THROUGH BRITISH COLUMBIA TO THE COAST
British Columbia is the third largest province of the Dominion of
Canada. It has an area as great as that of France, Italy, Belgium, and
Holland combined. It extends from the United States boundary to Yukon
Territory and Alaska, and, except for the northeastern section, it
is all plateaus and mountains and valleys. The interior table-lands
have an average elevation of three thousand feet. They contain some
good farms and dairies, but the chief wealth of the province is in its
forests, fisheries, and mines.
I have crossed this great territory often on my way westward, and have
at times gone southward from Golden into the Kootenay country. This is
far below the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Another line
of the Canadian Pacific crosses the region from the Crow’s Nest Pass.
In the mighty hills of the Kootenays I saw the headwaters of the
Columbia River. Its source is only a few hundred feet from the Kootenay
River, which at this point is a good-sized stream. The Columbia flows
north for one hundred and eighty miles, and then makes a sharp bend and
turns to the south. The two rivers meet after each has completed about
four hundred miles of its course, the parent stream of the Columbia
crossing the United States border to the Pacific. Before meeting, the
two rivers wind in and out among the hills, now in narrow streams, and
now in long, winding lakes that make one think of Como and Maggiore
on the borders of Switzerland and Italy. They are walled in by peaks
that rise almost straight up for hundreds of feet. Their waters are so
clear that one can stand on the slopes high above them and see the fish
swimming in the streams far below. The sides of the hills are covered
with fir and tamarack, and their tops are often capped with snow.
The Columbia and the Kootenay, by their circling courses, have made a
mighty island in the interior of British Columbia. If you will imagine
two gigantic wish bones, the tips of which are touching each other,
enclosing a diamond of mountainous land larger than the state of Ohio,
you will have an idea of the curious formation that Nature has created
here. A short canal that connects the two rivers near the headwaters
of the Columbia makes the island complete. The valleys of these two
streams, containing a million acres or so, are growing in importance as
a mixed farming, fruit growing, and dairying region.
The Kootenay country has also some of the richest mineral deposits of
the Rockies. It has gold, silver, copper, coal, iron, and lead. The
coal deposits near the Crow’s Nest Pass are said to contain thousands
of millions of tons, and near them are thousands of coke ovens blazing
away. Not far distant are deposits of hematite ore, upon which the
Canadians may some day build up a big iron and steel industry.
Coming farther on into British Columbia, I took a steamer through
Kootenay Lake and stopped at the town of Nelson, which is in the heart
of the mining country. There I talked with one of the men who opened
up some of the big silver and lead deposits more than two score years
ago. Said he:
“There had been a rush to this region, and I came in with five other
prospectors. When we got to the camp I suggested that our party see
what we could find in a mountain across the valley. We set out with
only two days’ provisions. Almost as soon as we started up the hill we
struck some float rock that showed signs of silver and lead, and on
the following day we discovered a great mass of galena, which was from
twenty-five to thirty feet wide. There were boulders of lead ore close
by, and we at once staked out our mine. It proved to be a rich one, and
was eventually sold for more than a million dollars.”
This whole region is a treasure house of minerals. Mining operations
were carried on for years near Phoenix in one of the biggest copper
beds of the world. The metal lay in a great mass two hundred feet wide
and more than a half mile in length.
The millions of tons of ore taken from the Phoenix mines were fed into
the smelter at Grand Forks, which stands on the banks of the Kettle
River, shadowed by mighty mountains. For years it annually produced
millions of pounds of copper, and in addition silver and gold worth a
million dollars or more. The smelter was closed in 1919 with a record
of having smelted fourteen million tons of ore, and the mines ceased
operations that same year.
In the meantime, the Granby Company, which owned the mines and the
smelter, had begun to take copper out of the Le Roi mine at Rossland,
a few miles to the east. Shafts there have been sunk more than two
thousand feet into the earth, and there are about ninety miles of
underground workings. This same company, which is owned largely by
American stockholders, operates the Hidden Creek copper mines at Anyox,
the biggest in British Columbia. They are located on the coast near the
Portland Canal, hundreds of miles to the northward and only a short
distance from Alaska. In one year they produced thirty million pounds
of copper. Other mines are worked on Vancouver Island and on Howe Sound
north of the city of Vancouver.
[Illustration: The Canadian Rockies, with three hundred peaks more
than ten thousand feet high, offer thrills aplenty for even the most
seasoned mountain climber. Alpine guides have been brought here from
Switzerland and have established a colony in British Columbia.]
[Illustration: The line of the Canadian National Railways through
Yellowhead Pass, the lowest gap in the Canadian Rockies, lies near Mt.
Robson, 13,068 feet high, and the tallest peak in all the Dominion.]
Although the deposits of the Boundary District have been practically
worked out after yielding twenty million tons of copper ore, British
Columbia still has more than half the copper output of the Dominion.
Its total annual mineral production is worth more than six hundred
million dollars. Of this, coal and coke make up about one third.
Silver, lead, zinc, and platinum are also mined.
Gold was first discovered in British Columbia on the Fraser River. That
was around 1857, just as the California placers had begun to play out,
and thousands of prospectors rushed here from our Pacific coast. Many
fortunes were made in a single season, and by 1863 the placer mines
had an annual yield of more than three million dollars’ worth of gold.
The total production to the present time has been valued at more than
seventy-five million dollars.
All of this gold was recovered by the pick and shovel and without
the aid of machinery. Hydraulic mining was not introduced until the
easily accessible gold had been washed out by primitive methods. The
lode mines were not worked to any extent until 1893, but these are now
producing more than the placers.
Northwest of the Boundary District we take a flying trip through the
Okanagan Valley, famous as a fruit-growing region. Apples from here
are shipped all over the Dominion. They are sold three thousand miles
away in eastern Canada in competition with those grown in the Annapolis
Valley in Nova Scotia. The region has been developed largely through
irrigation, and as we travel through it the green of the watered areas
stands out in sharp contrast to the sun-baked dry lands of the hills.
British Columbia has forty thousand acres in fruit, and it ships more
than a million boxes of apples a season. The interior valleys have been
found to be well adapted to raising peaches, plums, grapes, and small
fruits as well.
The chief city of British Columbia, as well as Canada’s most important
Pacific port, is Vancouver. It is beautifully situated on Burrard
Inlet on a site discovered in 1792 by Captain John Vancouver. In 1865
a lumber mill was started on the inlet and a settlement grew up here.
About twenty years later the town was entirely destroyed by fire, so
that the city of to-day was really founded in 1886.
Vancouver is about the same size as Omaha, and is the fourth largest
city of the Dominion. It is the terminal of the Canadian Pacific and
Canadian National railways, and of several roads from the States. It
has steamship lines to Hawaii and China and Japan and also to the
Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. There are coast lines to
Seattle, Victoria, Prince Rupert, and Alaska.
Let us go for a motor ride about the city. The Vancouver climate is
warmer and more moist than that of the south of England, and flowers
can be seen blooming in the gardens all the year round. On Shaughnessy
Heights are the beautiful homes of Vancouver’s millionaires, and
farther out is Stanley Park. Here, overlooking the Narrows through
which the ships enter the harbour, are thousands of giant cedars and
Douglas firs, some of them one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet
high.
We find Vancouver’s commercial districts busy and crowded. At the
wharves we see twenty ocean steamers loading lumber to be carried to
all parts of the world, and learn that sixteen million feet are shipped
from here in one month. Vancouver is increasing in importance as a
wheat-shipping port. It sends a million bushels or more to the Orient,
and twice as much to Europe by way of the Panama Canal.
Eighty miles across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver is Victoria,
British Columbia’s capital, noted for the architectural beauty of
the provincial government buildings. It lies at the southern end of
Vancouver Island, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the
snow-capped Olympic Mountains on the mainland. It is considered one of
the most English of Canadian cities, not only in climate and aspect,
but in the customs and traditions of its residents. It is the site of
the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, one of the largest of its kind
in the world.