acquaintance of the place, wasting no time in lamentation, had set to
work with his axe and in ten minutes a great fire was sending its hail of
sparks into the evening sky. It’s marvellous what wonders can be worked
in the wilderness with a sharp axe by a man who knows how to handle
it. By stretching the piece of sail-cloth we had with us between two
convenient trees and keeping it in place with saplings, in an amazingly
brief time Duncan had constructed a shelter which was proof against any
but a driving rain, and which, thanks to the camp-fire blazing in front
of it, was as warm as a steam-heated room in a hotel. Covering the soggy
ground with a layer of hemlock branches, and this in turn with a layer
of hay bought from the rancher at five cents per pound, and spreading on
top of the hay our rubber sheets and our blankets—behold, we were as
comfortable as kings; more comfortable, I fancy, than certain monarchs in
the Balkans. We lay side by side beneath the flimsy shelter like sardines
in a tin, while outside the rain fell drearily and the night wind soughed
in the tree tops, and the flickering flames of the camp-fire alternately
illumined and left in darkness everything.
We awoke the next morning to find that the sun, which is an infrequent
visitor to northern British Columbia in the autumn, had tardily come
to our assistance and was trying to make up for its remissness by a
desperate attempt to dry up the roads which, for the succeeding hundred
miles or so, lay across an open, rolling country bordered by distant
ranges of snow-capped mountains. Though the recollection of that day
stands out sharp and clear in my memory as the only one since leaving
Quesnel when we were not delayed by mud, our progress was hampered
by something much more inimical to the car—stumps. When the road was
constructed it evidently never entered into the calculations of its
builders that it would be used by a motor-car, so they sawed off the
trees which occupied the route at a height which would permit of their
stumps being cleared without difficulty by the axles of the high-wheeled
freight wagons, but which, had they been struck by the automobile, would
have torn the pan from the body and put it permanently out of business.
Along the stump-strewn stretches, therefore, our progress was necessarily
slow, for Duncan marched in advance, axe on shoulder, like a scout before
an advancing army, and whenever he found an enemy in the form of a stump
lying in wait to disable us he would destroy it with a few well-directed
blows of his axe. But it was a tiresome business. After a time, however,
the stump-dotted trail was supplanted by quite an excellent road of
gravel, and down this we spun for thirty miles with nothing to interrupt
our progress. When we started that morning we would have laughed
derisively if any one had told us that we could make Aldermere that
night, but, thanks to the unexpected blessing of good roads, we whirled
into that little frontier village at five o’clock in the afternoon,
ascertained from the open-mouthed loungers on the steps of the grocery
store that it was only thirty miles to Moricetown, which was at that time
the “end of steel,” and determined to push on that night. The good roads
soon died a sudden death, however, and it was late that night before
there twinkled in the blackness of the valley below us the bewildering
arrangement of green and scarlet lights which denote a railway yard all
the world over, and heard the familiar friendly shriek of a locomotive.
I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The
recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will
grow into a prosperous country village, with cement sidewalks and street
lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were there it was simply
the “end of steel.” In other words, it was the place where civilisation,
as typified by the railway in operation between there and the coast,
quit work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted of the railway
station, still smelling of yellow paint, two or three log cabins, a group
of hybrid structures, half house, half tent, and another building which,
if one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have been called a
hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was built of scantlings covered with
log slabs, and the partition walls consisted of nothing thicker than
tarred paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for if you
needed more light or air in your room all you had to do was to poke your
finger through the wall. Because we had arrived by automobile and were
therefore fair game, we were given the _suite de luxe_. This consisted
of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed with a dubious-looking
coverlet which had evidently passed through every possible experience
save a washing. There being no place in the room for a wash-stand, the
cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. Indeed, had not the door
opened outward we could never have gotten into the room at all. The
partitions were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the occupant
of the next room changed his mind. Outside our door was what, for want
of a better term, I will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to
the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, around which those
who could not get rooms sat through the night on rude benches, talking,
whispering, cursing, snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was
blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing on the benches were all
the types peculiar to this remote corner of the empire: Montenegrin and
Croatian railway labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks in
their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian ranchers from the back
country; a group of immigrants, fresh from England, their faces whitened
by the confinement of the long journey, who had left their rented farms
in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses to come out to the
colonies to earn a living; even some pallid women with squalling children
in their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come from the old
country to join their husbands and lead pioneer lives in the British
Columbian wild. The men snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded
their crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied toward the
ceiling, the army of insects that we found in possession of the bed
attacked us from all directions, the rain pattered dishearteningly upon
the tin roof, the air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked,
tired humanity. It was a _nuit du diable_, as our Paris friends would say.
It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown to New Hazelton,
the prefix “new” distinguishing it from the “old town,” which lies five
miles from the railway to the north. The road, so we were told, though
slippery after the rains and very hilly, was moderately smooth, and we
were as confident that we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as
we were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid plans of mice and
motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,” which, according to the glossary
of Scottish phrases in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to
the side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when only five miles
from our destination our driver, in his eagerness to taste civilised
cooking again, took a slippery curve at incautious speed and the car
skidded over into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank like
some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the better part of an hour to
get out the jacks and build a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at
last everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to throw on the
power. But there was no response from the engines to his pressure on the
throttle.
“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re out of gasoline!”
Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched and helpless car, a sky
leaden with impending rain—and only five miles from our destination.
There was nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton,
rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, and bring us a tin of
gasoline. The choice unanimously fell on Duncan, who set off down the
middle of the muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, we set
about preparations for our Sunday dinner. While the driver skirmished
about with an axe in search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn,
my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, and I attempted
to wash the knives and forks and tin plates in a convenient mud puddle.
As we had neglected to clean them after our last meal in the open, on the
ground that we would have no further use for them, the task I had set
myself was not an easy one: it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove
grease from tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We achieved
a meal at last, however—tinned sausages, tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread
made palatable by toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in
one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had many a worse meal,
too. Just as the rain began to descend in earnest, a horse and sulky
swung round the bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline.
Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double line of welcoming
townspeople down the muddy main street of New Hazelton. We were at our
journey’s end!
Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious hotel in all the
North country, when we were there this hostelry was still in course of
construction, so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and board.
After some searching we found accommodation in the cabin occupied by the
operator of the Yukon Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run
by an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald. And it was good eating,
too. Our first question after reaching New Hazelton was, of course:
“Is there any chance of our getting through to the Alaskan border?”
“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused answer. But we protested
that that was the answer we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and
Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the chances of getting
through to Hazelton.
“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a bearded frontiersman named
“Dutch” Cline. “There isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this
country close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking about. It’s
only about forty miles in an air-line from here to the Alaskan boundary,
but I doubt if a pack-mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You
would have to actually chop your way through forests that haven’t so
much as a trail. You would have to devise some way of getting your car
across no less than a dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb
to the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain range and then drop
down on the other side; and, finally, you would have to find some means
of crossing the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia from
Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at hand and that you would
probably be snowed in before you had got a quarter of the way, and you
will understand just how utterly impossible it is.”
So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope of hearing the Alaskan
gravel crunch beneath our tires and to content ourselves with the
knowledge that we had driven farther north than a motor-car had ever been
driven on this continent before: farther north than the Aleutian Islands,
farther north than Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of
Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in fact, than the southern
boundary of Alaska itself.
New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern British Columbia, where the
Skeena, the Babine, and the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as
the lower end of the Alaskan panhandle.
A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten shacks huddled on the river
bank at the foot of the Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit,
seven thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is one of
those boom towns with which the pioneer business men of the region are
shaking dice against fate. If they lose, the place will revert to the
primeval wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the coming
of the railway has made it all but certain that they will—they will
have laid the foundation of a future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only
in Constantinople during the stirring days which marked the end of the
Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca with the Foreign Legion, I do not
recall ever having encountered so many strange and picturesque and
interesting figures as I did in this log town on the ragged edge of
things. Every evening after supper the men would come dropping into the
hut by twos and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered in a
circle about the whitewashed stove and the air was so thick with the
fumes of Bull Durham that you could have cut it with a knife. Talk about
the Arabian Nights! Those were the British Columbian Nights, and if the
Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that circle of frontiersmen and listened
to the tales that passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on
the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded Scherezade in disgust.
Here, in the flesh, were the characters of which the novelists love to
write: men whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris chairs of ease;
men who had gone the pace in England long ago; men who had left their
country between two days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs
or regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too many; men who, on
nameless rivers or in strange valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.
The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would generally be opened
by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard pioneer who would have delighted
the heart of Remington. I remember that the first time I met him he
remarked that there would be an early winter, and when I asked him how
he knew he explained quite soberly it was because he was afflicted with
an uncontrollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by birth—hence
his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his youth had fought in turn the Zulus,
the Basutos, and the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on the
frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was a born
raconteur and would hold us spellbound as he yarned of the days when
he sailed under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and poached for
seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was a Dane, evolved the ingenious
idea of having a ship built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing
under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled by a gunboat,
whether American, British, Japanese, or Russian, and arrested for pelagic
sealing, it stirred up such an international rumpus with all the other
nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. He once gave his
vessel a coat of the grey-green paint used on the Czar’s warships,
uniformed his crew as Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe
frowning from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting from
his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing grounds, and when his
unsuspecting rivals cut their cables and fled seaward he helped himself
to the skins. Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained with
blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he would have wished, but
in a little harbour at the north end of Vancouver Island while trying to
save a little child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he told
the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; for, though these
men of the North have the hearts of vikings, they likewise often have the
tenderness of a woman.
Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed man-o’-war’s man who had
served under Dewey at the taking of the Philippines and later on had
been a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging to reel off
tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on every seaboard of the world,
but when the deed for which he had been recommended for the Carnegie
medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as his hair. So, as
he could never be induced to tell the story, some one, to his intense
embarrassment, would insist on telling it for him. While prospecting
in that remote and barren region which borders on the Great Slave Lake
his only companion had gone suddenly insane. MacDonald bound the
raging madman hand and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of
whip-sawed planks, and brought him down a thousand miles of unexplored
and supposedly unnavigable rivers, sometimes dragging his flimsy craft
across mile-long portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by
foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height, sometimes running
cataracts and rapids where his life hung on the twist of a paddle, living
on wild berries and such game as he could kill along the way, but always
caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as though he were a child. He
reached New Hazelton and its hospital with his charge at last, after one
of the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man—and the next day
his comrade died. Yet when I exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was
genuinely abashed. “Hell,” he blurted, “what else was there for me to do?
You wouldn’t have had me go off and leave him up there to die, would you?
You’d do the same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure you
would.”
When his instrument would cease its chatter for a time, the telegraph
operator would chip in with stories of the men who sit in those lonely
cabins scattered along two thousand miles of copper wire and relay the
news of the world to the miners of the Yukon. In hair-raising detail he
told of that terrible winter when the pack-train with its supplies was
lost and the snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive for many
months upon such scanty game as they could find in the frozen forests.
He told of the insufferable loneliness that drives men raving mad, of
the awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told, with the thrill
in the voice that comes only from actual experience, of how men run from
their own shadows and become frightened at the sound of their own voices;
of how each succeeding day is the intolerable same, only a little worse,
the messages that come faintly over the line being the sole relief from
the awful feeling that you are the only person left on all the earth.
Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline as he is invariably called
because of his Catalonian origin, would join our conversazione. His
ninety odd years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a man,
six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a chest like a barrel, his
mop of snowy hair in striking contrast to a skin which has been tanned
by sun and wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meerschaum.
Cataline is the most noted packer in the whole North country, being, in
fact, the owner of the last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande.
So much of his life has been spent in the wild, with Indian packers
and French-Canadian trappers for his only companions, that his speech
has become a strange mélange of English, French, half a dozen Indian
dialects, and some remnants of his native Spanish, the whole thickly
spiced with oaths. When, upon his periodic visits to the settlements, he
is compelled to sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets
and, wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort on the
floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he can shoot through the
coverings in case a marauder should appear. It is a custom among those
who know him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of enjoying the
unique performance that ensues. His invariable brand of “hooch” is Hudson
Bay rum, strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler. “Salue,
señores!” says the old Spaniard, and drains half his glass at a single
gulp. But he does not drink the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly
over his mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a strange
performance.
They tell with relish in the northern camps the story of how Old Man
Cataline, summoned to appear before the court sitting at Quesnel to
defend the title to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into
the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and, shoving aside
the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the startled judge. “Je worka
pour that land, señor!” he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole
frame trembling with passion. “Je payez pour heem, mister! He belonga
to moi! Je killa any one who try tak heem away! Oui, by God, je killa
you, m’sieu!” and, drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its
blade deep into the top of the judge’s table. Leaving this grim memento
quivering in the wood, Cataline turned upon his heel and strode away. He
was not molested.
When the world was electrified by the news that gold had been discovered
on the Yukon, the authorities at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of
the lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body of troops to
the scene for the preservation of law and order. To Old Man Cataline
was intrusted the task of transporting the several hundred soldiers and
their supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train. The officer
in command was a pompous person, fresh from the Eastern provinces and
much impressed with his own importance, who insisted that the routine
of barrack life should be rigidly observed upon the long and tedious
march through the wilderness, the men rising and eating and going to bed
by bugle-call. The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt
of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: “Pour cinquante, soixante
year I live in the grand forêt. Je connais when it ees time to get
up. Je connais when I am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now
it ees blowa de bug’ to get up; blowa de bug’ to eat; blowa de damned
bug’ to sleep. Nom d’un nom d’un nom du chien! What t’ell for?” Within
twenty-four hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not on
speaking terms. But the expedition continued to press steadily forward,
the commander riding at the head of the mile-long string of soldiers on
mule back, and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heavily laden
pack-mule became mired in a marsh and, despite the orders of the officer
and the efforts of the soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were
standing in deep perplexity about the helpless animal Cataline came
riding up from the rear. Pulling up his mule, he sat quietly in his
saddle without volunteering any advice. At last the officer, at his wit’s
end, pocketed his pride.
“How would you suggest that we get this mule out, Mr. Cataline?” he asked
politely.
“Oh,” remarked the old frontiersman drily, “blowa de bug’.”
Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a genial Irish section boss
on the Grand Trunk Pacific, whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a
grateful relief to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had
a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one of his chief
delights was to lean back in his chair and write patriotic “G. R.’s” and
“U. S. A.’s” in squirts of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he
ordered out his hand-car in a hurry.
“And where moight yez be goin’, Misther Flaherty?” solicitously inquired
his assistant.
“To hell wid yer questions,” was the answer. “Did Napoleon always be
tellin’ his min where he was goin’?”
* * * * *