Westward with the Prince of Wales Part 22

I don't suppose there have been many test cases of that kind in the whole of Canada, for certainly "the everyday people" everywhere have a cheerful and self-dependent look.

At Nelson the Prince embarked on another lake boat, the _Nasookin_, after congratulating rival bands, one of bra.s.s, and one (mainly boys) of bagpipes, on their tenacity in tune in the rain. Nelson gave him a very jolly send-off. The people managed to invade the quay in great numbers, and those who were daring clambered to the top of the freight cars standing on the wharf, the better to give him a cheer.

As the boat steamed out into the Kootenay River scores of the nattiest little gasoline launches flying flags escorted him for the first mile or so, chugging along beside the _Nasookin_, or falling in our wake in a bright procession of boats. Encouraged by the "movie" men they waved vigorously, and many good "shoots" of them were filmed.

At Balfour, where the narrow river, after pa.s.sing many homesteads of great charm nestling amid the greenery of the low sh.o.r.e that fringes the high mountains, turns into Kootenay Lake, the Prince went ash.o.r.e.

Here is a delightful chalet which was once an hotel, but is now a sanatorium for Canadian soldiers. Its position is idyllic. It stands above river and lake, with the fine mountains backing it, and across the river are high mountains.

Over these great slopes on this grey day clouds were gathered, crawling down the shoulders in billows, or blowing in odd and disconnected ma.s.ses and streamers. These odd ragged scarves and billows look like strayed sheep from the cloud fold, lost in the deep valleys that sit between the blue-grey mountain sides.

The Prince spent some time visiting the sanatorium, and chatting with the inmates, and then played golf on the course here. The C.P.R. were, meanwhile, indulging themselves in one of their habitual feats. The lakes make a gap in the line between Nelson, or rather Balfour siding, and Kootenay Landing at the head of the water. Over this water-jump the whole train, solid steel and weighing a thousand tons, was bodily carried.

Two great barges were used. The long cars were backed on to these with delicate skill--for the slightest waywardness of a heavy, all-steel car on a floating barge is a matter of danger, and each loaded barge was then taken up the lake by a tug grappled alongside.

At Kootenay Landing the delicate process was reversed, and all was carried out without mishap though it was a dark night, and the railwaymen had to work with the aid of searchlights. Kootenay Landing is, in itself, something of a wonder. In the dark, as we waited for the train to be made up, it seemed as solid as good hard land can make it. But as the big Canadian engine came up with the first car we felt our "earth" sway slightly, and in the beam of the big headlight we saw the reason. Kootenay Landing is a station in the air. It is built up on piles.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PRAIRIES AGAIN

I

In cold weather and through a snowfall that had powdered the slopes and foothills of the Rocky Mountains the Prince, on Thursday, October 2nd, reached the prairies again. Now he was travelling well to the south of his former journey on a line that ran just above the American border.

In this bleak and rolling land he was to call in the next two days at a series of small towns whose very names--McLeod, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Maple Creek, Swift Current, Moose Jaw and Regina--had in them a savour of the old, brave days when the Red Man was still a power, and settlers chose their names off-hand from local things.

McLeod, on the Old Man River, just escapes the foothills. It is prairies, a few streets, a movie "joint," an hotel and a golf course.

In McLeod we saw the dawn of the Mackinaw, or anyhow first saw the virtues of that strange coat which seems to have been adapted from the original of the Biblical Joseph by a Highland tailor. It is a thick, frieze garment, cut in Norfolk style. The colour is heroic red, or blue or mauve or cinnamon, over which black lines are laid in a plaid tracery.

We realized its value as a warmth-giver while we stood amid a crowd of them as the Prince received addresses. Among the crowd was a band of Blood Indians of the Blackfeet Tribe, whose complexions in the cold looked blue under their habitual brown-red. They had come to lay their homage before him and to present an Indian robe. The Prince shook hands and chatted with the chiefs as well as their squaws, and with the missionary who had spent his life among these Red Men, and had succeeded in mastering the four or five sounds that make up the Indian language.

We talked to an old chief upon whose breast were the large silver medals that Queen Victoria and King George had had specially struck for their Indian subjects. These have become signs of chieftainship, and are taken over by the new chief when he is elected by the tribesmen.

With this chief was his son, a fine, quiet fellow in the costume of the present generation of Indians, the cowboy suit. He had served all through the war in a Canadian regiment.

At Lethbridge, the next town, there was a real and full Indian ceremonial. Before a line of tepees, or Indian lodges, the Prince was received by the Chiefs of the Blood Tribe of the Blackfeet Nation, and elected one of them with the name of Mekastro, that is Red Crow.

This name is a redoubtable one in the annals of the Blackfeet. It has been held by their most famous chieftains and has been handed down from generation to generation. It was a Chief Red Crow who signed the Wolseley Treaty in '77. Upon his election the Prince was presented with an historic headdress of feathers and horns, a beautiful thing that had been worn by the great fighting leaders of the race.

There were gathered about the Prince in front of these tall, painted tepees many chiefs of strange, odd-sounding names. One of these immobile and aquiline men was Chief Shot on Both Sides, another Chief Weasel Fat, another Chief One Spot, another Chief Many White Horses.

They had a dignity and an unyielding calm, and if some of them wore befeathered bowler hats, instead of the sunray feathered headdress, it did not detract from their high austerity. Chief One Spot--"he whose voice can be heard three miles"--was a splendid and upright old warrior of eighty; he had not only been present at the historic treaty of '77, but had been one of the signatories.

The Prince chatted with these chiefs, while the Lethbridge people, who had shown extraordinary heartiness since the public welcome in the chief square of the town, crowded close around. While he was talking, the Prince asked if he could be shown the interior of one of the wigwams, and his brother, Chief Weasel Fat, took him to his own, over the door of which was painted rudely the emblem of the bald-headed eagle.

The wigwam is a fine airy home. Its canvas walls are supported by tall, leaning poles bound at the top. There is no need of a centre pole, and a wood fire burning on a circular hearth sent up a coil of smoke through the opening at the top of the poles.

The floor was strewn with bright soft rugs, on which squaws in vivid red robes were sitting, listening to all that was said with impa.s.sive faces. The walls were decorated with strips of warm cloth upon which had been sewn Indian figures and animals. The wide floor s.p.a.ce also held a rattanwork bed, musical instruments and the like; certainly it was a more comfortable and commodious place than its bell-tent shape would suggest.

Leaving the exhibition grounds, on which the encampment stood, the Prince pa.s.sed under an arch made of Indian clothes of white antelope skin, beads and feathers, and after reviewing the war veterans, went to the town ball that had been arranged in his honour.

Lethbridge is a mixture of the plain and the pit. It is a great grain centre, and there is no mistaking its prairie air, yet superimposed upon this is the atmosphere of, say, a Lancashire or Yorkshire mining town. Coal and other mines touch with a sense of dark industrial bustle the easy air of the plain town. It is a Labour town, and a force in Labour politics. That, of course, made not the slightest difference to its welcome; indeed, perhaps it tinged that greeting with a touch of independent heartiness that made it notable.

As a town it impresses with its vividity at once. That, indeed, is the quality of most Canadian cities. They capture one with their air of modernity and vivacity at first impact. True, one sometimes finds that the town that seemed great and bustling dwindles after a few fine streets into suburbs of dirt roadways, but one has been impressed. It may be very good window dressing, though, on the other hand, it is probably good planning which concentrates all the activity and interests of the town in the decisively main avenues.

II

Friday, October 3rd, saw the Prince visiting a string of three towns.

Medicine Hat was the first of these, an attractive, park-like place full of "pep." Medicine Hat's claim to fame beyond its name lies in the fact that, having discovered that it was sitting upon a vast subterranean reservoir of natural gas, it promptly harnessed it to its own use. Now, that elemental thing is in the control of humanity, and heats the town, and tamely drives the wheels of industry.

The outstanding ceremony was the way little boys suddenly took fright on a roof. In the middle of the town, beside the street, is a tall, thin standpipe, and this standpipe was to demonstrate a "shoot off" of the gas. Scores of small boys climbed on to the roofs of neighbouring sheds to see the fun. First there was a meek, submissive flame burning at the top of the pipe, and looking weak in the fine sunlight. Then, abruptly, the flame shot up a hundred feet, and there was a loud roaring. Not only was the roaring a terrifying thing, but the force of that rush of gas made the ground, the roof and the little boys tremble.

Little boys came off that roof in record time, and with such a clatter that the effort of the standpipe almost lost its place as a star turn.

This tremendous pressure is not habitual; it is, I believe, obtained by bursting a charge in one of the gas wells.

The Prince also saw the uses to which the gas was put in a big pottery mill. The kilns here were an incandescent ma.s.s of fire, the work of the easily controlled gas that does the work with a t.i.the of the labour and at a mere fraction of the cost necessitated by ordinary baking kilns.

Maple Creek and Swift Current were stepping-off places, with all their populations packed in the square about the station to give the Prince a hearty greeting. At Maple Creek the pretty daughters of the township were very much in evidence, and held His Royal Highness up with autograph alb.u.ms.

Moose Jaw, one of the few towns where a quaint name is traceable, for it is the creek where the white man mended the cart with a moose jaw-bone, which the Prince reached on the morning of October 4th, is a bigger town and proud of its position as a grain, food and machinery distributing centre for Southern Saskatchewan. In its station courtyard it had built up an admirable exhibit of its vegetables and fruit, its sides of bacon, its grain in ear, its porridge oats in packets, and its b.u.t.ter and cream in drums and churns; while chiefest of all it showed ramparts of some of the two million sacks of flour it handles annually. The whole of the exhibit was set in a moat of grain and potatoes.

The Prince went to the University Grounds, where a mighty crowd attended the welcoming ceremony, and where a wild and timeless waltz-quadrille of motors which straggled all-whither over the grounds, marked the attempts of people to locate and follow him when he drove away to the hospital and a big packing factory. At the packing plant he saw the whole process of handling meat, from the moment when cowboys in chaps drove the herd to the pens to the final jointing of the steer.

From Moose Jaw he went to Regina, which he reached that afternoon.

Regina is the capital of Saskatchewan, but an accidental capital.

Somewhere about 1880 it was decided to start itself in quite another place. Qu'Appelle, where there was a Hudson Bay Fort and the country was attractive, was the site chosen. And Qu'Appelle opened its mouth too wide--or, anyhow so the version of the story I was told goes. The land-owners there asked an outside number of million dollars, and the townplanners went to Pile o' Bones instead.

Pile o' Bones was a point near Wascana Lake where there had been a big slaughter of buffaloes. It was a point of no importance, but Canadians don't mind that sort of thing. When they make up their minds to build a city, a city arises. Regina arose, broad and bustling, a trifle chilly as becomes a city of the prairie, rather flat and not altogether attractive, yet purposeful.

It also gained another reason for regard by becoming the headquarters of the "Mounties," the Royal North-West Mounted Police, whose main barracks are here. We saw something of the discipline of that fine service in the way the big crowds were handled, for the Prince drove through the streets in the order and state of a London or New York pageant.

The Parliament Buildings are beautifully situated before a wide stretch of water. They are the semi-cla.s.sical, domed, white stone buildings of the design of those at Edmonton and other cities--a sort of standardized parliament building in fact. Before them, on the terraces and lawn that shelved down to the water, the big throng made a scene of quick beauty. There were ranks of pretty nurses, rank upon rank of khaki veterans, battalions of boy scouts mainly divorced from hats which were perpetually aloft on upraised and enthusiastic poles, aisles of sitting wounded whom the Prince shook hands with, and thick, supporting ma.s.ses of civilians. Lining this throng were unbending fillets of scarlet statues, the "Mounties" of the guard. And humanizing the whole were solid banks of school-children who sang and cheered at the right as well as the wrong moment.

The presentation of medals--one to a blinded doctor, who, led by a comrade, received the most poignant storm of cheers I have ever heard in my life--and a giant public reception finished that day's ceremonies. Sunday, October 5th, was a day of rest, and Monday was the day of the "Mounties."

The Prince showed a particular interest in his visit to the Headquarters of this splendid and romantic corps. The Royal North-West Mounted Police is a cla.s.sic figure in the history of the Empire. The day is now past when the lonely red rider of the wilds stood for the only token of awe and authority among Indian tribes and "bad men"

camps, but though that may be there are no more useful fellows than these smart and st.u.r.dy men, who, scarlet-coated, and with their Stetsons at a daring angle, add a dash of colour and bravery to the streets of Western Canada.

In his inspection the Prince saw the reason why the physique of the men should be so splendid and their nerve so sure. The training of the R.N.W.M.P. makes no appeal to the weakling of spirit or flesh. He saw their firm discipline. He saw them breaking in the bucking bronchos they had to ride. He saw them go through exhausting mounted tests.

His congratulations on their wonderful show were expressed with great warmth.

III

From Regina the Prince took a holiday. He went up to the sporting country near Qu'Appelle for duck and game shooting, spending from Monday, October 6th, until Friday, October 10th, there. This district abounds in duck, and the Prince and his staff had very fair sport.

During his stay the weather suddenly turned colder, the rivers froze over and snow fell. So sudden was the cold snap that one of those with the Prince was caught napping. He woke up to find that his false teeth were frozen into the solid block of ice that had been water the night before. He had to take the tooth gla.s.s to the kitchen of the house where he was staying, and thaw it before he could even articulate his emotions adequately.