Part 14

A very strange sight that my supposititious 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 grass, 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-grass 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-grass, 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, raccoon, 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 principally 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 assumption 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.

You will find that seven in ten among the more intelligent British Columbians conclude these Indians to be of Japanese origin. The Japanese current is neighborly to the province, and it has drifted Japanese junks to these shores. When the first traders visited the neighborhood of the mouth of the Columbia they found beeswax in the sand near the vestiges of a wreck, and it is said that one wreck of a junk was met with, and 12,000 pounds of this wax was found on her. Whalers are said to have frequently encountered wrecked and drifting junks in the eastern Pacific, and a local legend has it that in 1834 remnants of a junk with three Japanese and a cargo of pottery were found on the coast south of Cape Flattery. Nothing less than all this should excuse even a rudderless ethnologist for so cruel a reflection upon the Japanese, for these Indians are so far from pretty that all who see them agree with Captain Butler, the traveller, who wrote that "if they are of the Mongolian type, the sooner the Mongolians change their type the better."

The coast Indians are splendid sailors, and their dugouts do not always come off second best in racing with the boats of white men. With a primitive yet ingeniously made tool, like an adze, in the construction of which a blade is tied fast to a bent handle of bone, these natives laboriously pick out the heart of a great cedar log, and shape its outer sides into the form of a boat. When the log is properly hollowed, they fill it with water, and then drop in stones which they have heated in a fire. Thus they steam the boat so that they may spread the sides and fit in the crossbars which keep it strong and preserve its shape. These dugouts are sometimes sixty feet long, and are used for whaling and long voyages in rough seas. They are capable of carrying tons of the salmon or oolachan or herring, of which these people, who live as their fathers did, catch sufficient in a few days for their maintenance throughout a whole year. One gets an idea of the swarms of fish that infest those waters by the knowledge that before nets were used the herring and the oolachan, or candle-fish were swept into these boats by an implement formed by studding a ten-foot pole with spikes or nails. This was swept among the fish in the water, and the boats were speedily filled with the creatures that were impaled upon the spikes. Salmon, sea-otter, otter, beaver, marten, bear, and deer (or caribou or moose) were and still are the chief resources of most of the Indians. Once they sold the fish and the peltry to the Hudson Bay Company, and ate what parts or surplus they did not sell. Now they work in the canneries or fish for them in summer, and hunt, trap, or loaf the rest of the time. However, while they still fish and sell furs, and while some are yet as their fathers were, nearly all the coast Indians are semi-civilized. They have at least the white man's clothes and hymns and vices. They have churches; they live in houses; they work in canneries. What little there was that was picturesque about them has vanished only a few degrees faster than their own extinction as a pure race, and they are now a lot of longshoremen. What Mr. Duncan did for them in Metlakahtla--especially in housing the families separately--has not been arrived at even in the reservation at Victoria, where one may still see one of the huge, low, shed-like houses they prefer, ornamented with totem poles, and arranged for eight families, and consequently for a laxity of morals for which no one can hold the white man responsible.

They are a tractable people, and take as kindly to the rudiments of civilization, to work, and to co-operation with the whites as the plains Indian does to tea, tobacco, and whiskey. They are physically but not mentally inferior to the plainsman. They carve bowls and spoons of stone and bone, and their heraldic totem poles are cleverly shapen, however grotesque they may be. They still make them, but they oftener carve little ones for white people, just as they make more silver bracelets for sale than for wear. They are clever at weaving rushes and cedar bark into mats, baskets, floor-cloths, and cargo covers. In a word, they were more prone to work at the outset than most Indians, so that the present longshore career of most of them is not greatly to be wondered at.

To anyone who threads the vast silent forests of the interior, or journeys upon the trafficless waterways, or, gun in hand, explores the mountains for game, the infrequency with which Indians are met becomes impressive. The province seems almost unpeopled. The reason is that the majority of the Indians were ever on the coast, where the water yielded food at all times and in plenty. The natives of the interior were not well fed or prosperous when the first white men found them, and since then small-pox, measles, vice, and starvation have thinned them terribly. Their graveyards are a feature of the scenery which all travellers in the province remember. From the railroad they may be seen along the Fraser, each grave apparently having a shed built over it, and a cross rising from the earth beneath the shed. They had various burial customs, but a majority buried their dead in this way, with queerly-carved or painted sticks above them, where the cross now testifies to the work at the "missions." Some Indians marked a man's burial-place with his canoe and his gun; some still box their dead and leave the boxes on top of the earth, while others bury the boxes. Among the southern tribes a man's horse was often killed, and its skin decked the man's grave; while in the far north it was the custom among the Stickeens to slaughter the personal attendants of a chief when he died. The Indians along the Skeena River cremated their dead, and sometimes hung the ashes in boxes to the family totem pole. The Hydahs, the fierce natives of certain of the islands, have given up cremation, but they used to believe that if they did not burn a man's body their enemies would make charms from it. Polygamy flourished on the coast, and monogamy in the interior, but the contrast was due to the difference in the worldly wealth of the Indians. Wives had to be bought and fed, and the woodsmen could only afford one apiece.

To return to their canoes, which most distinguish them. When a dugout is hollowed and steamed, a prow and stern are added of separate wood. The prow is always a work of art, and greatly beautifies the boat. It is in form like the breast, neck, and bill of a bird, but the head is intended to represent that of a savage animal, and is so painted. A mouth is cut into it, ears are carved on it, and eyes are painted on the sides; bands of gay paint are put upon the neck, and the whole exterior of the boat is then painted red or black, with an ornamental line of another color along the edge or gunwale. The sailors sit upon the bottom of the boat, and propel it with paddles. Upon the water these swift vessels, with their fierce heads uplifted before their long, slender bodies, appear like great serpents or nondescript marine monsters, yet they are pretty and graceful withal. While still holding aloof from the ethnologists' contention, I yet may add that a bookseller in Victoria came into the possession of a packet of photographs taken by an amateur traveller in the interior of China, and on my first visit to the province, nearly four years ago, I found, in looking through these views, several Chinese boats which were strangely and remarkably like the dugouts of the provincial Indians. They were too small in the pictures for it to be possible to decide whether they were built up or dug out, but in general they were of the same external appearance, and each one bore the upraised animal-head prow, shaped and painted like those I could see one block away from the bookseller's shop in Victoria. But such are not the canoes used by the Indians of the interior. From the Kootenay near our border to the Cassiar in the far north, a cigar-shaped canoe seems to be the general native vehicle. These are sometimes made of a sort of scroll of bark, and sometimes they are dugouts made of cotton-wood logs. They are narrower than either the cedar dugouts of the coast or the birch-bark canoes of our Indians, but they are roomy, and fit for the most dangerous and deft work in threading the rapids which everywhere cut up the navigation of the streams of the province into separated reaches. The Rev. Dr. Gordon, in his notes upon a journey in this province, likens these canoes to horse-troughs, but those I saw in the Kootenay country were of the shape of those cigars that are pointed at both ends.

Whether these canoes are like any in Tartary or China or Japan, I do not know. My only quest for special information of that character proved disappointing. One man in a city of British Columbia is said to have studied such matters more deeply and to more purpose than all the others, but those who referred me to him cautioned me that he was eccentric.

"You don't know where these Indians came from, eh?" the _savant_ replied to my first question. "Do you know how oyster-shells got on top of the Rocky Mountains? You don't, eh? Well, I know a woman who went to a dentist's yesterday to have eighteen teeth pulled. Do you know why women prefer artificial teeth to those which God has given them? You don't, eh? Why, man, you don't know anything."

While we were--or he was--conversing, a laboring-man who carried a sickle came to the open door, and was asked what he wanted.

"I wish to cut your thistles, sir," said he.

"Thistles?" said the _savant_, disturbed at the interruption. "---- the thistles! We are talking about Indians."

Nevertheless, when the laborer had gone, he had left the subject of thistles uppermost in the _savant's_ mind, and the conversation took so erratic a turn that it might well have been introduced hap-hazard into _Tristram Shandy_.

"About thistles," said the _savant_, laying a gentle hand upon my knee. "Do you know that they are the Scotchmen's totems? Many years ago a Scotchman, sundered from his native land, must needs set up his totem, a thistle, here in this country; and now, sir, the thistle is such a curse that I am haled up twice a year and fined for having them in my yard."

But nearly enough has been here said of the native population. Though the Indians boast dozens of tribal names, and almost every island on the coast and village in the interior seems the home of a separate tribe, they will be found much alike--dirty, greasy, sore-eyed, short-legged, and with their unkempt hair cut squarely off, as if a pot had been upturned over it to guide the operation. The British Columbians do not bother about their tribal divisions, but use the old traders' Chinook terms, and call every male a "siwash" and every woman a "klootchman."

Since the highest Canadian authority upon the subject predicts that the northern half of the Cordilleran ranges will admit of as high a metalliferous development as that of the southern half in our Pacific States, it is important to review what has been done in mining, and what is thought of the future of that industry in the province. It may almost be said that the history of gold-mining there is the history of British Columbia. Victoria, the capital, was a Hudson Bay post established in 1843, and Vancouver, Queen Charlotte's, and the other islands, as well as the main-land, were of interest to only a few white men as parts of a great fur-trading field with a small Indian population. The first nugget of gold was found at what is now called Gold Harbor, on the west coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands, by an Indian woman, in 1851. A part of it, weighing four or five ounces, was taken by the Indians to Fort Simpson and sold. The Hudson Bay Company, which has done a little in every line of business in its day, sent a brigantine to the spot, and found a quartz vein traceable eighty feet, and yielding a high percentage of gold. Blasting was begun, and the vessel was loaded with ore; but she was lost on the return voyage. An American vessel, ashore at Esquimault, near Victoria, was purchased, renamed the _Recovery_, and sent to Gold Harbor with thirty miners, who worked the vein until the vessel was loaded and sent to England. News of the mine travelled, and in another year a small fleet of vessels came up from San Francisco; but the supply was seen to be very limited, and after $20,000 in all had been taken out, the field was abandoned.

In 1855 gold was found by a Hudson Bay Company's employe at Fort Colville, now in Washington State, near the boundary. Some Thompson River (B. C.) Indians who went to Walla Walla spread a report there that gold, like that discovered at Colville, was to be found in the valley of the Thompson. A party of Canadians and half-breeds went to the region referred to, and found placers nine miles above the mouth of the river. By 1858 the news and the authentication of it stirred the miners of California, and an astonishing invasion of the virgin province began. It is said that in the spring of 1858 more than twenty thousand persons reached Victoria from San Francisco by sea, distending the little fur-trading post of a few hundred inhabitants into what would even now be called a considerable city; a city of canvas, however. Simultaneously a third as many miners made their way to the new province on land. But the land was covered with mountains and dense forests, the only route to its interior for them was the violent, almost boiling, Fraser River, and there was nothing on which the lives of this horde of men could be sustained. By the end of the year out of nearly thirty thousand adventurers only a tenth part remained. Those who did stay worked the river bars of the lower Fraser until in five months they had shipped from Victoria more than half a million dollars' worth of gold. From a historical point of view it is a peculiar coincidence that in 1859, when the attention of the world was thus first attracted to this new country, the charter of the Hudson Bay Company expired, and the territory passed from its control to become like any other crown colony.

In 1860 the gold-miners, seeking the source of the "flour" gold they found in such abundance in the bed of the river, pursued their search into the heart and almost the centre of that forbidding and unbroken territory. The Quesnel River became the seat of their operations. Two years later came another extraordinary immigration. This was not surprising, for 1500 miners had in one year (1861) taken out $2,000,000 in gold-dust from certain creeks in what is called the Cariboo District, and one can imagine (if one does not remember) what fabulous tales were based upon this fact. The second stampede was of persons from all over the world, but chiefly from England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. After that there were new "finds" almost every year, and the miners worked gradually northward until, about 1874, they had travelled through the province, in at one end and out at the other, and were working the tributaries of the Yukon River in the north, beyond the 60th parallel. Mr. Dawson estimates that the total yield of gold between 1858 and 1888 was $54,108,804; the average number of miners employed each year was 2775, and the average earnings per man per year were $622.

In his report, published by order of Parliament, Mr. Dawson says that while gold is so generally distributed over the province that scarcely a stream of any importance fails to show at least "colors" of the metal, the principal discoveries clearly indicate that the most important mining districts are in the systems of mountains and high plateaus lying to the south-west of the Rocky Mountains and parallel in direction with them.