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Title: The Fair Dominion
A Record of Canadian Impressions
Author: R. E. Vernède
Illustrator: Cyrus Cuneo
Release Date: August 3, 2020 [EBook #62844]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAIR DOMINION ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND
LOUISE.]
THE FAIR DOMINION
A RECORD OF CANADIAN IMPRESSIONS
BY
R. E. VERNÈDE
AUTHOR OF
'THE PURSUIT OF MR. FAVIEL,' 'MERIEL OF THE MOORS,' ETC.
With 12 Illustrations in Colour
from Drawings by
CYRUS CUNEO
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRÜBNER & CO., LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.
1911
{v}
PREFACE
You know how long ago, in the earlier-than-Victorian days, the
country cousin, in order to see life, went up to the Metropolis. A
terrible journey it was, but well worth the labour and anxiety.
Accounts are still extant of how the bustle and noise of the streets
amazed him, of how endless the houses seemed, how startled he was by
the glittering, clattering folk, how innocent and countrified he felt
by comparison with them. Nowadays, though the London we know is to
that old London as a vast and sleepless city to a small somnolent
town, the country cousin is no longer carried off his feet by a visit
to it. It is not vast enough or noisy enough or new enough to
impress him. Perhaps no single city ever will be again.
But Canada! Some Winnipeg school teachers who came over recently to
see London, told a journalist that it seemed so quiet compared with
Canadian cities. 'In our cities,' {vi} they said, 'it is impossible
to escape from the noise of the streets.' ... Yet the streets and the
cities are not really the things that impress one most in Canada.
The amazing things are the forests and the fields, the prairies and
the lakes and the mountains: all the illimitable space and the
irrepressible men who are closing it in and giving it names for us to
know it by.
Clearly the English country cousin who wishes to be impressed should
go to Canada. It is as easy to reach as London was in the old days,
and there are no highwaymen. He will come back--if he comes
back--with many stories to tell his friends of the wonders he has
seen and of the still more incredible things that will soon be
visible. That is at least my position. I went out originally for
the _Bystander_, which wanted its Canadian news, like all its other
news, up-to-date and not too solemn, and I am indebted to the editor
of that journal for permission to make use in parts of the articles I
sent him for this book, in which, by the way, I have still
endeavoured to avoid solemnity. For some reason or other, many
writers upon Canada do fall into a solemn and portentous way of
describing the country--with the result {vii} that people who know
nothing of the facts say to themselves, 'This is indeed an important
Dominion, but dull.' As a matter of fact, of course, Canada is a
highly exciting country--from its grizzly bears to its political
problems--and having spent delightful months in various parts, some
well known, others, such as the French River, the Columbia Valley,
and the Selkirks, very little known; riding in trains or on mountain
ponies, sometimes trying to catch maskinongés (a tigerish kind of
pike), sometimes trying to catch prime ministers (who cannot be
described in such a general way)--I have tried to set down my
impressions as incompletely as I received them. Never, I hope, have
I fallen into the error of describing exactly how many salmon are
canned in the Dominion, or what Sir Wilfrid Laurier should do if he
really wishes to remain a great party leader. The errors I have
fallen into will be obvious, and I need not run through them here....
As for criticisms--if now and then I stop to make some--if I start
saying, 'Canada is a great country, nevertheless, we do some things
just as well or better at home,' no Canadian need mind. Country
cousins have said just {viii} that sort of thing from all time.
Every cousin--even the most countrified--makes some reservations in
favour of his own place; he would not be worth entertaining
otherwise. If the criticisms are pointless, Canadians may say, 'What
can you expect from a country cousin?' If there is something in
them, they will be entitled to remark, 'This English country cousin
shows some intelligence. But then he has been to Canada--the centre
of things.'
{ix}
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE START FROM LIVERPOOL
II. THE STEERAGE PASSAGE
III. LANDING IN CANADA
IV. A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC
V. THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY
VI. STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND A TRAVELLER'S VOW
VII. A HABITANT VILLAGE AND ITS NOTAIRE
VIII. GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL
IX. TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER
X. MASKINONGÉ FISHING ON THE FRENCH RIVER
XI. SOME SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY
XII. THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO
XIII. THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW TIMERS OF WINNIPEG
XIV. A PRAIRIE TOWN AND THE PRAIRIE POLICE
XV. IN CALGARY
{x}
XVI. THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION
XVII. AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS
XVIII. INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
XIX. A HOT BATH IN BANFF
XX. CANADA AND WOMAN
XXI. THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS
XXII. A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY
XXIII. THE FRUIT-LANDS OF LAKE WINDERMERE
XXIV. THE SELKIRKS--A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY
XXV. AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK THROUGH THE COLUMBIA VALLEY
XXVI. FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST
XXVII. A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY
XXVIII. THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND
XXIX. A CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF
BRITISH COLUMBIA AND A BIG FIRE AT VICTORIA
XXX. BACK THROUGH OTTAWA
INDEX
{xi}
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LOOKING FROM LAKE AGNES DOWN ON LAKES MIRROR AND LOUISE ...
Frontispiece
CHATEAU FRONTENAC FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS. DAY. QUEBEC
CHATEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT. QUEBEC
MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES
A TRAIL IN THE ROCKIES
THE HALT. SADDLEBACK. LAGGAN
LAKE LOUISE. LAGGAN. ALBERTA
IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS
ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY
THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS
A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES
IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT
{1}
THE FAIR DOMINION
CHAPTER I
THE START FROM LIVERPOOL
Canada and its wonders might lie before us, yet it was not all joy
there at the Liverpool docks, where we waited our opportunity to go
on board S.S. _Empress of Britain_. For one thing, the sun on that
August day of last year was so unusually warm that standing about
with a bag amongst crowds of people who were seeing other people off
was hard work; for another, I had left behind me in my Hertfordshire
home my bull-mastiff, forlorn ever since I had begun packing, and not
a bit deceived by the bone she had been supplied with at parting.
Even while she had gnawed it, she had whined. All those other people
already on the great ship, the people in the bows--the
emigrants--were leaving more even than a bull-mastiff: friends--for
who knew how long?--their parents in England perhaps for ever. Here
were thoughts to obscure the {2} pleasure of those who were making
for a new world, thoughts to sadden those who, whether by their own
choice or not, were staying behind. Less than my bull-mastiff could
they be either deceived or solaced. True, they might remember that
this is the way a great Empire is made. We talk of the Empire often
enough. But then we who talk of it are rarely those who make it or
suffer for it; and perhaps we are therefore more easily consoled by a
great idea than they.
Luckily going on board ship has to be a bustling business. My two
companions and I, who had been promised a four-berth third-class
cabin between us, had to bustle quite a lot--to different gangways
from which we were rapidly sent back and into various queues, which
turned out, after we had waited in them for some time, to be composed
of some other class of passenger. We were extremely heated before we
found ourselves in the end about to be passed up a gangway at which
the medical inspection of a group of Scandinavians was at the moment
going on. Scandinavian seems to be a roomy word which covers all
Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Lapps; and no foreigners not coming under
this category are carried by the 'Empress' boats.
{3}
The theory seems to be in regard to them that they are the only right
and proper shipmates for English emigrants going to Canada. They
were being pretty carefully examined all the same, men and women
alike. The doctors' attention seemed to centre on their heads and
eyelids. Hats were pulled off as they came level with them, and
tow-coloured hair was grasped and peered into apparently with
satisfactory results, for only a couple of elderly people were held
back for a few minutes; and they I fancy had not passed the eye test,
and were therefore not free from suspicion of having trachoma--a not
uncommon North European disease supposed to cause total blindness,
which is least of all to be desired in a new country. The two
detained Scandinavians were re-examined and passed, after which our
turn came. I think we all three felt a little uneasy in the eyelids
as we advanced upon the doctor, but we need not have been anxious,
for after a swift glance at us he reassured us by grinning and
saying, 'There's nothing wrong with you, I should say,'--and so we
passed on board. For the next hour or two we were part of a whirl of
confused humanity. There is always a tendency among landsmen to
become sheepish at sea, and in the steerage there were nine {4}
hundred of us, most of whom had never been at sea before. So we
rushed together and got jammed down companionways and in passages
which even on so big a liner as this could not hold us all abreast,
and scrummed to find the numbers of our berths from the steward, and
flung ourselves in masses upon our baggage, and pressed pell-mell to
the sides of the ship to wave good-bye, and formed a solid tossing
square saloonwards when bells rang and we thought they might mean
meals.
Of course there must have been even then self-possessed passengers,
who knew what they were about and only seemed to be lost with the
crowd, and to be vaguely trying to muddle through. Canadians
returning to their own country were conspicuous later by reason of
their cool bearing and air of knowing their way about the world. And
the invisible discipline of the ship that was to turn us all later
into reasonable and orderly individuals was no doubt already at work.
But the impression any one looking down on us that first evening
would have received would have been the impression of a scurrying
crowd, fancifully and variously dressed for its Atlantic
voyage--clerks in pink shirts and high collars and bowler hats,
peasants in smocks, women in the {5} very latest flapping head-gear,
or bareheaded and shawled, infants either terribly smart or mere
bundles of old clothes.
Up on the first-class deck superior people were walking calmly about
with just the right clothes and manners for such a small event as
crossing the Atlantic must have been to most of them. Occasionally
one of these upper folk would come to the rails, lean over and
smilingly stare at us: wondering perhaps at our confusion. But then
all our fortunes were embarked on the ship, and only a little part of
theirs.
When I went to sleep that night on a clean straw mattress in a lower
berth, with a pleasant air blowing in through the port-hole in the
passage, we were, I suppose, out to sea, and the air was Atlantic
air, and no longer that of the old country.
{6}
CHAPTER II
THE STEERAGE PASSAGE
Apart from its other merits the steerage has this to its
credit--every one is very friendly and affable. No one required an
introduction before entering into conversation, and the suspicion
that we might be making the acquaintance of some doubtful and
inferior person who would perhaps presume upon it later did not worry
any of us. I sat at a delightful table. Some one who knew the ins
and outs of a steerage passage had advised me to go in to meals with
the first 'rush,' instead of waiting for the second or third. His
theory was that the first relay got the pick of the food. So my two
friends and I had taken care to answer the very first call to the
saloon, which happened to be for high tea, and, seating ourselves at
random, found that we were thereby self-condemned to take every meal
in the same order--including breakfast at the unaccustomed and
somewhat dispiriting hour of 7 A.M. {7} I do not know that it
greatly mattered. In the cabin next ours there were several small
children, who appeared to wake and weep about 4 A.M., and either to
throw themselves or be thrown out of their berths on to the floor a
little later. Their lamentations then became so considerable, that
we were not sorry to rise and go elsewhere.
Besides the three of us, there were at our table the following:--
(1) A Norwegian peasant. Going on to the land. Quiet and rapid in
his eating.
(2) Another Norwegian peasant, also going on to the land. He must
have arrived on board very hungry, and he remained so throughout the
voyage. He used to help himself to butter with his egg spoon, after
he had finished most of his egg with it. Moreover, he would rise and
stretch a red and dusky arm all down the table, if he sighted
something appetising afar off. As we had a most excellent table
steward, whose waiting could not have been beaten in the first-class,
we all rather resented this behaviour, and I--as his next door
neighbour--was deputed to hold him courteously in his seat until the
desired eatables could be passed him.
(3) A Durham miner going to a mine in {8} northern Ontario. A cheery
red-faced person. He had bought a revolver before starting for
Canada, because friends had told him that they were rough sort of
places up there. I afterwards stayed a night in a mining town, and
the only row that I heard was caused by a young Salvation Army girl,
who beat a drum violently for hours outside the bar. We advised the
miner to practise with his revolver in some isolated spot, these
weapons being tricky.
(4) A small shy cockney boy who was going out to his dad at Winnipeg.
I don't know what his dad was, but I should think a clerk of sorts.
(5) A brass metal worker from the North. Going to a job in
Peterborough. A quiet pleasant young man.
(6) A chauffeur who had also been in the Royal Engineers. Had been
in the South African War, and told stories about it much more
interesting than those you see in books.
(7) A horse-breaker, with whom I spent many hours learning about bits
and bridles and shoes. He was the only married man among these
seven. He hoped to bring his wife and family out within the year,
and was not going to be happy until he did, even though {9} the kids
would have to be vaccinated, and he had most conscientious objections
to this process.
All these men--even the Norwegian with his egg-spoon habits--would
be, I could not help thinking, a distinct gain to any country. I
fancy too that they represented the steerage generally. Of course
there were other types. I remember some characteristic Londoners of
the less worthy sort--gummy-faced youths in dirty clothes that had
been smart. There was one in particular, whom the horse-breaker
would refer to as 'that lad that goes about in what was once a soot
o' clothes,' who had a perfect genius for card tricks and making
music on a comb. His career in Canada, judging by criticisms passed
upon him by returning Canadians, was likely to be brief and
unsuccessful.
The food--to turn to what is always of considerable interest on a
voyage--was good but solid. Pea soup, followed by pork chops and
plum-pudding, makes an excellent dinner when you are hungry.
Everybody was hungry the first day and also the last three days. In
between there was a cessation of appetites. The sea was never in the
least rough, but there was some slight motion on the second day out,
{10} and the majority of the nine hundred had probably never been to
sea before. The strange affliction took them unawares, and they did
not know how to deal with it. Where they were first seized, there
they remained and were ill. The sides of the ship which appealed to
more experienced travellers did not allure them. It was during this
affliction that a device which had struck me as a most excellent idea
upon going on board seemed in practice less good. This was a
railed-in sand-pit which the paternal company had constructed between
decks for the entertainment of the emigrant children. I had seen a
dozen or more at a time playing in it with every manifestation of
delight. Even now while they were ailing there, they did not seem to
mind it.
Everywhere one went on that day of tribulation one had to walk warily.
Afterwards the sea settled down into a mill pond, and every one began
to wear a cheerful and hopeful look. In the evenings, and sometimes
in the afternoons as well, some of the Scandinavians would produce
concertinas and violins, and the whole of them would dance their
folk-dances for hours. It was extraordinary how gracefully they
danced--the squat fair-haired women and the big men heavily {11}
clothed and booted. There was an attempt on the part of some of the
English people to take part in these dances, but they soon realised
their inferiority, and gave it up in favour of sports and concerts.
The sports, though highly successful in themselves, led to a slight
contretemps when the Bishop of London, who happened to be on board,
came over by request to distribute the prizes. The Scandinavians,
who quite wrongly thought they had been left out of the sports,
seized the opportunity afforded by the bishop's address (which was
concerned with our future in Canada), to form in Indian file, with a
concertinist at their head, and march round and round the platform on
which the bishop stood, making a deafening noise. It looked for a
little as if there might be a scuffle between them and the
prize-winners, but peace prevailed, though we were all prevented from
hearing what was no doubt very sound advice. Apart from this, there
was no horseplay to speak of until the last night but one, when a
rowdy set, headed by a fat Yorkshireman, chose to throw bottles about
in the dark, down in that part of the ship where about fifty men were
berthed together. For this the ringleader was hauled before the
captain and properly threatened.
{12}
Our concerts went with less éclat. They were held in the
dining-saloon, and there were usually good audiences. It seemed
however that we had only one accompanist, whose command of the piano
was limited, and in any case self-consciousness invariably got the
better of the performers at the last moment. Either they would not
come forward at all when their turn arrived, or else, having come
forward, they turned very red, wavered through a few notes and then
lost their voices altogether. Our best English concertina player, a
fat little Lancashire engineer, had his instrument seized with the
strangest noises halfway through 'Variations on the Harmonica,' and
after a manly effort to restrain them, failed and had to retire in
haste. We generally bridged over these recurring gaps in the
programme by singing 'Yip i addy.'
It was so fine most of the voyage, that one could be quite happy on
deck doing nothing at all but resting and strolling and talking. A
few of the girls skipped occasionally and some of the men boxed:
there was no real zeal for deck games. The voyage was too short, and
with the new life and the new world at the end of it we all wanted to
find out from one another what we knew--or at least what we {13}
thought--Canada would be like. We stood in some awe of returning
Canadians who talked of dollars as if they were pence, and we
wondered if we should get jobs as easily as people said we should.
Almost every type of worker was represented among us, and many types
of people.
Chief among my own particular acquaintances made on the boat were a
young lady-help from Alberta, two Russian Jews from Archangel, a
Norwegian farm hand from somewhere near the Arctic circle, two miners
from Ontario, and three small boys belonging to Perth, Scotland.
I do not know how the Russian Jews came to be on the boat. They had
some Finnish, and I suppose slipped in with the Scandinavians. They
also spoke a few words of German, which was the language we misused
together. They were brothers, good-looking men with charming
manners. The elder wore a frock coat and a bowler hat, and looked a
romantic Shylock. The other was clothed in a smock, and was hatless.
They said they had fled from the strife of Russia, and they wished
particularly to know if Canada was a free country. The younger man
was an ironworker and made penny puzzles in iron {14} which, so far
as I could make out, the elder brother invented. They had one puzzle
with them, but it was very complicated, and I was afraid that the
sale of such things in Canada might be limited, unless Canadians
fancied bewildering themselves over intricate ironwork during the
long winters. Still those two fugitives rolled Russian cigarettes
very well too, which should earn them a living.
The Norwegian was a simple youth in a queer hat, which afterwards
blew off into the sea much to his sorrow. He was very bent on
acquiring the English language during the voyage, not having any of
it to start with. I used to sit with him on one side and the small
Perthshire boys on the other, while we translated Scottish into
Norwegian and back again. The Scotch boys would inquire of me what
'hat' was in Norse, and I would point to the queer head-gear
above-mentioned, and ask its owner to name its Norwegian equivalent.
One of the things that stumped me--being a mere Englishman--was a
question put by the smallest Perth boy: 'Whit is gollasses in
Norwegian?'
It took me some time to find out what gollasses were in English, and
I don't know how to spell them now.
{15}
CHAPTER III
LANDING IN CANADA
It was while we were still out to sea that I first realised what
Canada might be like, and how different from England. We had been
steaming for five days, and hitherto the Atlantic had seemed a
familiar and still English sea. The sky above, the air around, even
the vast slowly heaving waters and the set of the sun one might see
from an English cliff. But on this last day but one, which was a day
of hot sun, the sky seemed to have risen immeasurably higher than in
England and to have become incredibly clearer, except where little
white rugged clouds were set. Snow clouds in a perfect winter's sky,
I should have said, if I had known myself to be at home; yet the air
round the ship was of the very balmiest summer. We should never get
such a sky and such an air together in England, and we were all
stimulated by it and began to forget England and think more of
Canada. We wondered {16} when we were going to see the lights of
Belle Isle, and somebody said we should pass an island called
Anticosti, and we began to look out for Anticosti, and anybody who
knew anything about Anticosti was listened to like an oracle. Not
that anybody did know much--even those who had crossed to and fro
several times. After all there was no reason why they should, for
Atlantic liners do not stop there, and there is not much to be seen
in passing. Still we weighed the words of those who had passed it
carefully, and decided to see what we could of it so that we might
also be regarded as oracles next time we came that way.
Though we had not seen Canada, yet we had received a favourable
impression of it, which was lucky, because the next day, when we had
got into the St. Lawrence, it came on to sleet and vapour. We of the
steerage, who had brought up our boxes and babies almost before
breakfast, so as to be ready to land at the earliest moment, had to
content ourselves with sitting on them between decks (on the boxes,
for choice, but the babies would get in the way too), and watch the
little white villages and tinned church spires and dark woods of
French Canada drive past the portholes in the {17} mist. We should
like to have been on deck seeing more of our new home, breathing some
of its bracing air; but the rain was incessant. Heavens, but it got
stuffy too on that lower deck. Nine hundred of us in our best
clothes and our overcoats--holding on to bundles and kids, and
sweating. It got so stuffy, that I took the opportunity of crossing
in the rain to the first-class, and hunting out two people to whom I
had introductions. One was the Canadian Minister for Emigration, who
had already been over to inspect us in a paternal sort of way and
declared that we were 'a particularly good lot'--very different, he
hinted, from the sort of English emigrants who used to be shipped
over, and got Englishmen a bad name in the new country for years.
His gratification at our general excellence was so natural that I did
not broach the question of whether Canada's gain was England's loss.
I hope it was not. I suppose we can afford to lose even good men,
provided we are not going to lose them really, but only station them
at a different spot along the great road of the Empire.
The other person I was anxious to see was Archbishop Bourne, who was
going out to the Eucharistic Congress at Montreal. We {18} discussed
that extraordinarily lucid book of Monsieur André Siegfried, which
deals with the race question in Canada. The archbishop admitted its
value, though he thought it unfair in parts. He was assured, for
example, that the unsocial attitude of the Irish and French Canadian
Catholics towards one another as well as towards those of another
religion was fast disappearing, nor did he seem to think that the
Church any longer tended to frustrate enterprise by keeping its
members under its wing in the East. Many Catholics were going West
nowadays, and after the Congress he himself was going West in the
spirit of the times. Perhaps he was right about the _rapprochement_
of the Irish and French Catholics, though men on the spot maintain
that their unsociability is largely due to the fact that both have a
singular yearning for State employment and the employment will not
always go round.
It was still raining when I recrossed to the steerage, and it was
still raining when we got into the Canadian Pacific Railway dock at
about 5 P.M. I was standing beside the horse-breaker at the time,
and the first thing that caught his eye in Quebec was the shape of
the telegraph poles.
{19}
'Why, look at them,' he said, 'they're all crooked!'
A little later, he commented on the slowness with which the
French-Canadian porters were getting the baggage off the boat. 'They
may have this here hustle on them that they talk of,' he said, 'but
I've seen that done a lot quicker in London.'
It was more loyalty to the old country than disloyalty to the new
that prompted the remark, in which there was perhaps some
justification. A Canadian who was standing by seemed to think so at
any rate.
'This is only French Canada,' he said, 'wait till you get West.'
Still we all of us had to wait a bit in French Canada anyhow. We did
not get through the emigration sheds till 9.30 P.M., and then there
was one's baggage to be got through the Customs after. Not that
there was much in that, the officials being most amiable. But we
none of us much enjoyed the emigrant inspection. It is necessary and
desirable no doubt, but we felt that we had been inspected pretty
often already on board the boat, and we had been up since daylight,
and we were hungry and miserable, and hot in the sheds and cold out
of them, and the babies fractious, {20} and everybody shoving and
pushing, and we felt like some sheep at sheep-dog trials which have
to be driven through pen after pen, and would go so much faster if
they only knew how, and the dogs didn't press them. However it was
all accomplished at last, and then the emigrants got into the
westbound train that was waiting for them. First and second-class
passengers had long since vanished in carriages to such abodes of
luxury as the Cháteau Frontenac and the rest of the leading hotels.
Now there were no carriages left. And we heard that a hundred people
at least had been turned away from the Château Frontenac, so full was
it; and since in any case we wished to start our Canadian impressions
from a humbler standpoint, we set out in the rain for a Quebec inn
which some of the Canadians returning in the steerage had told us of.
I suppose we had a good deal more than a mile to go through the rain
carrying bags, along those awful roads from the docks. I know
something about those roads, because I not only walked along them
that night, but next morning I drove a dray along them. I had gone
back to the docks to get my trunk which I had had to leave there, and
the dray was the only thing I could get to drive up in. Soon after
we had started {21} I said to the driver--a merry-faced French
Canadian--'Il trotte bien,' referring to the horse, and he was so
pleased with the compliment, or the French perhaps, that he handed me
the reins and let me drive the rest of the way through the stone
piles and mud that appeared to form the roads in lower Quebec. In
return for the reins I had lent him my tobacco pouch; and when the
horse leapt an extra deep hole, he would stop filling his pipe and
hold me in round the waist.
To go back to the inn--I suppose it was ten o'clock before we got
there. A few men sat smoking, with their feet against the wall in
the entrance room where the office was; and after we had waited about
for ten minutes or so, one of them told us if we wanted to see the
clerk we'd better ring a bell. We did so, and presently a youth
turned up and patronisingly accorded us rooms for the night.
'Is there any chance of getting a meal to-night?' we inquired,
somewhat damped by his unenthusiastic reception. (I may say that I
never met an office clerk in a Canadian hotel who did seem keen on
welcoming guests. That is one of the differences between the old
world and the new.)
'Yup, there's a café downstairs,' said the {22} youth, as he lit a
cigar and sat down to read a newspaper.
We went downstairs, and there in a narrow little room behind a long
counter which had plates of sausage rolls, under meat covers to keep
them from the flies, upon it, and little high stools upon which you
sit in discomfort to eat the sausage rolls quickly in front of it, we
found a small pale-faced boy who said 'Sure!' in the cheeriest way
when we repeated our question about food. Five minutes later he had
produced from a stove which he was almost too small to reach fried
bacon and eggs and coffee, and while we sat and ate these good
things, he gave us advice about the future. He evidently knew
without asking that we were emigrants from the old country, and he
supposed we wanted jobs. He recommended waiting as a start--waiting
in a hotel. Waiting was not, he said, much of a thing to stick at;
but there was pretty good money to be made at it in the season. Lots
of tourists gave good tips--especially in Quebec--and you could save
money as a waiter if you tried. He himself was from the States, but
he liked Quebec well enough. Of course it was not as hustling as
further west, and not to be compared to the States. If a man {23}
had ideas, the States was the place for him. There were more
opportunities for a man with ideas in the States than there were in
Canada. We asked him how much a man with ideas could reckon upon
making in the States, and he said such a man could reckon upon making
as much as five dollars a day. It did not seem an overwhelming
amount to my aspiring mind--not for a man with ideas. Perhaps that
is because one has heard of so many millionaires down in the States,
beginning with Mr. Rockefeller. But then again, perhaps millionaires
are not men with ideas themselves so much as men who know how to use
the ideas of others.
Having started on money, the boy gave us a lecture on the Canadian
coinage, the advantages of the decimal system, where copper money
held good and why--all in a way that would have done credit to a
financial expert. We thought him an amazing boy to be frying eggs
and bacon behind a counter in a small café: only you don't just stick
to one groove in Canada. At least you ought not to, as the boy
himself told us. Englishmen were like that, but it didn't do in the
States or Canada. A man should have several strings to his bow, and
be ready to turn his hand to anything.
{24}
Refreshed by our supper and his advice, we adjourned to the bar which
was handy, and got further enlightenment from the barman there. He
was a French Canadian, very dapper in a stiff white shirt and patent
leather boots. Money was also his theme. He told us he made forty
cents an hour, and meant to get up to seventy-five cents pretty soon.
That was good money to get, but he was worth it, and if the boss
didn't think so he would try some other boss who did. It was no good
a man's sitting down and taking less money than he was worth. A man
would not get anywhere if he did that sort of thing. He certainly
mixed cocktails at a lightning pace, and all the time he chatted he
strode up and down behind the bar like a caged jackal. He gave me my
first idea of that un-English restlessness--American, I suppose, in
its origin--which is beginning to spread so rapidly through Canada.
In America I fancy they are beginning to distrust it a little. Too
much enterprise may lead to an unsettled condition that is not much
better than stagnation. Farm hands tend to leave their employers at
critical moments, just for the sake of novelty. Farmers themselves
are so anxious to get on that they take what they can out of the
land, and move {25} to new farms, leaving the old ruined. It may be
that in a newer country like Canada enterprise is less perilous.
That remains to be seen. We retired to bed at midnight, sleepier
even than men from the old country are reputed to be.
{26}
CHAPTER IV
A FAIRLY LONG DAY IN QUEBEC
Quebec city is full of charms and memories. I am no lover of cities
when they have grown so great that no one knows any longer what site
they were built on, or what sort of a country is buried beneath them.
Their streets may teem with people and their buildings be very
splendid, but if they have shut off the landscape altogether I cannot
admire them. Quebec will never be one of those cities, however great
she may grow. Quebec stands on a hill, and just as a city on a hill
cannot be hid, so too it cannot hide from those who live in it the
country round, nor even the country it stands on. Always there will
be in Quebec a sense of steepness. The cliffs still climb even where
they are crowded with houses. And the air that reaches Quebec is the
air of the hills. Always too--from Dufferin Terrace at least--there
will be visible the sweep of the St. Lawrence, the dark crawl to the
north-east {27} of the Laurentian Mountains, and the clear and
immensely lofty Canadian skies.
I spent the whole of my first day in Quebec on Dufferin Terrace,
except for that journey down to the docks. Once I was on the
terrace, I forgot how bad the roads had been. You might drive a
thousand miles through stones and mud, and forget them all the moment
you set foot on Dufferin Terrace. Everything you see from it is
beautiful, from the Château Frontenac behind--surely the most
picturesque and most picturesquely situated hotel in the world--to
the wind on the river below. Most beautiful of all the things I saw
was the moon starting to rise behind Port Levis. It started in the
trees, and at first I thought it was a forest fire. There was
nothing but red flame that spread and spread among the trees at
first. Suddenly it shot up into a round ball of glowing orange, so
that I knew it was the moon long before it turned silver, high up,
and made a glimmering pathway across the river.
During this moonrise the band was playing on the terrace, and all
Quebec was strolling up and down or standing listening to the music,
as is its custom on summer evenings. The scene on the terrace has
often enough been described--with its mingling of many {28} types,
American tourists and Dominican friars, habitants from far villages,
and business men from the centre of things, archbishops and Members
of Parliament, and ships' stewards and commercial travellers, and
freshly arrived immigrants and old market women. The fair Quebeckers
love the terrace as much as their men folk, and I saw several pretty
faces among them and many pretty figures. They know how to walk,
these French Canadian ladies, and also how to dress--the latter an
art which has still to be achieved by the women of the West.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC, QUEBEC, FROM THE OLD RAMPARTS.]
The terrace besides being gay is very friendly too. My two
companions of the voyage had gone on that morning, being in a hurry
to reach the prairie; but I found several new friends on the terrace
in the course of the day. One was a young working man from England,
who had brought his child on to the terrace to play when I first met
him. He was so well-dressed and prosperous looking that I should
never have guessed he was only a shoe-leather cutter, as he told me
he was. But then he had been out in Quebec for five years, and he
was making twenty-five dollars a week instead of the thirty-two
shillings a week he used to make in Nottingham at the same trade. He
said he {29} had been sorry to leave England, but you were more of a
man in Canada. There were not twenty men after one job--that was the
difference. Consequently, if your boss offered to give you any dirt,
you could tell him to go to Hell. I suppose we should have counted
him a wicked and dangerous Socialist in England, but there is no
doubt that he is a typical Canadian citizen, and the kind of man they
want there. Another acquaintance I picked up was a commercial
traveller from Toronto--a stout tubby energetic man, who asked me,
almost with tears in his eyes, why England would not give up Free
Trade and study Canadian needs? He was particularly keen on English
manufacturers studying Canadian needs, and he put the matter in quite
a novel light as far as I was concerned. His argument was that we
made things in England too well. What was the use, he demanded, of
making good durable things when Canadians did not want them? It only
meant that the States jumped in with inferior goods more suited to
the moment. He assured me that Canada was a new country, and
Canadians did not want to buy things that would last hundreds of
years. Take furniture, machinery, anything--Canadians only wanted
stuff that {30} would last them a year or two, after which they could
scrap it and get something new. That kept the money in circulation.
Anyway, he insisted, a thing was no good if it was better than what a
customer required. I had not thought of things in that way before,
and it was interesting to hear him.
My third acquaintance was a member of the Quebec Parliament, who
started to chat quite informally, and having ascertained that I was
fresh from the old country took me to his house, that I might drink
Scotch whisky, and be informed that French Canadians loved the King
and hated the Boer War. I think when a French Canadian does not know
you well, he will always make these two admissions--but not any
more--lest you should be unsympathetic or he should give himself away.
That is why, since the position of French Canadians in Canadian
politics will some day be of the greatest importance, we ought all to
be thankful for the existence of Mr. Bourassa. Mr. Bourassa is
represented--by his opponents--as the violent leader of a small
faction of French Canadians, as a trial to moderate men of all sorts,
including the majority of his own French-Canadian fellow-citizens.
All this is very true. In Canadian politics, as they stand {31} at
present, Mr. Bourassa stands for just that and very little more.
Politically he is an extremist and a nuisance. But disregarding for
a moment immediate practical politics, Mr. Bourassa stands for much
more than that--stands indeed for the real essence of French Canada.
He is the French Canadian in action, shouting on the house-tops what
most of them prefer to dream of by the fire-side, insisting upon
bringing forward ideas which the others would leave to be brought
forward by chance or in the lapse of time.
He has been called the Parnell of Canada, but these international
metaphors are generally calculated to mislead. The most that Parnell
ever demanded was Home Rule for Ireland--that small part of Great
Britain, that fraction of the Empire. Mr. Bourassa does not only
want Home Rule for Quebec. He wants it for Canada; only the Canada
he sees thus self-ruling is a Canada permeated by French Canadianism.
If Parnell had wanted Home Rule, so that England, Scotland, and Wales
might be ruled from Dublin, he would have attained to something of
the completeness of Mr. Bourassa's policy. Mr. Bradley, whose book
on _Canada in the Twentieth Century_ is as complete as any one book
on Canada could {32} be, and as up-to-date as any--allowing for the
fact that Canada changes yearly--declared in in it, some years ago,
that the French Canadians realised that for them to populate the
North-West was a dream to be given up. It may be a dream, but I
doubt if it is given up: and the dreams of a population more prolific
than any other on the face of the earth may some day become
realities. What is against these dreams? The influx of English
immigrants? The rush for the land of American farmers? But these
are only temporary obstacles. The Americans may go back again. They
often do. The English immigrants are largely unmarried young men,
and there are no women in the West. They are making ready the land,
but the inheritors of it have yet to appear. It is not strange if
Mr. Bourassa sees those inheritors among his own people--only it is
not yet their time, not for many years yet--not for so many years yet
that it seems almost unpractical and absurd to look forward to it.
Even such a faith as that which Mr. Bourassa has confessed to in
regard to the Eastern provinces--Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick--that 'In fifteen years they will have become French in
language and Roman Catholic in faith,' seems highly unpractical.
{33} Ontario is not likely to become Roman Catholic any faster than
Ulster. But on the other hand it will only increase in its
anti-Frenchness and its anti-Roman Catholicism in so far as it is
upheld and influenced by Imperialism. Imperialism to Mr. Bourassa is
that bogey which goes about linking up all those small
non-conforming, hustling, militant and materialistic communities
which unaided would come into the Catholic French-Canadian fold. It
is that odious system which prevents other nations within the
Empire--such as French Canada--from developing along their own
natural lines. It is something which easily causes Mr. Bourassa to
forget that England and Englishmen--representing a distant
sovereignty which keeps the world's peace--have been a boon and a
blessing to French Canadians rather than otherwise; and causes him to
remember that they may in a moment become an imminent
sovereignty--imposing conscription, war, chapels (things that the
Ontarian takes to like a duck to water) upon the whole Canadian
community. Such impositions would not only strengthen the non-French
Canadians, and ruin the natural progress-to-power of the French
Canadians; but they would topple down like a house of {34} cards
those splendid dreams which might in a French-Canadianised Canada
become realities. What dreams? Rome shifted to Montreal for one,
and the Vatican gardens of the future sweeping down to the St.
Lawrence. The whole vast wealth of the Dominion diverted to the
carrying out of those traditions which are neither French nor English
but Canadian ... started four hundred years before by the captains
and the priests, voyageurs and martyrs, who in an age of unbelief
went forth in response to miraculous signs for the furtherance of the
glory of God.
[Illustration: CHÂTEAU FRONTENAC AND DUFFERIN TERRACE. NIGHT.
QUEBEC.]
I said that Quebec was full of memories. It is well to remember that
most of these are French-Canadian memories. The Englishman, at home
or touring, thinks most naturally of Wolfe in connection with Quebec,
and thinks with pride how that fight on the Plains of Abraham marked,
in Major Wood's words, 'three of the mightiest epochs of modern
times--the death of Greater France, the coming of age of Greater
Britain, and the birth of the United States.' The splendid daring
climb of the English army, the romantic fevered valour of its
general, the suddenness and completeness of the reversal of
positions, unite to make us think that never was a more glorious {35}
event, or one better calculated to appeal to men of the New World.
But do not let us forget that for French Canadians--great event as it
was, severing their allegiance to France for ever on the one hand,
leaving them free men as never before on the other--it was only one
event in a new world that was already for them (but not for us) three
hundred years old. 'Here Wolfe fell.' But here also, long before
Wolfe fell, Champlain stood, and French captains led valiant men on
expeditions against strange insidious foes, and the Cross was carried
onwards by the priests, and amid mystic voices and divinations, and
slaughterings and endurances, the faith prevailed and the character
of the people was formed. They have no hankering for France--these
people to whom Wolfe's battle seems but one out of many. France,
they think, has forsaken the Church. But they are French
still--these people--and amazingly conservative in their customs and
their creed. We may tell them that England--which sent out
Wolfe--has given them material prosperity, equality under the law,
the means of justice. They will reply, or rather they will silently
think, and only an occasional Nationalist will dare to say:--
'We owe nothing to Great Britain. England {36} did not take Canada
for love, or to plant the Cross of religion as the French did, but in
order to plant their trading posts and make money.'
Gratitude is not a virtue nations take pride in possessing; they are
indeed seldom nations until they have forgotten to be grateful. I
suppose French Canadians are on their way to forgetting to be
grateful to England for what she did in times past, but it is not
because they have any real quarrel with England, or desire to injure
her. Merely because they feel that from England exudes that
Imperialism which appeals in no way from the past, and menaces, they
think, their future.
{37}
CHAPTER V
THE ATTRACTION OF THE SAGUENAY
Almost directly one lands in Canada, one feels the desire to move
west. It is not that the east fails to attract and interest, or that
a man might not spend many years in Quebec province alone, and still
have seen little of its vast, wild, northern parts. Again there is
the Evangeline country, little known for all that it is 'storied.'
But the tide is west just at present. Everybody asks everybody
else--Have you been West, or Are you going West? And every one who
has been West or is going feels himself to be in the movement. Some
day no doubt the tide will set back again, or flow both ways equally.
To-day it flows westward.
I should have been sorry, however, if I had not gone eastward at
least as far as the Saguenay, and I am duly grateful to the American
who, so to speak, irritated me into going there. He was a thin, pale
youth, somewhat bald from {38} clutching at his hair, who sat next to
me at dinner my third day at Quebec. He announced to the table at
large that he was travelling for his pleasure, but to judge from his
strained face, travelling for his pleasure was one of the hardest
jobs he had tried. He had been doing Quebec, and he gave all
Canadians present to understand that Quebec had made him very very
tired. Look at the trips around too. Look at the Montmorency Falls.
Had anybody present seen Niagara? Well, if anybody had seen Niagara,
the Montmorency Falls could only make him tired. One or two
Canadians present bent lower to their food. But on the whole
Canadians do not readily enter into argument, and half Niagara Falls
is Canadian too, so that finding no opponents the youth proceeded
triumphantly to give the relative proportions in figures of the two
falls. As he directed them chiefly at me, I felt bound to say that I
had seen falls about a tenth the size of either which had struck me
as worth going to see. He then said that he guessed I was from
England. I said this was so. Thereupon he told me that everybody in
England was asleep. I suggested that sleep was better than insomnia,
and shocked by my soporific levity, he advised me to go and have a
look at {39} New York if I wanted to know how things could hum. I
said I supposed that New York was a fairly busy place. A silly
remark--only he happened to be a New Yorker, and all that tiredness
left him. I learnt so much about the busyness of New York that I
have hardly forgotten it all yet.
Afterwards, but some time afterwards, when the American had left the
table, a Scottish Canadian asked me if I had done the Saguenay trip,
and when I said that I had not done it, he strongly advised me not to
miss it.
'It's the finest trip in Canada. Yes, sir.'
I decided to go. It takes just two days from the start at Quebec to
Chicoutimi and back, and you go in a spacious sort of houseboat which
paddles along at just the right pace, first on one side of the river
then on the other, stopping to load and unload at the little villages
along the St. Lawrence. There to the left--a great sheet of silver
hung from the cliff--were the Montmorency Falls, which had made that
young American tired. A hundred and twenty years ago Queen
Victoria's father occupied the Kent house, hard by the Falls, now a
hotel. Wolfe lay ill for two weeks in a farm close by; probably on
no other sick-bed in the world were plans so big with fate {40}
conceived. Then the Ile d'Orléans floats by--that fertile island
which Cartier named after the Grape God four hundred years ago,
because of the vines that grew there. All this waterway is history,
French-Canadian history mostly. With a fine mist hung over the
river, concealing the few modern spires and roofs, you can see the
country to-day just as Cartier saw it when he came sailing up.
Neither four hundred nor four thousand years will serve to modernise
the banks of the St. Lawrence. Take that thirty-mile stretch where
the Laurentides climb sheer from the water. That is what Cartier
saw--nothing different. No houses, no people; only the grey rock
growing out of the green trees, and the grey sky overhead. Lower
down, with the sun shining as it did for us, Cartier would see, if he
came sailing up to-day, all those picturesque French-Canadian
villages which have sprung up along the shore--Baie St. Paul, St.
Irénée, Murray Bay, Tadousac, with the white farms of the Habitants,
and the summer homes of the Quebeckers and Montrealers, and the
shining spires of the churches, and the wooden piers jutting far out
into the river. Those piers are particularly cheerful places. There
are always gangs of porters waiting to run out freight from the hold,
and {41} a gathering of ladies in gay frocks who want to greet
friends on board, and heaps of little habitants playing about or
smoking their pipes. The habitant appears to start his pipe at the
age of eight or nine years, judging from those who frequent the piers.
I think I was the only Englishman on board that boat. Most of the
passengers were Americans, but cheerful ones--not like that young man
at the hotel--and we were all very keen on seeing everything, so that
it became dusk much too soon for most of us. We got to Tadousac just
about dusk, which I was particularly sorry for, since of all the
places we passed, it held the most memories. In 1600 the whole fur
trade of Canada centred round this benighted little spot, and the men
of St. Malo were the rivals of the Basques for the black foxes
trapped by the Indians of that date. I should like to have seen this
queer little port by daylight, but I suppose for most purposes
Parkman's description holds good, and cannot easily be beaten:--
'A desolation of barren mountain closes round it, betwixt whose ribs
of rugged granite, bristling with savins, birches, and firs, the
Saguenay rolls its gloomy waters from the northern wilderness.
Centuries of civilisation {42} have not tamed the wildness of the
place; and still, in grim repose, the mountains hold their guard
around the waveless lake that glistens in their shadow, and doubles,
in its sullen mirror, crag, precipice and forest.'
I know that Parkman goes on to say that when Champlain landed here in
April 1608 he found the lodges of an Indian camp, which he marked in
his plan of Tadousac. When we landed, there were also a few shacks
in much the same spot, and in one of the best lighted of them hung a
placard to this effect:--
THE ONLY REAL INDIAN
BUY WORK FROM HIM.
The lodges Champlain saw belonged to an Algonquin horde, 'Denizens of
surrounding wilds, and gatherers of their only harvest--skins of the
moose, cariboo, and bear; fur of the beaver, marten, otter, fox, wild
cat, and lynx.'
Other days, other harvests. From the shack of the Only Real Indian I
saw one stout tourist issue forth (a Chicago pork-packer he must have
been, if persons ever correspond to their professions), laden with
three toy bows and arrows, as many miniature canoes, and what
appeared to be a couple of patchwork bedspreads. That the descendant
of braves should live by making {43} patchwork bedspreads seemed too
much, even though I had given up as illusions the Red Indians of my
boyhood. Far rather would I at that moment have seen the stout
tourist come forth, either scalpless himself, or dangling at his
ample belt the raven locks of the Only Real Indian.
In the night we went on to Chicoutimi, but saw nothing of that, being
asleep. We had sung songs, American songs--'John Brown's Body,'
'Marching through Georgia,' etc., till a late hour of the night; and
in any case the bracing river air would have insured sleep. Only in
the morning as we came down the Saguenay again did I wake to its
beauty and strangeness. Men have learnt to tunnel through rocks at
last, but the Saguenay learnt this art for itself thousands of years
ago. A wide water tunnel through the sheer rock, a roofless tunnel,
open to the sky, that is the Saguenay--most magnificent at the point
where Cap Trinité looms up, a wall of darkness fifteen hundred feet
high.
It is a curious fact that famous landscapes always produce a
remarkable frivolity in the human tourist visiting them. Perhaps it
is man's instinct to assert himself against nature. When the boat
draws opposite Cap Trinité, {44} stewards produce buckets of stones
and passengers are invited to try and hit the Cap with the stones
from impossible distances. I do not know that it greatly added to
the pleasure of the trip, but we all tried to hit the cliff with the
stones and most of us failed, and had to content ourselves with
drawing echoes from it. After that we went on, and some of the white
whales which are characteristic of the Saguenay began to appear, and
experienced travellers explained that they were not really white
whales but a sort of white porpoise. Once again, as we passed it,
Tadousac was invisible, but this time because a white fog had wrapped
it round. So silently we turned out of the Saguenay into the St.
Lawrence. I think the silence of the Saguenay was what had most
impressed me. Not very long before I had steamed down the Hoogly
where by day the kites wheel and shriek overhead, and the air buzzes
with insects' sounds, and all night the jackals scream--a noisy
river, full of treacherous sandbanks, its shores green with the
bright poisonous green of the East. The Saguenay, unique as it is in
many ways, seemed by the contrast of its deepness and silence, and by
the fresh darkness of the rocks and trees that shut it in, to be
peculiarly a river of the West. I do not know if it {45} would have
made the somewhat bald young American tired.
It is only fair to say that his attitude about Quebec is not at all
characteristic of his fellow-countrymen. For most Americans, Quebec
province (and still more perhaps the woods of Ontario) is becoming
almost as popular a playground as Switzerland is for Englishmen.
Camping out has become a great craze among Americans, and if the
camping out can be done amid unspoilt natural surroundings, close to
rivers where one can fish and woods where one can hunt, an ideal
holiday is assured them. I forget who it was who said that much of
the old American versatility and nobility had disappeared since the
American boys left off whittling sticks, but in any case the desire
to whittle sticks is renewed again among them, from Mr. Roosevelt
downwards. And in Canada this whittling of sticks--this return to
nature--can easily be accomplished. For the north is still there,
unexploited. In Quebec province, fishing and hunting clubs of Quebec
and Montreal have secured the rights over vast tracts of country. So
vast are those tracts that one or two clubs, I was told, have not
even set eyes on all the trout streams they preserve. This may be an
exaggeration, though probably {46} not a great one. There
remains--especially in Ontario--much water and wood that any one may
sport in unlicensed, or get access to by permission of the local
hotel proprietor. Some of the Americans on the boat had been fishing
in Quebec streams and told me of excellent sport they had had, so
that I began to wonder why no Englishmen ever came this way. The
voyage to Canada is a little further than that to Norway, but there
are more fish in Canada. And there is certainly only one Saguenay in
the world.
{47}
CHAPTER VI
STE. ANNE DE BEAUPRÉ AND A TRAVELLER'S VOW
Ste. Anne de Beaupré is usually referred to as the Lourdes of Canada.
When a metaphor of this sort is used it usually means that the spot
referred to is in some way inferior to the original. In the case of
Ste. Anne de Beaupré, the inferiority is not, I believe, in the
matter of the number of miracles wrought there, but in the matter of
general picturesqueness. Ste. Anne de Beaupré is not nearly so
picturesque as Lourdes. If you wish to palliate this fact, you say,
as one writer has said, that 'The beauty of modern architecture
mingles at Beaupré with the remains of a hoary past.' If you do not
wish to palliate it, you say, as I do, that Ste. Anne de Beaupré is
not in the least picturesque. I did not particularly care for the
modern architecture, and the hoary past is not particularly in
evidence. Do not suppose me to say that Beaupré has not a hoary
past. Red Indians, long before the days of railroads, {48} travelled
thither to pray at the feet of Ste. Anne. Breton seamen, who belong
only to tradition, promised a shrine to Ste. Anne, if she would save
them from shipwreck. They erected the first chapel. The second and
larger chapel was built as far back as 1657, and miracles were quite
frequent from then onwards. Nevertheless, the basilica is quite new,
and so is the whole appearance of the place.
I visited it in company with a French-Canadian commercial traveller.
He was a great big good-looking youth with curly hair and blue eyes,
and he travelled in corsets or something of that sort for a Montreal
firm. I could not help thinking that many ladies would buy corsets
from him or anything else whether they wanted them or not, because of
his charming boyish manner and his good looks. He asked me to go to
Ste. Anne de Beaupré with him. He said that he supposed that I was
not a Catholic, but that did not matter. He wished to go to the good
Ste. Anne, and it would be a good thing to go. He had been several
times before, but he had not been for several years. He could easily
take the afternoon off, and first of all we would go by the electric
train to the good Ste. Anne, and then on the way back we would step
off {49} at the Falls station, and see the Montmorency Falls, and
also the Zoo that is there. It would be great fun to see the Zoo.
He had not seen the Zoo for several years, and the animals would be
very interesting.
So we took an afternoon electric train. There are electric trains
for pilgrims, of whom a hundred thousand at least are said to visit
the shrine yearly, and there are also electric trains for tourists.
We took a tourist train, and having secured one of the little
handbooks supplied by the electric company, had the gratification of
knowing that even if the car was pretty full it was, so the company
claimed, run at a greater rate of speed than any other electric
service.
At times in Canada I found myself getting very slack in attempting
descriptions of things simply because some company that had rights of
transport over the particular district had, so to speak, thrust into
my hand some pamphlet in which all the description was done for me.
Thus it was in the case of the district line between Quebec and Ste.
Anne de Beaupré. 'It is difficult,' I read in the electric company's
handbook which we had secured, 'to describe in words the dainty
beauty of the scenery along this route.'
{50}
'That is a nuisance,' I said to my companion, 'because words are the
only things I could describe it in.'
'It is much better to smoke,' said he.
So we smoked; and now I tell you straight out of that illogical
pamphlet, that 'The route from Quebec to Ste. Anne may be compared to
a splendid panorama. There are shady woodlands and green pastures,
undulating hills and sparkling rivers, whose banks are lined with
pretty villages, the tinned spires of the parish churches rising
above the rest of the houses, sparkling in the sun.' There, a little
ungrammatically, you have the scene 'to which,' adds my pamphlet,
'the Falls of Montmorency river add a touch of grandeur.' Ste. Anne
de Beaupré itself is twenty-one miles from Quebec. We went straight
from the station into the church, where the first thing to catch the
eye are the votive offerings and particularly the crutches,
walking-sticks, and other appliances left there by pilgrims who,
having been cured of their infirmities by miracle, had no further use
for these material aids. It is difficult to arrange such things in
any way that can be called artistic, and since the general effect is
nothing but ugly it might be wise for the church officials also to
dispense with such material {51} aids to faith. Apart from these the
most striking object is the miraculous statue. It stands on a
pedestal ten feet high and twelve feet from the communion rails. The
pedestal was the gift of a New York lady, the statue itself was
presented by a Belgian family. At the foot of it many people were
kneeling. A mass was being said and the church was very full, and
every time a petitioner got up from his knees from the feet of the
statue another moved down the aisle and took his or her place. I
suppose we were in the church fully half an hour before my companion
found an opportunity to go and kneel at the feet of the good Ste.
Anne, and having watched him there, I got up from my place and went
out into the village. It was rather a depressing village, full of
small hotels and restaurants and shops stocked with miraculous
souvenirs. I suppose more rubbish is sold in this line than in any
other. After inspecting a variety of it, I bought a bottle of cider
and a local cigar and sat on a fence smoking until my friend
reappeared. He came out most subdued and grave--not in the least the
boisterous person who had gone in--and said we would now go back. As
we had to wait half an hour for a returning train, I suggested that
we should go and have some more cider, {52} but he said no, he would
rather drink from the holy spring. 'Although this water,' said my
pamphlet, 'has always been known to be there, it is only within the
last thirty or thirty-five years that the pilgrims began to make a
pious use of it. What particular occasion gave rise to this
confidence, or when this practice first spread among the people,
cannot be positively asserted. However it may be, it is undeniable
that faith in the water from the fountain has become general, and the
use of it, from motives of devotion, often produces effects of a
marvellous nature.' Unfortunately, the fountain was not working,
owing, I expect, to the water having got low in the dry weather, and
my friend had to go without his drink. He said, however, that it did
not matter, and remained in a grave, aloof state all the way back in
the train as far as the Falls station, and indeed till we got to the
Zoo in the Kent house grounds. There, the exertion of trying to get
the beavers to cease working and come out and show themselves to
me--an exertion finally crowned with success, for the fat, furry,
silent creatures came out and sat on a log for us--livened him up a
bit. But he fell into a muse again in front of the cage containing
the timber wolf, and remained there so long that I was almost {53}
overcome by the smell of this ferocious animal. I got him away at
last, and I do not think he spoke after that until we got to Quebec
and were walking from the station to our inn.
'I have made a vow,' he then said suddenly.
'What sort of vow?' I inquired.
'I made it this afternoon,' he said, 'to the good Ste. Anne--never
any more to drink whisky.'
'It's not a bad vow to have made,' I said.
'No,' he said seriously, 'whisky is very terrible stuff. I shall
never drink it again. When I drink it it goes very quickly to my
head. Soon I am tight. That will not do.'
'Much better not to drink it certainly,' I agreed.
'Yes,' he continued vehemently. 'I am married. You did not guess
that perhaps? Also it is only recently that I have gone "on the
road." If the company I work for hears that I go about and get
tight, I shall at once be fired. So I shall not drink any more
whisky. Never. That is why I made the vow to the good Ste. Anne.'
We walked in silence the rest of the way to the inn, and I reflected
on the nature of vows. {54} It seemed very possible that a vow like
this might easily be a help to my companion. He was obviously not
what is called a strong character. It is strange how often a charm
of manner goes with a weakness of the will. And commercial
travelling--particularly perhaps in Canada--lays a man open to the
temptations of drink. If he went on drinking, it would probably mean
the ruin of the young girl he had married. Only one has always the
feeling that a vow is only a partial aid to keeping upright, just as
a stick is to walking. A man may lean too heavily on either.
Moreover, the making of a vow, while it may strengthen a man
temporarily in one direction tends to leave him unbalanced in other
directions. It makes him feel so strong perhaps in one part of him
that he forgets other parts where he is weak. I rather think that
the last part of these somewhat superficial reflections upon vows
occurred to me later in the evening, and not as we were walking home.
We had had supper by that time, and my companion had drunk a good
deal of water during the meal--a beverage, by the way, which is not
particularly safe either here or in any other Canadian town. At
times he had been depressed by it, at times elevated. After we had
smoked {55} together and he had grown more and more restless, he
jumped up and said:
'Let us go out for a walk.'
'Where to?' I asked.
'Oh, up on to the terrace,' he said. 'I tell you,' he went on
excitedly, 'where I will take you. There is a special place up there
that I know very well. It is where one meets the girls. We will go
there to-night and meet the girls.'
Really, I could have given a very good exposition of the temptation
offered by vows at that moment when he suggested this Sentimental
Journey.
{56}
CHAPTER VII
A HABITANT VILLAGE AND ITS NOTAIRE
'Il trotte bien.'
The second time I made use of this simple compliment I was again
being driven by a French Canadian, and again it was on an
extraordinarily bad road. But the vehicle was a sulky, and the road
was a country road--about halfway between Quebec and Montreal. I had
been already two days in the Habitant country which the ordinary
Englishman misses. Tourists in particular will go through French
Canada too fast. Their first stop after Quebec is Montreal, and the
guide-books help them to believe that they have lost nothing. It may
be that they do lose nothing in the way of spectacular views or big
hotels, but on the other hand they have undoubtedly lost the peaceful
charm of many a Laurentian village, and they have seen nothing at all
of the life of the French-Canadian farmer. That is a pity for the
English tourist, because they too, {57} the Habitants, belong to the
Empire, and we ought to know them for what they are apart from their
politics--courteous, solid, essentially prudent folk, often well to
do, but with no disposition to make a show of themselves.
I had spent my two days at the villa of a most hospitable French
lady, in one of the older villages on the St. Lawrence. It was not
exactly a beautiful village--rather ramshackle in fact--but
remarkably peaceful, and the great smooth river running by must give
it a perennial charm, such as comes from having the sea near. I had
missed my train going from that village, and had passed the time by
taking lunch at a little inn near the station. It was Friday, and
the landlord gave me pike and eggs for lunch. I had seen my pike and
several others lying in a sandy ditch near, passing a sort of
amphibious life in it, until Friday and a guest should make it
necessary for one of them to go into the frying pan. The landlord
came and chatted with me while I had lunch, and was grieved to find
that I was not a Catholic. I was English, but not Catholic? I said
that was so, and he shook his head sorrowfully. But there were
Catholics in England, he asked a little later. I said, Oh yes,
certainly. Many? I said that there {58} must be a good many, but I
could not tell him the exact numbers. Would a tenth of the English
at least be Catholics, he next demanded? I said I thought at least
that number, but I left him, I fear, a disappointed man. He had
hoped more from England than that, and even my strenuous praise of
the fried pike did not draw a smile from him.
My compliment about the horse drawing the sulky--to go back to that
drive, obtained a better response. The driver replied in the French
tongue: 'Monsieur, he trots very well, particularly in considering
that he has the age of twenty-eight years.'
I said that this was wonderful, and the driver replied that it was,
but that in French Canada such wonders did happen. He was intensely
patriotic, and this made the drive more interesting. He was all for
French-Canadian things, excepting, I think, the roads, which were
indeed nothing but ruts, some of the ruts being less deep than the
others, and being selected accordingly for the greater convenience of
our ancient steed. I liked his patriotism. It was at once so
genuine and so complete. For example, when I said that I had not
seen any Jersey cows on the farms we had passed, the driver said:
'No. The {59} cow of Jersey is a good cow and gives much milk. But
the Canadian cow is a better cow and gives still more milk.' I was
unable to make out what the prevailing milch-cow was in that part.
Canada has, I believe, begun to swear by the Holstein, but this can
hardly as yet be claimed as the Canadian cow. Still it passed the
time very pleasantly to have my driver so enthusiastic, and of what
should a man speak well, if not of his own country? He articulated
his French very slowly and distinctly, so that I was able to
understand him more easily than I should have understood a European
Frenchman. I was surprised at this, because one is usually told that
French Canadians talk so queerly that they are very hard to follow.
Perhaps my obvious inferiority in the language caused those Habitants
I met to adapt themselves to my necessity. I can only say that from
a few days' experience of conversation with all sorts and conditions,
I carried away the impression that French-Canadian was a very clear
and easy language. As for the country, I should call it serene and
spacious in aspect rather than fine. The farmhouses are pleasant
enough and comfortable within, but their immediate surroundings are
apt to be untidy. Very seldom of course {60} does one see a flower
garden, and vegetables do not make amends for the lack of flowers.
On the other hand, the tobacco patch that is so frequently to be seen
in the neighbourhood of the small farms is pleasant to look at,
especially for one who thinks much of smoke. There is not much
satisfaction to the eye in the small wired fields, nor would either
the farming or the soil startle an English farmer. I think that the
maple woods are the one thing that he would regard with real envy.
Nevertheless, no one would have denied that it was a really pretty
village, to which my driver brought me at last in the sulky. It was
built all round an old church in a sort of dell, behind which the
land rose steeply to a wood of maples. I had been given an
introduction to the curé, and we drove to his house by the church,
only to be told by the sexton (I think it was the sexton) that
Monsieur le Curé had, much to his regret, been called to Quebec, but
had begged that I would go over to the notaire, who would be pleased
to show me everything that was to be seen. We went to the notaire.
I think he was the postmaster too--at any rate he lived in the post
office, and a very kindly old gentleman he was. I do not know one I
have liked more {61} on so short an acquaintance, though he did start
by giving me Canadian wine to drink. It was a sort of port or
sherry--or both mixed--and was made, I think he said, in Montreal.
It had the genuine oily taste, but also a smack of vinegar. That in
itself would not have mattered so much, if the notaire had not said
it was best drunk with a little water, and provided me with water
from a saline spring which had its source in his backyard. These
saline springs seem not uncommon in Canada, and must be considered as
a distinct asset. But not mixed with port. Some local tobacco which
was very good, as indeed much of the tobacco grown in Quebec province
seems to be, took the taste away, and after that the notaire proposed
that he should take me out to see one of the huts where they boil
down the maple water in the early spring. He told me that my own
horse and driver should rest, and that we should go on the carriage
of Monsieur Blanc which was, it appeared, already in waiting,
together with Monsieur Blanc himself. Monsieur Blanc was the local
miller, and solely for the purpose of showing the village to a
stranger from England he had put himself to all this trouble. After
we had all bowed to one another and exchanged {62} compliments, we
started for the maple wood, and all the way the notaire explained to
me the economy of the village. It appeared that the farms round
averaged eighty acres of arable land, and a man and his son would
work one of that size. Each farmer would also have rights of grazing
on pasture land which was held in common--not to mention his piece of
maple wood. All the farmers belonged to a co-operative farmers'
society, which saved much when purchasing seeds, implements, and so
forth. The notaire himself was secretary of this society. I believe
he was also secretary of pretty well everything that mattered, and
might be regarded as the business uncle of the parish in which the
curé was spiritual father. As we drove along, avoiding roads as much
as possible, because the fields were so much more level, he greeted
everybody and everybody greeted him, stopping their field work for
the purpose. Jules left hay-making to show us the shortest cut to
the nearest hut; Antoine fetched the key. It was a tiny wooden
shack, the one we inspected--standing in the middle of the
trees--with just room in it for the heating apparatus and the boilers
to boil the maple water in. The cups which are attached to the trees
in the early spring, when {63} the sap begins to run--the tapping is
done high up--hung along the wooden walls. The notaire explained the
whole process to me. In the spring, when all is sleet and slush and
nothing can be done on the farm, the farmer and perhaps his wife come
up into the wood, and tap the trees and boil the water up until the
syrup is formed. It takes them days, very cold days, and they camp
out in the hut, though it hardly seemed possible that there should be
room for them. But it is all very healthy and pleasant, and they
drink so much of the syrup, while they are working, that they usually
go back to their farms very 'fat and salubrious.' So the notaire
said, and he also assured me that seven years before another English
visitor who spoke French very badly (he put it much more politely
than that though) had come to the village in the spring, and slept in
one of the huts for days, and helped make the sugar and enjoyed
himself thoroughly. I told the notaire I could quite believe it and
wished I had come in the spring too. I am not sure that I shall not
go back in the spring some day, for the simplicity of the place was
fascinating, even though the railway had come closer, and land had
doubled in value, and the farmers were more scientific than they used
to {64} be and made more money, though even so--as the notaire
earnestly declared--they would would never spend it on show. I
remarked that the notaire, even while he was recounting these modern
innovations, such as wealth, was not carried away by the glory of
them as a Westerner would be. He took a simple pride in the fact
that the village marched forward, but he was prouder still that it
remained modest. And when we got back to the post office, he told me
that what he liked best was the simplicity of it all. People used to
ask him sometimes why he who spoke English and Latin and Greek, for
he had been five years at college, qualifying to become a notaire,
should be content to live in such a small out-of-the-way place,
instead of setting up in Quebec or Montreal. They could not
understand that to be one's own master, and not to be rushed hither
and thither at the beck of clients, contented him, especially in a
place where the farmers looked upon him as their friend, and he could
play the organ in the village church. He made me understand it very
well, even though his English was rusty (for I think the syrup-making
Englishman had been the last he had talked with), and he had a
scholarly dislike to using any but the {65} right word, and he would
sometimes bring up a dozen wrong ones and reject them, before our
united efforts found the only one that conveyed his precise meaning.
I think I understood, and many times on the way back, seated behind
the twenty-eight year-old horse, I said to myself, that altogether
the notaire was a very fine old gentleman, and if there were many
such to be found in the French Canadian villages, I hoped they would
not change too soon. To make the money circulate--after the fashion
of the Toronto drummer--is a virtue no doubt; but courtesy and
simplicity and prudence are also virtues that not the greatest
country that is yet to come will find itself able to dispense with.
{66}
CHAPTER VIII
GLIMPSES OF MONTREAL
Just as a man who knows mountains can in a little time describe the
character of a mountain that is new to him, so a man who knows the
country in general will soon find himself becoming acquainted with
new country. It is not so with cities. Only a long residence in it
will reveal the character of a city. I suppose that is because man
is more subtle than nature. A clay land is always a clay land; it
produces the same crops, the same weeds, the same men. But who will
undertake to say what a city on a clay land produces? Only the man
who has long been familiar with the particular city, and he probably
will not even be aware that it stands on clay.
This is preparatory to saying that being a stranger to Montreal, I
did not find out much about it in the few days I was there, and I
will not pretend that I did. It is, I suppose, architecturally, far
the most beautiful city in {67} the Dominion, and indeed in the
Western Hemisphere, and for that very reason appears less strange to
European eyes than most other Canadian towns. I would not suggest
that all European towns are architecturally beautiful, or that
Montreal is anything but Canadian inwardly. Superficially it looks
like some fine French town. It also smells French.
'But them thereon didst only breathe
And sentst it back to me,
Since when it blows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee.'
Thus England might address France on the subject of Montreal, though
indeed France did more than breathe on Montreal. I would not be
taken to suggest that the smell is a malodorous one--merely French.
You get just that smell in summer in any French town from Rouen to
Marseilles, and it is probably due to nothing but the sun being at
the right temperature to bring out the mingled scent of omelettes and
road grit, cigarettes, _apéritifs_, and washing in sufficient
strength to attract the sensitive British nose. As for Montreal's
French appearance--the city is by all accounts strictly divided into
a French East-end and an English West-end, St. Laurent being the
dividing line. But when I passed west of {68} St. Laurent, and
hundreds of French men and French women and French children continued
to file past me, and I asked my way many times in English and was not
understood, I began to doubt the reality of that dividing line. It
seems a pity that there should be one, but there is of course, and it
runs through Canada as well as Montreal. Race and religion and
language combine to keep that line marked out, and it only becomes
faint in business quarters.
The time has gone by for great commercial undertakings to be
conducted by means of gesticulations or by the aid of an interpreter.
Master and man must speak the same language, at any rate outwardly.
Therefore all clerks learn English, which is also American; and I
take it that statistics, if they were kept, would show many more
French Canadians speaking English every year--whatever they may be
thinking.
So commerce, long the butt of moralists, takes its part among the
moral influences of the world. Already writers like Mr. Angell have
begun to assure us that it alone--by reason of its enormous and
far-reaching interests--can keep international war at a distance:
here is an example of how it {69} increases peace within a nation.
In the end, perhaps, Mammon himself may appear, purged of his
grossness upon the canonical list--St. Mammon!
Montreal has, so I am told, sixty-four millionaires--real, not dollar
millionaires; self-made, not descended millionaires; strenuous, not
idle millionaires. Most of them live in Sherbrooke Street, or near
it, on the way up to the Mountain. It is a fine wide road with an
extraordinary variety of houses in it. You cannot point to any one
house and say this is the sort of house a millionaire builds, for the
next one is quite different, and so is the next and the next. It is
natural that Canadians should be more original in their
house-building than our millionaires. They are more original men
altogether. They have made their money in a more original way, and
when they have made it, they have to think out original methods of
spending it--unlike ours, who find the etiquette of it all ready made
for them, and a practised set of people who want nothing more than to
be able to help millionaires scatter their money in the only correct
and fashionable way. You have to think everything out for yourself
in Canada, even to the spending of your money. That is, if you have
the money in large quantities. {70} For the ordinary person the
inherent slipperiness of the dollar suffices, and he will find that
it will circulate itself without his worrying. The diversity of
house-building, such as may be found in Sherbrooke Street, should
give encouragement to Canadian architects, but does, as a matter of
fact, let in the American architects as well. I could not feel that
they had altogether succeeded in this street--certainly not half so
well as they have succeeded in some of the business buildings,
especially the interior of the Bank of Montreal--but that is not
surprising. Architects must have their motives, and the reasons that
went to the building of some of the stately private houses of Europe
have ceased to exist now. The most that a man can demand from his
house--certainly in Canada--is that it shall be luxurious. Nobody is
going to keep retainers there. The three hundred servants even that
went to make up the household of an Elizabethan nobleman could not be
had in Canada either for love or money. Those three hundred serve in
the bank or the shops--not in the houses--and it is there that the
big man works also. Slowly we come to the right proportions of
things; nor am I suggesting that the private houses of the Canadian
millionaires are in the {71} least lacking in size. They are as
large as they need be, if not larger; and where they did not
altogether succeed was, I thought, in the attempt made with some of
them to achieve importance by rococo effects. The road itself,
curiously enough, was rather bad and rutty; I began to think, seeing
it, that there is some strange influence at work in French Canada
which prevents a road from ever being first-rate. It may be that
since roads there are only needed in summer, for a half year instead
of a whole one, the care and affection we lavish upon them is not
necessary. The good snow comes and turns Sherbrooke Street into a
sleigh-bearing thoroughfare only comparable with those of St.
Petersburg. The ruts are drifted up and vanish--why bother about
them? It is a good enough explanation. If another is needed, it may
be that there is money to be made--by those in charge of the keeping
up of the roads--by the simple method of not keeping them up.
Montreal has slums as well as Sherbrooke Street, which seems to show
that sixty-four millionaires are no real guarantee of a city's
perfectness. I heard about those slums from the editor of one of
Montreal's leading newspapers. The subject arose out of a question
{72} I put him as to whether he could tell me the difference between
Conservatives and Liberals in Canada. Some people maintain that the
difference even in England is so slight as to be unreal. To a
Canadian who is not much of a politician (but is, of course, either a
Liberal or a Conservative), the question amounts to being a catch
question. He has to think for a long time before he answers. This
editor, who was a Liberal, took it quite coolly.
'Oh,' he said, 'Liberals here are very much like Liberals in the old
country; we stand for Social Reform and the interests of the People.'
Then he told me about the slums in Montreal. But for these I should
have felt doubtful about the parallel, even though it was drawn by so
eminent an authority as the editor of a newspaper. For, naturally,
at present in most parts of Canada there is no People (with our own
English capital P) to stand for, just as there are no peers and no
Constitution. Where there are slums, there may be a People to be
represented. The more is the pity that there should be slums. Why
does Montreal possess them? Largely, I suppose, for the reason that
any very great city possesses them. There are landlords who can make
money out of them, there are people so poor that they will live in
them; {73} and their poverty is accounted for by the fact that cities
draw the destitute as the moon the tides. It seems against reason
that Canada, capable of absorbing hundreds of thousands of
immigrants, calling for them to be absorbed, so long as they are able
men, should have any destitute to be drawn to the cities; but it has
to be remembered that no immigration laws can really prevent a
percentage of incapables arriving. They may not be incapables as
such, but they are incapables on the land, which is indeed in Canada
endlessly absorbent, but absorbent only of those who have in them in
some way the land-spirit. To expect the land to take on hordes of
the city-bred without ever failing is to dream. It would be easier
for the sea to swallow men clothed in cork jackets. Some are bound
to be rejected, and they turn to the cities. But the cities of a New
World cannot absorb indefinite numbers of men; London or Glasgow
cannot. The work is not there for them--not for all of them.
The Canadian winter also has to be remembered as a factor driving men
to cities like Montreal. Even good men on the land cannot always
during the winter obtain work on the farms; or think that the little
they can make there is not worth while. So they, too, make {74} for
the cities, not always to their own improving. This problem of the
Canadian winter is one that has still to be reckoned with, and no
doubt the Canadians will solve it in due course--perhaps by some
extension of the Russian methods whereby the peasant of the summer
becomes the handicraftsman of the winter. It is not the winter
itself that is at fault in Canada, as used to be thought; it is the
method of dealing with it. The Canadian may not mind the hard, cold
months--may even boast of them, but he cannot ignore them. And the
solution of the winter problem seems to be that though Canada is
marked out as an agricultural country, it must also equally become a
manufacturing one, so that men--who cannot hibernate like
dormice--may be able to work the year through. The whitest nation is
that nation whose leisure is got by choice not by compulsion.
There must be local reasons, too, for Montreal slums, but these a
visitor is not happy in describing. Municipal mismanagement is
unfortunately not exclusive to Europe; and my editor gave me examples
of it in Montreal which were impressive without being novel.
He also pointed out that there were forty thousand Jews in Montreal,
as though that {75} might have something to do with her slums.
Others point out that the Catholic Church, which believes that the
poor must be always with us, is supreme in Montreal; poverty and the
faith, they say, go always together. I think it is truest to argue
that, while all these things are in their degree contributory, it is
not fair to fix on any one of them as the chief cause of the ill.
One thing is certain. Montreal's slums are not typical of Canada,
but of a great city. No great city has as yet found itself
completely, and the greater it is, the less soluble are its problems
of poverty. It may be that they can be resolved only by the great
cities ceasing to exist in the form we know them.
Meanwhile it looks as though the welfare of employees is not being
neglected by the leading directors of industry. Take, for example,
the Angus Shops, which are larger than any other engineering shops in
the world. Here are built these huge houses of cranks and pistons,
the railway engines of the Canadian Pacific, that hustle one from end
to end of the Dominion; here also are turned out all else that
appertains to the biggest railway company in existence. In these
shops a system has been introduced which might be called a
Bourneville system, only Canadianised. The management {76} refers to
it as Welfare Work, and it consists mainly in certain methods whereby
the men can obtain good food--while they are working--at low prices,
apprentices are helped to an education, the cost of 'holiday homes'
is defrayed, and so on. Very sensibly the management admits the
system to be a part of a business plan, which it finds remunerative.
The idea that beneficence plays a leading part in it is almost
scouted; indeed it would not be easy to persuade Canadian working-men
that their bosses were doing things from charity. I went over the
shops, and found them built on a vast and airy scale. Not being an
engineering sort of person, I usually feel, when I invade a machinery
place, like some unfortunate beetle that has strayed into a beehive,
and may at any moment be attacked by the busy and alarming creatures
that are buzzing about there. As I watched the huge engines, swung
like bags of feathers from the roof, some black demon would heave
showers of sparks at me, and when I started back, another would come
raiding out with red-hot tongs. I admired respectfully. But I am
one of those who can enjoy my honey just as much without knowing just
how it was made. Still, here was a big bit of Montreal, and what
miles of French houses {77} with green shutters one drove past to get
to it!
It would be absurd to suggest that poverty or slums are conspicuous
things in Montreal. The average tourist will see none of them, but
only many beautiful things--from the Bank of Montreal to the
Cathedral, from the Lachine Rapids to the Mountain. I will not
describe shooting the Rapids, it has been so often done. I wish I
could describe the view from the Mountain. It is the most beautiful
view of a city that can be seen. Marseilles from her hill is
beautiful, so is Paris from Champigny. From neither of these, nor
from any hill that I know of, is there so complete a view of so fair
a city. The Mountain is wooded, and through the arches of the trees
you gain a score of changing outlooks; but from the edge you see all
Montreal--houses and streets and spires, each roof and gate, each
chimney and window--so it seems. And beyond, the great river, and
beyond, and on every side--Canada. If there were a mountain above
Oxford, something like this might be seen.
It was up this wooded steep to Fletcher's field, where an altar had
been set up, that the great Eucharistic procession of 1910 wound its
way. I was in Montreal just before this event, {78} for which the
Montrealers had spent months preparing, and I realised a little why
Montreal hopes some day to be the New Rome. The whole city was in a
fervour of enthusiasm. A society had been formed for the special
purpose of growing flowers to line the way along which the
Cardinal-legate would walk, and gifts of money for the same purpose
had been received from every part of Canada. The papers, of course,
were full of every detail about Church dignitaries arriving or about
to arrive. Nor were the shops behindhand. 'Eucharistic Congress!
House decoration at moderate prices' was everywhere placarded; and
papal flags and papal arms were to be had cheap. There were Congress
sales, too, and you could buy Congress 'creations' from the
dressmakers, Congress hats from the milliners, Congress boots from
the bootmakers.
On the day that Cardinal Vannutelli arrived, in a dismal and violent
downpour of rain, all Montreal in macintoshes was to be seen dashing
for the Bonsecours wharf to offer its respectful greetings to the
papal legate.
Will the Montrealers' dream of providing the New Rome ever be
achieved? Who can say? Rome, though Italians may become subversive
of the faith, will perhaps stand for ever. If it {79} ceased, as the
centre of the Catholic faith, Montreal might certainly claim to take
its place. It is already the centre of French-Canadian Catholicism;
it might become the religious centre of Canada. There is no
certainty that Catholicism will persist in Canada only among the
French Canadians. It seems equally possible that Rome will prevail
among non-French Canadians. Both in Canada and the States her
strides forward have been enormous--comparable perhaps only to the
steps taken in other directions by Free Thought in Europe. Is it
that Catholicism makes peculiar appeal in a new country, or that in
these new countries the propagation of the faith has been great and
unceasing? These are debatable questions (though undebatable, I
think, is the statement that in the New World Rome has a marvellous
history of things attempted splendidly and achieved without
reproach). I will not debate, then, but rather return to the
Mountain and ask you to picture the great Eucharistic procession
moving slowly up to it--up to the altar built there in the open,
under the high and clear Canadian skies--all the inhabitants of a
mighty city moving with it, till the city itself is left behind and
all that is low and earthly left for the moment {80} with it. Then
you will have in your mind one picture of Montreal at least not
unworthy of it. It will be a picture of Montreal at its best and
highest--a city of the faithful--near to their Mountain.
{81}
CHAPTER IX
TORONTO, NIAGARA FALLS, AND A NEGRO PORTER
From Montreal to Toronto is a pleasant run through a southern part of
Canada. One passes orchards and woods and Smith's Falls, where
bricks are made, and Peterborough, which has the largest hydraulic
lift-lock in the world. The Union railway station at Toronto, when I
got there, was a seething mass of people and baggage, with an
occasional railway official hidden in the vortex. I spent an hour
trying to put a bag into the parcel-room, and after that gave up
trying. Canadians are singularly patient in matters of this kind.
Laden with heavy bags, they will collect in crowds outside the small
window of a parcel-room, and burdened thus will wait there for hours
without a murmur, while the youth inside lounges about at his
leisure. My temper has frequently been stretched to the limit in
Germany when I have had to wait perhaps ten minutes for a penny stamp
while the Prussian {82} postal official behind the glass slit curled
his moustaches in imitation of the Kaiser. I think the methods at
that parcel-room in Toronto were even more trying. I will admit that
it was Labour Day, and that Toronto was also in the throes of the
World's Fair. But in a city of that size one would expect some
preparation to be made for forthcoming throes. The truth seems to be
that throughout Canada important events, attracting immense crowds,
are brought off without any extra provision being made. Montreal
managed to contain its Congress hordes pretty well, but Toronto
during the World's Fair had a general air about it of sleeping six in
a bed, if it slept at all. I kept coming across the same sort of
thing at other places. Calgary, I remember, looked for the few days
I was there like the Old Kent Road on a Saturday night, so crowded
was it with people who had come in to witness the return to its
native heath of a victorious football team. Regina was overrun with
the Canadian bankers who, in massive formation, were touring the
North-West. In one or two small places in the Rockies enormous
trainloads of Canada's leading merchants, who were inspecting British
Columbia with an eye to its future, were deposited for a day in
passing, and caused as much {83} confusion as the canoe-loads of
savages must have done when they descended on Robinson Crusoe's
island.
Labour Day is in the New World very different from what it is with
us. In Canada, if you like, you may for three hundred and sixty-four
days labour and do all that you have to do, but the three hundred and
sixty-fifth is Labour Day, and no manner of work--except
transportation--may be done that day. Transport work is necessary,
because by way of observing Labour Day it is the thing to go
somewhere in great multitudes, preferably by rail, and pursue the
sort of pleasure that is only to be obtained by those who seek it
multitudinously.
Toronto was on this occasion a chosen spot for people to rollick in.
This, added to the fact that the World's Fair was also in progress,
prevented me from being able to get a room for the night, though I
applied at five different hotels. At the sixth, which was full of
excited commercial travellers, I was granted a bed on a top landing.
I did not mind so much because I was seeing Toronto in a lively
state. Ordinarily, I imagine, Toronto is the least bit too decorous,
not devoid of cheerfulness, but not joyous either. There is nothing
Parisian about Toronto, you would say. This stands to reason, {84}
because if there is any Parisian air in Canada at all it belongs to
Montreal, and Toronto would be the last place to imitate Montreal in
any manner. The extraordinary rivalry that exists between the great
East Canadian cities never leads to imitation. On the plains it is
different. Winnipeg is the great model for all the little towns on
the plains. But while Quebec resents the idea that Montreal is a
much more important city than itself, and Montreal regrets that the
seat of Government should be at so small a place as Ottawa, and
Toronto considers Montreal ill-balanced in spite of its wealth, each
of them would only consent to expand its own real superiority along
its own particular lines and in its own particular manner.
Still on Labour Night Toronto was quite gay. It did not look like
the Boston of Canada at all, though it has substantial grounds, I
read somewhere, for making this claim. I could realise that it was
entitled to make this claim if it wanted to. If one shut one's eyes
to the crowds, one could feel an air of brisk sobriety permeating it;
and everything that one reads about it goes to show that a brisk
sobriety is what it aims at. It keeps the Sabbath, for example, most
strictly, though it hustles or almost hustles the rest of the week.
I should {85} guess Toronto places briskness next to godliness, not a
very bad second either. Its industries and its opulence are too well
known to be worth detailing here. What struck me as most interesting
about Toronto was that it seemed to represent more than any other
place in Canada what we mean in England when we talk of Canadians.
We do not mean the French Canadians of Quebec Province, nor the
American Canadians and English public-school boys who are to be found
in such numbers in Alberta and the plains. The sort of people we are
thinking of are people who have been born in Canada, who have even
spent generations there, but are, nevertheless, British by descent
and British in tongue. There are people of this sort in other parts
of Canada. The inhabitants of the Maritime Provinces are such, in
spite of the fact that Mr. Bourassa has claimed that within fifteen
years they will have become French in language and Roman Catholic in
faith. Mr. Bourassa has made the same claim, to be sure, with regard
to the inhabitants of Ontario. In the meantime, it would be truer to
describe the inhabitants of Ontario as Canadians in the English
sense. And Toronto is their capital. It is, of course, the home of
the United Empire Loyalists who {86} settled here when the States
broke away from our rule. The temper that made any rule but
England's and any liberty that was not English liberty unendurable
still remains, and I think Mr. Bourassa will have his work cut out to
Gallicise them. Still even the sternest traditions of loyalty do not
prevent--nay, even encourage--a certain change in the character of a
people.
It is probable that Ontarians are less English now than they were,
just as Quebeckers are less French. Which have the right to be held
more essentially Canadian may be questioned, but I repeat that when
we in England talk of Canadians we have in mind a type of men to
which the Ontarians correspond more than any others. It would be
absurd, no doubt, to look for the English type in a metropolis like
London, and perhaps it is absurd to look for the Ontarian type in a
metropolis like Toronto. But it is less absurd, I think, and anyhow
I did look for it there. What did I find? Well, I hope elsewhere to
go cautiously and delicately into this matter of what a typical
Canadian is like. Here I will only say that if you can imagine a
Lowland Scot, cautious and self-possessed, outwardly resisting
American exuberance and {87} extravagance, but inwardly by slow
degrees absorbing--and thereby moderating--that hustling spirit of
which these things are manifestations, you have something not unlike
the Canadian of Toronto. Remember that Toronto is the southern
gateway of Canada. It fronts on the States. It deals with the
States. Between it and the States there is constant intercourse. It
pursues the same industries, following in many cases the same
methods. Many American managers of men are to be found in Toronto.
It is not unnatural that some of the American spirit should dwell
there also, and even tend to breed there.
Now for the Fair. Fairing is a pretty old thing, and I have done a
good deal of it, but fairing at Toronto struck me as being somehow
new. I do not mean in the way of the exhibits one saw. They were
nothing out of the way to any one who has seen the more famous
exhibitions of the Old World, and the arrangements struck me as poor.
The grounds by the lake are fairly extensive, but the buildings are
second-rate. I thought when I saw the fruit exhibit in one of them
that the whole display was little better than at a little English
village flower show. But the keenness of the crowd visiting the
ground! There was the {88} novelty. They did not glimpse at things
in our blasé European way, and then sink into seats to listen to the
band. They did listen to the band, but that was because the band was
part of the show; and they wanted to do the show, every inch of it.
Whole families camped for the day on the grounds. They brought meals
with them in paper bags and boxes to fortify themselves lest they
should drop before they had seen everything. Not that there was any
lack of smartness either. The ladies had on their best hats and
frocks, and the Canadian best in these respects is very fine. But
one did not suspect them, as one would have suspected ladies at the
White City or the Brussels Exhibition, of being there merely to show
themselves off. Their frocks were in honour of the Fair. The Fair
was the thing. It was a scene of the greatest enthusiasm under a
tolerably hot sun. I had been asked to note if any English firms had
taken the trouble to exhibit, and I am bound to say that I saw very
few. It seems a pity when one considers the sort of people who visit
the Fair--not merely a crowd amusing itself for an hour or two with
glancing at the exhibits, but a crowd trying to find out what there
was to buy--a crowd with dollars in its pockets and plenty of dollars
in its banks. {89} I dare say there are difficulties in the way.
There was not, for example, indefinite room for more exhibits, nor
are Canadian manufacturers, with rumours of reduced tariffs going
about, to be presumed eager to encourage competitors. Still, it
seemed a pity.
I clove my way to bed that night on the top landing through a horde
of keen commercial travellers joyfully discussing all the business
the exhibition would bring them. Next day I went to Niagara, by
steamer, across the great lake. Toronto owes at least half its
greatness to the Falls, and there should be, but I do not think there
is, a really big monument to their discoverer, Father Louis Hennepin.
Very likely, though, the discovery of Niagara was its own reward,
especially for so inquisitive a man as that friar. He has himself
confessed how, in the old days, when he was only a begging friar,
sent by the Superior of his Order to beg for alms at the seaport of
Calais, he used, in his curiosity, to hide himself behind tavern
doors and listen to the sailors within telling of their voyages,
while their tobacco smoke was wafted out and made him 'very sick at
the stomach.' In the end he was the first white man to see the
Falls, in the winter of 1687....
They were framed in a most gorgeous sunset {90} when I saw them on an
August day. The green and white foam swooped from a mountain of
clouds all grey and gold--clouds piled fantastically into the
furthest sky. No one seeing them in such a light could be
disappointed with them, but I would forbid any more writers to write
about them. Every man should be his own poet where the greater
sights of the world are concerned. On second thoughts it is
permissible to read Mr. Howells on the subject, and even Dickens,
provided one is never likely to see them with one's own eyes. I saw
the Falls at sunset, by starlight, and in the sunrise, and I can
commend them at all these times. The river that drowned Captain Webb
and was crossed by Blondin on the tight-rope, though extraordinary in
its way, seemed to me comparatively unbeautiful and uninteresting.
Any big sea on the Atlantic or Pacific is a finer sight and grips a
man harder. I like a river quiet myself. Moreover, the villas above
Niagara River give the landscape a domestic air in which its mad
swirl seems only like an attempt to show off malignantly.
One of my pleasantest recollections of Niagara is a conversation I
had with the porter at the hotel where I stopped on the Canadian
side. He was an American negro, extremely urbane {91} and chatty.
He told me that he guessed I was an Englishman. It was pretty easy,
he said, to tell that. I did not feel sure whether to feel flattered
or not, but I felt sure later, when he introduced me to the
lift-boy--a typical little stunted anæmic street arab from one of our
northern cities--with a wave of the hand and the remark, 'Thar's one
of your fellow-countrymen.' Afterwards, in self-defence, I steered
the conversation towards Canada, and the porter, who regarded himself
as an American citizen only, told me that the Canadians were a slow,
stupid people, who could not be trusted of themselves to do anything
but cultivate a little land badly.
'Look at Toronto,' he said; 'do you think there'd be any hustle in
that place if the Canadians had been left to themselves? No, sah.
But we came along and lent them our brains and our enterprise, and I
guess now it's a big fine city.'
{92}
CHAPTER X
MASKINONGÉ FISHING ON THE FRENCH RIVER
A friend, acquainted with Canada, met me in Toronto, and I told him I
was tired of cities and thought of going to the Muskoka Lakes.
'What do you expect to get there?' he asked.
'Scenery,' I said--'camping, fishing. A Fenimore Cooper existence in
the backwoods. Isn't it to be had there?'
'The scenery's all right,' he said, 'and you can camp out of course,
and there are some fish. But if you mean you want a quiet,
unconventional life----'
'I do for a few days,' I said.
'You'd better go further than the Muskoka district, then,' he said.
'It's beginning to be rather a fashionable camping-ground--quite
pleasant in its way. If you care to see charming American maidens in
expensive frocks falling out of canoes just on purpose to be able to
change into frocks still more expensive, the Muskoka country is the
place for you. If {93} not, you had better come with me and fish for
maskinongés on the French River.'
I did not know where the French River was or what maskinongés were,
or how you caught them; but I said 'Yes,' being very tired of cities,
and we took the night train from Toronto, and at 4.30 A.M. dropped
off it on to a bridge that spanned a deep, big river. The dawn was
exceedingly cold and grey.
Literally we dropped off the train, for it did not stop but only
slowed down, and after us the negro porter dropped our bags and
tackle. A minute later the train had vanished, and we were left
alone on the bridge, staring at the rocky, wooded cliffs that rose on
either bank. Rock, wood, and water indeed met the eye wherever one
looked. It seemed a country where Nature had once built mountains,
savage and sparsely wooded mountains in the midst of a great inland
sea, then in a cataclysmal mood had dashed them to pieces in every
direction. And as the boulders and splinters of boulders flew, some
fell in circles and made little lakes out of the great sea; some fell
in heaped cliffs and banks, between which the sea was squeezed into
winding, forking streams; some fell and sank and left the sea a
shallow swamp above them; some fell and stood up {94} out of the
water and became islands of dry rock. Every splinter that flew bore
in some crack of it a seed of spruce or fir or birch, which grew; so
that all this barren rock and waste of water became crowned with
trees. I dare say any geologist could explain exactly what did
happen. I am merely explaining what appears to have happened, when
you look at it the first time with eyes still full of sleep.
It was the French River at which we were gazing, and it looked at
this point somewhat wider than the Thames at Hammersmith. It was
flat and full with a good current; and my friend made some remark
about never having been given to understand, when he was at school in
England, that there was such a river at all--much less that it was
finer than the Thames.
'I doubt if one would find it marked on an English school map even
now,' he continued.
'I don't know, I'm sure,' I replied.
'Doesn't it show how disgracefully ignorant we are of Canada?' he
demanded in the hollow tones of an Imperial enthusiast.
'Yes,' I agreed. I daresay I should have agreed anyhow. It was
disgraceful that we neither of us had known anything about the {95}
French River. But the reason I agreed so quickly was that, if I had
not done so, he was capable of proving to me that such gross
ignorance, if persisted in, will some day prove fatal to the Empire.
Whereas I merely wanted breakfast. Any one who has been dropped off
a train at 4.30 on a misty morning in the sort of country I have
described will sympathise with me.
Luckily the dawn soon became a little less grey, and presently we
beheld a wooden shack standing on a crag some quarter of a mile up
stream, with a dozen canoes moored below it. Presently also--and
this was more to the point--some one in the shack became aware of us
standing on the bridge, and put out in an old boat fitted with a
motor to fetch us. An hour later we were enjoying breakfast inside
the shack, which is really a hotel of sorts, and its proprietor, Mr.
Fenton, was explaining to us all about the fishing to be had on the
French River. For five dollars--or nine for two persons, he would
supply us with a canoe, an Indian guide, a tent, provisions, and a
hundred miles or so of first-class fishing.
Now for the benefit of all benighted Englishmen who do not know the
French River or Mr. Fenton of Pickerel, but would like to make {96}
their acquaintance and that of the maskinongé, let me enlarge upon my
existence for the next few days.
Let me begin with Bill. Bill was our Indian guide. He was an
Ojibway. Youthful, well built, reserved in manner, he paddled us on
the average eight hours, cooked three meals, and set up or took down
our tent in an incredibly short time every day. When either of us
caught a fish, Bill laughed; when we did not, he stared into space.
He laughed pretty often, for we caught quite a number of fish. It
seemed unavoidable on the French River. Occasionally, in answer to
questions, Bill spoke. He spoke English. Once or twice he spoke on
his own account. I remember his saying that he preferred eggs to
fish. I do not know how much Bill thought. Accustomed to connect
such outward reserve and dignity as Bill showed with a philosophic
mind, I fancied for quite a long time that Bill must think a great
deal. I doubt it now. Those who have studied the Red Indian in his
native haunts have discovered, I believe, that though his mind works
in mysterious ways, it does work; but not quickly, or with superhuman
gravity or discernment. As for that look of reserve--it indicates no
more brain-work or {97} brain-power than the look of reserve on the
face of an alligator. When I read hereafter that the hero of a book
has a reserved face and an imperturbable manner (he so very often has
in the novels of ladies) I shall think of Bill, and be delighted.
Bill was so soothing. So was the French River. It is worth an
Englishman's while to know of it--worth his private as well as his
Imperial while. American sportsmen seem to know it well. They come
fishing up it in fair numbers earlier in the year, and they come
shooting later--deer and partridge and cariboo. The partridge
shooting is said to be some of the finest in Canada.
The French explorers also knew the French River, for it was by this
route that they first found their way to Lake Huron when, by reason
of Bill's ancestors being out on the war-path, seeking scalps, they
found Lake Ontario impossible of crossing. In width it varies
considerably. Sometimes it narrows to rapids, at others it broadens
to over a mile across, and is divided into channels by steep islands.
The scenery of it is as changeful as its channel. Now the banks are
built in sheer stone, a hundred feet high; again they rise terrace by
terrace, smooth as if men had made them; a little later they are
nothing but a {98} chaos of strewn rock. Sometimes the firs
predominate, sometimes the birches, pale green still these latter, or
yellowing in the fall. Then a splash of cherry colour or crimson
shows a maple on its way to winter. There are reedy backwaters where
great pike lie; and natural weirs, below which the rock bass wait for
their food; the deep pools hold pickerel or catfish. Everywhere the
air exhilarates, and along the wider reaches we used to meet a wind
like a sea-wind that put the river in waves and set them tippling
into the bows of the canoe.
For the most part we trolled, six or seven miles upstream from
Pickerel landing, using an artificial minnow or feathered double
spoon, which latter seemed to attract pike, bass, and pickerel,
though the last, like the cat-fish, preferred a worm. However, it is
a dull fish, the pickerel, hardly worth catching. Not so the
cat-fish. A six-pounder of this variety can be very strenuous
indeed, and the only drawback to it is, as an American we met
remarked, you would have to shut your eyes before you could eat it.
Certainly it is one of the most grotesque and hideous of freshwater
fish, having four slimy tendrils growing from the sides of its mouth,
with pig's eyes between. The bass is a fine eater. We got {99} bass
up to four pounds, and if it is not mean to mention such a matter in
connection with so sporting a fish, you know that when you have
landed one you have landed a glorious supper. Those suppers over the
camp fire, which Bill could set roaring within three minutes--so much
timber and touchwood lies everywhere--what would one not give to
enjoy the like in England? In an artificial sort of way you can do
so. Here one is in the wilds as they were from the beginning--except
that the Indian is cooking for the white man instead of cooking the
white man for fun.
What a delight it was, too, to go to bed on a couch of fir boughs,
with the wind rustling through the birches, to the soothing sound of
Bill, stretched at the foot of the tent, spitting gently into the
night. It was a soothing sound, until I awoke one night to find that
Bill had drawn the flap of the tent tight, but was still spitting--I
do not know whither.
We spent four days on the French River, and our catch averaged over
twelve pounds a day. It would have been much more if we had fished
for every sort of fish and taken no photographs. As it was we took a
good many photographs, and spent most of our time trying to lure the
maskinongé. It is {100} the king-fish of these waters--a sort of
pike--but with the leaping powers of a salmon and the heart of a
tiger. Bill used to madden us with tales of how the last party he
had guided had landed twenty maskinongés in three days. We fished
and fished, and then I, trolling with a spoon, hooked one. We saw
him almost instantly take a great white leap into the sun, thirty
yards from the canoe. Then Bill paddled gently for the nearest shore
at which one could land him, and I played him the while with such
care ... Oh, my maskinongé, never to be mine! I got him to the
bank--a flat piece of rock with a kindly slope to the water. Perhaps
he was not more than fifteen pounds in weight. Perhaps he was. Bill
said not. But then Bill had not hooked him; and in fact it was Bill
who lost him. Anyway, fifteen pounds is fifteen pounds, even if they
do run to forty. Yes, it was Bill that lost him. I stick to
that--though I admit that we had all been stupid enough to come out
without a gaff. So it came about that, though I drew him ever so
gingerly to the rock, yet--yet as Bill made a lunge at him to get him
up--my maskinongé leaped once more--and broke the line!
There for a second he lay, all dazed and {101} silvery, in the
shallow water--then woke up and vanished, spoon and all!...
Bill vowed that the line was too weak; but what line would have stood
it?
No matter--though I did not say 'no matter' at the time. Some day
perhaps I shall go back to the French River. For fifty pounds a man
could get there from England, spend three weeks in fishing, and
return again to the old country--a five-weeks trip in all--and know,
maybe, the best August and September of his life. Yes, I hope to go
back and catch maskinongé, and listen once more to the wind in the
birches, and go to sleep again to the sound of Bill spitting--for
choice into the night.
{102}
CHAPTER XI
SUPERFICIAL REFLECTIONS AT SUDBURY
Coming away from the French River, we spent a night at Sudbury, which
lies in the midst of 'rich deposits of nickeliferous pyrrhotite.'
Had I a brain capable of appreciating nickeliferous pyrrhotite, I
should have got more pleasure out of this prosperous mining town than
I did. My chief recollections of it are that it was unattractive,
that everybody looked prosperous in it, that trucks were shunted
under my bedroom window all night long, and that the hotel proprietor
forgot to wake us at the time we had requested, with the result that
we got to the station breakfastless, about half an hour after the
train was due to start. Luckily it was late. I do not care for
missing trains at any time, but to have missed that train at Sudbury
would have been singularly annoying. There was, in effect, nothing
of interest in Sudbury if you were not interested in nickeliferous
pyrrhotite. I know that I should not {103} make such a remark.
_Humani nihil a me alienum_ should be every writer's motto. But it
is one thing to possess a motto, another to act upon it after trucks
have been shunted under one's window all night, and one stands
breakfastless on a dull station very early in the morning, waiting
for a train that will not come.
Let me recall what sort of humanity was about. There was a stout,
middle-aged Indian guide, who told us the finest trout fishing in
Canada was to be had a few miles from Sudbury. He was the most
cheerful Indian I saw in Canada--really a cheerful man--creased with
smiles. There were miners looking out for jobs or leaving
them--mostly spitting. They were all young men. I only saw about
four old men in the whole Dominion. I do not know if Canadians are
shut up after a certain age, or do not grow to it, or retire like
butterflies to end their days far from the ken of man. So that there
was nothing surprising in there being only young men at the station.
More surprising was the amount of nationalities that seemed to be
represented among them. They seemed of every race and yet very
alike. I suppose a miner is a miner, whatever his nationality, just
as a mahout is a mahout. In the strange worlds both these kinds of
experts {104} live in, the one sort in the bowels of the earth, the
other on the necks of elephants, our little international
distinctions would tend to become of less importance. If a man is a
miner, he may also be a Belgian or a German or a Yorkshireman--but
his real country is subterranean: he is before all things a citizen
of the underworld. I do not know if one would get to recognise a
miner in Canada quite so easily as one gets to recognise a miner at
home--for miners there shift about more than in England, and spend
more time, therefore, in the upper world; which stamps men
differently. Still, though tales of new finds in new countries,
where wages will be almost incredibly high, constantly reach them,
and tempt them forth, after all they emerge from one part of the dark
earth only to plunge into another--passing the between-time
above-ground magnificently; but less magnificently than their wives.
The prices paid by miners' wives for their hats at some of the big
stores would startle the more extravagant of our own smart set. I
believe there were some lumbermen in the station too, taking their
ease, but I had not then grown to know the look of a lumberjack as I
did later. The chief thing about him is his magnificent
complexion--enviable of women. Canada {105} is not generous in the
matter of complexions, and one usually hears that the dry winds of
the winter time are accountable for making them poor, especially on
the plains. The hot stoves of the shacks are a still more likely
cause. Why then should the lumbermen have such incomparable skins?
Partly because they are men in 'the pink of condition'--so long as
they work (their condition out of it is best realised by a perusal of
_Woodsmen of the West_, one of the few fine local studies of a real
type of Canadian life that have yet been written); partly because
their work is in the woods which are windless and not dry.
Tokens of the lumbering life--besides the complexion--are jollity, a
freedom from care amounting to something even more delightful than
irresponsibility, an air of equality with something of superiority in
it--indeed, with a good deal of superiority in it--and a childlike
loquaciousness or an equally childlike dislike of talk. These last
two qualities are both, I fancy, Canadian in general. One is
generally told that the Canadians are ready talkers, will always
address a stranger in the train, will be inquisitive and
self-revealing to an extent unimagined by the Englishman. Mr.
Kipling remarked, I remember, in his Canadian {106} letters that you
will learn from an Englishman in two years less than you will learn
from a Canadian in two minutes. Mr. Kipling is perhaps the best
boaster Canada ever drew to herself. My own experience in the matter
of Canadian conversation is that a lot depends upon the individual.
Introductions are certainly not waited for, and on a journey one may
chat with strangers to one's heart's content. But it must be borne
in mind that the traveller _par excellence_ in Canada is the
commercial traveller whose business it is to talk. Off the line--and
on it, where other travellers are concerned--one finds men with a
gift of silence that can at times be disheartening. It is natural
that this should be so. Men in remote places lose the use of their
tongues. All men are not talkers, indeed I think the great majority
of men in any country are not talkers. When Canadians do talk, it
must be admitted that they excel us, or their working-men do. Their
working-men are not only ready, but also, superficially at any rate,
remarkably well-informed about things outside their own particular
job. They know what is being talked of, the prices of things, the
value of land, astonishingly well. All Canadians know something
about land; and about what he knows, {107} the Canadian is not
deprecating. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, the more educated
men among them are at times considerably less interesting than ours.
It is not that their conversational topics are few, but that they are
circumscribed. The personal and dogmatic element enters into them,
with the result that the subject discussed seems incapable of
extension, and tends to become circular. I have met quite young men
who were bores, and bores not only in essence, but in manner, like
the clergymen of our comic papers. I do not know why it is, but I do
know that it is sad. It may be that there are not enough women in
Canada to prevent it. Men are so patient they will stand
anything--even a bore. But where women abound, a man may not be
tiresome either in his clothes or his conversation....
I believe the train at Sudbury was almost an hour late, which is why
I have gone on so long noting trifles at large. When it did come in,
somewhere about 8 A.M., we discovered that it was full up, and people
had been standing in the first-class carriages all night. They had
mostly breakfasted since, and the first-class carriage we got into
was littered from end to end with bun-bags and sandwich-papers and
orange peel, and all the refuse that results {108} from picnics in
trains. Tired parents and sleepy children were piled above this
flotsam in an atmosphere hard to endure. Yet everybody was cheerful,
and though we both wished in our hearts that we could have got
'sleepers' entitling us to Pullman accommodation, we were both
grateful--or ought to have been grateful--that we were privileged to
witness the contented spirit with which these representatives of the
great Dominion bore their trials. Not a grumble--oh, my brother
Englishman, not a grumble! Think of it.
{109}
CHAPTER XII
THROUGH THE HIGHLANDS OF ONTARIO
I sat in the tail of the train smoking, while Ontario dropped behind,
league after league of thin trees growing out of the rock, of rock
growing out of bog or lake, of bog or lake covering all solid things.
Sometimes the trees were green and dark; sometimes green and light;
sometimes nothing but scorched trunks--black skeletons of trees left
by a forest fire which had killed everything within reach like a
beast of prey, but consumed only the tender parts.
Somebody, as we swung over a typical piece of muskeg country--black
and juicy bogland covered with a foot maybe of clear water--began to
tell a story of a train that had run off the rails and plunged head
first into just such a place. It had been a long train, he said; a
goods train, and it had gone down and down. When he saw it, the last
truck only stuck out of the muskeg. We listened respectfully. It
{110} was at least a well-found story, illustrating the difficulties
the engineers had had in laying the lines across a treacherous ooze
that nothing seemed to fill or make firm.
What will become of this one-thousand-mile stretch of swamped
rock-land? Nobody knows. There it lies separating East from West,
as land impassable, unnavigable as water. Firs and minerals, these
are the only things to be expected from it. Firs tend to grow less,
but the minerals of course may in the end so count that no one will
wish the country other than the rock it is. All along the line the
railway authorities have up the names of stations, as though there
really were stations there, and, even more, as though there were
villages or towns which those stations served. You are carried past
a hundred such stations--names on a board and nothing more at all,
unless it be a solitary wooden shack in which some railway
subordinate passes his life seeing that the line is clear. The gangs
of workers, Galicians or Italians, who do repairs along the line,
camp out; you see their camps now and then, temporary settlements in
this No Man's Land.
'_Pays mélancolique et marécageux!_' So Pierre Loti named Les
Landes, and the description fits this country too, though I doubt if
{111} melancholy is a word to be found in a Canadian's vocabulary.
'Pretty poor stuff' a Canadian might allow it to be, but would
immediately begin to talk of the fish in its waters, the big game to
be got among the woods, and the mining possibilities it would reveal
as soon as prospectors and syndicates got together. There never was
a people less born to be depressed than the Canadians; nor do I think
they will ever produce a Pierre Loti.
For my part, I began to find this country most fascinating when I
started to think of its effect upon the history of Canada. It is
easy to see that its very impenetrability hindered for a long time
the growth of the West. Where there was no road there was no way for
progress, and the great wheatlands were shut up beyond it, while
Eastern Canada developed. What is less easy to see is the effect
such a waste must have when the country on the other side has been
populated and fertilised. A little time ago people began to think
that East and West would simply reverse their order of importance.
They said, 'Quebec and Ontario have depreciated in value. The rich
land of Ontario has been ruined, why should any one stay there when
in the West there is limitless wheatland to settle on?' {112} But the
trackless country still lay between--distance is not annihilated by a
single railroad, nor by a dozen railroads. Quebeckers did not move
West much. Ontarian farmers began to find that exhausted land could
be renovated by scientific methods. If the plains had adjoined their
farms, they would not have bothered to try those methods, but the
muskeg and rock lay between. Some of them went West, but not all;
they did not like it that the West was being settled from the States
and Europe. In any case the West would have been an unfamiliar
country--the American and English immigrants only made it more
so--and the boasts of the West roused Eastern pride. Was the West
best? Ontarians looked about them and found that not only could
their present farms be improved but that there lay still in their own
particular country virgin land that needed only to be cleared and
worked. Already there is the new Ontario, north of the old Ontario,
offering fresh fields and pastures new for the Canadian born who
didn't mind clearing land as well as working it. It is land upon
which the average immigrant is lost, upon which the average Ontarian
is at home. Thus begins a northern movement which may spread any
distance.
{113}
I have not said, and would not say, that the rock and water of
Ontario account for this northern movement, for the fact that people
are beginning to say, 'This East and West business is overdone.
Canada is not a thin, straight line from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
but a country stretching north to Hudson Bay, having the depth of the
States almost, if a race spreads hardy enough to inhabit it.' The
immediate cause of the northern movement was the discovery that wheat
was as hardy as men, if not hardier, and would grow more north than
an old-time settler ever dreamed of. The movement began in the
North-West. All I would say is that if the waste country had not
lain between the Ontarian farmer and the West he would have rushed
with the rest, and the balance of importance would have shifted
altogether westward. As it is, Ontarian farmers thrive again; new
Ontario thrives excellently in a score of ways; the Canadian-born
prosper in that part of Canada where they are--and always have
been--most massed and most solidly Canadian. The West is a medley of
races; and if it had suddenly become dominant by reason of its vastly
superior prosperity, a people that could definitely be called
Canadian would have been still further to seek than it is. {114}
Canada, in effect, would have had to restart becoming a nation.
All that day the rock and bog and timber kept dropping behind the
train, and it was sunset before we came to the shore of Lake
Superior. A thunderous glow hung over the lake, glimmering on the
great granite cliffs. It was dark before we came to Port
Arthur--proud possessor of the largest elevator in the world, and
fierce rival of Fort William. In the morning we were in Manitoba.
{115}
CHAPTER XIII
THE OLD TIMERS OF KILDONAN AND THE NEW
TIMERS OF WINNIPEG
Winnipeg introduces the West. 'If you like Winnipeg,' I had been
told before I got there, 'you will like the West.' I had been
somewhat disheartened by this information. I had pictured Winnipeg
as a smoke-laden city of mean and narrow streets, set off with board
walks and wooden shacks of various sizes. I knew that I should not
like Winnipeg if it were like that. Well, it is not like that. Main
Street, which follows exactly the lines of the old Hudson Bay
Company's trail, is a hundred and thirty-two feet wide, and the other
streets are in proportion. Above is the immensely clear and lofty
Canadian sky. The wooden shacks are not there, and you will have to
go far to find the board walks. True, the buildings are, on the
whole, less impressive than the streets, but there are some
magnificent blocks rising several stories; and if you take an {116}
observation-car to go and see the sights of Winnipeg, you will find
yourself brought to spots where further fine blocks are rising; and
with the eye of the imagination you will behold Winnipeg as
splendidly lofty as New York. I am not sure that for a place as warm
as Winnipeg in summer and as cold in winter (I have heard the very
truest Canadians say that they have been nearly frozen there in
winter) the laying out of the town in so spacious a style is ideal.
Streets narrower and more easily screened from the sun and wind would
have seemed more comfortable to begin with. But then Winnipeg is
growing, growing, growing; and it may be that some day even Main
Street will seem shut in when it has its skyscrapers.
Certainly it is a mistake to have preconceptions of Canada. I found
Winnipeg spacious instead of mean. I next found that instead of
consisting of elevators and all the apparatus connected with the
storage of wheat, it was all banks and cinematograph parlours. There
were, it is true, shops and such things sandwiched in between. I
recall a jeweller's shop containing the suitable and attractive
placard in its window--'Marriage Licences for Sale Here.' It is
true, too, that banks and cinematograph {117} shows are not
unconnected with wheat. In the banks you store the dollars you have
made out of wheat; at the cinematograph shows you circulate them.
But really there was an almost incredible number of these
institutions.
Of the two kinds of business I felt that personally I would rather
own a moving picture show. Winnipegers are, I feel sure, easy to
amuse. And they look exceedingly prosperous. The air of prosperity
struck me as more obvious in Winnipeg than in any other part of
Canada. This may have been due in part to the ladies' hats. I saw
some wonderful hats in Winnipeg. Of course there are some women who
seem born to wear wonderful hats. Whatever they put on seems
wonderful. But in Winnipeg this art of wearing wonders seemed almost
universal. Ladies who might otherwise have passed for school
teachers--so serene and even precise was their general bearing--were
to be seen in hats that would be astounding either on Hampstead Heath
or in Covent Garden opera. I was told the hats come direct either
from London or Paris, and form an important part of the Steamship
Companies' freights, since they are charged for not by weight but by
their superficial area. I thought to myself, {118} after I had seen
a few samples of them, what sleepless nights the creators of these
marvels must pass in the fear that they can never again rival, much
less surpass, the last consignment to the Wheat City.
The men too have a prosperous appearance--always new hats, new coats,
new cigars; and I was so much impressed by it that I began to study
their faces to see if some new type--with the Croesus gift--had been
developed in this western place. If they had all looked alike, or
had not all looked prosperous, it would have been simpler. But they
all looked different--more different than Londoners--as they
would--for here all the nations of the earth are gathered, and over a
score of languages are taught in the schools (just think of it!); and
among these different faces one saw the old familiar aspects--the
shrewd and the foolish, the strong-mouthed and the weak, the
bluffer's and that of the man who counts. Clearly, they were not all
amazing organisers, or men with the grit and the brains that must
take them to the top. Not any more were so, I mean, than you would
see in any big place. No, it was the economic conditions, not the
men, which were changed.
Yet there is one thing noticeable in most of {119} the faces one sees
here. It is a general air of buoyancy--of greater expectation and,
therewith, of greater self-satisfaction--in a good sense--than one
sees at home. Just as the London clerk's face might be made to
read!--'I am merely a city clerk on £50 a year--I shall never rise
much higher, and I hope I may keep my place,' so the Winnipeg clerk's
face might be taken to announce--'At present I'm helping along the
Dominion Elevator Company. Luckily for them they're a go-ahead lot.
I guess, though, they'll have to raise my salary soon, pretty good
though it is now. If they don't, they'll have to look for another
man. There are plenty of jobs waiting for me.'
If it is the truth, what could be better?
That there are more jobs than men in the West seems undeniable,
though most of them of course are on the land. I had the pleasure of
a talk with Mr. Bruce Walker, through whose hands all the immigrants
to the West pass. Mr. Bruce Walker's office is in the station, which
is one of the sights of the West, when an immigrant train arrives.
For Winnipeg is their distributing centre, and in the station, when
the train comes in, you may see more types of men and women than a
year's travel in Europe would give you, and you may hear {120} more
different languages being spoken than went to the unmaking of the
tower of Babel. To place all these people, men, women and children,
in positions suited to their capacities, before the small sums of
money with which they have arrived in the New World have given out,
would seem to be a task which Napoleon might have shrunk from. But
Mr. Bruce Walker appeared quite undismayed. Although in the first
six months of 1910 the immigration from Great Britain alone had
increased 98 per cent. over any other corresponding period, he had
found no difficulty in dealing with it. He admitted that it meant
increase of work for himself and his staff, but that was nothing, he
said, so long as there were more jobs than men. 'And there are more
jobs,' he said. 'It's amazing. But the extent to which Canada can
absorb men seems endless.' He told me many excellent and amusing
stories of the difficulties that arise in connection with the
new-comers, but I have no space for them here.
The chief criticism to be directed against the Canadian Government's
methods in dealing with immigrants is, I think, that it encourages on
to the land men who are in some cases wasted there. It is natural
that it should {121} place immigrants on the land as far as possible.
The land is there, apparently endlessly absorbent. It offers,
superficially, work that any strong and able-bodied man should be
capable of doing. Again, that Canadian theory that a man should be
ready to turn his hand to anything, encourages the Canadian
Government to believe that it is justified in turning the hands of
immigrants to the work that most obviously wants doing. On the other
side, it has to be remembered that while a man may be capable of
turning his hand to anything, he is probably much more capable of
turning his hand to the work he has been trained to; and not only
that, but he is wasted to a large extent if he is not doing it. I am
thinking particularly of the skilled workmen who emigrate to Canada
from England. Turn them on to land and they may do fairly well; but
turn them on to the work they are used to, and they will do much
better. I do not say that the Canadian Government is bound to find
for such men the work for which they are fitted; but in so far as
they undertake to find work for immigrants, they should as far as
possible find the right work. That jealousy which causes the United
States to put obstacles in the way of the skilled immigrant who {122}
comes into the country, should not be encouraged in Canada. It is
absurd to suppose that Canada is already stocked with skilled
workmen, and I repeat it is waste to use men, who are skilled, in
work to which they are wholly unaccustomed. Moreover, though these
skilled artisans may in many cases only spend a certain time on the
land (after which they find the job which they want and are
accustomed to), yet in many other cases they may be so sickened by
their time on the land, doing unaccustomed work badly, that they
either become wastrels, or leave Canada altogether, believing it to
be no country for workers like themselves, and saying so with all the
bitterness of men who were capable of succeeding but did actually
fail. Another point to which the immigration department might give
all the attention it can spare, is that of making it as simple as
possible for decent immigrants to be joined at the earliest
opportunity by their wives and families. The lack of women in Canada
is a curse which there is no disguising. For one thing, to have a
country full only of able-bodied men without wives or families is to
give it an air of prosperity which is unreal. For another, it is to
leave it without any of the ambitions which cause the majority of men
{123} to save the money they make, and lay the foundations of a
civilised nation. The other objections are obvious. A wise
Government policy might go far towards making the period of
separation between an immigrant and his wife shorter.
Later on, to get a contrast with Winnipeg, I went out to see Kildonan
with a friend. It is the village where the Old-timers--the crofters
from the highlands, whom Lord Selkirk brought out in 1812 to colonise
the land--finally settled down. They had hard years enough; trouble
with the Indians, great trouble with the rival fur company. The
fur-traders could see in the farmers only men who would reduce the
wild and spoil their own industry. Only after years were their
disputes settled. Kildonan is three miles out from Winnipeg by
electric-car--along a dusty road fenced with wire from the fat black
land. The crofters must have rejoiced to see that loam. Nowadays it
has mostly been turned to market-gardening for the supplying of
Winnipeg, and the farmers have shifted further West. We turned down
a country lane, shaded with maple woods and golden birches, and came
presently to the banks of the Red River. Over on the other side,
standing among light trees, stood Kildonan {124} Church, the oldest
church in Western Canada. We crossed by the ferry, and walked up
into the churchyard. It is not large, but it is full, and everywhere
you read the familiar Scottish names--Macleod--Black--Ferguson and
the rest. The death among infants in those days seems to have been
great--naturally enough--for Kildonan then was far from civilisation
and doctor's help; and so, many small, unconscious settlers spent
only a few days or weeks in the new land. But there were others that
lived long. One of the most interesting gravestones commemorated the
death of a settler who had come out from Kildonan, Sutherlandshire,
at the age of nine. This in the year 1815--the year of Waterloo. He
had lived to be past ninety. For his epitaph some one had chosen
those noble words from the Epistle to the Hebrews: 'He looked for a
city which hath foundations--whose maker and builder is God.'
I think it cannot matter now that the old man died before the great
Canadian boom came, before Winnipeg had become the biggest
wheat-centre of the world, before he could realise, who looked for a
city which hath foundations, that even in his life he had attained to
'God's own country.'
{125}
CHAPTER XIV
A PRAIRIE TOWN AND THE PRAIRIE POLICE
Any one who knows the plains of Canada is aware that they rise in
three tiers, the rise having a westward trend, and that the scenery
of them varies as greatly as does the vegetation. Any one who has
only been through the Canadian plains in the train is under the
impression that, save for a bit of rolling country here and there in
the distance, they are as level as a billiard table; and that, except
that parts are cultivated and other parts are not, they look the same
almost from start to finish.
The moral is obvious. Do not suppose that from the train you can see
even the surface of the world.
This seemingly endless flat land, then, holds hills and gullies,
rivers and lakes--everything indeed but trees. But what am I saying?
There are heaps of trees in reality. Only they have a habit of
concealing themselves, and {126} those who want to see them in haste
should perhaps take a guide.
There is more monotony in the towns of the plains, I think, than in
the plains themselves. Not but what these towns must have
differences known to their inhabitants. A man who lived in Moosejaw
might conceivably deny that he could feel equally at home in Regina.
A citizen of Regina would not dream of admitting that he could find
his way blindfold about Moosejaw. Nevertheless all these little
towns are singularly alike in construction. It is reasonable that
they should be. They are all centres of a country engaged in a
single great industry--the raising of wheat. Other things are
raised, but in such small quantities, comparatively, that they do not
count. And the people engaged in this great industry of
wheat-raising are on a particular equality as regards the work they
do, the leisure they have, and the tastes that result from the
combination of that work and leisure. Some are richer, some poorer,
some are wise, some foolish, but mostly they are working together
pretty hard. The towns represent the places where they come after
their work to bargain and be amused. Moreover, as I suggested in a
previous chapter, the model for all other towns of the plains has
{127} always been Winnipeg, and Winnipeg is the embodiment of the
notion that a city may be a finer city than Chicago if it only tries
hard enough.
Architecturally, Winnipeg looks as though it always has allowed, and
always will allow, for its own expansion. Other great cities have
grown up anyhow, usually on lines that suggest that their greatness
was thrust upon them unexpectedly. Winnipeg too has grown
big--beyond all expectation one would have thought--yet it suggests
in its lines that it never felt, even in those far-off days when Main
Street was the Hudson Bay trail, that it would be anything but
tremendous. Very likely it is an accident that Winnipeg did possess
this power of expanding and Winnipegers did not deliberately foresee
and provide for its future vastness. Be this as it may, the towns of
the plains are not going to leave anything to chance. They are so
planned, that when the time comes they will be ready to outdo
Winnipeg. They rather expect to outdo Winnipeg. They even warn you
that they will. Here is an example. I got out at some little
station on the plains--let us call it Thebes. I don't think there is
a Thebes in existence, but if not, it will come along soon, {128} for
the classics as well as the Indian languages are being ransacked to
provide names for Canada's thousands of new-born towns. I prefer the
classical or Indian-named towns to those that bear hybrid titles like
Higgsville. I saw at once that Thebes consisted of about twenty
shacks and a store. It was all there, just outside the station, and
beyond was level prairie again, with one or two farmhouses on the
horizon--wooden boxes, like bathing-machines off their wheels to look
at.
I should not have been impressed by the greatness of Thebes, present
or future, had I not, just by the ticket office, come upon a great
placard, calling attention to a plan of the district marked off in
square blocks in red and black cross lines. Beneath were two
fanciful spheres, side by side, such as statisticians use--a large
one marked Winnipeg, a smaller one marked Thebes: also, the following
notification:--
'In 1870 Winnipeg had 240 inhabitants.
In 1910 Winnipeg has 180,000 inhabitants.
In 1910 Thebes has 74 inhabitants.
How many will Thebes have in 1925?
Buy a Thebes town lot.'
It may be that the method is an American one, recalling that by which
Martin Chuzzlewit {129} was persuaded to buy a lot in Eden city. An
old-fashioned Englishman, straight from the old country, might even
now be scared by it, and decide on the strength of it not to become a
citizen of Thebes. He need not be scared. He can dislike the
advertisement if he chooses, but he should bear in mind that by just
such advertisements men were attracted to prosperity in the States as
much as to adversity--even in the Dickens period--that real cities as
well as sham ones were built up by them, and that anyway most of the
Canadian land thus advertised is of an easily ascertainable value.
He should remember, too, that a man nowadays, certainly in the new
world, is not presumed to take every advertisement he sees as Bible
truth. A smart advertisement, such as the Thebes one, is to a
Canadian or American simply a proof that whoever it is wishes to sell
Thebes town lots is a go-ahead person who clearly wants to do
business, who probably knows how business ought to be done, who is
likely to come to the point of doing it more quickly and ably than a
man who won't even take the trouble to attract attention. No doubt
the purchase of town lots is bound to be a speculative business.
These little prairie villages may or may not become {130} Winnipegs.
Of the particular chances a man must satisfy himself. That there are
chances is a certainty; and the advertiser is only clothing that
certainty in what he considers an attractive garb.
I am very far from delighting in the 'plush of speech,' as Meredith
called the language of the advertisers. Apart altogether from the
fact that Canadians have not as yet learnt the art of understatement,
the plush of speech is far too common in Canada. I suppose it was to
be expected. Hard by lie the United States whose advertisers have,
in a very few years, done more to blazon all the horrors of which the
English tongue is capable than their great writers have done to point
out its beauties. Their example has spread. So that in Canada, too,
a barber's is announced as 'A Tonsorial Saloon'; a hat shop is 'A Bon
Ton Millinery Parlour.' There may be some magic attraction in the
words. The desire for a hat in the heart of a woman is not a
definitely economic want; perhaps to be able to get a hat from a
millinery parlour may strengthen that want. Only I know that
speaking for myself, I would not willingly have my hair shortened
oftener than was necessary, even if a tonsorial palace should be open
to me for the process.
{131}
To go back to the prairie towns, their future is ever before them,
and their citizens talk of them in the same proud, fond spirit as
that in which a mother will discuss the career of the
creature-in-the-perambulator, which for the ordinary person is too
embryo to be distinguished as either a boy or a girl. Already, of
course, the prairie towns are of all sizes, though you must never
judge them by the size they are. Take Regina. It is a capital city,
but the usual definition of a line--only reversed--best describes it.
It has breadth without length. Its streets, which are called
avenues, are astonishingly wide, the more astonishingly, because as
soon as you start to walk along them they come to an end in prairie.
I thought a notice which caught my eye as I wandered through the town
rather characteristic. The notice was pasted outside a half-built
block. It ran:--
'These premises will be open by September 5.'
It was long past 5th September, and those premises were not going to
be open for some weeks to come. The roof was not on yet, and in fact
I think the fourth wall had to go up. Still, when they were opened,
they would be fine and solid. You could see that. It is the same
with many of these western towns {132} themselves. Some day they,
too, are going to be fine and solid, but they are not really open
yet, though a good deal of business is being done, with the roof
still, so to speak, off, and the fourth wall still to go up. On the
outskirts of Regina, for example, there are some 1911 Exhibition
buildings which look rather larger than Regina itself. That is
enterprise.
I stayed a whole day in Regina because I wanted to see the barracks
of the famous North-West Mounted Police. It was a very hot day, and
I was not sure where the barracks were, so I went into a hotel,
partly to find out, partly to have a drink. The hotel was cool and
pleasant, and after a little while a well-dressed gentleman came over
and began chatting. We talked of various things, and then he asked
me if I would not like to have my suit pressed for Sunday, as he
would do it for a dollar. I said I should like it very well, but I
had not time for it as I had to go out to the police barracks.
'You don't think of joining them, do you?' he inquired with much
disdain.
'Why?' I asked.
'You're a fool if you do,' he said; 'there's too much discipline
about them. You spend {133} your whole time saluting every one you
see if you're in the police. I know what it is. I was two years in
the American Navy.'
I did not inform the ex-naval clothes-presser that I'd rather belong
to the police than press clothes, nor, indeed, did I waste any
further time upon him, and I only mention him because he is one of
the less valuable American types that find their way into Canada, and
also because he was the only man I met who had a word to say against
the mounted police.
The sun can be very hot on the prairie, and it was very hot that
afternoon when I did at last set out for a two-miles' tramp to the
barracks. Nobody was walking that way except myself, and nobody was
even riding. There was a fine dust about, and I needed brushing as
well as pressing before I reached my destination. When I did get
there, the courteous welcome of the second-in-command caused me to
forget that the way had been long, or that anything greatly mattered
except to hear about the North-West Mounted Police from the officer
who was good enough to show me all round, from the horse-hospital to
the prison cells. The latter were the least inviting part of the
barracks, and I decided on the spot that if I committed a crime I
would {134} not select the North-West of Canada for the scene of it.
I doubt if Canada, or England, has anything to be prouder of than the
North-West Mounted Police. Some of their deeds have been told from
time to time--that of the mounted policeman, for example, who brought
a homicidally-disposed maniac down hundreds of miles from the frozen
country, saved his charge from frost-bite, and lost his own reason in
the process; that of the corporal who went into the camp where
Sitting Bull sat armed with all his braves about him, and gave him a
quarter of an hour to clear over the border. But under a hundred
less-known acts the same spirit has run--the spirit of the one
representative of justice triumphant over incredible odds.
'It's made possible,' said my guide, 'partly because we have men who
regard every capture they're told off to make as a matter of personal
honour, partly because people know that if a man commits a crime, we
get him in the end. We go on till we do. Sitting Bull knew that if
he killed our corporal we'd hang him and every man with him. So he
went.'
All kinds of men are represented in the mounted police, but this
officer told me that the recruit they liked best to get was 'the
{135} young man with blood in him,' from an English public school or
university, as much as from anywhere; fond of riding and shooting,
and not lost when he is acting alone hundreds of miles from
headquarters. The district patrolled, remember, by five hundred men
is not much smaller than Europe minus Russia. Wanting that kind of
man, the authorities see to it that, in barracks at all events, he is
comfortable, and very little in the way of the accommodation for
these police could be improved upon.
The most historic part of the barracks is that window through which
Louis Riel stepped out--to drop with the rope round his neck. I was
shown it hurriedly. It is the capture of their man, not his
execution, that is these policemen's pride. Their record shows that
almost always they take him alive, with no struggle--a strange thing,
and one more proof of the reputation the police have built up for
themselves. 'What is the use of struggling with these men?' seems to
be the natural thought in the mind of the pursued; and no doubt much
bloodshed is saved as a result of it. I learnt a lot of stray
Canadian facts that afternoon. I learnt that the immigrants known
under the somewhat vague heading of 'Galicians' are at present
considered the leading {136} toughs, owing to their habit of using
their knives at random. Galicians mean roughly all those who come
from central Europe, and would, of course, include Letts. So that it
is not, apparently, merely the climate of England that induces in
these particular aliens a homicidal mania. It would be interesting
to know the opinion of a North-West Mounted Policeman on 'the Battle
of London.' Another thing I learnt was that a hundred miles a day is
no unusual distance for one of these policemen to cover on horseback,
and that of all the districts patrolled by them that in the
neighbourhood of the North Pole is most sought after. They do not
believe in English stirrups and girths any more than they believe in
the British truncheon. They do believe in sobriety. The man with
the drinking habit cannot continue, so I was told, a mounted
policeman.
As I walked back into Regina, I remember seeing in one of the
principal streets a second notice which struck me as quaint. The
notice was:--
'Please do not spit on the side-walks.'
The quaintness of it consisted in the last three words. 'Please do
not spit' one could understand. I should like to see that notice up
almost anywhere in Canada, since the habit it {137} deprecates is
almost universal. It is worst, perhaps, in a smoking compartment,
where it is difficult to get one's legs away from the neighbourhood
of spittoons. I have sat for hours feeling all the emotions of the
son of William Tell while the apple was still balanced on his head,
and his father was in the act to shoot. But it is an uncivilised,
unhealthy, absolutely unnecessary habit anywhere. That is why, for a
public authority to suggest that it may be done, provided it is not
done on the side-walks, is quaint. It should either be ignored or
penalised. When one reads, as one does so often in the papers, of
the ravages made by tuberculosis in Canada, it almost looks as if
offenders should be penalised. Certainly they should not be politely
requested to spit a few inches more to the left or the right. And
why provide them with spittoons?
{138}
CHAPTER XV
IN CALGARY
Alberta is at present the _débutante_ of the Dominion.
Countries, like cities, used to grow up and, if we stick to our
metaphor, 'come out' anyhow. It is true there were people called
statesmen who had at times bright ideas concerning the commonweal
which they tried to put into practice, and sometimes succeeded in
putting into practice, with not unsatisfactory results. But the
commonweal they had in mind was a limited one. It was not truly
'common,' either in respect of the people whose weal was considered,
or in respect of the weal it was desired to affect. Statesmen, in
fact, thought usually only of a particular section or part of the
population of their country and also thought only of a particular
aspect of that section's welfare--usually either its soul or its
prestige; very rarely its material prosperity.
Things have not altogether changed. Things {139} don't. Statesmen
still consider particular classes rather than the nation as a whole,
and their notions of what weal means are still limited notions. But
there is this difference. That aspect of the commonweal which can be
referred to somewhat vaguely as material prosperity now bulks very
large in their minds, and, as a result of it, the idea is beginning
to prevail that not only can cities be planned before they are built,
but that whole provinces can and should be encouraged to grow in
certain thought-out directions.
In the old world the new idea is likely to work slowly and somewhat
obscurely. Cities and countries have already grown up there in the
old-and-anyhow style; and grown-up things, like grown-up people, are
not easily changed. In England, for example, we may think that large
properties are a mistake; but they will not, with anything that can
be called celerity, be turned into small holdings. So with our
cities. There they are--fully grown and fully stocked with vested
interests. The possessors of those interests cannot see in any
proposed change the vast improvement that the non-possessors see in
it. The most that can be expected in England in the immediate future
is that, slowly and imperceptibly, certain {140} outrageous mistakes
of the past will be remedied, and that where new developments are
essential, they shall be the result of ideas, rather than of
confusions. The Town-Planning Bill is, I imagine, a case in point.
The most conservative people are beginning to see that in itself an
idea is not a vicious thing and may even produce a good result.
In the new world (and perhaps in the German Empire too) the notion of
planning the future of town or country instead of leaving it to luck
is having much swifter and more demonstrable effects. On the
Canadian plains, as I have pointed out, towns are being laid out
largely with an eye to their future. The same thing is being done
for the countryside. It, too, is being planned with an eye to its
future. It is not growing up just anyhow; it is being made to grow
in particular directions.
How much this is the idea of statesmen, of the public officials, that
is to say, of the Dominion; and how much it is due to the managers of
private companies and enterprises, historians will some day be able
to decide. I incline to the view that at present the big railway
companies represent far the most influential force in Canada, and
that they, without any of the outward paraphernalia of office, {141}
are deciding what Canada is to be for a good many years to come.
Naturally they work from what may be called the railway point of
view. Their notion of a Canadian commonweal takes the form,
therefore, of a country in which a settled and prosperous population
lives along the lines of the railroads, and is so distributed that
there shall be no uninhabited spaces through which the running of
trains will cease to be a paying proposition. There are bound, of
course, to be some intervals of the kind. The highlands of Ontario
form such a gap in the system of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That
gap is not easy to fill: Alberta is.
A few years ago Alberta was far from being a profitable country
through which to run trains. Cattle-ranching maintained the thinnest
of populations, and the leagues of sunburnt plains east of Calgary
seemed to offer few chances to a more numerous class of settler. Any
one who had prophesied then that they would shortly be crowded with
wheat-farmers would have been laughed at. But they are being
crowded, comparatively crowded, now. And the credit for this must be
given those who started the Bow River irrigation works. No doubt
there are other reasons for the rise of Alberta. The {142}
discoverers of new wheats have helped it; so have the American
farmers who, by spoiling the land across the line, created a demand
for new land. But the irrigation works are the main factor, and when
the Octopus, as the Canadian Pacific Railway is not uncommonly
called, is had up for judgment, these and many other of their
achievements will help them to make a stout defence. True, it is
their own land they are irrigating; it is passengers and freight for
themselves that they want to secure; but, whatever the motive, they
are advertising and causing to be populated and cultivated hundreds
of square miles on either side of their own particular land which
might otherwise have lain waste for many years.
It may be said--Where is the plan in this? Where is it any different
from the schemes of any railway country in the old world. The
difference is that in the old world as a rule the railway company
follows trade, and runs only through populous parts where that trade
is to be got; whereas in Canada, railway companies lay their lines
through the desert, so to speak, and then start to fill it in an
orderly and profitable manner. Alberta at present is being planned
into existence. It is not booming simply on its own merits, great
though these {143} may be. It lay fallow for many years. For all
one knows, other parts of Canada may have more of a future. But they
are not being boomed as Alberta is, because the time has not yet come
when they must, in the opinion of the railway companies, be filled in.
The need for the filling in of Alberta is one of the reasons why
Calgary has sprung up so quickly. A few years ago Calgary had no
future to speak of. Men not as yet middle-aged, can remember camping
in Calgary in tents. There was only one place to dance in, and
ranchers used to take turns at entering it. Now Calgary is a
stone-built town of solid appearance, and still more solid
importance. Like so many other Canadian towns, it is more important
than it looks. It looks bustling enough, but hardly important.
There are no buildings of a size to take the eye. The hotels are
singularly inadequate. They are not only not comfortable enough for
their guests, but they are not large enough. I had occasion to visit
Calgary twice within a week, and each time I got the last bed in a
different hotel, and tried to be thankful for it, but did not
succeed. I suppose that prosperity has overtaken it at such a pace
that it has not had time as yet to consider its responsibilities.
{144} A town which permits one of its best hotels to place three
double beds in one bedroom--and perhaps as many as nine guests in the
three double beds--may already be great, but it has not realised its
greatness.
Calgary differs from the prairie towns which lie between it and
Winnipeg, in that it is not really a prairie town, but a town on the
edge of the prairie. It looks at the mountains; and it is built of
the grey stone that is found near by; the Chinook winds that sweep it
and make its climate comparatively mild, are mountain winds; and it
stands on the Bow River, which is a mountain river, swift and clear,
and blue with the blue that is melted from snowfields. This is none
of your turbid streams like the Assiniboine or the Red River. All
rivers must run to the plains at last, but the Bow River does not
seem to belong to them, though it feeds them more than most. In the
old days Calgary, such as it was, owed everything to the hills. The
cattle-ranchers settled round there because the Chinook winds,
scatterers of the snow, made outdoor grazing possible for their
cattle during months when Manitoba and Saskatchewan were deep in
frozen drifts. And since it was just at the foot of the mountains,
the miners in the mountains {145} used it as a supply centre. It is
still a centre for ranchers and miners; but its real importance is
that it has become the headquarters of that prairie which produced
once, perhaps, half a ton of hay to the acre, and now yields the
finest wheat in the world. If any statues are to be put up in the
town--and it would be as well to wait for a native sculptor of
talent--they should be the statues of the men who constructed the
irrigation works.
Later on, but this is a smaller matter perhaps, I should like to see
a statue put up to the man who will make it possible for the bars of
Calgary to be allowed to remain open between the hours of 7 P.M. on
Saturday, and 7 A.M. on Monday. At present they are shut during
those hours, which means, I take it, that Calgarians, if admitted,
would drink more than was good for them. The person therefore, to
whom the suggested statue should be raised, would be the man who made
the Calgarian attitude towards the drink question more civilised. I
know that the problem is not peculiar to Calgary or to Canada. It
may even be that Canada for a new country does more to solve it than
most. I recollect than when I got back to England, one of the first
things that caught my eye was an {146} interview given to a local
paper by a leading Hertfordshire man, who had also just returned from
travelling through Canada. He assured the interviewer that, having
been from end to end of Canada, he had never once seen a man the
worse for liquor. It must have been a delightful, but perhaps unique
experience. I had not his good fortune, and having talked with many
decent Canadians, seldom fanatics, and rarely indeed total
abstainers, who nevertheless deplored the prevalence of the drink
evil in the West, I cannot think that that Hertfordshire traveller's
happy blindness is a thing to be imitated. Drink takes another
form--perhaps a less vicious one--in a new country; but it ruins more
good men than it does in an old one.
{147}
CHAPTER XVI
THE AMERICANISATION QUESTION
There is vague talk at times about the Americanisation of Canada.
Very dismal people talk about its Americanisation by force of arms.
Minor pessimists think the change will come about peaceably. How can
the Canadians--they ask--continue to assert themselves for ever
against the constant influx from the other side?
Monsieur André Siegfried, in that most lucid and excellent book, _Les
Deux Races en Canada_, considers this question a little, but the very
fact that he has called the book _Les Deux Races en Canada_, shows
that he considers the question premature. The two races he treats of
are not the Canadians and the Americans, but the French Canadians and
the Canadians who are not French. Certainly these two peoples are at
present, and must for a considerable time to come, be considered the
two main races of the Dominion. They {148} are still for all
practical purposes separate without being hostile; and it is quite
possible that one of these may Canadianise the other before any real
Americanisation makes itself felt. Should the French Canadians get
the upper hand, it is pretty certain that American influence would
get a set-back of perhaps centuries. Yet English writers as a rule
never seem to consider this contingency. Perhaps if they did, they
would begin to think that they would rather see Canada Americanised
than Gallicised.
Still the Americanisation may happen, and it is at least an
interesting possibility. Let us consider the task that lies before
the Americans. They will have to absorb--
(1) The French Canadians.
(2) The Canadian born, who are not French.
(3) The English who have immigrated.
(4) Foreign immigrants; _e.g._ Scandinavians, Galicians, Italians,
Doukhobors--all that strange assortment of people who have flowed in
from the poorer countries of Europe.
The Americans themselves represent at present only a small fifth in
this conglomeration of nations. Still, they have this in their
favour, that they start in while Canada is still an unfixed nation.
French Canadians--a small {149} third--only number about three
millions. Non-French Canadians about the same. The whole population
is under ten millions. It may in fifty years be ten times that
number. So that anything may happen.
Meanwhile, many effective American influences are at work. Their
order of effectiveness is not easy to define, but when one considers
their representatives of business enterprise, capital, journalism and
farming at work in the country, one can see that the Americans are
likely to go far.
What is their present value to the Dominion? Take American farmers.
They are an undoubted gain to Canada in so far as they possess
energy, capital, a knowledge of the local conditions, versatility and
adaptability. I hardly know if it is an example of their versatility
or their adaptability, but as soon as they cross over the line,
American farmers who were Tariff Reformers instantly become Free
Traders. It is not, of course, that they have adopted nobler
principles in their new country. It is merely that, having become
Canadians, they have now to support Canadian manufactures, and pay
more for their farming machines and shoddy clothes. Naturally they
think tariffs a mistake.
{150}
Setting aside for a moment this political elasticity as of doubtful
value, Canadians may still wonder if the American farmer is all gain
to them. Is it an objection, for example, that the American
introduces the purely commercial spirit into farming? Not entirely.
Not certainly so far as love of gain induces promptness and
enterprise. It is, however, an objection if it destroys that love of
the land which causes the English farmer to stick by his farm,
generation after generation. Perhaps American farmers have not that
land love in any case. If they had, they would not have crossed the
line. In most cases, they have crossed it to make money--more money.
It may be argued that the English farmers come further for the same
purpose, but that is not really the case. English farmers who come
are mostly men who were tenants, and find themselves either not
making money or expecting to have their rents raised if they do. Or
they are the sons of farmers who have not the capital to start
farming in the old country, or cannot get the land. The American
farmer is usually quite ready to admit that he is in Canada to make
money, and his enemies will admit for him that though this ideal may
lead him to adopt new methods {151} of farming which are good, it
also induces him to adopt that very old method of farming which
consists of getting all you can out of the land, putting nothing into
it, selling it to a fool and moving on to fresh land--which is a bad
method. Any one who is acquainted with the States at all, knows how
at present people there are awakening to the viciousness of this
practice. All their papers and speakers are full of the wastefulness
which Americans practised in the last century thinking it to be
smartness. Fine land, they say, was spoilt by it; forests were
annihilated; water supplies were overdrawn; people were made
restless. It was getting rich quick at the expense of posterity, and
it bred in Americans a nomadic spirit, and an imprudence in
considering the future, which has become a menace.
Canadians cannot altogether condemn the American farmer, for just
these methods spoilt so much of the land in Ontario; and only now are
their farmers beginning to improve on them. Still, they would do
well to indicate to American farmers that they are welcome only as
improvers and not as wasters of the new country. The trouble is to
give an effective indication of that kind. Settlement of the land is
still reckoned, especially by the {152} railway companies, as the
first of virtues, covering a multitude of sins; though even they, I
think, are recognising a little that the English farmer, whose aim is
not an immediate fortune, but a home which he can retain for his life
and hand over to his children after him, is not to be scorned as he
was a few years ago. The ready-made farms, made possible by the
irrigation work of the Canadian Pacific Railway, are the chief
example of the attempts made to draw the Englishman. 'We hope,' said
one of the Canadian Pacific Railway officials, speaking a few months
ago before the London Chamber of Commerce, 'that the Englishmen on
these farms will leaven the lot.' A few years ago, compliments of
that sort were not being offered to the English farmer in Canada.
Probably he was not so good a type as comes in now. But it is to be
remembered that the English immigrant has always had more adaptations
to make than the American. To the American from the northern States,
Canada is the country he is used to--only a little more north. The
Englishman finds a new soil, new climate, new manners, and new
methods. I should say that man for man, the English farmer knows at
least as much as the American about farming, and {153} a great deal
more than the average Canadian. But when he goes out to Canada he
has to put this knowledge behind him and learn afresh--a difficult
thing for a conservative race. The American can hold on to what he
knows and simply go ahead. The accident of birth has given him a
fine start over the Englishman.
The same advantage belongs to other Americans in Canada. Business
men, capitalists, journalists have only had to cross a non-existent
line, instead of an undeniable ocean. When Canadians complain that
Englishmen take no interest even in those Canadian schemes for which
they have found the money, they forget that capitalists cannot always
be close to their investments. I repeat, the Atlantic is not a thing
to be denied, nor is it fair to call the English mere moneylenders
because they have not always personally accompanied their loans. At
least they have shown themselves trustful of the men on the spot.
Nevertheless, I think that Canada has every reason to be grateful for
the able business men whom the States have sent her. That negro
porter at the Niagara Hotel who said that Canadians were a stupid
people, and would have done nothing without the {154} Americans, was
taking rather a spread-eagle view of the facts. Still there is no
doubt that American brains have been--and still are--of great service
to Canada; nor can I see that they can be charged with Americanising
tendencies. Business men are nearly always cosmopolitan in their
achievements, whatever their motives may be.
It is rather different with American journalists. They can hardly as
yet be charged with being citizens of the world, and where their
influence penetrates, an American trend is noticeable. They are
beginning to leave their mark in Canada. Canadian papers are
numerous and creditable, but an American atmosphere broods over them.
The most trivial incident is magnified by headlines, which repeat
three times over in large type and increasingly pompous language all
and more than all that follows in the news space. I am not talking
of the best Canadian newspapers but of the average ones. If their
methods are American, so very largely are the matters they deal with.
In some small up-country Canadian journal one will find the leading
columns occupied with the account of some dinner given, say, by Mrs.
Van So-and-So of New York, wife of the Coffin King, {155} with full
accounts of the costumes, menu, etc.,--wearisome and vulgar matter,
staringly of no interest whatever to the bucolic readers of the
journal in question. But it was all very cheaply wired from the
States: whereas news from England would be costly in the extreme.
The result is that Canadians--in spite of their local sagacity--are
at least as ignorant of the things that happen in Great Britain and
Europe as we are of what is happening in Canada. Often I have felt
while the Canadian-born were talking to me of the 'Old Country,'
talking of it too, not only in a loyal, but a fond and even wistful
manner--that they had in their minds a picture of it that would
probably have fitted England better in the fourteenth century than it
does now. A poor, worn-out, tottering old country is what they are
thinking of; and nothing would amaze some of them more than to see
modern England as it is.
Why should they have got this idea into their heads? Largely, I
suppose, because the new with them is necessarily best. The old
things were put up anyhow by men in a hurry and they are always
superseded by better things. The very epithet 'old' connotes badness
to a Canadian. Then, again, it is a {156} country of young men, and
young men are apt to favour youth, which they hardly associate with
England. No country--not even Spain--can be as antique and
ramshackle as many of them undoubtedly believe England to be.
Birmingham and Manchester are on paper such very ancient cities
compared with Regina and Moosejaw that the untravelled Canadian
thinks pityingly of the former; whereas he considers the latter
infinitely up-to-date and important, and would be hurt to know that
we have in England hundreds of little prosperous country towns very
like them, of which the ordinary Englishman hardly knows the names
and, if he did, would think no more of than he would think of Regina
and Moosejaw.
I would not seek to minimise that Canadian pride and optimism which
finds such satisfaction in everything that they build. Pride and
optimism are valuable assets to any country. All I would suggest is
that they should realise that the English habit of grumbling and
self-depreciation does not indicate that all Englishmen live in a
tottering old realm, doing nothing but decay and grumble.
Here we come back to newspapers. Most people derive their facts from
newspapers nowadays, and if Canadians find that everything {157} of
importance happens in the new world, whereas in the old world nothing
happens except an occasional sensational murder or the deposition of
a third-class king, they cannot infer that Europe is still an
important continent, and that perhaps the most important country in
it is England. What is to enlighten them? I suppose the receipt of
more news from Europe.
Probably the All Red Cable would do much in this direction. News has
to be cheap or it is not news (the converse proposition that news if
it is cheap must be news, is not true). Much also might be done by
private enterprise. English publishers could do more to push their
wares. So could English magazine proprietors. Most of the books and
magazines one can get in a hurry in Canada are American. English
Cabinet Ministers might now and again make a tour in the Dominion and
explain to Canadians some of those political principles in which at
home they have such fervid belief. It may be that the Americanising
tendency is too strong for any of these suggestions to be of much
avail in combating it. Reciprocity treaties between the States and
Canada may inevitably result in closer union, though I never could
feel that it was a marked human characteristic to pine for
fellow-citizenship with the man whom {158} one supplies with bread in
return for a reaping-machine. Trade relations may result in that
mystic fraternal sentiment by which nations come together, though
hitherto in the world's history men have never shown any very frantic
desire for a heart-to-heart intimacy with their tradespeople.
'Utility, Reciprocity, Fraternity' sounds rather a cold cry by which
to rally two great people together.[1]
[1] This chapter was written before the Reciprocity business flamed
forth. I return to the subject later.
When all is said and done, and there are a hundred other pros and
cons which might be considered, the chief obstacle to the
Americanisation of Canada is climate. Canada is north and America is
south; and those two show less inclination to rush together than even
east and west. Of course it is not extremes of north and south that
are represented in the two countries;--along the boundary the
climates are not dissimilar. Yet it seems to me that while Canada is
bound to be mainly a country of northern peoples, Americans are fast
becoming more and more southernised, I do not mean in the old sense
of becoming languid and effeminate and semi-tropical, but
southernised in just the same way as the French from being Norsemen
have become southernised. Have {159} you seen prints of old Paris
when it was a Gothic city? If you have, you will realise the
completeness of the change that has come over it. It spreads itself
to the sun now, faces to the Midi, and some such change might easily
come over New York, Chicago, and the rest of those at present
northern cities. Already the typical American is far from being the
son of a grim and dour Pilgrim Father. Rather he is lively and
energetic--with a temperament always on tiptoe--logical and apt to be
materialistic, yet sentimental and passionate too. You find such a
temperament among the French and Italians of northern Italy. It is
the sun working on them. Even the stolid German and the moody
Scandinavian feels it when he gets to the States, and thaws--into an
American.
It is not so in Canada. The northern immigrants there remain silent
and frosty, though the touch of fortune makes them perhaps more
genial. Canada will never become a southern country, even though its
northern parts are rendered temperate by the cutting down of timber
and constant ploughing. No, I think Canadians will remain a hardy
and somewhat dour race, slow-moving on the whole, but industrious and
virtuous, suspicious of talkers and hustlers; so suspicious, too, of
free {160} thought and new morals as to lay themselves open maybe to
the charge of hypocrisy; given at times to self-distrust and
self-depreciation, but for the most part steadfast, and holding in
their hearts the belief that there is no place like Canada and no men
like the inhabitants thereof.
In short, they are as likely as not to end by becoming Anglicised.
{161}
CHAPTER XVII
AMONG THE READY-MADE FARMS
There was a time when Englishmen got a very bad name in Canada. It
was not to be wondered at. For a long time English youths, who came
to be known as Remittance Men, used to be shipped out by relations
anxious only to get rid of them. These helped to create an opinion
that Englishmen were more remarkable for their drinking than their
working powers; and when to them was added shipload after shipload of
unemployables from yet lower classes, Canadians began to get
impatient of English immigrants. It was not logical of them to
suppose that these were favourable specimens of our working-classes;
it is never logical to suppose that the best men of a country are
ready to leave it. Logic, however, is difficult to insist on under
these circumstances, and though there were plenty of Englishmen even
then, and even more Scots perhaps, who were obviously as good as any
farmers on the {162} prairie, the bad name of the English clung to
them. That is all, or nearly all, changed now; and the project
connected with those farms, which came to be known in the English
papers as the Ready-made farms, proved that the Canadian Pacific
Railway Company at any rate, which is the biggest landowner in
Canada, was ready to welcome English farmers to the land, if they
could get the right sort. Readers will perhaps remember that the
idea of the company was to provide farms ploughed, irrigated, sowed,
and furnished with house and out-buildings, into which English
colonists, having been handed the front-door key, could
enter--straight from England--as well equipped almost as settlers who
had lived there for years. The purchase money was to be spread over
a certain term, after which the land would become the property of the
farmers.
The plan saves all that intermediate period during which the ordinary
homesteader has to set up his shack, sink his well, and generally
unsettle himself over the tedious work of settling in. Good farmers
are not necessarily born pioneers; and since the prairie in winter,
when work is slack, does not show a very hospitable climate to
new-comers and those unaccustomed to it, it generally happens that
{163} the English immigrant has to waste the spring and perhaps the
whole working season in the unremunerative business of settling in.
The Ready-made farms were intended to save all this time and trouble,
and they were at once filled--in the spring of 1910--by specially
picked men from the old country. The men were not all necessarily
farmers, but they were, hypothetically, at any rate, men of
intelligence and grit.
I wanted to see how they were getting on after six months of this new
life on the prairie. For that purpose I took train from Calgary with
a friend, back along the line to Strathmore, which is forty miles
east, and is the station for Nightingale, as this first colony of
ready-made farmers has been named. Strathmore itself is not
peculiarly beautiful or peculiarly interesting, though it has a
demonstration farm which is. We went over the demonstration farm
with Professor Eliott, its manager, who struck me as one of the
keenest and most interesting men of the West. What he does not know
of the productivity of the prairie is probably not worth knowing; and
his experience seems to be at the service of any farmer who has the
intelligence to apply for it. He showed us his barns and splendid
teams of horses and leviathan oats, and the little trees which he has
planted {164} in this country where it was thought no trees would
grow, and which he believes will change the face of it in a few
years. We were full of the future of the prairie when we got back to
Strathmore, and put up for the night in the last bedroom of the one
and only hotel. The two of us were lucky to get that last bedroom
containing a double bed to ourselves, for more often even than in
Calgary six people sleep in such a room and are very glad of the
accommodation. So I was told. It shows how things move in Alberta;
what a hustle there is upon the country.
We tossed for the bed, and I got it, and the other man took two
blankets and the floor. I slept very well, especially after a
mounted policeman came in and threw out two gentlemen next door who
were, as the hotel boy tersely put it, 'seeing snakes together.' My
friend slept less well. The room was small, not much bigger than the
bed, and we could not get the window to stay open. It had not been
constructed with a view to admitting fresh air. Still, after
breakfast in a dark chamber, where about thirty guests of every
profession and clothing (but all land-seekers) ate in silence, we
started pretty fit for Nightingale in a two-horse rig.
{165}
I wish I could describe the prairie. Harvesting was over, so that in
any case the leagues of golden wheat which you read about in
advertisements were not visible. It was another kind of monotony
altogether that we drove through--a kind I cannot begin to suggest
the charm of. It was a kind of bare, rolling, sunburnt country, with
a high sea-wind blowing through it, and waves of dust and an endless
sky. Intensely wearisome or intensely refreshing it must be,
according to a man's temperament; and going there from trees and
hills must be like changing from a room with patterned paper to one
with whitewashed walls. And then the soil, light and fertile,
stoneless, ready for the plough--the farmer wants no variety of that.
We drove fourteen miles, as far as I can remember, to get to
Nightingale, and it was all bad driving. Alberta seems to want roads
badly. In the old ranching days roads mattered less. The prairie
was a ready-made riding country, and nothing was produced or needed
that could not, so to speak, go of itself across country. 'I never
owned a plough the seventeen years I was there,' a retired rancher
told me proudly. 'It was a fine country then.' But it is a fine
country now, too, and going to be finer still when it has roads. At
present even {166} the roadways are changing. Once you could go
everywhere. Now from day to day a new farmer takes up a new piece of
land, and what was the road is enclosed by a wire fence.
One of the most inspiriting farms we passed was that of a man who had
been out from Cheshire only three months. He was now a chicken
rancher--kept fowls, as we say; and in his brief occupation had got
up--off a quarter block--eighty tons of hay, besides winning
thirty-eight prizes at Albertan poultry shows. This would seem to
show that Alberta is not yet rich in pure bred fowls. The Cheshire
chicken rancher said he hoped to show the people round what a good
table bird ought to look like. He was already a Canadian in all but
accent. May he prosper!
After talking with him we drove on again towards Nightingale in the
same sea-wind along the same bad roads. The sameness of the country
was amazing; nor should I have known in the end that we had come to
Nightingale but for the man driving us. 'See that avenue?' he said.
'The shacks standing along that are the farms. It seems more
sociable being along a road.' 'Certainly,' I said. So it is more
sociable to live along a road, provided you know it is a road. I
{167} didn't, but the colonists did, and that was the main thing. We
found those we visited apparently contented and undoubtedly hopeful.
Canada has the gift of making men hopeful. Though it had been in
this part a very poor year, owing to drought, and though the
irrigation had not been properly ready (but accidents will happen,
and the company was charging only a nominal rent as a result of this)
the farmers seemed as cheery as they would have been dismal in
England. The crops had been poor, but they would do for
chicken-feed. A bumper year was a sure thing some time or other.
The future held no clouds. They were going to study Canadian methods
suited to the country. I rubbed my eyes. These sentiments were
being enunciated by an English farmer, who was meanwhile giving us a
most hospitable English lunch. He was going to tell more people to
come out. It was the finest farming land possible, once you get the
water on it. Only one must take local advice how to run things. It
was no good standing out, and knowing better than people on the spot,
as one of the colonists was doing. He, I gathered, was the only man
regarded as likely to do badly, being determined to stick to the
methods of his English forebears. His leading {168} wrongheadedness
was in declining to believe that the winter was going to be or could
be as long and as hard as people said, and he had not got in half the
food needful for his cattle.
I suppose, but for that winter, the prairie would be the most
sought-after country in the world. But for that winter, however, it
would not possess the amazing friable soil it does. As has been
remarked, one cannot have everything all the time. The winter is
very severe, and there should be no disguising of the fact, nor
indeed any exaggerating of it. Formerly its hardships were no doubt
exaggerated. People had no use for a hard winter. Nowadays leisured
people go in search of it--on the understanding, however, that it
shall be made easy for them. They would like it less if they had to
work in it in a below zero temperature, twenty or thirty miles from
anywhere. I do not say that work under such conditions should or
would disgust healthy and energetic men, provided they were prepared
for it. It might even delight them. But it should be prepared for.
English farmers in particular should be made to understand the
drawbacks as well as the advantages of the new land they are going
to. Honesty is in fact the best {169} emigration policy. Given
that, it is tolerably certain that these transplanted English farmers
are going to find it more than worth while to have settled in
Nightingale or any of the newer prairie colonies, and what is
more--Canada is going to find it more than worth while to have them
settled there.
{170}
CHAPTER XVIII
INTO THE ROCKIES WITH A DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
For several days I had seen the Rockies far off--a black and jagged
coil of mountains, that seemed at times almost to be moving like some
prehistoric great scaly beast on its endless crawl across the plains.
Now I was to see them near by--some part of them at least. What has
any man seen in that ocean of mountains but a few drops?
At the unpleasing hour of 3.30 A.M. I disengaged myself from one of
the three double beds with which my room in the hotel was furnished,
washed slightly, dressed completely, and walked to the station.
Calgary was quiet at last. There had been a sound of revelry by
night. A man with a tenor voice had been singing songs in some
adjacent room to the hotel up to 3.30. But his songs and the vamped
accompaniment to them had ceased now, and peace prevailed. I don't
{171} remember to have passed any one on the way to the station.
There were two or three sleepy-eyed people lounging about there;
there always seem to be a few in Canadian stations, no matter what
the hour. I think they must be out-of-works who keep their spirits
up by listening to the squeaking and clash of shunting trucks, and
the letting off of steam, and the great clang of the bells that are
sounded from the engines as a trans-continental train comes in--all
those sounds of life and hustle that are dear to the Canadian soul.
[Illustration: MOUNT LEFROY. CANADIAN ROCKIES.]
The train I was waiting for entered slowly with the usual peal of
bells. All the blinds were drawn in the sleeping-carriages; and the
only sign of life from them was the protruded woolly head, here and
there, of a negro car conductor. I think I was the only person who
got in.
'What a lot of people,' I said to myself as I sat down in an empty
smoking compartment, and shivering lit a pipe, 'would envy the
prospects of a man about to spend days and perhaps weeks in the heart
of the Rockies.' 'What a lot of people,' myself replied to me,
'would see the Rockies further before they got out of bed at this
unholy hour.'
{172}
My pipe held the balance between us and gradually soothed the
rebellious part of me. It was still too dark to see anything, and
there was nothing to be done but wait patiently for the dawn. I
could not but regret that I was missing the scenery of the foothills,
for which those who have lived among them seem to have a peculiar
affection. But I was consoled by the entry a little later of two
fellow-passengers, who had evidently been disturbed in their sleep
and wanted smoke and conversation. Strange and various types one
sees in a Westbound train. The West is still--even to the Canadian
born--the Unknown and the Happy Hunting-grounds and Eldorado and
Ultima Thule and the Blessed Isles. West is where the farmer's son
of spirit goes to seek fresh lands, where the prospector goes to find
gold, where successful men go because they want to be more
successful, or maybe because they want to retire and enjoy
themselves, and they have heard that West there is a climate which
hardly includes winter, and has none at all of that fierce break-up
of winter which makes the plains in parts trying to the toughest
constitution; where the failures go because they have tried all other
places, and the last is {173} West. All sorts of other men may be
seen going West too--bank clerks and lumbermen, commercial travellers
and engineers, tourists and politicians, trappers and amateurs of
sport. But I never saw a more strangely assorted pair than these two
men who came into the smoking compartment where I sat as the train
mounted the foothills.
One was a very old man. I do not know what his profession was, but
his clothes and himself were equally weather-stained and dirty. He
had the coarsest snow-white hair hanging in cords about his neck and
cheeks and mouth, which gave him the appearance of a vicious old
billy-goat. He was, I discovered, a moderately vicious old man. The
other was a lumberjack--hardly more than a boy, sturdy, and
strikingly handsome, with the clearest blue eyes and a complexion
that a woman would give a fortune for. The old man--as they came in
together--was already engaged in telling the young one what you might
call a backwoods smoking-room story, and he went on with others even
thicker, over which the young one betrayed the hugest amusement.
What particularly won his laughter and admiration was the fact that
so elderly a person should enter into such topics with {174} so much
zest. I can still hear him repeating, 'There ain't many fellows as
old as you, Daddy, that 'ud be such sports. No, sir.'
And the old man would grin and chuckle at the compliment, and become
more highly improper in the warmth of the boy's praise. He became
indeed so elevated by it--especially after the boy had got up once or
twice and executed a brief step-dance to mark the exuberance of his
delight--that, thinking to gain even more glory by being still more
startling, he dropped the subject of women and took up that of
religion. It seemed he was an atheist of the old three-shots-a-penny
variety, and he went for Christianity hot and strong. He had, it
must be admitted, a perfectly skilled command of the old cheap
arguments, and marshalled them in good order. Only, the unexpected
happened. The boy, who had not minded being boyishly wicked, was
plainly shocked by this new thing, and he said so in language so warm
that a minister of the faith he was defending would have felt
positively faint to hear it. The old man, surprised and still more
annoyed, brought out further iconoclastic arguments, excellently
directed. It is true any theologian could have warded them off
easily enough. Any {175} debater could have. But it was clear that
the boy had never argued in his life. That didn't matter. He was
not going to sit there and listen to that sort of thing. He got
indeed quite hopelessly confused; intellectually he was tripped time
and again; he deferred with a lamb's innocence to the old man's
boasts of having perused Persian literature, Hebrew literature, all
the books that have to do with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism (I am
afraid I did not believe any of this); he allowed that so much
learning and thought must be a fine thing, but not an inch did he
yield of his creed. And the more the old man got at him with
arguments the more sulphurous grew the boy's language. I have never
known so queer a Defender of the Faith as that lumberjack--or in a
way a more successful one. His manner was childlike, his words
unprintable; he made a muddle whenever he attempted to follow the
simplest of the old villain's inferences. Yet never the least shake
could his opponent give him, and his dogged reiteration of the
statement that 'A man by ---- could only stick to the ---- faith that
he had, and Daddy was a ---- fool to think his that ---- arguments
made any difference'--wore the old free-thinker out in {176} the end.
He did not give in, but he gave up: a wiser but, it is to be feared,
not a better old man.
Meanwhile we were getting into the hills, and my first impressions
were rather of great rocks than of mountains. Most people, I
suppose, come upon the Rockies first from the east, and they seem
tremendous if only for the reason that one has come upon them after
days spent in those plains which, even while they rise, rise
imperceptibly. But tremendous as they seem from the east, they must
be far more so from the north, and far more beautiful from the west.
On the east the mountains have less height than on the north. Their
timber is poor by comparison with the trees that grow further west;
their valleys have little of the luxuriance of the Pacific valleys.
One feels a certain coldness and hardness about them, and after a
little while there seems almost a monotony of corrugated peaks, all
thrown together and slanting eastward. They are striking enough even
so, and the view from the train, especially when one considers that
railways are run through mountains by the easiest route not by the
finest, and that grades have to be counted before landscapes, cannot
disappoint anybody.
[Illustration: A TRAIL IN THE ROCKIES]
{177}
Comparisons with the Alps and the Himalayas should be kept till the
Rockies have been seen at closer quarters. The finest view I ever
had of the Rockies was from a mountain in the Selkirks, at a height
of over ten thousand feet, and over a hundred miles from the nearest
railway. There I forgot to make comparisons, which after all are
somewhat useless. It is easy to say that the Alps are softer and
more pictorial--showing that deep blue sky above their snows, which
is rarely if ever to be seen in the Rockies. The Canadian skies are
too lofty and distant ever to seem to be resting even on the topmost
snowfields. The Himalayas again have giants unparalleled.
Kinchinjunga, leaning out of the clouds, cannot be matched among the
Rockies. But the Rockies--well, the Rockies are different. As yet
we are only just getting to Banff.
{178}
CHAPTER XIX
A HOT BATH IN BANFF
Everybody stops at Banff. The popular places of the world are not
necessarily the most beautiful; and even if they start beautiful,
they are not rendered more so by the accretion in their midst of a
large number of even first-class hotels. Perhaps first-class hotels
increase the feeling for beauty. Indeed the sole defence of luxury
worth consideration is that it has this effect. Without luxury,
would there exist such an appreciator of beauty as d'Annunzio, to
name but one? Pardon, I am getting away from Banff.
It is a very beautiful watering-place at the foot of mountains. It
is not spoilt yet, and it will be difficult to spoil it. The air is
superb. I learnt that just as I was getting into it on my way from
the station. I seemed to be the only person walking into it that
morning--except for a local Canadian who was going in to his work.
It was still very {179} early in the morning, and distinctly cold,
and I said to this Canadian workman:
'It's pretty cold at Banff.'
'It's the finest air in Canada,' he replied, with that characteristic
touch of resentment of anything that might be taken as a criticism of
his native heath, which every Canadian invariably shows. 'Yes, sir,
it's the finest air in Canada, and they're putting down concrete
sidewalks.'
He was, as a matter of fact, engaged in that work himself, and after
I had expressed a proper admiration of it, he became friendly enough
and directed me to the hotel I wanted to stay in.
I wish it had not rained at Banff while I was there. It was an
unusually cold and early rain, and it prevented me from seeing many
of the sights of the place. The motor boat, which as a rule runs
several times a day up the Bow River, did not run at all while I was
there, and so I did not see this lovely valley. Nor did I take much
stock of the buffaloes of the National Park, which are one of the
greatest features of Banff, one that tourists with cameras always
make for first. Rain was the reason of my abstention. On the other
hand, the rain was the immediate {180} cause of my spending a most
delightful afternoon in a hot sulphur swimming-bath. There are three
such baths in Banff, and I chose the upper one, walking two miles up
a winding road, whose woods were beginning to show all the reds of
autumn, to get to it. I found that it was an open-air bath, fed by a
sulphur stream that trickles steaming down the face of a mountain,
and since no one had been tempted there on so gloomy a day, I had it
all to myself, and swam up and down in water that varied from 110° to
95° for an hour or more, looking at the hilltops opposite, and the
mists that rose and sank about them. The rain and the cold mattered
nothing so long as I swam there, wondering if luxury could go further
in this world of ours. For there I was lapped about with all the
warmth and peace that come to the beach-comber or the lotus-eater,
and yet drinking in the brisk mountain air and feeling the challenge
of the hills. It was to combine the emotions of a man climbing the
Alps with the emotions of a man squatting in a Turkish bath; and only
when the latter threatened to become rather the stronger of the two,
did I get out, feeling weak but fresh. I had the pleasure while
dressing of reading in a printed advertisement {181} of the baths
that I had been curing myself of rheumatism, sciatica, asthma,
anæmia, insomnia and, I fancy, any other disease I might happen to
have latent. Certainly I felt well and uncommonly drowsy when I got
back to the hotel. Indeed those who intend to explore Banff with
energy would be well advised to postpone the baths till their last
day. There is plenty to explore. The National Park alone is 5400
square miles in extent, and encloses half a dozen subsidiary ranges
of the Rocky Mountains; and if Banff is to be regarded as the centre
for mountain climbing, fishing, and big game hunting, there is of
course no end to it. Guide-books mention in a vague way that it is
such a centre--which only means that if you want to do any of these
things from a highly civilised and comfortable hotel, you had better
make Banff your stopping place. Good climbing is to be had quite
near, but whether the same is to be said for shooting or fishing
depends upon whether anything short of the best in these matters is
good. You cannot expect fish and big game to remain centralised.
Particularly is this the case with big game. They avoid the centre
of things, and prefer to keep on the circumference. In these sort of
matters {182} guide-books are very little use. Nowhere do conditions
change more rapidly than in Canada, and the man who wants big-horn or
big trout will have to make for the circumference too. But there he
will neither expect nor find first-class hotels.
Speaking of first-class hotels, I took part--quite an unwilling
part--in an incident that goes to show some of the difficulties
attendant upon trying to run them in Canada. Frankly, except for
those run by the Canadian Pacific Railway, there are practically
none. It is not to be wondered at. Cookery is an art, like
literature or music, not greatly encouraged in a new country. Take
waiters again. Though the wages they make are good and the standard
of waiting expected from them is rarely the highest, I believe they
are a perennial difficulty to hotel proprietors. On the trains and
in the big towns in the East one usually finds that the waiters are
Englishmen not long out; and they are so not because they have
acquired the science of waiting in the old country (as one might
suppose, since it is usually well learnt there), but because they
have not as yet acquired that Canadian spirit which makes anything
savouring of domestic service--or even of undue courtesy as from man
to {183} man--distasteful to the Canadian born, who, in any case,
dislikes working for uncertainly long hours. Englishmen, it has to
be admitted, are not particularly zealous for long and uncertain
hours of work either in these days; and therefore it generally
happens that as soon as the newcomer is the least acclimatised, he,
too, drops waiting if he has taken it up. In the East a freshly
arrived immigrant takes his place; but in the West there is no such
constant supply of spare white men. The result is that Western
hotels are more or less driven to employ as waiters either women or
Japanese and Chinese boys.
The hotel I stayed in at Banff had a staff of the former. Heaven
knows we have women waiters enough in England, but in Canada I do not
think heaven can know.... As soon as I came in to breakfast in the
morning I became aware of a sharp-featured maiden with eyeglasses and
tight lips and stiff white cuffs--very much the type of the Girton
girl in the older times--who was clearly in charge of the room, and
meant to let every one know it. I shrank down at the nearest table,
and in a hushed voice requested and received my breakfast from one of
the waitresses who were theoretically in attendance. She was very
kindly, {184} only she brought me tea instead of coffee. I wanted
coffee. I felt it was taking a risk, but as a man at his breakfast
usually prefers his own fancy to other people's, I looked about
delicately to see if I could catch my waitress's eye and induce her
to change the pot. By bad fortune I merely caught the eye of the
sharp young lady who, coming up and learning from my unwilling lips
that I had been given the wrong drink, said imperiously:
'Kindly tell me which of the girls gave you this!'
Now I had not particularly noticed the girl who had been good enough
to help me--an inexcusable carelessness--which the sharp young woman
evidently interpreted as a desire to fence with her, for while I
hesitated she went on:
'I'll tell you why I want to know. There's some game on this
morning----'
'Oh,' I said, 'yes.'
'And I'm not going to stand it,' said the sharp young woman fiercely.
'I fired two of the girls yesterday, and I don't mind if I fire the
lot, so if you'll tell me which of them brought you this I'll see to
her straight away.'
'I'm afraid I should not know her again,' I said hastily. A scene of
strife around my {185} unlucky person, while breakfast got cold and
all the other guests at the other tables looked on, was terrible to
my fancy. The sharp one seemed most disappointed.
'I wish you could,' she said. 'I'd fix her right now.'
'Quite impossible,' I murmured, hoping that I was speaking the truth.
Not so far off there was a young woman, standing chatting genially
with two men at another table, who might have brought me that tea.
'Oh, well, of course if you can't,' said the sharp one, and presently
brought me coffee with her own fair white-cuffed hands. I thanked
her warmly, and she went away; after which I was rewarded for my
supposed chivalry by the young woman who had been entertaining those
other two men coming up to me and saying in a sweet voice:
'I say, I'm awfully sorry that I brought you that tea instead of
coffee. The fact is we're awfully rushed this morning.'
'Not at all,' I said, 'don't think of it,' and hoped inwardly that
she would go away before the sharp one spotted her and bore down upon
us. She did not seem so rushed as she had said.
'Sure you won't have anything else now?' she persisted in the
kindliest way.
{186}
'No, thank you,' I said, and seeing, I suppose, that I was not an
entertaining person, she flitted gracefully away to a third table
where another male sat, to whom I heard her whisper in passing--on
the way to further chat with the other two men:
'Now, mind you don't forget to meet me outside the hotel at six
sharp!'
My sympathies almost went out to the sharp-visaged spinster, for
really there were quite a number of guests looking about them for
food while the rushed staff chatted freely and pleasantly with such
male visitors as seemed by their bearing to be worthy of being
fascinated. This at breakfast-time--breakfast-time when an
Englishman at all events wants food and would not be put off by the
conversation of Cleopatra or Helen of Troy. Canadians may be a more
gallant race at this hour of the day, but I am not sure of this. The
preponderance of Japanese waiters as one gets further West seems to
point to the fact that even they prefer food--at meal-times--to
sentiment. The Japanese may demand high wages, and leave their
places suddenly if they feel like it, but at least they do not
threaten one with an emotional scene over one's morning coffee. Nor
do I imagine that they require to be treated by their {187} employers
with quite that reverential respect of which I remember seeing an
example in a small hotel in the Columbia Valley. I was stopping at
the hotel over Sunday with a friend, and as we wanted to go out for
the day, we asked the manager if we could be supplied with some
sandwiches for lunch. He was a mild and obliging young man, but his
face fell.
'I'll--I'll see what can be done,' he said, and I heard him go to the
young lady who vouchsafed to wait at table occasionally in a superior
way. 'My God!' I heard him say in an extremely humble voice to her,
'I'm most awfully sorry to ask such a thing of you, but these chaps
want to go out and take some sandwiches. I say, do you suppose it
could be managed?'
We got two sandwiches each as a result of his intercession, and in
that mountain air we could have done with six times the number. But
we realised from the manager's face when he brought them to us that
the goddess who had provided them might, instead of doing so, have
stalked straight out of the hotel for good.
{188}
CHAPTER XX
CANADA AND WOMAN
Few books are complete nowadays without a chapter on the woman
question. Man can be treated of in between; one would not as yet
care to write a book without mentioning man in it. As a subsidiary
agent for keeping the world going man is still not without his
importance. But woman, as I have said, must have a chapter to
herself. And since I unwittingly arrived on the last page at the
subject of woman's work in Canada, I will pause--even on the
threshold of the mountains--and go further into the matter.
The most noticeable thing about woman in Western Canada is that she
has not yet arrived there. If any one wished to get an idea of how
the world would arrange itself supposing there were no women in it at
all, they would have to go a little further north and west, into some
of the British Columbian valleys or into the Yukon country, and look
around.
{189}
What a simple world it seems. No clothes question, no washing, the
simplest cookery, one man one plate (and that plate never washed),
one knife for eating with or for skinning a grizzly bear, no carpets
or curtains in the houses, no dustings or spring-cleanings, no
knick-knacks to knock over or break, no flowers without or within
except such as grow wild, no luxuries, in short, either to enjoy or
to pay for, and a terrible amount of dirt. That is the physical
aspect of the world without women.
The spiritual side of it is less easy to arrive at. These bachelors
you see in the backwoods are a silent people, lacking in
self-consciousness, and, I daresay, in manners, but law-abiding and
amiable and peculiarly handy. All men are handy who have not women
to steal that talent from them; and most womenless men are silent
too. One knows, of course, that bores may be found among men at
times, but never chatterboxes. There is something to be said for the
view that speech arose by women putting questions so often that men
were driven, in sheer weariness, to make answers.
Does it seem an unattractive life that these hardy bachelors have
perforce to live? Perhaps. But you will not find them bemoaning
{190} their lot. That is not the way of bachelors. We know they are
to be pitied, but they do not pity themselves. Seriously, the
trouble with these men is that they have none of those inducements to
consider the future which make a man better than a machine. They
take the world as it comes, which is well enough for themselves but
not well enough for the world. I doubt if it is well for themselves
really. True, they have nothing to worry them so long as they are in
health. They can make big money when they choose and take holidays
when they choose, conscious that when their money is spent they have
only to set to again. Their wages are indeed to them little more
than trinkgeld--and this means that those splendid workers have no
real reward for their work, leave no successors to carry on the
traditions of their toil, enrich only the bar-keepers and the rogues
who live on the folly of honest men.
Clearly the most honourable opening for women in Canada is marriage.
Only wives are capable of putting down the drink curse, preventing
the growth of a particularly odious plutocracy, establishing a
permanent instead of a nomad population in the West. Nor might it be
a bad thing (but for Anglo-Saxon {191} prejudices) if provincial
governments there could start marriage offices, due attention being
paid to eugenics. Even in so small a matter as the following, the
presence of wives should make all the difference. All down the
Columbia valley I found the cattle ranchers, who were bachelors,
drinking tinned milk, while scores of cows ran wild and went dry.
When I asked if it wasn't worth while to keep one cow milking, I was
always told, 'No, we haven't time to bother about it,' till I came to
the shack of a married Swede, whose wife had time to bother about it.
In his shack tinned milk was anathema, as it should be everywhere.
As prejudice would undoubtedly prevent the formation of governmental
marriage offices, marriage can only be considered as an indirect
opening for women. What are the directer openings? A great deal
depends on what part of Canada immigrant women make for. In the East
there is no such lack of women as in the West. The sexes are fairly
balanced. In the big towns there is the usual demand for domestic
servants, but not many more openings for educated Englishwomen than
there are in big towns at home. There are a few more, because those
cities are going at a faster pace than our English cities, and
because all work there is {192} more valuable than in England. Women
skilled in the arts that have to do with personal decoration, such as
millinery, dressmaking, etc., could make their way there.
Factory work in Canada is hardly worth going into here, the chief
point about it being that wages are of course higher; nor did I
notice any unusual professions engaging the attention of women,
unless it were the checking of parcels and the playing in hotel
orchestras, neither of which requires a man's strength.
[Illustration: THE HALT. LAGGAN.]
French Canada offers employment to but very few. Western Canadians
sniff at the Habitants because they let their women work in the
fields; haymaking and hoeing. But the idea of using women as outdoor
workers is not so uncivilised as it looks to those unaccustomed to
seeing it. Ethnologists are agreed nowadays that the tribes in which
women do the fieldwork are not the least but the most civilised, and
maintain that the position of women among such tribes is higher than
among any others. Women began to work out-of-doors because the
primitive peoples believed in a connection between their fertility
and that of the earth; and where they do such work, women are always
the keepers of the grain store--hold in their hands, that is to say,
the {193} food upon which the life of the tribe depends. The most
honourable primitive customs are not always the best in modern times,
but there can be no doubt of the fertility of the French Canadians.
As one goes West, woman becomes more of an indoor creature; and this
may be due to the greater chivalry of their men folk. But one has to
remember that the great charm of Canadian life, especially on the
prairies, is an outdoor charm--working in the exhilarating air--not
cooking over a hot stove indoors. One hears of a few cases in which
women have taken up farming or vegetable-gardening and made a success
of it, but no one could honestly say that the fortune awaiting women
who take up such work is usually a great one. The work is too hard,
especially in the winter time. Chicken-ranching is perhaps easier;
but the real demand in the West is for women to do that housework
which the men have not time for. At such work capable women can earn
from three to five pounds a month with board and lodging; and while
they are likely to find it rather harder--certainly not less
hard--than similar work at home, it has compensations besides the
money to be made by it. For one thing there is none of the odium
that attaches {194} to it in the older countries. The cook is as
good as her employer, who probably did the cook's work for years
before the cook was to be had. It is natural that the work which
most ladies have to do for themselves, because neither love nor money
can obtain them substitutes, should lose its menial and unpleasant
aspect, and the finest ladies in western Canada do it unashamed.
Often their guests will help them to wash up, and even prepare the
dinner. Personally, I found myself becoming quite expert at cleaning
fish for a hostess who thereafter cooked it and dished it up, and yet
appeared at table as fresh and elegant and apparently leisured as any
lady who keeps a staff of servants in the old country. And I found
as I got on that I rather liked cleaning fish.
It stands to reason that the lady help is not wanted. The precise
duties demanded of such a lady are always a little misty, but I
imagine that they include a little sewing and a little reading, the
ability to chat pleasantly, to be good-tempered (and possibly a
Protestant), to feed the canary, and, at a pinch, even to clean out
its cage. None of these talents are needed in a new country, and I
heard of forty women who were on the books of an employment {195}
office in Calgary, all wanting to be lady helps and all likely to go
on wanting it till Doomsday.
One hears a good deal of discussion (not in Canada) of the openings
in the colonies for educated women. There is an English
committee--the Committee of Colonial Intelligence for Educated
Women--which, 'recognising the crying need of our colonies for the
best type of educated women,' undertakes to furnish them with
detailed, practical and up-to-date information, before advising them
to go out. This committee hopes later on to found settlements in the
colonies, where training, suitable to the needs of each colony, can
be given, and centres can be formed to which the girls can return in
the intervals of employment. There is much sense both in the
recognition of the need for educated women in the colonies and in the
perception that the most educated woman will be lost there unless she
is prepared to be practical. The truth is that that same
adaptability which is required of men in Canada is required of women
also. They must first suit the country before they can hope to leave
their mark on it. Educated women can leave their mark there by their
inward, not by their outward, superiority.
Centres to which the girls can go in the first {196} place, and to
which they can return in the intervals of employment, are an
excellent idea, and one which central or local government authorities
in Canada would do well to support. Of course the Young Women's
Christian Association already gives much help in this direction, but
it cannot be expected to have branches everywhere. New towns and
settlements are planned and put through very quickly in Canada, and
wherever they result in creating a demand for women's work, some such
centre for girls as near the railway depot as possible should be
started. For one thing it would facilitate the engagement of girls,
for another it would attract a better class. Probably the best
openings of all for women in Canada--educated women, I mean--are in
the big cities of the furthest West. In Vancouver and Victoria
wealthy people reside who can afford to pay for such luxuries as
private school-mistresses and governesses. And the supply of women
is not so great there. Women also seem to be more employed there as
hotel manageresses and under-manageresses, and as cashiers in hotels
and offices. I never heard of women being real estate agents, but in
a profession in which the arts of persuasion play a leading part,
there seems no reason why they {197} should not shine. Of bachelor
girls, living their own lives, I have also never heard in the West.
They could hardly have the hearts to do it with so many bachelor men
wasting their lives around them.
On the whole, the position of woman in Canada is one of honourable
toil lightened by the high consideration in which they are held.
They have hardly as yet obtained that dominant super-man eminence
which American women are said to occupy. That is, perhaps, because
they have not gone in so much for that culture and social
fastidiousness by the lack of which in themselves some American
husbands are made to feel their inferiority. On the other hand they
seem to keep their men folk contented, and remain contented with
them. Divorce is, I believe, uncommon in Canada.
{198}
CHAPTER XXI
THE LAKES AMONG THE CLOUDS
Who thinks the Rockies only of a forbidding magnificence, of a
grandeur always dark and fierce? Let him go to Lake Louise. The
only phrase I know that fits it is that German one--_märchenhaft
schön_--lovely as a scene of fairyland. Coming upon it suddenly, on
a moonlight night, it seems so unlooked-for, so exquisite, that one
says to oneself, 'Surely it will vanish like a dream.'
[Illustration: LAKE LOUISE, LAGGAN, ALBERTA]
It is quite a little lake, shut in for the most part by hills. The
hills are wooded at their base, and wooded high up--wooded, indeed,
right into the clouds; but higher still they turn to bare walls of
rock or snow-strewn peaks, where the snow and the flowers grow side
by side. Up among the heights other little lakes lie--the Lakes in
the Clouds, they are called--and sometimes they are in the clouds and
sometimes not, and they are coloured like thick opals and moonstones,
and you can see {199} the tall, slim firs growing at the bottom as if
they were real trees and not only reflections. I think it is the
colours of these lakes that are so fairy-like. People may say of the
Rockies that they never give the contrast of white snow-fields and
deep blue sky that is so marked in the Swiss and Italian Alps, but
what of that? The colours they do yield are, in truth, far more
delicate and varied--perhaps because the Canadian skies are so much
loftier and farther away--and, if you do not believe it, go and look
at the waters of Lake Louise. They are distilled from peacocks'
tails and paved with mother-of-pearl, and into them rush those wild
blues that are only mixed in the heart of glaciers.
Across the end of the lake stretches the hotel garden--green turf
crossed by one great border of Iceland poppies, golden and orange,
fringing the water front. One other plant I should have liked to see
growing there--the opal anchusa. Its colour is so exactly the colour
of the lake, in sun and in shadow. Still, more colour is hardly
needed anywhere round Lake Louise. As I have said, the very snows
are gay when you get to them, and pied with flowers, as old English
meadows used to be when old English poets used that word, before
{200} scientific farming came in and determined that flowers were
weeds and killed them. And I had thought of these valleys as black
and frowning, full of melancholy noises among the trees, rather than
windless and radiant.
The station for Lake Louise is Laggan, and the time to arrive there
is in the evening, just before the moon rises. It does not matter if
the drive up from the station is accomplished in the dark. The road
is wooded and beautiful, but do not wish for the moon till the last
bend of it leads you suddenly on to the lake. Then wish for the moon
hard. Or, if you want to make sure of it, and the moon (though it
seems always magical in its uprising) follows laws like other things
and will not rise unless it is due to, make cold calculations some
time ahead, and be sure they are right. There never could be
anything better worth timing than moonrise on Lake Louise.
If the poppied air that was fabled to pervade certain lovely places
in the old world hung about this region, there would be no coming
away from it. You would remain gazing drowsily for ever at the lake
like the lover on the Greek urn that Keats described. But all around
are the mountains which distil an air keen and exhilarating, so that
before you know {201} it you are set walking, or riding or
climbing--in some way adventuring forth. Some people adventure forth
in a carriage, but that is rather too like going out to battle in
evening clothes.
Myself, having but two days at my disposal--which I could very well
have spent looking across the Iceland poppies at the lake--was urged
by the air and a sense of duty to take a long walk the first day and
a longish ride the second. For this second expedition I hired a
mountain pony and decided to reach the Moraine Lake, which lies at
the end of The Valley of the Ten Peaks. It was my first experience
of a Rocky Mountain pony, and I will state at once that it was an
unfavourable one. There exist, no doubt, a few excellent mountain
ponies. I bestrode one or two later in different places. But this
first one was so dispiriting that he warped my mind concerning the
whole breed. The truth is that mountain ponies, being intended for
the average tourist who seems to be not much of a rider, are both
bred and trained to go no faster, and exhibit no more spirit than a
bath-chair man. Not theirs to trot or canter, even if a smooth
stretch of road present itself. Enough if they move steadily up
mountain trails and along mountain {202} ledges and down precipitous
tracks in a manner designed to make the tourist feel that mules are
stumbling creatures by comparison. Enough in one way but not in
another, for to emulate a baser creature corrupts the best-bred pony
in the world. Ponies have that much of humanity in them. Besides,
it is not worth while to breed the best ponies for such work; and,
further and anyway, a mountain pony is, so to say, a contradiction in
species. A pony as much as a horse is a creature of the plains;
place him in the mountains and he becomes something
different--scarcely a pony at all. He is then an animal that picks
up his feet in a marvellous way, is free from mountain sickness and
the faintness that comes from high altitudes, and carries a pack or a
person on his back. But he is no longer the friend of man. He is
merely the tool of the tourist.
We started downhill--that pony and I--directly after lunch.
Words--words--words. I mounted that pony directly after lunch. The
road led downhill in the first instance. I tried to start the pony
in that direction. That is a truer description of what actually
happened. But after I had got his head set towards the Ten Peaks
Valley, he slewed it round again. We had not by any means {203}
started. 'He is frightened of the hill,' I thought to myself, and
redirected his head, encouraging him with words and reins. I had no
whip. The owners of these hired mountain ponies seem to think whips
unnecessary, and, indeed, they are very little use. I tried one cut
from the roadside some five minutes later. We had by that time made
about a hundred yards. I beat him also with his own reins and my
heels, and we accomplished about a quarter of a mile downhill, going
delicately. I said to myself, 'Patience. The descent will soon be
over. The road then rises. We shall see a different animal.'
What I saw when we came, by sideways and prolonged efforts, to the
first part of the ascent, was that, greatly as that pony hated a
down-hill grade, far more did he loathe an uphill one. We mounted it
at what seemed to be a mile an hour or less, and I groaned to think
that we had eight or nine to accomplish before we got to the lake,
and the same in returning. By late afternoon I judged we had made
the half distance and were still going weakly. I had cut two or
three different sticks by now, and encouraged the pony with different
words from those I had used at the start. He woke up once or twice
and trotted for a moment. {204} The road was not really steep for
most of the way; where it was steep I walked, dragging the pony
behind me. He did not seem to mind whether I was on his back or off,
provided no motion was required of him. I found it was cooler work
to get off and pull him than to propel him from the saddle. Always
he stood still for choice.
The road was good--good underfoot and good to observe from. On our
left lay a broad valley, and on our right the hills. I should love
to have paused voluntarily and absorbed the views, but in point of
fact I only paused in passion to cut whips; the pony, meanwhile,
grazing. He knew the road to the Moraine Lake better than I did, and
he contested every inch of it.
I think I was aware long before the Ten Peaks came into sight that I
should not reach the lake that day--or perhaps ever; but I was
determined that I would at least see where it lay, though the sun set.
We came within sight of it at last. Before then the Ten Peaks had
come into line one by one till there they stood, ten white peaks all
in a row. At their base I thought I saw the lake lying, very still
and cold among its ice-worn pebbles.
[Illustration: IN THE VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.]
{205}
If I did not see it, if it was but a mirage, I do not greatly care.
I achieved something more that afternoon than the mere sight of a
lake. I got that pony back to the hotel almost in time for dinner.
I was pretty stiff in the arms. It was not to be wondered at.
Hauling a pony nine miles is no light work.
{206}
CHAPTER XXII
A SOLITARY RIDE INTO THE YOHO VALLEY
Emerald Lake is beautiful, but less beautiful, I think, than Lake
Louise. It is more like a lake among mountains, and less like a lake
in a dream. I went to it because I wanted to get into the Yoho
Valley, if only for a day, and the trail from Emerald Lake into the
Yoho is, I had heard, the most picturesque of all. Even
superficially to see the valley takes four days, and I had left
myself with only one, so that it was in a deprecating spirit that I
asked the manageress of the lake chalet if I could at least get
within sight of the valley and back before dark. She said that if I
started at two o'clock punctually, on a pony, the thing could just be
done. I said that I had tried one or two mountain ponies, and did
not care about them when I was in a hurry.
[Illustration: ON THE TRAIL, YOHO VALLEY.]
'Oh, but I'll give you a slicker,' said the manageress. 'You see
there's no run on {207} the ponies at present, and I'll ask the man
to give you his very best. He'll just get you there and back in
time.'
I thanked her and said I would try the slicker; and, half an hour
later, the slicker and I were skirting the wooded shore of the
Emerald Lake at what was, for a mountain pony, quite a fast trot. We
were alone together. There were a few guests at the chalet, but the
lateness of the season and the snow-clouds that loomed on the horizon
had deterred any of them from starting on the Yoho Valley trip that
day. Earlier in the year, there would have been quite a party riding
together with a guide in the direction I was taking, for there are
four camps in the valley, placed at picturesque points an easy day's
ride apart, where you may rest and sleep, one night beneath a
waterfall, the next on the edge of a glacier, with the ponies
tethered round, and the camp-fires crackling pleasantly, so that you
feel that you are pioneering, but pioneering luxuriously.
But now, as I have said, it was late in the season, and the
snow-clouds were holding themselves in the sky ready for further
attacks, and a keen wind was beginning to rise, so that no one else
thought the Yoho Valley {208} tempting enough, and it was certain I
should have it all to myself if I got there.
The trail was not difficult to follow. There, at the end of the
lake, was a mountain pass visible from the chalet, and the thin white
line that screwed about among the rocks and trees was the trail. The
slicker trotted. He trotted through the wood that borders the lake;
he trotted through a wonderful pebbled valley beyond it which might
have been a sea beach (only everywhere slim spruces, like sharp,
green, tenpenny nails, grew out of the pebbles); and he trotted up
the first stretch of trail leading to the pass ahead of us. Then for
an hour or more the slicker climbed as steadily as a Swiss guide.
The trail was less than a yard wide and metalled with rolling stones,
and though it wound continually, its most generous spirals left it,
to my fancy, almost sheer. We wound with it, past boulders and
hanging trees and little cataracts that shot through air from some
invisible lips of stone above--between shadowy crags and over
unprotected places where the sun glared. In the end the slicker
brought me to the pass itself, and we rode into a dark wood there,
and the trees grew bigger and bigger, and the trail grew stickier and
stickier, and the {209} pass ended suddenly, and below, far, far
below, was the Yoho Valley.
The story of the boy who cried 'wolf' when there was no wolf is a
familiar one, but much more familiar in everyday life is the story of
the man who cries 'lion' when there is no lion. You know him and you
don't believe him. You know that, moved by the immoderate enthusiasm
which is the chief qualification for the profession of writing, he is
doing his level best to make you believe that the object he is
presenting to you is a lion, for the simple reason that if you
believe it, you will be more attracted by it and him. Canada, being
a much-advertised country at present, is full of lions. 'The finest
view in Canada. Yes, sir.' How often I heard that remark! How
often it turned out to be an overstatement. How distrustfully I came
to listen to it.
Was it, then, that for some months I had imbibed the Canadian air,
that when I reached the Rockies I too was carried away, and became as
immoderately enthusiastic as any Canadian? I do not know. I merely
have to confess that I was carried away, that I have already cried
'lion' more than once, and that I must do so once again now that I
have got to the Yoho Valley. Baedeker saves his own dignity--and
{210} that of literature--by using an asterisk at these critical
points, or two asterisks if his emotions are very poignant. But I,
who have to fill paper, must use words. Well, I am not afraid of
exaggerating the beauties of the Yoho. This valley of enormous trees
spiring up from unseen gorges to wellnigh unseen heights; of
cataracts that fall in foam a thousand feet; of massed innumerable
glaciers; this valley into which it seems you could drop all
Switzerland, and still look down--is not easily overpraised. The
difficulty is to praise it at all adequately.
It seemed to me as I rode on along the high trail that sometimes
edged out to the gulf below and sometimes swerved back from it, that
one of the wonders of the valley was a thing that in smaller places
would have made for disappointment, and that is that it lies, and
always has lain, outside the human radius. It has none of those
connections with men that set us thrilling in other parts. No
Hannibal ever led his army by this route across these mountains. No
hardy tribesmen watched the approach of an enemy among its crags, or
bred among them a race of mountaineers. No gods dwelt on its
heights, and no poets ever came near to sing them. History {211} has
nothing to tell of it. Little hills and little valleys have their
stories and their songs, their memories and their miracles. They are
haunted still with those forgotten mysteries which stir men's fancies
more deeply than things remembered or discovered can. This valley
walled about with mountains has been above and beyond men's ken from
the beginning of the world: and now that men have come into it, they
find nothing to discover in it except its vastness and immunity from
the touch of men. It strikes one even now as not only devoid of
human adjuncts but needless of them. A man no more looks for legends
there than he would look for them in the centre of a typhoon.
I suppose that men did pass through it--even before the valley became
a known part of the world, and even a sight for tourists. It was
not, as the phrase goes, untrodden by the foot of man. A few
prospectors must have passed this way from time to time many years
ago. Some may have died there for all one knows. Indian hunters,
too, would enter the valley in pursuit of game. But no one possessed
it; no one gave it the human air: or, if they did, the records are
lost. Prospectors tell us only of their finds, nothing {212} of
their lives. Of the Indians, some one someday may, perhaps, find
some traces. At present their white brothers are little troubled by
them or their history or their origin. Canadians are content to
think of them as a primitive, decaying people who came from God knows
where to a country they never realised was God's. It will be easier
to forget them than to understand them, these strange men with faces
no more expressive than wood, who, if they ever came to the Yoho
Valley, must have passed through it more like trees walking among the
trees than like men that stop and wonder, and leave a habitation and
a name.
Shadowy, disregardable creatures, then, as uninfluential as the
slicker and myself, may have roamed the valley in times past and left
no more traces upon it. We two realising, I trust, our minuteness
and unimportance, went on, as it turned out, far beyond the point
intended for our afternoon's excursion. In contemplation of the
valley I had given the slicker the rein, and he, poor pony, no doubt
thought that he was bound for the first camp, there to rest the night
in the ordinary course. Presently I found him, his two front feet
planted firmly together, sliding down the {213} slipperiest piece of
trail we had yet encountered, sliding and sliding till we had got to
the very bottom of the valley--whereupon I discovered that we had
indeed attained the first camp.
It was a queer, unexpected sight--a few little lean-to tents and a
couple of log huts, standing side by side on a flat piece of the
valley floor, just beyond the spray of a cascade that dropped from
ledge to ledge of the mountain opposite, starting so high up that it
seemed to spring from the sky. The place seemed deserted, but while
the slicker and I paused to look about us, out of the biggest tent
there came a small, silent, yellow figure. It did not speak to me,
but only stared, and I, having stared back for a little and having
wondered if it were some gnome peculiar to the valley, suddenly saw
that it had a pigtail, and remembered that I had been told that there
was a Chinese cook in every camp.
'Is this the first camp?' I therefore asked.
'Yup!'
'Can you give me some tea?'
'Yup!' he repeated, and vanished into the tent whence he had come.
By the time I had tethered the slicker on the grassiest spot I could
find, that boy had {214} tea ready. He stared at me while I ate it,
stared at me when I paid him for it, and stared at me when, having
offered the slicker some bread and sugar in vain, I remounted him and
set him on the homeward trail. I had not a watch with me. But it
was evident from the position of the sun that we had very little
daylight left for the return ride. Dusk, indeed, came on just as we
reached the other side of the pass, with a mountain side still to
descend. Dusk and an exceedingly cold wind--in the face of which
that corkscrew trail seemed doubly steep. It was one of those
occasions when vowing candles to one's patron saint might have added
to one's peace of mind. But I have no patron saint and could but
give the reins to the slicker, and he rewarded me for my trust by not
falling down till we had actually accomplished the descent and were
on the pebbled beach. Then, in the pitch-dark night, we both rolled
over together. A match, lighted with difficulty, revealed the fact
that neither of us was injured; and so, very steadily and cautiously,
we moved on to the chalet, where we arrived to find dinner finished.
But we had seen splendid things, the slicker and I.
{215}
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.
[Illustration: THE DEVIL'S FINGERS. ROCKY MOUNTAINS.]
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.
{224}
CHAPTER XXIV
THE SELKIRKS--A GRIZZLY-BEAR COUNTRY
Behind Wilmer lies a part of the Selkirks which is known only to a
few ranchers in the neighbourhood, and is scarcely accessible except
from this point. We had spent two days in the neighbourhood of Lake
Windermere, and on the third, though each of us was booked to be
hundreds of miles further on our way by the end of the week, and
heaven only knew how we were even going to reach Golden again, for we
had let the rig go back and the boat was reported stuck somewhere on
the Columbia River, we neither of us could resist an offer that was
made us of an opportunity to climb Iron Top Mountain, which was
somewhere at the back of this alluring country.
The offer came from a Mr. Starboard. In Canada you will sometimes
find, several hundreds of miles from civilisation, some strenuous and
capable man whom you would think civilisation needed and would
require. But the wilds in {225} Canada are more important. Mr.
Starboard had come to these parts originally as a prospector and
miner, but the mine he had come to had shut down--not for lack of
silver and lead in it, but for lack of transport facilities;
whereupon Mr. Starboard, fascinated by one of these valleys, had
started horse-breeding there, occupying what time was left from
clearing his land in making roads through the mountains and hunting
big game. Dropping in at Mr. Bruce's casually one morning, he asked
us if we should like to see the best view he knew of in the Selkirks.
We said we should; and each, equipped with a toothbrush and a comb,
was driven out to Starboard's ranch for lunch.
Travelling in the remoter parts of Canada gives you strange table
companions. You never know quite what company you will meet, though
you can generally count upon its being interesting. While we were
being driven up the Columbia Valley a few days before, we had heard
from various homesteaders that there was 'a big German bug' staying
up in the mountains with his friends, trying for bear. 'They call
him the Land Crab,' our informant would usually add for further
elucidation of the big bug's official position. On arriving at Mr.
Starboard's ranch we found that the big bug {226} in question was, in
the commoner prose of Europe, the Landgraf of Hesse with two
equerries and a small retinue. For a motley collection, the party
that sat down to lunch that day in the chief room of Starboard's
ranch would be difficult to beat. There was the Landgraf himself and
his German companions, a well-known Canadian official, three
valets--these all neatly dressed--Mrs. Starboard quite wonderfully
frocked, as the fashion papers say, Mr. Starboard in ranching
costume, and ourselves who had slept in our clothes for several days.
The waiters were a Japanese and a Chinese. We fed off bear, shot by
one of the Germans, who had been most successful in their hunting
both of bear and goat.
Bear, by the way, was only one among other delicacies. Its taste is
rather like that of Christmas beef stewed in the gravy of a goose.
Vegetarians would not care about it; but after living on little else
for two days I can answer for its being both appetising and
sustaining, particularly in high altitudes. After lunch, four of us,
Mr. Starboard, the railway man, my friend, and myself started for
Iron Top Mountain, which lay seventeen miles off along a trail that
rose steeply most of the way. The ponies were excellent ones, better
even than {227} the slicker. Mr. Starboard had specially picked
them, because he wanted to see if they could be got to carry us to
the top of the mountain, a little over ten thousand feet. He had
never taken ponies as high before, and doubted if the test had ever
been made in Canada, though I fancy ponies have done as much or more
in the Himalayas.
We did fourteen miles that afternoon, following at first the bank of
a blue foaming stream, then turning eastward up a steeper valley
through which a smaller stream flowed. The trail was far better than
many roads in French Canada or on the prairie, and had been
constructed by Mr. Starboard himself to provide access to a silver
and lead mine which had been shut down for some time. It seemed
extraordinary that in a country so wild and remote there should be
any trail at all, but miners go anywhere. A man who has to find his
way into the earth makes no difficulty about finding his way across
it.
It was a day, half sunshine and half mist, and the mountains would
sometimes be shut entirely in shrouds of vapour, sometimes would
reveal slanted white tops cut off in mid-air by the fog below,
sometimes would clear altogether, so that one could see everything on
them, {228} from the snowslides down which the grizzlies travel to
the narrow tracks of the goats. As we mounted, the valley grew
steeper and steeper, and the trail wound more and more. We passed
one place where, earlier in the year, there had been a terrific slide
of snow half a mile in width. The huge firs still lay where they had
fallen, shattered and splintered before it. Half-way down, the
avalanche had met a great pinnacle of rock that had stood the shock
unmoved, and caused the snow to part to left and to right, where it
had hewn two lanes of almost equal breadth through the trees. It was
just near here that Mr. Starboard showed me a grizzly's track, and
told me that he had seen no less than seventeen of these bears in the
last fortnight. He said that their numbers were increasing yearly in
that neighbourhood. A little later a porcupine crossed the trail
ahead of us, and lurched unwieldily into the undergrowth. The trees
grew close together all the way, except where we passed a great
stretch of mountainside where a forest fire had raged, and even there
the scorched trunks still stood, gibbeted skeletons of trees.
We put up for the night in a deserted mining camp, almost a village
it was, with wooden shacks likely to be used again when the Kamloops
{229} to Golden Railway is completed and it is worth while getting
the stuff out of the mine.
Up there it had begun to freeze hard, but a big fire and much bear,
which the railway man fried over it with skill, kept us warm enough
till we went to bed under many blankets in one of the shacks.
It was bitterly chill--the start in the early morning--after a
breakfast of cold bear; and very soon after we set out we got into
snow, and the trees ceased, and the ponies' flanks began to heave
steadily. The morning was as bright as it was cold, however, and
Mount Farnham, shaped like a chimney-pot, glittered right over us on
the left. I remarked to Mr. Starboard what a nasty mountain it
looked for climbing purposes, whereupon he astonished me by saying he
had been up it.
'You went up to see if it could be done?' I said, thinking I had
struck a keen climber in the European sense of the word.
'No,' said Mr. Starboard simply; 'you would not catch me going up a
place like that for the climb. I went there because I thought there
was silver and lead there.'
The ponies were now beginning to show their respective stamina, two
of them going right ahead, and the one that carried my friend {230}
getting slower and slower. We had got by this time into a sort of
rocky amphitheatre where the snow lay thicker, and just as I passed
under a little cascade congealed into fantastic icicles as it spouted
from a cleft, I heard a noise in my rear, and turned to see my friend
and his pony doing Catherine wheels in the snow together. Luckily
they fell--and rolled--softly and rose uninjured; but very soon after
that the ponies had to be left. We turned them loose on a platform
of rock which was, Mr. Starboard said, just short of ten thousand
feet up. Only a few hundred more remained to be done, which we
accomplished on foot through knee-deep snow, gaining the summit just
in time.
For the first time I got a view of the Rockies. We looked down a
long, narrow, purple valley that ran at right angles to the Columbia
River, over the first hills beyond Wilmer, into a sea of mountains.
I had heard that phrase--a sea of mountains--applied to the Rockies
before, but I had not realised its fitness before.
[Illustration: A SENTINEL OF THE ROCKIES.]
There it was, a sea of white caps frozen eternally in the very moment
when they had stormed the sky.
For just five minutes we gazed, and then a mist settled down on them,
and, where we were, {231} immediately a bitter wind began to blow and
caused us to make for the ponies hurriedly. As we rode down the
frozen trail we startled some ptarmigan, which rose and fluttered
above the snow like big white butterflies.
{232}
CHAPTER XXV
AN EIGHTY-MILE WALK THROUGH THE COLUMBIA VALLEY
We got back to Wilmer the following morning, and the problem then
was--how to reach Golden again. The boat was due up the river some
time in the day, but sandbanks do not encourage punctuality. I had
my suspicions of that boat, and in any case, even if it arrived that
day, it would certainly not start back again till the morning
following. I did not want to wait for it at Wilmer, and decided
instead that I would start walking down the valley at once and pick
the boat up at Spellamacheen, forty miles downstream, some time next
day. My friend was as suspicious of the walk as I was of the boat;
and since he had heard that some men were likely to turn up that day
in a motor from Golden who might give him a lift back in case the
boat failed, he decided to wait for them.
So we parted, and rather late in the day--at {233} noon, to be
exact--I set out on my walk. Forty miles is not much of a walk. It
can be done in ten hours very easily--in eight if you make up your
mind to it. I decided I would take nine hours over it and waste no
time. I did not stop for lunch in Athelmer--where one crosses the
Columbia--but merely bought some chocolate and a pound of apples, and
hurried on.
About a mile out of Athelmer I ate the apples, because they were a
nuisance to carry, and wished I could as easily get rid of my heavy
overcoat, which had its pockets stuffed with toilet and sleeping
accessories just like a suit-case. I also wished that I had on boots
that I had ever tried walking in. Still I did six or seven miles in
the first hour and a half, and then I realised that two things
destructive to fast walking were about to happen. One was
footsoreness and the other was rain. Both came upon me a few minutes
later, and both increased steadily hour after hour. The valley which
had looked so beautiful in all the reds of autumn, as we drove
through it in the sunlight, was now filled with a clammy mist; and
the road which had seemed a fine road for the horses in fine weather
now struck me as offensively sticky, and my pace declined {234} to
something under three miles an hour. I consoled myself for a little
with the thought that I was getting an experience of autumn in the
Columbia Valley. Afterwards I decided that I would gladly do without
it. I could have imagined it just as well. The road was like glue
and my coat had increased in weight several pounds. To balance this
as far as possible, I sat on a wet spruce tree that had fallen by the
side of the road and ate my packet of chocolate; after which I moved
on at a very sober pace. I began to doubt if I should get to
Spellamacheen that night; and the doubt soon increased to a certainty
that I should not. Then I remembered that on the drive out we had
passed a place called Dolans, only twenty-eight miles from Wilmer. I
did some mental arithmetic which seemed to prove that even Dolans was
a terrible distance off, and I tried a little running, but it was not
of a kind to win a Marathon race. Running through glue when you are
footsore is trying work. Nevertheless by six o'clock I calculated I
was only about three miles from Dolans, which rejoiced me, until the
horrid thought cropped up--if I got in after the supper hour, should
I get any supper?
It was by no means certain in that valley.
{235}
Providence a few minutes later sent a buggy, driven by a small,
glum-looking man up behind me, and the glum-looking man said 'Care to
drive?' I said 'Yes,' and found he was bound for Dolans like myself.
We got there about seven o'clock. The rancher and his wife were in;
also another wayfarer like ourselves, who had arrived a few minutes
before us. He was an elderly man, with a great shock of iron-grey
hair, who was driving into Golden in a farm-cart from some place
several days distant. He had the strangest pair in his cart--a
little brown mare of about fourteen hands, and a great lanky horse
the height of a giraffe.
We were all given a good meal, and ate it in silence, and sat in
silence to digest it. Canadians in these valleys are often that way;
it is due not to unsociability but to disuse of their tongues.
Possibly to ruminate is the better way, but silence can be
oppressive, and if you start a conversation and the other people only
reflect upon your words, they may be weighing them as if they were
gold, but you are not sure enough of this to be elated. I was rather
glad to be shown to my bed, which was in a barn (but the blankets
were clean, Mr. Dolans said), pretty early. {236} Mr. Dolans sat on
the bed for a bit, and advised me to buy the ranch. I promised to
think the matter over, and went to sleep instead in a nice atmosphere
of hay, and got up for six o'clock breakfast. The other two had
already driven off; but the rain had ceased, and though the road was
a mud slide, I started for Spellamacheen in high hopes of catching
the boat in spite of being footsore.
I need not have worried myself, for when I got there at 12.30, I
learnt that the boat had just passed on its way up to Wilmer, and was
not likely to be down again for two or three days.
Spellamacheen consists of a rest-house ranch in full view of a
semicircle of snowclad mountains, but I was a little disheartened in
spite of the view. I particularly wanted to catch the midnight train
from Golden to Vancouver, and now I realised that to do this I should
have to walk the rest of the way--another forty miles. From two
o'clock to twelve is ten hours. If I did four miles an hour, I
should catch the train to a nicety.
When I am resting on a walk I am always singularly optimistic. I was
stiff after lunch--partly from the unusual exercise, partly from
sleeping in wet clothes, and my feet {237} were sorer than ever, but
I set out for Golden, confident that I should catch that train. A
young man with a bundle on his back, who had got into Spellamacheen
just ahead of me, offered to hike with me. He also was for Golden,
but thought twenty miles more that day would satisfy him.
He was a pleasant and conversational young man, and told me that he
was from New Brunswick, but had for the last eight months been at
work digging the ditches for the Columbia Valley Irrigation Company.
He had had enough of it, he said; in fact too much. Compared with
New Brunswick, British Columbia was no catch at all, and he meant to
go back home. Frenchmen are not fonder of their 'patrie' than are
the Canadian-born. He brimmed over, did that young man, with praises
of New Brunswick--brimmed over very intelligently, telling me about
the Reversible Falls of St. John and the conditions of farming in the
province with a clearness which few Englishmen of his class could
emulate. He said that he would only get one and a half dollars a day
instead of two and a half, but then one and a half would go much
further there than two and a half in British Columbia. You could
live better on it, and life was easier {238} there. British Columbia
was too rough: he allowed there was no pioneer about him. He had got
tired of the Columbia Valley months before, and had started to come
out of it in July, but had only got as far as Athelmer. There he had
gone to a hotel for the night, and had got drinking, and somehow
before he knew it all the money he had saved during his months of
digging had been drunk. So he had gone back to the ditches. But he
meant to get out of the valley this time. I gathered that even this
time it had been a near shave, for having again got as far as the
hotel, he had found a lot of fellows drinking what he called
'Schlampagne.' He supposed there must have been a hundred bottles of
schlampagne drunk last night, and whisky afterwards, but he himself
had been very careful and had taken gin instead. You never knew, he
said, what the whisky would be made of, but if you drank from a
bottle of gin marked English, it was all right. He felt a bit funny
inside to-day, but seemed quite cheerful about it because he had won
away from the hotel, and was pretty sure now to get back to New
Brunswick, after which he would not go pioneering again. He doubted,
however, if we were likely to get to Golden that day. There was
{239} a place called M'Kie's we could put up at eighteen miles on, or
if we felt like it, another called Petersen's--eight miles further.
I said I wanted to catch the midnight train from Golden, and was
going to walk on by night: at which he said he would do the same. He
repeated that he was funny inside and footsore, but he thought he
could do it. We would get to M'Kie's for supper, or rather get M'Kie
to make us up a supper, which we would eat upon the road, and we
should thus get into Golden in good time. He was sure we were going
at least four miles an hour.
I was sure we were scarcely doing three, and by the time we did get
to M'Kie's, just before dark, we were both so sure that a rest would
do us good that we thought we would eat our supper there after all.
M'Kie's was a shack just off the road, with a huge puma-skin nailed
to the verandah. Inside was a very old woman, who said that we could
get our tea all right, but M'Kie wasn't in yet, and we'd better wait
for him. So we sat down in the road, and I paddled in an icy creek
that went foaming by the house door. Then the old woman asked us in
and chatted to us while she cooked the meal. M'Kie turning up, we
fell to, and {240} M'Kie entertained us with trapping stories. It
seemed he was half-trapper, half-rancher, and the big skin we had
seen outside he had got only a few days before. The mountain lion
had come down right into the sheepfold, and his two dogs had treed
it, and a single bullet had brought it down. It was the biggest skin
that he had ever seen, and measured ten feet six from tip to tail.
It certainly was a large skin, but a puma's tail counts for a good
deal. M'Kie had also shot a bear in the sheepfold the week before,
and he talked so much about cinnamons and grizzlies, which seemed
very plentiful round there, that the New Brunswicker insisted on our
having his opinion as to whether they ever attacked unarmed men
walking by night. M'Kie thought not. So we started on again,
somewhat reassured, along what promised to be an uncommonly dark road.
The sky was all clouded over, and it was now 8.30, and there was no
chance whatever of my catching the midnight train, since twenty miles
still remained to be accomplished, and our limp condition made even
three miles an hour hard. But we walked on, mostly because I now
wanted to get the morning train at eleven o'clock, and I felt that if
we {241} went back to M'Kie's and stopped the night, I should be so
stiff that I could not walk at all next day. The New Brunswicker
sportingly said that he would go on for as long as he could anyhow,
though he wasn't bent on any particular train; and for some four
mortal hours we splashed along through mud and water in what was the
next thing to pitch darkness. To add to the discomfort, a high,
cold, and very wet wind began to blow, and there was every prospect
of rain soon descending in torrents. It was at this point, I think,
that our thoughts began to turn to Petersen's. The New Brunswicker
remarked that if we had passed Petersen's there was nowhere to stop
at between where we were and Golden; but if we had not passed
Petersen's, we might rest there a few minutes and perhaps get some
milk to drink. Soon after this we felt sure that we had passed
Petersen's in the dark; and though neither of us admitted it, I think
our respective hearts sank. We decided to rest a little, which we
did, and we rested again a few minutes later without deciding to do
it. As we got up from a brief smoke on a fallen log the rain began
to pelt down, and we saw a light just off the road.
I own I should have wanted to stop at {242} Petersen's anyhow, even
if the New Brunswicker had not confessed that he could not go any
further: but I don't know that I should have had his perseverance in
knocking Petersen's up. There certainly was a light there. But I
was convinced that everybody inside was deep in sleep. The New
Brunswicker thought somebody might be up, and after knocking vainly
for ten minutes at the front door of the house he went round to the
back, while I sat on the doorstep, wondering what fifteen miles in
that black rain would be like.
A couple of minutes later, the New Brunswicker appeared triumphant.
The Petersens, he said, were up--in their kitchen--and thither we
limped, much relieved. They were the kindest people--Swedes, both of
them, and kept a milk cow, and gave us milk and buttermilk. They
said they were sorry they hadn't a bed to offer us, but we could have
the kitchen. Fastidious travellers might have thought the kitchen
untidy and stuffy, and even the New Brunswicker before he went to
sleep on the floor on his blankets, with some old clothes that we
found hanging on the walls over our legs--even he got a broom (after
the Petersens had gone to bed) and swept a clean space {243} for us
to lie on. But at least it was warm, and a haven of luxury compared
with the road.
Personally, I know that I was very sorry to have to get up off that
floor at 4 A.M., when that industrious old lady, Mrs. Petersen, came
in again to relight the stove and to prepare breakfast. She was
followed presently by her husband and son and a hired man, while from
the barn there issued forth not only that shock-headed old man with
the queer rig whom I had seen at Dolans, but no less than five other
men who had been working in different parts of the valley, and were
hiking out before the winter should come. These had all spent their
night in the barn, which seems to be a privileged resting-place for
travellers in this part of the country.
Mrs. Petersen had to get breakfast for some dozen people, and an odd
company we were, all unkempt and unshaven, and most of us looking,
truthfully enough, as if we had slept for some months in our clothes.
We all did a wash before breakfast, however. Two of the men at table
were socialists, and we had a desultory conversation on that subject
while we were not occupied in eating Mrs. Petersen's bacon and eggs.
Nobody seemed much to dispute the socialist position, but {244} this
might have been because nobody was greatly interested in it. I
remember that the socialists thought that capital ought to be done
away with, but Mr. Petersen, who no doubt had a small amount himself
and kept a hired man, thought it was a useful thing, and should be
retained. Everybody went off directly the meal was finished, except
ourselves, who lingered because the New Brunswicker had boldly
requested the shock-headed old man to drive us in to Golden in his
farm-cart, and we went to help harness the little mare and the big
giraffe.
It was still raining heavily when we started, and it rained just as
heavily all the way into Golden. I never was so damped in my life,
and this was due not merely to the rain, but because the farm-cart
was so full of the old man's things (he seemed to be moving his house
in it) that the only place available in it for me was a sack of hay.
The cart had stood out all night in the rain, and the sack of hay was
wet through, which made it like a sponge, so that the more I dried
off the top of it the more moisture I seemed to absorb from the under
part. The little mare and the big horse made about two and a half
miles an hour, and if I could have walked, {245} I should have done
so, for now again the eleven o'clock train seemed in danger of
getting off from Golden without me. Indeed it was half-past eleven
before we got to Golden, and, resigned to despair, I accompanied the
New Brunswicker into an inn, where I thought I should have to wait
again for the midnight train. We ordered beer in the bar, and as I
was explaining to the proprietor what a nuisance it was to have
missed the train, he put down his glass and said, 'Wait a minute,'
and went to the telephone. He came back to inform me that the train
had just been signalled, being very late. He thought I should just
have time to catch it if I rushed.
{246}
CHAPTER XXVI
FROM GOLDEN TO THE COAST
I managed to get that train, and also a half bottle of rye whisky on
the way to it, and sank into a seat in the smoking compartment, where
I sat all soaked and miserable, supping my rye whisky at intervals
and half dozing until two grizzly-bear hunters got in a few stations
down the line. They were very wonderfully arrayed in moccasins and
Arctic socks and turned-up overalls and sweaters and cartridge belts;
and though they were modest enough in their bearing, and did not talk
about their exploits until they were asked questions, the whole
compartment was soon eagerly chatting of nothing but grizzly bears.
The two hunters, who were amateurs of the sport, had been up in the
mountains alone, a three days' portage from the railroad, and had got
three grizzlies, and would have got more, they said, but that heavy
falls of snow had forced them to decamp. They spoke like good
shots--which does not {247} mean that they said they were good
shots--and they seemed very keen on their sport, which they claimed
to be the most dangerous and exacting in the world; nor would they
listen to my meek suggestion that the Bengal tiger would compare
favourably with the grizzly.
'It's a cat,' one of them said sniffily; 'you shoot it off elephants.'
I said that I knew Anglo-Indians who went after tigers on foot, and I
also argued that even in the case of shooting from elephants the
combination of a charging tiger and a restive elephant offered
opportunity of showing one's nerve to be in order such as is not to
be despised, especially if the howdah happens to have been inexpertly
fixed and slides at the critical moment. They allowed that there
might be something in this, but persisted that in any case
tiger-hunting was done at ease, with natives to do all the portering,
whereas grizzly-bear hunters like themselves had to carry everything
with them, and camp in the snow, and shoot on mountain-sides, down
which a grizzly bear would charge at a man quicker than a racehorse.
They gave graphic descriptions of charges of grizzly bears, with
their back legs flying ahead of their front ones. The {248} last
bear they had bagged had dropped, they said, within twenty paces of
them, after being rolled over three times.
I fancy they spoke reasonably enough, and that the pursuit of the
grizzly--certainly if done without a guide--is as good a test of a
man's nerve as any other. As to the merits of the grizzly considered
as a brute likely to do for you if you do not previously do for it,
and compared with such others as the tiger, the buffalo, the
rhinoceros, the elephant, or the lion, there is no arriving at any
final conclusion. African hunters never seem agreed about the
comparative merits of the last three; while one Indian sportsman
supports the buffalo, another will support the tiger. Not having any
experience of the grizzly bear myself, I can only say that, judging
from what I have heard, he must be accounted big enough game for
anybody. There is no doubt that most of the old trappers have a
wholesome respect for him, and the longer they are after him, the
greater, as a rule, their respect grows. His pace, when charging, is
said to be something terrific, and, downhill, it always charges as
soon as hit, its back legs flying out before it at a nightmare speed.
Add that it seems less easy to drop finally than any other animal,
that your fingers {249} may be frozen to the trigger in the intervals
of shooting, and that a single blow from one of its front paws is
strong enough to claw the face out of an ox, and it will be seen that
it is no contemptible foe. On the other hand, experts seem agreed
that it rarely if ever charges uphill, and if shot from above is
therefore comparatively harmless. If a man could always pick his
position for shooting, this would reduce the value of the grizzly
bear as a sporting animal; but obviously the hunter cannot always
choose. Any one who has been on a snowslide will realise that. From
the point of view of an unarmed person, the grizzly bear would seem
to be rather less dangerous than he is sometimes made out to be. You
will often hear that grizzly bears will attack a man at sight. The
truth seems to be that--as is the case with any other bears--attacks
are only to be feared either from female grizzlies with cubs, or from
a grizzly of either sex, if the intruder is so placed as to appear to
the grizzly's eyes to be cutting off its retreat to its lair. Of
course no unarmed man would elect to put himself in either of these
positions, and equally naturally he might unwittingly do so--in which
case it would be better not to be that man, though I believe there is
an {250} authentic story of a lumberman who, returning alone from his
work, was suddenly attacked by two grizzlies, and managed to kill
both of them with his axe, though the second mauled him badly.
Authentic or not, and one grizzly or two, it is pretty certain that
few people would care to try a similar encounter.
Afterwards the conversation shifted to timber-wolves and the Yukon.
One of the passengers scoffed at the notion of a dog being able to
kill a timber-wolf, as happens in one of Mr. Jack London's novels. A
northern timber-wolf, according to this critic, is at least twice the
size of the European wolf, with a disproportionately large and
powerful jaw--a single snap from which would polish off any dog. Two
or three of the biggest dogs known could hardly even hold a
timber-wolf much less kill it. I dare say there was more in this
criticism than in one I heard later, anent Mr. Maurice Hewlett. A
very solemn fruit-rancher was ploughing wearily through one of Mr.
Hewlett's earlier romances, and he looked up presently to say it was
funny the sort of yarns these writing chaps seemed to believe in.
There was a girl in the book who milked a wild deer. He had seen
plenty of deer in his time, but none of them had seemed to fancy
coming close enough to {251} be milked. If a chap wanted to write
about the country he ought to know it right through like Mr. Service.
Had we read Service's poems? Several of the men in the compartment
evidently had read them; and, indeed, Mr. Service's poems concerning
the Yukon seemed to have reached the heights of popularity. I think
it is due in part to the fascination which the north exercises on all
sorts and conditions of Canadians, not only because it stands for
romance and mystery, but because a sort of idea is gaining ground
that these inhospitable and well-nigh polar regions only await a
sufficiently hardy type of colonist to have as great a boom almost as
some of the more southern districts. The idea exists not only among
business-like estate-agents, who see themselves in fancy selling
Arctic blocks to this expected race, but among quite disinterested
and patriotic people, who talk of it, as Mr. Service himself does, as
a strong man's land. A few peculiarly strong men may survive there;
and it is excusable for a poet to regard them as super-men--Canada's
noblest type. As a matter of fact it is at least as romantic to
weave halos about the heads of the crowd that seeks the Yukon country
as it is to make one's heroine milk a wild deer. A certain praise
{252} is always due to pioneers, and the struggle with nature at its
cruellest and most wild is not a bad test of an individual's
character; but for respectable ranchers and fruit-growers (who have
never been to the Yukon themselves, but have struggled with nature
quite as valiantly elsewhere) to talk enthusiastically about the
great lone land as the country for breeding men is absurd. Canadians
may be able to colonise further north than they have done at present,
and their descendants will, no doubt, be a fine and hardy race. But
there is a point in the north just as there is a point in the south
beyond which no white man's country lies. If any strong men are
going to perpetuate their families beyond that northern point, they
are going to be strong Esquimaux--not strong Canadians. Esquimaux
already do quite a lot of grappling with nature in lone lands, but
they are not the heroes of Mr. Service's poems. I don't wish to
labour the point, but this northern strong man business seems to me
entirely overdone. There is always going to be romance attached to
the uninhabitable country, and adventurous young men will get there;
but the theory that these are the people of whom Canada has
peculiarly to be proud will not do. Adam Gordon's bush-riders {253}
had a certain merit; so had Mr. Kipling's gentlemen-rankers; so have
Mr. Service's prospectors; but none of them ever forwarded
civilisation very greatly. The fact is, there are true and admirable
pioneers, men like Hudson and Thompson, of whom Canada has had
plenty; and there are pioneers of doubtful value like those in Mr.
Service's poems. These latter are picturesque enough in verse,
especially in Mr. Service's verse, which catches the fascination of
the north at times admirably, but the others are the men worth
boasting about.
The rain persisted while we sat talking of all these matters, and the
mountains were hung about with a clammy vapour which spoilt the view
from the train. I should like to have stopped at Glacier, which is
the usual centre for the better-known Selkirks, of which many of the
giants have been climbed only within the last six or seven years, but
I had not time, and they all swam by in the mist, which changed into
dusk as we reached Revelstoke. There a number of lumberjacks filled
up the carriage, and were very cheery and conversational all night.
Having slept only two hours the night before, I should not have
minded being able to get a sleeper, but they were all taken; and
{254} indeed there were not even seats enough to go all round, though
it was a first-class carriage. In any case the lumberjacks in my
part of the carriage would have prevented sleep. Sometimes they
would sit down for a few minutes and tell stories, then they would
dart off to have a look at a carriage-load of Doukhobors who were on
in front and seemed rather better than a show to judge by the
lumbermen's guffaws when they came back from these trips. Canadian
trains may not always be restful, but they are generally
entertaining. The distances traversed are so great that people
cannot afford to sit in them in hunched silence. They have to
unbend, and some of them unbend thoroughly. That is why, though the
ordinary traveller has to pass through great tracts of land in the
train, he is not losing local colour to quite the extent one loses it
in an European train. Some one in the carriage is sure to know
something about the district one is passing through and to be ready
to talk about it. The smoking compartment becomes an animated
club-room in which conversation becomes general on any subject.
There is no better place for a discussion of political problems, and
I fancy a great many Canadians reserve their consideration of these
for {255} the time they have to spend in the train. Certainly they
grow very keen in the train, and I have heard the warmest arguments
and the most libellous denunciations of leading Canadian statesmen
hurled freely about among men who had never set eyes on one another
before. And there are plenty of other arguments with which to pass
the time. As we got to Sicamous Junction, for example, we took on
board two fruit-growers, one of whom was a 'wet' grower and the other
a 'dry.' A wet fruit-grower is a man who does not irrigate his
fruit-land, and a dry fruit-grower is one who, having settled in the
dry belt, has to irrigate. As fierce a debate was started between
these two as ever you heard between exponents of wet and dry
fly-fishing.
[Illustration: IN THE SELKIRKS. THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT.]
As far as fruit-raising is concerned, the 'dry' men appear to have
the advantage. Their contention is that they can turn off the water
so as to leave their trees dry for the winter when frost at wet roots
is so fatal; while they can turn the water on whenever it is wanted
for swelling the fruit. In addition, the dry belt country gets a
longer season of sunshine, which is more favourable for the growth of
the earlier and finer dessert apples. It seems curious that none of
our finest-flavoured apples, {256} such as Cox's Orange Pippin or
Ribston Pippin, seem to come to perfection in Canada; and I found
British Columbian fruit-growers very anxious that English people
should appreciate this fact, and also get to know which are the
British Columbian apples most worth asking for in England, as though
some of the older orchards are still growing comparatively worthless
apples, the new ones are being planted only with a few best kinds,
which are as wine to water. One of these best kinds, by the way, is
called Wine-sap; two of the other selectest varieties being Jonathan
and Winter Banana. The latter is said to have a strong banana
flavour. It is worth the English public's while, if it is going in
largely for British Columbian apples, to encourage only the growing
of the best, and that is to be done by demanding only the best from
our own greengrocers by name. It is just as simple to plant a good
apple tree as it is to plant a bad one, and there is no reason why
the world in general should not eat only the best apples. So long as
people are contented to look only at the colour of the fruit, which
is no criterion whatever, and to pay their greengrocers' price for an
unnamed sort, the best apples will not be for sale, and one will go
on being provided with {257} highly-coloured samples that taste like
inferior turnips.
The weather picked up in the morning, and I was able to see some of
the beauties of the great Fraser River, though I somehow missed the
Chinamen washing for gold, Indians spearing salmon, bright red, split
salmon drying on frames, Chinese cabins and Indian villages with
their beflagged graveyards, which are said to be visible from the car
windows. Perhaps I was talking too much.
{258}
CHAPTER XXVII
A LITTLE ABOUT VANCOUVER CITY
A diminutive Japanese who picked up my fairly heavy trunk, slung it
over his shoulder and walked down the platform with it as though it
were nothing but a shawl, was the first person I met in Vancouver,
reminding me that that land-locked sea below was the Pacific, which
white men do not own but only share with the brown and yellow
Orientals. I wonder--will the day come when the latter want an ocean
all to themselves? And are there, in view of this contingency, plans
of this intricate coast among the Japanese naval archives? They knew
the other side pretty well before the war began with Russia, and they
are not a people to leave things to chance. The yellow men have
known the Pacific coast from San Francisco to Vancouver as long as
the white men, and put in a great deal of work there and eaten much
humble pie, and also realised by the constant {259} rise in their
wages--ten times anything their own country offers--that the white
man is strangely lost without them. They had no flair for colonising
half a century ago, when the rush was made for the Pacific coast, but
they have it now.
Vancouver is very beautifully situated. The ground sloping to the
shut sea, girt with those huge, straight trees that give a sense of
luxuriance to this northern Pacific coast which no tropic country can
excel, is a perfect situation for a big city. Vancouver is a big
city. It is so big that many people are afraid for its immediate
future. They say that it is already far bigger than it has any right
to be, and that by the dubiously beneficent aid of innumerable real
estate men, it is increasing at a pace that is bound to end in
disaster. The slump had been expected in 1909, it was expected last
year, it is expected this year. Some year it will come; and if I
were a patriotic and hard-working inhabitant of Vancouver, I should
then head a deputation which had for its purpose the dumping in the
sea of a large number of the real estate agents who swarm hungrily in
the place. There is a big street entirely filled with their offices,
and the mark of them is {260} everywhere. Mr. A. G. Bradley, in that
encyclopædic work _Canada in the Twentieth Century_, jeers at the
English for their distrust of the real estate man, who, he thinks,
serves a useful and necessary purpose. Better go to the real estate
man, says Mr. Bradley, if you want to buy land, than to the bar
loafer. There is a great deal in that. In individual cases they are
excellent men. But, collected together in vast numbers, as in
Vancouver, they can do mischief in a way the bar loafer never can,
and that is by so magnifying the importance of the buying and selling
of land, that people take to it in exchange for work, and falsely
imagine that enormous prosperity is coming to a place which is in
reality doing nothing but changing its land at fancy and speculative
prices, expecting the prosperity somehow and some day to follow of
itself.
I suppose Seattle, with less justification, is in very much the same
case. Both, besides being ports with great expectations, happen to
be the last place, so to speak, in their respective countries; and
there is something magnetic in the attraction of a last place.
Thither drifts that very considerable population which, by getting on
geographically, almost persuades itself that it is getting on
materially. Having {261} attained the limit, it stays there and does
as little as it can. Such people give a city a false air of
greatness, and are, in fact, a surplus population with nothing to do
but bid up land against one another.
Of course there are plenty of genuine citizens in Vancouver, with all
the enterprise and intelligence that help to make cities great.
Practically, too, the greatness of Vancouver is in the end assured.
It is already a magnificent port, having a big trade with the East,
but nothing to what it will have. The Panama Canal will make it the
centre, by sea, of the world. Again, it is the terminus of the
Canadian Pacific Railway, and is destined, every one says, to become
the terminus of the Grand Trunk, and any other railroad that wants to
outlet on the Pacific. Wheat has begun to come through it from the
prairie that used to go west to Montreal. The new reciprocity treaty
will divert some of this freight to the south, no doubt, but that
remains to be seen. In any case, besides being a port, Vancouver
will remain the business capital of a province endlessly rich in
minerals and timber, and increasingly rich in fruit- and farm-land.
Some day, therefore, Vancouver will extend to those remote spots
{262} where already town lots are being disposed of. Some day.
Only, a big city should not live upon its future; and the sale of
such lots miles off in the backwoods to people who, having bought
them, cannot pay for them or cannot put up houses on them, or cannot
afford to live in those houses even if they put them up, because
there is nothing for them to do there and their money has run
out--this sort of sale, while it enriches the real estate man, does
not enrich anybody else. Moreover, it creates a restless spirit
among those genuine farmers out in the country who would honestly be
farming their land, if real estate agents would leave them alone, and
not persuade them that it is just as profitable a game to hang about
waiting for opportunities to sell their farms in plots. Of course
they, like most other people who get as far as Vancouver, are not
mere innocents. Sellers and buyers are probably equally aware of the
risks they run; but where a tide of speculation sets in, the
shrewdest people seem ready to take the most absurd risks. And the
slump has taken so long in coming, and the possibilities of Vancouver
seem so immense, that speculation in land has become a perfect
fascination.
{263}
'What will it be worth next year?'
That is the formula you constantly see at the end of an advertisement
of some town lot--five miles, perhaps, from anywhere. The correct
answer varies. If the slump does not come off next year, the lot may
be worth double what is being asked for it now. If the slump does
come off it will be worth a twentieth, perhaps, of what was given for
it. Slump or no slump, this method of building up a city is
unsatisfactory. Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg--these have become great
as the centres of comparatively populous provinces, in which wealth
has been gradually and carefully created by agricultural and
industrial enterprises established on a firm basis. The jobs have
been waiting for the men. In Vancouver alone, of all big Canadian
cities, the men are waiting for the jobs, or, what is worse, waiting
in the belief that money comes anyhow, and that jobs are not the
prerequisite of money-making. I do not wish to give the impression
that Vancouver is full of unemployed people, still less of
unemployable ones; merely that many of the people there employed are
not engaged in the undertakings that ensure the continuity of a
city's prosperity.
{264}
Certainly any picture of Vancouver that made it out gloomy would be a
mistake. Nothing could be livelier than its streets and its people;
and if the slump does not come, and the Jeremiahs are wrong,
Vancouver citizens will be justified of any amount of exultation.
Already they have most of the things that make citizens pleased and
proud--a beautiful site, fine streets, the most splendid of public
parks, water-ways innumerable in front, and, behind, a country good
to look at and rich in potentialities. Vancouver's industries, even
if they do not justify the size of the place, are important and
prosperous; and its propinquity to the salmon fisheries and vast
timber tracts of British Columbia is something which alone would make
a great town. In tone it is new world compared with Victoria, but
old world compared with Seattle. There are many English people
there. Living is high. No coin under five cents is, of course, in
use, and when you start the day by paying that sum for a newspaper
marked one cent, you find it difficult to beat down prices during the
rest of the day. Apropos of newspapers, I was told of a very
successful strike among the paper-boys of Vancouver some little time
ago. Many people must have heard {265} of it, but it is worth
retelling. The strike was headed by a youthful organiser, popularly
known as Reddy, from the colour of his hair. Reddy was alleged to be
thirteen years of age at the time, but Pitt was not so much older
when he became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Holding the firm
conviction that he and his fellow-workers were entitled to at least
two cents out of the five for every paper sold (I am not sure of my
figures), Reddy proclaimed a strike, and conducted it so successfully
that the newspaper proprietors of Vancouver were compelled to wait
upon him humbly, and yield in every particular to his demands. Among
historic strikes this seems worthy of a place.
{266}
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HAPPY FARMERS OF THE ISLAND
There are no lotus-lands attached to the Dominion, and will not be,
unless we make over to it at some date the West Indies. But because
Vancouver Island has a climate excelling that of any other part of
Canada, and a beauty of scenery not surpassed anywhere; because also
the men who have settled there have reckoned these possessions dearer
than other things, such as the fat soil of the prairie and the chance
of growing quickly rich, Canadians of the mainland are given at times
to lay a charge of lotus-eating against them. I think the charge is
an unfair one. Life may be less strenuous on the island, and there
are men there, no doubt, who take their work there over easily.
Against this has to be set the fact that the work that does go on in
Vancouver Island goes on all the year round, that the colonists are
men with an eye to the far future as well as to the immediate {267}
one (they have, that is to say, an English ideal of permanent
residence instead of the notion of getting what they can from the
place and decamping), and that in their hands, if the island is not
being developed as fast as it might be, it is at least safe from
spoliation and waste. Some day, when the mainland Canadians have
time to consider the amenities of a country life as well as the
necessities, they will find themselves going to the island for hints.
As one crosses from Vancouver, the beauty of the straits prepares one
a little for the beauty of the island which, so far as I saw it, has
no bare or ugly places. Its coast-line has the contour of the
Scandinavian fiords, but its charm is greater, owing to the luxuriant
growth of the tall and splendid trees. Right to the edge of these
rock-bound sea-water lakes the forest grows--Douglas firs, surely the
finest of all straight-growing trees, cedar and maple, jack-pine and
arbutus, and at their feet, flowers and mosses and saxifrages.
Arriving at Victoria, I went straight through to Duncans, and,
looking from the train, was reminded by the greenness of the land,
freshened by the delicate rain that was falling, of the mountainous
parts of Ceylon--which impression was strengthened by the fact of the
{268} smoking-compartment being crowded with Orientals of all sorts,
mostly Chinese, but Japanese too and some Indians, all seeming very
much at their ease among the white men. It was a harmonious sight;
but what, I wondered, would an Anglo-Indian say if he found himself
condemned to sit with his cheroot among this riff-raff of natives?
and what chance of any agreement on questions affecting our Indian
Empire between the officials of India and these Westerners who admit
the Oriental to an equality with themselves?
I was bound on a visit to friends who had a farm on Quamichan Lake,
and found a buggy waiting for me at Duncans station, driven by an
elderly man who had all the Canadian optimism, in spite of the fact
that he had, in 1882, sold for a song the whole of Edmonton, then in
his possession. Another of the missed millionaires of Canada. He
brought me in the dark to my friends' farm, and when I looked out of
my window next morning, I almost believed myself to be back in
England. A little lake lay two fields below--a fresh-water lake
still and reedy, with woods or orchards sloping to its edge, and in
the distance a ring of hills. It might be Grasmere transported to
some warmer county such as Devonshire; {269} but Devonshire never
grew such stately trees, nor has England anywhere mountains wooded
like these to their peaks. A heat-mist lay on the water, and the
apples in the orchard seemed the reddest I had ever seen. Only the
grass was not English grass, though it was greener than most of the
grass of the new world. All round the lake were farms, belonging
largely to Englishmen, dairy-farming or fruit-farming, making use of
science and co-operation, but not sacrificing beauty to utility.
Perhaps they could not spoil the island if they tried. The trees are
so dominant and stately that every piece of cleared land seems to
look at once like a part of an old English park.
It should have been called New England, this beautiful country which
has so many English people in it, which carries on so much of the
English tradition and sentiment, and which has even the English
pheasant. I saw thousands of pheasants during the days I spent
there. They were put down on the island not so very many years ago,
and they have increased enormously. The deer were already there, and
you may see them in the orchards, unless they are very high-fenced,
at almost any time in the early morning. And there are {270} grouse
and partridges in plenty too, and beasts that England no longer
possesses--the coon and the puma, and the bear and the wolverine. To
see the salmon leaping all across Cowichan Bay, on a bright October
morning, is a sight for sore eyes, if they happen to be an angler's.
To drive along the roads is to realise instantly that they are the
best roads in the Dominion. Duncans is particularly English, even
for Vancouver Island. I think it is vanity and a certain cause of
vexation to expect in the new world a conformity to the ways of the
old, which necessary differences of living--the indispensable growth
of new habits, some of them better than the old--render in time
impossible. Those who expect such a conformity are usually the first
to forget that the old country changes too, and that it is we, as
often as those across the sea, who have forgotten the ancient order
and taken on the new, generally without thought, and often without
reason. Though it is absurd to expect to find Canada a replica in
ideas and habits of the old world, it is nevertheless pleasant to
come upon a community there which, without holding itself too much
apart from its neighbours or standing out against what is
progressive, does represent some peculiarly {271} English qualities
at their best. That is, perhaps, why the island makes a particular
appeal to the man newly out from home. I certainly do not think its
inhabitants are to be charged with stiffness and unadaptability. Men
who have taken on the new life, and work in a spirit of optimism not
less than that shown elsewhere, are rather to be admired than
otherwise if they have retained, and even insist on, what is good in
the old. And a love of sport and beauty and sociability, and even of
leisure, is a good thing, especially when it is found among men who
do their own work as these men do, and more especially when found
among women who work as the women of the island do. The work is the
best of all, but all work and no play turns many people--and not a
few Canadians--not merely into dull folk, but into narrow-minded and
backward ones, who will some day have all the unpleasantness of being
rudely awakened to the fact.
No doubt there are some ne'er-do-weels on the island, but the great
majority of those I met seemed to me to be capable men, likely to do
well by what is the most beautiful, and will some day be, perhaps,
the most valuable part of the Empire.
{272}
CHAPTER XXIX
A CHAT WITH THE PRIME MINISTER OF BRITISH
COLUMBIA AND A BIG FIRE AT VICTORIA
As everybody knows who has been in Canada, there are two hotel
systems in vogue there. By the one system you pay for your room and
board separately, and this is called the European plan. By the other
you take your meals and lodging at a fixed price, and that is called
the American plan.
In much the same way one might say there are two systems of life in
Canada, and indeed elsewhere. By the one you distinguish between
your work and your play, and treat each as a separate item. By the
other you mix the two up, and are apt to consider yourself a
strenuous person. I don't know that it is fair to describe these
respectively as the American and the European system of life; but I
am pretty certain that whether you apply the systems to life or to a
hotel, the results produced by them are not on the whole very
different. {273} Applying them to life, the main distinction seems
to be that the exponents of the strenuous or American method--those
who get their fun out of their work and their holidays out of their
forced travel, or their compulsory rest by doctor's orders--are
frequently led to confuse the appearance of work with the reality,
and to be disentitled to wear that air of superiority which, in the
presence of confessed believers of leisure, they too frequently
assume. For, when all is said and done, leisure is as necessary to
man as work, and everybody takes it, whatever he may think.
Vancouver laughs at Victoria for its dead-aliveness and want of
hustle. Victoria smiles at Vancouver for its restlessness and
superfluity of energy.
Now you see the point of my aphorism. I do not propose to hold the
balance between these distinguished cities. Both have their peculiar
merits; and if Vancouver is likely in years to come to leave Victoria
far behind in the race for industrial supremacy, Victoria is none the
less likely to remain ahead of Vancouver in culture and the arts. At
present I should judge that Victoria is distinctly the steadier city
of the two. Speculation in land is the exception rather than the
rule; prices go {274} up steadily, and the land is bought by
intending residents. At which point I will abandon comparisons,
which are the more absurd because the destinies of the two towns are
so widely different. Vancouver is a great port on the mainland of
Canada, connecting it with Asia, the western States, South America,
and whatever countries will henceforth export merchandise via the
Panama Canal. Victoria is the political capital of British Columbia,
with all the prestige that attaches to such a position and the finest
climate in the Dominion. Not that it is only that. Some of its
inhabitants consider that its prospects are immeasurably superior to
those of Seattle, 'since the riches of Vancouver Island' (I quote
from a local pamphlet), 'in their entirety incomparably more valuable
than the gold-mines of Alaska, are directly tributary to the British
Columbia capital.'
There is a great deal in this, though one has to remember that those
riches will take many years to develop. The drawback to the
immediate development of Vancouver Island is that it is covered with
enormous timber. Reciprocity with the States is likely to give a
fillip to the lumber industry, and the clearing of the land will then
go on far quicker than {275} hitherto. True, lumbermen do not
actually clear the land; they leave the stumps behind them, and all
the poorer trees. But they undoubtedly open the land up. Moreover,
the revival of Esquimalt as a naval base will revive the prestige of
Victoria, and create more work, besides inducing railwaymen to press
on into the island.
I stopped there on my way back, partly to see the town itself, partly
because I wished to see Mr. Richard M'Bride. The town disappointed
me just a little. It commands a magnificent view of the mountains on
the mainland, and the country all round is beautiful. But the villas
and gardens, which one hears so much praised, struck me as a little
commonplace. Perhaps it is that I like a town to be a town and a
garden to be a garden; whereas Victoria is a sort of garden city,
grateful no doubt to those eyes that are accustomed to the
utilitarian towns of the West, but altogether lacking in
architectural fineness. The Parliament Buildings are good, and would
be very good if those responsible for their maintenance would remove
the inscription 'Canada' from across the front of them. In its
coloured lettering it looks like the icing-sugar mottoes you see
inscribed on birthday cakes.
{276}
But let a more enthusiastic pen than mine (again I fall back on that
local pamphlet) describe Victoria as it appears to Victorians.
'If there are sights more beautiful than the Olympian Mountains from
Beacon Hill, or the windings of the Gorge as the waters come in from
the sea between waving battlements of plumy firs, then eyes have not
seen them. If there is a sweeter song than the skylark's matin
melodies high up from Cadboro Bay, then ears have not heard it. If
there be more bewildering loveliness than clusters about the shaded
and flower-gemmed gardens of Victorian homes looking seaward, then
poets have not written it in imperishable numbers, nor minstrels
celebrated it in well-remembered song. If there be a city of dreams,
even the fabled Atlantis of antiquity, or vision of Babylonian towers
set in hanging gardens, and redolent of strange odours of musk and
myrrh, or fairy casements opening out to perilous seas forlorn, then
never one approached in splendour this jewel of all time, ringed by
the azure seas and sentinelled by everlasting hills.... A bird's
song drops like the sudden peal of a bell. Outside are broad
boulevards, grey with powdery macadam, stretching towards the
bustling city; highways of progress and {277} modernity, now scrolled
by the flight of a whizzing automobile, now echoing with the staccato
sound of hurrying hoof-beats. Inside are flowers and brooding
hedges, the sheen of close-cropped grasses and sun-lacquered
tree-trunks--rest, peace, and sweet seclusion.'
After this it comes almost as a relief to know from the same pamphlet
that 'the climate of Victoria is best expressed in figures.' There
is a great deal to be said for figures.
There is a very good, small, natural-history museum in a wing
attached to the Parliament Buildings, but it is absurdly small. The
collection of Indian curios is remarkably inadequate, and merely
tempts the visitor to ask when Canadians are going to devote some of
the money they are undoubtedly making to a genuine study and
collection of the remains of their predecessors in the land. Indians
are not dying out as fast as some people suppose; but their crafts
are, and so are their creeds and all that appertains to them. It
would be easy even now to create a magnificent Indian museum, but it
will become less and less easy as the years go by. Relics of Indian
times are constantly being picked up by men travelling in
out-of-the-way parts, or unearthed during railroad and other {278}
excavations, and if it were known that the authorities would be glad
to receive them and would perhaps pay the cost of their carriage to
some centre, there is no doubt that many valuable finds would be
forwarded to them. The making of museums, just like the building of
ships, is a branch of empire work which should not be neglected; and
Victorians are eminently the people to recognise this.
It was in his rooms in Parliament Buildings that Mr. M'Bride
conversed with me on the subject of British Columbia. You hear
people say in Canada, that if ever that astutest of party leaders,
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, goes out of office with his Liberals, Mr.
M'Bride will shortly after become Prime Minister of the Dominion--as
Conservative leader, be it understood. He is not a great orator, and
he has no scheme even for a party millennium. That, however, in
Canada is a strength rather than a weakness. Politicians are not
expected in Canada to bring about the millennium: indeed, so far as I
could make out, the average Canadian is of opinion that when the
millennium comes, it will be noticeable for an absence of
politicians. They have not our reverence for these great men. But
on the other hand, they require from them evidence of qualities which
{279} may or may not be present in our ministers. One is a readiness
to seize opportunity as it comes. Another is, to have a practical
understanding of the ways of finance. Yet a third is, to be in touch
with men and things--the sort of quality we mean, however vaguely,
when we raise the cry of a Cabinet of Business Men. All these
qualities Mr. M'Bride possesses, together with that readiness to seem
agreeable which is almost a necessity to a public man.
Mr. M'Bride confined his conversation with me to British Columbia--a
big enough subject for a short interview. I wished to know if the
survey of the province was being carried out as quickly as possible.
In a vast country like British Columbia, it seems one of the most
important things. The right to acquire land must be made simple and
certain. Mr. M'Bride declared that surveying was going on as fast as
men and money could do it, and referred me to the surveyor-general
for details. I wish I could go further into the subject, but there
is no space for it here. Then we got on to education, and Mr.
M'Bride asked me to assure the working men of England that the
education facilities of British Columbia were as fine as any to be
got anywhere. {280} Perhaps this is so, though I heard some
criticism of the public schools from another eminent Victorian. It
is easier, perhaps, to be enthusiastic than to be unanimous about any
given system of education. To take but one small point, the
co-education of boys and girls is a thing upon which people are not
agreed even in British Columbia.
I was on the steamboat, ready to start for Vancouver, when the great
fire of 1910 broke out in the town. With a considerable wind blowing
it seemed to me not improbable that the whole of Victoria would be
burnt down that night, and I had sufficient of the journalistic
instinct to leave my things to go on by the boat and to go back
myself to watch the blaze. Luckily the wind dropped and the fire was
kept to one quarter, and I rather regretted my haste when I found
myself stranded in Victoria at three o'clock in the morning. Still,
it was worth while to have been there, if only to observe the working
of the Canadian mind in a crisis of this sort. In England you would
have heard ejaculations of horror and much sympathy expressed with
those who were bound to suffer by the fire. The Victorian crowd took
it quite differently. 'This'll create more work,' said one {281} man
fervidly. 'Just what the town needed,' said another enthusiast.
'We'll be able to have a better-looking street there after this.
Those shops weren't good enough.' I even heard some of the men who
had rushed out of their burning offices talking keenly and proudly of
the sort of buildings they'd have to start putting up next day--much
better buildings. Presumably they were insured, but even so men in
the old country would have been a little shocked and perturbed, and
regretful of the old rooms they were accustomed to. I fell asleep,
when I had found a hotel, almost oppressed by the optimism of Canada.
{282}
CHAPTER XXX
BACK THROUGH OTTAWA
It was just before sunrise that I first saw Ottawa. I was on my way
back from Vancouver, and had spent four successive days in the train,
getting out only for minutes at a time to stamp about platforms where
the train waited long enough to permit of such exercise.
Such days, varied only by meals for which one is always looking, but
never hungry, tend to become monotonous, even though one spends them
mostly in the observation car. The fact is, observation pure and
simple is one of the most difficult things possible to a member of
the human tribe--as hard as doing compulsory jig-saws; and reading
humorous American magazines, one after the other, is an alternative
that also requires the strong mind. If I must travel long distances
by train, I want to be the engine-driver.
The country, I thought, looked less attractive {283} as I repassed it
now than it looked before, and I put this down to the freeze-up,
which had come unusually early, people kept saying, and gave to the
land a black and ruffled look, like a sick bird's. Later it would be
beautiful again in snow, and the life and work of the season of snow
would begin. Meanwhile, people in the little northerly stations we
passed had the appearance of having stopped work. You saw them
standing about--always with their backs to buildings to get out of
the shrivelling wind. I suppose in most of these places there is a
between-time in which nobody can work.
Nothing much was doing in Ottawa when I got out there, but that of
course was due to the earliness of the hour. It was so early that
when I reached a hotel they told me breakfast was not to be had for
some time yet, and so, since I was too wide-awake to go to sleep
again, I thought I would spend the hour looking at the Dominion
Parliament Buildings. Perhaps it was the too early hour, perhaps it
was the coldness of the wind blowing round that bluff above the river
on which the famous buildings stand--but I could feel none of that
satisfaction, when I looked at them, which great architecture gives.
The {284} situation is fine, but not the buildings. Anthony Trollope
has written of them:--'As regards purity of art and manliness of
conception, the work is entitled to the very highest praise.... I
know no modern Gothic purer of its kind or less sullied with
fictitious ornamentation'--but I think he must have breakfasted
handsomely first. Some one else, but I forget who, and it does not
matter, has described the buildings as 'a noble pile,' which seems to
hit the mark, if, as I fancy, that mid-Victorian expression suggests
something on so large a scale, which has obviously cost such a lot of
money, that vague admiration is the least of the emotions which
should be produced by a sight of it. 'A noble pile,' then, let them
remain, especially since, seen from some distance, with the beautiful
river below and a spacious country stretched before them, they
possess a certain imposing appearance. Closer up, one is less
impressed. There is a long-backed unmeaning set to the buildings, as
though the architects had found concentration a vexation, and had
decided to extend instead. Still, they might have elaborated
painfully, and they did not--except for those little turrets on the
side-buildings, surmounted by railings which one associates chiefly
with {285} the London area. Area railings are meant, I suppose, to
prevent errand-boys from falling into the areas, but there can be few
errands to the roof of the Parliament Buildings. In passing, I did
not like those hundreds of silly little windows that peep all round:
one, as it were, for every official to peep from.
Reflection should serve to temper criticism, however. The year 1867,
in which the Dominion Parliament required its Houses, was not one of
brilliant achievement in the architectural world; and when it is
remembered that Canada itself was also a new country, the wonder is
that nothing worse was built. Only a few years before, we in England
had been transfixed with admiration of the Crystal Palace; Royal
Academicians were above criticism, and 'almost too great to live';
bright in the sun gleamed the Albert Memorial. We ruled the waves,
but not the arts; and 'our daughter of the snows' took over our large
ideas and our little taste in building.
Whether she took over our political ideas is another matter, upon
which I pondered as I contemplated those Parliament Buildings. There
stood the House in which Sir John Macdonald evolved that
east-and-west policy which seemed such an empire-cementing thing;
{286} where Sir Wilfrid Laurier teaches the world how to lead a
party; where not as yet had been ratified that Reciprocity Agreement
with America which has been agitating our statesmen so much this
year, though, even as I gazed, it must have been in course of
construction. Would an Imperial Parliament sit there some day, I
wondered, and direct the affairs of the British Empire from what
would be, not so long hence, a far more central and important spot
than Westminster? I could not quite imagine it. I could not even
like the idea, as some Imperialists at any price can. Home Rule for
England is one of the policies I shall always stand for, I believe;
even when Canadians have that grasp of Imperial affairs which we in
England impute to them--by comparison, we generally mean, with our
own English political opponents--that grasp which, as a matter of
fact, is much less common among them at present than it is among us,
whether we be Liberals or Conservatives.
I wish our party political system allowed of our minimising the zeal
and intelligence of the side opposed to us without magnifying those
qualities in a third party which, in strict reality, it scarcely
possesses. I wish, for example, that Tariff Reformers could deride
{287} the Imperialistic attitude of Free Traders (and vice versa)
without declaring that Canadians could in this matter teach us all
lessons. For the truth is that Canadians could not give lessons to
either in this matter. They have an Imperial sentiment all right,
but they do not worry over it as we do. Take that question of
Preference which has been making us all so hot for several years now.
It never troubled Canadians at all. They thought that there was a
good deal in it from a business point of view, and they were prepared
to try it--and did so. But they never for a moment fancied or
perturbed themselves with thinking that, either with or without it,
the Empire would totter to its fall. Our fervours left them entirely
cool; and in that business-like state of coolness, after duly
granting us Preference, they have, equally duly in their opinion, set
out to establish reciprocity with the States. The only thing likely
to make them hot in this matter is the suggestion that they have been
lacking in Imperial spirit. Of course they had been lacking in that
early, romantic, self-immolating and fantastically quaint, Imperial
spirit which we attributed to them--just to make our own Little
Englanders try and feel ashamed; but, equally again, they {288} never
had it, and would not dream of claiming it even if they could be made
to understand what our devotees meant by it. To forgo trade in order
to uphold the flag would not appeal to a Canadian--mainly for the
reason that the idea would strike him as grotesque.
In the matter of this Reciprocity Agreement, then, I think it is we
who are wrong if we make it a reproach to the Canadians. It may or
may not be a sound economic proceeding, but it is entered upon
without prejudice to Imperial sentiment. Only if we first assume
that all Canadians have been burning for years past with the same
zeal for an Imperial Zollverein that has animated our own Tariff
Reformers, can we now credit them with cooling off and backsliding.
But such an assumption would be a very great mistake. All
assumptions that Canadians view our political problems from our point
of view are great mistakes. They no more do so than we view theirs
from their point of view. We do not. Nothing struck me more
forcibly than the fact that what causes us political turmoil in Great
Britain is viewed with complete coolness in Canada, and that what
Canadians are keen after remains unknown to us. While I was there, I
kept seeing letters {289} in English papers (reproduced
sometimes--but very briefly--in Canadian papers) saying that Canada
was whole-hearted for Tariff Reform, or that Canadian Free Traders
were sweeping the country; whereas the fact was and is, that these
two terms (whatever might in reality be the state of Canadian
parties) never conveyed in the least in Canada what we mean by them,
and therefore conveyed no truth that could be understood of both
peoples equally.
Does this inter-Imperial lack of comprehension threaten the future of
the Empire? It might seem so at first. Lack of understanding
between fellow-citizens cannot be a good thing in itself. But it has
this merit, that it makes real interference on either side a rare
thing. If we understood--or believed we understood--what was for the
future welfare of Canada, it is doubtful if we could refrain from
pointing it out, even if we could refrain from insisting upon it. If
the Canadians thought themselves capable of directing us in the right
way--say in the management of India--they would feel urged to give
their opinion, and Anglo-Indian officials, having this last straw
added to their backs, would strike _en masse_. As it is, we let each
other's real problems {290} alone, and are satisfied with our own
solutions of them. Imperial Conferences are necessary because in
some matters the Empire must work together, having the same
interests. Cables and Dreadnoughts are cases in point. That Great
Britain still bears the main expenditure in all such matters is
proof, if proof be needed, that what American papers somewhat
unkindly call 'British Island Politics' are, still, more Imperial
than the politics of any other part of the Empire. We pay and we ask
for little in return, and the Empire will go on, even now that Canada
has become a nation. Only some mistake could, I think, part us--a
mistake as big as that which parted us from the United States--and we
are not likely to make it; nor is Canada likely to wish for it,
however great she may picture and make her own destiny. But that she
will want to rule entirely in her own house is certain. Canadians
themselves--the voters I mean--are not likely for a long time to wish
for much more than they have in the way of national liberty. I do
not think they would much worry as to whether their ambassador at
Washington, for example, was appointed from Ottawa or from London.
The results in either case would be likely to be very similar, {291}
and in any case, as I have said, Canadians are not obsessed at
present with politics. But it has to be remembered that besides
Canadian voters, there are Canadian politicians, and since it is in
the nature of politicians to be at least as ambitious as other
people, it is natural that Canadian politicians should want in their
own hands all the important posts that are to be had. Just at
present Canadians take such a disrespectful view of politicians in
general--which is unfair no doubt to their own political
representatives, but natural perhaps in a new country which has not
too much time to reflect upon the real benefactions politicians may
confer, and rather fancies, from isolated examples, that 'graft' is
what they are usually after--that they are not likely to demand of
their own accord more power to the hand of their own statesmen. But
the accord of voters depends in due course upon the persuasive powers
of candidates, and I foresee the candidates persuading pretty hard in
the near future: all of which will make work for Imperial Conferences
of the near future, but not, it is to be hoped, impossible work.
I find that having represented myself as reflecting upon Canadian
politics outside the {292} Dominion Parliament Buildings, I have
altogether omitted Canadian politics in favour of Imperial
considerations. Beyond showing, or rather trying to show, that
Canadian politics--the things that really interest Canadians--are not
in the least what we are accustomed to think them, I have got no
further at all. Still, that--if I have shown it--is something, for
it may suggest to some gentle reader that an Empire is not a simple,
extended Great Britain, in which every one thinks precisely the same
things to be of the same immediate importance; of which all the
emotions and reflections may be realised in full by a perusal, let us
say, of the Standard of Empire.
And so I remove myself from that bluff above the river at Ottawa to
my hotel, and thence to divers parts of that charming town, which
looked then--for Parliament was not sitting--something like Oxford
out of term; and thence to the train carrying me back to Montreal and
Quebec.
Afterwards came the return across the Atlantic to a country smaller
than Canada--(less than a week of steaming, my friends), in company
with Canadians who were returning to see what the old place was like
after many years. I think they would not be {293} ill-pleased with
it, small as it is by comparison. I hope they found behind it some
of the qualities which, as it seems to me, are to be found also in
THE FAIR DOMINION, making it to my eyes yet more fair.
{294}
INDEX
ABBOTT, MOUNT, 215.
Alaska, 274.
Alberta, 13, 138, 141, 142, 143, 164, 165, 217.
Alps, the, 177, 180, 199.
Angell, Norman, 68.
Annunzio, Gabriel d', 178.
Anticosti, 16.
Archangel, 13.
Athelmer, 233, 238.
BAIE ST. PAUL, 40.
Banff, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183.
Beacon Hill, 276.
Beaupré, 47, 48, 49, 50.
Beaupré, Ste. Anne de, 48, 51, 53.
Bears, Grizzly, 246-50.
Belle Isle, 16.
Birmingham, 156.
Blondin, 90.
Bourassa, Mr., 30, 31, 33, 85, 86.
Bourne, Archbishop, 17.
Bow River, 141, 144, 179.
Bradley, A. G., 31.
British Columbia, 188, 216, 237, 238, 256, 274, 279.
Bruce, Randolph, 221, 222, 225.
Brussels, 88.
CADBORO' BAY, 276.
Calgary, 141, 143, 144, 145, 163, 164, 170, 195.
Canadian Pacific Railway, 18, 141, 142, 152, 162, 182, 261.
Cartier, 40.
Ceylon, 267.
Champlain, 35, 42.
Chicago, 159.
Chicoutimi, 39, 43.
Chuzzlewit, Martin, 128.
Colonial Intelligence for Educated Women, Committee of, 195.
Columbia River, 218, 219, 222, 224, 230, 233.
Columbia Valley, 215, 216, 225, 234, 238.
Cooper, Fenimore, 92.
Covent Garden, 117.
DICKENS, CHARLES, 29, 90.
Dufferin Terrace, 26, 27, 28.
Duncans, 267, 268, 270.
EDEN CITY, 129.
Edmonton, 268.
Eliott, Professor, 163.
Emerald Lake, 206.
_Empress of Britain_, S.S., 1.
Eucharistic Congress, the, 17, 77, 78, 79.
FARNHAM, MOUNT, 229.
Fort William, 114.
Fraser River, 257.
Free Trade, 29, 149, 287.
French River, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102.
GLACIER HOUSE, 215.
Glasgow, 73.
Golden, 215, 216, 217, 218, 224, 232, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, 244.
Gordon, Adam, 252.
Grand Trunk Railway, 261.
Grasmere, 268.
HAMMERSMITH, 94.
Hampstead Heath, 117.
Heights of Abraham, 34.
Hennepin, Father Louis, 89.
Hesse, Landgraf of, 226.
Hewlett, Maurice, 250.
Higgsville, 128.
Himalayas, the, 177, 227.
Home Rule, 31.
Hoogly, the, 44.
Howells, W. D., 90.
Hudson Bay Company, 115.
IMPERIALISM, 33, 36, 287, 290.
Illecillewaet Glacier, the Great, 215.
Iron Top Mountain, 224.
Irrigation Company, Columbia Valley, 237.
Irrigation Works, Columbia Valley, 221.
KAMLOOPS, 216, 229.
Keats, John, 200.
Kildonan, 123, 124.
Kinchinjunga, 177.
Kipling, Rudyard, 105, 106, 253.
LACHINE RAPIDS, 77.
Laggan, 200.
Laurentian Mountains, 27.
Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 278, 286.
Liverpool, 1.
LONDON CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, 152.
London, 73, 86, 117, 118, 119, 285.
Loti, Pierre, 110, 111.
Louise, Lake, 198, 199, 200, 206.
Lourdes, 47.
MACDONALD, SIR JOHN, 285.
Manchester, 156.
Manitoba, 114, 144.
Marseilles, 77.
Maskinongé, 93, 96, 99, 100.
M'Bride, Richard, 275, 278, 279.
Meredith, George, 130.
Montmorency Falls, 38, 39, 49, 50.
Montreal, 17, 34, 45, 56, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76,
77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 292.
Moosejaw, 126, 156.
Moraine Lake, 201, 204.
Murray Bay, 40.
Muskoka Lakes, 92.
NAPOLEON, 120.
National Park, 179, 181.
New Brunswick, 32, 237, 238, 242.
New York, 39, 51, 154, 159.
Niagara Falls, 38, 89, 90.
Nightingale, 163, 165, 166.
North Pole, 136.
Nottingham, 28.
Nova Scotia, 32.
OJIBWAY, AN, 96, 97, 99, 100.
Okanagan, 216, 219.
Olympian Mountains, 276.
Ontario, 8, 13, 32, 33, 45, 85, 109, 111, 112, 113, 141, 151.
Orléans, Ile d', 40.
Ottawa, 84, 282, 283, 292.
Oxford, 77, 292.
PANAMA CANAL, 261, 274.
Paris, 77, 117, 158.
Parkman, Francis, 41, 42.
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 31.
Peterborough, 8, 81.
Pickerel, 95, 98.
Pitt, William, 265.
Police, North-West Mounted, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136.
Port Arthur, 114.
QUAMICHAN LAKE, 268.
Quebec, 18, 20, 22, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 45, 49, 50, 53,
56, 60, 61, 64, 111, 112, 292.
REVELSTOKE, 253.
Red River, 123, 144.
'Reddy,' 265.
Regina, 82, 126, 131, 132, 136, 156, 218.
Remittance Men, 161.
Rockefeller, 23.
Rockies, the, 170, 171, 177, 181, 198, 209, 215, 216, 230.
Rome, 34, 79.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 45.
Russia, 135.
SAGUENAY, 37, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46.
San Francisco, 258.
St. Irénée, 40.
St. John, Reversible Falls of, 237.
St. Laurent, 67, 68.
St. Lawrence, 16, 26, 34, 39, 40, 44, 57.
St. Malo, 41.
Saskatchewan, 144.
Seattle, 260, 264, 274.
Selkirk, Lord, 123.
Selkirks, the, 215, 216, 224, 225, 253.
Siegfried, André, 18, 147.
Sir Donald, Mount, 215.
Spain, 156.
Spillamacheen, 232, 234, 237.
Strathmore, 163, 164.
Sudbury, 102, 107.
Superior, Lake, 114.
TADOUSAC, 40, 41, 42, 44.
Tariff Reform, 149, 286, 288.
Thames, 94.
Thebes, 127, 128, 129.
Toronto, 29, 65, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93.
Town Planning Bill, 140.
Trachoma, 3.
Trinité, Cap, 43, 44.
Trollope, Anthony, 284.
ULSTER, 33.
VALLEY OF THE TEN PEAKS, 201, 202, 204.
Vancouver, 196, 236, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 273,
274, 282.
Vancouver Island, 266-71, 274.
Vannutelli, Cardinal, 78.
Victoria, 196, 267, 273, 275, 277, 280.
WALKER, BRUCE, 119, 120.
Webb, Captain, 90.
Wilmer, 216, 220, 221, 224, 232, 236.
Windermere, Lake, 222, 223.
Winnipeg, 8, 84, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 127, 128, 130,
144.
Wolfe, General, 34, 35, 39.
Wood, Major, 34.
World's Fair, the, 82, 83, 87, 88.
YOHO VALLEY, 206, 207, 209, 210.
Young Women's Christian Association, 196.
Yukon, 188, 250, 251, 252.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
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