CHIEF MORNING STAR COMES TO BANFF AND THE ROCKIES
I
In the night the Royal train steamed the few miles from Calgary and on
the morning of Wednesday, September 17th, we woke up in the first field
works of the Rocky Mountains.
It was a day on which we were to see one of the most picturesque
ceremonies of the tour, and slipping through the high scarps of the
mountains to the little valley in which Banff station stands, we were
into that experience of colour at once.
Drawn up in the open by the little station was a line of Indians, clad
in their historic costumes, and mounted on the small, springy horses of
Canada. Some were in feathers and buckskin and beads, some in the high
felt hats and bright-shirts of the cowboy, all were romantic in
bearing. They were there to form the escort of the new "Chief."
As the Prince's car drove from the station along a road that wound its
way amid glades of spruce and poplar glowing with the old gold of
Autumn that filled the valleys winding about the feet of high and
austere mountains, other bodies of Stoney Indians joined the escort
about the car.
They had gathered at the opening of every side lane, and as the
cavalcade passed, dropped in behind, until the procession became a
snake of shifting colour, vermilion and cherry, yellow and blue and
green, going forward under the dappling of sun that slipped between the
swinging branches.
Chiefs, the sunray of eagles' feathers on their heads, braves in full
war-paint, Indian cowboys in shirts of all the colours of the spectrum,
and squaws a mass of beads and sequins, with bright shawls and brighter
silk head-wraps, made up the escort. Behind and at times in front of
many of the squaws were papooses, some riding astraddle, their arms
round the women's waists, others slung in shawls, but all clad in
Indian garb that seemed to be made up of a mass of closely-sewn beads,
turquoise, green, white or red, so that the little bodies were like
scaly and glittering lizards.
This ride that wound in and out of these very beautiful mountain
valleys took the Prince past the enclosures of the National Park, and
he saw under the trees the big, hairy-necked bison, the elk and
mountain goats that are harboured in this great natural reserve.
On the racecourse were Indian tepees, banded, painted with the heads of
bulls, and bright with flags. The braves who were waiting for the
Prince, and those who were escorting him, danced, their ponies whirling
about, racing through veils of dust and fluttering feathers and
kerchiefs in a sort of ride of welcome. From over by the tepees there
came the low throbbing of tom-toms to join with the thin, high,
dog-like whoop of the Indian greeting.
On a platform at the hub of half-circle of Indians the Prince listened
to the addresses and accepted the Chieftaincy of the Stoney tribe.
Some of the Indians had their faces painted a livid chrome-yellow, so
that their heads looked like masks of death; some were smeared with
red, some barred with blue. Most, however, showed merely the
high-boned, sphinx-like brown of their faces free from war-paint. The
costumes of many were extremely beautiful, the wonderful beadwork on
tunic and moccasins being a thing of amazing craftsmanship, though the
elk-tooth decorations, though of great value, were not so attractive.
Standing in front of the rest, the chief, "Little Thunder," read the
address to the Prince. He was a big, aquiline fellow, young and
handsome, clad in white, hairy chaps and cowboy shirt. He spoke in
sing-song Cree, his body curving back from straddled knees as though he
sat a pulling horse.
In his historic tongue, and then in English, he spoke of the honour the
Prince was paying the Stoneys, and of their enduring loyalty to him and
his father; and he asked the Prince "to accept from us this Indian
suit, the best we have, emblematic of the clothes we wore in happy
days. We beg you also to allow us to elect you as our chief, and to
give you the name Chief Morning Star."
The suit given to the Prince was an exceedingly handsome one of white
buckskin, decorated with beads, feathers and fur, and surmounted by a
great headdress of feathers rising from a fillet of beads and fur. The
Prince put on the headdress at once, and spoke to the Indians as a
chief to his braves, telling them of the honour they had done him.
When he had finished, the tom-toms were brought into action again, and
a high, thin wail went up from the ring of Indians, and they began
almost at once to move round in a dance. Indian dancing is monotonous.
It is done to the high, nasal chanting of men gathered round a big drum
in the centre of the ring. This drum is beaten stoically by all to
give the time.
Some of the dancing is the mere bending of knees and a soft shuffling
stamping of moccasined feet. In other dances vividly clad,
broad-faced, comely squaws joined in the ring of braves, whose feathers
and elk-tooth ornaments swung as they moved, and the whole ring, with a
slightly rocking movement, shuffled an inch at a time round the tom-tom
men. The motion was very like that of soldiers dressing ranks.
A more spirited dance is done by braves holding weapons stiffly, and
following each other in file round the circle, now bending knees, or
bodies, now standing upright. As they pass round and dip they loose
little snapping yelps. All the time their faces remain as impassive as
things graven.
The dancing was followed by racing. Boys mounted bareback the springy
little horses, and with their legs twisted into rope-girths--with
reins, the only harness--went round the track at express speed. Young
women, riding astride, their dresses tied about their knees, also
raced, showing horsemanship even superior to the boys. The riding was
extremely fine, and the little horses bunch and move with an elastic
and hurtling movement that is thrilling.
The ceremony had made the bravest of spectacles. The Indian colour and
romance of the scene, set in a deep cup rimmed by steep, grim
mountains, the sides and icecaps of which the bright sunlight threw up
into an almost unreal actuality, gave it a rare and entrancing quality.
And not the least of its picturesque attractions were the papooses in
bead and fringed leather, who grubbed about in the earth with stoic
calm. They looked almost too toylike to be true. They looked as
though their right place was in a scheme of decoration on a wall or a
mantel-shelf. As one lady said of them: "They're just the sort of
things I want to take home as souvenirs."
II
Banff is an exquisite and ideal holiday place, and I can appreciate the
impulse that sends many Americans as well as Canadians to enjoy its
beauties in the summer.
It is a valley ringed by an amphitheatre of mountains, up the harsh
slopes of which spruce forests climb desperately until beaten by the
height and rock on the scarps beneath crests which are often
snow-capped. Through this broad valley, and winding round slopes into
other valleys, run streams of that poignant blueness which only glacial
silt and superb mountain skies can Impart.
The houses and hotels in this Switzerland of Canada are charming, but
the Banff Springs Hotel, where the Prince stayed, is genius. It is
perched up on a spur in the valley, so that in that immense ring of
heights it seems to float insubstantially above the clouds of trees,
like the palace of some genii. For not only was its site admirably
chosen, but the whole scheme of the building fits the atmosphere of the
place. And it is as comfortable as it is beautiful.
It faces across its red-tiled, white-balustered terraces and vivid
lawns, a sharp river valley that strolls winding amid the mountains.
And just as this river turns before it, it tumbles down a rock slide in
a vast mass of foam, so that even when one cannot see its beauty at
night, its roar can be heard in the wonderful silence of the valley.
On the terrace of the hotel are two bathing-pools fed from the sulphur
springs of Banff, and here Canadians seem to bathe all day until
dance-time--and even slip back for a moonlight bath between dancing and
bed.
It is an ideal place for a holiday, for there is golfing, climbing,
walking and bathing for those whose athletic instincts are not
satisfied with beauty, and automobile rides amid beauty. And it is, of
course, a perfect place for honeymooners, as one will find by
consulting the Visitors' Book, for with characteristic frankness the
Canadians and Americans sign themselves:
"_Mr. and Mrs. Jack P. Eeks, Spokane. We are on our honeymoon._"
The Prince spent an afternoon and a morning playing golf amid the
immensities of Banff, or travelling in a swift car along its beautiful
roads. There are most things in Banff to make man happy, even a coal
mine, sitting like a black and incongruous gnome in the heart of
enchanted hills, to provide heat against mountain chills.
The Prince saw the sulphur spring that bubbles out of quicksand in a
little cavern deep in the hillside--a cavern made almost impregnable by
smell. In the old days the determined bather had to shin down a pole
through a funnel, and take his curative bath in the rocky oubliette of
the spring. Now the Government has arranged things better. It has
carved a dark tunnel to the pool, and carried the water to two big
swimming tanks on the open hillside, where one can take a plunge with
all modern accessories.
III
From Banff in the afternoon of Thursday, September 18th, the train
carried the Prince through scenery that seemed to accumulate beauty as
he travelled to another eyrie of loveliness, Lake Louise.
At Lake Louise Station the railway is five thousand feet above the
sea-level, but the Chateau and Lake are yet higher, and the Prince
climbed to them by a motor railway that rises clinging to the
mountain-side, until it twists into woods and mounts upward by the side
of a blue-and-white stream dashing downward, with an occasional
breather in a deep pool, over rocks.
The Chateau is poised high up in the world on the lip of a small and
perfect lake of poignant blue, that fills the cup made by the meeting
of a ring of massive heights. At the end of the lake, miles away, but,
thanks to the queerness of mountain perspective, looking close enough
to touch, rises the scarp of Mount Victoria, capped with a vast glacier
that seemed to shine with curious inner lambency under the clear light
of the grey day. There is a touch of the theatre in that view from the
windows or the broad lawns of the Chateau, for the mountain and glacier
is a huge back-drop seen behind wings made by the shoulders of other
mountains, and all, rock and spruce woods, as well as the clear shining
of the ice, are mirrored in the perfect lake that makes the floor of
the valley.
Up on one of the shoulders of the lake, hidden away in a screen of
trees, is the home of an English woman. She used to spend her days
working in a shop in the West End of London until happy chance brought
her to Lake Louise, and she opened a tea chalet high on that lonely
crag. She has changed from the frowsty airs of her old life to a place
where she can enjoy beauty, health and an income that allows her to fly
off to California when the winter comes. The Prince went up to take
tea in this chalet of romance and profit during his walk of exercise.
There is another kind of romance in the woods about the Chateau, and
one of the policemen who guarded the Prince made its acquaintance
during the night. In the dark he heard the noise of some one moving
amid the trees that come down to the edge of the hotel grounds. He
thought that some unpleasant intruder on the Prince's privacy was
attempting to sneak in by the back way. He marched up to the edge of
the wood and waited in his most legal attitude for the intruder--and a
bear came out to meet him. Not only did it come out to meet him, but
it reared up and waved its paws in a thoroughly militant manner. The
policeman was a man from the industrial East, and not having been
trained to the habits of bears, decided on a strategic withdrawal.
His experience was one of the next day's jokes, since it appears that
bears often do come out of the woods attracted by the smell of hotel
cooking. On the whole they are amiable, and are no more difficult than
ordinary human beings marching in the direction of a good dinner.
From Lake Louise the Prince went steadily west through some of the most
impressive scenery in Canada. The gradient climbs resolutely to the
great lift of petrified earth above Kicking Horse Pass, so that the
train seemed to be steaming across the sky.
A little east of the Pass is a slight monument called "the Great
Divide." Here Alberta meets British Columbia, and here a stream
springs from the mountains to divide itself east and west, one fork
joining stream after stream, until as a great river it empties into
Hudson Bay; the other, turning west and leaping down the ledges of
valleys, makes for the Pacific.
Beyond "the Great Divide" the titanic Kicking Horse Pass opens out. It
falls by gigantic levels for 1,300 feet to the dim, spruce-misted
valleys that lie darkly at the foot of the giant mountains. It is not
a straight canyon, but a series of deeper valleys opening out of deep
valleys round the shoulders of the grim slopes. Down this tortuous
corridor the railway creeps lower, level by level, going with the
physical caution of a man descending a dangerous slope.
The line feels for its best footholds on the sides of walls that drop
sheer away, and tower sheer above. We could look over the side down
abrupt precipices, and see through the dense rain of the day the mighty
drop to where the Kicking Horse River, after leaping over rocky ramps
and flowing through level pools, ran in a score of channels on the wide
shingly floor of the Pass.
Beneath us as we descended we could see the track twisting and looping,
as it sought by tunnelling to conquer the exacting gradient. The
planning of the line is, in its own way, as wonderful as the natural
marvel of the Pass. One is filled with awe at the vision, the genius
and the tenacity of those great railway men who had seen a way over
this grim mountain barrier, had schemed their line and had mastered
nature.
At Yoho Station that clings like a limpet near the top of this soaring
barrier, the Prince took to horse, and rode down trails that wind along
the mountainside through thickets of trees to Field at the foot of the
drop. The rain was driving up the throat of the valley before a strong
wind, and it was not a good day for riding, even in woolly chaps such
as he wore, but he set out at a gallop, and enjoyed the exercise and
the scenery, which is barbaric and tremendous, though here and there it
was etherealized by sudden gleams of sunlight playing on the wet
foliage of the mountain-side and turning the wet masses into rainbows.
During this ride he passed under the stain in a sheer wall of rock that
gives the Pass its name. For some geological reason there is, high up
in a straight mass of white towering cliff, a black outcrop that is
like the silhouette of an Indian on a horse. I could not distinguish
the kick in the horse myself, but I was assured it was there, and
Kicking Horse is thus named.
From Field, a breathing space for trains, about which has grown a small
village possessing one good hotel, the Prince rode up the valleys to
some of the beauty spots, such as Emerald Lake, which lies high in the
sky under the cold glaciers of Mount Burgess. It was a wonderful ride
through the spruce and balsam woods of these high valleys.
IV
During Saturday, September 20th, the train was yet in the mountains,
and the scenery continued to be magnificent. From Field the line works
down to the level of the Columbia River, some 1,500 feet lower, through
magnificent stretches of mountain panorama, and through breathless
gorges like the Palliser, before climbing again steeply to the highest
point of the Selkirk Range. Here the train seemed to charge straight
at the towering wall of Mount MacDonald, but only because there is a
miracle of a tunnel--Connaught Tunnel--which coaxes the line down by
easy grades to Rogers Pass, the Illicilliwaet and Albert Canyon.
Through all this stretch the scenery is superb. In the gorges and the
canyon high mountains force the river and railway together, until the
train runs in a semi-darkness between sheer cliffs, with the water
foaming and tearing itself forward in pent-up fury between harsh, rocky
walls. Sometimes these walls encroach until the water channel is
forced between two rocks standing up like doorposts, with not much more
than a doorway space between them. Through these gateways the volume
of water surges with an indescribable sense of power.
At places, as in the valley of the Beavermouth, east of the Connaught
Tunnel, the line climbs hugely upward on the sides of great ranges,
and, on precarious ledges, hangs above a gigantic floor, tree-clad and
fretted with water channels. The train crept over spidery bridges,
spanning waterdrops, and crawled for miles beneath ranges of big timber
snowsheds.
The train stopped at the pleasant little mountain town of Golden, where
the Prince went "ashore," and there was the ceremony of reception.
This was on the program. The next stop was not.
West of the Albert Canyon, at a tiny station called Twin Butte, we
passed another train standing in a siding, with a long straggle of men
in khaki waiting on the platform and along the track, looking at us as
we swept along. Abruptly we ceased to sweep along. The communication
cord had been pulled, and we stopped with a jerk.
The Prince had caught sight of the soldiers, and had recognized who
they were. He had given orders to pull up, and almost before the
brakes had ground home, he was out on the track and among the men,
speaking to them and the officers, who were delighted at this
unexpected meeting.
The soldiers were English. They were men of the 25th Middlesex, H.A.C.
and other regiments, four hundred all told. They had come from Omsk,
in Russia, by way of the Pacific, and were being railed from Vancouver
to Montreal in order to take ship for home. The men of the Middlesex
were those made famous by the sinking of their trooper off the African
coast in 1916. Their behaviour then had been so admirable that it will
be remembered the King cabled to them, "Well done, Diehards!"
By the isolated railway station and under the lonely mountains so far
from their homes, they were drawn up, and the Prince made an informal
inspection of the men who had been so long away, and who had travelled
the long road from Siberia on their way Blightyward.
The inspection lasted only a few minutes, and the episode, spontaneous
as it was characteristic, scarcely broke the run into Revelstoke. But
it was the happiest of meetings.
Revelstoke is a small, bright mountain town known, as its inhabitants
say, for snow and strawberries. It is their way of explaining that the
land in this deep mountain valley is splendidly fertile, and that
settlers have only to farm on a small scale in order to make a
comfortable living, though in winter it is--well, of the mountains.
The fishing there is also extremely good, and we were told almost
fabulous tales of boys who on their journey home from school spent a
few minutes at the creeks of the Columbia River, and went on their way
bearing enough fish to make a dinner for a big family.
The chief feature of Revelstoke's reception was a motor run up
Revelstoke mountain, a four thousand feet ride up a stiffish road that
climbed by corkscrew bends. This was thrilling enough, for there were
abrupt depths when we saw Revelstoke far down on the valley floor
looking neat and doll-like from this airman's eye-view, and we had to
cross frail wooden bridges spanning deep crevices, some of them at ugly
corners.
From Revelstoke the train went on to Sicamous, where it remained until
the middle of Sunday, September 21st. Sicamous is merely an hotel and
a few houses beside a very beautiful lake. It is a splendid fishing
centre, for a chain of lakes stretches south through the valleys to
Okanagan. A branch line serves this district (which we were to explore
later), where there are rich orchard lands.
With Revelstoke, Sicamous acts as a distributing centre for the big
Kootenay areas, that romantic land of the earliest trail breakers,
those dramatic fellows who pushed all ways through the forest-clad
valleys after gold and silver, and the other rich rewards of the
prospector. Even now the country has only been tapped, and there are
many new discoveries of ore in the grim rock of the district.
A short stop at Kamloops on Sunday, September 21st, and then a straight
run through the night brought us to Vancouver, with just a note of
interest outside the Pacific city. For miles we passed dumps of war
material, shells, ammunition boxes, the usual material of armies. It
was lying discarded and decaying, and it told a tragic story. It was
the war material that the Allies had prepared for Russia. These were
the dumps that fed the transports for Russia plying from Vancouver.
After the peace of Brest-Litovsk all work ceased about them, and there
they remained to that day, monuments to the Bolshevik Peace.