offers so many worth-while things in a superlative degree for red-blooded
people to do. Where else, pray, can you climb a mountain which is higher
than any peak in Europe save one (Mount Hooker, in British Columbia,
is only eighty feet lower than Mont Blanc, the monarch of the Alps,
while Mount Rainier, which, as I have remarked, is almost in Tacoma’s
front yard, is nearly a thousand feet higher than the Jungfrau); where
else can you look along your rifle barrel at such big game as grizzly,
elk, panther, mountain-sheep, and even the spotted bear, the rarest of
all North American big game; where else can you have your fly-rod bent
like a sapling in a storm and hear your reel whir like a sawmill by a
sixty-pound salmon or a six-pound trout; where else can you cruise, for
weeks on end, amid the islands of an archipelago more beautiful than
those of Georgian Bay and more numerous than those of the Ægean, without
the necessity of ever dropping anchor twice in the same harbour; where
else can you canoe by day and camp by night along rivers which have their
sources on the roof of a continent and, after taking their course through
a thousand miles of wilderness, empty into the greatest of the oceans;
where else can you throw open the throttle of your motor on a macadamised
highway which, in another year or two, will stretch its length across
twenty-five degrees of latitude, linking Mexico with Alaska? Where else
can you find such amusements as these, I ask? Answer me that.
* * * * *
Were it not for the complicated customs formalities that a motorist
has, perforce, to go through at the Canadian border, one could, by
getting an early start and not lingering over his lunch, make the
one-hundred-and-seventy-mile journey from Seattle to Vancouver between
dawn and dark of the same day. But the red tape which the American
officials insist upon unwinding before you can leave the land of the beef
trust and the home of the Pullman porter and the equal amount of red
tape which the Canadian officials wind up before you are permitted to
enter the dominions of his gracious Majesty King George make a one-day
trip out of the question; so we did it comfortably in two and spent the
intervening night in the seaport town of Bellingham. It’s a great place
for canneries, is Bellingham; indeed, I should think that the residents
would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face. Twenty miles farther on,
at a hamlet called Blaine, we were greeted by a huge sign whose staring
letters read: “International Boundary.” On one side the Stars and
Stripes floated over an eight-by-ten shanty; on the other side of this
imaginary but significant line the Union Jack flapped in the breeze over
a shanty a trifle larger. They are inquisitive, those British customs
officials, and when they had finished with our car there wasn’t much
they didn’t know about it. They inspected it as thoroughly as a Kaffir
is inspected when he knocks off work in a South African diamond mine.
Before entering Canada it is wise to obtain from the American authorities
at the border a certificate containing a description of your car and
all that it contains; otherwise you will be subjected to innumerable
formalities upon entering the country again, while the Canadian laws
require that a tourist desiring to remain more than eight days in the
Dominion must provide a bond to cover the value of his car and make in
addition a deposit of twenty-five dollars, both of which will be returned
to him when he leaves the country. There is a grocer in Blaine—I forget
his name, but he is a most obliging fellow—who makes a specialty of
providing bonds for motorists, and by going to him we saved ourselves
much trouble. It was all very informal. He simply called up the Canadian
customs house on the phone and said: “Say, Bill, there’s some folks
here that’s motorin’ into Canada. I ain’t got time to make out a bond
just now, ’cause there’s an old lady here waitin’ to buy some potatoes,
but you just let ’em skip through and I’ll fix it up the next time I
see you.” Careless and informal, just like that. So all they did was to
take the pedigree of the car for four generations, note the numbers of
the spare tires, inventory the extra parts, go through our belongings
with a dandruff comb, inquire where I was born, what the E. in my name
stood for, and was I unfortunate enough to have to pay taxes; and, after
presenting me with a list of the pains and penalties which I would incur
if I broke any of his Majesty’s orders in council, permitted us to enter
the territory of the Dominion.
[Illustration: WHERE THE SALMON COME FROM.
“It’s a great place for canneries, is Bellingham; I should think the
residents would be ashamed to look a salmon in the face.”]
I hope, for the sake of those who follow in our tire tracks, that the
fifty miles of highway between Blaine and Vancouver has been materially
improved since we went over it. Doubtless with the best intentions in
the world, they had constructed a “crowned” road, which, as its name
implies, is one that is rounded upward in the middle so as to drain the
more readily; but, as a result of the rains, the sloping sides were so
greasy that it was only with considerable difficulty that I kept the car
from sliding into the ditch. There is one thing that the motorist must
bear constantly in mind from the moment his front tires roll across the
Canadian border, and that is _keep to the left_. Barring New Brunswick
and Nova Scotia, British Columbia is the only Canadian province which
retains the English system of turning to the left and passing to the
right, and it takes an American some time to become habituated to it.
After seemingly endless miles of slippery going through dripping woods,
we entered the outskirts of New Westminster, a prosperous seaport near
the mouth of the Fraser and the oldest place in this region, as age is
counted in western Canada. A splendid boulevard, twenty-five miles long,
connects New Westminster with Vancouver, and the car fled along it as
swiftly as an aeroplane and as silently as a ghost. The virgin forest
dwindled and ran out in recently made clearings, where gangs of men were
still at work dynamiting and burning the stumps; and on the cleared land
neat cottages of mushroom growth appeared, and these changed gradually
to two-storied, frame houses, and these again to the increasingly ornate
mansions of the well-to-do, the wealthy, and the _rich_. Through the murk
beyond them the white sky-scrapers of Vancouver shot skyward—memorials to
the men who have roped and tied and tamed a savage land.
XIII
CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE
“Up along the hostile mountains where the hair-poised snowslide shivers—
Down and through the big fat marshes that the virgin ore bed stains,
Till I heard the mile-wide muttering of unimagined rivers
And beyond the nameless timber saw illimitable plains.
Plotted sites of future cities, traced the easy grades between ’em;
Watched unharnessed rapids wasting fifty thousand head an hour;
Counted leagues of water frontage through the axe-ripe woods that
screen ’em—
Saw the plant to feed a people—up and waiting for the power!”
XIII
CLINCHING THE RIVETS OF EMPIRE
Darkness had fallen on the Oregonian forest when our forward tire
exploded with a report which sounded in that eerie stillness like a
bursting shell. It was not a reassuring place to have a blowout—in the
heart of a forest as large as many a European kingdom, with the nearest
settlement half a hundred miles away and the nearest apology for a hotel
as many more. Between the cathedral-like columns of the pines, however,
I glimpsed a signal of human presence in the twinkling of a fire, and
toward it I made my way through underbrush and over fallen trunks,
while my chauffeur, blaspheming under his breath, busied himself at the
maddening task of fitting on another tire in the darkness.
I shall not soon forget the incongruity of the scene which greeted me
as I halted on the edge of a little clearing fitfully illuminated by a
roaring camp-fire. Within the circle of warmth—for the summer nights are
chilly in the north country—stood a canvas-topped wagon which appeared to
be a half-brother to a prairie-schooner, an uncle to an army ambulance,
and a cousin to a moving van. Its side curtains had been let down, so
that it formed a sort of tent on wheels, and seated beside it on an
upended soap box a plump little woman in a calico dress was preparing
six small youngsters for bed as unconcernedly as though she were in a
New England farmhouse, with the neighbours’ lights twinkling through the
trees, instead of in the middle of a primeval wilderness, a long day’s
journey from anywhere. The horses had been outspanned, as they say in
South Africa, and were placidly exploring the recesses of their nose-bags
for the last stray grams of oats. A lank, stoop-shouldered, sinewy-framed
man, who had been squatting beside the fire watching the slow progress
of a pot of coffee, slowly rose to his feet on my approach and slouched
forward with outstretched hand. He radiated good nature and hospitality
and an air of easy-going efficiency, and from the first I liked him.
“Howdy, friend,” he drawled, with the unmistakable nasal twang of the
Middle West. “I reckon you’ve had a little bad luck with your machine,
ain’t you? We heard you a-comin’ chug-chuggin’ through the woods, hell
bent for election, an’ all to once there was a noise ’s if some one had
pulled the trigger of a shotgun. ‘There,’ says I to Arethusa, ‘some pore
autermobile feller’s limpin’ ’round in the darkness on three legs,’ says
I, ‘an’ as soon ’s I get this coffee to boilin’ I reckon I’ll stroll over
with a lantern an’ see if I can’t give him some help.’”
“Just as much obliged,” said I, “but my man has the tire pretty well on
by now. But we could do with a cup or so of that coffee if you’ve some to
spare.”
[Illustration: This settler’s nearest neighbour was fifty miles away—
And he was a Swede farmer with a Siwash wife.
OUTPOSTS OF CIVILISATION.]
“That’s what coffee’s for, friend—to drink,” he said cordially, reaching
for a tin cup. “Where’ve you come from?” he added with polite curiosity.
“From the Mexican border,” said I, with, I suspect, a trace of
self-satisfaction in my voice, for fifteen hundred miles of desert,
forest, and mountains lay behind us. “And you?” I asked in turn.
“Us?” he answered. “Oh, we’ve come from Kansas.” (He said it as
unconcernedly as a New Yorker might mention that he had just run over to
Philadelphia for a day.) “Left Emporia thirteen weeks ago come Thursday
and have averaged nigh on twenty-five miles a day ever since. An’ the
horses ain’t in bad condition, neither.”
“And where, in the name of Heaven,” I exclaimed, “are you going?”
“Well,” was the reply, “we’re headed for British Columbia, but I reckon
we’ll have to winter somewheres in Washington and push on across the line
in the spring. You see, friend,” he continued, in his placid, easy-going
manner, in reply to my rapid fire of inquiries, “it was this way. I was
in the furniture business back in Kansas, furniture an’ undertakin’, but
I didn’t much care for the business ’cause it kept me indoors so much,
my folks always havin’ been farmers and such like. Well, one day a while
back, I picked up one of them folders sent out by the Canadian Gov’ment,
tellin’ ’bout the rich resources up in British Columbia, an’ how land
was to be had for the askin’. So that night when I went home I says to
Arethusa: ‘What’d you think of sellin’ out an’ packin’ up and goin’ up
British Columbia way, an’ gettin’ a farm where we can live out o’ doors
an’ make a decent livin’?’ ‘Sure,’ says she, ‘I’d like it fine. An’ it’ll
be great for the kids.’ ‘All right,’ says I,’ it’s all decided. I’ll
build a body for the delivery wagon that we can sleep in, an’ we’ll take
Peter an’ Repeater, the delivery team, an’ it won’t take us more than six
or eight months to make the trip if we keep movin’.’ You see, friend,” he
added, “my paw moved out to Kansas when there warn’t nothin’ there but
Indians an’ sage-brush, an’ hers did, too, so I reckon this movin’ on to
new places is sort of in the blood.”
“But why British Columbia?” I queried. “Why Canada at all? What’s the
reason that you, an American, don’t remain in the United States?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly,
I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a
man has a better chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’ the
Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled an’ there ain’t
the chances in it there was once; but up British Columbia way it’s still
a frontier country, they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle down
an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’ quicker’n anywhere else, I
guess. It’s fine land up in the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’
in the Cariboo country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad that
they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a pretty good country for a
man to live in, too. Here in the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’
’bout our laws, but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they
just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in wrong, of course, but
from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a great country up there one of these
days, when they get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta got
the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers, like our paws
were, an’ get in an’ help build the country, an’ let our kids grow up
with it. You’ve got to be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’
coffee before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve met you. Good
luck to you.”
“Good luck to _you_,” said I.
[Illustration: “Chopping a path to To-morrow—” Frontiersmen clearing a
town site in the forests of British Columbia.
Law and order in the back country: the sheriff of the Cariboo—the only
law-officer for three hundred miles.
BREAKING THE WILDERNESS.]
* * * * *
Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, my acquaintance of the forest
was a soldier in an army of invasion. This army had come from the south
quietly, unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of drum, its
weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe and the spade, its object the
conquest, not of a people but of a wilderness. Have you any conception,
I wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agricultural invasion
of Canada has assumed? Did you know that last year upward of one hundred
thousand Americans crossed the border to take up farms and carve out
fortunes for themselves under another flag? These settlers who are
trekking northward by rail and road are the very pick of the farming
communities of our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid character
and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty that is characteristic of
those closely associated with the soil, they take with them a substantial
amount of capital—probably a thousand dollars at least, on an average,
either in cash, stock, or household goods. Moreover, they bring what
is most valuable of all—experience. Coming from a region where the
agricultural conditions are similar to those prevailing in the Canadian
West, they quickly adapt themselves to the new life. Unlike the settlers
from the mother country and from the Continent, to whom everything
is strange and new, and who consequently require some time to adjust
themselves to the changed conditions, the American wastes not a moment
in contemplation but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes
hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and building a home. He is
efficient, energetic, industrious, businesslike, adaptable, and quite
frankly admits that he has come to the country because it offers him
better prospects. So, though he may not sing “God Save the King” with the
fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is none the less valuable to the
land of his adoption.
[Illustration: A heavy load but well packed.
Even the dogs have to carry their share.
A heavy load poorly packed.
PACK-HORSES AND A PACK-DOG.]
Ask your average well-informed American what he knows about British
Columbia, and it is dollars to doughnuts that he will remark rather
dubiously: “Oh, yes, that’s the place where the tinned salmon comes from,
isn’t it?” Take yourself, for example. Did you happen to be aware that,
though it has barely as many inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area
is equal to that of California, Oregon, and Washington put together,
with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or, if the comparison
is more graphic, that it is larger than the combined areas of Italy,
Switzerland, and France? Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising
the Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards of Washington
and the mines of Idaho; eastward it ends where the cattle-ranges of
Alberta begin; to its north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories
and the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered by the heaving
Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged coast which forms the panhandle
of Alaska. Though clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two
great cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one on the
continent, by the way, which runs from tide-water to tide-water under
the same management and the same name) hugs the province’s southern
border and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast hinterland,
larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms, with its network of unnamed
rivers and its unguessed-at wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals,
contains thousands upon thousands of square miles which have never felt
the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice.
Do you realise that, should you turn your horse’s head northwestward
from the Kootenai, on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far
as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you could unsaddle
beneath the Stars and Stripes at White Pass, on the frontier of Alaska?
Did you know that the province contains the greatest compact area of
merchantable timber in North America, its forests being greater in extent
than those of the New England States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have heard naval
experts and railway presidents and mining men talk ponderously of a
future shortage in the coal supply—but they need not worry, for British
Columbia’s coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion tons of
bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite (100,000,000,000, tons
in all, if so endless a caravan of ciphers means anything to you)—enough
to run the engines of the world until Gabriel’s trumpet sounds “Cease
working.” The output of its salmon canneries will provide those who order
fish on Fridays with most excellent and inexpensive eating until the
crack of doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hematite are so
extensive that they bid fair to make the ironmasters of Pittsburg break
that commandment (I forget which one it is) which says: “Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The province has enough pulpwood to
supply the Hearst and Harmsworth presses with paper until the last “extra
special edition” is issued on the morning of judgment day. The recently
discovered petroleum deposits have proved so large that they promise to
materially reduce the income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf
on the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and fruit lands in the
province is estimated at sixty million acres, of which less than one
tenth has been taken up, much less put under cultivation. And scattered
through the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din-like
territory is a total population of less than four hundred thousand
souls. Everything considered, it has, I suppose, greater natural
resources than any area of the same size on the globe. So I don’t see
how a young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little capital, and
a speaking acquaintance with hard work could do better than to drop
into the nearest railway ticket office and say to the clerk behind the
counter: “A ticket to British Columbia—and step lively, if you please. I
want to get there before it is too late to be a pioneer.”
Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles, sheltered from the
winter blizzards of the prairie provinces by the high wall of the Rocky
Mountains, its long western coast washed by the warm waves of the Japan
current, its air tinctured with the balsamic fragrance of millions of
acres of hemlock, spruce, and pine, British Columbia’s climate is, to
use the phraseology of the real-estate boosters, “highly salubrious”;
although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add that it is
extremely wet during a considerable portion of the year. But it is a
misty, drizzly sort of rain to which no one pays the slightest attention.
You will see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets,
and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs and hotels in a
rain which would make a Chicagoan hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn
up his collar and seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh
good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way: “Why, is it raining?
By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn’t it? Really, you know, I hadn’t
noticed it at all.” Then they will go on to tell you that it is the
moistness of the climate which gives British Columbia its beautiful women
and its beautiful flowers. And I can, and gladly do, vouch for the beauty
of them both. They—particularly the women—are worth going a long way to
see.
You mustn’t confuse British Columbia, you understand, with the flat,
monotonous, grain-growing provinces which lie on the other side of the
Rockies. It isn’t that sort of a country at all. It is too mountainous,
too ravined, with many impassable chasms and nigh-impenetrable forests.
Its plateaus are eroded by lake and river into gorges which are younger
sisters of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. From a little distance the
mountain slopes look as though they had been neatly upholstered in the
green plush to which the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but,
upon closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into dense
forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thousands of brooks empty into
the creeks and hundreds of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these
mighty waterways, the Fraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the Columbia, go
roaring and booming seaward through their rock-walled channels, wasting
a million head of power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so
many picturesque and interesting scenes combined with such sensational
and impressive scenery as along the cañon of the Lower Fraser. Here the
mountains of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles above
the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls of the cañon being
so precipitous and smooth that one marvels at the daring and ingenuity
of the men who built a railway there. As the cañon widens, the traveller
catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold on the river
bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks guiding with their spike-shod poles
the course of mile-long log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with
poised salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like statues cast
in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisation begin to appear in the
form of hillsides which have been cleared and set out to fruit-trees,
of Japanese truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the little
yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills, and salmon canneries;
and so through a region where neat hamlets alternate with stretches of
primeval forest, until in the distance, looming above the smoke pall, the
sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear.
[Illustration: The Upper Fraser: “Streams of threaded quicksilver hasten
through the valleys as though anxious to escape from the solitude that
reigns.”
“On the flanks of the ridges, massed in their black battalions, stand the
bleak, barbarian pines.”
IN THE GREAT, STILL LAND.]
The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the commercial capital
and a port and railway terminus of great industrial importance, and
Victoria, the seat of government and the centre of provincial society.
There are also several smaller cities: New Westminster, at the mouth
of the Fraser and so close to Vancouver that it is almost impossible
for the stranger to determine where the one ends and the other begins;
Nanaimo, a coal-mining town of considerable importance on the eastern
shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni, famous for its salmon fisheries,
at the head of an arm of the sea extending inland from the western coast;
Nelson, the _chef-lieu_ of the prosperous fruit-growing district of
the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern corner of the province; Bella
Coola, on a fiord at the mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the
gateway to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific
Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers;
and Prince Rupert, the remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk
Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the coast of British
Columbia, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, as the Pacific
Coast terminus for the transcontinental system which has recently been
completed.