Part 26

You of the sheltered life: you, Mr. Bank President, you, Mr. Lawyer, you, Mr. Business Man, you, Mr. Tourist, who travel in Pullman cars and sleep in palatial hostelries, have you any real conception of the breed of men who are conquering this wilderness, who are laying these railways, who are building these cities, who are making these new markets and new playgrounds for you and me? Some of them have saved and scrimped for years that they might be able to buy a ticket from the Middle West, or from the English shires, or from the Rhine banks to this beckoning, primeval, promiseful land. Others, taking their families and their household belongings with them, have trekked overland by wagon, just as their grandfathers did before them for the taking of the West, trudging in the dust beside the weary horses, cooking over camp-fires in the forest or on the open prairie, sleeping, rolled in their blankets, under the stars. Some there are who have come overland from the Yukon, on snowshoes, mayhap; their pitifully meagre possessions on their back, living on the food which they killed, their only sign-posts the endless line of wire-draped poles. There are the engineers, who, mocking at the hostility of the countenance which this savage, untamed land turns toward them, are pushing forward and ever forward their twin lines of steel, cutting their way through well-nigh impenetrable forests, throwing their spider spans across angry rivers and forbidding gorges, running their levels and laying their rails and driving their spikes oblivious to torrential rains or blinding snows, to blistering heat or freezing cold. Then, too, there are the silent, efficient, quick-witted men who have maintained law and order through the length and breadth of this great province—travelling on duty through its wildest parts, amid dangers and privations without end, at one time deep in the snows of the far Nor’west, at others making their hazardous way on horseback along the brink of precipices which make one sick and dizzy to look down; swimming rapid rivers holding to the tails of their horses or journeying over the frozen lands with teams of dogs; one month in the mining camps on the uppermost reaches of the Fraser and the next carrying the fear of the law to the wild tribes of the Kootenai. Such are the men who, in Britain’s westernmost outpost, are clinching down the rivets of empire.

XIV

BACK OF BEYOND

“I hear the tread of pioneers, Of millions yet to be; The first low wash of waves where soon Shall roll a human sea. The elements of empire here Are plastic yet and warm, The chaos of a mighty world Is rounding into form.”

XIV

BACK OF BEYOND

Most people—and by that I mean nine hundred and ninety-eight in every thousand—have come to believe quite positively that, on this continent at least, there is no longer any region that can truthfully be called “The Frontier.” Therein they are wrong. Because the municipality of Tombstone has applied to the Arizona Legislature for permission to change its name, because the cow-puncher is abandoning the range for the more lucrative occupation of cavorting before a moving-picture camera, because the roulette ball clicks no longer behind open doors in any Western town is no proof that the frontier is no more. As a matter of fact, it has only been pushed back. There still exists a real frontier, all wool and eight hundred miles wide, together with all the orthodox concomitants of cowboys, Concord coaches, log cabins, prairie-schooners, pack-trains, trappers, grizzly bears, and Indians. But it won’t last much longer. This is the last call. If you would see this stage of nation building in all its thrilling realism and picturesqueness you have need to hurry. A few more years—half a dozen at the most—and store clothes will replace the _chaparejos_ and sombreros; the mail-sacks, instead of being carried in the boots of stage-coaches, will be flung from the doors of flying trains; the motor-car will supplant the prairie-schooner and the pack-train.

Answer me, now. If, at a moderate outlay of time, money, and exertion, you could visit a region as untamed and colourful as was the country beyond the Pecos forty years back and peopled by the hardiest breed of adventurers that ever foreran the columns of civilisation, would you give up for a time the comforts of the sheltered life and go? You would? I hoped so. Get out the atlas, then, from its dusty place of exile and open it to the map of North America that I may show you the way. In the upper left-hand corner, stretching its scarlet bulk across eleven degrees of printed latitude, is British Columbia, whose central and northern portions contain thousands upon thousands of square miles that have never felt the pressure of a white man’s foot or echoed to a white man’s voice. Here is the last of the “Last West”; here the frontier is making its final stand; here, fighting the battles and solving the problems of civilisation, are to be found the survivors of that race of rugged adventurers, now almost extinct, who replaced the forest with the wheat-field—the Pioneers.

There are several routes by which one can reach the interior of the province: from the made-to-order seaport of Prince Rupert up the Skeena by railway to New Hazelton and Fort Fraser, for example; or down the South Fork of the Fraser by river steamer from Tête Jaune Cache to Fort George; or from the country of the Kootenai overland through the Okanogan and Lillooet. These, however, are obscure side entrances and more or less difficult of access. The front door to the hinterland, and the logical way to enter it, is by way of Ashcroft, a one-street-two-hotels-and-eight-saloons town on the main line of the Canadian Pacific, eight hours east of Vancouver as the _Imperial Limited_ goes. At Ashcroft, which is the principal outfitting point for all this region, begins the historic highway known as the Cariboo Trail, by which you can travel northward—provided you are able to get a seat in the crowded stages—until civilisation sits down to rest and the wilderness begins.

What the Wells-Fargo Company, with its comprehensive system of mail, passenger, and freight services, was to our own West in the days before the railway came, the British Columbia Express Company, commonly known as the “B. C. X.,” is to that vast region which is watered by the Fraser. Nowhere that I can recall has travelling through a wild and mountainous country been reduced to such a science. Although the company operates upward of a thousand miles of stage lines, along which are distributed more than three hundred horses at relay stations approximately sixteen miles apart, its coaches, in spite of blizzards, torrential rains, and ofttimes incredibly atrocious roads, maintain their schedules with the rigidity of mail-trains. The company’s equipment is as complete in its way as that of a great railway system, its rolling stock consisting of everything from a two-horse thorough-brace “jerky” to a six-horse Concord stage, to say nothing of automobiles and sleighs. In conjunction with its system of vehicular transportation it operates a service of river steamers, specially constructed for running the rapids, upon the Upper Fraser and the Nechako.

The backbone of the “B. C. X.” system, and, indeed, of all transportation in the British Columbian hinterland, is the Cariboo Trail, a government post-road, three hundred miles long, which was built by the Royal Engineers in the early sixties as a result of the rush to the gold-fields on Williams Creek. Starting from Ashcroft, it runs due north for two hundred and twenty miles to Quesnel, on the Upper Fraser, where it abruptly turns westward and continues to its terminus at Barkerville, once a famous mining-camp but now a quiet agricultural community in the heart of the Cariboo. Scattered along the trail, at intervals of fifteen miles or so, are rest-houses where the wayfarer can obtain surprisingly well-cooked meals at a uniform charge of six bits—a “bit,” I might explain for the benefit of the Eastern chechako, being equivalent to twelve and a half cents. For the same price the traveller can get a clean and moderately soft bed, although he must accept it as part and parcel of frontier life should he find that the room to which he is assigned already contains half a dozen snoring occupants. These rest-houses, which, with their out-buildings, stables, and corrals, are built entirely of logs, are often liberally coated with whitewash and occasionally surrounded by stockades and constantly reminded me of the post stations which marked the end of a day’s journey on the Great Siberian Road before Prince Orloff and his railway builders came. During the summer months the “up journey” of three hundred and twenty miles from Ashcroft to Fort George is performed by a conjoined service of motor-cars, stage-coaches, and river boats, and, if the roads are dry, is made in about four days. As a one-way ticket costs sixty-five dollars, exclusive of meals, the fare works out at a trifle over twenty cents a mile, thus making it one of the most expensive journeys of its length in the world, being even costlier, if I remember rightly, than the one by the Abyssinian railway from Djibuti to Deré Dawa. It is worth every last penny of the fare, however, for there is about it a novelty, a picturesqueness, an excitement, which cannot be duplicated on this continent. From the moment that you set your foot on the hub of the stage-coach in Ashcroft until your steamer slips out of Prince Rupert Harbour, southward bound, you are seeing with your own eyes, instead of through the unconvincing mediums of the Western novel and the moving-picture screen, a nation in the cellar-digging stage of its existence; you are transported for a brief time to the Epoch of the Dawn.

In anticipation of the atrocious roads which we expected to encounter, I had had the car fitted with shock-absorbers and had brought with me from Vancouver an entire extra set of springs, and at Ashcroft we selected an equipment with as great care as though we were starting on an East African _safari_. A pick, a long-handled shovel, a pair of axes, a block and tackle, four spare tires, and a dozen inner tubes comprised the essentials of our outfit, to which was added at Quesnel a supply of tinned foods, a small shelter tent, a set of rubber sheets, and three of the largest-size Hudson Bay blankets. It’s a costly business, this motoring in lands where motors have never gone before. The most important thing of all, of course, is the gasoline, the entire success of our venture depending upon our ability to carry a sufficient supply with us to get us through the six hundred miles of uninhabited wilderness between Quesnel and the Skeena. By reducing our personal belongings to a minimum, we succeeded in getting eight five-gallon tins into the tonneau of the car, in addition to the twenty gallons in the tank, thus giving us a total of sixty gallons, which, theoretically at least, should have sufficed us. As a matter of fact, it did not suffice to carry us half-way to the Skeena, so slow was the going and so terrible the condition of the road, and, had I not been so fortunate as to obtain an order from a British development company on its agents at several points in the interior, instructing them to supply us with gasoline from some drums which had been taken in at enormous expense a year or so before in a futile attempt to establish an automobile service, we should have been compelled to abandon the car in the wilderness for lack of fuel. Gasoline, like everything else, is expensive in the interior: at Ashcroft I paid fifty cents a gallon, at Quesnel a dollar, and thereafter, until we reached the end of steel at Moricetown, two dollars a gallon—which, so I was assured, was exactly what it had cost the company to freight it in. Briefly, our plan was this: to start from Ashcroft, a station on the Canadian Pacific, two hundred miles from the coast, and follow the Cariboo Trail northward to Quesnel, thence striking through the unsettled and almost unexplored wilderness which reaches from the Fraser to the Skeena, following the Yukon Telegraph Trail through Fort Fraser to New Hazleton, on the Skeena, which is barely half a hundred miles south of the Alaskan border. I asked every one I met in Ashcroft as to our chances of getting through, and the more people to whom I talked the slimmer they seemed to become.

One man assured us that there was no road whatever north of Fort Fraser and that, if we wanted to get through, we would have to take the car apart and pack it in on the backs of horses, as an automobile agent from Seattle had done the year before; another told us that there were no bridges and that we would be compelled to hire Siwash Indians to make rafts to ferry us across the streams; still a third cheered us up by assuring us that we could always get a team to haul us out.

“An eight-horse swing ought to haul you out in a fortnight,” he remarked cheeringly.

“What would it cost?” I inquired.

“Oh,” he answered, “if you’re a good hand at bargaining you ought to get the outfit for about a hundred dollars a day.”

That cheered us up tremendously, of course.

We started from Ashcroft early on an autumn morning. The air was like sparkling Moselle, overhead was a sky of wash-tub blue, and before us the gray ribbon of the Cariboo Trail stretched away, between dun and barren hills, into the unknown. The entire population of the little town had turned out to see us off, and as we moved away, with the long, low bonnet of the car pointed northward, they gave us a cheer and shouted after us, “Hope you’ll get through, fellows!” and “Good luck!” Before we left Seattle I had bought a little silk American flag, and this we flew from a metal rod at the front of the hood, and more than once, when we were mired in the mud below the Nechako, and were utterly exhausted and ready to quit, it was the sight of that bit of tricoloured bunting fluttering bravely before us which spurred us on.

Were the Cariboo Trail in certain of the Eastern States it would be described by the natives as “a fair to middlin’ road,” and it is all of that and more—in the dry season. When we traversed it, in the early fall, it had not yet been rutted by the torrential autumn rains and heavy teaming and was as good a road as an automobile pioneer could ask for. In that journey up the Cariboo Trail were concentrated all the glamour and colour and panorama of that strange, wild border life which most people think of as having passed with the pony express and the buffalo. A stage-coach rattled past amid a rolling cloud of dust, its scarlet body lurching and swaying on its leathern springs, its four horses at a spanking trot, the driver cracking his whip-lash spasmodically between the ears of his leaders, for he carried his Majesty’s mails and must make his six miles an hour, hour in and hour out. Like a gigantic boa-constrictor, a pack-train wound slowly past, the burdened mules plodding by dejectedly, long ears to shaven tails. Scattered along the line, like mounted officers beside a marching column, were the packers: wiry, iron-hard fellows, their faces sun tanned to the colour of their saddles; picturesque figures in their goatskin _chaparejos_, their vivid neckerchiefs, and their broad-brimmed, rakish hats. Where they were bound for, Heaven only knows: with supplies for the operators of the Yukon Telegraph, perhaps, or the miners of the Groundhog, or, it might be, for the lonely trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and the headwaters of the Liard and the Peace. In the pack-train’s dusty wake would plod a solitary prospector, dog dirty, his buckskin shirt glazed with grime, his tent, pick, shovel, and his meagre store of food loaded upon a single patient donkey. Occasionally we passed some Sguswap and Siwash ranchers—for the Indian of British Columbia takes more kindly to an agricultural life than do his brothers on the American side of the border—gaily clad squaws and bright-eyed children peering curiously at our strange vehicle from beneath the canvas covers of the wagons, driving into the settlements to barter the produce of their holdings in the back country for cartridges, red blankets, ginger ale, perhaps a phonograph.

But oftenest of all we met the freighters, their six and eight and twelve horse teams straining at the huge, creaking, white-topped wagons—the freight trains of the railroadless frontier. Though they bear a marked resemblance to the prairie-schooners of crossing-the-plains days, the British Columbian freight wagons are barely half as large as the enormous scow-bodied vehicles in which the American pioneers trekked westward. Their inferior carrying capacity is compensated for, however, by the custom of linking them in pairs, experience having proven that to attempt to negotiate the hairpin turns in the mountain roads with vehicles having an unusually long wheel-base is but to invite disaster. In freighting parlance, five wagons with their teams are called a “swing,” the drivers are known as “skinners,” and the man in charge of the outfit is the “swing boss.” To meet one of these wagon-trains on a road that was uncomfortably narrow at the best and frequently bordered by a sheer cliff was not a pleasant business, for, according to law, the freighter is always permitted to take the inside of the road, so that more than once we were compelled to pull so far to the outside, in order to give the huge vehicles space to get by, that there was not room between our outer wheels and the precipice’s brink for a starved greyhound to pass.

The deeper into the wilderness you push, the more infrequent become the mails, until, north of the Fraser, the settlers receive their letters and newspapers only once a month during the summer and frequently not for many months on end when the rains have turned the trails into impassable morasses. When we left Quesnel for Fort Fraser the mail was already two weeks overdue, and the roads were in such terrible condition that the driver of the mail-stage would not even hazard a guess as to when he could start. At frequent intervals along the way men were camping in the rain-soaked brush beside the road, with no protection save the scant shelter afforded by a dog-tent or a bit of canvas stretched between two trees. At the sound of our approach they would run out and hail us and inquire eagerly as to whether we could tell them when the mail was likely to be along. These men were settlers whose ranches lay far back in the wilderness, and they had been waiting patiently beside that road for many days, straining their ears to catch the rattle of the wheels which would bring them word from the loved ones at home. One of them, a clean-cut, clear-eyed young Englishman, who was camping beside the road in a little shelter tent, told us that he had been there for fifteen days waiting for the postman.

“I’ve got a little ranch about thirty miles back,” he explained, “and I was so afraid that I might miss the mail that I tramped out and have been sleeping here by the roadside waiting for it. My wife and the kiddies are back in the old country, in Devonshire, waiting until I can get a home for them out here. I haven’t had a letter from them now for going on seven weeks. The last one that I had told me that my little girl was sick, and I’m pretty anxious about her. It’s bad news that the coach hasn’t started yet. I guess the only thing to do is to keep on waiting.”

To such men as these I lift my hat in respect and admiration. Resolute, patient, persevering, facing with stout hearts and smiling lips all the hardships and discouragements that such a life has to bring, they are the real advance-guards of progress, the skirmishers of civilisation. In Rhodesia, the Sudan, West Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada you find them, wherever the flag of England flies, clamping down the rivets of empire.

A great deal has been written about the brand of Englishman who goes by the name of remittance-man. With a few pounds a month to go to the devil on, he haunts the highways and byways of the newer lands, working when he must, idling when he may. In Cape Town, Bulawayo, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne, Calgary you will find him, hanging over the polished bars, or, if his remittances permit, in the local clubs. As his long-suffering relatives generally send him as far from home as they can buy a ticket, he has become a familiar figure in the western provinces of the Dominion and particularly along the Pacific Coast. Dressed in well-cut tweeds or flannels and smoking the inevitable brier, you can see him at almost any hour of any day strolling aimlessly about the corridors of the Empress Hotel in Victoria or dawdling about the Union Club. But you rarely find him in the British Columbian bush. The atmosphere—and by this I do not mean the climate—is uncongenial, for “he ain’t a worker” and in consequence is cordially detested by the native-born no less than by those industrious settlers whose mail from home brings them no monthly cheques. In that country, if a man does not go out to his labour in the morning he is counted an undesirable addition to the population. Hence, though the hinterland is filled with the discards of the pack, comparatively few of them bear the despised label of remittance-man.

But that is not saying that you do not find numbers of well-bred, well-educated young Englishmen chopping out careers for themselves up there in the forests of the North. We came across two such at a desolate and lonely ranch midway between Quesnel and Blackwater, three hundred miles from the nearest railway and thirty from the nearest house. We stopped at their little cabin and asked for lunch, and they welcomed us as they would a certified cheque. One of them, I learned after considerable questioning, was the nephew of an earl and had stroked an Oxford crew; the other, with a diffidence that was delightful, showed me the picture of a rambling, ivy-covered manor-house in Hampshire which he called home, and remarked quite casually that he had been something of a cricketer before he came out to the Colonies and had played for the Gentlemen of England. Yet here were these two youngsters, gently born and cleanly bred, “pigging it,” as they themselves expressed it, in a one-room cabin up here at the Back of Beyond. Good Heavens! how glad they were to see us—not for our own sakes, you understand, but because we were messengers from that great, gay world from which they had exiled themselves. While one of them pared the potatoes, the other fried the bacon—“sow-belly” they called it—in ill-smelling cottolene, and both of them fired questions at us like shots from an automatic: what were the newest plays, the latest songs, how long since I had been in London, was the chorus at the Gaiety as good-looking as it used to be, was Winston Churchill really making good in the cabinet or was he just a bally ass, did we think that there was anything to this talk about the Ulstermen revolting—and all the other questions that homesick exiles ask.

“What on earth induces you to stay on in this God-forsaken place?” I asked, when at length they paused in their questioning for lack of breath. “No neighbours, no theatres, no amusements, mails once a month if you are lucky, rain six months out of the twelve, and snow for four months more. Why don’t you try some place nearer civilisation? You can’t do much more than make a bare living up here, and a pretty poor one at that, eh?”