Part 24

“Well, I don’t know exactly, friend,” he answered, a little shamefacedly, I thought, “unless it’s because it’s a newer country up there an’ a man has a better chance. What with the Swedes an’ the Germans an’ the Eyetalians, this country’s gettin’ pretty well settled an’ there ain’t the chances in it there was once; but up British Columbia way it’s still a frontier country, they tell me, an’ a man who’s willin’ to buckle down an’ work can make a home an’ a good livin’ quicker’n anywhere else, I guess. It’s fine land up in the middle o’ Vancouver Island, I hear, an’ in the Cariboo country, too, an’ they want settlers so darn bad that they’ll give you a farm for nothin’. An’ it’s a pretty good country for a man to live in, too. Here in the United States we do a heap o’ talkin’ ’bout our laws, but up in Canada they don’t talk about ’em at all—they just go right ahead an’ enforce ’em. I may be in wrong, of course, but from all I hear it’s goin’ to be a great country up there one of these days, when they get the railroads through, an’ me an’ Arethusa sorta got the notion in our heads that we’d like to be pioneers, like our paws were, an’ get in an’ help build the country, an’ let our kids grow up with it. You’ve got to be startin’, eh? Won’t you have another cup o’ coffee before you go? Well, friend, I’m mighty glad to’ve met you. Good luck to you.”

“Good luck to _you_,” said I.

* * * * *

Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, my acquaintance of the forest was a soldier in an army of invasion. This army had come from the south quietly, unostentatiously, without blare of bugle or beat of drum, its weapons the plough and the reaper, the hoe and the spade, its object the conquest, not of a people but of a wilderness. Have you any conception, I wonder, of the astounding proportions which this agricultural invasion of Canada has assumed? Did you know that last year upward of one hundred thousand Americans crossed the border to take up farms and carve out fortunes for themselves under another flag? These settlers who are trekking northward by rail and road are the very pick of the farming communities of our Middle West. Besides being men of splendid character and fine physique, and of a rugged honesty that is characteristic of those closely associated with the soil, they take with them a substantial amount of capital—probably a thousand dollars at least, on an average, either in cash, stock, or household goods. Moreover, they bring what is most valuable of all—experience. Coming from a region where the agricultural conditions are similar to those prevailing in the Canadian West, they quickly adapt themselves to the new life. Unlike the settlers from the mother country and from the Continent, to whom everything is strange and new, and who consequently require some time to adjust themselves to the changed conditions, the American wastes not a moment in contemplation but rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, and goes hammer and tongs at the task of making a farm and building a home. He is efficient, energetic, industrious, businesslike, adaptable, and quite frankly admits that he has come to the country because it offers him better prospects. So, though he may not sing “God Save the King” with the fervour of a newly arrived Briton, he is none the less valuable to the land of his adoption.

Ask your average well-informed American what he knows about British Columbia, and it is dollars to doughnuts that he will remark rather dubiously: “Oh, yes, that’s the place where the tinned salmon comes from, isn’t it?” Take yourself, for example. Did you happen to be aware that, though it has barely as many inhabitants as Newark, N. J., its area is equal to that of California, Oregon, and Washington put together, with Indiana thrown in to make good measure? Or, if the comparison is more graphic, that it is larger than the combined areas of Italy, Switzerland, and France? Westernmost of the eleven provinces comprising the Dominion, it is bounded on the south by the orchards of Washington and the mines of Idaho; eastward it ends where the cattle-ranges of Alberta begin; to its north are the fur-bearing Mackenzie Territories and the gold-fields of the Yukon; westward it is bordered by the heaving Pacific and that narrow strip of ragged coast which forms the panhandle of Alaska. Though clinging to its edges are a score of towns and two great cities; though a transcontinental railway (the only one on the continent, by the way, which runs from tide-water to tide-water under the same management and the same name) hugs the province’s southern border and another is cutting it through the middle; its vast hinterland, larger than the two Scandinavian kingdoms, with its network of unnamed rivers and its unguessed-at wealth in forests, fish, furs, and minerals, contains thousands upon thousands of square miles which have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Do you realise that, should you turn your horse’s head northwestward from the Kootenai, on the Idaho border, you would have to ride as far as from Lake Superior to the Gulf of Mexico before you could unsaddle beneath the Stars and Stripes at White Pass, on the frontier of Alaska? Did you know that the province contains the greatest compact area of merchantable timber in North America, its forests being greater in extent than those of the New England States, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Blue Ridge combined? I have heard naval experts and railway presidents and mining men talk ponderously of a future shortage in the coal supply—but they need not worry, for British Columbia’s coal measures are estimated to contain forty billion tons of bituminous and sixty billion tons of anthracite (100,000,000,000, tons in all, if so endless a caravan of ciphers means anything to you)—enough to run the engines of the world until Gabriel’s trumpet sounds “Cease working.” The output of its salmon canneries will provide those who order fish on Fridays with most excellent and inexpensive eating until the crack of doom. Its untouched deposits of magnetite and hematite are so extensive that they bid fair to make the ironmasters of Pittsburg break that commandment (I forget which one it is) which says: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The province has enough pulpwood to supply the Hearst and Harmsworth presses with paper until the last “extra special edition” is issued on the morning of judgment day. The recently discovered petroleum deposits have proved so large that they promise to materially reduce the income of the lean old gentleman who plays golf on the Pocantico Hills. The area of agricultural and fruit lands in the province is estimated at sixty million acres, of which less than one tenth has been taken up, much less put under cultivation. And scattered through the length and breadth of this great Cave-of-Al-ed-Din-like territory is a total population of less than four hundred thousand souls. Everything considered, it has, I suppose, greater natural resources than any area of the same size on the globe. So I don’t see how a young man with courage, energy, ambition, a little capital, and a speaking acquaintance with hard work could do better than to drop into the nearest railway ticket office and say to the clerk behind the counter: “A ticket to British Columbia—and step lively, if you please. I want to get there before it is too late to be a pioneer.”

Situated in the same latitude as the British Isles, sheltered from the winter blizzards of the prairie provinces by the high wall of the Rocky Mountains, its long western coast washed by the warm waves of the Japan current, its air tinctured with the balsamic fragrance of millions of acres of hemlock, spruce, and pine, British Columbia’s climate is, to use the phraseology of the real-estate boosters, “highly salubrious”; although, to be strictly truthful, I am compelled to add that it is extremely wet during a considerable portion of the year. But it is a misty, drizzly sort of rain to which no one pays the slightest attention. You will see ladies without umbrellas stop to chat on the streets, and men lounging and laughing in front of the clubs and hotels in a rain which would make a Chicagoan hail a taxicab and a Bostonian turn up his collar and seek the subway. When you speak about it they laugh good-naturedly and say in a surprised sort of way: “Why, is it raining? By Jove, it is a trifle misty, isn’t it? Really, you know, I hadn’t noticed it at all.” Then they will go on to tell you that it is the moistness of the climate which gives British Columbia its beautiful women and its beautiful flowers. And I can, and gladly do, vouch for the beauty of them both. They—particularly the women—are worth going a long way to see.

You mustn’t confuse British Columbia, you understand, with the flat, monotonous, grain-growing provinces which lie on the other side of the Rockies. It isn’t that sort of a country at all. It is too mountainous, too ravined, with many impassable chasms and nigh-impenetrable forests. Its plateaus are eroded by lake and river into gorges which are younger sisters of the Grand Cañon of the Colorado. From a little distance the mountain slopes look as though they had been neatly upholstered in the green plush to which the builders of Pullman cars are so partial, but, upon closer inspection, the green covering resolves itself into dense forests of spruce and pine. Thousands and thousands of brooks empty into the creeks and hundreds of creeks empty into the big rivers, and these mighty waterways, the Fraser, the Kootenai, the Skeena, the Columbia, go roaring and booming seaward through their rock-walled channels, wasting a million head of power an hour. Nowhere, that I can recall, are so many picturesque and interesting scenes combined with such sensational and impressive scenery as along the cañon of the Lower Fraser. Here the mountains of the Coast Range rise to a height of nearly two miles above the surface of the swirling, angry river, the walls of the cañon being so precipitous and smooth that one marvels at the daring and ingenuity of the men who built a railway there. As the cañon widens, the traveller catches fleeting glimpses of Chinamen washing for gold on the river bars; of bearded, booted lumberjacks guiding with their spike-shod poles the course of mile-long log rafts; of Siwash Indians, standing with poised salmon-spears on the rocks above the stream, like statues cast in bronze. Then the outposts of civilisation begin to appear in the form of hillsides which have been cleared and set out to fruit-trees, of Japanese truck-gardens, every foot of which is tended by the little yellow men with almost pathetic care, of sawmills, and salmon canneries; and so through a region where neat hamlets alternate with stretches of primeval forest, until in the distance, looming above the smoke pall, the sky-scrapers of Vancouver appear.

The chief cities of the province are Vancouver, the commercial capital and a port and railway terminus of great industrial importance, and Victoria, the seat of government and the centre of provincial society. There are also several smaller cities: New Westminster, at the mouth of the Fraser and so close to Vancouver that it is almost impossible for the stranger to determine where the one ends and the other begins; Nanaimo, a coal-mining town of considerable importance on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, and Alberni, famous for its salmon fisheries, at the head of an arm of the sea extending inland from the western coast; Nelson, the _chef-lieu_ of the prosperous fruit-growing district of the Kootenai, in the extreme southeastern corner of the province; Bella Coola, on a fiord at the mouth of the Bella Coola River; Ashcroft, the gateway to the hinterland, on the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway; Fort George, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers; and Prince Rupert, the remarkable mushroom city which the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway has built, from the ground up, on the coast of British Columbia, forty miles south of the Alaskan border, as the Pacific Coast terminus for the transcontinental system which has recently been completed.

Between Vancouver and Victoria the most intense rivalry exists. They are as jealous of each other as two prima donnas singing in the same opera. Vancouver is a great and prosperous city, with broad and teeming streets, clanging street-cars, rumbling traffic, belching factory chimneys, towering office-buildings, extensive railroad yards, excellent pavements, and attractive residential suburbs. Of course there is nothing very startling in all this, were it not for the fact that it is all new—twenty years ago there was no such place on the map. It is a busy, bustling place, where every one seems too much occupied in making fortunes overnight to have much time to spare for social amenities. There was a land boom on the last time I was in Vancouver—in fact, I gathered that it was a perennial condition—and prices were being asked (and paid!) for town lots not yet cleared of forest which would have made an American real-estate agent admit quite frankly that he had not progressed beyond the kindergarten stage of the game. I am perfectly serious in saying that within the city limits of Vancouver lots are being sold which are still covered with virgin forest. Within less than two miles of the city hall you can see gangs of men clearing residential sites by chopping down the primeval forest with which they are covered and blowing out and burning the stumps. This real-estate boom, with its consequent inflation of land values, has had a bad effect on the prosperity of Vancouver, however, for many ordinarily conservative business men, dazzled by visions of sudden wealth, have gone land mad; money is difficult to get, for Canadian banks are prohibited by law from loaning on real estate; and, like so many other towns which have been stimulated by artificial means, Vancouver is already beginning to show the effects of the inevitable reaction.

Victoria, unlike Vancouver, is old, as oldness counts in the Dominion. It was the seat of government when Vancouver was part jungle and part beach. It is the residential city of western Canada, and is much in vogue as a place of permanent abode for those who in any of the nearer provinces “have made their pile,” for well-to-do men with marriageable daughters and socially ambitious wives, and for military and naval officers who have retired and wish to get as much as possible out of their limited incomes. Victoria is as essentially English as Vancouver is American. It is, indeed, a bit of England set down in this remote corner of the empire. It has stately government buildings, broad, tree-shaded streets, endless rows of the beam-and-plaster villas which one sees in every London suburb, and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. Its people spend much of their time on the tennis-courts, cricket-fields, and golf-links, and are careful not to let business interfere with pleasure. That is the reason, no doubt, why in business Vancouver has swept by Victoria as an automobile sweeps by a horse and buggy. Vancouver might aptly be compared to a hustling, energetic business man who never lets slip an opportunity to make a dollar and who is always on the job. Victoria, on the contrary, is a quietly prosperous, rather sportily inclined old gentleman who is fond of good living and believes that no time is wasted that is devoted to sport. Each town has a whole-souled contempt for the other. The Victorian takes you aside and says: “Oh, yes, Vancouver is progressing quite rapidly, I hear, although, fact is, the subject really doesn’t interest me. The people are so impossible, you know. Why, would you believe it, my dear fellow, most of them came there without a dollar to their names—fact, I assure you. Now they’re all bally millionaires. Positively vulgar, I call it. Very worthy folk, no doubt, but scarcely in our class. Look here, let’s have a drink and then motor out and have a round of golf. What say, old chap? Right-o!”

The Vancouver man shoves his derby on the back of his head, sticks a thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat, and with the other hand gives you a resounding whack on the shoulder. “Victoria? Pshaw, no one takes Victoria seriously. Nice little place to send the madam and the kids for the summer. But it’s asleep—nothing doing—no business. Why, say, friend, do you know what they do down there? _They drink afternoon tea!_ Believe me, Vancouver is the only real, growing, progressive, wide-awake, up-and-doing burg this side of Broadway. Say, have you got an hour to spare? Then just jump into my car here and I’ll run you out and show you a piece of property that you can make a fortune on if you buy it quick. Yes, sirree, you can get rich quick, all right all right, if you invest your money in Vancouver.”

There are not more than ten harbours in the world, certainly not more than a dozen at the most, that have a right to be spoken of in the same breath with Victoria’s landlocked port. Picking her cautious way through the long, narrow, curving entrance that makes the harbour of Victoria resemble a chemist’s retort, our vessel swept ahead with stately deliberation, while we leaned over the rail in the crispness of the early morning and watched the scenes that accommodatingly spread themselves before us. Slender, white-hulled pleasure yachts, dainty as a débutante; impertinent, omnipresent launches, poking their inquisitive noses everywhere and escaping disaster by the thickness of their paint; greasy, hard-working tugboats, panting like an expressman who has carried your trunk upstairs; whalers outfitting for the Arctic—you can tell ’em by the scarlet lookout’s barrel lashed to the fore masthead; rusty freighters from Sitka, Callao, Singapore, Heaven knows where; Japanese fishing-boats with tattered, weather-beaten sails such as the artists love to paint; Siwash canoes manned by squat, shock-headed descendants of the first inhabitants; huge twin-funnelled Canadian Pacific liners outward bound for Yokohama or homeward bound for Vancouver, for Victoria boasts of being “the first and last port of call”—take my word for it, it’s a sight worth seeing, is Victoria Harbour on a sunny morning. We forged ahead at half speed and the city crept nearer and nearer, until we could make out the line of four-horsed brakes waiting to rattle those tourists whose time was limited to the customary “points of interest,” and the crowd of loungers along the quay, and the constables with their helmet straps under their lower lips and blue-and-white-striped bands on their sleeves, exactly like their fellows in Oxford Circus and Piccadilly. At the right the imposing stone façade of the Parliament buildings rose from an expanse of vivid lawn—as a result of the combined warmth and moisture the vegetation of Victoria is unsurpassed in the temperate zone; at the left the business portion of the city stretched away in stolid and uncompromising brick and stone; squarely ahead of us loomed the great bulk of the Empress Hotel. We would have run into it had we kept straight on, but of course we didn’t, for the captain yanked a lever on the bridge and bells jangled noisily in the engine room, and the vessel, turning ever so deliberately, poked her prow into the berth that awaited it like a horse entering its accustomed stall.

What I like about Victoria is that it is so blamed British. Unless you are observing enough to notice that the date-lines of the London papers in the Union Club are quite a fortnight old, you would never dream that you were upward of six thousand miles from Trafalgar Square and barely sixty from the totem-pole in Seattle. If you still have any lingering doubts as to the atmosphere of the place being completely and unreservedly British, they will promptly be dispelled if you will drop into the lobby (they call it lounge) of the Empress Hotel any afternoon at four o’clock and see the knickerbockered sons of Albion engaged in the national diversion of drinking tea. When an American is caught drinking afternoon tea he assumes an I-give- you-my-word-I-never-did-this-before-but-the-ladies-dragged-me-into-it air, but your Britisher does it with all the matter-of-courseness with which a New Yorker orders his pre-dinner cocktail. One of the earliest impressions one gets in Victoria is that all the inhabitants are suffering from extraordinarily hard colds—brought on, you suppose, by the dampness of the climate—but after a little it dawns on you that they are merely employing the broad A that they brought with them from the old country, along with their monocles and their beautifully cut riding clothes. In Vancouver, on the contrary, you never hear the broad A used at all unless by a new arrival with the brand of Bond Street fresh upon him. They have no time for it. They are too busy making money. The Victorians, on the other hand, never lie awake nights fretting about the filthy lucre. _They_ are too busy having a good time. They have enough money to be comfortable, and that seems to be all they want. That’s the plan on which the place is run—comfort and pleasure. Most of the Victorians, so I was told, are people with beer pocketbooks and champagne thirsts. For a man with a modest income and an unquenchable thirst for sport Victoria is the best place of residence I know. In most places it needs a rich man’s income to lead the sporting life, for game-preserves and salmon rivers and polo ponies run into a lot of money, but in Victoria almost any one can be a sport, if not a sportsman, for you can pick up a pony that can be broken to polo for sixty or seventy dollars and a few miles back of the city lies one of the greatest fishing and shooting regions in the world. The last time I was in Victoria I found all the banks and business houses closed, and flags were flying from every public building, and a procession, headed by mounted police and a band, was coming down the street. “What’s going on?” I inquired of a deeply interested bystander. “Is it the King’s birthday or is there royalty in town, or what?” “Not on your life!” he answered witheringly. “It’s the prime minister on his way to open the baseball season.”