“Ay ban reckon ay can.”
A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in which Rasmussen and his
single ranch-hand, a stolid and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked
and ate and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by the light of
a guttering candle was the bunk house. A bunk house, I might explain, is
a building peculiar to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room
with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built against the wall.
Here travellers may find a roof to shelter them and some hay on which
to spread their blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his
bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted us when Rasmussen
threw open the heavy door, this particular bunk house had evidently not
been occupied for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, we
found that the bunks were very much occupied indeed. But after Pete had
started a roaring fire in the little sheet-iron stove and when we had
spread our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound
hay which served in lieu of mattresses and had scrubbed off some of the
mud with which we were veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry
ones, the complexion of things began to change from brunette to blonde.
Between the intervals of corduroying the road in the morning, I had shot
with my revolver half a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our
way. They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we handed them over
to Pete to pluck and cook for supper, which was still further eked out by
a mess of lake trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region one
may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the every-day necessities,
such as salt and butter and bread, but he can surfeit himself on such
luxuries as venison and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, like
so many other settlers in British Columbia, had come from the American
Northwest, lured by the glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial
government. But he, like so many others, had found that the appalling
cost of living had made it impossible, even with hay at a hundred dollars
a ton, for him to clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay
ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he concluded, knocking
the ashes from his pipe. And that’s precisely what a great many other
discouraged Americans in western Canada are going to do.
For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s the road was rough,
boggy, and exceedingly trying to the disposition, but it gradually
improved until by the time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves
running along a short stretch of road of which a New England board of
supervisors need not have felt too much ashamed. The terrible condition
of the roads throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely due
to the fact that they run for great distances through dense forests where
the sun cannot penetrate to dry them up; this, taken with the abnormally
heavy rains, serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. At
Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of some twoscore log
cabins clustered about a mission church whose gaudy paint and bulging
dome spoke of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the Russians.
The interior tribes are known as “stick Indians,” referring, of course,
to the fact that they dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to
those living along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.”
Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered moccasins sat sewing
and gossiping before their cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their
skins white or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world over;
bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled like frisky puppies in the
street; bearskins were stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear
of every house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the Siwashes’
staple article of food. Though only one of the braves, who had been out
into civilisation, had ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them
seemed to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely enough,
they became as shy as deer at sight of my camera, one picturesque old
squaw refusing consecutive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents,
and a dollar to come out from behind the door where she was hiding and
let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter was willing enough to
take a chance, however, for she offered to pose for as many pictures as
we desired if we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which
I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn street of the
village at a rattling clip, and she not only never turned a hair but
asked me to go faster. Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would
make a real road burner.
It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to Fort Fraser and the road
proved a surprisingly good one. You must bear in mind, however, that
when I speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, I am speaking
comparatively. The best road we encountered would, if it existed in the
United States, drive a board of highway commissioners out of office,
while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community wouldn’t be
considered a road at all—it would be used for a hog-wallow or for duck
shooting. The mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name from the
old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles from the town on the shores
of Fraser Lake. When we were there the town consisted of half a hundred
log and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five general stores,
the branch of a Montreal bank, and the only hotel in the four hundred
miles between Quesnel and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we
were there, and was of particular interest to us because it represented
a phase of civilisation which in our own country has long since passed,
but now that the railway is in operation its picturesque log cabins will
doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses with green blinds,
the boards laid along the edge of the road will give way to cement
sidewalks, and it will have street lamps and a town hall and its name
displayed in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the station lawn and
will look exactly like any one of a hundred other towns scattered along
the transcontinental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall pass
through it again, this time from the observation platform of a Pullman,
and I shall remark quite nonchalantly to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes,
I was up here in the good old days when this was nothing but a cluster of
log huts at the Back of Beyond.”
XV
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED
“Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking
through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.”
XV
THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED
It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good
deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links
thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort
Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our
skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been
subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out,
and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern
British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads
unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in
that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery
as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as
likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of
emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as
we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car.
After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed
him.
“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the
chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”
“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that
I’m getting hard of hearing.”
“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.
I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for
the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty,
second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar
almost anywhere?”
“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight
charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound.
But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser
with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause
they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll
do—_I’ll knock off the forty cents_.”
* * * * *
Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the
imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the
prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we
replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:
Flour 16 cents per pound
Sugar 25 cents per pound
Tea and coffee $1.00 per pound
Butter 75 cents per pound
Oatmeal 30 cents per pound
Dried fruits 25 cents per pound
Tinned fruits 75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin
Bacon 50 cents per pound
Eggs (when procurable) $1.50 per dozen
(In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)
Potted meats 50 cents to $1.00 per tin
Bread 25 cents per 1-pound loaf
(Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.)
Potatoes $3.00 per bushel
Chickens $4.00 each
It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon
became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however,
that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser
is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has
doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale
of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come
in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.
[Illustration: A Siwash lady going shopping.
Half-breeds of the Upper Skeena.
“Blackwater Kate.”
SOME LADIES FROM THE UPPER SKEENA.]
The population of Fort Fraser turned out _en masse_ to see us off, the
mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were
there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first
motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered
by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water
fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows,
and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.
We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had
slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside
the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of
the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a feeble sun was
doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort
Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once
more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars,
or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight
of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a
moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom
of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous
black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy,
two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off
our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a
blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako
to Burns Lake was uneventful.
Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous
flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps
illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the
settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time
we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding
the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing
more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of
hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of
the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon
inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into
a loft above an eating-house, where fully twoscore labourers from the
south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw,
snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the
mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that
it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to
whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our
blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air
of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:
“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I
understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for
Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to
carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and
it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me,
it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these
bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go
by water if you go at all.”
Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of
the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to
the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our
errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes
by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes,
which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are
lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and
tortuous channel which winds its devious course through a wilderness of
swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of
Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division
of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway
for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using
for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water.
Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at
night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate
circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company
tens of thousands of dollars.
It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that
night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of
the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat
in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as
though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little
gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us,
and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our
lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion.
It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully
through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the
darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black
as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear,
no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise that was
positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached
the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned
Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on
everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely
nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the
laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against
the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I
can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five
feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge
crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed
a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell,
I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and
fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us
and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and
blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We
were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how
we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.
Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His
name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had
the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle
an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who,
with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone
to-morrow, he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn
a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New
Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to
work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so
extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It
was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an
hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch
of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.
“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking
at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll
never see the car again.”
What he said was so obviously true that we decided that the only thing
to do was to avoid the road altogether and chop our way around it. This
involved cutting a path through three quarters of a mile of primeval
forest and the removal of scores of trees. There was nothing to be gained
by groaning over the prospect, so we rolled up our sleeves, spat on our
lacerated palms, and went at it with the axes. Did you ever see an expert
woodsman in action? No? Well, it’s a sight worth seeing, take my word
for it. Duncan would walk up to a forest giant that looked as big as the
Tower of Pisa and slam-bang into it with his double-bitted axe, amid a
perfect shower of chips, until he had chopped a hole in the base the size
of a hotel fireplace. A few more strokes at the right spot, a warning
shout of “Timber!” “Timber!” and the great tree would come crashing down
within a hand’s breadth of where he wanted it. A few minutes more of the
axe business and the prone trunk would be cut into sections and rolled
away. “She’s all jake, boys,” Duncan would bellow, and, putting on the
power, we would push the car a few yards more ahead. It took the four
of us eight hours of steady chopping to make our way around that awful
stretch of road, but we did get through finally with no more serious
mishap than crumpling up one of the forward fenders, caused by the car
swerving into a tree. While we were still congratulating ourselves on
having gotten out of the woods in more senses than one, we swung around
a bend in the road and came to a sudden halt before a hog-wallow which
stretched away, like a black and slimy serpent, as far as the eye could
see.
[Illustration: After the car had passed: a stretch of road south of the
Nechako.
Mired in muskeg on the Yukon Telegraph Trail.
Prying the car out of a swamp in the Blackwater country.
WHERE NO MOTOR-CAR HAD EVER GONE: SOME INCIDENTS OF MR. POWELL’S JOURNEY
THROUGH THE BRITISH COLUMBIAN WILDERNESS.]
“We’re up against it good and hard this time,” said our driver, grown
pessimistic for the first and only time. “I don’t believe the car can
make it. There’s too much of it and it’s too deep—the wheels simply can’t
get traction.”
As we were contemplating it in dismal silence we heard the welcome
rattle of wheels and clink of harness, and an empty freight wagon, drawn
by eight sturdy mules, pulled out of the forest behind us, the bearded
“mule-skinner” urging on his beasts with cracking whip and a crackle of
oaths. I waded toward him through the mire.
“Where’s the nearest place that we can eat and sleep?” I demanded.
“Waal,” he drawled with exasperating slowness, “I reckon’s how they
mought fix ye up fer the night at th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House.
Thet’s the only place I knows on, an’ it’s darned poor, too.”
“How far is it from here?” I asked.
“Waal, I calkilate it mought be a matter o’ two mile an’ a half or three
mile.”
“Good,” said I, “and what will you charge to haul us there? We can’t get
through this mud-hole alone, but the car’s got lots of power and with the
help of your mules we ought to make it all right.”
Instantly the man’s native shrewdness asserted itself. He cast an
appraising eye over my mud-stained garments, over the mud-bespattered car
and at the yawning sea of mud ahead.
“I’ll haul ye to th’ Hunderd an’ Fifty Mile House for fifteen dollars,”
he said.
“Fifteen dollars for a two-and-a-half-mile haul?” I exclaimed.
“Take it or leave it,” said the teamster rudely. “I ain’t got no time to
stand in the road bargainin’.”
I promptly capitulated, for I had no intention of letting our only hope
of rescue get away. “Hitch on to the car,” said I.
That was where the sixteen-dollar-and-forty-cent chain to which I
referred at the beginning of this story came in handy, for we had no rope
that would have stood the strain of hauling that car through those three
_perfectly awful_ miles. Night was tucking up the land in a black and
sodden blanket when the driver pulled up his weary mules at the roadside
post bearing the numerals “150,” which signified that we were still a
hundred and fifty miles from our journey’s end, and I counted into his
grimy paw the sum agreed upon in the greasy bank-notes of the realm. _It
had taken us just eleven hours to make fourteen miles._
Though we had not deluded ourselves into expecting that we would find
anything but the most primitive accommodation at the 150 Mile House,
we were none of us, unless it might have been Duncan, prepared for the
wholly impossible quarters that greeted us. Standing in a clearing in the
wilderness was a log cabin containing but a single room, in one corner
of which was a stove and in the other a rickety table piled high with
unwashed dishes. Such space as was left in the twelve-by-fourteen room
was occupied by a huge home-made bed which provided sleeping quarters for
the English rancher, his gaunt, starved-looking wife, and a veritable
litter of small children.
“We’ve nothing here that ’ud do for the likes of you, sir,” said the man
civilly, in reply to my request for accommodations. “The missis can fix
you up a meal, but there’s not a place that you could lay your heads,
unless ’twould be in the loft.”
“Good Heavens, man!” interrupted my companion, “We can’t sleep
out-of-doors on such a night as this. Let’s see the loft.”
Assuring us once more that “it was no place for the likes of us,” the
rancher pointed to a ladder made of saplings which poked its nose through
a black square in the ceiling directly above the family couch. Taking a
candle from the woman I ascended. The fitful light illuminated a space
formed by the ceiling of the room below and the steeply pitched roof
of the cabin, barely large enough for a man to enter on his hands and
knees. Its uneven floor, made of saplings, laid lengthwise, was strewn
with musty hay, upon which were thrown some tattered pieces of filthy
burlap bagging. One of these pieces of bedding seemed to move, but upon
looking at it more closely I saw it was fairly aswarm with vermin. I took
one glance and scrambled down the ladder. “Where’s the nearest ditch?” I
asked. “I’d rather sleep in a ditch any time than in that loft.”