pieces of oak or birch lashed together with buckskin thongs and turned
up high in front. It is usually about nine feet in length by sixteen
inches wide. A leather cord is run along the outer edges for fastening
whatever may be put upon the sled. Varying numbers of dogs are
harnessed to such sleds, but the usual number is four. Traces, collars,
and backbands form the harness, and the dogs are hitched one before the
other. Very often the collars are completed with sets of sleigh-bells,
and sometimes the harness is otherwise ornamented with beads, tassels,
fringes, or ribbons. The leader, or fore-goer, is always the best in the
team. The dog next to him is called the steady dog, and the last is
named the steer dog. As a rule, these faithful animals are treated
harshly, if not brutally. It is a Hudson Bay axiom that no man who
cannot curse in three languages is fit to drive them. The three
profanities are, of course, English, French, and Indian, though whoever
has heard the Northwest French knows that it ought to serve by itself,
as it is half-soled with Anglo-Saxon oaths and heeled with Indian
obscenity. The rule with whoever goes on a dog-sled journey is that the
driver, or mock-passenger, runs behind the dogs. The main function of
the sled is to carry the dead weight, the burdens of tent-covers,
blankets, food, and the like. The men run along with or behind the dogs,
on snow-shoes, and when the dogs make better time than horses are able
to, and will carry between 200 and 300 pounds over daily distances of
from 20 to 35 miles, according to the condition of the ice or snow, and
that many a journey of 1000 miles has been performed in this way, and
some of 2000 miles, the test of human endurance is as great as that of
canine grit.
Men travelling "light," with extra sleds for the freight, and men on
short journeys often ride in the sleds, which in such cases are fitted
up as "carioles" for the purpose. I have heard an unauthenticated
account, by a Hudson Bay man, of men who drove themselves, disciplining
refractory or lazy dogs by simply pulling them in beside or over the
dash-board, and holding them down by the neck while they thrashed them.
A story is told of a worthy bishop who complained of the slow progress
his sled was making, and was told that it was useless to complain, as
the dogs would not work unless they were roundly and incessantly cursed.
After a time the bishop gave his driver absolution for the profanity
needed for the remainder of the journey, and thenceforth sped over the
snow at a gallop, every stroke of the half-breed's long and cruel whip
being sent home with a volley of wicked words, emphasized at times with
peltings with sharp-edged bits of ice. Kane, the explorer, made an
average of 57 miles a day behind these shaggy little brutes. Milton and
Cheadle, in their book, mention instances where the dogs made 140 miles
in less than 48 hours, and the Bishop of Rupert's Land told me he had
covered 20 miles in a forenoon and 20 in the afternoon of the same day,
without causing his dogs to exhibit evidence of fatigue. The best time
is made on hard snow and ice, of course, and when the conditions suit,
the drivers whip off their snow-shoes to trot behind the dogs more
easily. In view of what they do, it is no wonder that many of the
Northern Indians, upon first seeing horses, named them simply "big dog."
But to me the performances of the drivers are the more wonderful. It was
a white youth, son of a factor, who ran behind the bishop's dogs in
the spurt of 40 miles by daylight that I mention. The men who do such
work explain that the "lope" of the dogs is peculiarly suited to the
dog-trot of a human being.
[Illustration: "HUSKIE" DOGS ON THE FROZEN HIGHWAY]
A picture of a factor on a round of his outposts, or of a chief factor
racing through a great district, will now be intelligible. If he is
riding, he fancies that princes and lords would envy him could they see
his luxurious comfort. Fancy him in a dog-cariole of the best pattern--a
little suggestive of a burial casket, to be sure, in its shape, but
gaudily painted, and so full of soft warm furs that the man within is
enveloped like a chrysalis in a cocoon. Perhaps there are Russian bells
on the collars of the dogs, and their harness is "Frenchified" with
bead-work and tassels. The air, which fans only his face, is crisp and
invigorating, and before him the lake or stream over which he rides is a
sheet of virgin snow--not nature's winding-sheet, as those who cannot
love nature have said, but rather a robe of beautiful ermine fringed and
embroidered with dark evergreen, and that in turn flecked at every point
with snow, as if bejewelled with pearls. If the factor chats with his
driver, who falls behind at rough places to keep the sled from tipping
over, their conversation is carried on at so high a tone as to startle
the birds into flight, if there are any, and to shock the scene as by
the greatest rudeness possible in that then vast, silent land. If
silence is kept, the factor reads the prints of game in the snow, of
foxes' pads and deer hoofs, of wolf splotches, and the queer
hieroglyphics of birds, or the dots and troughs of rabbit-trailing. To
him these are as legible as the Morse alphabet to telegraphers, and as
important as stock quotations to the pallid men of Wall Street.
Suddenly in the distance he sees a human figure. Time was that his
predecessors would have stopped to discuss the situation and its
dangers, for the sight of one Indian suggested the presence of more, and
the question came, were these friendly or fierce? But now the sled
hurries on. It is only an Indian or half-breed hunter minding his traps,
of which he may have a sufficient number to give him a circuit of ten or
more miles away from and back to his lodge or village. He is approached
and hailed by the driver, and with some pretty name very often--one that
may mean in English "hawk flying across the sky when the sun is
setting," or "blazing sun," or whatever. On goes the sled, and perhaps a
village is the next object of interest; not a village in our sense of
the word, but now and then a tepee or a hut peeping above the brush
beside the water, the eye being led to them by the signs of slothful
disorder close by--the rotting canoe frame, the bones, the dirty
tattered blankets, the twig-formed skeleton of a steam bath, such as
Indians resort to when tired or sick or uncommonly dirty, the worn-out
snow-shoes hung on a tree, and the racks of frozen fish or dried meat
here and there. A dog rushes down to the water-side barking
furiously--an Indian dog of the currish type of paupers' dogs the world
around--and this stirs the village pack, and brings out the squaws, who
are addressed, as the trapper up the stream was, by some poetic names,
albeit poetic license is sometimes strained to form names not at all
pretty to polite senses, "All Stomach" being that of one dusky princess,
and serving to indicate the lengths to which poesy may lead the
untrammelled mind.
The sun sinks early, and if our traveller be journeying in the West and
be a lover of nature, heaven send that his face be turned towards the
sunset! Then, be the sky anything but completely storm-draped, he will
see a sight so glorious that eloquence becomes a naked suppliant for
alms beyond the gift of language when set to describe it. A few clouds
are necessary to its perfection, and then they take on celestial dyes,
and one sees, above the vanished sun, a blaze of golden yellow thinned
into a tone that is luminous crystal. This is flanked by belts and
breasts of salmon and ruby red, and all melt towards the zenith into a
rose tone that has body at the base, but pales at top into a mere blush.
This I have seen night after night on the lakes and the plains and on
the mountains. But as the glory of it beckons the traveller ever towards
itself, so the farther he follows, the more brilliant and gaudy will be
his reward. Beyond the mountains the valleys and waters are more and
more enriched, until, at the Pacific, even San Francisco's shabby
sand-hills stir poetry and reverence in the soul by their borrowed
magnificence.
The travellers soon stop to camp for the night, and while the "breed"
falls to at the laborious but quick and simple work, the factor either
helps or smokes his pipe. A sight-seer or sportsman would have set his
man to bobbing for jack-fish or lake trout, or would have stopped a
while to bag a partridge, or might have bought whatever of this sort the
trapper or Indian village boasted, but, ten to one, this meal would be
of bacon and bread or dried meat, and perhaps some flapjacks, such as
would bring coin to a doctor in the city, but which seem ethereal and
delicious in the wilderness, particularly if made half an inch thick,
saturated with grease, well browned, and eaten while at the temperature
and consistency of molten lava.
[Illustration: THE FACTOR'S FANCY TOBOGGAN]
The sled is pulled up by the bank, the ground is cleared for a fire,
wood and brush are cut, and the deft laborer starts the flame in a
tent-like pyramid of kindlings no higher or broader than a teacup. This
tiny fire he spreads by adding fuel until he has constructed and led up
to a conflagration of logs as thick as his thighs, cleverly planned with
a backlog and glowing fire bed, and a sapling bent over the hottest part
to hold a pendent kettle on its tip. The dogs will have needed
disciplining long before this, and if the driver be like many of his
kind, and works himself into a fury, he will not hesitate to seize one
and send his teeth together through its hide after he has beaten it
until he is tired. The point of order having thus been raised and
carried, the shaggy, often handsome, animals will be minded to forget
their private grudges and quarrels, and, seated on their haunches, with
their intelligent faces towards the fire, will watch the cooking
intently. The pocket-knives or sheath-knives of the men will be apt to
be the only table implement in use at the meal. Canada had reached the
possession of seigniorial mansions of great character before any
other knife was brought to table, though the ladies used costly blades
set in precious and beautiful handles. To-day the axe ranks the knife in
the wilderness, but he who has a knife can make and furnish his own
table--and his house also, for that matter.
Supper over, and a glass of grog having been put down, with water from
the hole in the ice whence the liquid for the inevitable tea was gotten,
the night's rest is begun. The method for this varies. As good men as
ever walked have asked nothing more cosey than a snug warm trough in the
snow and a blanket or a robe; but perhaps this traveller will call for a
shake-down of balsam boughs, with all the furs out of the sled for his
covering. If nicer yet, he may order a low hollow chamber of three sides
of banked snow, and a superstructure of crotched sticks and cross-poles,
with canvas thrown over it. Every man to his quality, of course, and
that of the servant calls for simply a blanket. With that he sleeps as
soundly as if he were Santa Claus and only stirred once a year. Then
will fall upon what seems the whole world the mighty hush of the
wilderness, broken only occasionally by the hoot of an owl, the cry of a
wolf, the deep thug of the straining ice on the lake, or the snoring of
the men and dogs. But if the earth seems asleep, not so the sky. The
magic shuttle of the aurora borealis is ofttimes at work up over that
North country, sending its shifting lights weaving across the firmament
with a tremulous brilliancy and energy we in this country get but pale
hints of when we see the phenomenon at all. Flashing and palpitating
incessantly, the rose-tinted waves and luminous white bars leap across
the sky or dart up and down it in manner so fantastic and so forceful,
even despite their shadowy thinness, that travellers have fancied
themselves deaf to some seraphic sound that they believed such commotion
must produce.
An incident of this typical journey I am describing would, at more than
one season, be a meeting with some band of Indians going to a post with
furs for barter. Though the bulk of these hunters fetch their quarry in
the spring and early summer, some may come at any time. The procession
may be only that of a family or of the two or more families that live
together or as neighbors. The man, if there is but one group, is certain
to be stalking ahead, carrying nothing but his gun. Then come the women,
laden like pack-horses. They may have a sled packed with the furs and
drawn by a dog or two, and an extra dog may bear a balanced load on his
back, but the squaw is certain to have a spine-warping burden of meat
and a battered kettle and a pappoose, and whatever personal property of
any and every sort she and her liege lord own. Children who can walk
have to do so, but it sometimes happens that a baby a year and a half or
two years old is on her back, while a newborn infant, swaddled in
blanket stuff, and bagged and tied like a Bologna sausage, surmounts the
load on the sled. A more tatterdemalion outfit than a band of these
pauperized savages form it would be difficult to imagine. On the plains
they will have horses dragging travoises, dogs with travoises, women
and children loaded with impedimenta, a colt or two running loose, the
lordly men riding free, straggling curs a plenty, babies in arms, babies
swaddled, and toddlers afoot, and the whole battalion presenting at its
exposed points exhibits of torn blankets, raw meat, distorted pots and
pans, tent, poles, and rusty traps, in all eloquently suggestive of an
eviction in the slums of a great city.
I speak thus of these people not willingly, but out of the necessity of
truth-telling. The Indian east of the Rocky Mountains is to me the
subject of an admiration which is the stronger the more nearly I find
him as he was in his prime. It is not his fault that most of his race
have degenerated. It is not our fault that we have better uses for the
continent than those to which he put it. But it is our fault that he is,
as I have seen him, shivering in a cotton tepee full of holes, and
turning around and around before a fire of wet wood to keep from
freezing to death; furnished meat if he has been fierce enough to make
us fear him, left to starve if he has been docile; taught, aye, forced
to beg, mocked at by a religion he cannot understand, from the mouths of
men who apparently will not understand him; debauched with rum,
despoiled by the lust of white men in every form that lust can take. Ah,
it is a sickening story. Not in Canada, do you say? Why, in the northern
wilds of Canada are districts peopled by beggars who have been in such
pitiful stress for food and covering that the Hudson Bay Company has
kept them alive with advances of provisions and blankets winter after
winter. They are Indians who in their strength never gave the
Government the concern it now fails to show for their weakness. The
great fur company has thus added generosity to its long career of just
dealing with these poor adult children; for it is a fact that though the
company has made what profit it might, it has not, in a century at
least, cheated the Indians, or made false representations to them, or
lost their good-will and respect by any feature of its policy towards
them. Its relation to them has been paternal, and they owe none of their
degradation to it.
[Illustration: HALT OF A YORK BOAT BRIGADE FOR THE NIGHT]
I have spoken of the visits of the natives to the posts. There are two
other arrivals of great consequence--the coming of the supplies, and of
the winter mail or packet. I have seen the provisions and trade goods
being put up in bales in the great mercantile storehouse of the company
in Winnipeg--a store like a combination of a Sixth Avenue ladies' bazaar
and one of our wholesale grocers' shops--and I have seen such weights of
canned vegetables and canned plum-pudding and bottled ale and other
luxuries that I am sure that in some posts there is good living on high
days and holidays if not always. The stores are packed in parcels
averaging sixty pounds (and sometimes one hundred), to make them
convenient for handling on the portages--"for packing them over the
carries," as our traders used to say. It is in following these supplies
that we become most keenly sensible of the changes time has wrought in
the methods of the company. The day was, away back in the era of the
Northwest Company, that the goods for the posts went up the Ottawa
from Montreal in great canoes manned by hardy _voyageurs_ in picturesque
costumes, wielding scarlet paddles, and stirring the forests with their
happy songs. The scene shifted, the companies blended, and the centre of
the trade moved from old Fort William, close to where Port Arthur now is
on Lake Superior, up to Winnipeg, on the Red River of the North. Then
the Canadians and their cousins, the half-breeds, more picturesque than
ever, and manning the great York boats of the Hudson Bay Company, swept
in a long train through Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, and thence by a
marvellous water route all the way to the Rockies and the Arctic,
sending off freight for side districts at fixed points along the course.
The main factories on this line, maintained as such for more than a
century, bear names whose very mention stirs the blood of one who knows
the romantic, picturesque, and poetic history and atmosphere of the old
company when it was the landlord (in part, and in part monopolist) of a
territory that cut into our Northwest and Alaska, and swept from
Labrador to Vancouver Island. Northward and westward, by waters emptying
into Hudson Bay, the brigade of great boats worked through a region
embroidered with sheets and ways of water. The system that was next
entered, and which bore more nearly due west, bends and bulges with
lakes and straits like a ribbon all curved and knotted. Thus, at a great
portage, the divide was reached and crossed; and so the waters flowing
to the Arctic, and one--the Peace River--rising beyond the Rockies, were
met and travelled. This was the way and the method until after the
Canadian Pacific Railway was built, but now the Winnipeg route is of
subordinate importance, and feeds only the region near the west side of
Hudson Bay. The Northern supplies now go by rail from Calgary, in
Alberta, over the plains by the new Edmonton railroad. From Edmonton the
goods go by cart to Athabasca Landing, there to be laden on a steamboat,
which takes them northward until some rapids are met, and avoided by the
use of a singular combination of bateaux and tramway rails. After a slow
progress of fifteen miles another steamboat is met, and thence they
follow the Athabasca, through Athabasca Lake, and so on up to a second
rapids, on the Great Slave River this time, where oxen and carts carry
them across a sixteen-mile portage to a screw steamer, which finishes
the 3000-mile journey to the North. Of course the shorter branch routes,
distributing the goods on either side of the main track, are still
traversed by canoes and hardy fellows in the old way, but with shabby
accessories of costume and spirit. These boatmen, when they come to a
portage, produce their tomplines, and "pack" the goods to the next
waterway. By means of these "lines" they carry great weights, resting on
their backs, but supported from their skulls, over which the strong
straps are passed.
The winter mail-packet, starting from Winnipeg in the depth of the
season, goes to all the posts by dog train. The letters and papers are
packed in great boxes and strapped to the sleds, beside or behind which
the drivers trot along, cracking their lashes and pelting and cursing
the dogs. A more direct course than the old Lake Winnipeg way has
usually been followed by this packet; but it is thought that the route
_via_ Edmonton and Athabasca Landing will serve better yet, so that
another change may be made. This is a small exhibition as compared with
the brigade that takes the supplies, or those others that come plashing
down the streams and across the country with the furs every year. But
only fancy how eagerly this solitary semi-annual mail is waited for! It
is a little speck on the snow-wrapped upper end of all North America. It
cuts a tiny trail, and here and there lesser black dots move off from it
to cut still slenderer threads, zigzagging to the side factories and
lesser posts; but we may be sure that if human eyes could see so far,
all those of the white men in all that vast tangled system of trading
centres would be watching the little caravan, until at last each pair
fell upon the expected missives from the throbbing world this side of
the border.
VIII
CANADA'S EL DORADO
[Illustration]
There is on this continent a territory of imperial extent which is one
of the Canadian sisterhood of States, and yet of which small account has
been taken by those who discuss either the most advantageous relations
of trade or that closer intimacy so often referred to as a possibility
in the future of our country and its northern neighbor. Although British
Columbia is advancing in rank among the provinces of the Dominion by
reason of its abundant natural resources, it is not remarkable that we
read and hear little concerning it. The people in it are few, and the
knowledge of it is even less in proportion. It is but partially
explored, and for what can be learned of it one must catch up
information piecemeal from blue-books, the pamphlets of scientists, from
tales of adventure, and from the less trustworthy literature composed to
attract travellers and settlers.
It would severely strain the slender facts to make a sizable pamphlet of
the history of British Columbia. A wandering and imaginative Greek
called Juan de Fuca told his people that he had discovered a passage
from ocean to ocean between this continent and a great island in the
Pacific. Sent there to seize and fortify it, he disappeared--at least
from history. This was about 1592. In 1778 Captain Cook roughly surveyed
the coast, and in 1792 Captain Vancouver, who as a boy had been with
Cook on two voyages, examined the sound between the island and the
main-land with great care, hoping to find that it led to the main water
system of the interior. He gave to the strait at the entrance the
nickname of the Greek, and in the following year received the transfer
of authority over the country from the Spanish commissioner Bodega of
Quadra, then established there. The two put aside false modesty, and
named the great island "the Island of Vancouver and Quadra." At the time
the English sailor was there it chanced that he met that hardy old
homespun baronet Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first man to cross
the continent, making the astonishing journey in a canoe manned by
Iroquois Indians. The main-land became known as New Caledonia. It took
its present name from the Columbia River, and that, in turn, got its
name from the ship _Columbia_, of Boston, Captain Gray, which entered
its mouth in 1792, long after the Spaniards had known the stream and
called it the Oregon. The rest is quickly told. The region passed into
the hands of the fur-traders. Vancouver Island became a crown colony in
1849, and British Columbia followed in 1858. They were united in 1866,
and joined the Canadian confederation in 1871. Three years later the
province exceeded both Manitoba and Prince Edward Island in the value of
its exports, and also showed an excess of exports over imports. It has a
Lieutenant-governor and Legislative assembly, and is represented at
Ottawa in accordance with the Canadian system. Its people have been more
closely related to ours in business than those of any other province,
and they entertain a warm friendly feeling towards "the States." In the
larger cities the Fourth of July is informally but generally observed as
a holiday.
British Columbia is of immense size. It is as extensive as the
combination of New England, the Middle States and Maryland, the
Virginias, the Carolinas, and Georgia, leaving Delaware out. It is
larger than Texas, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire joined
together. Yet it has been all but overlooked by man, and may be said to
be an empire with only one wagon road, and that is but a blind artery
halting in the middle of the country. But whoever follows this
necessarily incomplete survey of what man has found that region to be,
and of what his yet puny hands have drawn from it, will dismiss the
popular and natural suspicion that it is a wilderness worthy of its
present fate. Until the whole globe is banded with steel rails and
yields to the plough, we will continue to regard whatever region lies
beyond our doors as waste-land, and to fancy that every line of latitude
has its own unvarying climatic characteristics. There is an opulent
civilization in what we once were taught was "the Great American
Desert," and far up at Edmonton, on the Peace River, farming flourishes
despite the fact that it is where our school-books located a zone of
perpetual snow. Farther along we shall study a country crossed by the
same parallels of latitude that dissect inhospitable Labrador, and we
shall discover that as great a difference exists between the two shores
of the continent on that zone as that which distinguishes California
from Massachusetts. Upon the coast of this neglected corner of the world
we shall see that a climate like that of England is produced, as
England's is, by a warm current in the sea; in the southern half of the
interior we shall discover valleys as inviting as those in our New
England; and far north, at Port Simpson, just below the down reaching
claw of our Alaska, we shall find such a climate as Halifax enjoys.