who had been out into civilisation, had ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them seemed to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely enough, they became as shy as deer at sight of my camera, one picturesque old squaw refusing consecutive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and a dollar to come out from behind the door where she was hiding and let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter was willing enough to take a chance, however, for she offered to pose for as many pictures as we desired if we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn street of the village at a rattling clip, and she not only never turned a hair but asked me to go faster. Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would make a real road burner.

It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to Fort Fraser and the road proved a surprisingly good one. You must bear in mind, however, that when I speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, I am speaking comparatively. The best road we encountered would, if it existed in the United States, drive a board of highway commissioners out of office, while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community wouldn’t be considered a road at all—it would be used for a hog-wallow or for duck shooting. The mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name from the old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles from the town on the shores of Fraser Lake. When we were there the town consisted of half a hundred log and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five general stores, the branch of a Montreal bank, and the only hotel in the four hundred miles between Quesnel and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we were there, and was of particular interest to us because it represented a phase of civilisation which in our own country has long since passed, but now that the railway is in operation its picturesque log cabins will doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses with green blinds, the boards laid along the edge of the road will give way to cement sidewalks, and it will have street lamps and a town hall and its name displayed in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the station lawn and will look exactly like any one of a hundred other towns scattered along the transcontinental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall pass through it again, this time from the observation platform of a Pullman, and I shall remark quite nonchalantly to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes, I was up here in the good old days when this was nothing but a cluster of log huts at the Back of Beyond.”

XV

THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED

“Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on, Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore, Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon, Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar? Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it, Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost? Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it; Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.”

XV

THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED

It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out, and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car. After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed him.

“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”

“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that I’m getting hard of hearing.”

“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.

I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty, second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar almost anywhere?”

“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound. But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—_I’ll knock off the forty cents_.”

* * * * *

Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:

Flour 16 cents per pound

Sugar 25 cents per pound

Tea and coffee $1.00 per pound

Butter 75 cents per pound

Oatmeal 30 cents per pound

Dried fruits 25 cents per pound

Tinned fruits 75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin

Bacon 50 cents per pound

Eggs (when procurable) $1.50 per dozen (In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)

Potted meats 50 cents to $1.00 per tin

Bread 25 cents per 1-pound loaf (Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.)

Potatoes $3.00 per bushel

Chickens $4.00 each

It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however, that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.

[Illustration: A Siwash lady going shopping.

Half-breeds of the Upper Skeena.

“Blackwater Kate.”

SOME LADIES FROM THE UPPER SKEENA.]

The population of Fort Fraser turned out _en masse_ to see us off, the mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows, and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.

We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a feeble sun was doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars, or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy, two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako to Burns Lake was uneventful.

Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into a loft above an eating-house, where fully twoscore labourers from the south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw, snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:

“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me, it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go by water if you go at all.”

Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes, which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and tortuous channel which winds its devious course through a wilderness of swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water. Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company tens of thousands of dollars.

It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us, and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion. It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear, no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise that was positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell, I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.

Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who, with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone to-morrow, he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.

“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll never see the car again.”