BRITISH COLUMBIA.
_No greater contrast...._
[Illustration:
A MADONNA OF THE KOOTENAYS.]
[Illustration:
DRAWING WATER
FROM THE COLUMBIA.]
No greater contrast can be afforded by Nature than that between level
Prairie and the Rocky Mountains. It is at the moment of the change from
one to the other that one realizes _both_ are Characters, each separate,
individual and eternal. Here, as the train swings along by the banks of
the Bow River, one looks up to those towering peaks, their gray and aged
cheeks flushed with the wine of the air into perpetual youth, the
Character that is Nature dominating all others. One cannot think of
those peaks as still and dead matter only. They must be alive! There is
the sharpness of the Craig, the smoothness of the scumbled bloom upon
it, head after head against that faultless blue that one has hitherto
thought of as exclusively Italian. But there it is--Capri inverted.
And so one comes to Banff, or drops down at Lake Louise, or bestrides a
pony to the Valley of the Ten Peaks, or watches the Mountain Goat a
riotous snowflake against the blue sky or wanders at the end of a rope
about the face of the Great Glacier and, doing these things, feels it
good just to be alive. That must surely have been the thought behind the
preservation of this section of the Rockies as a national playground in
perpetuity when it was reserved by the Dominion Government as a great
Park.
But British Columbia, in addition to being a land of Mountains, is also
a land of large tumbling rivers and fingerlike lakes pushing out into
the fruitful valleys. It was the West of early days that enriched the
language with that word “Trail”. British Columbia is the land of the
Trail. The Trail or mere thread-road of the early pioneer from the
Prairie to the Coast has now been completely metamorphosed into the
orderly double-track of the railroad; so that hardships have vanished
and, in their place, positive luxury attends a trip to the Pacific Coast
via the Canadian Rockies.
Yet there is more than enough of the “primeval” remaining to give sauce
to the voyage. Romance still clings to the Columbia and the Fraser
Rivers. The mere names of Sun-Dance Canyon, The Crow’s Nest, Glacier,
Jasper Park and a dozen others but faithfully record the existing charm
and atmosphere. They suggest, too, that these Ranges were once the
Hunting Grounds of Indians. Some old-timer says that these now have
headquarters “down about MacLeod”. Nevertheless the Indian still comes
back to the hot sulphur springs at Banff which it is quite probable he
knew and used long ages ago, before even the discovery of the American
Continent.
The Indian in British Columbia, like the Indian all through Canada, is
still a romantic figure of the atmospheric background. He is still and
always will be a page from the tome of the simple life, retiring before
the advance of that form of society which involves living indoors. He
still clings to the wigwam, to the canoe and to fishing and hunting for
a living. (Although, of course, even among the Indians there are many
notable exceptions and some of them carry on business and own fine homes
of their own).
Romance, however, clings to the blanket of the old-timer. The web of
fancy is not confined when a bend in the road reveals a group of Indians
spearing salmon from a flat rock, perilously over-hanging the swirling,
canyoned cauldron of the Fraser. There is something bizarre in the
simple arrangement of the bleached wooden poles whereon their salmon
swings a-drying in the wind. One feels that if anyone knows the secrets
of the great Ranges, the towering peaks, the vast stretches between the
Pacific and that faraway Northern mysterious Arctic, it is that man, a
ragged-spot-of-brown above the swift cascade; too steep for all
navigators except the salmon, madly daring every obstacle in efforts to
reach the very highest pools where her spawn will be safe. A well of
tradition is stored up in that old squaw’s head down there by the calmer
waters, cooking the evening meal where the spiral of blue smoke trails
upward.
These folk know the Nature-book of these parts by heart. For long
centuries there trails in these old hearts and minds a survival of the
fittest in picture. And that is all there is in history and Tradition
... a series of pictures, a few outstanding facts and figures. Time in
the aggregate is like that. As a Figure, the Indian is a Synopsis.
The land embraced by British Columbia is elemental--big. Every form of
it, rivers, peaks, lakes and valley, is grand in the sense of bigness.
It is a land of big trees, big mines, big ranches, big outlook. And the
big outlook not only glances Eastward across a Continent, but wings its
way outward across the Pacific with its ships touching the shores of
Asia and Australia.
The co-relation of interests between those most widely separated of
Canadian Provinces, British Columbia and Nova Scotia, has been
strikingly increased by the prominence acquired by the Pacific since
1914. Canada has now a _Pacific_ Maritime Province as well as the
Atlantic group which for so long has held exclusive rights to the term.
But the craft of the Pacific coast are laid down on different lines from
those of the East. Nova Scotia started with sails and she still stands
by the halyards of Banker and Coaster. Vancouver came into the race at a
later date. Steam, now oil-burners, and the Panama Canal, have opened
her way to European as well as Oriental ports. Truly the Canadian Trader
is a big ship!
But British Columbia has its little ’longshore boats too. And the
Westerner, with Cowboy breeziness, looks upon these half-indulgently and
dubs them the “mosquito fleet”. In this lesser fleet are found the
halibut-fisherman and the whaler, cruising, the one, many hundred miles
out in the Pacific; and the other off the Queen Charlotte Islands or
along the Alaskan shore, in fact anywhere a skipper deems he can raise
the cry of “Thar she blows” from the lookout. A whaler out of the
Pacific ports is a steamer with mechanical devices and bombs for killing
and inflating the whale at once, so that the carcase floats and can be
brought in to market. Her counterpart in Newfoundland and the Gulf of
Saint Lawrence is the sturdy old “sealer”; but what a difference in
model! The Sealer is old. But with her staunch, wooden timbers and
planks and roomy deck, with a “crow’s-nest” for the lookout, her
ocean-wisdom for seals, is every bit as keen, as the Westerner’s for
oil.
In British Columbia great stress is laid on the proper “smoking” of fish
and delicious indeed is the flavour attained by the Western process. A
range of characteristic atmosphere follows in the long trail of “smoked”
salmon and herring. Scotch lassies have come out from fishing-towns of
Old Scotland to give the proper “Scotch Cure” to the Pacific bloater in
the curing houses at Vancouver. It is a far cry from these girls, and
the big plant, with its chill-rooms for freezing the halibut, the latter
with its own private car to Boston, to the old Indian woman, who has her
little “smokehouse” on the shingle at Alert Bay and trusses up her
salmon on splints in the shadow of the wet piles of some old
boat-landing.
These are sea-pictures and pictures of ’longshore life. British Columbia
in its valleys is a land of farms. It raises its own famous apples
around its lakes, as Nova Scotia brings Bellefleurs and other beauties
to perfection, round the Bay of Fundy. Okanagan, Arrowhead, Kootenay,
all have their ranches with their acres of meadow, bench-lands and
climbing fields. And here, on these Ranches beside the Lake, backed by
mountains from whose peaks the snow never melts, are perched the homes
of the ranchers.
Each of these homes presents its own epic, each family tracing it to the
chosen spot from somewhere in Eastern Canada--Nova Scotia, Quebec or
Ontario--or coming here to this Alpine region of the Dominion from
somewhere over-seas, the British Islands, France, and indeed, all other
countries of Old Europe, even reaching a finger into Asia at India and
Japan. Truly the human-interest element of British Columbia is as big as
its outlook.
Each little homestead and ranch stands for a family uprooted from old
associations, whether Eastern Canadian, British or Foreign, transplanted
here to the West, on the edge of things; but now--within the past ten
years--coming to a consciousness of itself as no longer on the edge of
wilderness and remoteness, separated from its fellows of the East by the
great barrier of the Mountains, but a part of the beautiful curve of the
World-circumference of the British Empire. Each little log-cabin in its
forest or surroundings of stump-land (and the big trees of British
Columbia make an endless number of big stumps) is a stake in the land.
Practically it represents the bombardment of the black and unfriendly
wilderness with a home and a family--the best ammunition in the world
for the pioneer.
There is a long list of miniature cities and little towns, with a hotel,
a bank, a couple of grocery shops, a butcher, a drug-store with week-old
newspapers from Winnipeg or Calgary, yesterday’s Vancouver Sheets and
the Newspaper from the nearest Over-the-Border large city; all these
business places with large single-pane show-windows, in utter contrast
to the little old-fashioned shop-windows of the small towns and villages
of rural Quebec. The arrival and departure of trains once or twice a day
is a thing as personal as the letter which comes into the hand of the
butcher, the banker, the druggist, from that same adventuring train that
kicks the level dust of the Prairie miles behind it, with the ease of a
thoroughbred, and climbs the gorges, the canyons and the steeps of the
passes, and enters the black mysteries of the long tunnels as
nonchalantly as a cowboy, hand on hip, sits astride his pony.
These little towns may be rather dull, with a society only partly
stirred into life by an occasional Movie, but there is always more than
appears on the surface, since, behind them somewhere out there in the
miles, threaded up sometimes by mere trails, are the little homes of the
ranchers converting the soil to agriculture, “making land”--a curious
phrase--where every ranch is a stage of dramatic action, and every
little simple act of everyday life takes on heroic proportions from the
very closeness of success or disaster constantly stalking the adventure
on which the rancher has staked his all.