as jealous of each other as two prima donnas singing in the same opera.
Vancouver is a great and prosperous city, with broad and teeming streets,
clanging street-cars, rumbling traffic, belching factory chimneys,
towering office-buildings, extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements,
and attractive residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing very
startling in all this, were it not for the fact that it is all new—twenty
years ago there was no such place on the map. It is a busy, bustling
place, where every one seems too much occupied in making fortunes
overnight to have much time to spare for social amenities. There was a
land boom on the last time I was in Vancouver—in fact, I gathered that
it was a perennial condition—and prices were being asked (and paid!) for
town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have made an American
real-estate agent admit quite frankly that he had not progressed beyond
the kindergarten stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying that
within the city limits of Vancouver lots are being sold which are still
covered with virgin forest. Within less than two miles of the city hall
you can see gangs of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the
primeval forest with which they are covered and blowing out and burning
the stumps. This real-estate boom, with its consequent inflation of land
values, has had a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however, for
many ordinarily conservative business men, dazzled by visions of sudden
wealth, have gone land mad; money is difficult to get, for Canadian banks
are prohibited by law from loaning on real estate; and, like so many
other towns which have been stimulated by artificial means, Vancouver is
already beginning to show the effects of the inevitable reaction.
Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness counts in the Dominion. It
was the seat of government when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach.
It is the residential city of western Canada, and is much in vogue as a
place of permanent abode for those who in any of the nearer provinces
“have made their pile,” for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters
and socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval officers who
have retired and wish to get as much as possible out of their limited
incomes. Victoria is as essentially English as Vancouver is American.
It is, indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner of the
empire. It has stately government buildings, broad, tree-shaded streets,
endless rows of the beam-and-plaster villas which one sees in every
London suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. Its
people spend much of their time on the tennis-courts, cricket-fields,
and golf-links, and are careful not to let business interfere with
pleasure. That is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver has
swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a horse and buggy. Vancouver
might aptly be compared to a hustling, energetic business man who never
lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is always on the job.
Victoria, on the contrary, is a quietly prosperous, rather sportily
inclined old gentleman who is fond of good living and believes that no
time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has a whole-souled
contempt for the other. The Victorian takes you aside and says: “Oh, yes,
Vancouver is progressing quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the
subject really doesn’t interest me. The people are so impossible, you
know. Why, would you believe it, my dear fellow, most of them came there
without a dollar to their names—fact, I assure you. Now they’re all bally
millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it. Very worthy folk, no doubt,
but scarcely in our class. Look here, let’s have a drink and then motor
out and have a round of golf. What say, old chap? Right-o!”
The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back of his head, sticks a
thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, and with the other hand gives
you a resounding whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one takes
Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the madam and the kids
for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing doing—no business. Why, say,
friend, do you know what they do down there? _They drink afternoon tea!_
Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, progressive, wide-awake,
up-and-doing burg this side of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to
spare? Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out and show you
a piece of property that you can make a fortune on if you buy it quick.
Yes, sirree, you can get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest
your money in Vancouver.”
There are not more than ten harbours in the world, certainly not more
than a dozen at the most, that have a right to be spoken of in the
same breath with Victoria’s landlocked port. Picking her cautious way
through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes the harbour of
Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort, our vessel swept ahead with
stately deliberation, while we leaned over the rail in the crispness of
the early morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly spread
themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled pleasure yachts, dainty as a
débutante; impertinent, omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive
noses everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of their paint;
greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting like an expressman who has carried
your trunk upstairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell
’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore masthead; rusty
freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore, Heaven knows where; Japanese
fishing-boats with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists
love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed descendants
of the first inhabitants; huge twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners
outward bound for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for Victoria
boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take my word for it,
it’s a sight worth seeing, is Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We
forged ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and nearer, until
we could make out the line of four-horsed brakes waiting to rattle those
tourists whose time was limited to the customary “points of interest,”
and the crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables with their
helmet straps under their lower lips and blue-and-white-striped bands
on their sleeves, exactly like their fellows in Oxford Circus and
Piccadilly. At the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament
buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a result of the combined
warmth and moisture the vegetation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the
temperate zone; at the left the business portion of the city stretched
away in stolid and uncompromising brick and stone; squarely ahead of us
loomed the great bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into it had
we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t, for the captain yanked a
lever on the bridge and bells jangled noisily in the engine room, and the
vessel, turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the berth that
awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed stall.
What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed British. Unless
you are observing enough to notice that the date-lines of the London
papers in the Union Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never
dream that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar
Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in Seattle. If you still
have any lingering doubts as to the atmosphere of the place being
completely and unreservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled
if you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of the Empress
Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and see the knickerbockered
sons of Albion engaged in the national diversion of drinking tea.
When an American is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give-
you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it
air, but your Britisher does it with all the matter-of-courseness
with which a New Yorker orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the
earliest impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants
are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought on, you suppose,
by the dampness of the climate—but after a little it dawns on you that
they are merely employing the broad A that they brought with them from
the old country, along with their monocles and their beautifully cut
riding clothes. In Vancouver, on the contrary, you never hear the broad A
used at all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond Street fresh
upon him. They have no time for it. They are too busy making money. The
Victorians, on the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about
the filthy lucre. _They_ are too busy having a good time. They have
enough money to be comfortable, and that seems to be all they want.
That’s the plan on which the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most
of the Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks and
champagne thirsts. For a man with a modest income and an unquenchable
thirst for sport Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In
most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the sporting life, for
game-preserves and salmon rivers and polo ponies run into a lot of money,
but in Victoria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, for
you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo for sixty or seventy
dollars and a few miles back of the city lies one of the greatest fishing
and shooting regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria I
found all the banks and business houses closed, and flags were flying
from every public building, and a procession, headed by mounted police
and a band, was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I inquired of
a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the King’s birthday or is there
royalty in town, or what?” “Not on your life!” he answered witheringly.
“It’s the prime minister on his way to open the baseball season.”
If you want to go a-motoring in a foreign country without the expense
and trouble of an ocean voyage, I doubt if you could do better than
to put your car on a steamer at Seattle or Vancouver, with “Victoria”
pencilled on the bill of lading. Take my word for it, you will find
Vancouver Island as foreign (perhaps I should say as un-American) as
England; in many respects it is more English than England itself. Though
the aggregate length of the insular highways is not very great, for
civilisation has as yet but nibbled at the island’s edges, the roads that
have been built are unsurpassed anywhere. If roads are judged not only
by their smoothness but by the scenery through which they pass, then
the highways of Vancouver Island are in a class by themselves. They are
as smooth as the arguments of an automobile salesman; their grades are
as easy as the path to shame; they are bordered by scenery as alluring
as Scherezade. The spinal column of Vancouver’s highway system is the
splendid Island Highway, which, after leaving Victoria, parallels the
east coast, running through Cowichan, Chemainus, Ladysmith, Nanaimo, and
Wellington, to Nanoose Bay. Here the road divides, one fork continuing up
the coast to Campbell River, which is the northernmost point that can be
reached by road, while the other fork swings inland, skirting the shores
of Cameron Lake and through Alberni, at the head of Barclay Sound, to
Great Central Lake, which, as its name indicates, is in the very heart
of the island, upward of a hundred and fifty miles from Victoria as
the motor goes. The first twenty miles of the Island Highway are known
as the Malahat Drive, the road here climbing over a mountain range of
considerable height by means of a splendidly surfaced but none too wide
shelf, with many uncomfortably sharp turns, cut in the rocky face of
the cliff. This shelf gradually ascends until the giant firs in the
gloomy gorge below look no larger than hedge-plants, and the waters of
the sound, with its wild and wooded shores, like a miniature lakelet in
a garden. The Malahat is a safe enough road if you drive with caution.
But it is no place for joy riding. It is too narrow, in the first place,
and the turns are too sharp, and it is such a fearfully long way to the
bottom that they would have to gather up your remains with a shovel,
which is messy and inconvenient.
Throughout our tour on Vancouver Island we were impressed with the
universal politeness and good nature of the people we met, particularly
in the back country, and by the courteous wording of the signs along
the highways. The highway signs in the United States have a habit of
shaking a fist in your face, metaphorically speaking, and shouting at
you: “Go any faster if you dare!” But in Vancouver they assume that you
are a gentleman and address you as such. Instead of curtly ordering you
to “Go slow” without condescending to give any reason, they erect a sign
like this: “Schoolhouse ahead. Please look out for the children,” and,
a little way beyond, another which says, “Thank you”—a little courtesy
which costs nothing except a few extra strokes of the brush and leaves
you permeated with a glow of good feeling.
When we reached Nanaimo, which is a coal-mining centre of considerable
importance, we found one of the periodic strikes which serve to relieve
the tedium of life in the drab little colliery town in progress and a
militia regiment of Highlanders encamped in its streets. When we speak
of militia in the United States we usually think of slouch-hatted youths
in rather slovenly uniforms of yellow khaki, who meet every Wednesday
night for drill at the local armoury, spend ten days in an instruction
camp each summer, and parade down the main streets of their respective
towns on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. But these Canadian
militiamen were something quite different. I don’t suppose that they are
a whit more efficient when it comes to the business of slaughter than
their cousins south of the border, but they are certainly a lot more
picturesque. But I ask you now, candidly, can you imagine several hundred
young Americans dressed in plaid kilts and plaid stockings, with an
interim of bare knees, jackets chopped off at the waist-line, and dinky
little caps with ribbons hanging down behind keeping the upper hand in a
strike-ridden American city? I can’t. These young men belonged, so I was
told, to a “Highland” regiment, though after talking with a few of them I
gathered that their acquaintance with the Highlands consisted in having
occupied seats in the upper gallery at a performance by Harry Lauder.
But, kilts or no kilts, there was no doubt that they were running the
show in Nanaimo and, from all indications, running it very well.
Decidedly the most worth-while thing on Vancouver Island, either from
the view-point of an artist or a motorist, is that portion of the Island
Highway between Nanoose Bay, on the Straits of Georgia, and Alberni,
at the head of Barclay Sound. When I first traversed it in the golden
radiance of an October day, I thought it was the most beautiful road I
had ever seen. And as I traverse it again in the motor-car of memory,
with a knowledge of most of the other beautiful highways of the world
to compare it with, I am still of the same opinion. So impressive is
the scenery, so profound the silence that we felt a trifle awed and
spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, as though we were in the nave
of a great cathedral. High above us the tree tops interlaced in a roof
of translucent green through which the sun-rays filtered, turning the
road into a golden trail and the moss on the rocks and the tree trunks
into old-gold plush. The meadowed hillsides were so thickly strewn with
lacy ferns and wild flowers that it seemed as though the Great Architect
had draped them in the dainty, flowered cretonne they use in ladies’
boudoirs; and scattered about, as might be expected in a lady’s boudoir,
were silver mirrors—with rainbow-trout leaping in them. Then there were
the mountains: range piled upon range, peaks peering over the shoulders
of other peaks like soldiers _en échelon_. They ran the gamut of the more
sober colours; green at the base, where the lush meadows lay, then the
dark green of the forest, then the rusty brown of scrub and underbrush,
the violet and blue and purple of the naked rock, and, atop of all, a
crown of dazzling white.
The versatile gentlemen who write those alluring folders that you find
in racks in railway offices and hotel lobbies very cleverly play on
the Anglo-Saxon love for sport by describing the region through which
their particular system runs as “a sportsman’s paradise.” It makes small
difference whether they are describing the New Jersey mud-flats or the
Berkshire hills, they are all “sportsman’s paradises.” But the northern
half of Vancouver Island is all that this much-abused term implies and
more. It is, I suppose, the finest and most accessible fish and game
country on the continent south of the Skeena. I am perfectly aware that I
may be accused of belonging to the Ananias Club when I say that certain
of the smaller streams in Vancouver Island (and also in northern British
Columbia) are at certain seasons of the year so choked with salmon
that they can be, _and are_, speared with a pitchfork, and that ruffed
grouse and Chinese pheasants are so plentiful and tame that they can be
knocked over with a long-handled shovel. It’s true, just the same. We
didn’t pitchfork any salmon ourselves, because it isn’t our conception
of sport, but we saw natives tossing them out of a stream north of
Alberni as unconcernedly as though they were pitchforking hay. Nor did
we assassinate any game-birds with a shovel; but more than once, during
the run from Nanoose Bay to Great Central Lake, we had to swerve aside to
avoid running down grouse, which were so tame that a Plymouth Rock would
be wild in comparison; and once, near Cameron Lake, we actually did run
over the trailing tail-feathers of a gorgeous Chinese cock pheasant that
insolently refused to get off the road.
Alberni and its bigger, busier sister, Port Alberni, occupy the
anomalous position of being in the middle of the island and at the same
time on its western coast. If you will take the trouble to look at the
map you will see that the arm of the sea called Barclay Sound reaches
into the very heart of the island, thus permitting deep-sea merchantmen
to tie up at Port Alberni’s wharfs and take aboard cargoes of lumber and
dried salmon. Alberni was one of the places that I should have liked to
linger in, so peaceful and easy-going is its Old-World atmosphere as
it dozes the sunny days away, the soft salt breath of the sea mingling
with the balsamic fragrance of the forest which surrounds it. Because
it is so comparatively little visited, and because the waters of the
sound are famous for their salmon runs, we expected that we would have
an opportunity to bend our rods off Alberni, but we were met with
disappointment, for the salmon with which these waters swarm were, for
strictly domestic reasons, not biting at the time we were there. So we
kept on to Great Central Lake, a dozen miles north of Alberni, through
the forest.
[Illustration: The Ark, on Great Central Lake. “Like its prototype of
Noah’s day, it is a floating caravansary.”
A wolverine caught in a trap in the forest at the northern end of
Vancouver Island.
SPORT ON VANCOUVER ISLAND.]
Even though you do not know a trout from a turbot, a fly from a spoon;
even though some of the finest scenery in the three Americas could not
elicit an “Oh!” of admiration or an “Ah!” of pleasure, I hope that some
day you will visit Great Central Lake, if for no other reason than to
experience the novelty of spending a night in its extraordinary hotel.
It is called The Ark, and, like its prototype of Noah’s day, it is a
floating caravansary. Briefly, it is a hotel of twenty bedrooms built on
a raft anchored in the lake. When the fishing becomes indifferent in the
neighbourhood, the proprietor hoists his anchors, starts up the engines
of his launch, and tows his floating hotel elsewhere. The fish have a
hard time keeping away from it, for it pursues them remorselessly. It
is patronised in the main by that world-wide brotherhood whose members
believe that no place is too remote or too difficult of access if their
journey is rewarded by the thrill of a six-pound trout on an eight-ounce
rod or by glimpsing a bighorn or a bear along a rifle barrel. For that
reason one is quite likely to run across some very interesting people at
The Ark. While we were there a party of English notabilities arrived.
There were the Earl of Something-or-Other and his beautiful daughter,
Lady Marjorie What’s-her-Name, and a cousin, the Honourable So-and-So,
and the earl’s mine manager, and one or two others. Now there isn’t
anything very remarkable about meeting British nobility in the Colonies,
for nowadays you find earls and marquises and dukes floating around
everywhere. In fact, as Mark Twain once remarked of decorations, you
can’t escape them. The remarkable thing about this particular party was
that they had tramped overland from the extreme northern end of the
island, where some mining properties in which the earl was interested
are situated, through unmapped and almost unknown forests, sleeping in
the open with no covering save the blankets they carried on their backs,
and with the Lady Marjorie for their cook. She was as slim and trim and
pretty a girl as one could ask for, and, with her curly hair creeping out
from under her soft hat, her Norfolk jacket snugly belted to her lissom
figure, her smartly cut knickerbockers and her leather stockings, she
might have stepped out of one of those novels by the Williamsons.
* * * * *
The chief factor in the colonisation of British Columbia and in the
development of its resources is the remarkable railway expansion which is
now taking place. No region in the world has witnessed such extraordinary
progress in railway construction during the past five years. Until the
spring of 1914 the “C. P. R.,” as the Canadian Pacific is commonly called
throughout the Dominion, enjoyed a monopoly of freight and passenger
transportation in the province, being scarcely less autocratic in its
attitude and methods than the Standard Oil Company before it was curbed
by Federal legislation. But when, early in 1914, the last rail of the
Grand Trunk Pacific was laid in the vicinity of Fort George and the last
spike driven, the “C. P. R.” suddenly found its hitherto undisputed
supremacy challenged by a rich, powerful, and splendidly equipped system,
which, owing to its more northerly route and easier gradients, is able
to make considerably faster running time from ocean to ocean than its
long-established rival. Moreover, another great transcontinental system,
the Canadian Northern, is already in partial operation and is rapidly
nearing completion, while the construction gangs have begun work on the
Pacific Great Eastern, a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Pacific, over
whose rails the latter plans to reach tide-water at Vancouver, thus
invading territory which the Canadian Pacific has heretofore regarded as
peculiarly its own. In another year or so, therefore, British Columbia
will not only have a more complete railway system than either Washington
or Oregon, but it will be the terminus of three great transcontinental
systems, each of which will run from tide-water to tide-water, under the
same management and the same name.