THE END OF STEEL.
I love the hills and the hills love me
As mates love one another.--MACCATHMHAOIL.
It is over a year since, in the last chapter, I was turned back from
the End of Steel because of a wash-out on construction, and now I am
come back, but this time, through the kindness of the Grand Trunk
Pacific Railway, on a through service, electric-lighted,
fast-scheduled, no-fare excursion. And on this occasion, I am not the
only woman on the train but merely one among a hundred, for this, you
must know, is the triennial excursion of the women journalists and
authors of Canada. The men present may be counted on one hand. The
engineers who travelled with me last time have gone on further to new
outposts.
"What are they doing?" you ask. I'll tell you.
"They are busy building railways on
The map's deserted spot,
Or staking out an empire in
The land that God forgot."
Doers of deeds are these men and the world has salted them with curious
and stern experiences. To my way of thinking, Dinny Hogan, boss
contractor, with his blue eyes that are the blue of steel, is a bigger
man than the First Lord of the Admiralty and his work is of more
permanent value to the Empire. It was only the other day that Dinny
made an arch of "coyotes"--that is to say, of round holes--in one of
the mountains, and into them he packed fifty carloads of gunpowder.
The reader may find it difficult to follow this idea, but no doubt he
could if he saw where Dinny removed the mountain in one shot. This
would seem to be a kind of big game shooting which has all others
vanquished into nothingness. This is a wonderful trail through the
mountains--the pass called the Yellowhead--a level ribbon of land along
which the steels are laid for most of the way. But in some places, a
road has been blasted out just to show how the mountains can be beaten.
These lords of earth and sky, when called upon, must bow their
unwilling necks to the yoke of steel. And no proper-spirited person
can stand in this pass without feeling the challenge of the hills and
without an immutable desire to conquer them. This I take it is the
spirit of the buccaneer.
The highest mountain in these Rockies is Robson, called
_Yu-hai-has-kun_ by the Indians, meaning thereby a high, winding road.
The Alpine Club of Canada intend, one of these times, to erect a chalet
at Mount Robson so that they may attempt to scale it often. Three men
succeeded in making the ascent this very summer. They were roped
together for thirty hours, and when they had come down again, their
faces were seen to be cut and greatly marred. These men spoke fine and
glorious things concerning the hilltop, and of how they looked down
upon five hundred other peaks, but, in strait and narrow minds like
ours, these climbs may be accounted only as strange follies. I have
talked to Clausen Otto about these things, for he has been a guide
hereabout these ten years or more, and is a notable man of affairs. He
said I was only a terribly lame dog in front of a terribly high stile,
and then, fearing that his comment was truthful rather than polite,
Otto proceeded to salve my feelings by explaining how the desire to
climb glaciers was an ill-regulated one, and that what the Bible said
about sucking honey out of a rock was "plumb foolishness."
Once, he was climbing with a hunter of goats when a bear came swiftly
over the glacier-clad peak of the mountain. They were greatly puzzled
to know why the bear had climbed so high, and why it dashed across the
summit. Surely there was something remarkable on the other side of the
peak. After climbing several hours they made the ascent and looked
over. "What do you think we saw?" asked Otto.
"Give it up," said I.
"I wish we had too," said Otto; "there was nothing on the far side but
another glacier."
Perhaps, the literary critics will help me decide if Otto meant this
for the parable of the climber or whether he was only singularly adept
in the art of suggestion.
You do not see Mount Robson till you have passed by. Our train stops
to let us look aright, but cloud curtains obscure the turrets of this
great temple of stone. Like a sorrowful Caryatid it stands erect under
the burden of the sky. But, after awhile, the veil is rent asunder and
a tingling flood of light spills itself on the snow in blurs of garnet
and blue and gold which scintillate and blend like the colours of a
shell: Of a surety, the North has the alchemy that transmutes base
metals into gold.
What else may one see at Robson in this dream of summer Canada? Come
near till I whisper! You may see white horses--and roan--and chariots
of fire, but not every one can. This is one of the mountain's secrets.
And if you listen you may hear what the hills talk about, but you must
listen. One mountain who is not so solemn as you might imagine wishes
to deny that he is of the earth, earthy.
"Bosh!" he said, and "Stuff! Any one who hasn't moss on his eyes can
see I am of the rocks, rocky!"
"Mark me and be astonished!" boasts a stupendous fellow near by whose
face is furrowed by snow-slides. "I am a western mountain. Beat me if
you can!"
"I used to be a fish plantation," remarks a chalky-looking individual.
"It was in the cretaceous period and I lay underneath the sea."
"Lobster plantation?" queries the western one.
"No, you froward ignoramus," replies the fossiliferous fellow, "I
consist of Inoceramus problematicus, Faseiolaria buccinoides, and other
aristocratic mollusks of the which you have never even heard."
... Overhead, an aweless eagle, rising wing above wing says to his
sweetheart, "It is my opinion God made these mountains for no other
reason than that you and I might build our nest in them....."
There is, in this region, a body of water called Maligne Lake, and
Jules DuBois, a trapper, whose son is married to 'Toinette, the niece
of the second cousin of Pierre, whose mother-in-law was the third wife
of Black Moccasin, the chieftain, once told me that this lake is
dreaded by the Indians because there are no fish in it. This is why it
is called "maligne." It frets Jules at the heart to go near it, for he
has heard how the fish have been frightened away by a dead man who
lives there. This man can see without eyes and his face is like a
fungus with white teeth. When he laughs there is a noise in his throat
like the crackle of tamarack twigs, freshly lighted.
Because of the glaciers on these hills and the warmth of the summer in
the valleys, this atmosphere seems like that of an eternal spring.
Just to breathe it is a delight. Here the air strokes you into
quietness till you forget the tearing hurry of life; the fretting
uneasiness that rasps, and the hurt that comes of the fight. This is a
sating of one's desire for the spiritual. And should you wish for a
token you may stay awhile and drink of the water that cascades over the
rocks. This is living water. This is the good wine of the hills. You
may drink it in remembrance.
I am very sorry I must die some day and miss these wilding joys and the
odour of the trees and flowers, but it is my comfortable hope that when
I return to Claeg, the Round One, who is called the earth, I shall be
evolved into a pine-tree and grow happily in this mountain pass. Then
will other people come to, even as I come to these trees, and say,
"Good morning, my friend! I have been lonely for you."
The pines are our fellow-creatures and more closely related to us than
anything that has roots in the earth. They speak to our inmost being.
A group of pines will restore sanity to the disdistracted and sorrowful
mind, for they are cordial trees, and in quietness and confidence is
their strength. The pines are never tremulous or trivial, neither do
they fade or die. Other trees are green for awhile, but these all the
while.
... Pippa, the little maid who sang for the world's hurt, came out of
the woods, as likewise the Nazarene who died for it.
Upland growths are the pines as befitteth the gods of the arboreal
world. They are northern trees, "the chief things of the ancient
mountains, the precious things of the lasting hills." Their history is
writ far back in the black strata of the carboniferous age, and that
they will be the last trees to disappear off the earth, who can
gainsay? As for me I shall not be persuaded otherwise though a man
rise from the dead to tell me.
And now we have come to Jasper, where we have two hours to rest off and
talk to the men of a construction camp who have struck work for the day
in order to see the train come in. Of course, it does not take all
their day for this, but there were the preliminary toilet preparations
to make and the walk in and out. Such newly shaven chins; such freshly
brushed clothes; such irreproachable boots! Who could have expected it!
Like the ascetics who of old-time went into the wilderness and found
themselves dreaming of scarlet lips and white arms, so these fine
fellows are ever fancying a comely woman gliding across their trail; a
distressed damsel who needs to be fed and carried for long, long
distances and sheltered in a low-built house of logs that is
well-warmed and well-provisioned, with no other bachelor nearer than a
hundred miles.
The bachelors will doubtless deny this sweet dalliance with a vehement
fervour, but it has the matter of fact virtue of being true, and is no
whimsey of mine. A year ago it was, in a prize competition, I was
called upon to read over a hundred short stories, or more properly
speaking, human nature studies. An amazingly large proportion of these
came from northern camps, and in nearly every case the afore-mentioned
situation was the theme. The variation from this concerned a young
Englishman of education who is notified that he has inherited wealth at
home but prefers to stay with his woodland wife--a beautiful Indian
girl--rather than return to the granitic conventions of the old world,
and to the busy idleness that goes by the name of society.
And why deny that their hearts are a-brim with dreams, for these are
beautiful reveries and worthy the most chivalrous of knights. Since it
was given me to look into the recesses of their minds I have liked them
better than ever and am many times heartily glad. Any woman who is a
gentleman would.
And here Opportunity has spilled a whole trainload of women before
them--old and young, wise and otherwise. It would be tempting the
patience of Providence if they didn't meet the train, these bachelors
who would gladly lose a rib.
"Such a waste of excellent material," says a poetess who looks over the
bachelors with an appraising eye. "How big they are! Someway or
other, they make me think of steel girders."
"Ragingly handsome, I call them," says a petite miss who edits a page
on a big eastern daily. "Do you think it possible, Lady Jane, that
they--could--have--holes--in--their--socks?"
"Not only possible, My Dear, but highly probable," I reply.
"What odds?" asks Cy Warman, the poet. "It is recorded that President
Taft was noticed to have a hole in his sock when he took off his boots
in a Tokyo tea-room."
"I am persuaded," remarks an historian who has been listening, "that it
is the duty of the Prime Minister of Canada to import wives for the
bachelors who live on the frontiers. He has most excellent precedent
in the case of Talon, the Intendant, who in 1670, because of the
disparity of the sexes in this country, imported one hundred and
sixty-five young women. Moreover, Talon specified that in sending out
these girls from France, the King should see that they had good looks
and were strong and healthy."
"My fellow-women!" interrupts a society reporter, who is an incarnation
of frankness, "lend me your ears; I won't need your money. I intend
coming here to live. No longer will I remain a martyr to good form. I
am weary to death of musicales and other entertainments of an
objectionable character. I intend to quit the 'best circles,' the
'local coteries,' and the '_haut noblesse_ in favour of a man with a
bungalow at Jasper, and for these delectable mountains with the glories
thereof. Now, what do you say to that?"
"Taken," replies a distinctly masculine voice in the rear--a voice that
might come from a steel girder--whereupon the rest of us discreetly
retire to allow for the arrangement of preliminaries. Love is born
through effrontery more often than we think.
When we have achieved the sights of Jasper we entrain for Tete Jaune
Cache, a beautiful moping place on the Fraser River. All the way along
we pass through the fastnesses of the hills, places of glamour and
mystery, and perhaps of fear. Here our eyes are pleasured with an
illusive perspective or an uncertain silhouette; a fantastic rock-form
cut out by the cruel chisels of the ice; a precipitous gorge up which
the adventurous trees have stormed in darkened files; a welt of green
where the moss has healed the hurt of the avalanche; a snow-born river
with its white-toothed angry waters, a splash of ice called a
glacier--a steady, long-living splash obedient only to the sun.
The artists with us talk of values, vistas, truth of space,
chiaroscuro, mellowness of effect, and transparence of air. Perhaps
they are right, but it seems to me that when Nature stretched her stone
canvas in the Rockies she did not trouble with the trivialities of
pleasing prettiness or technical nicety. She brushed in her colours
with a boldness of mass and outline, with an energy and expression that
stagger. There is no ambiguity about them. She used primary colours
and never hesitated. Royal purple, the orange light of fire, and the
sickening red in which Tintoretto has painted the wounds of his
martyrs, she here emphasized by the "cold virgin snow" on the peaks.
For uncounted centuries, silence has brooded over the beauty of these
imperturbable hills and over their unpathed, desolate places which only
the eyes of the gods have seen. It is well with me this day that I
journey through them, for here, as in Eden, the terrestrial and
celestial may be one. It is well, too, that in passing I may shut my
eyes and mentally sing the song of the land as it came hot from the
heart of a poet in his home at the foot of these hills--
"Oh, could ye see, and could ye see
The great gold skies so clear,
The rivers that race the pine shade dark,
The mountainous snows that take no mark,
Sunlit and high on the Rockies stark
So far they seem as near.
But could ye know, and forever know
The word of the young Northwest;
A word she breathes to the true and bold,
A word misknown to the false and cold,
A word that never was broken or sold,
But the one who knows is best."
At Tete Jaune Cache, they are preparing to "strike camp" and move on to
Mile 149. This has been the supply station for all the outposts, which
means more than you may think, for the Railway Company furnishes an
amazingly generous and varied bill-of-fare to its employees.
Don't ask me what you can get here, for I won't tell lest the urban
epicures whose jaded palates need tickling should start out in a body
for this lodge at Tete Jaune.
And the leading man in the kitchen has the most substantial merit and
can roast a sirloin of beef or bake a cake of prodigious bigness for
the men's supper just as he can cunningly and designedly contrive a
pimento bisque, an omelette espanol, or shrimps a la creole for the
boss and his company. I'll not tell another word about the fare, but,
believe me it is "with such cookery a monkey might eat his own father."
Te' Jaune, as it is familiarly called in the North, is situated on the
Fraser River. Because of the snow melting on the mountains, the Fraser
is swollen as if the waters surged from underneath. While we wait,
swart, husky-looking men are putting off to Fort George in primitive
craft built of squared logs. These boats are called scows. They are
carried along by the current which is from six to eight miles an hour,
and are guided by means of a paddle with a vast yellow blade.
As the men pass on and wave their hands to us, a fret falls on me to go
with them along this river-road to its very end, and if you are of my
kin you would want it too. We would live sturdily; we would be sopped
in sunshine, and God would give us joy.
At Te' Jaune there are many tongues spoken, for the workmen hail from
all over the universe. Of late, we have heard much about these
foreigners and of "those nations which we, so full-mouthed, call
barbarous." Certain Canadians are enwrathed and utterly discomfited
because of them. It is their desire to tidy up the country by sending
the "alien offscourings" to where they belong. They tell us that our
manners will become corrupted and our institutions imperilled by them.
This fear of strangers is not peculiar to our country and age.
Strangers have, in all lands, been looked upon as enemies to the
commonwealth, and consequently to be avoided or extinguished.
According to Flavius Josephus, when Moses came to die he said, "Oh you
Israelites and fellow-soldiers.... I would advise you to preserve
these laws to leave none of your enemies alive when you have conquered
them, but to look upon it as for your advantage to destroy them all,
lest if you permit them to live, you taste of their manners and thereby
corrupt your own proper institutions. I do farther exhort you to
overthrow their altars and their groves and whatsoever temples they
have among them, and burn all such, their nation and their very memory
with fire; for by this means alone the safety of your own happy
constitution can be secured to you."
The Jewish constitution was not worth the price asked; neither is ours.
This should be far from the spirit of Canada--"the manless land that is
crying out for the landless man." Canada is the child of the nations
and our husky provinces have need of these husky peoples. Not only
must we open wide our doors and bid them a good welcome, but having
entered, it must be our endeavour to weld them into a seemly and
coherent whole.
This is a task which is half accomplished e'er it is begun, for the
Russian, the Italian, the Scandinavian and all our immigrants are eager
to be like the Canadians, to speak our language, to wear our clothes,
and to think, talk and walk like us. Their differentiation is a burden
to them and they desire to drop it as quickly as possible.
These Coming Canadians from Europe are of a fine advantage to this
country where thousands of miles of roads and railways are to be built,
in that they perform the more onerous tasks of digging and drainage
which the Canadian, British, and American turns from as menial and
unworthy. It would be a wide mistake for us to turn back from our
sea-ports these unlearned and common peoples who seek entrance--as
foolish as the farmer who would fear a large yield of wheat lest he
could not thresh it, or a banker who dreaded an inrush of gold lest he
could not count it.
It was Michael Gowda, a Ruthenian living at Edmonton, who expressed for
his people their feelings of loyalty towards the land of their adoption
in a poem entitled "O Free and Fresh-home Canada"--
"And are you not, O Canada, our own?
Nay, we are still but holders of thy soil,--
We have not earned by sacrifice and groan
The right to boast the country where we toil.
But, Canada, our hearts are thine till death,
Our children shall be free to call thee theirs,
Their own dear land where, gladly drawing breath,
Their parents found safe homes, and left strong heirs.
Of homes, and native freedom, and the heart
To live and strive and die, if need be,
In standing manfully by honour's part
To guard the country that has made us free."