that the railway systems of British Columbia roughly resemble a gigantic
Z. The lower right-hand corner of the Z represents Kicking Horse Pass,
near Lake Louise, where the Canadian Pacific crosses the Rockies; the
lower left-hand corner may stand for Vancouver, which is the terminus
of the Canadian Pacific, the Canadian Northern, and the Pacific Great
Eastern; the upper right-hand corner of the Z we will designate as
Yellowhead (or Tête Jaune) Pass, where both the Grand Trunk Pacific and
the Canadian Northern cross the Rockies; while the upper left-hand corner
is the great terminal port which the Grand Trunk Pacific has built to
order at Prince Rupert. The lower bar of the Z approximately represents
the Canadian Pacific, the upper bar the Grand Trunk Pacific, and the
diagonal the Canadian Northern.
The main line of the Canadian Pacific enters the province at Kicking
Horse Pass and, dropping southward in a series of sweeping curves,
strikes the Fraser at Lytton and hugs its northern bank to Vancouver.
From the main line numerous branches straggle southward to the American
border, thus giving access to the rich country lying between the Kootenai
and the Okanogan. Entering British Columbia far to the northward, through
the Tête Jaune Pass, where the mountains are much lower, the Canadian
Northern lays its course southwestward in almost a straight line,
crossing the Thompson just above its junction with the Fraser and thence
paralleling the Canadian Pacific through the cañon of the Fraser, though
on the opposite side of the river, to Vancouver. The Canadian Northern
is, I might add, spending a large sum in the construction of railway
shops and yards at Port Mann, a place which it is building to order
amid the virgin forest, a few miles east of New Westminster. The Grand
Trunk Pacific likewise uses the Tête Jaune Pass as a gateway. Instead of
turning southward after crossing the mountains, however, it swings far
to the north, following the east fork of the Fraser to Fort George and
thence up the level and fertile valleys of the Nechako and the Bulkley
to New Hazelton and so down the Skeena to Prince Rupert. Recognising
the necessity of having a means of direct access to Vancouver, which
is the metropolis of western Canada, the Grand Trunk Pacific now has
under construction a subsidiary system, to be known as the Pacific Great
Eastern, which, leaving the main line at Fort George, will follow the
Fraser due southward to Lillooet and then strike directly across a virgin
country to Vancouver, thus giving the Grand Trunk Pacific two west-coast
terminals instead of one. The Grand Trunk Pacific engineers have also
drawn plans for a line running due north from New Hazelton toward the
Yukon, which would throw open to exploitation the rich coal-fields of the
Groundhog and the fertile prairies of northernmost British Columbia, the
idea being, of course, to ultimately effect a junction with the proposed
Federal railway in Alaska, thus bringing Alaska into direct railway
communication with the outside world.
[Illustration: Indians breaking camp.
Mr. Powell arriving at a frontier hotel in the Nechako country.
An Indian bridge near New Hazelton.
LIFE AT THE BACK OF BEYOND.]
Though enormously rich in timber and ore, Vancouver Island has not yet
had its share of railway expansion, its only system of transportation at
present being the Esquimault & Nanaimo Railway, which runs from Victoria
to Alberni, in the heart of the island. The Canadian Northern, however,
proposes to build a line from Victoria half-way up the west coast of the
island, while the Grand Trunk Pacific, going its rival one better, has
obtained a concession for building a railway from one end of the island
to the other, thus opening up its enormously rich fisheries, mines, and
forests. With this era of railway expansion immediately before them, it
seems to me that the British Columbians are quite justified in looking at
the future through rose-coloured glasses.
[Illustration: The bull train: the last on the continent.
The dog train: taking in supplies to the miners of the Groundhog
coal-fields.
TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]
Consider the cities, how they grow—Prince Rupert, for example. A city
literally made to order, just as a tailor would make a suit of clothes,
is something of a novelty even in an age which jeers at precedent and
slaps tradition in the face. “Rome was not built in a day,” but that
was because it had no transcontinental railway system to finance and
superintend and push forward its construction. If a Gaul, Transalpine,
& Pompeian Railway had been in operation, and its directors knew their
business, they would have turned loose their engineers, architects, and
builders and, after staking out and draining a town site beside the
Tiberian marshes, they would have run up the Eternal City and auctioned
off the building lots along the Via Appia as expeditiously as the Grand
Trunk Pacific Railway has brought into being the west-coast terminus
which it has named Prince Rupert after that adventurous Palatine prince,
nephew of Charles I, who was in turn a cavalry leader, a naval commander,
and the first governor of the Hudson Bay Company. Unless your family
atlas is of recent vintage (and I have regretfully observed that most
of them were purchased at about the period of Stanley’s explorations)
you will search it in vain for Prince Rupert, for this custom-made
municipality came into existence about the same time as the tango and
the turkey-trot. The easiest way to locate it, then, is to trace with
your finger parallel 54° 40′ North (the slogan “Fifty-four forty or
fight!” you will recall, once nearly brought on a war with England)
until it reaches the Pacific Coast of North America. There, five hundred
and fifty miles north of Vancouver, forty miles south of the Alaskan
border, on Kai-en Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, set on a
range of hills overlooking one of the finest deep-water harbours in
the world, is Prince Rupert. It is in the same latitude as London and
has a wet and foggy climate which cannot fail to make a Londoner feel
very much at home. Probably never before have there been so much time
and money expended in the planning and preliminary work of a new city.
The town site was chosen only after a careful inspection of the entire
British Columbia coast-line and was laid out by a famous firm of Boston
landscape engineers with the same attention to detail which they would
have given to laying out a great estate. Experts who have studied the
plan on which Prince Rupert is built assert that in time it will be one
of the most beautiful cities on the continent. The site is a picturesque
one, for, from the six-mile-long shore-line which sweeps around the front
of the city, the ground rises abruptly, so that on clear days—which,
by the way, are far from common—a magnificent view may be had from the
heights of the forested and fiord-indented coast, of the island-studded
channel, of the Indian village of Metlakatla, known as the “Holy City,”
and, on rare occasions, of the mountains of Alaska. Unless one is
conversant with the development of the Pacific Coast; unless one has
seen its seaports—Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, San Pedro, San
Diego—spring into being almost overnight, one cannot fully realise the
possibilities and potentialities of this new city with the unfamiliar
name. To begin with, the distance from Liverpool to Yokohama by way of
Prince Rupert is eight hundred miles shorter than via New York and San
Francisco; it is five hundred miles nearer the Orient than any other
Pacific port. Nothing illustrates more graphically the strategic value
of its position than the fact that a traveller bound, say, for New York
from China, Japan, or Alaska can board a train at Prince Rupert and be
as far as Winnipeg, or virtually half across the continent, before the
steamer from which he disembarked could reach Vancouver. In addition to
the shorter distance across the Pacific must be added the much faster
time that can be made by rail over the practically level grades (four
tenths of one per cent) that the Grand Trunk Pacific has obtained through
the lower mountains to the north, which will enable trains to be moved at
the rate of two miles for every one mile on the heavier grades of rival
systems. What is most important of all, however, Prince Rupert has at its
back probably the potentially richest hinterland in the world—a veritable
commercial empire waiting to be explored, developed, and exploited. The
mineral wealth of all this vast region, the forest products, the gold,
the coal, the copper, the iron ore of northern British Columbia and the
Yukon, the food products of the prairie provinces, and the fish and
fur of the far North—in short, all the westbound export wealth of this
resourceful region—will find its outlet to the sea at Prince Rupert as
surely and as true to natural laws as its rivers empty into the Pacific.
[Illustration: The pack-train: crossing the prairies of northern British
Columbia.
The wagon-train: a settler on his way into the interior over the Cariboo
Trail.
TRANSPORT ON AMERICA’S LAST FRONTIER.]
You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer,
you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars
and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the
breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these
railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new
markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and
scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the
Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this
beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and
their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon,
just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West,
trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in
the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets,
under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon,
on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back,
living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless
line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the
hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward
them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel,
cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their
spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their
levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to
torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold.
Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have
maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great
province—travelling on duty through its wildest parts, amid dangers
and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far
Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the
brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming
rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the
frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the
uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law
to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s
westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.
XIV
BACK OF BEYOND
“I hear the tread of pioneers,
Of millions yet to be;
The first low wash of waves where soon
Shall roll a human sea.
The elements of empire here
Are plastic yet and warm,
The chaos of a mighty world
Is rounding into form.”
XIV
BACK OF BEYOND
Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every
thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent
at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called
“The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of
Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change
its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more
lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because
the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town
is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has
only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and
eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of
cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains,
trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer.
This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building
in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to
hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will
replace the _chaparejos_ and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being
carried in the boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of
flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the
pack-train.
Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion,
you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country
beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of
adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you
give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would?
I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and
open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In
the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven
degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and
northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that
have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white
man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier
is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the
problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of
rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the
wheat-field—the Pioneers.
There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the
province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the
Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or
down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune
Cache to Fort George; or from the country of the Kootenai overland
through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side
entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the
hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a
one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the
Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the _Imperial Limited_
goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this
region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which
you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the
crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness
begins.
What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail,
passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before
the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as
the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser.
Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous
country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates
upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed
more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen
miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and
ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the
rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its
way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting
of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace “jerky” to a six-horse
Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction
with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of
river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the
Upper Fraser and the Nechako.
The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and, indeed, of all transportation
in the British Columbian hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government
post-road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the Royal
Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the rush to the gold-fields
on Williams Creek. Starting from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two
hundred and twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where it
abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus at Barkerville,
once a famous mining-camp but now a quiet agricultural community in the
heart of the Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of fifteen
miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer can obtain surprisingly
well-cooked meals at a uniform charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might
explain for the benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to
twelve and a half cents. For the same price the traveller can get a clean
and moderately soft bed, although he must accept it as part and parcel
of frontier life should he find that the room to which he is assigned
already contains half a dozen snoring occupants. These rest-houses,
which, with their out-buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely
of logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and occasionally
surrounded by stockades and constantly reminded me of the post stations
which marked the end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road before
Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. During the summer months
the “up journey” of three hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort
George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars, stage-coaches,
and river boats, and, if the roads are dry, is made in about four days.
As a one-way ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the
fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, thus making it
one of the most expensive journeys of its length in the world, being
even costlier, if I remember rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian
railway from Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of the
fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a picturesqueness, an
excitement, which cannot be duplicated on this continent. From the moment
that you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft until
your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert Harbour, southward bound, you are
seeing with your own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums
of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, a nation in the
cellar-digging stage of its existence; you are transported for a brief
time to the Epoch of the Dawn.
In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we expected to encounter,
I had had the car fitted with shock-absorbers and had brought with me
from Vancouver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft we
selected an equipment with as great care as though we were starting on
an East African _safari_. A pick, a long-handled shovel, a pair of axes,
a block and tackle, four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised
the essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel a supply of
tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of rubber sheets, and three
of the largest-size Hudson Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this
motoring in lands where motors have never gone before. The most important
thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, the entire success of our
venture depending upon our ability to carry a sufficient supply with
us to get us through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness
between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing our personal belongings
to a minimum, we succeeded in getting eight five-gallon tins into the
tonneau of the car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus
giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically at least, should
have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, it did not suffice to carry
us half-way to the Skeena, so slow was the going and so terrible the
condition of the road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an
order from a British development company on its agents at several points
in the interior, instructing them to supply us with gasoline from some
drums which had been taken in at enormous expense a year or so before
in a futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we should have
been compelled to abandon the car in the wilderness for lack of fuel.
Gasoline, like everything else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft
I paid fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, until
we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two dollars a gallon—which,
so I was assured, was exactly what it had cost the company to freight
it in. Briefly, our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on
the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, and follow the
Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, thence striking through the unsettled
and almost unexplored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to the
Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail through Fort Fraser to New
Hazleton, on the Skeena, which is barely half a hundred miles south of
the Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft as to our chances
of getting through, and the more people to whom I talked the slimmer they
seemed to become.
One man assured us that there was no road whatever north of Fort Fraser
and that, if we wanted to get through, we would have to take the car
apart and pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile agent from
Seattle had done the year before; another told us that there were no
bridges and that we would be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make
rafts to ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us up by
assuring us that we could always get a team to haul us out.
“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in a fortnight,” he remarked
cheeringly.
“What would it cost?” I inquired.
“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at bargaining you ought to get
the outfit for about a hundred dollars a day.”
That cheered us up tremendously, of course.
We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn morning. The air was like
sparkling Moselle, overhead was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the
gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between dun and barren
hills, into the unknown. The entire population of the little town had
turned out to see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low bonnet
of the car pointed northward, they gave us a cheer and shouted after
us, “Hope you’ll get through, fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left
Seattle I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we flew from
a metal rod at the front of the hood, and more than once, when we were
mired in the mud below the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready
to quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting fluttering
bravely before us which spurred us on.