width. To whoever crosses the country it seems the scene of a vast
earth-disturbance, over which mountains are scattered without system. In
fact, however, the Cordillera belt is there divided into four ranges,
the Rockies forming the eastern boundary, then the Gold Range, then the
Coast Range, and, last of all, that partially submerged chain whose
upraised parts form Vancouver and the other mountainous islands near the
main-land in the Pacific. A vast valley flanks the south-western side of
the Rocky Mountains, accompanying them from where they leave our
North-western States in a wide straight furrow for a distance of 700
miles. Such great rivers as the Columbia, the Fraser, the Parsnip, the
Kootenay, and the Finlay are encountered in it. While it has a lesser
agricultural value than other valleys in the province, its mineral
possibilities are considered to be very great, and when, as must be the
case, it is made the route of communication between one end of the
territory and the other, a vast timber supply will be rendered
marketable.
The Gold Range, next to the westward, is not bald, like the Rockies,
but, excepting the higher peaks, is timbered with a dense forest growth.
Those busiest of all British Columbian explorers, the "prospectors,"
have found much of this system too difficult even for their pertinacity.
But the character of the region is well understood. Here are high
plateaus of rolling country, and in the mountains are glaciers and snow
fields. Between this system and the Coast Range is what is called the
Interior Plateau, averaging one hundred miles in width, and following
the trend of that portion of the continent, with an elevation that grows
less as the north is approached. This plateau is crossed and followed by
valleys that take every direction, and these are the seats of rivers and
watercourses. In the southern part of this plateau is the best grazing
land in the province, and much fine agricultural country, while in the
north, where the climate is more most, the timber increases, and parts
of the land are thought to be convertible into farms. Next comes the
Coast Range, whose western slopes are enriched by the milder climate of
the coast; and beyond lies the remarkably tattered shore of the Pacific,
lapped by a sheltered sea, verdant, indented by numberless inlets,
which, in turn, are faced by uncounted islands, and receive the
discharge of almost as many streams and rivers--a wondrously beautiful
region, forested by giant trees, and resorted to by numbers of fish
exceeding calculation and belief. Beyond the coast is the bold chain of
mountains of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are
parts. Here is a vast treasure in that coal which our naval experts have
found to be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are traces of
metals, whose value industry has not yet established.
It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 100,000 white
inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It
is a vast land of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the field
and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sportsman to the quarry of the
miner. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses it, revealing to the
immigrant and the globe-trotter an unceasing panorama of grand, wild,
and beautiful scenery unequalled on this continent. During a few hours
the traveller sees, across the majestic canyon of the Fraser, the
neglected remains of the old Cariboo stage road, built under pressure of
the gold craze. It demonstrated surprising energy in the baby colony,
for it connected Yale, at the head of short steam navigation on the
Fraser, with Barkerville, in the distant Cariboo country, 400 miles
away, and it cost $500,000. The traveller sees here and there an Indian
village or a "mission," and now and then a tiny town; but for the most
part his eye scans only the primeval forest, lofty mountains, valleys
covered with trees as beasts are with fur, cascades, turbulent streams,
and huge sheltered lakes. Except at the stations, he sees few men. Now
he notes a group of Chinamen at work on the railway; anon he sees an
Indian upon a clumsy perch and searching the Fraser for salmon, or in a
canoe paddling towards the gorgeous sunset that confronts the daily
west-bound train as it rolls by great Shuswap Lake.
But were the same traveller out of the train, and gifted with the power
to make himself ubiquitous, he would still be, for the most part,
lonely. Down in the smiling bunch-grass valleys in the south he would
see here and there the outfit of a farmer or the herds of a cattle-man.
A burst of noise would astonish him near by, in the Kootenay country,
where the new silver mines are being worked, where claims have been
taken up by the thousand, and whither a railroad is hastening. Here and
there, at points out of sight one from another, he would hear the crash
of a lumberman's axe, the report of a hunter's rifle, or the crackle of
an Indian's fire. On the Fraser he would find a little town called Yale,
and on the coast the streets and ambitious buildings and busy wharves of
Vancouver would astonish him. Victoria, across the strait, a town of
larger size and remarkable beauty, would give him company, and near
Vancouver and Victoria the little cities of New Westminster and Nanaimo
(lumber and coal ports respectively) would rise before him. There, close
together, he would see more than half the population of the province.
[Illustration: AN IMPRESSION OF SHUSWAP LAKE, BRITISH COLOMBIA]
Fancy his isolation as he looked around him in the northern half of the
territory, where a few trails lead to fewer posts of the Hudson Bay
Company, where the endless forests and multitudinous lakes and streams
are cut by but infrequent paddles in the hands of a race that has lost
one-third its numerical strength in the last ten years, where the only
true homes are within the palisades or the unguarded log-cabin of the
fur-trading agents, and where the only other white men are either
washing sand in the river bars, driving the stages of the only line that
penetrates a piece of the country, or are those queer devil-may-care but
companionable Davy Crocketts of the day who are guides now and then,
hunters half the time, placer-miners when they please, and whatever else
there is a can for between-times!
A very strange sight that my supposititious traveller would pause long
to look at would be the herds of wild horses that defy the Queen, her
laws, and her subjects in the Lillooet Valley. There are thousands of
them there, and over in the Nicola and Chilcotin country, on either side
of the Fraser, north of Washington State. They were originally of good
stock, but now they not only defy capture, but eat valuable grass, and
spoil every horse turned out to graze. The newspapers aver that the
Government must soon be called upon to devise means for ridding the
valleys of this nuisance. This is one of those sections which promise
well for future stock-raising and agricultural operations. There are
plenty such. The Nicola Valley has been settled twenty years, and there
are many cattle there, on numerous ranches. It is good land, but rather
high for grain, and needs irrigation. The snowfall varies greatly in all
these valleys, but in ordinary winters horses and cattle manage well
with four to six weeks' feeding. On the upper Kootenay, a valley eight
to ten miles wide, ranching began a quarter of a century ago, during the
gold excitement. The "cow-men" raise grain for themselves there. This
valley is 3000 feet high. The Okanagon Valley is lower, and is only from
two to five miles wide, but both are of similar character, of very great
length, and are crossed and intersected by branch valleys. The greater
part of the Okanagon does not need irrigating. A beautiful country is
the Kettle River region, along the boundary between the Columbia and the
Okanagon. It is narrow, but flat and smooth on the bottom, and the land
is very fine. Bunch-grass covers the hills around it for a distance of
from four hundred to five hundred feet, and there timber begins. It is
only in occasional years that the Kettle River Valley needs water. In
the Spallumcheen Valley one farmer had 500 acres in grain last summer,
and the most modern agricultural machinery is in use there. These are
mere notes of a few among almost innumerable valleys that are clothed
with bunch-grass, and that often possess the characteristics of
beautiful parks. In many wheat can be and is raised, possibly in most of
them. I have notes of the successful growth of peaches, and of the
growth of almond-trees to a height of fourteen feet in four years, both
in the Okanagon country.
The shooting in these valleys is most alluring to those who are fond of
the sport. Caribou, deer, bear, prairie-chicken, and partridges abound
in them. In all probability there is no similar extent of country that
equals the valley of the Columbia, from which, in the winter of 1888,
between six and eight tons of deer-skins were shipped by local traders,
the result of legitimate hunting. But the forests and mountains are as
they were when the white man first saw them, and though the beaver and
sea-otter, the marten, and those foxes whose furs are coveted by the
rich, are not as abundant as they once were, the rest of the game is
most plentiful. On the Rockies and on the Coast Range the mountain-goat,
most difficult of beasts to hunt, and still harder to get, is abundant
yet. The "big-horn," or mountain-sheep, is not so common, but the
hunting thereof is usually successful if good guides are obtained. The
cougar, the grizzly, and the lynx are all plentiful, and black and
brown bears are very numerous. Elk are going the way of the
"big-horn"--are preceding that creature, in fact. Pheasants (imported),
grouse, quail, and water-fowl are among the feathered game, and the
river and lake fishing is such as is not approached in any other part of
the Dominion. The province is a sportsman's Eden, but the hunting of big
game there is not a venture to be lightly undertaken. It is not alone
the distance or the cost that gives one pause, for, after the province
is reached, the mountain-climbing is a task that no amount of wealth
will lighten. And these are genuine mountains, by-the-way, wearing
eternal caps of snow, and equally eternal deceit as to their distances,
their heights, and as to all else concerning which a rarefied atmosphere
can hocus-pocus a stranger. There is one animal, king of all the beasts,
which the most unaspiring hunter may chance upon as well as the bravest,
and that animal carries a perpetual chip upon its shoulder, and seldom
turns from an encounter. It is the grizzly-bear. It is his presence that
gives you either zest or pause, as you may decide, in hunting all the
others that roam the mountains. Yet, in that hunter's dream-land it is
the grizzly that attracts many sportsmen every year.
From the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company in Victoria I obtained
the list of animals in whose skins that company trades at that station.
It makes a formidable catalogue of zoological products, and is as
follows: Bears (brown, black, grizzly), beaver, badger, foxes (silver,
cross, and red), fishers, martens, minks, lynxes, musk-rat, otter (sea
or land), panther, raccoon, wolves (black, gray, and coyote),
black-tailed deer, stags (a true stag, growing to the size of an ox, and
found on the hills of Vancouver Island), caribou or reindeer, hares,
mountain-goat, big-horn (or mountain-sheep), moose (near the Rockies),
wood-buffalo (found in the north, not greatly different from the bison,
but larger), geese, swans, and duck.
The British Columbian Indians are of such unprepossessing appearance
that one hears with comparative equanimity of their numbering only
20,000 in all, and of their rapid shrinkage, owing principally to the
vices of their women. They are, for the most part, canoe Indians, in the
interior as well as on the coast, and they are (as one might suppose a
nation of tailors would become) short-legged, and with those limbs small
and inclined to bow. On the other hand, their exercise with the paddle
has given them a disproportionate development of their shoulders and
chests, so that, being too large above and too small below, their
appearance is very peculiar. They are fish-eaters the year around; and
though some, like the Hydahs upon the coast, have been warlike and
turbulent, such is not the reputation of those in the interior. It was
the meat-eating Indian who made war a vocation and self-torture a
dissipation. The fish-eating Indian kept out of his way. These short
squat British Columbian natives are very dark-skinned, and have
physiognomies so different from those of the Indians east of the Rockies
that the study of their faces has tempted the ethnologists into
extraordinary guessing upon their origin, and into a contention which I
prefer to avoid. It is not guessing to say that their high check-bones
and flat faces make them resemble the Chinese. That is true to such a
degree that in walking the streets of Victoria, and meeting alternate
Chinamen and Siwash, it is not always easy to say which is which, unless
one proceeds upon the assumption that if a man looks clean he is apt to
be a Chinaman, whereas if he is dirty and ragged he is most likely to be
a Siwash.
You will find that seven in ten among the more intelligent British
Columbians conclude these Indians to be of Japanese origin. The Japanese
current is neighborly to the province, and it has drifted Japanese junks
to these shores. When the first traders visited the neighborhood of the
mouth of the Columbia they found beeswax in the sand near the vestiges
of a wreck, and it is said that one wreck of a junk was met with, and
12,000 pounds of this wax was found on her. Whalers are said to have
frequently encountered wrecked and drifting junks in the eastern
Pacific, and a local legend has it that in 1834 remnants of a junk with
three Japanese and a cargo of pottery were found on the coast south of
Cape Flattery. Nothing less than all this should excuse even a
rudderless ethnologist for so cruel a reflection upon the Japanese, for
these Indians are so far from pretty that all who see them agree with
Captain Butler, the traveller, who wrote that "if they are of the
Mongolian type, the sooner the Mongolians change their type the better."
[Illustration: THE TSCHUMMUM, OR TOOL USED IN MAKING CANOES]
The coast Indians are splendid sailors, and their dugouts do not always
come off second best in racing with the boats of white men. With a
primitive yet ingeniously made tool, like an adze, in the construction
of which a blade is tied fast to a bent handle of bone, these natives
laboriously pick out the heart of a great cedar log, and shape its outer
sides into the form of a boat. When the log is properly hollowed, they
fill it with water, and then drop in stones which they have heated in a
fire. Thus they steam the boat so that they may spread the sides and fit
in the crossbars which keep it strong and preserve its shape. These
dugouts are sometimes sixty feet long, and are used for whaling and long
voyages in rough seas. They are capable of carrying tons of the salmon
or oolachan or herring, of which these people, who live as their fathers
did, catch sufficient in a few days for their maintenance throughout a
whole year. One gets an idea of the swarms of fish that infest those
waters by the knowledge that before nets were used the herring and the
oolachan, or candle-fish were swept into these boats by an implement
formed by studding a ten-foot pole with spikes or nails. This was swept
among the fish in the water, and the boats were speedily filled with the
creatures that were impaled upon the spikes. Salmon, sea-otter, otter,
beaver, marten, bear, and deer (or caribou or moose) were and still are
the chief resources of most of the Indians. Once they sold the fish and
the peltry to the Hudson Bay Company, and ate what parts or surplus they
did not sell. Now they work in the canneries or fish for them in summer,
and hunt, trap, or loaf the rest of the time. However, while they still
fish and sell furs, and while some are yet as their fathers were, nearly
all the coast Indians are semi-civilized. They have at least the white
man's clothes and hymns and vices. They have churches; they live in
houses; they work in canneries. What little there was that was
picturesque about them has vanished only a few degrees faster than their
own extinction as a pure race, and they are now a lot of longshoremen.
What Mr. Duncan did for them in Metlakahtla--especially in housing the
families separately--has not been arrived at even in the reservation at
Victoria, where one may still see one of the huge, low, shed-like houses
they prefer, ornamented with totem poles, and arranged for eight
families, and consequently for a laxity of morals for which no one can
hold the white man responsible.
They are a tractable people, and take as kindly to the rudiments of
civilization, to work, and to co-operation with the whites as the plains
Indian does to tea, tobacco, and whiskey. They are physically but not
mentally inferior to the plainsman. They carve bowls and spoons of stone
and bone, and their heraldic totem poles are cleverly shapen, however
grotesque they may be. They still make them, but they oftener carve
little ones for white people, just as they make more silver bracelets
for sale than for wear. They are clever at weaving rushes and cedar
bark into mats, baskets, floor-cloths, and cargo covers. In a word,
they were more prone to work at the outset than most Indians, so that
the present longshore career of most of them is not greatly to be
wondered at.
To anyone who threads the vast silent forests of the interior, or
journeys upon the trafficless waterways, or, gun in hand, explores the
mountains for game, the infrequency with which Indians are met becomes
impressive. The province seems almost unpeopled. The reason is that the
majority of the Indians were ever on the coast, where the water yielded
food at all times and in plenty. The natives of the interior were not
well fed or prosperous when the first white men found them, and since
then small-pox, measles, vice, and starvation have thinned them
terribly. Their graveyards are a feature of the scenery which all
travellers in the province remember. From the railroad they may be seen
along the Fraser, each grave apparently having a shed built over it, and
a cross rising from the earth beneath the shed. They had various burial
customs, but a majority buried their dead in this way, with
queerly-carved or painted sticks above them, where the cross now
testifies to the work at the "missions." Some Indians marked a man's
burial-place with his canoe and his gun; some still box their dead and
leave the boxes on top of the earth, while others bury the boxes. Among
the southern tribes a man's horse was often killed, and its skin decked
the man's grave; while in the far north it was the custom among the
Stickeens to slaughter the personal attendants of a chief when he died.
The Indians along the Skeena River cremated their dead, and sometimes
hung the ashes in boxes to the family totem pole. The Hydahs, the fierce
natives of certain of the islands, have given up cremation, but they
used to believe that if they did not burn a man's body their enemies
would make charms from it. Polygamy flourished on the coast, and
monogamy in the interior, but the contrast was due to the difference in
the worldly wealth of the Indians. Wives had to be bought and fed, and
the woodsmen could only afford one apiece.
To return to their canoes, which most distinguish them. When a dugout is
hollowed and steamed, a prow and stern are added of separate wood. The
prow is always a work of art, and greatly beautifies the boat. It is in
form like the breast, neck, and bill of a bird, but the head is intended
to represent that of a savage animal, and is so painted. A mouth is cut
into it, ears are carved on it, and eyes are painted on the sides; bands
of gay paint are put upon the neck, and the whole exterior of the boat
is then painted red or black, with an ornamental line of another color
along the edge or gunwale. The sailors sit upon the bottom of the boat,
and propel it with paddles. Upon the water these swift vessels, with
their fierce heads uplifted before their long, slender bodies, appear
like great serpents or nondescript marine monsters, yet they are pretty
and graceful withal. While still holding aloof from the ethnologists'
contention, I yet may add that a bookseller in Victoria came into the
possession of a packet of photographs taken by an amateur traveller in
the interior of China, and on my first visit to the province, nearly
four years ago, I found, in looking through these views, several Chinese
boats which were strangely and remarkably like the dugouts of the
provincial Indians. They were too small in the pictures for it to be
possible to decide whether they were built up or dug out, but in general
they were of the same external appearance, and each one bore the
upraised animal-head prow, shaped and painted like those I could see one
block away from the bookseller's shop in Victoria. But such are not the
canoes used by the Indians of the interior. From the Kootenay near our
border to the Cassiar in the far north, a cigar-shaped canoe seems to be
the general native vehicle. These are sometimes made of a sort of
scroll of bark, and sometimes they are dugouts made of cotton-wood logs.
They are narrower than either the cedar dugouts of the coast or the
birch-bark canoes of our Indians, but they are roomy, and fit for the
most dangerous and deft work in threading the rapids which everywhere
cut up the navigation of the streams of the province into separated
reaches. The Rev. Dr. Gordon, in his notes upon a journey in this
province, likens these canoes to horse-troughs, but those I saw in the
Kootenay country were of the shape of those cigars that are pointed at
both ends.
[Illustration: THE FIRST OF THE SALMON RUN, FRASER RIVER]
Whether these canoes are like any in Tartary or China or Japan, I do not
know. My only quest for special information of that character proved
disappointing. One man in a city of British Columbia is said to have
studied such matters more deeply and to more purpose than all the
others, but those who referred me to him cautioned me that he was
eccentric.
"You don't know where these Indians came from, eh?" the _savant_ replied
to my first question. "Do you know how oyster-shells got on top of the
Rocky Mountains? You don't, eh? Well, I know a woman who went to a
dentist's yesterday to have eighteen teeth pulled. Do you know why women
prefer artificial teeth to those which God has given them? You don't,
eh? Why, man, you don't know anything."
While we were--or he was--conversing, a laboring-man who carried a
sickle came to the open door, and was asked what he wanted.
"I wish to cut your thistles, sir," said he.
"Thistles?" said the _savant_, disturbed at the interruption. "---- the
thistles! We are talking about Indians."
Nevertheless, when the laborer had gone, he had left the subject of
thistles uppermost in the _savant's_ mind, and the conversation took so
erratic a turn that it might well have been introduced hap-hazard into
_Tristram Shandy_.
"About thistles," said the _savant_, laying a gentle hand upon my knee.
"Do you know that they are the Scotchmen's totems? Many years ago a
Scotchman, sundered from his native land, must needs set up his totem, a
thistle, here in this country; and now, sir, the thistle is such a curse
that I am haled up twice a year and fined for having them in my yard."