On Canada's Frontier Part 8

The lowest rank in the service is that of the laborer, who may happen to fish or hunt at times, but is employed--or enlisted, as the fact is, for a term of years--to cut wood, shovel snow, act as a porter or gardener, and labor generally about the post. The interpreter was usually a promoted laborer, but long ago the men in the trade, Indians and whites alike, met each other half-way in the matter of language. The highest non-commissioned rank in early days was that of the postmaster at large posts. Men of that rank often got charge of small outposts, and we read that they were "on terms of equality with gentlemen." To-day the service has lost these fine points, and the laborers and commissioned officers are sharply separated. The so-called "gentleman" begins as a prentice clerk, and after a few years becomes a clerk. His next elevation is to the rank of a junior chief trader, and so on through the grades of chief trader, factor, and chief factor, to the office of chief commissioner, or resident American manager, chosen by the London board, and having full powers delegated to him. A clerk--or "clark," as the rank is called--may never touch a pen. He may be a trader. Then again he may be truly an accountant. With the rank he gets a commission, and that ent.i.tles him to a minimum guarantee, with a conditional extra income based on the profits of the fur trade. Men get promotions through the chief commissioner, and he has always made fitness, rather than seniority, the criterion. Retiring officers are salaried for a term of years, the original pension fund and system having been broken up.

Sir Donald A. Smith, the present governor of the company, made his way to the highest post from the place of a prentice clerk. He came from Scotland as a youth, and after a time was so unfortunate as to be sent to the coast of Labrador, where a man is as much out of both the world and contact with the heart of the company as it is possible to be. The military system was felt in that instance; but every man who accepts a commission engages to hold himself in readiness to go cheerfully to the north pole, or anywhere between Labrador and the Queen Charlotte Islands. However, to a man of Sir Donald's parts no obstacle is more than a temporary impediment. Though he stayed something like seventeen years in Labrador, he worked faithfully when there was work to do, and in his own time he read and studied voraciously. When the Riel rebellion--the first one--disturbed the country's peace, he appeared on the scene as commissioner for the Government. Next he became chief commissioner for the Hudson Bay Company. After a time he resigned that office to go on the board in London, and thence he stepped easily to the governorship. His parents, whose home was in Morayshire, Scotland, gave him at his birth, in 1821, not only a const.i.tution of iron, but that shrewdness which is only Scotch, and he afterwards developed remarkable fore-sight, and such a grasp of affairs and of complex situations as to amaze his a.s.sociates.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VOYAGEUR WITH TUMPLINE]

Of course his career is almost as singular as his gifts, and the governorship can scarcely be said to be the goal of the general ambition, for it has been most apt to go to a London man. Even ordinary promotion in the company is very slow, and it follows that most men live out their existence between the rank of clerk and that of chief factor.

There are 200 central posts, and innumerable dependent posts, and the officers are continually travelling from one to another, some in their districts, and the chief or supervising ones over vast reaches of country. In winter, when dogs and sleds are used, the men walk, as a rule, and it has been nothing for a man to trudge 1000 miles in that way on a winter's journey. Roderick Macfarlane, who was cut off from the world up in the Mackenzie district, became an indefatigable explorer, and made most of his journeys on snow-shoes. He explored the Peel, the Liard, and the Mackenzie, and their surrounding regions, and went far within the Arctic Circle, where he founded the most northerly post of the company. By the regular packet from Calgary, near our border, to the northernmost post is a 3000-mile journey. Macfarlane was fond of the study of ornithology, and cla.s.sified and catalogued all the birds that reach the frozen regions.

I heard of a factor far up on the east side of Hudson Bay who reads his daily newspaper every morning with his coffee--but of course such an instance is a rare one. He manages it by having a complete set of the London _Times_ sent to him by each winter's packet, and each morning the paper of that date in the preceding year is taken from the bundle by his servant and dampened, as it had been when it left the press, and spread by the factor's plate. Thus he gets for half an hour each day a taste of his old habit and life at home.

There was another factor who developed artistic capacity, and spent his leisure at drawing and painting. He did so well that he ventured many sketches for the ill.u.s.trated papers of London, some of which were published.

The half-breed has developed with the age and growth of Canada. There are now half-breeds and half-breeds, and some of them are t.i.tled, and others hold high official places. It occurred to an English lord not long ago, while he was being entertained in a Government house in one of the parts of newer Canada, to inquire of his host, "What are these half-breeds I hear about? I should like to see what one looks like." His host took the n.o.bleman's breath away by his reply. "I am one," said he.

There is no one who has travelled much in western Canada who has not now and then been entertained in homes where either the man or woman of the household was of mixed blood, and in such homes I have found a high degree of refinement and the most polished manners. Usually one needs the information that such persons possess such blood. After that the peculiar black hair and certain facial features in the subject of such gossip attest the truthfulness of the a.s.sertion. There is no rule for measuring the character and quality of this plastic, receptive, and often very ambitious element in Canadian society, yet one may say broadly that the social position and attainments of these people have been greatly influenced by the nationality of their fathers. For instance, the French _habitants_ and woodsmen far, far too often sank to the level of their wives when they married Indian women. Light-hearted, careless, unambitious, and drifting to the wilderness because of the absence of restraint there; illiterate, of coa.r.s.e origin, fond of whiskey and gambling--they threw off superiority to the Indian, and evaded responsibility and concern in home management. Of course this is not a rule, but a tendency. On the other hand, the Scotch and English forced their wives up to their own standards. Their own home training, respect for more than the forms of religion, their love of home and of a permanent patch of ground of their own--all these had their effect, and that has been to rear half-breed children in proud and comfortable homes, to send them to mix with the children of cultivated persons in old communities, and to fit them with pride and ambition and cultivation for an equal start in the journey of life. Possessing such foundation for it, the equality has happily never been denied to them in Canada.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VOYAGEURS IN CAMP FOR THE NIGHT]

To-day the service is very little more inviting than in the olden time.

The loneliness and removal from the touch of civilization remain throughout a vast region; the arduous journeys by sled and canoe remain; the dangers of flood and frost are undiminished. Unfortunately, among the changes made by time, one is that which robs the present factor's surroundings of a great part of that which was most picturesque. Of all the prettinesses of the Indian costuming one sees now only a trace here and there in a few tribes, while in many the moccasin and tepee, and in some only the moccasin, remain. The birch-bark canoe and the snow-shoe are the main reliance of both races, but the steamboat has been impressed into parts of the service, and most of the descendants of the old-time _voyageur_ preserve only his worsted belt, his knife, and his cap and moccasins at the utmost. In places the _engage_ has become a mere deck-hand. His scarlet paddle has rotted away; he no longer awakens the echoes of forest or canon with _chansons_ that died in the throats of a generation that has gone. In return, the horrors of intertribal war and of a precarious foothold among fierce and turbulent bands have nearly vanished; but there was a spice in them that added to the fascination of the service.

The dogs and sleds form a very interesting part of the Hudson Bay outfit. One does not need to go very deep into western Canada to meet with them. As close to our centre of population as Nipigon, on Lake Superior, the only roads into the north are the rivers and lakes, traversed by canoes in summer and sleds in winter. The dogs are of a peculiar breed, and are called "huskies"--undoubtedly a corruption of the word Esquimaux. They preserve a closer resemblance to the wolf than any of our domesticated dogs, and exhibit their kinship with that scavenger of the wilderness in their nature as well as their looks.

To-day their females, if tied and left in the forest, will often attest companionship with its denizens by bringing forth litters of wolfish progeny. Moreover, it will not be necessary to feed all with whom the experiment is tried, for the wolves will be apt to bring food to them as long as they are thus neglected by man. They are often as large as the ordinary Newfoundland dog, but their legs are shorter, and even more hairy, and the hair along their necks, from their shoulders to their skulls, stands erect in a thick, bristling ma.s.s. They have the long snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves, and their cry is a yelp rather than a bark. Like wolves they are apt to yelp in chorus at sunrise and at sunset. They delight in worrying peaceful animals, setting their own numbers against one, and they will kill cows, or even children, if they get the chance. They are disciplined only when at work, and are then so surprisingly obedient, tractable, and industrious as to plainly show that though their nature is savage and wolfish, they could be reclaimed by domestication. In isolated cases plenty of them are. As it is, in their packs, their battles among themselves are terrible, and they are dangerous when loose. In some districts it is the custom to turn them loose in summer on little islands in the lakes, leaving them to hunger or feast according as the supply of dead fish thrown upon the sh.o.r.e is small or plentiful. When they are kept in dog quarters they are simply penned up and fed during the summer, so that the savage side of their nature gets full play during long periods. Fish is their princ.i.p.al diet, and stores of dried fish are kept for their winter food. Corn meal is often fed to them also. Like a wolf or an Indian, a "husky" gets along without food when there is not any, and will eat his own weight of it when it is plenty.

A typical dog-sled is very like a toboggan. It is formed of two thin pieces of oak or birch lashed together with buckskin thongs and turned up high in front. It is usually about nine feet in length by sixteen inches wide. A leather cord is run along the outer edges for fastening whatever may be put upon the sled. Varying numbers of dogs are harnessed to such sleds, but the usual number is four. Traces, collars, and backbands form the harness, and the dogs are hitched one before the other. Very often the collars are completed with sets of sleigh-bells, and sometimes the harness is otherwise ornamented with beads, ta.s.sels, fringes, or ribbons. The leader, or fore-goer, is always the best in the team. The dog next to him is called the steady dog, and the last is named the steer dog. As a rule, these faithful animals are treated harshly, if not brutally. It is a Hudson Bay axiom that no man who cannot curse in three languages is fit to drive them. The three profanities are, of course, English, French, and Indian, though whoever has heard the Northwest French knows that it ought to serve by itself, as it is half-soled with Anglo-Saxon oaths and heeled with Indian obscenity. The rule with whoever goes on a dog-sled journey is that the driver, or mock-pa.s.senger, runs behind the dogs. The main function of the sled is to carry the dead weight, the burdens of tent-covers, blankets, food, and the like. The men run along with or behind the dogs, on snow-shoes, and when the dogs make better time than horses are able to, and will carry between 200 and 300 pounds over daily distances of from 20 to 35 miles, according to the condition of the ice or snow, and that many a journey of 1000 miles has been performed in this way, and some of 2000 miles, the test of human endurance is as great as that of canine grit.

Men travelling "light," with extra sleds for the freight, and men on short journeys often ride in the sleds, which in such cases are fitted up as "carioles" for the purpose. I have heard an unauthenticated account, by a Hudson Bay man, of men who drove themselves, disciplining refractory or lazy dogs by simply pulling them in beside or over the dash-board, and holding them down by the neck while they thrashed them.

A story is told of a worthy bishop who complained of the slow progress his sled was making, and was told that it was useless to complain, as the dogs would not work unless they were roundly and incessantly cursed.

After a time the bishop gave his driver absolution for the profanity needed for the remainder of the journey, and thenceforth sped over the snow at a gallop, every stroke of the half-breed's long and cruel whip being sent home with a volley of wicked words, emphasized at times with peltings with sharp-edged bits of ice. Kane, the explorer, made an average of 57 miles a day behind these s.h.a.ggy little brutes. Milton and Cheadle, in their book, mention instances where the dogs made 140 miles in less than 48 hours, and the Bishop of Rupert's Land told me he had covered 20 miles in a forenoon and 20 in the afternoon of the same day, without causing his dogs to exhibit evidence of fatigue. The best time is made on hard snow and ice, of course, and when the conditions suit, the drivers whip off their snow-shoes to trot behind the dogs more easily. In view of what they do, it is no wonder that many of the Northern Indians, upon first seeing horses, named them simply "big dog."

But to me the performances of the drivers are the more wonderful. It was a white youth, son of a factor, who ran behind the bishop's dogs in the spurt of 40 miles by daylight that I mention. The men who do such work explain that the "lope" of the dogs is peculiarly suited to the dog-trot of a human being.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HUSKIE" DOGS ON THE FROZEN HIGHWAY]

A picture of a factor on a round of his outposts, or of a chief factor racing through a great district, will now be intelligible. If he is riding, he fancies that princes and lords would envy him could they see his luxurious comfort. Fancy him in a dog-cariole of the best pattern--a little suggestive of a burial casket, to be sure, in its shape, but gaudily painted, and so full of soft warm furs that the man within is enveloped like a chrysalis in a coc.o.o.n. Perhaps there are Russian bells on the collars of the dogs, and their harness is "Frenchified" with bead-work and ta.s.sels. The air, which fans only his face, is crisp and invigorating, and before him the lake or stream over which he rides is a sheet of virgin snow--not nature's winding-sheet, as those who cannot love nature have said, but rather a robe of beautiful ermine fringed and embroidered with dark evergreen, and that in turn flecked at every point with snow, as if bejewelled with pearls. If the factor chats with his driver, who falls behind at rough places to keep the sled from tipping over, their conversation is carried on at so high a tone as to startle the birds into flight, if there are any, and to shock the scene as by the greatest rudeness possible in that then vast, silent land. If silence is kept, the factor reads the prints of game in the snow, of foxes' pads and deer hoofs, of wolf splotches, and the queer hieroglyphics of birds, or the dots and troughs of rabbit-trailing. To him these are as legible as the Morse alphabet to telegraphers, and as important as stock quotations to the pallid men of Wall Street.

Suddenly in the distance he sees a human figure. Time was that his predecessors would have stopped to discuss the situation and its dangers, for the sight of one Indian suggested the presence of more, and the question came, were these friendly or fierce? But now the sled hurries on. It is only an Indian or half-breed hunter minding his traps, of which he may have a sufficient number to give him a circuit of ten or more miles away from and back to his lodge or village. He is approached and hailed by the driver, and with some pretty name very often--one that may mean in English "hawk flying across the sky when the sun is setting," or "blazing sun," or whatever. On goes the sled, and perhaps a village is the next object of interest; not a village in our sense of the word, but now and then a tepee or a hut peeping above the brush beside the water, the eye being led to them by the signs of slothful disorder close by--the rotting canoe frame, the bones, the dirty tattered blankets, the twig-formed skeleton of a steam bath, such as Indians resort to when tired or sick or uncommonly dirty, the worn-out snow-shoes hung on a tree, and the racks of frozen fish or dried meat here and there. A dog rushes down to the water-side barking furiously--an Indian dog of the currish type of paupers' dogs the world around--and this stirs the village pack, and brings out the squaws, who are addressed, as the trapper up the stream was, by some poetic names, albeit poetic license is sometimes strained to form names not at all pretty to polite senses, "All Stomach" being that of one dusky princess, and serving to indicate the lengths to which poesy may lead the untrammelled mind.

The sun sinks early, and if our traveller be journeying in the West and be a lover of nature, heaven send that his face be turned towards the sunset! Then, be the sky anything but completely storm-draped, he will see a sight so glorious that eloquence becomes a naked suppliant for alms beyond the gift of language when set to describe it. A few clouds are necessary to its perfection, and then they take on celestial dyes, and one sees, above the vanished sun, a blaze of golden yellow thinned into a tone that is luminous crystal. This is flanked by belts and b.r.e.a.s.t.s of salmon and ruby red, and all melt towards the zenith into a rose tone that has body at the base, but pales at top into a mere blush.

This I have seen night after night on the lakes and the plains and on the mountains. But as the glory of it beckons the traveller ever towards itself, so the farther he follows, the more brilliant and gaudy will be his reward. Beyond the mountains the valleys and waters are more and more enriched, until, at the Pacific, even San Francisco's shabby sand-hills stir poetry and reverence in the soul by their borrowed magnificence.

The travellers soon stop to camp for the night, and while the "breed"

falls to at the laborious but quick and simple work, the factor either helps or smokes his pipe. A sight-seer or sportsman would have set his man to bobbing for jack-fish or lake trout, or would have stopped a while to bag a partridge, or might have bought whatever of this sort the trapper or Indian village boasted, but, ten to one, this meal would be of bacon and bread or dried meat, and perhaps some flapjacks, such as would bring coin to a doctor in the city, but which seem ethereal and delicious in the wilderness, particularly if made half an inch thick, saturated with grease, well browned, and eaten while at the temperature and consistency of molten lava.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FACTOR'S FANCY TOBOGGAN]

The sled is pulled up by the bank, the ground is cleared for a fire, wood and brush are cut, and the deft laborer starts the flame in a tent-like pyramid of kindlings no higher or broader than a teacup. This tiny fire he spreads by adding fuel until he has constructed and led up to a conflagration of logs as thick as his thighs, cleverly planned with a backlog and glowing fire bed, and a sapling bent over the hottest part to hold a pendent kettle on its tip. The dogs will have needed disciplining long before this, and if the driver be like many of his kind, and works himself into a fury, he will not hesitate to seize one and send his teeth together through its hide after he has beaten it until he is tired. The point of order having thus been raised and carried, the s.h.a.ggy, often handsome, animals will be minded to forget their private grudges and quarrels, and, seated on their haunches, with their intelligent faces towards the fire, will watch the cooking intently. The pocket-knives or sheath-knives of the men will be apt to be the only table implement in use at the meal. Canada had reached the possession of seigniorial mansions of great character before any other knife was brought to table, though the ladies used costly blades set in precious and beautiful handles. To-day the axe ranks the knife in the wilderness, but he who has a knife can make and furnish his own table--and his house also, for that matter.

Supper over, and a gla.s.s of grog having been put down, with water from the hole in the ice whence the liquid for the inevitable tea was gotten, the night's rest is begun. The method for this varies. As good men as ever walked have asked nothing more cosey than a snug warm trough in the snow and a blanket or a robe; but perhaps this traveller will call for a shake-down of balsam boughs, with all the furs out of the sled for his covering. If nicer yet, he may order a low hollow chamber of three sides of banked snow, and a superstructure of crotched sticks and cross-poles, with canvas thrown over it. Every man to his quality, of course, and that of the servant calls for simply a blanket. With that he sleeps as soundly as if he were Santa Claus and only stirred once a year. Then will fall upon what seems the whole world the mighty hush of the wilderness, broken only occasionally by the hoot of an owl, the cry of a wolf, the deep thug of the straining ice on the lake, or the snoring of the men and dogs. But if the earth seems asleep, not so the sky. The magic shuttle of the aurora borealis is ofttimes at work up over that North country, sending its shifting lights weaving across the firmament with a tremulous brilliancy and energy we in this country get but pale hints of when we see the phenomenon at all. Flashing and palpitating incessantly, the rose-tinted waves and luminous white bars leap across the sky or dart up and down it in manner so fantastic and so forceful, even despite their shadowy thinness, that travellers have fancied themselves deaf to some seraphic sound that they believed such commotion must produce.

An incident of this typical journey I am describing would, at more than one season, be a meeting with some band of Indians going to a post with furs for barter. Though the bulk of these hunters fetch their quarry in the spring and early summer, some may come at any time. The procession may be only that of a family or of the two or more families that live together or as neighbors. The man, if there is but one group, is certain to be stalking ahead, carrying nothing but his gun. Then come the women, laden like pack-horses. They may have a sled packed with the furs and drawn by a dog or two, and an extra dog may bear a balanced load on his back, but the squaw is certain to have a spine-warping burden of meat and a battered kettle and a pappoose, and whatever personal property of any and every sort she and her liege lord own. Children who can walk have to do so, but it sometimes happens that a baby a year and a half or two years old is on her back, while a newborn infant, swaddled in blanket stuff, and bagged and tied like a Bologna sausage, surmounts the load on the sled. A more tatterdemalion outfit than a band of these pauperized savages form it would be difficult to imagine. On the plains they will have horses dragging travoises, dogs with travoises, women and children loaded with impedimenta, a colt or two running loose, the lordly men riding free, straggling curs a plenty, babies in arms, babies swaddled, and toddlers afoot, and the whole battalion presenting at its exposed points exhibits of torn blankets, raw meat, distorted pots and pans, tent, poles, and rusty traps, in all eloquently suggestive of an eviction in the slums of a great city.

I speak thus of these people not willingly, but out of the necessity of truth-telling. The Indian east of the Rocky Mountains is to me the subject of an admiration which is the stronger the more nearly I find him as he was in his prime. It is not his fault that most of his race have degenerated. It is not our fault that we have better uses for the continent than those to which he put it. But it is our fault that he is, as I have seen him, shivering in a cotton tepee full of holes, and turning around and around before a fire of wet wood to keep from freezing to death; furnished meat if he has been fierce enough to make us fear him, left to starve if he has been docile; taught, aye, forced to beg, mocked at by a religion he cannot understand, from the mouths of men who apparently will not understand him; debauched with rum, despoiled by the l.u.s.t of white men in every form that l.u.s.t can take. Ah, it is a sickening story. Not in Canada, do you say? Why, in the northern wilds of Canada are districts peopled by beggars who have been in such pitiful stress for food and covering that the Hudson Bay Company has kept them alive with advances of provisions and blankets winter after winter. They are Indians who in their strength never gave the Government the concern it now fails to show for their weakness. The great fur company has thus added generosity to its long career of just dealing with these poor adult children; for it is a fact that though the company has made what profit it might, it has not, in a century at least, cheated the Indians, or made false representations to them, or lost their good-will and respect by any feature of its policy towards them. Its relation to them has been paternal, and they owe none of their degradation to it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HALT OF A YORK BOAT BRIGADE FOR THE NIGHT]

I have spoken of the visits of the natives to the posts. There are two other arrivals of great consequence--the coming of the supplies, and of the winter mail or packet. I have seen the provisions and trade goods being put up in bales in the great mercantile storehouse of the company in Winnipeg--a store like a combination of a Sixth Avenue ladies' bazaar and one of our wholesale grocers' shops--and I have seen such weights of canned vegetables and canned plum-pudding and bottled ale and other luxuries that I am sure that in some posts there is good living on high days and holidays if not always. The stores are packed in parcels averaging sixty pounds (and sometimes one hundred), to make them convenient for handling on the portages--"for packing them over the carries," as our traders used to say. It is in following these supplies that we become most keenly sensible of the changes time has wrought in the methods of the company. The day was, away back in the era of the Northwest Company, that the goods for the posts went up the Ottawa from Montreal in great canoes manned by hardy _voyageurs_ in picturesque costumes, wielding scarlet paddles, and stirring the forests with their happy songs. The scene shifted, the companies blended, and the centre of the trade moved from old Fort William, close to where Port Arthur now is on Lake Superior, up to Winnipeg, on the Red River of the North. Then the Canadians and their cousins, the half-breeds, more picturesque than ever, and manning the great York boats of the Hudson Bay Company, swept in a long train through Lake Winnipeg to Norway House, and thence by a marvellous water route all the way to the Rockies and the Arctic, sending off freight for side districts at fixed points along the course.

The main factories on this line, maintained as such for more than a century, bear names whose very mention stirs the blood of one who knows the romantic, picturesque, and poetic history and atmosphere of the old company when it was the landlord (in part, and in part monopolist) of a territory that cut into our Northwest and Alaska, and swept from Labrador to Vancouver Island. Northward and westward, by waters emptying into Hudson Bay, the brigade of great boats worked through a region embroidered with sheets and ways of water. The system that was next entered, and which bore more nearly due west, bends and bulges with lakes and straits like a ribbon all curved and knotted. Thus, at a great portage, the divide was reached and crossed; and so the waters flowing to the Arctic, and one--the Peace River--rising beyond the Rockies, were met and travelled. This was the way and the method until after the Canadian Pacific Railway was built, but now the Winnipeg route is of subordinate importance, and feeds only the region near the west side of Hudson Bay. The Northern supplies now go by rail from Calgary, in Alberta, over the plains by the new Edmonton railroad. From Edmonton the goods go by cart to Athabasca Landing, there to be laden on a steamboat, which takes them northward until some rapids are met, and avoided by the use of a singular combination of bateaux and tramway rails. After a slow progress of fifteen miles another steamboat is met, and thence they follow the Athabasca, through Athabasca Lake, and so on up to a second rapids, on the Great Slave River this time, where oxen and carts carry them across a sixteen-mile portage to a screw steamer, which finishes the 3000-mile journey to the North. Of course the shorter branch routes, distributing the goods on either side of the main track, are still traversed by canoes and hardy fellows in the old way, but with shabby accessories of costume and spirit. These boatmen, when they come to a portage, produce their tomplines, and "pack" the goods to the next waterway. By means of these "lines" they carry great weights, resting on their backs, but supported from their skulls, over which the strong straps are pa.s.sed.

The winter mail-packet, starting from Winnipeg in the depth of the season, goes to all the posts by dog train. The letters and papers are packed in great boxes and strapped to the sleds, beside or behind which the drivers trot along, cracking their lashes and pelting and cursing the dogs. A more direct course than the old Lake Winnipeg way has usually been followed by this packet; but it is thought that the route _via_ Edmonton and Athabasca Landing will serve better yet, so that another change may be made. This is a small exhibition as compared with the brigade that takes the supplies, or those others that come plashing down the streams and across the country with the furs every year. But only fancy how eagerly this solitary semi-annual mail is waited for! It is a little speck on the snow-wrapped upper end of all North America. It cuts a tiny trail, and here and there lesser black dots move off from it to cut still slenderer threads, zigzagging to the side factories and lesser posts; but we may be sure that if human eyes could see so far, all those of the white men in all that vast tangled system of trading centres would be watching the little caravan, until at last each pair fell upon the expected missives from the throbbing world this side of the border.

VIII

CANADA'S EL DORADO

[Ill.u.s.tration]

There is on this continent a territory of imperial extent which is one of the Canadian sisterhood of States, and yet of which small account has been taken by those who discuss either the most advantageous relations of trade or that closer intimacy so often referred to as a possibility in the future of our country and its northern neighbor. Although British Columbia is advancing in rank among the provinces of the Dominion by reason of its abundant natural resources, it is not remarkable that we read and hear little concerning it. The people in it are few, and the knowledge of it is even less in proportion. It is but partially explored, and for what can be learned of it one must catch up information piecemeal from blue-books, the pamphlets of scientists, from tales of adventure, and from the less trustworthy literature composed to attract travellers and settlers.

It would severely strain the slender facts to make a sizable pamphlet of the history of British Columbia. A wandering and imaginative Greek called Juan de Fuca told his people that he had discovered a pa.s.sage from ocean to ocean between this continent and a great island in the Pacific. Sent there to seize and fortify it, he disappeared--at least from history. This was about 1592. In 1778 Captain Cook roughly surveyed the coast, and in 1792 Captain Vancouver, who as a boy had been with Cook on two voyages, examined the sound between the island and the main-land with great care, hoping to find that it led to the main water system of the interior. He gave to the strait at the entrance the nickname of the Greek, and in the following year received the transfer of authority over the country from the Spanish commissioner Bodega of Quadra, then established there. The two put aside false modesty, and named the great island "the Island of Vancouver and Quadra." At the time the English sailor was there it chanced that he met that hardy old homespun baronet Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first man to cross the continent, making the astonishing journey in a canoe manned by Iroquois Indians. The main-land became known as New Caledonia. It took its present name from the Columbia River, and that, in turn, got its name from the ship _Columbia_, of Boston, Captain Gray, which entered its mouth in 1792, long after the Spaniards had known the stream and called it the Oregon. The rest is quickly told. The region pa.s.sed into the hands of the fur-traders. Vancouver Island became a crown colony in 1849, and British Columbia followed in 1858. They were united in 1866, and joined the Canadian confederation in 1871. Three years later the province exceeded both Manitoba and Prince Edward Island in the value of its exports, and also showed an excess of exports over imports. It has a Lieutenant-governor and Legislative a.s.sembly, and is represented at Ottawa in accordance with the Canadian system. Its people have been more closely related to ours in business than those of any other province, and they entertain a warm friendly feeling towards "the States." In the larger cities the Fourth of July is informally but generally observed as a holiday.

British Columbia is of immense size. It is as extensive as the combination of New England, the Middle States and Maryland, the Virginias, the Carolinas, and Georgia, leaving Delaware out. It is larger than Texas, Colorado, Ma.s.sachusetts, and New Hampshire joined together. Yet it has been all but overlooked by man, and may be said to be an empire with only one wagon road, and that is but a blind artery halting in the middle of the country. But whoever follows this necessarily incomplete survey of what man has found that region to be, and of what his yet puny hands have drawn from it, will dismiss the popular and natural suspicion that it is a wilderness worthy of its present fate. Until the whole globe is banded with steel rails and yields to the plough, we will continue to regard whatever region lies beyond our doors as waste-land, and to fancy that every line of lat.i.tude has its own unvarying climatic characteristics. There is an opulent civilization in what we once were taught was "the Great American Desert," and far up at Edmonton, on the Peace River, farming flourishes despite the fact that it is where our school-books located a zone of perpetual snow. Farther along we shall study a country crossed by the same parallels of lat.i.tude that dissect inhospitable Labrador, and we shall discover that as great a difference exists between the two sh.o.r.es of the continent on that zone as that which distinguishes California from Ma.s.sachusetts. Upon the coast of this neglected corner of the world we shall see that a climate like that of England is produced, as England's is, by a warm current in the sea; in the southern half of the interior we shall discover valleys as inviting as those in our New England; and far north, at Port Simpson, just below the down reaching claw of our Alaska, we shall find such a climate as Halifax enjoys.

British Columbia has a length of 800 miles, and averages 400 miles in width. To whoever crosses the country it seems the scene of a vast earth-disturbance, over which mountains are scattered without system. In fact, however, the Cordillera belt is there divided into four ranges, the Rockies forming the eastern boundary, then the Gold Range, then the Coast Range, and, last of all, that partially submerged chain whose upraised parts form Vancouver and the other mountainous islands near the main-land in the Pacific. A vast valley flanks the south-western side of the Rocky Mountains, accompanying them from where they leave our North-western States in a wide straight furrow for a distance of 700 miles. Such great rivers as the Columbia, the Fraser, the Parsnip, the Kootenay, and the Finlay are encountered in it. While it has a lesser agricultural value than other valleys in the province, its mineral possibilities are considered to be very great, and when, as must be the case, it is made the route of communication between one end of the territory and the other, a vast timber supply will be rendered marketable.

The Gold Range, next to the westward, is not bald, like the Rockies, but, excepting the higher peaks, is timbered with a dense forest growth.

Those busiest of all British Columbian explorers, the "prospectors,"

have found much of this system too difficult even for their pertinacity.

But the character of the region is well understood. Here are high plateaus of rolling country, and in the mountains are glaciers and snow fields. Between this system and the Coast Range is what is called the Interior Plateau, averaging one hundred miles in width, and following the trend of that portion of the continent, with an elevation that grows less as the north is approached. This plateau is crossed and followed by valleys that take every direction, and these are the seats of rivers and watercourses. In the southern part of this plateau is the best grazing land in the province, and much fine agricultural country, while in the north, where the climate is more most, the timber increases, and parts of the land are thought to be convertible into farms. Next comes the Coast Range, whose western slopes are enriched by the milder climate of the coast; and beyond lies the remarkably tattered sh.o.r.e of the Pacific, lapped by a sheltered sea, verdant, indented by numberless inlets, which, in turn, are faced by uncounted islands, and receive the discharge of almost as many streams and rivers--a wondrously beautiful region, forested by giant trees, and resorted to by numbers of fish exceeding calculation and belief. Beyond the coast is the bold chain of mountains of which Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands are parts. Here is a vast treasure in that coal which our naval experts have found to be the best on the Pacific coast, and here also are traces of metals, whose value industry has not yet established.

It is a question whether this vast territory has yet 100,000 white inhabitants. Of Indians it has but 20,000, and of Chinese about 8000. It is a vast land of silence, a huge tract slowly changing from the field and pleasure-ground of the fur-trader and sportsman to the quarry of the miner. The Canadian Pacific Railway crosses it, revealing to the immigrant and the globe-trotter an unceasing panorama of grand, wild, and beautiful scenery unequalled on this continent. During a few hours the traveller sees, across the majestic canon of the Fraser, the neglected remains of the old Cariboo stage road, built under pressure of the gold craze. It demonstrated surprising energy in the baby colony, for it connected Yale, at the head of short steam navigation on the Fraser, with Barkerville, in the distant Cariboo country, 400 miles away, and it cost $500,000. The traveller sees here and there an Indian village or a "mission," and now and then a tiny town; but for the most part his eye scans only the primeval forest, lofty mountains, valleys covered with trees as beasts are with fur, cascades, turbulent streams, and huge sheltered lakes. Except at the stations, he sees few men. Now he notes a group of Chinamen at work on the railway; anon he sees an Indian upon a clumsy perch and searching the Fraser for salmon, or in a canoe paddling towards the gorgeous sunset that confronts the daily west-bound train as it rolls by great Shuswap Lake.

But were the same traveller out of the train, and gifted with the power to make himself ubiquitous, he would still be, for the most part, lonely. Down in the smiling bunch-gra.s.s valleys in the south he would see here and there the outfit of a farmer or the herds of a cattle-man.

A burst of noise would astonish him near by, in the Kootenay country, where the new silver mines are being worked, where claims have been taken up by the thousand, and whither a railroad is hastening. Here and there, at points out of sight one from another, he would hear the crash of a lumberman's axe, the report of a hunter's rifle, or the crackle of an Indian's fire. On the Fraser he would find a little town called Yale, and on the coast the streets and ambitious buildings and busy wharves of Vancouver would astonish him. Victoria, across the strait, a town of larger size and remarkable beauty, would give him company, and near Vancouver and Victoria the little cities of New Westminster and Nanaimo (lumber and coal ports respectively) would rise before him. There, close together, he would see more than half the population of the province.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN IMPRESSION OF SHUSWAP LAKE, BRITISH COLOMBIA]

Fancy his isolation as he looked around him in the northern half of the territory, where a few trails lead to fewer posts of the Hudson Bay Company, where the endless forests and mult.i.tudinous lakes and streams are cut by but infrequent paddles in the hands of a race that has lost one-third its numerical strength in the last ten years, where the only true homes are within the palisades or the unguarded log-cabin of the fur-trading agents, and where the only other white men are either washing sand in the river bars, driving the stages of the only line that penetrates a piece of the country, or are those queer devil-may-care but companionable Davy Crocketts of the day who are guides now and then, hunters half the time, placer-miners when they please, and whatever else there is a can for between-times!

A very strange sight that my supposit.i.tious traveller would pause long to look at would be the herds of wild horses that defy the Queen, her laws, and her subjects in the Lillooet Valley. There are thousands of them there, and over in the Nicola and Chilcotin country, on either side of the Fraser, north of Washington State. They were originally of good stock, but now they not only defy capture, but eat valuable gra.s.s, and spoil every horse turned out to graze. The newspapers aver that the Government must soon be called upon to devise means for ridding the valleys of this nuisance. This is one of those sections which promise well for future stock-raising and agricultural operations. There are plenty such. The Nicola Valley has been settled twenty years, and there are many cattle there, on numerous ranches. It is good land, but rather high for grain, and needs irrigation. The snowfall varies greatly in all these valleys, but in ordinary winters horses and cattle manage well with four to six weeks' feeding. On the upper Kootenay, a valley eight to ten miles wide, ranching began a quarter of a century ago, during the gold excitement. The "cow-men" raise grain for themselves there. This valley is 3000 feet high. The Okanagon Valley is lower, and is only from two to five miles wide, but both are of similar character, of very great length, and are crossed and intersected by branch valleys. The greater part of the Okanagon does not need irrigating. A beautiful country is the Kettle River region, along the boundary between the Columbia and the Okanagon. It is narrow, but flat and smooth on the bottom, and the land is very fine. Bunch-gra.s.s covers the hills around it for a distance of from four hundred to five hundred feet, and there timber begins. It is only in occasional years that the Kettle River Valley needs water. In the Spallumcheen Valley one farmer had 500 acres in grain last summer, and the most modern agricultural machinery is in use there. These are mere notes of a few among almost innumerable valleys that are clothed with bunch-gra.s.s, and that often possess the characteristics of beautiful parks. In many wheat can be and is raised, possibly in most of them. I have notes of the successful growth of peaches, and of the growth of almond-trees to a height of fourteen feet in four years, both in the Okanagon country.

The shooting in these valleys is most alluring to those who are fond of the sport. Caribou, deer, bear, prairie-chicken, and partridges abound in them. In all probability there is no similar extent of country that equals the valley of the Columbia, from which, in the winter of 1888, between six and eight tons of deer-skins were shipped by local traders, the result of legitimate hunting. But the forests and mountains are as they were when the white man first saw them, and though the beaver and sea-otter, the marten, and those foxes whose furs are coveted by the rich, are not as abundant as they once were, the rest of the game is most plentiful. On the Rockies and on the Coast Range the mountain-goat, most difficult of beasts to hunt, and still harder to get, is abundant yet. The "big-horn," or mountain-sheep, is not so common, but the hunting thereof is usually successful if good guides are obtained. The cougar, the grizzly, and the lynx are all plentiful, and black and brown bears are very numerous. Elk are going the way of the "big-horn"--are preceding that creature, in fact. Pheasants (imported), grouse, quail, and water-fowl are among the feathered game, and the river and lake fishing is such as is not approached in any other part of the Dominion. The province is a sportsman's Eden, but the hunting of big game there is not a venture to be lightly undertaken. It is not alone the distance or the cost that gives one pause, for, after the province is reached, the mountain-climbing is a task that no amount of wealth will lighten. And these are genuine mountains, by-the-way, wearing eternal caps of snow, and equally eternal deceit as to their distances, their heights, and as to all else concerning which a rarefied atmosphere can hocus-pocus a stranger. There is one animal, king of all the beasts, which the most unaspiring hunter may chance upon as well as the bravest, and that animal carries a perpetual chip upon its shoulder, and seldom turns from an encounter. It is the grizzly-bear. It is his presence that gives you either zest or pause, as you may decide, in hunting all the others that roam the mountains. Yet, in that hunter's dream-land it is the grizzly that attracts many sportsmen every year.

From the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company in Victoria I obtained the list of animals in whose skins that company trades at that station.

It makes a formidable catalogue of zoological products, and is as follows: Bears (brown, black, grizzly), beaver, badger, foxes (silver, cross, and red), fishers, martens, minks, lynxes, musk-rat, otter (sea or land), panther, racc.o.o.n, wolves (black, gray, and coyote), black-tailed deer, stags (a true stag, growing to the size of an ox, and found on the hills of Vancouver Island), caribou or reindeer, hares, mountain-goat, big-horn (or mountain-sheep), moose (near the Rockies), wood-buffalo (found in the north, not greatly different from the bison, but larger), geese, swans, and duck.

The British Columbian Indians are of such unprepossessing appearance that one hears with comparative equanimity of their numbering only 20,000 in all, and of their rapid shrinkage, owing princ.i.p.ally to the vices of their women. They are, for the most part, canoe Indians, in the interior as well as on the coast, and they are (as one might suppose a nation of tailors would become) short-legged, and with those limbs small and inclined to bow. On the other hand, their exercise with the paddle has given them a disproportionate development of their shoulders and chests, so that, being too large above and too small below, their appearance is very peculiar. They are fish-eaters the year around; and though some, like the Hydahs upon the coast, have been warlike and turbulent, such is not the reputation of those in the interior. It was the meat-eating Indian who made war a vocation and self-torture a dissipation. The fish-eating Indian kept out of his way. These short squat British Columbian natives are very dark-skinned, and have physiognomies so different from those of the Indians east of the Rockies that the study of their faces has tempted the ethnologists into extraordinary guessing upon their origin, and into a contention which I prefer to avoid. It is not guessing to say that their high check-bones and flat faces make them resemble the Chinese. That is true to such a degree that in walking the streets of Victoria, and meeting alternate Chinamen and Siwash, it is not always easy to say which is which, unless one proceeds upon the a.s.sumption that if a man looks clean he is apt to be a Chinaman, whereas if he is dirty and ragged he is most likely to be a Siwash.