The Farthest West
WERE all those good lives wasted, then, and the scores of good ships
too, lost in three centuries of wild-goose chase?
But for that wild-goose chase, carried on by brave British sailors from
the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, our Dominion of Canada, stretching
from sea to sea, would never have come into existence. If we had not
taken a vigorous part in the exploration of the Pacific coast, the
Russians coming down from the north and Spaniards coming up from the
south would between them have seized and held it all, till both their
shares were swallowed up by our neighbors of the United States.
It has had a very curious history, this west coast of ours. To begin
with, no one dreamed that there was any “west coast of America” at all,
for the first explorers all thought America was simply an extension of
Asia. Even when they got into the Pacific and sailed up the western
shore of Mexico, they expected any day to see land barring their way and
bending round to the left, so that, by following the coast, they would
presently find themselves among the people of China. They were
astonished at the land persistently keeping on their right, however far
north they sailed.
In the days of Queen Elizabeth, only a year after Frobisher’s attempt to
discover a channel through America in the North-west, his
fellow-countryman Sir Francis Drake sailed round Cape Horn in the hope
of finding the other end of that channel, which imaginative geographers
had already drawn on the maps and called the “Straits of Anian.”
How far north Sir Francis got, nobody knows. Up to Oregon, for certain.
The weather was bad, with “thick stinking fogs” and “nipping cold” in
midsummer; so he turned back, resolved to encircle the globe by going
home round Africa and India instead of around America. First, however,
he landed in California, finding a “convenient harbour” which was
probably San Francisco Bay. The natives were shivering under their furs,
in July, but they gave the white men a warm welcome. In fact, the “King”
or chief came “with a retinue of about 12,000 men,” “humbly desiring of
Drake that he would accept of the Realm,”—putting a feather crown on
his head, and three big chains of bone around his neck.
The great commander accepted the gift, took formal possession of the
country in the English Queen’s name, and called it New Albion, as Albion
was the old name of the Mother-land.
Nearly two hundred years passed before the first settlement on the
Californian coast was made by Spanish missionaries from Mexico. That was
in 1770. Farther north, not a white man was to be found when Captain
Cook arrived on his famous voyage in 1778. James Cook, the runaway son
of an English laborer, had already earned the gratitude of his
fellow-citizens. Exploring vast breadths of southern sea, he had added
Australia to our Empire. The northern sea next attracted him; at that
time the prize offered by the British Government for the finding of a
North-west Passage was $100,000.
Sailing up the Pacific as far as Behring Straits, he did not find what
he sought; but, by peering into every river mouth and inlet, he added
much to men’s knowledge of the present British Columbia.
Ten years later another inquisitive Englishman visited these coasts; in
fact, Captain Meares went so far as to build a house on Nootka Sound.
The Spaniards, who claimed the whole Pacific side of the continent as
the French had claimed the centre, warned off the “trespassers,” seized
several British ships, and in 1790 planted a little Spanish settlement
on the disputed shore. The governments of the two countries then came to
a makeshift agreement that neither should interfere with the settlements
of the other till the ownership of the soil could be decided. The naval
representatives of Spain and England met on the spot, dined in each
other’s cabins, went on exploring expeditions together, and joined their
names in the title of “Vancouver-Cuadra” Island. Beyond this the rival
powers could not get. The Spanish settlement, however, was soon
abandoned.
In 1819 Spain gave up to the United States all her claims to the Pacific
coast north of Mexico; but the British claims north of California
remained, and for twenty-seven years the two English-speaking
governments, at Westminster and Washington, exercised joint control over
what was known as the “Oregon Territory.”
In the early forties, however, so many Americans had arrived and settled
in the neutral territory that it could be left neutral no longer. The
United States government not only withdrew from the joint arrangement,
but claimed the whole territory between California and Alaska for
itself. This would have shut off the British colonies from all access to
the Pacific Ocean, as absolutely as the French claims a century before
would have shut off the Americans.
To guard against emergencies, and if possible to find a peaceful way out
of the difficulty, a ship of the British Navy, the _American_, in 1845
visited Vancouver Island, and Captain Gordon is reported to have
exclaimed, “I would not give one of the bleakest knolls of all the bleak
hills of Scotland for twenty islands arrayed like this in barbaric
glories.” The captain’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, was Foreign Minister,
but happily he did not throw away the future of British America because
its glories at that time were “barbaric.”
The trouble was ended in 1846 by a compromise. All the western
territories north of the 49th degree of latitude (except, of course,
Alaska) were to belong to Britain, and all south of that degree to the
United States. It was the most charmingly simple way of creating a
frontier that could be imagined: rule a straight line across the map
from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific shore, a line 1,200 miles long
without a break, and the thing is done.
Between that 1,200-mile boundary and the Arctic Ocean the British power
was represented by a great trading corporation. The Hudson’s Bay
Company, as you will remember, had had its commercial monopoly extended
to the Pacific shore as early as 1821, and it was no more anxious for
the spread of settlement among the mountains and on the western islands
than it had been on the prairie and in the woodland of the interior. The
rising tide of white population would drive away the game and demoralize
the native hunters.
A little agriculture was indulged in, so that the Company’s forts should
not go without fresh vegetables, and early in the nineteenth century a
certain number of farmers were encouraged to take up land because the
Company had contracted to feed the Russian fur traders up in Alaska. On
Puget Sound, when the artist Kane reached the coast in 1847, a ranching
company had about 6,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle. The wool found its way
to England by the Company’s ships—the cattle were killed and salted for
the Sandwich Islands and the Russian territory.
“A Babel of Languages” met the artist’s ears when he reached Fort
Vancouver, as the inhabitants were a mixture of English, French,
Iroquois from Eastern Canada, Crees from the Centre, and Chinooks of the
west coast, with Sandwich Islanders from Hawaii. “The buildings,” he
says, “are enclosed by strong pickets about sixteen feet high, with
bastions for cannon at the corners.” The Company’s 200 voyageurs, with
their Indian wives, lived in a little village of log huts near the bank
of the river.
“Ninety miles without stopping,” six Indians paddling his canoe, is
Kane’s record of his crossing from Nasqually on the mainland to the
four-year-old Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. Beside the harbor of
the future capital stood an Indian village boasting 500 warriors, armed
chiefly with bows and arrows. Some of their lodges were sixty or seventy
feet long, and well built; the boards were split from the logs with bone
wedges, but were very smooth and regular.
Dogs were bred for their wool,—a peculiar breed with “long hair of a
brownish black and clear white.” A winter suit consisted of a blanket
made of dog’s hair, or dog’s hair and goose-down mixed, or frayed cedar
bark, or wildgoose skin. The sea otter was then the most valuable fur
animal on the coast—twelve blankets had to be paid for one skin. It has
now been hunted out of existence.
Like most barbarians, and many white folk who call themselves civilized,
the Indians were great gamblers. They often spent two or three days and
nights on end playing such simple games as “lehallum.” Ten small round
pieces of wood, one being black, were shuffled rapidly between two
bundles of frayed bark, by one player, and his opponent had to guess
which bundle contained the black piece when the shuffling stopped. A
player would often keep this up till he had lost everything, even his
wife; and some of them had much wealth in blankets, furs and slaves.
[Illustration]
_Coast Indian Mask_
Any Indian caught by another tribe, even if there was no war between
them, could be kept as a slave; and slaves had no rights, not even a
right to live. Kane tells of a chief who “erected a colossal idol of
wood and sacrificed five slaves to it, boastfully asking who else could
afford to kill so many slaves.” Before going off to fish, or to fight,
or even to gather camas, the tribe had a “Medicine Mask Dance.” Half a
dozen men put on wooden masks “highly painted and ornamented, with the
eyes and mouth ingeniously made to open and shut. In their hands they
hold carved rattles, which are shaken in time to a monotonous song or
humming noise (there are no words to it) sung by the whole company as
they slowly dance round and round in a circle.”
The camas, by the way, was their favorite vegetable; it is a bulbous
root, looking like an onion, but “more like a potato when cooked, and
very good eating.” Fish, of course, was the principal food all along the
coast. In fact, salmon pemmican was carried far inland. The coast canoe,
very large but very light, was hollowed out of a cedar tree by fire and
smoothed off with stone axes.
One of the chief amusements Paul Kane found among the Chinooks was
picking and eating insects from each other’s heads. “On my asking an
Indian why he ate them, he replied that they bit him, and he gratified
his revenge by biting them in return.”
The Flat-head monstrosity which Kane found and depicted was cultivated
by whole tribes on the mainland and around Victoria on the island. The
infant, strapped to its papoose board for the mother to carry on her
back, had its head pressed by a leather band passing tightly over the
forehead and through holes in the board. This pressure was kept up
steadily till the child was eight or twelve months old; that was enough
to give its head the shape of a wedge for the rest of its life. Kane
says that he never heard an infant cry under this treatment until the
fastenings were removed, when it would cry until they were replaced.
Farther north on the island the head was pressed by bandaging into the
shape of a cone.
About this time a proposal was made in England to organize a colony on
the Pacific coast. The Hudson’s Bay Company asked to be entrusted with
the task. Mr. Gladstone and other British statesmen argued that the
Company had always opposed settlement and was quite unfit for such an
enterprise: as well ask the wolf to guard the sheepfold.
The protest was in vain, and in 1849 Vancouver Island was organized as a
colony under the Company’s rule. The experiment was an utter failure.
The Company charged $5 an acre for land, while any settler could get 320
acres for nothing on the American side of the frontier. After five years
the white and part-white population of Vancouver Island numbered 450 in
all, and only 500 acres were under cultivation.
A poor little parliament of seven members was elected in 1856, and
assembled at the miniature capital called Victoria; but they had little
power and less revenue. The Company was still the master, and its chief
agent held at the same time the position of royal governor. The settlers
petitioned for direct imperial rule, and in 1858 an event occurred which
compelled the Government in England to grant their request.
This event was the outbreak of the gold fever. Several years before,
Indians canoeing down from Queen Charlotte’s Islands to trade at
Victoria had brought with them specimens of gold, and now a rumor spread
that quantities of the precious metal had been found along the river
bottoms of the mainland. The men who had turned California into a mining
camp pulled up stakes and flocked northward to collect what they
imagined would be easier and richer spoil in British territory.
Victoria, the little provincial capital on Vancouver Island, suddenly
awoke to the noise and bustle of a commercial city. In a single summer
25,000 men landed there, while 8,000 more found their way to the
frontier by land after a three weeks’ ride on horseback. Those who had
come by water deposited their capital—sacks of raw gold—in the office
of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Victoria, and set themselves to build
rafts, boats, and canoes in which to reach the mainland and ascend the
golden Fraser River. Many of them were drowned on the way; and of the
33,000 who reached the river, thirty thousand turned back in disgust to
their deserted California.
The three thousand who remained had to be kept in order and provided for
in some way. Governor Douglas, of Vancouver Island, was ready to
undertake this awkward task, but on the mainland he had no authority
except that of a Hudson’s Bay factor. On November 17, 1858, proclamation
was made that company rule over the mountains and islands of the West
was ended forever—surviving the East India Company’s rule over the
plains of Hindustan by just eleven weeks. The Hudson’s Bay Company might
continue to exist, but its trading monopoly on the mainland and its
political supremacy on Vancouver Island were extinguished together.
Douglas, giving up the attempt to serve two masters, resigned his
connection with the Company. He received in exchange the Queen’s
commission as Governor, not only of the island, but of the new colony,
“British Columbia,” stretching four hundred miles eastward from the
Pacific Ocean to where the Rocky Mountains look down upon the inland
plains.
[Illustration]
_On the Cariboo Trail, Thompson River_
The immigrant might well be appalled by his first experience of British
Columbian gold-streams, for these do not meander along gentle valleys,
but pour through gloomy gorges, walled for hundreds of miles by
precipitous mountain sides. At the season when the human tide poured in,
the water was at its highest too, and the sand-bars where men expected
gold were hidden deep under the torrent of the Fraser. Such ground as
still lay high and dry was soon crowded with miners, each hunting for a
fortune in a little patch of earth twenty-five feet square. Those
adventurous spirits who pressed on to the upper reaches of the stream,
and into the tributary gorge of the Thompson River, had to scramble
along trails where mountain goats alone had trod before.
All provisions had to be brought up on the backs of men, and before a
mule track could be cut along the precipices the men were reduced to a
diet of wild berries. Yet some were not too hungry, nor too absorbed in
dreams of gold, to be charmed by the wild magnificence of the
canyon—the gloomy depths closed in for miles by perpendicular walls,
then opening out in steep fantastic slopes, all splashed with brown and
cream and orange and purple and black, and sprinkled with dark green
solitary pines.
About $500,000 worth of gold was taken out in 1858, but it had cost the
miners a good deal more than that in the getting. The next year’s yield
was estimated at $1,500,000. This, however, was only a preface to the
volume of riches quickly opened to a wondering world. In 1860, a young
Nova Scotian named Macdonald, and two Americans named Dietz and Rose,
left the Fraser and Thompson rivers behind them in search of virgin
gold-fields farther north. In consequence of the discoveries they made,
an unknown and uninhabited wilderness of forest and ravine sprang into
fame as an Eldorado to which the miners of California and Australia and
amateur gold-hunters from all the world were madly rushing.
In seven years this Cariboo district, about fifty miles square, yielded
gold worth $25,000,000. In one day five men washed $1,200 out of the
soil; four men in the same short time got $1,850. An old river bed was
found where nuggets could be picked up to the amount of $1,000 per
square foot.
The mountain lion and grizzly bear looked on in wonder as mushroom towns
sprang up in the silent hunting grounds and the rocks re-echoed with the
white man’s oath and pistol. Provisions still had to be carried up from
the coast on mule-back, and were often intercepted and devoured by
miners travelling the same road. In the winter of 1861, flour in Cariboo
cost $72 a barrel, and bacon 75 cents a pound. Next year men came in so
much faster than meal that the population was brought to the verge of
famine.
The miners were a rough set for the most part, given to furious gambling
on the gold-fields and to excesses of every sort when they returned to
the comparative civilization of Victoria or San Francisco. Still, the
mining towns had their well-filled reading-rooms, their concerts and
debates, and the authority of law was uncommonly well respected. “Gold
commissioners” were appointed to deal out justice promptly in every
camp, and over this whole system presided a judicial genius whose name
was a terror to evildoers.
“Old Judge Begbie soon made them understand who was master,” says an old
miner. “I saw a fellow named Gilchrist, who had killed two men in
California, on trial. He killed a man on Beaver Lake, in the Cariboo
country, who was gambling with him. Whilst sitting at the table, a miner
came in, threw down his bag of gold, bet an ounce, and won. Gilchrist
paid. The man bet again, and won again, flippantly inquiring of the
gambler if there was any other game he could play better, as he drew in
the stake. Gilchrist took offence at the remark, and, lifting his
pistol, shot him dead.
“Gilchrist was tried, and the jury brought in a verdict of
‘manslaughter.’ Turning to the prisoner, the judge said: ‘It is not a
pleasant duty for me to have to sentence you only to prison for life.
Your crime was unmitigated murder. You deserve to be hanged. Had the
jury performed their duty, I might now have the painful satisfaction of
condemning you to death. And you, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to
say that it would give me great pleasure to see you hanged, each and
every one of you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of
manslaughter.’”
Thirty thousand rough whites could hardly invade an Indian province
without some little trouble from the natives, and one or two fights took
place; but as a rule the two races got on very well together. The
newcomers washing sand along the river beds did not destroy the game on
which the old inhabitants depended for their living; true British
justice was measured out to red man and to white with equal hand; and
the Indians took readily to such work as white employers wanted done. An
American historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, has left on record his opinion
that “never in the pacification and settlement of any section of America
have there been so few disturbances, so few crimes against life and
property” as in this British land.
Fifteen years after the first rush Cariboo was utterly deserted by the
white miners, though the frugal Chinese continued to sift out the golden
dregs left in the district. In those fifteen years many other districts
in the “sea of mountains” had been invaded by detachments of gold
hunters. Some of these acquired fortunes to squander, while many came
out poorer than they went in, and some never came out at all. Of the
three lucky Cariboo pioneers mentioned a little while ago, Dietz died a
pauper in 1877, and the body of Rose was found in the woods, starved to
death while searching for new gold-fields to conquer.
Even coal-mining has had its romantic episodes in the history of British
Columbia. In 1835, some Indians visiting a Hudson’s Bay outpost on
Vancouver Island happened into the smithy. They were astonished to find
the blacksmith burning coal, and when told it had been brought a six
months’ journey from over the sea they burst out laughing. There was any
quantity of the same “black stone,” they said, at the north end of that
very island. Other deposits were found from time to time, and the
Pacific slope farther south has been glad to draw largely on the British
territory for its coal supply.
In 1864, British Columbia—the mainland territory, that is—was endowed
with a separate Governor and an infant legislature of which only three
members out of thirteen were elected by the people. Two years afterwards
Vancouver Island and British Columbia were united under the latter name;
and in 1871, when the whole colony entered the Canadian Federation, the
political swaddling bands were removed, and the Provincial Legislature
became an elected body, with full control over the Government.
One other striking episode in the history of our Pacific Province must
still be mentioned—an episode that nearly caused a war with the United
States.
When the frontier question was settled, or supposed to be settled, in
1846, a serious omission was made. On the mainland the British and
United States territories were divided, clearly enough, by the 49th
parallel of latitude; but when the sea was reached the line was simply
ordered to follow “the middle of the channel” between Vancouver Island
and the United States part of the mainland. Now there are a number of
islands between Vancouver and the mainland of the United States, and
therefore several channels through which the frontier might be imagined
to run.
The island of San Juan, which belonged to our country or to the United
States according as one channel or another might be considered the
frontier, had been used by the Hudson’s Bay Company as a cattle pasture
since 1843. In 1852, the “Americans” landed a sheriff and a customs
officer on the island and tried to collect taxes from the British
herdsmen, who refused to pay and hoisted the Union Jack.
Here were the makings of a pretty quarrel; and in 1859, when an
“American” settler killed a Hudson’s Bay hog for rooting in his garden,
the naval and military forces of Queen and President came within an ace
of opening fire on each other.
Before this calamity could occur, however, the British Government
proposed arbitration. The dispute dropped out of sight when the energies
of the United States Government were distracted by the Civil War. For
twelve years the settlers and hogs of San Juan were kept at peace by
British and United States detachments of equal strength, and the two
forces got on famously together. At last, in 1871, the German Emperor
was called in as arbitrator, and traced the frontier through a channel
which gave San Juan to the United States.