CHAPTER XXIII

THE FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE

It would have been harder to leave the Rockies if I had not been bound for the Selkirks, which have this advantage over the Rockies, that they are perhaps less known. That part I was bound for is, indeed, not known at all to tourists, and very little known to anybody. The known part of the range lies round Glacier House, and includes Mount Abbott, the Great Illecillewaet Glacier, Mount Sir Donald, etc., which high places the railway has now made accessible for tourists who can climb. The part I was to see lies to the south-east, at the head of the Columbia Valley, and is at present a hundred miles from the nearest railway station.

First of all I took train to Golden. If you take a map of Canada and follow the trans-continental line westward, you will see that it emerges from the Rockies at Golden. Golden is a little mining town lying in the Columbia {216} Valley, with the Rockies on one side of it and the Selkirks on the other. It was chiefly to see this valley--one of the most fertile in British Columbia, but at present unopened--that I got out at Golden with a friend. An excursion into the Selkirks was to depend upon the time at our disposal. We had been told that near Lake Windermere, at a place called Wilmer, there was a great irrigation scheme in progress, which would shortly result in 60,000 acres of dry belt-land being ready for fruit-farming. This, when the rail from Kamloops to Golden was completed, would make the Columbia Valley as famous for its fruit as the Okanagan. We both wanted to see it. My friend wanted to buy land. The problem was how to get up the valley.

There were, we found, five different ways of doing the eighty miles from Golden to Wilmer.

1. The first was to wait for that day of the week on which the stage-coach ran. It took two days to do the distance, and was very convenient if we did not mind waiting in Golden a few days first. But we were in a hurry.

2. This way was by river-boat--a delightful trip. But there were one or two objections to it. The water of the Columbia was very {217} low at this time of the year, the sand-banks were numerous, and the boat had gone up some days before and nobody knew when it would get down again. We gave up the boat.

3. The third way, which we decided should be ours, was to go up in the only motor which Golden possessed. This would cost fifty dollars, but the journey there would only take about seven hours. When we had decided upon this, we went to the proprietor of the motor and found that the car was already out for an indefinite number of days.

4. This way was to walk the eighty miles--a plan I favoured and tried on the way back, as I shall describe. But my friend could not fancy it. Statelier than myself, he had to carry five more stones with him.

5. This was the way we took. We hired a two-horse rig which undertook to do the journey in the same time as the stage--but for twenty dollars apiece instead of five.

We started from Golden on a Monday morning in the two-horse rig, driven by a young American. He had been in the United States navy, and also in Alberta, farming, but he had had no luck with his farm, having started with too small a capital to tide over {218} the two bad seasons which he had met there. He told us that he found Canada very similar to the States--neither much better nor worse; and he took his own luck there philosophically. He seemed to me altogether a capable man, whose fortune might have been all the other way. Anyway he drove excellently and was not a grumbler, like the American ex-sailor I met at Regina.

Nothing could have been more beautiful than the late September morning when we started out of Golden. A spreading village of pretty poplar-lined avenues and pleasant bungalows, Golden explained its own name as we went. The wooded hills on either side were all splashed with autumn yellows, and the sun, striking down through a grove of silver poplars which shuts off the south end of the village, made it all seem shot with gold. It is a mining village, but compared with the usual mining village of Great Britain it seemed as Eden to the Inferno.

Coming out of it we struck what is the dominant scenery of the valley--the blue Columbia winding in and out, sometimes wooded to its brim, sometimes sweeping over into open marshland, but always with the hills lightly wooded, facing one another across it, and behind {219} them the white peaks hung with snow. At every mile or two a silvery creek, sometimes a mere ribbon of water, sometimes almost a river, rushed down to join the Columbia below; by the side of these creeks mostly would be the cleared land which small ranchers had settled, and where they had gone on living presumably on what they could grow off their own places, since the chances of reaching a market became obviously more difficult at every mile. Every wind of the road--and it mostly follows the river--gave views that were always changing and beautiful.

It was on the second day of our driving that the appearance of the valley grew different. The creeks became rarer; the soil drier. Instead of silver poplars rising among a tangled underbush, there were now jack-pines growing out of a burnt-up sward. We might have been going through some English park in the south country, and some one had evidently thought this before, for a man we met driving told us that this part of the valley was known as the Park. Passing through it we came at last to the real dry belt. Those who know the Okanagan would no doubt find it less strange, but it amazed me to find a country among these mountains almost Egyptian in its colouring and {220} texture. Drier and drier became the soil; the trees became sparser and sparser; there was now no underwood at all. The straight firs rose clear out of sandy hills and hollows. Sandy they might appear, but this was not sand in the vulgar sense. It was glacial silt--bottomless drifts of powdered clay that has slipped down from the mountains and piled and sloped itself into 'benches' above the river.

We had to cross the river to get to Wilmer, which is the headquarters of the irrigation. Headquarters sounds imposing; and in a few years, doubtless, Wilmer will be imposing, but at present it consists of a few shacks, two small stores, a dirty little hotel (in the bar of which a man was shot the day after we left), and one presiding genius who has made Wilmer what it is and also what it will be shortly. Need I say that it was a Scot who years ago saw the far-reaching value of this land, conceived the idea of irrigating it, and personally superintended the carrying out of his conception? I don't know that I need. I came to the conclusion before I left Canada that Scots, more than any other race, were at the bottom, and generally also at the top, of most of the enterprises that were being carried out there. No {221} one talks of the Scotticisation of Canada. Perhaps Scots do not proselytise. Perhaps they do not find any other people worthy of being taken into their community. They prefer to remain an international oligarchy, managing others but not admitting them to equal rights. They effect their intentions by usually working alone and always sticking together. A paradoxical people. It is amazing to think that at the beginning of the eighteenth century the Scottish Highlander was regarded by the average Englishman in much the same light as we now regard the Hottentot or the Andaman Islander, a hopelessly idle and uncouthly impossible person, destined to remain a barbarian for ever. _Dis aliter visum_. The Highlander now directs the Empire, distinguishing himself in that respect even more than his Lowland brother. Yet only two hundred years have passed since he was outside the pale.

My friend knew Mr. Randolph Bruce, the Highlander who presides over the Columbia Valley Irrigation Works, and will, it seems to me, rank as one of the many makers of Canada, and Mr. Bruce most hospitably put us up while we were in Wilmer, and showed us what he has done and what he means to do. What he means to do is to create a town on the shores {222} of Lake Windermere, and he drove us down there to show us the lake, which is not the least like its English original, but very beautiful nevertheless, lying as it does clear and still among the sand-hills, a belt of autumn-tinted trees around it, and, above, the hills and the snows. It looked like some African lake stretched at the feet of the Mountains of the Moon. It looked as if it might lie thus for centuries, silent and untouched by the hands of men. But it was a Canadian lake, and though it might seem to be at the very back of the world, it was shortly to have a town built on its shores. Mr. Bruce showed us the town site, the hotel site, the site of the bowling-green and the polo ground. I rather think he showed us the race-course that was going to be. I saw it all the more clearly because Mr. Bruce also showed us the work already actually accomplished--the canals and ditches that brought the upper mountain lakes down on to the benches of friable clay that were to grow the apples we shall eat in England a few years hence. It is all extraordinarily interesting, seeing this town of the future and these fruit-lands of the future--of which my friend bought twenty acres, which were to be named after him. The Columbia River ran just below the {223} bench-land he bought, and I wished I had some capital handy that I might buy the adjoining plot, that I might also grow fruit there and have a portion of the fair Dominion named after me. If the Windermere race-course had already been in existence, and a race being run, I should have backed one of the horses against all my principles, and laid out the proceeds in a fruit-farm.

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