On Canada's Frontier Part 10

To this rule, as here laid down, there are some notable exceptions. One particular tree, called there the bull-pine--it is the pine of Lake Superior and the East--grows to great size all over the province. It is a common thing to find the trunks of these trees measuring four feet in diameter, or nearly thirteen feet in circ.u.mference. It is not especially valuable for timber, because it is too sappy. It is short-lived when exposed to the weather, and is therefore not in demand for railroad work; but for the ordinary uses to which builders put timber it answers very well.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE POTLATCH]

There is a maple which attains great size at the coast, and which, when dressed, closely resembles bird's-eye-maple. It is called locally the vine-maple. The trees are found with a diameter of two-and-a-half to three feet, but the trunks seldom rise above forty or fifty feet. The wood is crooked. It runs very badly. This, of course, is what gives it the beautiful grain it possesses, and which must, sooner or later, find a ready market for it. There is plenty of hemlock in the province, but it is nothing like so large as that which is found in the East, and its bark is not so thick. Its size renders it serviceable for nothing larger than railway ties, and the trees grow in such inaccessible places, half-way up the mountains, that it is for the most part unprofitable to handle it. The red cedars--the wood of which is consumed in the manufacture of pencils and cigar-boxes--are also small. On the other hand, the white cedar reaches enormous sizes, up to fifteen feet of thickness at the base, very often. It is not at all extraordinary to find these cedars reaching 200 feet above the ground, and one was cut at Port Moody, in clearing the way for the railroad, that had a length of 310 feet. When fire rages in the provincial forests, the wood of these trees is what is consumed, and usually the trunks, hollow and empty, stand grimly in their places after the fire would otherwise have been forgotten. These great tubes are often of such dimensions that men put windows and doors in them and use them for dwellings. In the valleys are immense numbers of poplars of the common and cottonwood species, white birch, alder, willow, and yew trees, but they are not estimated in the forest wealth of the province, because of the expense that marketing them would entail.

This fact concerning the small timber indicates at once the primitive character of the country, and the vast wealth it possesses in what might be called heroic timber--that is, sufficiently valuable to force its way to market even from out that unopened wilderness. It was the opinion of the engineer to whom I have referred that timber land which does not attract the second glance of a prospector in British Columbia would be considered of the first importance in Maine and New Brunswick. To put it in another way, river-side timber land which in those countries would fetch fifty dollars the acre solely for its wood, in British Columbia would not be taken up. In time it may be cut, undoubtedly it must be, when new railroads alter its value, and therefore it is impossible even roughly to estimate the value of the provincial forests.

A great business is carried on in the s.h.i.+pment of ninety-foot and one-hundred-foot Douglas fir sticks to the great car-building works of our country and Canada. They are used in the ma.s.sive bottom frames of palace cars. The only limit that has yet been reached in this industry is not in the size of the logs, but in the capacities of the saw-mills, and in the possibilities of transportation by rail, for these logs require three cars to support their length. Except for the valleys, the whole vast country is enormously rich in this timber, the mountains (excepting the Rockies) being clothed with it from their bases to their tops. Vancouver Island is a heavily and valuably timbered country. It bears the same trees as the main-land, except that it has the oak-tree, and does not possess the tamarack. The Vancouver Island oaks do not exceed two or two-and-a-half feet in diameter. The Douglas fir (our Oregon pine) grows to tremendous proportions, especially on the north end of the island. In the old offices of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Vancouver are panels of this wood that are thirteen feet across, showing that they came from a tree whose trunk was forty feet in circ.u.mference. Tens of thousands of these firs are from eight to ten feet in diameter at the bottom.

Other trees of the province are the great silver-fir, the wood of which is not very valuable; Englemann's spruce, which is very like white spruce, and is very abundant; balsam-spruce, often exceeding two feet in diameter; the yellow or pitch pine; white pine; yellow cypress; crab-apple, occurring as a small tree or shrub; western birch, common in the Columbia region; paper or canoe birch, found sparingly on Vancouver Island and on the lower Fraser, but in abundance and of large size in the Peace River and upper Fraser regions; dogwood, arbutus, and several minor trees. Among the shrubs which grow in abundance in various districts or all over the province are the following: hazel, red elder, willow, barberry, wild red cherry, blackberry, yellow plum, choke-cherry, raspberry, gooseberry, bearberry, currant, and s...o...b..rry, mooseberry, bilberry, cranberry, whortleberry, mulberry, and blueberry.

I would have liked to write at length concerning the enterprising cities of the province, but, after all, they may be trusted to make themselves known. It is the region behind them which most interests mankind, and the Government has begun, none too promptly, a series of expeditions for exploiting it. As for the cities, the chief among them and the capital, Victoria, has an estimated population of 22,000. Its business district wears a prosperous, solid, and attractive appearance, and its detached dwellings--all of frame, and of the distinctive type which marks the houses of the California towns--are surrounded by gardens. It has a beautiful but inadequate harbor; yet in a few years it will have spread to Esquimault, now less than two miles distant. This is now the seat of a British admiralty station, and has a splendid haven, whose water is of a depth of from six to eight fathoms. At Esquimault are government offices, churches, schools, hotels, stores, a naval "canteen," and a dry-dock 450 feet long, 26 feet deep, and 65 feet wide at its entrance.

The electric street railroad of Victoria was extended to Esquimault in the autumn of 1890. Of the climate of Victoria Lord Lorne said, "It is softer and more constant than that of the south of England."

Vancouver, the princ.i.p.al city of the main-land, is slightly smaller than Victoria, but did not begin to displace the forest until 1886. After that every house except one was destroyed by fire. To-day it boasts a hotel comparable in most important respects with any in Canada, many n.o.ble business buildings of brick or stone, good schools, fine churches, a really great area of streets built up with dwellings, and a notable system of wharves, warehouses, etc. The Canadian Pacific Railway terminates here, and so does the line of steamers for China and j.a.pan.

The city is picturesquely and healthfully situated on an arm of Burrard Inlet, has gas, water, electric lights, and shows no sign of halting its. .h.i.therto rapid growth. Of New Westminster, Nanaimo, Yale, and the still smaller towns, there is not opportunity here for more than naming.

In the original settlements in that territory a peculiar inst.i.tution occasioned gala times for the red men now and then. This was the "potlatch," a thing to us so foreign, even in the impulse of which it is begotten, that we have no word or phrase to give its meaning. It is a feast and merrymaking at the expense of some man who has earned or saved what he deems considerable wealth, and who desires to distribute every iota of it at once in edibles and drinkables among the people of his tribe or village. He does this because he aspires to a chieftains.h.i.+p, or merely for the credit of a "potlatch"--a high distinction. Indians have been known to throw away such a sum of money that their "potlatch" has been given in a huge shed built for the feast, that hundreds have been both fed and made drunk, and that blankets and ornaments have been distributed in addition to the feast.

The custom has a new significance now. It is the white man who is to enjoy a greater than all previous potlatches in that region. The treasure has been garnered during the ages by time or nature or whatsoever you may call the host, and the province itself is offered as the feast.

IX

DAN DUNN'S OUTFIT

At Revelstoke, 380 miles from the Pacific Ocean, in British Columbia, a small white steamboat, built on the spot, and exposing a single great paddle-wheel at her stern, was waiting to make another of her still few trips through a wilderness that, but for her presence, would be as completely primitive as almost any in North America. Her route lay down the Columbia River a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles to a point called Sproat's Landing, where some rapids interrupt navigation.

The main load upon the steamer's deck was of steel rails for a railroad that was building into a new mining region in what is called the Kootenay District, just north of our Was.h.i.+ngton and Idaho. The sister range to the Rockies, called the Selkirks, was to be crossed by the new highway, which would then connect the valley of the Columbia with the Kootenay River. There was a temptation beyond the mere chance to join the first throng that pushed open a gateway and began the breaking of a trail in a brand-new country. There was to be witnessed the propulsion of civilization beyond old confines by steam-power, and this required railroad building in the Rockies, where that science finds its most formidable problems. And around and through all that was being done pressed a new population, made up of many of the elements that produced our old-time border life, and gave birth to some of the most picturesque and exciting chapters in American History.

It should be understood that here in the very heart of British Columbia only the watercourses have been travelled, and there was neither a settlement nor a house along the Columbia in that great reach of its valley between our border and the Canadian Pacific Railway, except at the landing at which this boat stopped.

Over all the varying scene, as the boat ploughed along, hung a mighty silence; for almost the only life on the deep wooded sides of the mountains was that of stealthy game. At only two points were any human beings lodged, and these were wood-choppers who supplied the fuel for the steamer--a Chinaman in one place, and two or three white men farther on. In this part of its magnificent valley the Columbia broadens in two long loops, called the Arrow Lakes, each more than two miles wide and twenty to thirty miles in length. Their prodigious towering walls are densely wooded, and in places are snow-capped in midsummer. The forest growth is primeval, and its own luxuriance crowds it beyond the edge of the grand stream in the fretwork of fallen trunks and bushes, whose roots are bedded in the soft ma.s.s of centuries of forest debris.

Early in the journey the clerk of the steamer told me that wild animals were frequently seen crossing the river ahead of the vessel; bear, he said, and deer and elk and porcupine. When I left him to go to my state-room and dress for the rough journey ahead of me, he came to my door, calling in excited tones for me to come out on the deck. "There's a big bear ahead!" he cried, and as he spoke I saw the black head of the animal cleaving the quiet water close to the nearer sh.o.r.e. Presently Bruin's feet touched the bottom, and he bounded into the bush and disappeared.

The scenery was superb all the day, but at sundown nature began to revel in a series of the most splendid and spectacular effects. For an hour a haze had clothed the more distant mountains as with a transparent veil, rendering the view dream-like and soft beyond description. But as the sun sank to the summit of the uplifted horizon it began to lavish the most intense colors upon all the objects in view. The snowy peaks turned to gaudy prisms as of crystal, the wooded summits became impurpled, the nearer hills turned a deep green, and the tranquil lake a.s.sumed a bright pea-color. Above all else, the sky was gorgeous. Around its western edge it took on a rose-red blush that blended at the zenith with a deep blue, in which were floating little clouds of amber and of flame-lit pearl.

A moonless night soon closed around the boat, and in the morning we were at Sproat's Landing, a place two months old. The village consisted of a tiny cl.u.s.ter of frame-houses and tents perched on the edge of the steep bank of the Columbia. One building was the office and storehouse of the projected railroad, two others were general trading stores, one was the hotel, and the other habitations were mainly tents.

I firmly believe there never was a hotel like the hostlery there. In a general way its design was an adaptation of the plan of a hen-coop.

Possibly a box made of gridirons suggests more clearly the principle of its construction. It was two stories high, and contained about a baker's dozen of rooms, the main one being the bar-room, of course. After the framework had been finished, there was perhaps half enough "slab" lumber to sheathe the outside of the house, and this had been made to serve for exterior and interior walls, and the floors and ceilings besides. The consequence was that a flock of gigantic canaries might have been kept in it with propriety, but as a place of abode for human beings it compared closely with the Brooklyn Bridge.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN INDIAN CANOE ON THE COLUMBIA]

They have in our West many very frail hotels that the people call "telephone houses," because a tenant can hear in every room whatever is spoken in any part of the building; but in this house one could stand in any room and see into all the others. A clergyman and his wife stopped in it on the night before I arrived, and the good woman stayed up until nearly daylight, pinning papers on the walls and laying them on the floor until she covered a corner in which to prepare for bed.

I hired a room and stored my traps in it, but I slept in one of the engineers' tents, and met with a very comical adventure. The tent contained two cots, and a bench on which the engineer, who occupied one of the beds, had heaped his clothing. Supposing him to be asleep, I undressed quietly, blew out the candle, and popped into my bed. As I did so one pair of its legs broke down, and it naturally occurred to me, at almost the same instant, that the bench was of about the proper height to raise the fallen end of the cot to the right level.

"Broke down, eh?" said my companion--a man, by-the-way, whose face I have never yet seen.

"Yes," I replied. "Can I put your clothing on the floor and make use of that bench?"

"Aye, that you can."

So out of bed I leaped, put his apparel in a heap on the floor, and ran the bench under my bed. It proved to be a neat subst.i.tute for the broken legs, and I was quickly under the covers again and ready for sleep.

The engineer's voice roused me.

"That's what I call the beauty of a head-piece," he said. Presently he repeated the remark.

"Are you speaking to me?" I asked.

"Yes; I'm saying that's what I call the beauty of a head-piece. It's wonderful; and many's the day and night I'll think of it, if I live.

What do I mean? Why, I mean that that is what makes you Americans such a great people--it's the beauty of having head-pieces on your shoulders.

It's so easy to think quick if you've got something to think with. Here you are, and your bed breaks down. What would I do? Probably nothing.

I'd think what a beastly sc.r.a.pe it was, and I'd keep on thinking till I went to sleep. What do you do? Why, as quick as a flash you says, 'h.e.l.lo, here's a go!' 'May I have the bench?' says you. 'Yes,' says I.

Out of bed you go, and you clap the bench under the bed, and there you are, as right as a trivet. That's the beauty of a head-piece, and that's what makes America the wonderful country she is."

Never was a more sincere compliment paid to my country, and I am glad I obtained it so easily.

There was a barber pole in front of the house, set up by a "prospector"

who had run out of funds (and everything else except hope), and who, like all his kind, had stopped to "make a few dollars" wherewith to outfit again and continue his search for gold. He noted the local need of a barber, and instantly became one by purchasing a razor on credit, and painting a pole while waiting for custom. He was a jocular fellow--a born New Yorker, by-the-way.

"Don't shave me close," said I.

"Close?" he repeated. "You'll be the luckiest victim I've slashed yet if I get off any of your beard at all. How's the razor?"

"All right."

"Oh no, it ain't," said he; "you're setting your nerves to stand it, so's not to be called a tender-foot. I'm no barber. I expected to 'tend bar when I b.u.mped up agin this place. If you could see the blood streaming down your face you'd faint."

In spite of his self-depreciation, he performed as artistic and painless an operation as I ever sat through.

While I was being shaved the loungers in the barber-shop entered into a conversation that revealed, as nothing else could have disclosed it, the deadly monotony of life in that little town. A hen cackled out-of-doors, and the loungers fell to questioning one another as to which hen had laid an egg.

"It must be the black one," said the barber.

"Yet it don't exactly sound like old blacky's cackle," said a more deliberate and careful speaker.

"'Pears to me 's though it might be the speckled un," ventured a third.

"She ain't never laid no eggs," said the barber.

"Could it be the bantam?" another inquired.

Thus they discussed with earnestness this most interesting event of the morning, until a young man darted into the room with his eyes lighted by excitement.