Part 29

I don’t care to dwell on the night we spent at Moricetown. The recollection is not a pleasant one. In a few years, no doubt, it will grow into a prosperous country village, with cement sidewalks and street lamps and rows of neat cottages, but when we were there it was simply the “end of steel.” In other words, it was the place where civilisation, as typified by the railway in operation between there and the coast, quit work and the wilderness began. The “town” consisted of the railway station, still smelling of yellow paint, two or three log cabins, a group of hybrid structures, half house, half tent, and another building which, if one had no regard whatever for veracity, might have been called a hotel. Let me tell you about it. It was built of scantlings covered with log slabs, and the partition walls consisted of nothing thicker than tarred paper. In certain respects this had its advantages, for if you needed more light or air in your room all you had to do was to poke your finger through the wall. Because we had arrived by automobile and were therefore fair game, we were given the _suite de luxe_. This consisted of a six-by-eight room containing an iron bed with a dubious-looking coverlet which had evidently passed through every possible experience save a washing. There being no place in the room for a wash-stand, the cracked wash-bowl was kept under the bed. Indeed, had not the door opened outward we could never have gotten into the room at all. The partitions were so flimsy that we were awakened every time the occupant of the next room changed his mind. Outside our door was what, for want of a better term, I will call the lobby: a low-ceilinged room warmed to the suffocating point by a huge whitewashed stove, around which those who could not get rooms sat through the night on rude benches, talking, whispering, cursing, snoring, spitting, coughing, smoking. The place was blue with the acrid fumes of Bull Durham. Dozing on the benches were all the types peculiar to this remote corner of the empire: Montenegrin and Croatian railway labourers, stolid and dirty; Canadian lumberjacks in their moccasins and hooded parkas; Scandinavian ranchers from the back country; a group of immigrants, fresh from England, their faces whitened by the confinement of the long journey, who had left their rented farms in Sussex or their stools in London counting-houses to come out to the colonies to earn a living; even some pallid women with squalling children in their arms, fretful from lack of sleep, who had come from the old country to join their husbands and lead pioneer lives in the British Columbian wild. The men snored sickeningly, the tired mothers scolded their crying children, the clouds of tobacco smoke eddied toward the ceiling, the army of insects that we found in possession of the bed attacked us from all directions, the rain pattered dishearteningly upon the tin roof, the air was heavy with the odours of grimy, sweat-soaked, tired humanity. It was a _nuit du diable_, as our Paris friends would say.

It is only about five-and-twenty miles from Moricetown to New Hazelton, the prefix “new” distinguishing it from the “old town,” which lies five miles from the railway to the north. The road, so we were told, though slippery after the rains and very hilly, was moderately smooth, and we were as confident that we would eat our Sunday dinner in New Hazelton as we were that the next day was Monday. But the best-laid plans of mice and motorists, you know, “gang aft agley,” which, according to the glossary of Scottish phrases in the back of the dictionary, means “to go off to the side,” and that was precisely what we did, for when only five miles from our destination our driver, in his eagerness to taste civilised cooking again, took a slippery curve at incautious speed and the car skidded over into the ditch and reclined against the shelving bank like some mud-stained, weary monster. It took the better part of an hour to get out the jacks and build a causeway of stones and pry her up. But at last everything was ready and we shouted to the driver to throw on the power. But there was no response from the engines to his pressure on the throttle.

“By Jove!” he muttered despondently. “We’re out of gasoline!”

Sunday noon, a deserted mountain road, a ditched and helpless car, a sky leaden with impending rain—and only five miles from our destination. There was nothing for it but for some one to walk into New Hazelton, rouse the local storekeeper from his Sunday nap, and bring us a tin of gasoline. The choice unanimously fell on Duncan, who set off down the middle of the muddy road at a four-miles-an-hour pace. Meanwhile, we set about preparations for our Sunday dinner. While the driver skirmished about with an axe in search of wood that was not too rain-soaked to burn, my friend opened such of the tinned goods as were left, and I attempted to wash the knives and forks and tin plates in a convenient mud puddle. As we had neglected to clean them after our last meal in the open, on the ground that we would have no further use for them, the task I had set myself was not an easy one: it’s surprising how difficult it is to remove grease from tin with nothing but a stick and some cold water. We achieved a meal at last, however—tinned sausages, tinned spaghetti, mouldy bread made palatable by toasting, and some week-old coffee which we found in one of the thermos bottles and heated—and I’ve had many a worse meal, too. Just as the rain began to descend in earnest, a horse and sulky swung round the bend bearing Duncan and the precious tin of gasoline. Thirty minutes later we were rolling between a double line of welcoming townspeople down the muddy main street of New Hazelton. We were at our journey’s end!

Though New Hazelton now boasts the most pretentious hotel in all the North country, when we were there this hostelry was still in course of construction, so we were compelled to look elsewhere for bed and board. After some searching we found accommodation in the cabin occupied by the operator of the Yukon Telegraph and ate our meals at the pie counter run by an American known as “Black Jack” Macdonald. And it was good eating, too. Our first question after reaching New Hazelton was, of course:

“Is there any chance of our getting through to the Alaskan border?”

“Not a chance in the world,” was the chorused answer. But we protested that that was the answer we had received at Vancouver and Ashcroft and Quesnel and Fort Fraser when we inquired as to the chances of getting through to Hazelton.

“The boys are quite right, gentlemen,” said a bearded frontiersman named “Dutch” Cline. “There isn’t a chance in the world. I’ve lived in this country close on twenty years and I know what I’m talking about. It’s only about forty miles in an air-line from here to the Alaskan boundary, but I doubt if a pack-mule could get through, let alone a motor-car. You would have to actually chop your way through forests that haven’t so much as a trail. You would have to devise some way of getting your car across no less than a dozen dangerous rivers. You would have to climb to the very summit of a six-thousand-foot mountain range and then drop down on the other side; and, finally, you would have to find some means of crossing the Portland Canal, which separates British Columbia from Alaska. Add to that the fact that winter is at hand and that you would probably be snowed in before you had got a quarter of the way, and you will understand just how utterly impossible it is.”

So we were forced to abandon regretfully the hope of hearing the Alaskan gravel crunch beneath our tires and to content ourselves with the knowledge that we had driven farther north than a motor-car had ever been driven on this continent before: farther north than the Aleutian Islands, farther north than Hudson Bay, farther north than the Peninsula of Kamchatka, half a hundred miles farther north, in fact, than the southern boundary of Alaska itself.

New Hazelton is in the very heart of northern British Columbia, where the Skeena, the Babine, and the Bulkley meet, and in the same latitude as the lower end of the Alaskan panhandle.

A collection of log cabins and weather-beaten shacks huddled on the river bank at the foot of the Rocher de Boulé, whose cloud-wreathed summit, seven thousand feet in height, seems to scrape the sky, it is one of those boom towns with which the pioneer business men of the region are shaking dice against fate. If they lose, the place will revert to the primeval wilderness from which it sprang; if they win—and the coming of the railway has made it all but certain that they will—they will have laid the foundation of a future Winnipeg or Vancouver. Save only in Constantinople during the stirring days which marked the end of the Hamidieh régime, and at Casablanca with the Foreign Legion, I do not recall ever having encountered so many strange and picturesque and interesting figures as I did in this log town on the ragged edge of things. Every evening after supper the men would come dropping into the hut by twos and threes until there were a dozen or more gathered in a circle about the whitewashed stove and the air was so thick with the fumes of Bull Durham that you could have cut it with a knife. Talk about the Arabian Nights! Those were the British Columbian Nights, and if the Caliph of Bagdad had sat in that circle of frontiersmen and listened to the tales that passed round with the black bottle in that cabin on the banks of the Skeena he would have beheaded Scherezade in disgust. Here, in the flesh, were the characters of which the novelists love to write: men whom the wanderlust had lured from the Morris chairs of ease; men who had gone the pace in England long ago; men who had left their country between two days and for their country’s good; men who, in clubs or regimental messes, had been caught with an ace too many; men who, on nameless rivers or in strange valleys, had played knuckle down with Death.

The talk fest of anecdote and reminiscence would generally be opened by “Dutch” Cline, a hairy, iron-hard pioneer who would have delighted the heart of Remington. I remember that the first time I met him he remarked that there would be an early winter, and when I asked him how he knew he explained quite soberly it was because he was afflicted with an uncontrollable desire to steal a dog. Cline was a Boer by birth—hence his nickname of “Dutch”—and in his youth had fought in turn the Zulus, the Basutos, and the Matabele, having, as he expressed it, lived on the frontier ever since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. He was a born raconteur and would hold us spellbound as he yarned of the days when he sailed under Captain Hansen, “the Flying Dutchman,” and poached for seals off the Pribilofs. Hansen, who was a Dane, evolved the ingenious idea of having a ship built in Japan but owned by Americans and sailing under the British flag, so that when he was overhauled by a gunboat, whether American, British, Japanese, or Russian, and arrested for pelagic sealing, it stirred up such an international rumpus with all the other nations concerned that it was easier to let him go. He once gave his vessel a coat of the grey-green paint used on the Czar’s warships, uniformed his crew as Russian sailors, and, with guns of stovepipe frowning from his decks and the flag of Saint Andrew flaunting from his stern, bore majestically down on the sealing grounds, and when his unsuspecting rivals cut their cables and fled seaward he helped himself to the skins. Though a pirate and an outlaw whose hands were stained with blood, he met his death not on deep water, as he would have wished, but in a little harbour at the north end of Vancouver Island while trying to save a little child. I remember that “Dutch” wiped his eyes as he told the story, and no one smiled at his doing it, either; for, though these men of the North have the hearts of vikings, they likewise often have the tenderness of a woman.

Then there was Bob MacDonald, a red-headed man-o’-war’s man who had served under Dewey at the taking of the Philippines and later on had been a steam-shovel man at Panama. He needed no urging to reel off tales of mad pranks and wild adventures on every seaboard of the world, but when the deed for which he had been recommended for the Carnegie medal was mentioned his face would turn as fiery as his hair. So, as he could never be induced to tell the story, some one, to his intense embarrassment, would insist on telling it for him. While prospecting in that remote and barren region which borders on the Great Slave Lake his only companion had gone suddenly insane. MacDonald bound the raging madman hand and foot, placed him in a canoe which he built of whip-sawed planks, and brought him down a thousand miles of unexplored and supposedly unnavigable rivers, sometimes dragging his flimsy craft across mile-long portages, sometimes hoisting it, inch by inch, foot by foot, over rocky walls half a thousand feet in height, sometimes running cataracts and rapids where his life hung on the twist of a paddle, living on wild berries and such game as he could kill along the way, but always caring for the gibbering maniac as tenderly as though he were a child. He reached New Hazelton and its hospital with his charge at last, after one of the most intrepid journeys ever made by a white man—and the next day his comrade died. Yet when I exclaimed over his heroism, MacDonald was genuinely abashed. “Hell,” he blurted, “what else was there for me to do? You wouldn’t have had me go off and leave him up there to die, would you? You’d do the same thing if your pal was took sick on the trail. Sure you would.”

When his instrument would cease its chatter for a time, the telegraph operator would chip in with stories of the men who sit in those lonely cabins scattered along two thousand miles of copper wire and relay the news of the world to the miners of the Yukon. In hair-raising detail he told of that terrible winter when the pack-train with its supplies was lost and the snow-bound operators had to keep themselves alive for many months upon such scanty game as they could find in the frozen forests. He told of the insufferable loneliness that drives men raving mad, of the awful silence that seems to crush one down. He told, with the thrill in the voice that comes only from actual experience, of how men run from their own shadows and become frightened at the sound of their own voices; of how each succeeding day is the intolerable same, only a little worse, the messages that come faintly over the line being the sole relief from the awful feeling that you are the only person left on all the earth.

Occasionally Eugene Caux, or Old Man Cataline as he is invariably called because of his Catalonian origin, would join our conversazione. His ninety odd years notwithstanding, he is a magnificent figure of a man, six feet four in his elk-hide moccasins, with a chest like a barrel, his mop of snowy hair in striking contrast to a skin which has been tanned by sun and wind to the rich, ripe colour of a well-smoked meerschaum. Cataline is the most noted packer in the whole North country, being, in fact, the owner of the last great pack-train north of the Rio Grande. So much of his life has been spent in the wild, with Indian packers and French-Canadian trappers for his only companions, that his speech has become a strange mélange of English, French, half a dozen Indian dialects, and some remnants of his native Spanish, the whole thickly spiced with oaths. When, upon his periodic visits to the settlements, he is compelled to sleep under a roof, he strips the bed of its blankets and, wrapping himself in them, spends the night in comfort on the floor, his cocked revolver next his leg so that he can shoot through the coverings in case a marauder should appear. It is a custom among those who know him to invariably offer him a drink for the sake of enjoying the unique performance that ensues. His invariable brand of “hooch” is Hudson Bay rum, strong enough to eat the lining from a copper boiler. “Salue, señores!” says the old Spaniard, and drains half his glass at a single gulp. But he does not drink the other half. Instead, he pours it slowly over his mop of tousled hair and carefully rubs it in. It is a strange performance.

They tell with relish in the northern camps the story of how Old Man Cataline, summoned to appear before the court sitting at Quesnel to defend the title to some land that he had filed a claim on, strode into the crowded court-room in the midst of a trial, and, shoving aside the bailiffs, menacingly confronted the startled judge. “Je worka pour that land, señor!” he thundered, shaking his fist and his whole frame trembling with passion. “Je payez pour heem, mister! He belonga to moi! Je killa any one who try tak heem away! Oui, by God, je killa you, m’sieu!” and, drawing a hunting-knife from his belt, he drove its blade deep into the top of the judge’s table. Leaving this grim memento quivering in the wood, Cataline turned upon his heel and strode away. He was not molested.

When the world was electrified by the news that gold had been discovered on the Yukon, the authorities at Ottawa, anticipating the stampede of the lawless and the desperate that ensued, rushed a body of troops to the scene for the preservation of law and order. To Old Man Cataline was intrusted the task of transporting the several hundred soldiers and their supplies overland to the gold-fields by pack-train. The officer in command was a pompous person, fresh from the Eastern provinces and much impressed with his own importance, who insisted that the routine of barrack life should be rigidly observed upon the long and tedious march through the wilderness, the men rising and eating and going to bed by bugle-call. The absurdity of this proceeding aroused the contempt of Cataline, who would snort disgustedly: “Pour cinquante, soixante year I live in the grand forêt. Je connais when it ees time to get up. Je connais when I am hongry. Je connais when I am tired. But now it ees blowa de bug’ to get up; blowa de bug’ to eat; blowa de damned bug’ to sleep. Nom d’un nom d’un nom du chien! What t’ell for?” Within twenty-four hours Cataline and the commanding officer were not on speaking terms. But the expedition continued to press steadily forward, the commander riding at the head of the mile-long string of soldiers on mule back, and Cataline bringing up the rear. One day a heavily laden pack-mule became mired in a marsh and, despite the orders of the officer and the efforts of the soldiers, could not be extricated. As they were standing in deep perplexity about the helpless animal Cataline came riding up from the rear. Pulling up his mule, he sat quietly in his saddle without volunteering any advice. At last the officer, at his wit’s end, pocketed his pride.

“How would you suggest that we get this mule out, Mr. Cataline?” he asked politely.

“Oh,” remarked the old frontiersman drily, “blowa de bug’.”

Nor will I readily forget Michael Flaherty, a genial Irish section boss on the Grand Trunk Pacific, whose effervescent Celtic wit formed a grateful relief to the grim stories of hardship and suffering. He had a front tooth conveniently missing, I remember, and one of his chief delights was to lean back in his chair and write patriotic “G. R.’s” and “U. S. A.’s” in squirts of tobacco juice upon the ceiling. One day he ordered out his hand-car in a hurry.

“And where moight yez be goin’, Misther Flaherty?” solicitously inquired his assistant.

“To hell wid yer questions,” was the answer. “Did Napoleon always be tellin’ his min where he was goin’?”

* * * * *

The Indians of British Columbia, doubtless because of their remoteness from civilisation, have retained far more of their racial customs and characteristics than have their cousins below the international boundary. Though divided into innumerable clans and tribes, under local names, they fall naturally, on linguistic grounds, into a few large groups. Thus, the southern portion of the hinterland is occupied by the Salish and the Kootenay; in the northern interior are to be found the Tinneh or Athapackan people; while the Haidas, Tsimshians, Kwakiatles, and Nootkas have their villages along the coast, though the white settlers speak of them collectively as Siwashes, “Siwash” being nothing more than a corruption of the French _sauvage_. These British Columbian aborigines are strikingly Oriental in appearance, having so many of the facial characteristics of the Mongol that it does not need the arguments of an ethnologist to convince one that they owe their origin to Asia. Indeed, it is a common saying that if you cut the hair of a Siwash you will find a Japanese. They are generally short and squat of figure and, though habitually lazy, are possessed of almost incredible endurance. One of them was pointed out to me, a brave named Chickens, who packed a piece of machinery weighing three hundred pounds over one hundred and eighty miles of rough forest trails in twelve days. Some years ago the Indians of the Hag-wel-get village constructed a suspension bridge of rope and timbers across the dizzy chasm at the bottom of which flows the raging Bulkley. This bridge is an interesting piece of work, for in building it the Indians adopted the cantilever system, a form of construction generally supposed to be beyond the comprehension of uncivilised peoples. But the amazing feature of the structure is that the varying members are not secured together by nails, bolts, or screws but simply lashed with willow withes. It is a crazy-looking affair, and when you venture on it it creaks, groans, and swings as if threatening to collapse. Even the weight of a dog is sufficient to set it vibrating sickeningly. When it was completed, the Indians were evidently in some doubt as to the stability of their handiwork, for they tested it by sending a score of kloochmen out upon the quivering structure. If it held, well and good—it was strong enough to bear the weight of an Indian; if it gave way—oh, well, there were plenty of other squaws where those came from.