The Prairie proper ends at Calgary, among the cattle-ranches, mills,
breweries, and three million acre irrigation works. The river that
floats timber to the town from the mountains does not slide nor rustle
like Prairie rivers, but brawls across bars of blue pebbles, and a
greenish tinge in its water hints of the snows.
What I saw of Calgary was crowded into one lively half-hour (motors were
invented to run about new cities). What I heard I picked up, oddly
enough, weeks later, from a young Dane in the North Sea. He was
qualmish, but his Saga of triumph upheld him.
'Three years ago I come to Canada by steerage--third class. _And_ I have
the language to learn. Look at me! I have now my own dairy business, in
Calgary, and--look at me!--my own half section, that is, three hundred
and twenty acres. All my land which is mine! And now I come home, first
class, for Christmas here in Denmark, and I shall take out back with me,
some friends of mine which are farmers, to farm on those irrigated lands
near by Calgary. Oh, I tell you there is nothing wrong with Canada for a
man which works.'
'And will your friends go?' I inquired.
'You bet they will. It is all arranged already. I bet they get ready to
go now already; and in three years they will come back for Christmas
here in Denmark, first class like me.'
'Then you think Calgary is going ahead?'
'You bet! We are only at the beginning of things. Look at me! Chickens?
I raise chickens also in Calgary,' etc., etc.
After all this pageant of unrelieved material prosperity, it was a rest
to get to the stillness of the big foothills, though they, too, had been
in-spanned for the work of civilisation. The timber off their sides was
ducking and pitch-poling down their swift streams, to be sawn into
house-stuff for all the world. The woodwork of a purely English villa
may come from as many Imperial sources as its owner's income.
The train crept, whistling to keep its heart up, through the winding
gateways of the hills, till it presented itself, very humbly, before the
true mountains, the not so Little Brothers to the Himalayas. Mountains
of the pine-cloaked, snow-capped breed are unchristian things.
Men mine into the flanks of some of them, and trust to modern science to
pull them through. Not long ago, a mountain kneeled on a little mining
village as an angry elephant kneels; but it did not get up again, and
the half of that camp was no more seen on earth. The other half still
stands--uninhabited. The 'heathen in his blindness' would have made
arrangements with the Genius of the Place before he ever drove a pick
there. 'As a learned scholar of a little-known university once observed
to an engineer officer on the Himalaya-Tibet Road--'You white men gain
nothing by not noticing what you cannot see. You fall off the road, or
the road falls on you, and you die, and you think it all an accident.
How much wiser it was when we were allowed to sacrifice a man
officially, sir, before making bridges or other public works. Then the
local gods were officially recognised, sir, and did not give any more
trouble, and the local workmen, sir, were much pleased with these
precautions.'
There are many local gods on the road through the Rockies: old bald
mountains that have parted with every shred of verdure and stand wrapped
in sheets of wrinkled silver rock, over which the sight travels slowly
as in delirium; mad, horned mountains, wreathed with dancing mists;
low-browed and bent-shouldered faquirs of the wayside, sitting in
meditation beneath a burden of glacier-ice that thickens every year; and
mountains of fair aspect on one side, but on the other seamed with
hollow sunless clefts, where last year's snow is blackened with this
year's dirt and smoke of forest-fires. The drip from it seeps away
through slopes of unstable gravel and dirt, till, at the appointed
season, the whole half-mile of undermined talus slips and roars into the
horrified valley.
The railway winds in and out among them with little inexplicable
deviations and side-twists, much as a buck walks through a forest-glade,
sidling and crossing uneasily in what appears to be a plain way. Only
when the track has rounded another shoulder or two, a backward and
upward glance at some menacing slope shows why the train did not take
the easier-looking road on the other side of the gorge.
From time to time the mountains lean apart, and nurse between them some
golden valley of slow streams, fat pastures, and park-like uplands, with
a little town, and cow bells tinkling among berry bushes; and children
who have never seen the sun rise or set, shouting at the trains; and
real gardens round the houses.
At Calgary it was a frost, and the dahlias were dead. A day later
nasturtiums bloomed untouched beside the station platforms, and the air
was heavy and liquid with the breath of the Pacific. One felt the spirit
of the land change with the changing outline of the hills till, on the
lower levels by the Fraser, it seemed that even the Sussex Downs must be
nearer at heart to the Prairie than British Columbia. The Prairie people
notice the difference, and the Hill people, unwisely, I think, insist on
it. Perhaps the magic may lie in the scent of strange evergreens and
mosses not known outside the ranges: or it may strike from wall to wall
of timeless rifts and gorges, but it seemed to me to draw out of the
great sea that washes further Asia--the Asia of allied mountains, mines,
and forests.
We rested one day high up in the Rockies, to visit a lake carved out of
pure jade, whose property is to colour every reflection on its bosom to
its own tint. A belt of brown dead timber on a gravel scar, showed,
upside down, like sombre cypresses rising from green turf and the
reflected snows were pale green. In summer many tourists go there, but
we saw nothing except the wonderworking lake lying mute in its circle of
forest, where red and orange lichens grew among grey and blue moss, and
we heard nothing except the noise of its outfall hurrying through a jam
of bone-white logs. The thing might have belonged to Tibet or some
unexplored valley behind Kin-chinjunga. It had no concern with the West.
As we drove along the narrow hill-road a piebald pack-pony with a
china-blue eye came round a bend, followed by two women, black-haired,
bare-headed, wearing beadwork squaw-jackets, and riding straddle. A
string of pack-ponies trotted through the pines behind them.
'Indians on the move?' said I. 'How characteristic!'
As the women jolted by, one of them very slightly turned her eyes, and
they were, past any doubt, the comprehending equal eyes of the civilised
white woman which moved in that berry-brown face.
'Yes,' said our driver, when the cavalcade had navigated the next
curve,' that'll be Mrs. So-and-So and Miss So-and-So. They mostly camp
hereabout for three months every year. I reckon they're coming in to the
railroad before the snow falls.'
'And whereabout do they go?' I asked.
'Oh, all about anywheres. If you mean where they come from just
now--that's the trail yonder.'
He pointed to a hair-crack across the face of a mountain, and I took
his word for it that it was a safe pony-trail. The same evening, at an
hotel of all the luxuries, a slight woman in a very pretty evening frock
was turning over photographs, and the eyes beneath the strictly-arranged
hair were the eyes of the woman in the beadwork jacket who had quirted
the piebald pack-pony past our buggy.
Praised be Allah for the diversity of His creatures! But do you know any
other country where two women could go out for a three months' trek and
shoot in perfect comfort and safety?
These mountains are only ten days from London, and people more and more
use them for pleasure-grounds. Other and most unthought-of persons buy
little fruit-farms in British Columbia as an excuse for a yearly visit
to the beautiful land, and they tempt yet more people from England. This
is apart from the regular tide of emigration, and serves to make the
land known. If you asked a State-owned railway to gamble on the chance
of drawing tourists, the Commissioner of Railways would prove to you
that the experiment could never succeed, and that it was wrong to risk
the taxpayers' money in erecting first-class hotels. Yet South Africa
could, even now, be made a tourists' place--if only the railroads and
steamship lines had faith.
On thinking things over I suspect I was not intended to appreciate the
merits of British Columbia too highly. Maybe I misjudged; maybe she was
purposely misrepresented; but I seemed to hear more about 'problems'
and 'crises' and 'situations' in her borders than anywhere else. So far
as eye or ear could gather, the one urgent problem was to find enough
men and women to do the work in hand.
Lumber, coal, minerals, fisheries, fit soil for fruit, dairy, and
poultry farms are all there in a superb climate. The natural beauty of
earth and sky match these lavish gifts; to which are added thousands of
miles of safe and sheltered waterways for coastal trade; deep harbours
that need no dredge; the ground-works of immense and ice-free ports--all
the title-deeds to half the trade of Asia. For the people's pleasure and
good disport salmon, trout, quail, and pheasant play in front of and
through the suburbs of her capitals. A little axe-work and
road-metalling gives a city one of the loveliest water-girt parks that
we have outside the tropics. Another town is presented with a hundred
islands, knolls, wooded coves, stretches of beach, and dingles, laid
down as expressly for camp-life, picnics, and boating parties, beneath
skies never too hot and rarely too cold. If they care to lift up their
eyes from their almost subtropical gardens they can behold snowy peaks
across blue bays, which must be good for the soul. Though they face a
sea out of which any portent may arise, they are not forced to protect
or even to police its waters. They are as ignorant of drouth, murrain,
pestilence locusts, and blight, as they are of the true meaning of want
and fear.
Such a land is good for an energetic man. It is also not so bad for the
loafer. I was, as I have told you, instructed on its, drawbacks. I was
to understand that there was no certainty in any employment; and that a
man who earned immense wages for six months of the year would have to be
kept by the community if he fell out of work for the other six. I was
not to be deceived by golden pictures set before me by interested
parties (that is to say, by almost every one I met), and I was to give
due weight to the difficulties and discouragements that beset the
intending immigrant. Were I an intending immigrant I would risk a good
deal of discomfort to get on to the land in British Columbia; and were I
rich, with no attachments outside England, I would swiftly buy me a farm
or a house in that country for the mere joy of it.
I forgot those doleful and unhumorous conspirators among people who
fervently believed in the place; but afterwards the memory left a bad
taste in my mouth. Cities, like women, cannot be too careful what sort
of men they allow to talk about them.
Time had changed Vancouver literally out of all knowledge. From the
station to the suburbs, and back to the wharves, every step was strange,
and where I remembered open spaces and still untouched timber, the
tramcars were fleeting people out to a lacrosse game. Vancouver is an
aged city, for only a few days previous to my arrival the Vancouver
Baby--_i.e._ the first child born in Vancouver--had been married.
A steamer--once familiar in Table Bay--had landed a few hundred Sikhs
and Punjabi Jats--to each man his bundle--and the little groups walked
uneasy alone, keeping, for many of them had been soldiers, to the
military step. Yes, they said they had come to this country to get work.
News had reached their villages that work at great wages was to be had
in this country. Their brethren who had gone before had sent them the
news. Yes, and sometimes the money for the passage out. The money would
be paid back from the so-great wages to come. With interest? Assuredly
with interest.. Did men lend money for nothing in _any_ country? They
were waiting for their brethren to come and show them where to eat, and
later, how to work. Meanwhile this was a new country. How could they say
anything about it? No, it was not like Gurgaon or Shahpur or Jullundur.
The Sickness (plague) had come to all these places. It had come into the
Punjab by every road, and many--many--many had died. The crops, too, had
failed in some districts. Hearing the news about these so-great wages
they had taken ship for the belly's sake--for the money's sake--for the
children's sake.
'Would they go back again?'
They grinned as they nudged each other. The Sahib had not quite
understood. They had come over for the sake of the money--the rupees,
no, the dollars. The Punjab was their home where their villages lay,
where their people were waiting. Without doubt--without doubt--they
would go back. Then came the brethren already working in the
mills--cosmopolitans dressed in ready-made clothes, and smoking
cigarettes.
'This way, O you people,' they cried. The bundles were reshouldered and
the turbaned knots melted away. The last words I caught were true Sikh
talk: 'But what about the money, O my brother?'
Some Punjabis have found out that money can be too dearly bought.
There was a Sikh in a sawmill, had been driver in a mountain battery at
home. Himself he was from Amritsar. (Oh, pleasant as cold water in a
thirsty land is the sound of a familiar name in a fair country!)
'But you had your pension. Why did you come here?'
'Heaven-born, because my sense was little. And there was also the
Sickness at Amritsar.'
(The historian a hundred years hence will be able to write a book on
economic changes brought about by pestilence. There is a very
interesting study somewhere of the social and commercial effects of the
Black Death in England.)
On a wharf, waiting for a steamer, some thirty Sikhs, many of them
wearing their old uniforms (which should not be allowed) were talking at
the tops of their voices, so that the shed rang like an Indian railway
station. A suggestion that if they spoke lower life would be easier was
instantly adopted. Then a senior officer with a British India medal
asked hopefully: 'Has the Sahib any orders where we are to go?'
Alas he had none--nothing but goodwill and greetings for the sons of
the Khalsa, and they tramped off in fours.
It is said that when the little riot broke out in Vancouver these
'heathen' were invited by other Asiatics to join in defending themselves
against the white man. They refused on the ground that they were
subjects of the King. I wonder what tales they sent back to their
villages, and where, and how fully, every detail of the affair was
talked over. White men forget that no part of the Empire can live or die
to itself.
Here is a rather comic illustration of this on the material side. The
wonderful waters between Vancouver and Victoria are full of whales,
leaping and rejoicing in the strong blue all about the steamer. There
is, therefore, a whalery on an island near by, and I had the luck to
travel with one of the shareholders.
'Whales are beautiful beasts,' he said affectionately. 'We've a contract
with a Scotch firm for every barrel of oil we can deliver for years
ahead. It's reckoned the best for harness-dressing.'
He went on to tell me how a swift ship goes hunting whales with a
bomb-gun and explodes shells into their insides so that they perish at
once.
'All the old harpoon and boat business would take till the cows come
home. We kill 'em right off.'
'And how d'you strip 'em?'
It seemed that the expeditious ship carried also a large air-pump, and
pumped up the carcass to float roundly till she could attend to it. At
the end of her day's kill she would return, towing sometimes as many as
four inflated whales to the whalery, which is a factory full of modern
appliances. The whales are hauled up inclined planes like logs to a
sawmill, and as much of them as will not make oil for the Scotch
leather-dresser, or cannot be dried for the Japanese market, is
converted into potent manure.
'No manure can touch ours,' said the shareholder. 'It's so rich in bone,
d'you see. The only thing that has beat us up to date is their hides;
but we've fixed up a patent process now for turning 'em into floorcloth.
Yes, they're beautiful beasts. That fellow,' he pointed to a black hump
in a wreath of spray, 'would cut up a miracle.'
'If you go on like this you won't have any whales left,' I said.
'That is so. But the concern pays thirty per cent, and--a few years
back, no one believed in it.'