Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 13

The fishing itself proved disappointing. The famous speckled trout of Nipigon did not rise to the occasion, and the sport was fair, but not extraordinary. The best day brought in twenty-seven fish, the largest being three and a half pounds, not a good specimen of the lake's trout, which go to six and eight pounds in the ordinary course of things.

And the disappointment had an irony of its own. The man who caught the most fish was the man who couldn't fish at all. The official photographer, who had gone solely to take snapshots, also took the maximum of fish out of the river. Indeed, he was so much of an amateur that the first fish he caught placed him in such a predicament that he did not play it, but landed it with so vigorous a jerk that it flew over his head and caught high in a fir. An Indian guide had to climb the tree to "land" it.

Nevertheless, he caught the most fish, and when he returned with his spoil, the Prince said to him:

"Look here, don't you realize I'm the one to do that? You're taking my place in the program."

The reason for the indifferent sport was probably the lateness of the season--it was practically finished when the Prince arrived--and the fact that Nipigon had had a record summer, with large parties of sportsmen working its reaches steadily all the time. The fish were certainly shy, particularly, it seemed, of fly, and the best catches were made with a small fish, a sort of bull-headed minnow called cocatoose, that creeps about close to the rocks.

Of course, trout, even if famous, are naturally temperamental. They will rise in dozens at unexpected times, just as they will refuse all temptations for weeks on end. An Englishman, and no mean fisherman, once went to Nipigon to show the local inhabitants how fishing should be done. A master in British waters, he considered the speckled monsters of the lakes fit victims for his rod and fly. He went out with his guides to catch fish, and after a few days among the big trout came back disgusted.

"Did you catch any trout?" he was asked by one of his party.

"Catch 'em," he snapped. "How can one catch 'em? The infernal things are anch.o.r.ed."

Walking and duck shooting was also in the program, and there were other excitements.

The weather, delightful during the first two days, broke on Sunday, and there were bad winds, rainstorms and occasional hailstorms, when stones as big as small pebbles drummed on the tents and bombarded the camp.

So fierce was the wind that the Royal Standard on a high flagstaff was carried away. A pine tree was also uprooted, and fell with a crash between the Prince's tent and that of one of his suite. A yard either way and the tent would have been crushed. Fortunately the Prince was not in the tent at that moment, but the happening gave the camp its sense of adventure.

During this rest, too, the Prince suffered a little from his eyes, an irritation caused by grains of steel that had blown into them while viewing the works at "Soo." His right hand was also painful from the heartiness of Toronto, and the knuckles swollen. To set these matters right, the doctor went up from the train, and by the Indian canoe that carried the mail and the daily news bulletin, reached the camp.

When he returned on Monday, September 8th, the Prince was looking undeniably fit. He marched up the railway from the lake in footer-shorts and golf jacket, with an air of one who had thoroughly enjoyed "roughing it."

II

While the Prince and his party were camping, the train remained in Nipigon, a tiny village set in complete isolation on the edge of the river and in the heart of the woods.

It is a little germ-culture of humanity cut off from the world. The only way out is, apparently, the railway, though, perhaps, one could get away by the boats that come up to load pulp wood, or by the petrol launches that scurry out on to Lake Superior and its waterside towns.

But the roads out of it, there appear to be none. Follow any track, and it fades away gently into the primitive bush.

It is a nest of loneliness that has carried on after its old office as a big fur collecting post--you see the original offices of Revillon Freres and the Hudson Bay Company standing today--has gone. Now it lives on lumber and the fishing, and one wonders what else.

Its tiny station, through which the Transcontinental trains thunder, is faced by a long, straggling green, and fringing the green is a row of wooden shops and houses equally straggling. They have a somnolent and spiritless air. Behind is a wedge of pretty dwellings stretching down to the river, tailing off into an Indian encampment by the stream, where, about dingy tepees, a dozen or so stoic children play.

There are three hundred souls in the village, mainly Finns and Indians become Canadians. They are not the Indians of Fenimore Cooper, but men who wear peaked caps, bright blouse shirts or sweaters, with broad yellow, blue and white stripes (a popular article of wear all over Canada), and women who wear the shin skirts and silks of civilization.

Only here and there one sees old squaw women, stout and brown and bent, with the plaid shawl of modernity making up for the moccasins of their ancient race.

Small though it is, or perhaps because it is so small and observable, Nipigon is an example of the amalgam from which the Canadian race is being fused. We went, for instance, to a dance given by the Finns in their varnished, brown-wood hall on the Sat.u.r.day night. It was an attractive and interesting evening. The whole of the village, without distinction, appeared to be there. And they mixed. Indian women in the silk stockings, high heels and glowing frocks of suburbia, danced (and danced well) with high cheek-boned, monosyllabic Finns in grey sweaters, workaday trousers and coats and bubble-toed boots. A vivid Canadian girl in semi-evening dress went round in the jazz with a guard of the Royal train. A policeman from the train danced with a Finnish girl, demure and well-dressed, who might have been anything from the leader of local Society to a clerk (i.e., a counter hand) in one of the shops. For all we knew, the plumber might have been dancing with the leading citizen's daughter, and the local Astor with the local dressmaker's a.s.sistant.

In any case, it didn't matter. In Canada they don't think about that sort of thing. They were all unconcerned and happy in the big, generous spirit of equality that makes Canada the home of one big family rather than the dwelling-place of different cla.s.ses and social grades. This fact was not new to us; naturally, we had seen and mixed with Canadians in hotels and on the street elsewhere. In those gathering-places of humanity, the hotels, we had lived with the big, jolly, homely crowds without social strata, who might very well have changed places with the waiters and the waiters with them without anybody noticing any difference. That would not have meant a loss of dignity to anybody. n.o.body has any use for social status in the Dominion, the only standard being whether a man is a "mixer" or not.

By way of a footnote, I might say that waiters, even as waiters, are on the way to take seats as guests, since, apparently, waiting is only an occupation a man takes up until he finds something worth while. Not unexpectedly Canadian waiting suffers through this.

What we had seen in the large towns, and in the large gregarious life of cities, we saw "close up" at Nipigon. The varied crowd, Finns, British, Canadian and Indian (one of the Indians, a young dandy, had served with distinction during the war, had married a white Canadian, and was one of the richest men present), danced without social distinctions in that pleasant hall to Finn folk-songs that had never been set down on paper played on an accordion. It was a delightful evening.

For the rest, those with the train fished (or, rather, went through all the ritual with little of the results), walked, bathed in the lake, watched the American "movie" men in their endeavours to convert the British to baseball, or endeavoured, with as little success, to convert the baseball "fans" to cricket. The recreations of Nipigon were not hectic, and we were glad to get on to towns and ma.s.sed life again.

I confess our view of Nipigon of the hundred houses was not that of the Indian boy who discussed it with us. He told us Nipigon was not the place for him.

"You wait," he said. "Next year I go. Next year I am fifteen. Then I go out into the woods. I go right away. I can't stand this city life."

III

Canada, on Monday, September 8th, demonstrated its amazing faculty for startling contrasts. It lifted the Prince from the primitive to the ultra-modern in a single movement. In the morning he was in the silent forests of Nipigon, a tract so wild that man seemed no nearer than a thousand miles. Three hours later he was moving amid the dense crowds that filled the streets of the latest word in industrial cities.

He stepped straight from Nipigon to the twin cities of Port Arthur and Fort William. These two cities are really one, and together form the great trade pool into which the traffic of the vast grain-bearing West and North-West pours for transport on the Great Lakes.

These two cities sprang from the little human nucleus made up of a Jesuit mission and a Hudson Bay Company depot of the old days. They stand on Thunder Bay, a deep-water sack thrusting out from Lake Superior under the slopes of flat-topped Thunder Cape. The situation is ideal for handling the trade of the great lake highway that swings the traffic through the heart of the Western continent.

Port Arthur and Fort William have seen their chances and made the most of them. They have constructed great wharves along the bay to accommodate a huge traffic. Over the wharves they have built up the greatest grain elevators in the world, not a few of them but a series, until the cities seemed to be inhabited solely by these giants. These elevators and stores collect and distribute the vast streams of grain that pour in from the prairies, at whose door the cities stand, distributing it across the lakes to the cities of America, or along the lakes to the Canadian East and the railways that tranship it to Europe.

On the quays are the towering lattices of patent derricks, forests of them, that handle coal and ore and cargoes of infinite variety. And the [Transcriber's note: word(s) possibly missing from source] derricks and the elevators are the uncannily long and lean lake freighters, ships with a tiny deck superstructure forward of a great rake of hold, and a tiny engine-house astern under the stack. And by these grain boats are the ore tramps and coal boats from Lake Erie, and cargo boats with paper pulp for England made in the big mills that turn the forests about Lake Superior into riches.

Not content with docking boats, the twin cities build them. They build with equal ease a 10,000-ton freighter, or a great sky-sc.r.a.ping tourist boat to ply between Canada and the American sh.o.r.es. And presently it will be sending its 10,000-tonners direct to Liverpool; they only await the deepening of the Welland Ca.n.a.l near Niagara before starting a regular service on this 4,000-mile voyage.

They are modern cities, indeed, that s.n.a.t.c.h every chance for wealth and progress, and use even the power that Nature gives in numerous falls to work their dynamos, and through them their many mills and factories.

And the marvel of these cities is that they are inland cities--inland ports thousands of miles from the nearest salt water.

These places gave the Prince the welcome of ardent twins. Their greeting was practically one, for though the train made two stops, and there were two sets of functions, there are only a few minutes'

train-time between them, and the greetings seemed of a continuous whole.

Port Arthur had the Prince first for a score of minutes, in which crowds about the station showed their welcome in the Canadian way. It was here we first came in touch with the "Mounties," the fine men of the Royal North-West Mounted Police, whose scarlet coats, jaunty stetsons, blue breeches and high tan boots set off the carriage of an excellently set-up body of men. They acted as escort while the Prince drove into the town to a charming collegiate garden, where the Mayor tried to welcome him formally.

Tried is the only word. How could Prince or Mayor be formal when both stood in the heart of a crowd so close together that when the Mayor read his address the doc.u.ment rested on the Prince's chest, while at the Prince's elbows crowded little boys and other distinguished citizens? Formal or not, it was very human and very pleasant.

Returning through the town, something went wrong with the procession.

Many of the automobiles forcing their way through the crowd to the train--which stood beside the street--found there was no Prince. We stood about asking what was happening and where it was happening.

After ten minutes of this an automobile driver strolled over from a car and asked "what was doing now?"

We consulted the programs and told him that the Prince was launching a ship.

"He is, is he?" said the driver without pa.s.sion. "Well, I've got members of the shipbuilding company and half the reception committee in my car."

In spite of that, the Prince launched a fine boat, that took the water broadside in the lake manner, before going on to Fort William.

Fort William had an immense crowd upon the green before the station, on the station, and even on the station buildings. Part of the crowd was made up of children, each one of them a representative of the nationalities that came from the Old World to find a new life and a new home in Canada. Each of them was dressed in his or her national costume, making an interesting picture.

There were twenty-four children, each of a different race, and the races ranged from France to Slovenia, from Persia to China and Syria.

There were negroes and Siamese and Czecho-Slovaks in this remarkable collection of elements from whose fusion Canada of today is being fashioned.

The Prince drove through the cheering streets of Fort William, and paid visits to some of the great industrial concerns, before setting out for Winnipeg and the wide-flung s.p.a.ces of the West.