THE FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE
It would have been harder to leave the Rockies if I had not been
bound for the Selkirks, which have this advantage over the Rockies,
that they are perhaps less known. That part I was bound for is,
indeed, not known at all to tourists, and very little known to
anybody. The known part of the range lies round Glacier House, and
includes Mount Abbott, the Great Illecillewaet Glacier, Mount Sir
Donald, etc., which high places the railway has now made accessible
for tourists who can climb. The part I was to see lies to the
south-east, at the head of the Columbia Valley, and is at present a
hundred miles from the nearest railway station.
First of all I took train to Golden. If you take a map of Canada and
follow the trans-continental line westward, you will see that it
emerges from the Rockies at Golden. Golden is a little mining town
lying in the Columbia {216} Valley, with the Rockies on one side of
it and the Selkirks on the other. It was chiefly to see this
valley--one of the most fertile in British Columbia, but at present
unopened--that I got out at Golden with a friend. An excursion into
the Selkirks was to depend upon the time at our disposal. We had
been told that near Lake Windermere, at a place called Wilmer, there
was a great irrigation scheme in progress, which would shortly result
in 60,000 acres of dry belt-land being ready for fruit-farming.
This, when the rail from Kamloops to Golden was completed, would make
the Columbia Valley as famous for its fruit as the Okanagan. We both
wanted to see it. My friend wanted to buy land. The problem was how
to get up the valley.
[Illustration: THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.]
There were, we found, five different ways of doing the eighty miles
from Golden to Wilmer.
1. The first was to wait for that day of the week on which the
stage-coach ran. It took two days to do the distance, and was very
convenient if we did not mind waiting in Golden a few days first.
But we were in a hurry.
2. This way was by river-boat--a delightful trip. But there were
one or two objections to it. The water of the Columbia was very
{217} low at this time of the year, the sand-banks were numerous, and
the boat had gone up some days before and nobody knew when it would
get down again. We gave up the boat.
3. The third way, which we decided should be ours, was to go up in
the only motor which Golden possessed. This would cost fifty
dollars, but the journey there would only take about seven hours.
When we had decided upon this, we went to the proprietor of the motor
and found that the car was already out for an indefinite number of
days.
4. This way was to walk the eighty miles--a plan I favoured and
tried on the way back, as I shall describe. But my friend could not
fancy it. Statelier than myself, he had to carry five more stones
with him.
5. This was the way we took. We hired a two-horse rig which
undertook to do the journey in the same time as the stage--but for
twenty dollars apiece instead of five.
We started from Golden on a Monday morning in the two-horse rig,
driven by a young American. He had been in the United States navy,
and also in Alberta, farming, but he had had no luck with his farm,
having started with too small a capital to tide over {218} the two
bad seasons which he had met there. He told us that he found Canada
very similar to the States--neither much better nor worse; and he
took his own luck there philosophically. He seemed to me altogether
a capable man, whose fortune might have been all the other way.
Anyway he drove excellently and was not a grumbler, like the American
ex-sailor I met at Regina.
Nothing could have been more beautiful than the late September
morning when we started out of Golden. A spreading village of pretty
poplar-lined avenues and pleasant bungalows, Golden explained its own
name as we went. The wooded hills on either side were all splashed
with autumn yellows, and the sun, striking down through a grove of
silver poplars which shuts off the south end of the village, made it
all seem shot with gold. It is a mining village, but compared with
the usual mining village of Great Britain it seemed as Eden to the
Inferno.
Coming out of it we struck what is the dominant scenery of the
valley--the blue Columbia winding in and out, sometimes wooded to its
brim, sometimes sweeping over into open marshland, but always with
the hills lightly wooded, facing one another across it, and behind
{219} them the white peaks hung with snow. At every mile or two a
silvery creek, sometimes a mere ribbon of water, sometimes almost a
river, rushed down to join the Columbia below; by the side of these
creeks mostly would be the cleared land which small ranchers had
settled, and where they had gone on living presumably on what they
could grow off their own places, since the chances of reaching a
market became obviously more difficult at every mile. Every wind of
the road--and it mostly follows the river--gave views that were
always changing and beautiful.
It was on the second day of our driving that the appearance of the
valley grew different. The creeks became rarer; the soil drier.
Instead of silver poplars rising among a tangled underbush, there
were now jack-pines growing out of a burnt-up sward. We might have
been going through some English park in the south country, and some
one had evidently thought this before, for a man we met driving told
us that this part of the valley was known as the Park. Passing
through it we came at last to the real dry belt. Those who know the
Okanagan would no doubt find it less strange, but it amazed me to
find a country among these mountains almost Egyptian in its colouring
and {220} texture. Drier and drier became the soil; the trees became
sparser and sparser; there was now no underwood at all. The straight
firs rose clear out of sandy hills and hollows. Sandy they might
appear, but this was not sand in the vulgar sense. It was glacial
silt--bottomless drifts of powdered clay that has slipped down from
the mountains and piled and sloped itself into 'benches' above the
river.
We had to cross the river to get to Wilmer, which is the headquarters
of the irrigation. Headquarters sounds imposing; and in a few years,
doubtless, Wilmer will be imposing, but at present it consists of a
few shacks, two small stores, a dirty little hotel (in the bar of
which a man was shot the day after we left), and one presiding genius
who has made Wilmer what it is and also what it will be shortly.
Need I say that it was a Scot who years ago saw the far-reaching
value of this land, conceived the idea of irrigating it, and
personally superintended the carrying out of his conception? I don't
know that I need. I came to the conclusion before I left Canada that
Scots, more than any other race, were at the bottom, and generally
also at the top, of most of the enterprises that were being carried
out there. No {221} one talks of the Scotticisation of Canada.
Perhaps Scots do not proselytise. Perhaps they do not find any other
people worthy of being taken into their community. They prefer to
remain an international oligarchy, managing others but not admitting
them to equal rights. They effect their intentions by usually
working alone and always sticking together. A paradoxical people.
It is amazing to think that at the beginning of the eighteenth
century the Scottish Highlander was regarded by the average
Englishman in much the same light as we now regard the Hottentot or
the Andaman Islander, a hopelessly idle and uncouthly impossible
person, destined to remain a barbarian for ever. _Dis aliter visum_.
The Highlander now directs the Empire, distinguishing himself in that
respect even more than his Lowland brother. Yet only two hundred
years have passed since he was outside the pale.
My friend knew Mr. Randolph Bruce, the Highlander who presides over
the Columbia Valley Irrigation Works, and will, it seems to me, rank
as one of the many makers of Canada, and Mr. Bruce most hospitably
put us up while we were in Wilmer, and showed us what he has done and
what he means to do. What he means to do is to create a town on the
shores {222} of Lake Windermere, and he drove us down there to show
us the lake, which is not the least like its English original, but
very beautiful nevertheless, lying as it does clear and still among
the sand-hills, a belt of autumn-tinted trees around it, and, above,
the hills and the snows. It looked like some African lake stretched
at the feet of the Mountains of the Moon. It looked as if it might
lie thus for centuries, silent and untouched by the hands of men.
But it was a Canadian lake, and though it might seem to be at the
very back of the world, it was shortly to have a town built on its
shores. Mr. Bruce showed us the town site, the hotel site, the site
of the bowling-green and the polo ground. I rather think he showed
us the race-course that was going to be. I saw it all the more
clearly because Mr. Bruce also showed us the work already actually
accomplished--the canals and ditches that brought the upper mountain
lakes down on to the benches of friable clay that were to grow the
apples we shall eat in England a few years hence. It is all
extraordinarily interesting, seeing this town of the future and these
fruit-lands of the future--of which my friend bought twenty acres,
which were to be named after him. The Columbia River ran just below
the {223} bench-land he bought, and I wished I had some capital handy
that I might buy the adjoining plot, that I might also grow fruit
there and have a portion of the fair Dominion named after me. If the
Windermere race-course had already been in existence, and a race
being run, I should have backed one of the horses against all my
principles, and laid out the proceeds in a fruit-farm.
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