CHAPTER V

The Farthest West

WERE all those good lives wasted, then, and the scores of good ships too, lost in three centuries of wild-goose chase?

But for that wild-goose chase, carried on by brave British sailors from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic, our Dominion of Canada, stretching from sea to sea, would never have come into existence. If we had not taken a vigorous part in the exploration of the Pacific coast, the Russians coming down from the north and Spaniards coming up from the south would between them have seized and held it all, till both their shares were swallowed up by our neighbors of the United States.

It has had a very curious history, this west coast of ours. To begin with, no one dreamed that there was any “west coast of America” at all, for the first explorers all thought America was simply an extension of Asia. Even when they got into the Pacific and sailed up the western shore of Mexico, they expected any day to see land barring their way and bending round to the left, so that, by following the coast, they would presently find themselves among the people of China. They were astonished at the land persistently keeping on their right, however far north they sailed.

In the days of Queen Elizabeth, only a year after Frobisher’s attempt to discover a channel through America in the North-west, his fellow-countryman Sir Francis Drake sailed round Cape Horn in the hope of finding the other end of that channel, which imaginative geographers had already drawn on the maps and called the “Straits of Anian.”

How far north Sir Francis got, nobody knows. Up to Oregon, for certain. The weather was bad, with “thick stinking fogs” and “nipping cold” in midsummer; so he turned back, resolved to encircle the globe by going home round Africa and India instead of around America. First, however, he landed in California, finding a “convenient harbour” which was probably San Francisco Bay. The natives were shivering under their furs, in July, but they gave the white men a warm welcome. In fact, the “King” or chief came “with a retinue of about 12,000 men,” “humbly desiring of Drake that he would accept of the Realm,”—putting a feather crown on his head, and three big chains of bone around his neck.

The great commander accepted the gift, took formal possession of the country in the English Queen’s name, and called it New Albion, as Albion was the old name of the Mother-land.

Nearly two hundred years passed before the first settlement on the Californian coast was made by Spanish missionaries from Mexico. That was in 1770. Farther north, not a white man was to be found when Captain Cook arrived on his famous voyage in 1778. James Cook, the runaway son of an English laborer, had already earned the gratitude of his fellow-citizens. Exploring vast breadths of southern sea, he had added Australia to our Empire. The northern sea next attracted him; at that time the prize offered by the British Government for the finding of a North-west Passage was $100,000.

Sailing up the Pacific as far as Behring Straits, he did not find what he sought; but, by peering into every river mouth and inlet, he added much to men’s knowledge of the present British Columbia.

Ten years later another inquisitive Englishman visited these coasts; in fact, Captain Meares went so far as to build a house on Nootka Sound. The Spaniards, who claimed the whole Pacific side of the continent as the French had claimed the centre, warned off the “trespassers,” seized several British ships, and in 1790 planted a little Spanish settlement on the disputed shore. The governments of the two countries then came to a makeshift agreement that neither should interfere with the settlements of the other till the ownership of the soil could be decided. The naval representatives of Spain and England met on the spot, dined in each other’s cabins, went on exploring expeditions together, and joined their names in the title of “Vancouver-Cuadra” Island. Beyond this the rival powers could not get. The Spanish settlement, however, was soon abandoned.

In 1819 Spain gave up to the United States all her claims to the Pacific coast north of Mexico; but the British claims north of California remained, and for twenty-seven years the two English-speaking governments, at Westminster and Washington, exercised joint control over what was known as the “Oregon Territory.”

In the early forties, however, so many Americans had arrived and settled in the neutral territory that it could be left neutral no longer. The United States government not only withdrew from the joint arrangement, but claimed the whole territory between California and Alaska for itself. This would have shut off the British colonies from all access to the Pacific Ocean, as absolutely as the French claims a century before would have shut off the Americans.

To guard against emergencies, and if possible to find a peaceful way out of the difficulty, a ship of the British Navy, the _American_, in 1845 visited Vancouver Island, and Captain Gordon is reported to have exclaimed, “I would not give one of the bleakest knolls of all the bleak hills of Scotland for twenty islands arrayed like this in barbaric glories.” The captain’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, was Foreign Minister, but happily he did not throw away the future of British America because its glories at that time were “barbaric.”

The trouble was ended in 1846 by a compromise. All the western territories north of the 49th degree of latitude (except, of course, Alaska) were to belong to Britain, and all south of that degree to the United States. It was the most charmingly simple way of creating a frontier that could be imagined: rule a straight line across the map from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific shore, a line 1,200 miles long without a break, and the thing is done.

Between that 1,200-mile boundary and the Arctic Ocean the British power was represented by a great trading corporation. The Hudson’s Bay Company, as you will remember, had had its commercial monopoly extended to the Pacific shore as early as 1821, and it was no more anxious for the spread of settlement among the mountains and on the western islands than it had been on the prairie and in the woodland of the interior. The rising tide of white population would drive away the game and demoralize the native hunters.

A little agriculture was indulged in, so that the Company’s forts should not go without fresh vegetables, and early in the nineteenth century a certain number of farmers were encouraged to take up land because the Company had contracted to feed the Russian fur traders up in Alaska. On Puget Sound, when the artist Kane reached the coast in 1847, a ranching company had about 6,000 sheep and 2,000 cattle. The wool found its way to England by the Company’s ships—the cattle were killed and salted for the Sandwich Islands and the Russian territory.

“A Babel of Languages” met the artist’s ears when he reached Fort Vancouver, as the inhabitants were a mixture of English, French, Iroquois from Eastern Canada, Crees from the Centre, and Chinooks of the west coast, with Sandwich Islanders from Hawaii. “The buildings,” he says, “are enclosed by strong pickets about sixteen feet high, with bastions for cannon at the corners.” The Company’s 200 voyageurs, with their Indian wives, lived in a little village of log huts near the bank of the river.

“Ninety miles without stopping,” six Indians paddling his canoe, is Kane’s record of his crossing from Nasqually on the mainland to the four-year-old Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island. Beside the harbor of the future capital stood an Indian village boasting 500 warriors, armed chiefly with bows and arrows. Some of their lodges were sixty or seventy feet long, and well built; the boards were split from the logs with bone wedges, but were very smooth and regular.

Dogs were bred for their wool,—a peculiar breed with “long hair of a brownish black and clear white.” A winter suit consisted of a blanket made of dog’s hair, or dog’s hair and goose-down mixed, or frayed cedar bark, or wildgoose skin. The sea otter was then the most valuable fur animal on the coast—twelve blankets had to be paid for one skin. It has now been hunted out of existence.

Like most barbarians, and many white folk who call themselves civilized, the Indians were great gamblers. They often spent two or three days and nights on end playing such simple games as “lehallum.” Ten small round pieces of wood, one being black, were shuffled rapidly between two bundles of frayed bark, by one player, and his opponent had to guess which bundle contained the black piece when the shuffling stopped. A player would often keep this up till he had lost everything, even his wife; and some of them had much wealth in blankets, furs and slaves.

_Coast Indian Mask_

Any Indian caught by another tribe, even if there was no war between them, could be kept as a slave; and slaves had no rights, not even a right to live. Kane tells of a chief who “erected a colossal idol of wood and sacrificed five slaves to it, boastfully asking who else could afford to kill so many slaves.” Before going off to fish, or to fight, or even to gather camas, the tribe had a “Medicine Mask Dance.” Half a dozen men put on wooden masks “highly painted and ornamented, with the eyes and mouth ingeniously made to open and shut. In their hands they hold carved rattles, which are shaken in time to a monotonous song or humming noise (there are no words to it) sung by the whole company as they slowly dance round and round in a circle.”

The camas, by the way, was their favorite vegetable; it is a bulbous root, looking like an onion, but “more like a potato when cooked, and very good eating.” Fish, of course, was the principal food all along the coast. In fact, salmon pemmican was carried far inland. The coast canoe, very large but very light, was hollowed out of a cedar tree by fire and smoothed off with stone axes.

One of the chief amusements Paul Kane found among the Chinooks was picking and eating insects from each other’s heads. “On my asking an Indian why he ate them, he replied that they bit him, and he gratified his revenge by biting them in return.”

The Flat-head monstrosity which Kane found and depicted was cultivated by whole tribes on the mainland and around Victoria on the island. The infant, strapped to its papoose board for the mother to carry on her back, had its head pressed by a leather band passing tightly over the forehead and through holes in the board. This pressure was kept up steadily till the child was eight or twelve months old; that was enough to give its head the shape of a wedge for the rest of its life. Kane says that he never heard an infant cry under this treatment until the fastenings were removed, when it would cry until they were replaced. Farther north on the island the head was pressed by bandaging into the shape of a cone.

About this time a proposal was made in England to organize a colony on the Pacific coast. The Hudson’s Bay Company asked to be entrusted with the task. Mr. Gladstone and other British statesmen argued that the Company had always opposed settlement and was quite unfit for such an enterprise: as well ask the wolf to guard the sheepfold.

The protest was in vain, and in 1849 Vancouver Island was organized as a colony under the Company’s rule. The experiment was an utter failure. The Company charged $5 an acre for land, while any settler could get 320 acres for nothing on the American side of the frontier. After five years the white and part-white population of Vancouver Island numbered 450 in all, and only 500 acres were under cultivation.

A poor little parliament of seven members was elected in 1856, and assembled at the miniature capital called Victoria; but they had little power and less revenue. The Company was still the master, and its chief agent held at the same time the position of royal governor. The settlers petitioned for direct imperial rule, and in 1858 an event occurred which compelled the Government in England to grant their request.

This event was the outbreak of the gold fever. Several years before, Indians canoeing down from Queen Charlotte’s Islands to trade at Victoria had brought with them specimens of gold, and now a rumor spread that quantities of the precious metal had been found along the river bottoms of the mainland. The men who had turned California into a mining camp pulled up stakes and flocked northward to collect what they imagined would be easier and richer spoil in British territory.

Victoria, the little provincial capital on Vancouver Island, suddenly awoke to the noise and bustle of a commercial city. In a single summer 25,000 men landed there, while 8,000 more found their way to the frontier by land after a three weeks’ ride on horseback. Those who had come by water deposited their capital—sacks of raw gold—in the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Victoria, and set themselves to build rafts, boats, and canoes in which to reach the mainland and ascend the golden Fraser River. Many of them were drowned on the way; and of the 33,000 who reached the river, thirty thousand turned back in disgust to their deserted California.

The three thousand who remained had to be kept in order and provided for in some way. Governor Douglas, of Vancouver Island, was ready to undertake this awkward task, but on the mainland he had no authority except that of a Hudson’s Bay factor. On November 17, 1858, proclamation was made that company rule over the mountains and islands of the West was ended forever—surviving the East India Company’s rule over the plains of Hindustan by just eleven weeks. The Hudson’s Bay Company might continue to exist, but its trading monopoly on the mainland and its political supremacy on Vancouver Island were extinguished together. Douglas, giving up the attempt to serve two masters, resigned his connection with the Company. He received in exchange the Queen’s commission as Governor, not only of the island, but of the new colony, “British Columbia,” stretching four hundred miles eastward from the Pacific Ocean to where the Rocky Mountains look down upon the inland plains.

_On the Cariboo Trail, Thompson River_

The immigrant might well be appalled by his first experience of British Columbian gold-streams, for these do not meander along gentle valleys, but pour through gloomy gorges, walled for hundreds of miles by precipitous mountain sides. At the season when the human tide poured in, the water was at its highest too, and the sand-bars where men expected gold were hidden deep under the torrent of the Fraser. Such ground as still lay high and dry was soon crowded with miners, each hunting for a fortune in a little patch of earth twenty-five feet square. Those adventurous spirits who pressed on to the upper reaches of the stream, and into the tributary gorge of the Thompson River, had to scramble along trails where mountain goats alone had trod before.

All provisions had to be brought up on the backs of men, and before a mule track could be cut along the precipices the men were reduced to a diet of wild berries. Yet some were not too hungry, nor too absorbed in dreams of gold, to be charmed by the wild magnificence of the canyon—the gloomy depths closed in for miles by perpendicular walls, then opening out in steep fantastic slopes, all splashed with brown and cream and orange and purple and black, and sprinkled with dark green solitary pines.

About $500,000 worth of gold was taken out in 1858, but it had cost the miners a good deal more than that in the getting. The next year’s yield was estimated at $1,500,000. This, however, was only a preface to the volume of riches quickly opened to a wondering world. In 1860, a young Nova Scotian named Macdonald, and two Americans named Dietz and Rose, left the Fraser and Thompson rivers behind them in search of virgin gold-fields farther north. In consequence of the discoveries they made, an unknown and uninhabited wilderness of forest and ravine sprang into fame as an Eldorado to which the miners of California and Australia and amateur gold-hunters from all the world were madly rushing.

In seven years this Cariboo district, about fifty miles square, yielded gold worth $25,000,000. In one day five men washed $1,200 out of the soil; four men in the same short time got $1,850. An old river bed was found where nuggets could be picked up to the amount of $1,000 per square foot.

The mountain lion and grizzly bear looked on in wonder as mushroom towns sprang up in the silent hunting grounds and the rocks re-echoed with the white man’s oath and pistol. Provisions still had to be carried up from the coast on mule-back, and were often intercepted and devoured by miners travelling the same road. In the winter of 1861, flour in Cariboo cost $72 a barrel, and bacon 75 cents a pound. Next year men came in so much faster than meal that the population was brought to the verge of famine.

The miners were a rough set for the most part, given to furious gambling on the gold-fields and to excesses of every sort when they returned to the comparative civilization of Victoria or San Francisco. Still, the mining towns had their well-filled reading-rooms, their concerts and debates, and the authority of law was uncommonly well respected. “Gold commissioners” were appointed to deal out justice promptly in every camp, and over this whole system presided a judicial genius whose name was a terror to evildoers.

“Old Judge Begbie soon made them understand who was master,” says an old miner. “I saw a fellow named Gilchrist, who had killed two men in California, on trial. He killed a man on Beaver Lake, in the Cariboo country, who was gambling with him. Whilst sitting at the table, a miner came in, threw down his bag of gold, bet an ounce, and won. Gilchrist paid. The man bet again, and won again, flippantly inquiring of the gambler if there was any other game he could play better, as he drew in the stake. Gilchrist took offence at the remark, and, lifting his pistol, shot him dead.

“Gilchrist was tried, and the jury brought in a verdict of ‘manslaughter.’ Turning to the prisoner, the judge said: ‘It is not a pleasant duty for me to have to sentence you only to prison for life. Your crime was unmitigated murder. You deserve to be hanged. Had the jury performed their duty, I might now have the painful satisfaction of condemning you to death. And you, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to say that it would give me great pleasure to see you hanged, each and every one of you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of manslaughter.’”

Thirty thousand rough whites could hardly invade an Indian province without some little trouble from the natives, and one or two fights took place; but as a rule the two races got on very well together. The newcomers washing sand along the river beds did not destroy the game on which the old inhabitants depended for their living; true British justice was measured out to red man and to white with equal hand; and the Indians took readily to such work as white employers wanted done. An American historian, Hubert Howe Bancroft, has left on record his opinion that “never in the pacification and settlement of any section of America have there been so few disturbances, so few crimes against life and property” as in this British land.

Fifteen years after the first rush Cariboo was utterly deserted by the white miners, though the frugal Chinese continued to sift out the golden dregs left in the district. In those fifteen years many other districts in the “sea of mountains” had been invaded by detachments of gold hunters. Some of these acquired fortunes to squander, while many came out poorer than they went in, and some never came out at all. Of the three lucky Cariboo pioneers mentioned a little while ago, Dietz died a pauper in 1877, and the body of Rose was found in the woods, starved to death while searching for new gold-fields to conquer.

Even coal-mining has had its romantic episodes in the history of British Columbia. In 1835, some Indians visiting a Hudson’s Bay outpost on Vancouver Island happened into the smithy. They were astonished to find the blacksmith burning coal, and when told it had been brought a six months’ journey from over the sea they burst out laughing. There was any quantity of the same “black stone,” they said, at the north end of that very island. Other deposits were found from time to time, and the Pacific slope farther south has been glad to draw largely on the British territory for its coal supply.

In 1864, British Columbia—the mainland territory, that is—was endowed with a separate Governor and an infant legislature of which only three members out of thirteen were elected by the people. Two years afterwards Vancouver Island and British Columbia were united under the latter name; and in 1871, when the whole colony entered the Canadian Federation, the political swaddling bands were removed, and the Provincial Legislature became an elected body, with full control over the Government.

One other striking episode in the history of our Pacific Province must still be mentioned—an episode that nearly caused a war with the United States.

When the frontier question was settled, or supposed to be settled, in 1846, a serious omission was made. On the mainland the British and United States territories were divided, clearly enough, by the 49th parallel of latitude; but when the sea was reached the line was simply ordered to follow “the middle of the channel” between Vancouver Island and the United States part of the mainland. Now there are a number of islands between Vancouver and the mainland of the United States, and therefore several channels through which the frontier might be imagined to run.

The island of San Juan, which belonged to our country or to the United States according as one channel or another might be considered the frontier, had been used by the Hudson’s Bay Company as a cattle pasture since 1843. In 1852, the “Americans” landed a sheriff and a customs officer on the island and tried to collect taxes from the British herdsmen, who refused to pay and hoisted the Union Jack.

Here were the makings of a pretty quarrel; and in 1859, when an “American” settler killed a Hudson’s Bay hog for rooting in his garden, the naval and military forces of Queen and President came within an ace of opening fire on each other.

Before this calamity could occur, however, the British Government proposed arbitration. The dispute dropped out of sight when the energies of the United States Government were distracted by the Civil War. For twelve years the settlers and hogs of San Juan were kept at peace by British and United States detachments of equal strength, and the two forces got on famously together. At last, in 1871, the German Emperor was called in as arbitrator, and traced the frontier through a channel which gave San Juan to the United States.