described by the natives as “a fair to middlin’ road,” and it is all
of that and more—in the dry season. When we traversed it, in the early
fall, it had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn rains and heavy
teaming and was as good a road as an automobile pioneer could ask for.
In that journey up the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour
and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border life which most
people think of as having passed with the pony express and the buffalo.
A stage-coach rattled past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet
body lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four horses
at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash spasmodically
between the ears of his leaders, for he carried his Majesty’s mails and
must make his six miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic
boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the burdened mules
plodding by dejectedly, long ears to shaven tails. Scattered along the
line, like mounted officers beside a marching column, were the packers:
wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the colour of their
saddles; picturesque figures in their goatskin _chaparejos_, their vivid
neckerchiefs, and their broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound
for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators of the Yukon
Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the Groundhog, or, it might be, for
the lonely trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the
Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake would plod a solitary
prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin shirt glazed with grime, his tent,
pick, shovel, and his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient
donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and Siwash ranchers—for the
Indian of British Columbia takes more kindly to an agricultural life than
do his brothers on the American side of the border—gaily clad squaws
and bright-eyed children peering curiously at our strange vehicle from
beneath the canvas covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to
barter the produce of their holdings in the back country for cartridges,
red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a phonograph.
But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their six and eight and twelve
horse teams straining at the huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the
freight trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear a marked
resemblance to the prairie-schooners of crossing-the-plains days, the
British Columbian freight wagons are barely half as large as the enormous
scow-bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked westward.
Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated for, however, by the
custom of linking them in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt
to negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with vehicles having
an unusually long wheel-base is but to invite disaster. In freighting
parlance, five wagons with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers
are known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the outfit is the
“swing boss.” To meet one of these wagon-trains on a road that was
uncomfortably narrow at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff
was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the freighter is
always permitted to take the inside of the road, so that more than once
we were compelled to pull so far to the outside, in order to give the
huge vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between our outer
wheels and the precipice’s brink for a starved greyhound to pass.
The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more infrequent become the
mails, until, north of the Fraser, the settlers receive their letters
and newspapers only once a month during the summer and frequently not for
many months on end when the rains have turned the trails into impassable
morasses. When we left Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two
weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible condition that the
driver of the mail-stage would not even hazard a guess as to when he
could start. At frequent intervals along the way men were camping in the
rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection save the scant
shelter afforded by a dog-tent or a bit of canvas stretched between two
trees. At the sound of our approach they would run out and hail us and
inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell them when the mail was likely
to be along. These men were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the
wilderness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that road for many
days, straining their ears to catch the rattle of the wheels which would
bring them word from the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut,
clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside the road in a little
shelter tent, told us that he had been there for fifteen days waiting for
the postman.
“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,” he explained, “and I
was so afraid that I might miss the mail that I tramped out and have been
sleeping here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the kiddies
are back in the old country, in Devonshire, waiting until I can get a
home for them out here. I haven’t had a letter from them now for going
on seven weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little girl was
sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s bad news that the coach
hasn’t started yet. I guess the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”
To such men as these I lift my hat in respect and admiration. Resolute,
patient, persevering, facing with stout hearts and smiling lips all the
hardships and discouragements that such a life has to bring, they are
the real advance-guards of progress, the skirmishers of civilisation. In
Rhodesia, the Sudan, West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find
them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping down the rivets of
empire.
A great deal has been written about the brand of Englishman who goes by
the name of remittance-man. With a few pounds a month to go to the devil
on, he haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, working when he
must, idling when he may. In Cape Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney,
Melbourne, Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished bars,
or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. As his long-suffering
relatives generally send him as far from home as they can buy a ticket,
he has become a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion
and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed in well-cut tweeds or
flannels and smoking the inevitable brier, you can see him at almost any
hour of any day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the Empress
Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the Union Club. But you rarely
find him in the British Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I
do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he ain’t a worker” and in
consequence is cordially detested by the native-born no less than by
those industrious settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly
cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out to his labour in
the morning he is counted an undesirable addition to the population.
Hence, though the hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack,
comparatively few of them bear the despised label of remittance-man.
[Illustration: A meeting of the old and the new.
“The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.”
“The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded
by stockades.”
SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL.]
But that is not saying that you do not find numbers of well-bred,
well-educated young Englishmen chopping out careers for themselves up
there in the forests of the North. We came across two such at a desolate
and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel and Blackwater, three hundred
miles from the nearest railway and thirty from the nearest house. We
stopped at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed
us as they would a certified cheque. One of them, I learned after
considerable questioning, was the nephew of an earl and had stroked an
Oxford crew; the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed me
the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house in Hampshire which he
called home, and remarked quite casually that he had been something of
a cricketer before he came out to the Colonies and had played for the
Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two youngsters, gently born
and cleanly bred, “pigging it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a
one-room cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens! how glad
they were to see us—not for our own sakes, you understand, but because
we were messengers from that great, gay world from which they had exiled
themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, the other fried the
bacon—“sow-belly” they called it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of
them fired questions at us like shots from an automatic: what were the
newest plays, the latest songs, how long since I had been in London, was
the chorus at the Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston
Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he just a bally ass,
did we think that there was anything to this talk about the Ulstermen
revolting—and all the other questions that homesick exiles ask.
“What on earth induces you to stay on in this God-forsaken place?” I
asked, when at length they paused in their questioning for lack of
breath. “No neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a month
if you are lucky, rain six months out of the twelve, and snow for four
months more. Why don’t you try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t
do much more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty poor one at
that, eh?”
“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than
you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year,
now that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get a hundred and
fifty.”
“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity in my voice. “Heavens
alive, man, what does that amount to?”
“It amounted to something over ten thousand dollars,” he answered. “Up
here, you see, hay is a pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred
dollars a ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit lonely,
of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s all sort of fishin’ and
shootin’—there’s a skin of a grizzly that I killed last week tacked up
at the back of the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment,
“this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’ around London and doin’
the society-Johnnie act. We feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit
toward buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”
Though they probably didn’t know it, those two young fellows in flannel
shirts and cord breeches, who had evidently left England because they
were tired of living _à la métronome_, because they had wearied of
garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, were members in good
standing of the Brotherhood of Nation Builders.
Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty gallons of gasoline, the
going had been so heavy that by the time we reached the telegraph hut
at Bobtail Lake, where the development company of which I have already
spoken had left the first of its drums of gasoline, our supply was
seriously diminished. These relay telegraph stations are scattered at
intervals of fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire,
two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City with Vancouver. Many
of them are so remotely situated that the only time the operators see
a white man’s face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual
pack-train brings them their supplies in the spring and fall. I can
conceive of no more intolerable existence than the lives led by these
men, sitting at deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their
log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing under the sun
to do save listen to the ceaseless chatter of a telegraph instrument,
day after day, week after week, month after month the same. Imagine the
monotony of it! There were two young men at the Bobtail Lake hut, an
operator and a linesman, and when they saw the little flag of stripes and
stars fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their hats and
cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered lives in offices or factories
or stores, the flag may be nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue
bunting, but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where it is
rarely seen, it stands for home and country and family and friends, and
is reverenced accordingly.
“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,” one of the young men
remarked a trifle huskily. “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on
it in more’n two years. When we heard you coming through the woods we
thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to see an automobile up in
this God-forsaken hole.”
“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.
“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee. Used to be a train-despatcher
down in Texas, got tired of living in a box car with no trees but
sage-brush and no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. And
believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country again.”
That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. The English owner and
his wife were absent in Vancouver, but the ranch hand in charge of the
place was only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house,
though built of logs, for up there there is nothing else to build with,
was considerably more pretentious than the general run of frontier
dwellings. Instead of the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room,
it had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone fireplace and
the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, and two sleeping rooms, while
in front, in pathetic imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny
plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums and surrounded
by an attempt at a picket fence. The floor of the house was of planks
hand-hewn; cedar poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod
formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks in the log walls
were stuffed with moss and clay and papered over with illustrations torn
from the London weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in
the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and obviously
home-made, with benches instead of chairs, for the freighters, who
charge thirty cents a pound for hauling merchandise in from the railway,
refuse to bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which require
space out of all proportion to their weight. Lying on the table in the
living-room, atop of a heap of year-old newspapers and magazines (for
in the north country printed matter of any description is something to
be read and reread and then read once again before it is passed on to a
neighbour) were two much-thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was
curious to see what sort of literature would appeal to people who lived
their lives in such a place. One was the “Discourses of Epictetus,”
the other “Manners and Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter
entitled “The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the nearest neighbour, a
Swedish rancher with a Siwash wife, lived fifty miles away.
If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the house, or only half as
good, there would have been little left to be desired. The ranch hand
who was in charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed
the information that he had been a British soldier in India before
coming to Canada to seek his fortune and wished to God that he was
back in India again—made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough
soda-biscuits the first of every month to last until the next month came
round. As we were there about the twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite
hard—like dog-biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter
of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; stone-cold boiled
potatoes, a pan of the inevitable stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking
coffee, which was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? This
was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.
I was particularly impressed throughout our journey across British
Columbia with the almost paternal interest the provincial government
takes in the welfare of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere
are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything from the
filing of homestead claims to the prevention of forest-fires. Rest-houses
are maintained by the government along certain of the less-travelled
routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness in every
direction; forest-rangers and agricultural experts are constantly
riding about the province with open eyes and ears; in every settlement
is stationed a government agent from whom the settlers can obtain
information and advice on every subject under the sun. Law and order
prevail to an extraordinary degree. I was told that there are only
three police constables between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of
more than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and sparsely settled
country, where a criminal would have comparatively little difficulty
in making his escape. This remarkable absence of crime is due in large
measure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of alcoholic
liquor within a certain distance of a public work, such as the building
of a railway; in fact, the workman is debarred from intoxicants as
rigorously as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities, and
results have shown that they know what they are talking about. Not until
the railway is completed and the construction gangs have moved on are
the saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although this policy
unquestionably makes for law and order, it is by no means popular with
the workmen, who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name of
town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and such a place is a hell
of a fine town,” I was frequently assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!”
Judged by this standard, Fort George, which is a division point on the
Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers,
and will unquestionably become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is
a veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than its share of
gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has vividly described it in a
single couplet:
“The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,
Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a Mecca for the dry
of throat, who make bacchanalian pilgrimages from incredible distances
to its bottle-decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on a
jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred miles or more,
can prevent him from gratifying his desires. Indeed, it is by no means
unusual for a man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has
accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing up his job, to tramp
a hundred miles through the wilderness to Fort George and blow every
last cent of his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What a sudden
falling off in intemperance there would be in a civilised community
if a man had to walk a hundred miles to get a drink! What? Yet this
proscription of alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the
men, being denied what might be described as legal liquors, resort to
innumerable more or less efficient substitutes. Red ink they will swallow
with avidity, for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, and
the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another popular refreshment
is lemon extract, such as is commonly used in civilised households for
flavouring jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, which is to
all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage champagne is to all other
wines, is a certain patent medicine which contains _eighty per cent of
pure alcohol_. This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the
construction camps as cocktails are in a New York club, both workmen and
Indians pouring it down like water. It is warranted to cure all pains,
and it does, for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the
world for at least a day.
As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones, Fort George might
truthfully be described as a very lively town. In one of its saloons
twelve white-aproned individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of
polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful man with a cocked
revolver on his knees; while mingling with the crowd in front of the bar
are three bull-necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.”
Instead of throwing a patron who becomes obstreperous into the street,
however, in which case he would stagger to the saloon opposite and get
rid of the balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,” where
he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects of his debauch,
after which he is ready to start in all over again. As a result of this
ingenious system of conservation, very little money gets away.
These frontier communities have handled the perplexing problem of the
social evil in a novel manner. The bedecked and bedizened women who
follow in the wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs,
instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within the town, are
forced to reside in colonies of their own well without the municipal
limits, sometimes half a dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who
wishes to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend a
considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, though I regret to add
that this did not appear to act as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn
trails that I saw in the Northland being those which led from the
settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.
Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began to rain—not a sudden
shower which comes and drenches and goes, but one of those steady,
disheartening drizzles, which in this region sometimes last for a week.
The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which had
been atrocious from the moment we left the Fraser, quickly became worse.
It was composed of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries,
saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very sticky and very
slippery material peculiar to British Columbia, known as “muskeg.”
Though it looks substantial enough, with its top growth of stubble and
moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of Virginia red clay,
Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and New Orleans molasses. To make matters
worse, a drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded us, so
that the road, which was inconceivably bad under any circumstances,
had been trampled into a black morass which no vehicle could by any
possibility get through. There was only one thing for us to do and that
was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst stretches of it. I have
heard veterans of the Civil War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying
roads for the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy, but
I didn’t appreciate the truth of their remarks until I tried it myself.
While camping in various parts of the world I had used an axe in a
dilettante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping fire-wood,
but there is a vast deal of difference between that sort of thing and
cutting down enough trees to pave a road. In an hour our hands were so
blistered that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating pain;
but it was a question of corduroying that road or else abandoning the
car and making our way to civilisation afoot through several hundred
miles of forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance. At
noon we paused long enough to light a fire and cook a meal of sorts,
which we ate seated on logs amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting
down and swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering about
us. Five hours more of tree felling and we decided that our corduroy
causeway was sufficiently solid to get over it with the car. As a matter
of fact, we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that stage of
exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t care what happened. If the car
stuck in the mud, well and good. She could stay there and take root and
sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing up so as to get
a running start, our driver opened wide his throttle and the car tore
at the stretch of home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck.
Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s body were hurled a
dozen feet away. The snapping of the limbs and the deafening explosions
of the engines sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled and
swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant I expected it to
capsize; but our driver, clinging desperately to the wheel, contrived,
with a skill in driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it
from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to tell it, we had
traversed the morass we had spent an entire day in corduroying, and the
car, trembling like a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground.
The road over which we had passed looked as though it had been struck by
a combined hurricane, cyclone, and tornado.
It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned by a Swede named Peter
Rasmussen. What the man at Blackwater had described as “a swell place”
consisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set down in the
middle of a forest clearing. No smoke issued from the chimney, no dog
barked a welcome, there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a
few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that no one was at home.
Presently, however, we saw a fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon
his shoulder, emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us across
the pasture. I hailed him.
“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”
“Ay ban reckon ay am.”