each other with a bitter rivalry. They do not love their cities as a
Manchester man loves Manchester or a Münchener Munich, for they have
probably lately arrived in them, and will surely pass on soon. But while
they are there they love them, and with no silent love. They boost. To
boost is to commend outrageously. And each cries up his own city,
both from pride, it would appear, and for profit. For the fortunes
of Newville are very really the fortunes of its inhabitants. From the
successful speculator, owner of whole blocks, to the waiter bringing you
a Martini, who has paid up a fraction of the cost of a quarter-share
in a town-lot--all are the richer, as well as the prouder, if Newville
grows. It is imperative to praise Edmonton in Edmonton. But it is sudden
death to praise it in Calgary. The partisans of each city proclaim its
superiority to all the others in swiftness of growth, future population,
size of buildings, price of land--by all recognised standards of
excellence. I travelled from Edmonton to Calgary in the company of
a citizen of Edmonton and a citizen of Calgary. Hour after hour they
disputed. Land in Calgary had risen from five dollars to three hundred;
but in Edmonton from three to five hundred. Edmonton had grown from
thirty persons to forty thousand in twenty years; but Calgary from
twenty to thirty thousand in twelve.... "Where"--as a respite--"did I
come from?" I had to tell them, not without shame, that my own town
of Grantchester, having numbered three hundred at the time of Julius
Caesar's landing, had risen rapidly to nearly four by Doomsday Book, but
was now declined to three-fifty. They seemed perplexed and angry.
Sentimental people in the East will talk of the romance of the West, and
of these simple, brave pioneers who have wrung a living from the soil,
and are properly proud of the rude little towns that mark their conquest
over nature. That may apply to the frontiers of civilisation up North,
but the prairie-towns have progressed beyond all that. A few of the old
pioneers of the West survive to watch with startled eyes the wonderful
fruits of the seed they sowed. Such are among the finest people
in Canada, very different from the younger generation, with wider
interests, good talkers, the best of company. From them, and from
records, one can learn of the early settlers and the beginnings of the
North-West Mounted Police. The Police seem to have been superb. For no
great reward, but the love of the thing, they imposed order and fairness
upon half a continent. The Indians trusted them utterly; they were
without fear. A store stands now in Calgary where forty years ago a
policeman was shot to death by a murderer, followed over a thousand
miles. He knew that the criminal would shoot; but it was the rule of the
Mounted Police not to fire first. Wounded, he killed his man, then died.
And there was the case of the desperado who crossed the border, and was
eventually captured and held by an immense force of American police and
military. They awaited a regiment of the Police to conduct the villain
back to trial. Two appeared, and being asked, "Where is the escort?"
replied, "We are the escort," and started back their five hundred miles
ride with the murderer in tow. And there were the two who pursued a
horse-thief from Dawson down to Minneapolis, caught him, and took him
back to Dawson to be hanged. And there was the settler, who....
The tragedy of the West is that these men have passed, and that what
they lived and died to secure for their race is now the foundation for
a gigantic national gambling of a most unprofitable and disastrous kind.
Hordes of people--who mostly seem to come from the great neighbouring
Commonwealth, and are inspired with the national hunger for getting rich
quickly without deserving it--prey on the community by their dealings in
what is humorously called 'Real Estate.' For them our fathers died. What
a sowing, and what a harvest! And where good men worked or perished is
now a row of little shops, all devoted to the sale of town-lots in some
distant spot that must infallibly become a great city in the next two
years, and in the doorway of each lounges a thin-chested, much-spitting
youth, with a flabby face, shifty eyes, and an inhuman mouth, who
invites you continually, with the most raucous of American accents, to
"step inside and ex-amine our Praposition."
XII
THE INDIANS
When I was in the East, I got to know a man who had spent many years
of his life living among the Indians. He showed me his photographs. He
explained one, of an old woman. He said, "They told me there was an old
woman in the camp called Laughing Earth. When I heard the name, I just
said, 'Take me to her!' She wouldn't be photographed. She kept turning
her back to me. I just picked up a clod and plugged it at her, and said,
'Turn round, Laughing Earth!' She turned half round, and grinned. She
_was_ a game old bird! I joshed all the boys here Laughing Earth was my
girl--till they saw her photo!"
There stands Laughing Earth, in brightly-coloured petticoat and blouse,
her grey hair blowing about her. Her back is towards you, but her face
is turned, and scarcely hidden by a hand that is raised with all the
coyness of seventy years. Laughter shines from the infinitely lined,
round, brown cheeks, and from the mouth, and from the dancing eyes, and
floods and spills over from each of the innumerable wrinkles. Laughing
Earth--there is endless vitality in that laughter. The hand and face
and the old body laugh. No skinny, intellectual mirth, affecting but the
lips! It was the merriment of an apple bobbing on the bough, or a brown
stream running over rocks, or any other gay creature of earth. And with
all was a great dignity, invulnerable to clods, and a kindly and noble
beauty. By the light of that laughter much becomes clear--the right
place of man upon earth, the entire suitability in life of very
brightly-coloured petticoats, and the fact that old age is only a
different kind of a merriment from youth, and a wiser.
And by that light the fragments of this pathetic race become more
comprehensible, and, perhaps, less pathetic. The wanderer in Canada sees
them from time to time, the more the further west he goes, irrelevant
and inscrutable figures. In the east, French and Scotch half-breeds
frequent the borders of civilisation. In any western town you may chance
on a brave and his wife and a baby, resplendent in gay blankets and
trappings, sliding gravely through the hideousness of the new order that
has supplanted them. And there will be a few half-breeds loitering at
the corners of the streets. These people of mixed race generally seem
unfortunate in the first generation. A few of the older ones, the
'old-timers', have 'made good,' and hold positions in the society for
which they pioneered. But most appear to inherit the weaknesses of both
sides. Drink does its work. And the nobler ones, like the tragic figure
of that poetess who died recently, Pauline Johnson, seem fated to be
at odds with the world. The happiest, whether Indian or half-breed, are
those who live beyond the ever-advancing edges of cultivation and order,
and force a livelihood from nature by hunting and fishing. Go anywhere
into the wild, and you will find in little clearings, by lake or river,
a dilapidated hut with a family of these solitaries, friendly with the
pioneers or trappers around, ready to act as guide on hunt or trail.
The Government, extraordinarily painstaking and well-intentioned, has
established Indian schools, and trains some of them to take their places
in the civilisation we have built. Not the best Indians these, say
lovers of the race. I have met them, as clerks or stenographers, only
distinguishable from their neighbours by a darker skin and a sweeter
voice and manner. And in a generation or two, I suppose, the strain
mingles and is lost. So we finish with kindness what our fathers began
with war.
The Government, and others, have scientifically studied the history and
characteristics of the Indians, and written them down in books, lest it
be forgotten that human beings could be so extraordinary. They were a
wandering race, it appears, of many tribes and, even, languages. Not apt
to arts or crafts, they had, and have, an unrefined delight in bright
colours. They enjoyed a 'Nature-Worship,' believed rather dimly in a
presiding Power, and very definitely in certain ethical and moral rules.
One of their incomprehensible customs was that at certain intervals
the tribe divided itself into two factitious divisions, each headed by
various chiefs, and gambled furiously for many days, one party against
the other. They were pugnacious, and in their uncivilised way fought
frequent wars. They were remarkably loyal to each other, and treacherous
to the foe; brave, and very stoical. "Monogamy was very prevalent." It
is remarked that husbands and wives were very fond of each other, and
the great body of scientific opinion favours the theory that mothers
were much attached to their children. Most tribes were very healthy, and
some fine-looking. Such were the remarkable people who hunted, fought,
feasted, and lived here until the light came, and all was changed. Other
qualities they had even more remarkable to a European, such as
utter honesty, and complete devotion to the truth among themselves.
Civilisation, disease, alcohol, and vice have reduced them to a few
scattered communities and some stragglers, and a legend, the admiration
of boyhood. Boys they were, pugnacious, hunters, loyal, and cruel, older
than the merrier children of the South Seas, younger and simpler than
the weedy, furtive, acquisitive youth who may figure our age and type.
"We must be a Morally Higher race than the Indians," said an earnest
American businessman to me in Saskatoon, "because we have Survived them.
The Great Darwin has proved it." I visited, later, a community of our
Moral Inferiors, an Indian 'reservation' under the shade of the Rockies.
The Government has put aside various tracts of land where the Indians
may conduct their lives in something of their old way, and stationed
in each an agent to protect their interests. For every white man, as
an agent told me, "thinks an Indian legitimate prey for all forms of
cheating and robbery."
The reservations are the better in proportion as they are further
from the towns and cities. The one I saw was peopled by a few hundred
Stonies, one of the finest and most untouched of the tribes. Of these
Laughing Earth had made one, but alas! a few years before she had become
"a portion of the mirthfulness
That once she made more mirthful."
The Indians occupy themselves with a little farming and hunting, and
with expeditions, and live in two or three small scattered villages
of huts and tents. But the centre of the community is the little
white-washed house where the agent has his office. Here we sat, he
and I, and talked, behind the counter. The agent is father, mother,
clergyman, tutor, physician, solicitor, and banker to the Indians. They
wandered in and out of the place with their various requests. The most
part of them could not talk English, but there was generally some young
Indian to interpret. An old chief entered. His grey hair curled down
to his broad shoulders. He had a noble forehead, brown, steady eyes, a
thin, humorous mouth. His cow had been run over by the C.P.R. What was
to be done? and how much would he get? The affair was discussed through
an interpreter, a Canadianised young Indian in trousers, who spat. Some
of the men, especially the older ones, have wonderful dignity and beauty
of face and body. Their physique is superb; their features shaped and
lined by weather and experience into a Roman nobility that demands
respect. Several such passed through. Then came an old woman, wizened
and loquacious, bent double by the sack of her weekly provision of meat
and flour. She required oil, was given it, secreted it in some cranny of
the many-coloured bundle that she was, and staggered creakily off again.
The office emptied for a while. Then drifted in a younger man, tall,
with that brown, dog-like expression of simplicity many Indians wear. He
was covered by a large grey-coloured blanket, over his other clothes. He
puffed at a pipe and stared out of the window. The agent and I continued
talking. You must never hurry an Indian. Presently he gave a little
grunt. The agent said, "Well, John?" John went on smoking. Five minutes
later, in the middle of our conversation, John said suddenly, "Salt." He
was staring inexpressively at the ceiling. "Why, John," said the agent,
"I gave you enough salts on Thursday to last you a week." John directed
his gaze on us, and smoked dumbly. "Still the stomach?" inquired the
agent, genially. John's expression became gradually grimmer, and
he moved one hand slowly across till it rested on his stomach. An
impassive, significant hand. After a courteous pause the agent rose,
poured some Epsom salts out of a large jar, wrapped them in paper, and
handed them over. John secreted them dispassionately in some pouch
among the skins and blankets that wrapped him in. We went back to
our conversation. Five minutes after he grunted, suddenly. Again five
minutes, and he departed. His wife--a plump, patient young woman--and
his solemn-eyed, fat, ridiculous son of four, were sitting stolidly on
the grass outside. It obviously made no difference if he took one hour
or seven over his business. They mounted their tiny ponies and trotted
briskly off.... I suppose one is apt to be sentimental about these good
people. They're really so picturesque; they trail clouds of Fenimore
Cooper; and they seem, for all their unfitness, reposefully more in
touch with permanent things than the America that has succeeded them.
And it is interesting to watch our pathetic efforts to prevent or disarm
the effects of ourselves. What will happen? Shall we preserve these few
bands of them, untouched, to succeed us, ultimately, when the grasp of
our 'civilisation' weakens, and our transient anarchy in these wilder
lands recedes once more before the older anarchy of Nature? Or will they
be entirely swallowed by that ugliness of shops and trousers with which
we enchain the earth, and become a memory and less than a memory?
They are that already. The Indians have passed. They left no arts, no
tradition, no buildings or roads or laws; only a story or two, and a few
names, strange and beautiful. The ghosts of the old chiefs must surely
chuckle when they note that the name by which Canada has called her
capital and the centre of her political life, Ottawa, is an Indian name
which signifies 'buying and selling.' And the wanderer in this land will
always be remarking an unexplained fragrance about the place-names, as
from some flower which has withered, and which he does not know.
XIII
THE ROCKIES
At Calgary, if you can spare a minute from more important matters, slip
beyond the hurrying white city, climb the golf links, and gaze west. A
low bank of dark clouds disturbs you by the fixity of its outline. It
is the Rockies, seventy miles away. On a good day, it is said, they
are visible twice as far, so clear and serene is this air. Five hundred
miles west is the coast of British Columbia, a region with a different
climate, different country, and different problems. It is cut off from
the prairies by vast tracts of wild country and uninhabitable ranges.
For nearly two hundred miles the train pants through the homeless
grandeur of the Rockies and the Selkirks. Four or five hotels, a few
huts or tents, and a rare mining-camp--that is all the habitation in
many thousands of square miles. Little even of that is visible from the
train. That is one of the chief differences between the effect of
the Rockies and that of the Alps. There, you are always in sight of
a civilisation which has nestled for ages at the feet of those high
places. They stand, enrobed with worship, and grander by contrast with
the lives of men. These un-memoried heights are inhuman--or rather,
irrelevant to humanity. No recorded Hannibal has struggled across them;
their shadow lies on no remembered literature. They acknowledge claims
neither of the soul nor of the body of man. He is a stranger, neither
Nature's enemy nor her child. She is there alone, scarcely a unity in
the heaped confusion of these crags, almost without grandeur among the
chaos of earth.
Yet this horrid and solitary wildness is but one aspect. There is beauty
here, at length, for the first time in Canada, the real beauty that is
always too sudden for mortal eyes, and brings pain with its comfort. The
Rockies have a remoter, yet a kindlier, beauty than the Alps. Their
rock is of a browner colour, and such rugged peaks and crowns as do not
attain snow continually suggest gigantic castellations, or the ramparts
of Titans. Eastward, the foothills are few and low, and the mountains
stand superbly. The heart lifts to see them. They guard the sunset.
Into this rocky wilderness you plunge, and toil through it hour by hour,
viewing it from the rear of the Observation-Car. The Observation-Car
is a great invention of the new world. At the end of the train is a
compartment with large windows, and a little platform behind it, roofed
over, but exposed otherwise to the air, On this platform are sixteen
little perches, for which you fight with Americans. Victorious, you
crouch on one, and watch the ever-receding panorama behind the train. It
is an admirable way of viewing scenery. But a day of being perpetually
drawn backwards at a great pace through some of the grandest mountains
in the world has a queer effect. Like life, it leaves you with a dizzy
irritation. For, as in life, you never see the glories till they are
past, and then they vanish with incredible rapidity. And if you crane to
see the dwindling further peaks, you miss the new splendours.
The day I went through most of the Rockies was, by some standards, a
bad one for the view. Rain scudded by in forlorn, grey showers, and the
upper parts of the mountains were wrapped in cloud, which was but rarely
blown aside to reveal the heights. Sublimity, therefore, was left to
the imagination; but desolation was most vividly present. In no weather
could the impression of loneliness be stronger. The pines drooped and
sobbed. Cascades, born somewhere in the dun firmament above, dropped
down the mountain sides in ever-growing white threads. The rivers roared
and plunged with aimless passion down the ravines. Stray little clouds,
left behind when the wrack lifted a little, ran bleating up and down the
forlorn hill-sides. More often, the clouds trailed along the valleys,
a long procession of shrouded, melancholy figures, seeming to pause, as
with an indeterminate, tragic, vain gesture, before passing out of sight
up some ravine.
Yet desolation is not the final impression that will remain of the
Rockies and the Selkirks. I was advised by various people to 'stop off'
at Banff and at Lake Louise, in the Rockies. I did so. They are supposed
to be equally the beauty-spots of the mountains. How perplexing it is
that advisers are always so kindly and willing to help, and always so
undiscriminating. It is equally disastrous to be a sceptic and to be
credulous. Banff is an ordinary little tourist-resort in mountainous
country, with hills and a stream and snow-peaks beyond. Beautiful
enough, and invigorating. But Lake Louise--Lake Louise is of another
world. Imagine a little round lake 6000 feet up, a mile across, closed
in by great cliffs of brown rock, round the shoulders of which are
thrown mantles of close dark pine. At one end the lake is fed by a
vast glacier, and its milky tumbling stream; and the glacier climbs to
snowfields of one of the highest and loveliest peaks in the Rockies,
which keeps perpetual guard over the scene. To this place you go up
three or four miles from the railway. There is the hotel at one end of
the lake, facing the glacier; else no sign of humanity. From the windows
you may watch the water and the peaks all day, and never see the same
view twice. In the lake, ever-changing, is Beauty herself, as nearly
visible to mortal eyes as she may ever be. The water, beyond the
flowers, is green, always a different green. Sometimes it is tranquil,
glassy, shot with blue, of a peacock tint. Then a little wind awakes in
the distance, and ruffles the surface, yard by yard, covering it with
a myriad tiny wrinkles, till half the lake is milky emerald, while
the rest still sleeps. And, at length, the whole is astir, and the sun
catches it, and Lake Louise is a web of laughter, the opal distillation
of all the buds of all the spring. On either side go up the dark
processional pines, mounting to the sacred peaks, devout, kneeling,
motionless, in an ecstasy of homely adoration, like the donors and their
families in a Flemish picture. Among these you may wander for hours
by little rambling paths, over white and red and golden flowers, and,
continually, you spy little lakes, hidden away, each a shy, soft jewel
of a new strange tint of green or blue, mutable and lovely.... And
beyond all is the glacier and the vast fields and peaks of eternal snow.
If you watch the great white cliff, from the foot of which the glacier
flows--seven miles away, but it seems two--you will sometimes see a
little puff of silvery smoke go up, thin, and vanish. A few seconds
later comes the roar of terrific, distant thunder. The mountains tower
and smile unregarding in the sun. It was an avalanche. And if you climb
any of the ridges or peaks around, there are discovered other valleys
and heights and ranges, wild and desert, stretching endlessly away. As
day draws to an end the shadows on the snow turn bluer, the crying
of innumerable waters hushes, and the immense, bare ramparts
of westward-facing rock that guard the great valley win a rich,
golden-brown radiance. Long after the sun has set they seem to give
forth the splendour of the day, and the tranquillity of their centuries,
in undiminished fulness. They have that other-worldly serenity which a
perfect old age possesses. And as with a perfect old age, so here, the
colour and the light ebb so gradually out of things that you could swear
nothing of the radiance and glory gone up to the very moment before the
dark.
It was on such a height, and at some such hour as this, that I sat
and considered the nature of the country in this continent. There
was perceptible, even here, though less urgent than elsewhere, the
strangeness I had noticed in woods by the St Lawrence, and on the banks
of the Delaware (where are red-haired girls who sing at dawn), and in
British Columbia, and afterwards among the brown hills and colossal
trees of California, but especially by that lonely golden beach in
Manitoba, where the high-stepping little brown deer run down to drink,
and the wild geese through the evening go flying and crying. It is an
empty land. To love the country here--mountains are worshipped, not
loved--is like embracing a wraith. A European can find nothing to
satisfy the hunger of his heart. The air is too thin to breathe.
He requires haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts. The
immaterial soil of England is heavy and fertile with the decaying stuff
of past seasons and generations. Here is the floor of a new wood, yet
uncumbered by one year's autumn fall. We Europeans find the Orient stale
and too luxuriantly fetid by reason of the multitude of bygone lives and
thoughts, oppressive with the crowded presence of the dead, both men and
gods. So, I imagine, a Canadian would feel our woods and fields heavy
with the past and the invisible, and suffer claustrophobia in an English
countryside beneath the dreadful pressure of immortals. For his own
forests and wild places are windswept and empty. That is their charm,
and their terror. You may lie awake all night and never feel the passing
of evil presences, nor hear printless feet; neither do you lapse into
slumber with the comfortable consciousness of those friendly watchers
who sit invisibly by a lonely sleeper under an English sky. Even an
Irishman would not see a row of little men with green caps lepping
along beneath the fire-weed and the golden daisies; nor have the subtler
fairies of England found these wilds. It has never paid a steamship or
railway company to arrange for their emigration.