On the Wings of the West
“_Cela est bien dit; mais je sais aussi qu’il faut cultiver
notre jardin._”
“_That is well said, but I also know that we must cultivate our
garden._”
AFTER many adventures, the speaker of these famous words at last found
satisfaction, which nothing else had brought, in winning his daily bread
from a little patch of earth.
Our “garden” is so big that we should still need months of travel to see
it all, even now when trains are running over 20,000 miles of western
railways. Our lawns and beds are measured by the million acres; our
shrubbery, the forest, by the million acres too; with mountain ranges
for our ornamental rockery, an ocean for our fish-pond. As the crow
flies, a thousand miles divide a Manitoba farm on Lake of the Woods from
an Albertan farm on Peace River; and the bird would have another 500
miles to fly before he saw the end of the West on the British Columbian
coast. Fifteen hundred miles—nearly the breadth of the Atlantic, from
Newfoundland to old Ireland.
Let us take an airplane, and beat the crow. In a space so vast, there
are vast differences, of climate and soil, of people and their ways; but
in a zig-zag flight, with sharp eyes and ears, we can discover a good
deal of what is being done in various ways to “cultivate our garden.”
There are four of us—a Manitoban, a Saskatchewander (the name is his
own invention, he says), an Albertan and a British Columbian. But I
think our airplane will carry a few guests without a breakdown. Let us
offer a ride to our visiting brothers and cousins from the East. The
trip will do them good, and we shall enjoy their company.
Sir Sandford Fleming, the engineer, who came west in 1872 to spy out a
route for the promised railway, took thirty-six days of hard riding,
over forty miles a day, to reach the foothills of the Rocky Mountains
from the Red River. Eleven years later, as he tells us, he made the trip
by Canadian Pacific in fifty-six hours. To-day a traveller by the same
railway does it in thirty hours. We shall cover three or four times that
distance in thirty minutes.
We rise from the sea where the sun has a habit of setting, and steer for
the coast explored by Captain Cook. At the foot of Vancouver Island we
hover above the Jewel City, the city of flowers, Victoria. Do you smell
the roses? A gem of architecture, the Parliament Building of British
Columbia, rises from its garden on the shore of a land-locked port.
Flying over fields of strawberries, we circle a high, wooded hill
crowned by a shining watch-tower. From its revolving dome looks out the
sleepless Eye of Canada, the priceless telescope, famed among
astronomers, busy discovering suns that shone before the world was born.
Our practical country is no longer a mere hanger-on of the international
brotherhood of science and literature and art.
We leap the straits, alive with salmon, and steer for a clump of giant
trees, cedars and Douglas fir towering 250 feet in air. Big ships are
steering that way too, for those trees are the gateposts of the
Dominion. There is a steamer just going in, the fastest on the Pacific.
In a few hours her precious cargo of oriental silk will be speeding
across the continent from Vancouver by special train. Here is another,
coming out, bound for Australia and New Zealand. Here come two more,
both laden with grain, one for Japan and the other for England by way of
Panama. In twelve months fifty million bushels of prairie wheat have
passed through this western gate.
That silent ship with a few blue-coated figures on deck—she carries no
grain, but every ounce of grain is carried under her protection. The
prairie farmer, a thousand miles from salt water, carries on all his
business under the sheltering flag of the British fleet. Without that
protection a few years ago our wheat trade would have fallen to ruin in
a night; the freedom of the seas would have vanished—and with it the
freedom of the world. Neither the mother-land herself, nor Canada, nor
even the United States, could have sent her army to the rescue, but for
the splendid efficiency of the British fleet. We call it an engine of
war, but its chief duty and pride is to keep the peace. Its quiet patrol
of the sea is the most effective insurance against the risk of war; and
for this protection we Canadians pay not one cent. The British
blue-jacket is feared only by war-lovers and law-breakers. He is the
guardian of the peace at sea, as surely as the policeman is its guardian
on land.
Vancouver, where forty years ago scarce an axe had broken the silence of
the forest, is a great city now, and likely to be the greatest sea-port
on the west coast of America. This Province, by the way, owns 1,900
ships—more than any other Province in the Dominion.
Over the verdant coastal plain we fly, with its rich berry farms and
dairy farms, and away up the narrow sea, beloved of tourists, between
numberless islands and the mainland pierced by many a mountain fjord.
Hundreds of fishermen are out in their little boats, catching halibut,
which in a few days will appear on the dining tables of St. Paul or
Chicago. British Columbia catches $20,000,000 worth of fish in a year,
with salmon heading the list and halibut next. No other Province comes
near that total.
Those mighty forests on our right, too, furnish $30,000,000 worth of
wood, which means nearly 450,000,000 cubic feet of standing timber cut
down. Quite as much as that probably goes up in smoke. Are we so gorged
and bloated with riches that we must burn up our possessions to get rid
of them? By the careless act of a moment we destroy wholesale the gifts
that nature has taken centuries to grow for our use.
Sweeping into a picturesque fjord, we see a little town clinging to a
steep hillside, with a huge mill covering the shore: a paper town,
sending out shipload after shipload of transformed forest to be covered
with printer’s ink.
Another arm of the sea brings us to a famous silver mine. In gold and
silver mining, and in mineral production as a whole, this Province is
second only to Ontario. In lead and zinc the score is “British Columbia
first and the rest nowhere.” At Prince Rupert, the ocean terminus of the
Canadian National Railway, we strike inland and follow the track for
hundreds of miles. The land is neither mountainous nor so heavily
timbered: open spaces appear.
The sound of hammering comes up from a pioneer settlement. A farmer is
building a new barn. Now he stops. Mrs. Settler is just home with the
wagon, from the creamery. “They were asking if we couldn’t send in more
cream,” she says. “I’ll buy another cow,” says Mr. Settler, “while the
buying’s good. And half that $300 I made trapping last winter is in the
bank yet.”
Children come running out of the house, three of them; a fourth, a small
boy, has been helping his father; Mrs. Settler goes indoors and comes
out with a fifth in her arms. This looks good. I think we must land
here.
We all sit down and chat under the shade trees that father was careful
to leave when he cleared the land for his garden. It turns out that the
man and his wife were a country boy and girl who drifted into the city,
as so many do. “But when the babies began to come,” says the lady, “we
both made up our minds to get out where they could grow up in freedom as
we did, and learn to do things for themselves, as they never would in
town. That more than makes up for not having quite such a good school,
even if we hadn’t the education to help them keep ahead of the school
work all the time, as we do. And as for us, we’re not crazy about the
white lights and all that; we get all the white light we want from Mr.
Sun—when he gets up he don’t wait long for us! No, we’ve never
regretted coming out here, and only wish we’d come sooner.”
“You don’t find the work too much for you, then, with your five
children?”
“Five! There’s seven—the two biggest are out stacking hay, Jim on the
stacker and Jenny riding the sweep. They just love to handle the teams
alone, without being interfered with, and made me promise to take the
cream to-day so they could. They seem to think the farm work is just a
big sort of play.”
“I guess they find it pleasant because they never hear you and your
husband talking as if it was unpleasant.”
“No, indeed; why should we? Of course, we don’t let them overdo it—nor
ourselves either. We study, and plan, and find out all sorts of
labor-saving dodges and devices; and we cut out the frills, too, in
clothing and cooking and everything else. I reckon we’ve got the ‘simple
life’ down to a pretty fine point, and enjoy it all the more. The West
has got to work out a way of living for itself, and not make itself
miserable trying to follow fashions that grew up where people had
servants to do everything for them. We’ve got to choose: we can either
have children and happiness and health, with the simplest possible life,
or wear ourselves out with drudgery, trying to ‘keep up with the
Joneses’. If the Joneses talk to me about a ‘high standard of living,’ I
say that’s just what we’ve got and they haven’t.”
Yes, the high standard of living we have to set before ourselves, and
before the people we ask to join us, is a high standard of working, a
high standard of learning and thinking, with a high standard of family
life and public spirit. In these we shall enjoy a high standard of
living indeed.
“The wife is right,” says her husband, laughing, as I look to see how he
is taking all this. “I wouldn’t say so if she starved us, or sent the
children to school in rags, would I? But it seems to me, the more she
has to do, the better she gets things done. Planning does it, I
reckon—just thinking and planning.”
“Use your brains and save your hands, eh?”
“That’s the size of it. Next time the Prince of Wales comes out to his
ranch, you send him along, and I reckon she’d cook him a four-course
dinner on a chip-and-a-half of firing, if he was keen on style, which he
doesn’t seem to be. Of course we’ve got a fireless cooker; she planned
it from one she saw in a paper, and little Jim made the box. But,
listen! There they are.”
Melodious sounds are echoing through the woods—“Comin’ through the
rye,” sung in unison by two robust young voices, and jingling tug-chains
for accompaniment.
With that music echoing in our ears, and the “three cheers” of the whole
happy family as we take off, we sail away down the middle of the
Province to the South.
* * * * *
There’s the Okanagan Valley, with its beautiful houses, set gem-like in
their gardens, looking out on battalions, brigades, whole army corps of
apple and cherry and plum and peach and apricot trees, knee-deep in
vetch and alfalfa; on spreading fields of tomatoes, onions and celery,
and potatoes; all watered from the mountain streams close by. And this
is only one, though the chief, among the fruit valleys of this rich and
corrugated Province.
“They used to laugh at us,” an English orchardman says, “and what they
called our ‘style’—‘Piccadilly in the Wilds,’ and all that—but we know
how to work.” No, if we ever laughed we stopped when we saw 3,400
men—3,400 from a total population of 15,000—pouring out of this valley
to fight for our common cause. When those thousands hurried off to the
War, those who were left doubled up and did their work for them, as far
as human beings could. . . . Of the 590,572 men in the Canadian
Expeditionary Force, we do not forget that 200,569 came from these four
Western Provinces, besides 2,327 from Yukon. British Columbia sent
51,438, Alberta 45,146, Saskatchewan, 37,666, and Manitoba 66,319.
* * * * *
Turn east again, across a labyrinth of mountain and forest. A blast of
hot air rises from one spot—a highly effective kind of hot air, too.
That smelter pours out sixty million pounds of refined zinc in a
year—nearly the whole zinc production of Canada.
That broad valley where two rivers meet, the Columbia and the Kootenay,
was filled with dense jungle a few years ago. It has been transformed
into a garden, by the co-operative industry of the Doukhobors. This is
the headquarters of their community. That black snake winding for miles
up to the head of a waterfall is their new irrigation pipe-line, and
that big building beside the railway is their jam factory.
Higher, now! Ten thousand feet up, and still we have to twist and turn
to avoid the higher peaks. We are nearing the Great Divide of the
Continent. A sea of Rocky Mountains, piercing the azure sky with spires
and domes and pyramids of white and grey, till sunset magic changes all
to flaming red; mountains towering over glaciers and snowfields, which
pour their torrents down through pine-clad glens and dark ravines. A
lake of brilliant blue, set in a royal ring of snow-soft pearls and
glacial diamonds. That is Lake Louise: many travellers call it the most
beautiful spot in this rich land of beauties. More lakes, more
cataracts, more glaciers, more peaks that pierce the sky; a land of
myriad marvels; a treasure house of all that is grand and beautiful.
The crack of a rifle, and a mountain lion rolls down the slope, as the
echo volleys from cliff to cliff. The big-game hunter’s paradise, this;
the paradise of tourists, alpine climbers, artists, and all who cannot
be satisfied with anything short of perfection.
“I have been there and still would go,
It’s like a little heaven below.”
Hundreds of peaks have never yet been climbed, and many daring alpinists
come in every year to win fresh victories over the mountains, with the
help of Swiss guides who live in those picturesque chalets perched on a
height overlooking the Columbia, back there at Golden.
We are not the only navigators of the upper air to enjoy this bird’s-eye
view of the earthly paradise. As we glide down the eastern slope of the
mountains another airplane sweeps up to meet us—and now it is past and
away to patrol the high forest. It comes from High River, near the
Prince of Wales’s Canadian home. There, as well as at Winnipeg and
Vancouver, the Department of National Defence keeps up stations of the
Royal Canadian Air Force. Its fliers carry out many useful operations,
such as patrolling the coast against drug and liquor smuggling and
illegal fishing; carrying surveyors and their supplies, and treaty money
for Indian tribes; aerial photography, especially for the survey of
water-powers; and, most of all, patrolling the forest on the watch
against fires. Many a fire that might have done untold mischief has thus
been discovered and checked before it could get beyond control. By
wireless telephone a flying plane has sent back word of such a fire to
the station 190 miles away.