PICNICS AND PRAIRIES
I
Early on the morning of Friday, September 5th, the train passed through
the second tunnel it had encountered in Canada, and came to a small
stopping-place amid trees.
It was a lady's pocket handkerchief of a station, made up of a tool
shed, a few houses and a road leading away from it. Its significance
lay in the road leading away from it. That road leads to Nipigon river
and lake, one of the finest trout waters in Canada. Even at that it is
only famous half the year, for it hibernates in winter like any other
thing in Canada that finds snow and remoteness too much for it.
At this station--Nipigon Lodge--the Prince, in shooting knickers and a
great anxiety to be off and away, left the train at 8.30, and walking
along the road, came to the launch that was to take him down river to
the fishing camp where he was to spend a week-end of sport.
Leaving this little waterside village of neglected fishermen's huts,
for the season was late and the tourists that usually fill them had all
gone, he went down the beautiful stream to the more than beautiful
Virgin Falls. Here he met his outfit, thirty-eight Indian guides, all
of them experts in camp life and cunning in the secrets of stream and
wood.
In the care of these high priests of sport, he left civilization, in
the shape of the launch, behind him, and in a canoe fished down stream
until the lovely reaches of Split-rock were attained; here, on the
banks of the stream, amid the thick ranks of spruce, the camp was
pitched.
At first it had been the intention to push on after a day's sport to
other camping-places, but the situation and the comfort of this camp
was so satisfactory that the Prince decided to stay, and made it his
headquarters during the week-end.
It was no camp of amateur sportsmen playing at the game. It was not,
perhaps, "roughing" it as the woodsman knows it, for he lies hard in a
floorless tent (if he has one), as well as lives laboriously, but it
was certainly a rough and ready life, as near that of the woodsman as
possible.
The Prince slept in a tent, rose early, bathed in the river and shaved
in the open in exactly the same manner as every one else in the party.
He took his place in the "grub queue," carrying his plate to the
cook-house and demanding his particular choice in bacon and eggs,
broiled trout, flapjacks, or the wonderful white flatbread, which the
cook, an Indian, Jimmy Bouchard, celebrated for open-fire cooking, knew
how to prepare.
Sometimes before breakfast the Prince indulged his passion for running;
always after breakfast he set out on foot, or in canoe for the day's
fishing, returning late at night hungry and tired with the healthy
weariness of hard exertion to the camp meal. There were spells round
the big camp fire burning vividly amid the trees, and then sleep in the
tent.
The fishing was usually done from the bass canoe, two Indian guides
being always the ship's company. And fishing was not the only
attraction of the stream and lake. There is always the thrilling,
placid beauty of the scenery, the deep forests, the lake valleys, and
the austere, forest-clad hills that rise abruptly from the enigmatic
pools. And there is the active beauty of the many rapids, those
piled-up and rushing masses of angry water, tossing and foaming in
pent-up force through rock gates and over rocks.
He tried the adventure of these rapids, shooting through the tortured
waters that look so beautiful from the shore and so terrible from the
frail structure of a canoe, until it seemed to him as though not even
the skill of his guides could steer through safely. He got through
safely, but only after an experience which he described as the most
exciting in his life.
The fishing itself proved disappointing. The famous speckled trout of
Nipigon did not rise to the occasion, and the sport was fair, but not
extraordinary. The best day brought in twenty-seven fish, the largest
being three and a half pounds, not a good specimen of the lake's trout,
which go to six and eight pounds in the ordinary course of things.
And the disappointment had an irony of its own. The man who caught the
most fish was the man who couldn't fish at all. The official
photographer, who had gone solely to take snapshots, also took the
maximum of fish out of the river. Indeed, he was so much of an amateur
that the first fish he caught placed him in such a predicament that he
did not play it, but landed it with so vigorous a jerk that it flew
over his head and caught high in a fir. An Indian guide had to climb
the tree to "land" it.
Nevertheless, he caught the most fish, and when he returned with his
spoil, the Prince said to him:
"Look here, don't you realize I'm the one to do that? You're taking my
place in the program."
The reason for the indifferent sport was probably the lateness of the
season--it was practically finished when the Prince arrived--and the
fact that Nipigon had had a record summer, with large parties of
sportsmen working its reaches steadily all the time. The fish were
certainly shy, particularly, it seemed, of fly, and the best catches
were made with a small fish, a sort of bull-headed minnow called
cocatoose, that creeps about close to the rocks.
Of course, trout, even if famous, are naturally temperamental. They
will rise in dozens at unexpected times, just as they will refuse all
temptations for weeks on end. An Englishman, and no mean fisherman,
once went to Nipigon to show the local inhabitants how fishing should
be done. A master in British waters, he considered the speckled
monsters of the lakes fit victims for his rod and fly. He went out
with his guides to catch fish, and after a few days among the big trout
came back disgusted.
"Did you catch any trout?" he was asked by one of his party.
"Catch 'em," he snapped. "How can one catch 'em? The infernal things
are anchored."
Walking and duck shooting was also in the program, and there were other
excitements.
The weather, delightful during the first two days, broke on Sunday, and
there were bad winds, rainstorms and occasional hailstorms, when stones
as big as small pebbles drummed on the tents and bombarded the camp.
So fierce was the wind that the Royal Standard on a high flagstaff was
carried away. A pine tree was also uprooted, and fell with a crash
between the Prince's tent and that of one of his suite. A yard either
way and the tent would have been crushed. Fortunately the Prince was
not in the tent at that moment, but the happening gave the camp its
sense of adventure.
During this rest, too, the Prince suffered a little from his eyes, an
irritation caused by grains of steel that had blown into them while
viewing the works at "Soo." His right hand was also painful from the
heartiness of Toronto, and the knuckles swollen. To set these matters
right, the doctor went up from the train, and by the Indian canoe that
carried the mail and the daily news bulletin, reached the camp.
When he returned on Monday, September 8th, the Prince was looking
undeniably fit. He marched up the railway from the lake in
footer-shorts and golf jacket, with an air of one who had thoroughly
enjoyed "roughing it."
II
While the Prince and his party were camping, the train remained in
Nipigon, a tiny village set in complete isolation on the edge of the
river and in the heart of the woods.
It is a little germ-culture of humanity cut off from the world. The
only way out is, apparently, the railway, though, perhaps, one could
get away by the boats that come up to load pulp wood, or by the petrol
launches that scurry out on to Lake Superior and its waterside towns.
But the roads out of it, there appear to be none. Follow any track,
and it fades away gently into the primitive bush.
It is a nest of loneliness that has carried on after its old office as
a big fur collecting post--you see the original offices of Revillon
Freres and the Hudson Bay Company standing today--has gone. Now it
lives on lumber and the fishing, and one wonders what else.
Its tiny station, through which the Transcontinental trains thunder, is
faced by a long, straggling green, and fringing the green is a row of
wooden shops and houses equally straggling. They have a somnolent and
spiritless air. Behind is a wedge of pretty dwellings stretching down
to the river, tailing off into an Indian encampment by the stream,
where, about dingy tepees, a dozen or so stoic children play.
There are three hundred souls in the village, mainly Finns and Indians
become Canadians. They are not the Indians of Fenimore Cooper, but men
who wear peaked caps, bright blouse shirts or sweaters, with broad
yellow, blue and white stripes (a popular article of wear all over
Canada), and women who wear the shin skirts and silks of civilization.
Only here and there one sees old squaw women, stout and brown and bent,
with the plaid shawl of modernity making up for the moccasins of their
ancient race.
Small though it is, or perhaps because it is so small and observable,
Nipigon is an example of the amalgam from which the Canadian race is
being fused. We went, for instance, to a dance given by the Finns in
their varnished, brown-wood hall on the Saturday night. It was an
attractive and interesting evening. The whole of the village, without
distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in
the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced
(and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey
sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid
Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard
of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish
girl, demure and well-dressed, who might have been anything from the
leader of local Society to a clerk (i.e., a counter hand) in one of the
shops. For all we knew, the plumber might have been dancing with the
leading citizen's daughter, and the local Astor with the local
dressmaker's assistant.
In any case, it didn't matter. In Canada they don't think about that
sort of thing. They were all unconcerned and happy in the big,
generous spirit of equality that makes Canada the home of one big
family rather than the dwelling-place of different classes and social
grades. This fact was not new to us; naturally, we had seen and mixed
with Canadians in hotels and on the street elsewhere. In those
gathering-places of humanity, the hotels, we had lived with the big,
jolly, homely crowds without social strata, who might very well have
changed places with the waiters and the waiters with them without
anybody noticing any difference. That would not have meant a loss of
dignity to anybody. Nobody has any use for social status in the
Dominion, the only standard being whether a man is a "mixer" or not.
By way of a footnote, I might say that waiters, even as waiters, are on
the way to take seats as guests, since, apparently, waiting is only an
occupation a man takes up until he finds something worth while. Not
unexpectedly Canadian waiting suffers through this.
What we had seen in the large towns, and in the large gregarious life
of cities, we saw "close up" at Nipigon. The varied crowd, Finns,
British, Canadian and Indian (one of the Indians, a young dandy, had
served with distinction during the war, had married a white Canadian,
and was one of the richest men present), danced without social
distinctions in that pleasant hall to Finn folk-songs that had never
been set down on paper played on an accordion. It was a delightful
evening.
For the rest, those with the train fished (or, rather, went through all
the ritual with little of the results), walked, bathed in the lake,
watched the American "movie" men in their endeavours to convert the
British to baseball, or endeavoured, with as little success, to convert
the baseball "fans" to cricket. The recreations of Nipigon were not
hectic, and we were glad to get on to towns and massed life again.
I confess our view of Nipigon of the hundred houses was not that of the
Indian boy who discussed it with us. He told us Nipigon was not the
place for him.
"You wait," he said. "Next year I go. Next year I am fifteen. Then I
go out into the woods. I go right away. I can't stand this city life."
III
Canada, on Monday, September 8th, demonstrated its amazing faculty for
startling contrasts. It lifted the Prince from the primitive to the
ultra-modern in a single movement. In the morning he was in the silent
forests of Nipigon, a tract so wild that man seemed no nearer than a
thousand miles. Three hours later he was moving amid the dense crowds
that filled the streets of the latest word in industrial cities.
He stepped straight from Nipigon to the twin cities of Port Arthur and
Fort William. These two cities are really one, and together form the
great trade pool into which the traffic of the vast grain-bearing West
and North-West pours for transport on the Great Lakes.
These two cities sprang from the little human nucleus made up of a
Jesuit mission and a Hudson Bay Company depot of the old days. They
stand on Thunder Bay, a deep-water sack thrusting out from Lake
Superior under the slopes of flat-topped Thunder Cape. The situation
is ideal for handling the trade of the great lake highway that swings
the traffic through the heart of the Western continent.
Port Arthur and Fort William have seen their chances and made the most
of them. They have constructed great wharves along the bay to
accommodate a huge traffic. Over the wharves they have built up the
greatest grain elevators in the world, not a few of them but a series,
until the cities seemed to be inhabited solely by these giants. These
elevators and stores collect and distribute the vast streams of grain
that pour in from the prairies, at whose door the cities stand,
distributing it across the lakes to the cities of America, or along the
lakes to the Canadian East and the railways that tranship it to Europe.
On the quays are the towering lattices of patent derricks, forests of
them, that handle coal and ore and cargoes of infinite variety. And
the [Transcriber's note: word(s) possibly missing from source] derricks
and the elevators are the uncannily long and lean lake freighters,
ships with a tiny deck superstructure forward of a great rake of hold,
and a tiny engine-house astern under the stack. And by these grain
boats are the ore tramps and coal boats from Lake Erie, and cargo boats
with paper pulp for England made in the big mills that turn the forests
about Lake Superior into riches.
Not content with docking boats, the twin cities build them. They build
with equal ease a 10,000-ton freighter, or a great sky-scraping tourist
boat to ply between Canada and the American shores. And presently it
will be sending its 10,000-tonners direct to Liverpool; they only await
the deepening of the Welland Canal near Niagara before starting a
regular service on this 4,000-mile voyage.
They are modern cities, indeed, that snatch every chance for wealth and
progress, and use even the power that Nature gives in numerous falls to
work their dynamos, and through them their many mills and factories.
And the marvel of these cities is that they are inland cities--inland
ports thousands of miles from the nearest salt water.
These places gave the Prince the welcome of ardent twins. Their
greeting was practically one, for though the train made two stops, and
there were two sets of functions, there are only a few minutes'
train-time between them, and the greetings seemed of a continuous whole.
Port Arthur had the Prince first for a score of minutes, in which
crowds about the station showed their welcome in the Canadian way. It
was here we first came in touch with the "Mounties," the fine men of
the Royal North-West Mounted Police, whose scarlet coats, jaunty
stetsons, blue breeches and high tan boots set off the carriage of an
excellently set-up body of men. They acted as escort while the Prince
drove into the town to a charming collegiate garden, where the Mayor
tried to welcome him formally.
Tried is the only word. How could Prince or Mayor be formal when both
stood in the heart of a crowd so close together that when the Mayor
read his address the document rested on the Prince's chest, while at
the Prince's elbows crowded little boys and other distinguished
citizens? Formal or not, it was very human and very pleasant.
Returning through the town, something went wrong with the procession.
Many of the automobiles forcing their way through the crowd to the
train--which stood beside the street--found there was no Prince. We
stood about asking what was happening and where it was happening.
After ten minutes of this an automobile driver strolled over from a car
and asked "what was doing now?"
We consulted the programs and told him that the Prince was launching a
ship.
"He is, is he?" said the driver without passion. "Well, I've got
members of the shipbuilding company and half the reception committee in
my car."
In spite of that, the Prince launched a fine boat, that took the water
broadside in the lake manner, before going on to Fort William.
Fort William had an immense crowd upon the green before the station, on
the station, and even on the station buildings. Part of the crowd was
made up of children, each one of them a representative of the
nationalities that came from the Old World to find a new life and a new
home in Canada. Each of them was dressed in his or her national
costume, making an interesting picture.
There were twenty-four children, each of a different race, and the
races ranged from France to Slovenia, from Persia to China and Syria.
There were negroes and Siamese and Czecho-Slovaks in this remarkable
collection of elements from whose fusion Canada of today is being
fashioned.
The Prince drove through the cheering streets of Fort William, and paid
visits to some of the great industrial concerns, before setting out for
Winnipeg and the wide-flung spaces of the West.