TO THE BUILDERS
To the builders of the highway, that skirt the canyon's brink,
To the men that bind the roadbed fast,
To the high, the low, the first and last,
I raise my glass and drink!--EVELYN GUNNE.
As yet, there is no passenger service from Edson to the End of Steel.
Several day coaches are run, but they are chiefly for the use of the
engineers and workmen. This is how I happen to be the only woman
aboard pulling out for the mountains across this newly-made trail.
Do not misunderstand me; it is the railroad that is new. The trail
that runs by its side was an old one when Columbus discovered America,
and beaten deep with feet, and also it is a long trail, for it leads
through to the Pacific Ocean. For centuries, it was the only mark of
human interference in this waste that is world-old. It is a trail of
lean hunger and bleeding feet, one that has ever been prodigal of
promise, but wary of accomplishment. Surely this is so, for once over
it stumbled and swore those half-mad men known as the Caribou
Stampeders--these, and other unwept, unhonoured fellows who fared into
the wilderness for what reasons even the wise Lord knoweth not. If the
bones of the red and white folk who have travelled this long, long
street were stood upright, I doubt not they would make a fence of
pickets for us all the way.
I have no sooner thought this thing than it happens there is a dry
stirring and, in an eye-wink of time, the dead men have taken on flesh
and colour. They must have been keenly near. Grim, plainish fellows
are they, not unlike the gang around me, but rougher-clad and more
hairy. They are powerful and full-lifed men, I can see that, and the
rough-necked one with the trail stride and mop of curly hair is
Alexander MacKenzie, a Scotchman from Inverness, but late of Messrs.
Gregory & Co.'s counting-house. He is "down North" endeavouring to
open out a trade with the Indians, obtaining a foothold they doubtless
call it; his masters, the Nor'-West Fur Company--for monopolists are
always sensitive to terms. His is a continental errand (mark this
well), for he is the first white man to cross the Rockies, and to tell
us what lies over and beyond the hills where the sun goes down. Honour
to Alexander MacKenzie, Esq., of Inverness, say I! Some day, when
Messrs. the Publishers give me fuller royalties, I shall surely build a
cairn to him on the height of land e'er it falls away to the Western
Sea.
This man lived more than a century ago, and yet, as his figure fades
back into nothingness, we see this other figure close by. It is David
Thompson, the Welshman, who has recently discovered a river, and has
called it by his own name. Also, he has captured the Astoria
fur-trade, and has established a trading post, which future generations
will know as Kamloops.
And here is Sir George Simpson, Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay
Company. He likes to travel with pipers who go before him, piping as
he enters a fort in order that Lo, the Red Man, may be properly
impressed.
The ugly person with the harshly aggressive features is Sir James
Douglas. He looks as fully open to convincement as a stone pavement.
This spalpeen near by is none other than young Lieutenant Butler of
Ireland. He is gathering material for a volume he proposes to call
_The Great Lone Land_. I like the way he carries his head. Who runs
may read him for a fighter with a fighter's build.
But on they go, and on, this long procession of pioneers, till we can
only call out their names as they file by--Dr. Hector, Daniel Harmon,
Viscount Milton, Alexander Henry, Dr. Cheadle, and other lean,
laborious fellows, long since passed into the shadows. Dead men do
tell tales. You may hear if you care to listen.
And what a strange thing has come to pass in these latter months! The
tenuous, twisting trail--that very old trail--has been superseded by a
clean white road that is like to a long bowstring. Its impotent,
creeping life has given way before the gallant onslaught of pick and
spade, chain and transit, and before monstrous lifting machines which
have other names, but which are really leviathans.
Hitherto, it may be said of this land what was once said of Rome, that
the memory sees more than the eye. This is no longer true. Before we
realize it, Baedeker will be setting down a star opposite the name of a
fashionable hotel in the Athabaska Valley, and the whole of this
morning world, from end to end, will be spotted with a black canker of
towns. Right glad am I to go through it this day with a construction
party, and for my own satisfaction to mentally tie together the threads
of the Past and Present. And who knows but in a century from now some
curious boy in one of these towns may find this record in an attic
rubbish-heap, and may rejoice with me over the knotted threads. (I
love you, boy! you must know this.)
My fellows of the Way, who are young engineers, tell me the peculiarity
of each cut and grade and the difficulties they encountered. They do
not speak of stations but of "Mile 48" or "Mile 60," by which they mean
48 miles from Wolf Creek. The railway, when completed, will measure
3,556 miles. They talked of other matters mathematical, much to my
bewilderment, but from which I, for myself, ultimately deducted that
while the genie who built Aladdin's palace in a night was the champion
contractor of fairy-tale countries, he is not to be mentioned in the
same breath as these master-men who blaze out this metal highway
towards the sea.
Each engineer lives on a residency which is twelve miles long, and it
is his duty to supervise the work of grading in his division. This
duty occupies about eighteen months, when he is moved on to another
residency.
The men placed in a residency camp are an engineer, an instrument man,
a rod man, two chain men and a cook. Over these camps, there are
placed the chief engineer at Winnipeg; the divisional engineer at the
End of Steel; and assistant divisional engineers, who may locate at
different points from fifty or sixty miles apart.
The grading itself is built by contractors, and sub-contractors, down
to station men, who with the aid of spades, picks and wheelbarrows,
built a hundred feet. All these are paid by the yard and according to
the nature of the soil or rock. The station men work from five in the
morning until nine or ten at night, and make from five to ten dollars a
day each. The blasters are known by the uneuphemistic title of
"rock-hogs."
The first engineers who scouted had a hard time in their unsplendid
isolation, but now that the rails are catching up, life on the
residencies is more pleasant than one might imagine. The shack is
fairly warm and comfortable and the Powers that Be supply to the men an
abundance of the best food procurable, with a reasonable portion of
dainties. The Powers doubtless recognize the distant advisability of
keeping the engineers and their assistants in health and temper, for
after all, nothing is so expensive as sickness. Still, the men are by
no means petted. It is true that one engineer has a pair of sheets,
but these are the talk, and possibly the envy, of all the residence's
on the line. When visitors come to his residency they sleep between
the sheets, while their chivalric host betakes himself to the long desk
that is built for map work.
Each residency has a gramophone, and some of them have small
menageries, including pet bears. In the summer, after hours, the men
have outdoor games such as baseball and tennis. They have been able on
several occasions to secure a sufficiently large attendance of women to
have a dance. It may happen that the engineer is married and that his
wife has girl-visitors, which party may be augmented by a visiting
contingency from the residency twelve miles further down the grade, or
some such fortunate happening as this. It is a heyday, I can tell you,
when this happens.
They do not quarrel in the residencies as missionaries do at their
posts, although a man sometimes gets moody. All through the winter
they talk over everything they did when last in town, and what every
one else did. Between times, they can watch the married engineers and
declare how much better the bachelors are situated. Purple grapes were
ever sour. They told me about other things, but I forget them;
besides, they are secrets.
One of the engineers gathers me some flowers at a wayside station,
concerning which the others, with full-throated laughter, propounded
riddles.
"When did he ast-er?" "How much did the rose raise?" "Who gave Susan
her black eye?" These, and other problems of peculiar interest to
young bloods, the solution of which we shall never know till flowers
learn to speak plainer.
The riddle, "Why does the willow weep?" elicits a discussion on music,
and on the sound of the wind in the pines. One man says he has read
somewhere that violin makers construct their instruments out of the
north sides of trees. He does not know if this be true, but I think it
must be, for the urging of the north wind in the trees and the soft
calling of the violin, are one and the same. They both allure to a
land where no one lives. You must have observed this yourself.
One rueful rascal with no civic conscience, and an overweening
appreciation of his sex, gives it as his opinion that this is an
ill-reasoned theory. He declares the sound to be a screeching
crescendo that has its origin in an implacable quarrel between the wind
and the pines. The wind is a suffragette, a woman of determined
grievance, who would be better of bit and bridle and possibly of gag.
She makes the pine a butt for her insult and ridicule and a target
against which she lashes the hail and drives her shrewish snow. When
not grappling his throat with her plaguing, pestilent fingers, it is
only because she is recoiling to strike again. She calls this "a spell
o' weather."
It is a bitter monologue this leather-fleshed, lathy-framed fellow
gives me, and I takes it as a body blow, but I answer not a word, for I
have heard it said, or perhaps I have read it, that the meek will own
the earth; besides--you can try it yourself--nothing so puzzles the
understanding of mortal man as a woman who refuses to go on defence.
Her silence fills him with a gnawing uneasiness similar to that one
feels when he has swallowed a tack.
And yet I would like to tell him he has overstated his case; to point
out that the trees are cross-grained to the wind; that their green
spectacles prevent their seeing things in proper perspective, and that
they are deep-rooted in obsolete prejudices. Sir Pine cannot escape
being an intractable old person, seeing that woman's suffrage was not
the rule seventy-five years ago, or more, when he was born. Yes! I
should have liked to say this, but it is almost as equal satisfaction
to score a verbal chicane.
I think, perhaps, the men felt my silence more than I intended, for
they argue the anti-suffragist out of countenance, although I have no
doubt they secretly and sincerely agree with him. To change the
subject, one of them brings me a caged squirrel he is taking to his
residency. Punch is a well-groomed squirrel and has an immoderate
tongue. His owner says that in the mountains these red squirrels
collect and dry mushrooms. They group them on a rock, or fix them in
the forks of young trees, ultimately banking them in hollow logs. He
is trying to tame Punch, but then we have all heard of the American who
tried to tame an oyster.
Punchinello is as active as pop-corn in a pan. He is a squirrel with a
job, and not nearly so light-minded as he looks. His job is to go
round and round on a wheel but never to make progress, for the wheel is
so swung that it revolves with him. I am appalled by the absolute
inutility of it. What a life! What a life! Wearing out a wheel and
himself at one and the same time. "Let him go when you get to the
woods," say I, "it will be kinder. You have heard of those Eastern
folk, who, when they wish to praise Allah, buy birds and set them free."
"No! I have not heard," he replies; "tell me about them."
"There is no more to the story, that is all."
"But I don't see the application when a fellow does not want to render
praises. I invested part of my savings at the races and the tenor of
my success was markedly uneven. I bought town lots, hoping to sell
before the second payment--'Stung'--Yes! it's as good a word as any.
The father of my best girl has cursed me to the tenth generation."
"For what?"
"Oh! for a newspaper item which concerned me. I will allow it would
have been just as well had it not appeared, but there it was! There it
was! No! I cannot see any special reason why I should set the
squirrel free. Besides" (and here he speaks softly and with a kindly
persuasiveness, as if he had butter in his mouth), "this Punchinello is
a sweet-toothed fellow, and the cook will feed him daintily; he has no
store set by for the winter; no drey, no mate; he is not properly
furred for exposure, and he would not know how to protect himself
against the hawks and stoats. Surely, you would not have him go free?
I tell you the thing would be cruelty itself, and I will not do it."
You see, he does not know this matter is a personal one with me, I mean
the wheel that goes round and never gets anywhere. If he did it would
probably make no difference, for the peculiarity about his arguments
are their sincerity and wisdom. I always did suspect that Providence
was a large serene young man with a strain of steel in him.
At Bickerdike, all the engineers I knew got out. Some are stationed
here; some await orders, but most of them go down the branch line that
is under construction from this point. Bickerdike is largely a tent
town, although, as yet, it is the metropolis of the Grade. I heard one
man on the train tell another it was "one of these here high-society
places where folks dance on a plank floor and don't call off the
figures." I promise to visit at Bickerdike on my return trip with some
friends I have not seen for years. No matter where you come from, it
would be almost impossible to drop off at any of these little frontier
posts without meeting some one you knew elsewhere, so representative is
the population of this Northern country.
At each post the same question is asked the newly-arrived passenger.
"Well, what's the news along the road?" To-day the news concerns a
wash-out near the End of Steel, and doubts are expressed as to the
possibility of our getting through.
At Marlboro, the people are talking of their cement industry, and at
the next station lumber is the topic. They are making the lumber out
of spruce. The small logs have been converted into railway ties. Some
of them are crossed. If ever you have "taken out" ties you know what
this means. As you likely haven't, I'll tell you. The railroad
contractor, when he rejects a tie, crosses the end of it with a blue or
red pencil. Once an acquaintance of mine, by name Jerry Dalton, took
out a cut of ties in the Province of Saskatchewan. One day Jerry--an
accurate man rather than a placid one--was stamping about somewhat more
rampageous than a baited bull.
"What is the matter now, Man Jerry!" I asked; "you are always having a
big sorrow."
"Sorrow ith it?" lisped Jerry at the top of his tall voice. "Look at
them d---- ties (begging your pardon, ma'am). Look at them ties! Does
that turkey-faced, muddle-headed idjit of a contractor think I'm
running a Catholic themetery? Crosses ith it? It's crosses he's after
giving Jerry! Troth! an' it's a crown I'll be puttin' on him." ...
And so as I look at this pile of crossed logs by the wayside, I am
wondering who is the rascal responsible for the Catholic themetery.
These mills belong to a Northern timber chief whose large holdings have
made them turbulent. They have called him a timber-wolf, and other
names that are smart rather than polite. As a matter of fact, any man
who pays the government dues and converts the trees into lumber for the
use of the settlers, deserves all the emoluments that can possibly
accrue. On account of floods and fires, lumbering is a precarious
industry, and the majority of operators fail thereat or carry a
nerve-grinding overdraft at the bank.
And did you ever stand on the heights and watch a rising, ripping flood
bear out your booms and incidentally the year's logs? If you have, my
good little man, you'll be sensible to something closely approximating
a tender regard for the timber-wolves. This play of lamb and wolf is
frequently disastrous to the wolf.
I would like to rest off here to see the whip-saw bite into the logs;
to watch the long white boards as they fall from the carriage, and to
drink in their refreshing odour, for the whole essence of the North is
concentrated in the odour of the spruce.
Big Eddy takes its name from the whirlpool formed by the confluence of
the McLeod River and the Sun Dance Creek. The creek is an impetuous,
capering stream that leaps to the McLeod as a little laughing girl
would throw herself into the arms of her father. This is the fairest
tarrying place I have seen this way, and fit for a ball-room of the
dryads. Down in the valley beside the great bridge, the divisional
engineer has built him a wide house of logs, with hospitable porches
and chimneys that suggest generous fireplaces. I covet his right,
title and ownership thereto. They say this engineer is seventy-eight
years old, but I don't believe it.
"Beyond all doubt he is," says one of the train officials; "believe me,
he has eaten up his teeth at the work of building roads, and he has a
heart of great goodness."
"A strong man, is he?" I ask.
"Why, I cannot say, only that he sticks to his work and takes the trail
with the best of them. The men say he is 'sun-ripened,' which I am
convinced means something praiseworthy, for every man is his friend."
The Canadian Northern Railway Company is running a line immediately
parallel to this of the Grand Trunk Pacific, and as I look out of my
window I can see the men at work on the rival road. They are the
primal ploughers of the land, these railway fellows, and can cut a
valley out of a hill, like it were the rip of a brutal blade. To my
thinking, this is an enterprise of high heart and bravery..... And
yet, as I watch them at work, heaping up a grade, they seem small to
me, and paltry, like dirty boys intent on nothing more serious than
mud-pies. In some places, they build through marshy dunes that are
coppery-brown and tawny-red. Walking in these places is like walking
upstairs all the way, or like treading in deep straw, forms of exercise
most certainly concomitant with heart disease and a hackney gait.
Westward they go and Westward, these uncouth moving pictures of the
landscape, that change well-nigh as quick as those on a canvas, but
always it is a picture of a grade, a new cut, a gridiron of ties, and
long, long trails of steel. I tell you, these trails are the
heartstrings of the North.
But you must not think that the only builders are the men. The horses,
mules and oxen help. Some folk there are who mislike the oxen, but
these are foolishly prejudiced and ill-informed. The ox, it is true,
has a tiresome straddling gait, and his brain is small in comparison
with the bulk of his head, but contrariwise he retains a stolid
reliability that keeps him at his job. Once inspanned, he has no
desire to kick over the traces or to explore foreign parts; he doesn't
bite his trace-mate, or engage in any of those little playful jinks so
strangely peculiar to northern horses and northern men, not he ... the
ox is a good sort, and one who strictly attends to business. He is an
animal that walks in the light. There are northern men who will
doubtless resent these remarks, so I may as well explain that my
comparisons have been prompted by the conduct of "the gang" which
offends my sense of decency.
The "happy low lie down" all over the car in various stages of
intoxication. How hideous they are with their unshaven faces, open
mouths and yellow teeth! Abroad they are silly; at home they are
heart-scalds. As they sprawl over the floor like huge primeval toads,
I am consumed by a desire to kick them with my boots. Drunkenness is a
disgusting, unfleshed sin.
And yet, these prostrate fellows are hardly more offensive than those
still able to sit up and debate about nothing. As controversialists
they remind me of the characters in _Alice through the Looking-Glass_,
who want "to deny something and don't know what it is." When any
over-wise babbler feels himself worsted in an argument, he says to his
opponent, "You are a liar." While fairly popular, this argument can
hardly be considered a logical one. It can be claimed, however, to
cover the whole ground, and to be a masterpiece of brevity.
One fellow, who reeled through the car in a molluscous invertebrate
condition, stopped by my seat to tell me he was my friend for life. He
was old enough to have known better, and I was glad when a glorious,
tall stranger collared the fellow and hurtled him down the aisle like a
hockey-player would hurtle the puck.
Soon afterwards the train's agent, a civil-spoken young man, came into
the car and took me into his caboose. I knew something fortunate would
happen on this journey.... And to think it came just as my nomad
spirit had failed me, and I was utterly crumpled with weariness and
hunger.
I would here desire to reiterate my belief that Providence is a large,
serene young man, with a strain of steel in him.