Chapter XV: The Map That Is Half Unrolled 419 (12)

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

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

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

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

“What would it cost?” I inquired.

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

That cheered us up tremendously, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The freight trains of the railroadless frontier.”

“The rest-houses are built entirely of logs and occasionally surrounded by stockades.”

SCENES ON THE CARIBOO TRAIL.]

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

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

“Well,” said one of them apologetically, “we do a lot better up here than you’d think. Why, last season we cut a hundred tons of hay and this year, now that we’ve cleared some more land, we’ll probably get a hundred and fifty.”

“A hundred tons of hay!” I exclaimed, with pity in my voice. “Heavens alive, man, what does that amount to?”

“It amounted to something over ten thousand dollars,” he answered. “Up here, you see, hay is a pretty profitable crop—it sells for a hundred dollars a ton. Besides, we like the life jolly well. It’s a bit lonely, of course, but we’re fond of the open and there’s all sort of fishin’ and shootin’—there’s a skin of a grizzly that I killed last week tacked up at the back of the house. And,” he added, with a hint of embarrassment, “this life is a lot more worth while than loafin’ around London and doin’ the society-Johnnie act. We feel, y’ know, as though we were doin’ a bit toward buildin’ up the country—sort of bally pioneers.”

Though they probably didn’t know it, those two young fellows in flannel shirts and cord breeches, who had evidently left England because they were tired of living _à la métronome_, because they had wearied of garden-parties and club windows and the family pew, were members in good standing of the Brotherhood of Nation Builders.

Though we had started from Quesnel with sixty gallons of gasoline, the going had been so heavy that by the time we reached the telegraph hut at Bobtail Lake, where the development company of which I have already spoken had left the first of its drums of gasoline, our supply was seriously diminished. These relay telegraph stations are scattered at intervals of fifty miles or so along that single strand of copper wire, two thousand miles long, which connects Dawson City with Vancouver. Many of them are so remotely situated that the only time the operators see a white man’s face or hear a white man’s voice is when the semiannual pack-train brings them their supplies in the spring and fall. I can conceive of no more intolerable existence than the lives led by these men, sitting at deal tables within the lithograph-covered walls of their log cabins, with no neighbours, no amusements, nothing under the sun to do save listen to the ceaseless chatter of a telegraph instrument, day after day, week after week, month after month the same. Imagine the monotony of it! There were two young men at the Bobtail Lake hut, an operator and a linesman, and when they saw the little flag of stripes and stars fluttering from the bonnet of the car they waved their hats and cheered madly. To you who lead sheltered lives in offices or factories or stores, the flag may be nothing more than a bit of red-white-and-blue bunting, but to those who live in the earth’s far corners, where it is rarely seen, it stands for home and country and family and friends, and is reverenced accordingly.

“It seems darned good to see the old flag again,” one of the young men remarked a trifle huskily. “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on it in more’n two years. When we heard you coming through the woods we thought we must be dreaming. We never expected to see an automobile up in this God-forsaken hole.”

“You’re not a Canadian, then?” I asked.

“Not on your tintype. I’m from Tennessee. Used to be a train-despatcher down in Texas, got tired of living in a box car with no trees but sage-brush and no neighbours but coyotes, so I wandered up here. And believe me, I wish I was back in God’s country again.”

That night we spent at a ranch on the Blackwater. The English owner and his wife were absent in Vancouver, but the ranch hand in charge of the place was only too willing to play the part of host. The ranch-house, though built of logs, for up there there is nothing else to build with, was considerably more pretentious than the general run of frontier dwellings. Instead of the customary kitchen-living-dining-sleeping room, it had a comfortable living-room with a hospitable stone fireplace and the floor thickly strewn with bearskins, and two sleeping rooms, while in front, in pathetic imitation of some old-country garden, was a tiny plat set out to fuchsias and mignonette and geraniums and surrounded by an attempt at a picket fence. The floor of the house was of planks hand-hewn; cedar poles laid lengthwise and covered with shakes and sod formed a roof impervious to snow or rain; the chinks in the log walls were stuffed with moss and clay and papered over with illustrations torn from the London weeklies. Like nearly all of the houses that we saw in the interior of the province, its furniture was crude and obviously home-made, with benches instead of chairs, for the freighters, who charge thirty cents a pound for hauling merchandise in from the railway, refuse to bother with anything so unprofitable as chairs, which require space out of all proportion to their weight. Lying on the table in the living-room, atop of a heap of year-old newspapers and magazines (for in the north country printed matter of any description is something to be read and reread and then read once again before it is passed on to a neighbour) were two much-thumbed volumes. I picked them up, for I was curious to see what sort of literature would appeal to people who lived their lives in such a place. One was the “Discourses of Epictetus,” the other “Manners and Social Usages”—with a book-mark at the chapter entitled “The Etiquette of Visiting Cards”! And the nearest neighbour, a Swedish rancher with a Siwash wife, lived fifty miles away.

If the food at Blackwater had been as good as the house, or only half as good, there would have been little left to be desired. The ranch hand who was in charge of the place and who did the cooking—he vouchsafed the information that he had been a British soldier in India before coming to Canada to seek his fortune and wished to God that he was back in India again—made it a point, so he told us, to bake enough soda-biscuits the first of every month to last until the next month came round. As we were there about the twenty-eighth, the biscuits were quite hard—like dog-biscuits, only not so appetising. Then we had a platter of “sow-belly” swimming in an ocean of rancid grease; stone-cold boiled potatoes, a pan of the inevitable stewed prunes, and mugs of evil-looking coffee, which was really chicory in disguise. But what would you? This was not Fifth Avenue; this was the Frontier.

I was particularly impressed throughout our journey across British Columbia with the almost paternal interest the provincial government takes in the welfare of the settlers. On trees and buildings everywhere are posted crown-surmounted notices relating to everything from the filing of homestead claims to the prevention of forest-fires. Rest-houses are maintained by the government along certain of the less-travelled routes; new roads are being cut through the wilderness in every direction; forest-rangers and agricultural experts are constantly riding about the province with open eyes and ears; in every settlement is stationed a government agent from whom the settlers can obtain information and advice on every subject under the sun. Law and order prevail to an extraordinary degree. I was told that there are only three police constables between Ashcroft and Fort George, a distance of more than three hundred miles—and this in a savage and sparsely settled country, where a criminal would have comparatively little difficulty in making his escape. This remarkable absence of crime is due in large measure, no doubt, to the rigid prohibition of the sale of alcoholic liquor within a certain distance of a public work, such as the building of a railway; in fact, the workman is debarred from intoxicants as rigorously as the Indian. “No drink, no crime,” say the authorities, and results have shown that they know what they are talking about. Not until the railway is completed and the construction gangs have moved on are the saloons permitted to throw open their doors. Although this policy unquestionably makes for law and order, it is by no means popular with the workmen, who refuse to consider any place deserving of the name of town until it has obtained a licence. “Such and such a place is a hell of a fine town,” I was frequently assured. “They’ve got a saloon there!” Judged by this standard, Fort George, which is a division point on the Grand Trunk Pacific, at the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers, and will unquestionably become in time a second Winnipeg or Calgary, is a veritable metropolis, for it has considerably more than its share of gin-palaces and booze joints. The poet has vividly described it in a single couplet:

“The camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare,
Its gambling dens ariot, its gramophones all ablare.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that Fort George is a Mecca for the dry of throat, who make bacchanalian pilgrimages from incredible distances to its bottle-decorated shrines; for if a man is determined to “go on a jag” no power on earth, not even a journey of a hundred miles or more, can prevent him from gratifying his desires. Indeed, it is by no means unusual for a man to work on a ranch or on the railway until he has accumulated a half year’s wages, and then, throwing up his job, to tramp a hundred miles through the wilderness to Fort George and blow every last cent of his hard-earned money in one grand jamboree. What a sudden falling off in intemperance there would be in a civilised community if a man had to walk a hundred miles to get a drink! What? Yet this proscription of alcohol has, in a way, defeated its own object, for the men, being denied what might be described as legal liquors, resort to innumerable more or less efficient substitutes. Red ink they will swallow with avidity, for it contains a good percentage of low-grade alcohol, and the colour, no doubt, completes the illusion. Another popular refreshment is lemon extract, such as is commonly used in civilised households for flavouring jellies and puddings. But the favourite beverage, which is to all other alcoholic substitutes what vintage champagne is to all other wines, is a certain patent medicine which contains _eighty per cent of pure alcohol_. This is as common in the “end-of-steel” towns and the construction camps as cocktails are in a New York club, both workmen and Indians pouring it down like water. It is warranted to cure all pains, and it does, for the man who drinks two bottles of it is dead to the world for at least a day.

As a result of its popularity with the thirsty ones, Fort George might truthfully be described as a very lively town. In one of its saloons twelve white-aproned individuals are constantly on duty behind a bar of polished oak; behind the cash-register sits a watchful man with a cocked revolver on his knees; while mingling with the crowd in front of the bar are three bull-necked, big-bicepsed persons known as the “chuckers-out.” Instead of throwing a patron who becomes obstreperous into the street, however, in which case he would stagger to the saloon opposite and get rid of the balance of his money, he is thrown into the “cooler,” where he is given an opportunity to sleep off the effects of his debauch, after which he is ready to start in all over again. As a result of this ingenious system of conservation, very little money gets away.

These frontier communities have handled the perplexing problem of the social evil in a novel manner. The bedecked and bedizened women who follow in the wake of the gold seekers and the construction gangs, instead of being permitted to flaunt themselves within the town, are forced to reside in colonies of their own well without the municipal limits, sometimes half a dozen miles back in the bush. The miner who wishes to see his light-o’-love is compelled, therefore, to expend a considerable amount of time and shoe-leather, though I regret to add that this did not appear to act as a serious deterrent, the deepest-worn trails that I saw in the Northland being those which led from the settlements to these colonies of easy virtue.

Shortly after we left Blackwater Ranch it began to rain—not a sudden shower which comes and drenches and goes, but one of those steady, disheartening drizzles, which in this region sometimes last for a week. The road—I call it a road merely for the sake of politeness—which had been atrocious from the moment we left the Fraser, quickly became worse. It was composed of the decayed vegetable accumulations of centuries, saturated with stagnant water, thus forming a very sticky and very slippery material peculiar to British Columbia, known as “muskeg.” Though it looks substantial enough, with its top growth of stubble and moss, it combines the most unpleasant qualities of Virginia red clay, Irish peat-bog, Mexican adobe, and New Orleans molasses. To make matters worse, a drove of several hundred cattle had recently preceded us, so that the road, which was inconceivably bad under any circumstances, had been trampled into a black morass which no vehicle could by any possibility get through. There was only one thing for us to do and that was to corduroy the road, or at least the worst stretches of it. I have heard veterans of the Civil War dwell on the difficulties of corduroying roads for the guns to pass over in the swamps of the Chickahominy, but I didn’t appreciate the truth of their remarks until I tried it myself. While camping in various parts of the world I had used an axe in a dilettante sort of way for cutting tent-poles and chopping fire-wood, but there is a vast deal of difference between that sort of thing and cutting down enough trees to pave a road. In an hour our hands were so blistered that every movement of the axe helve brought excruciating pain; but it was a question of corduroying that road or else abandoning the car and making our way to civilisation afoot through several hundred miles of forest. There was no garage to telephone to for assistance. At noon we paused long enough to light a fire and cook a meal of sorts, which we ate seated on logs amid a sea of slimy ooze, with rain pelting down and swarms of voracious black flies and mosquitoes hovering about us. Five hours more of tree felling and we decided that our corduroy causeway was sufficiently solid to get over it with the car. As a matter of fact, we doubted it in our hearts, but we had reached that stage of exhaustion and desperation where we didn’t care what happened. If the car stuck in the mud, well and good. She could stay there and take root and sprout motor-cycles, so far as I was concerned. Backing up so as to get a running start, our driver opened wide his throttle and the car tore at the stretch of home-made corduroy like a locomotive running amuck. Under the terrific impact logs as large as a man’s body were hurled a dozen feet away. The snapping of the limbs and the deafening explosions of the engines sounded like a battle in the Balkans. The car reeled and swayed like a schooner in a squall, and every instant I expected it to capsize; but our driver, clinging desperately to the wheel, contrived, with a skill in driving that I have never seen equalled, to keep it from going over, and, in far less time than it takes to tell it, we had traversed the morass we had spent an entire day in corduroying, and the car, trembling like a frightened horse, stood once again on solid ground. The road over which we had passed looked as though it had been struck by a combined hurricane, cyclone, and tornado.

It was nightfall when we reached the ranch owned by a Swede named Peter Rasmussen. What the man at Blackwater had described as “a swell place” consisted of two small cabins and a group of log barns set down in the middle of a forest clearing. No smoke issued from the chimney, no dog barked a welcome, there was not a sign of life about the place, and for a few minutes we were assailed by the horrid fear that no one was at home. Presently, however, we saw a fair-haired, raw-boned Swede, an axe upon his shoulder, emerge from the forest and come swinging toward us across the pasture. I hailed him.

“Are you Mr. Rasmussen?”

“Ay ban reckon ay am.”

“And can you put us up for the night?” I queried anxiously.

“Ay ban reckon ay can.”

A stone’s throw from the one-roomed log cabin in which Rasmussen and his single ranch-hand, a stolid and uncommunicative Swede, slept and cooked and ate and in the evenings read three-months-old papers by the light of a guttering candle was the bunk house. A bunk house, I might explain, is a building peculiar to the frontier, usually consisting of one large room with two, and sometimes three, tiers of bunks built against the wall. Here travellers may find a roof to shelter them and some hay on which to spread their blankets, for in British Columbia every one carries his bedding with him. From the musty odour which greeted us when Rasmussen threw open the heavy door, this particular bunk house had evidently not been occupied for some time. When we tried to go to sleep, however, we found that the bunks were very much occupied indeed. But after Pete had started a roaring fire in the little sheet-iron stove and when we had spread our “five-point” Hudson Bay blankets on the five-cents-a-pound hay which served in lieu of mattresses and had scrubbed off some of the mud with which we were veneered and had changed our wet clothes for dry ones, the complexion of things began to change from brunette to blonde. Between the intervals of corduroying the road in the morning, I had shot with my revolver half a dozen grouse that persisted in getting in our way. They were almost as large as Plymouth Rocks and we handed them over to Pete to pluck and cook for supper, which was still further eked out by a mess of lake trout brought in by his ranch hand. Up in that region one may have considerable difficulty in obtaining the every-day necessities, such as salt and butter and bread, but he can surfeit himself on such luxuries as venison and grouse and trout. We found that Rasmussen, like so many other settlers in British Columbia, had come from the American Northwest, lured by the glowing prospectuses issued by the provincial government. But he, like so many others, had found that the appalling cost of living had made it impossible, even with hay at a hundred dollars a ton, for him to clear as much as he had in the United States. “So ay ban tank ay go back an’ buy a farm in Minnesota,” he concluded, knocking the ashes from his pipe. And that’s precisely what a great many other discouraged Americans in western Canada are going to do.

For thirty miles or so after leaving Rasmussen’s the road was rough, boggy, and exceedingly trying to the disposition, but it gradually improved until by the time we reached Stony Creek we found ourselves running along a short stretch of road of which a New England board of supervisors need not have felt too much ashamed. The terrible condition of the roads throughout the interior of British Columbia is largely due to the fact that they run for great distances through dense forests where the sun cannot penetrate to dry them up; this, taken with the abnormally heavy rains, serving to make them one long and terrifying slough. At Stony Creek there is a Siwash village consisting of some twoscore log cabins clustered about a mission church whose gaudy paint and bulging dome spoke of its proximity to Alaska and the influence of the Russians. The interior tribes are known as “stick Indians,” referring, of course, to the fact that they dwell in the forest, in contradistinction to those living along the coast, who are known as “salt-chuck Indians.” Squaws in vivid blankets and quill-embroidered moccasins sat sewing and gossiping before their cabin doors, just as womenfolk, be their skins white or black or bronze, sit and gossip the whole world over; bright-eyed, half-naked youngsters gambolled like frisky puppies in the street; bearskins were stretched on frames for drying, and at the rear of every house was a cache for dried salmon, which forms the Siwashes’ staple article of food. Though only one of the braves, who had been out into civilisation, had ever set eyes on a motor-car before, none of them seemed to have any particular fear of it, although, strangely enough, they became as shy as deer at sight of my camera, one picturesque old squaw refusing consecutive offers of twenty-five cents, fifty cents, and a dollar to come out from behind the door where she was hiding and let us take her picture. The old lady’s daughter was willing enough to take a chance, however, for she offered to pose for as many pictures as we desired if we would give her a ride in the car, a proposal to which I promptly acceded. I brought her down the stone-strewn street of the village at a rattling clip, and she not only never turned a hair but asked me to go faster. Given an opportunity, that Siwash maiden would make a real road burner.

It is less than twenty miles from Stony Creek to Fort Fraser and the road proved a surprisingly good one. You must bear in mind, however, that when I speak of a British Columbian road being a good one, I am speaking comparatively. The best road we encountered would, if it existed in the United States, drive a board of highway commissioners out of office, while the worst road we negotiated in a civilised community wouldn’t be considered a road at all—it would be used for a hog-wallow or for duck shooting. The mushroom settlement of Fort Fraser takes its name from the old Hudson Bay post, which is three miles from the town on the shores of Fraser Lake. When we were there the town consisted of half a hundred log and frame buildings, a blacksmith shop, four or five general stores, the branch of a Montreal bank, and the only hotel in the four hundred miles between Quesnel and Hazelton. It was a real frontier town when we were there, and was of particular interest to us because it represented a phase of civilisation which in our own country has long since passed, but now that the railway is in operation its picturesque log cabins will doubtless be replaced by prosaic white frame houses with green blinds, the boards laid along the edge of the road will give way to cement sidewalks, and it will have street lamps and a town hall and its name displayed in a mosaic of whitewashed pebbles on the station lawn and will look exactly like any one of a hundred other towns scattered along the transcontinental lines of railway. Some day, no doubt, I shall pass through it again, this time from the observation platform of a Pullman, and I shall remark quite nonchalantly to my fellow travellers: “Oh, yes, I was up here in the good old days when this was nothing but a cluster of log huts at the Back of Beyond.”

XV

THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED

“Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking
through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.”

XV

THE MAP THAT IS HALF UNROLLED

It wasn’t much of a chain as chains go—it really wasn’t. After a good deal of poking about I had come upon its dozen feet of rusted links thrown carelessly behind the forge in the only blacksmith shop in Fort Fraser. Now, I had an imperative need for a chain of some sort, for our skid chains, as the result of the wear and tear to which they had been subjected on the journey from Quesnel, were on the point of giving out, and it is not wise to attempt to negotiate what the settlers of northern British Columbia, with an appalling disregard for the truth, call roads unless you have taken all possible precautions against skidding. Up in that country of two-mile-high mountains, and mountain roads as slippery as the inside of a banana peel, a side-slip of only a few inches is as likely as not to send car and occupants hurtling through half a mile of emptiness. As the chain would answer our purpose after a fashion, and as we could get nothing better, I told the smith to throw it in the car. After he had attended to a few minor repairs I asked him how much I owed him.

“Well,” he answered, figuring with his pencil on a chip of wood, “the chain comes to sixteen dollars an’ forty cents, an——”

“Hold on!” I interrupted. “Please say that over again. It must be that I’m getting hard of hearing.”

“Sixteen dollars and forty cents for the chain,” he repeated, unabashed.

I leaned against the door of the log smithy for support. “Not for the chain?” I gasped unbelievingly. “Not for twelve feet of rusty, second-hand, five-eighths-inch chain that I could get for half a dollar almost anywhere?”

“Sure,” said he. “An’ I ain’t makin’ no profit on it at that. The freight charges for bringin’ it in from the coast were eighteen cents a pound. But lookee here, friend, I don’t want you to go away from Fort Fraser with the idee in your head that things up here is high-priced, ’cause they ain’t. I wanta do the right thing by you. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—_I’ll knock off the forty cents_.”

* * * * *

Despite the assurances of the blacksmith, by no stretch of the imagination could Fort Fraser be called a poor man’s town. Some of the prices which were asked—and which we paid—in the local store where we replenished our supply of provisions were as follows:

Flour 16 cents per pound

Sugar 25 cents per pound

Tea and coffee $1.00 per pound

Butter 75 cents per pound

Oatmeal 30 cents per pound

Dried fruits 25 cents per pound

Tinned fruits 75 cents to $1.00 per 2-pound tin

Bacon 50 cents per pound

Eggs (when procurable) $1.50 per dozen
(In winter they sell for 50 cents each.)

Potted meats 50 cents to $1.00 per tin

Bread 25 cents per 1-pound loaf
(Farther in the interior 50 cents per loaf is the standard price.)

Potatoes $3.00 per bushel

Chickens $4.00 each

It was my introduction to a scale of frontier prices to which I soon became accustomed though not reconciled. It is only fair to say, however, that this was before the completion of the railway. Now that Fort Fraser is a station on a transcontinental system, the cost of living has doubtless been materially reduced, though I have no doubt that the scale of prices just quoted still obtains and will for a very long time to come in the settlements to the north of the Skeena.

Half-breeds of the Upper Skeena.

“Blackwater Kate.”

SOME LADIES FROM THE UPPER SKEENA.]

The population of Fort Fraser turned out _en masse_ to see us off, the mothers—there were only eight white women in the town when we were there—bringing their children to the cabin doors to see their first motor-car. Did you ever stop to think of the deprivations suffered by these women who dwell along “the edge of things”: no soda-water fountains, no afternoon teas, no bargain sales, no moving-picture shows, and the fashion papers usually six months late? It must be terrible.

We felt quite gay and light-hearted that morning, I remember, for we had slept in beds instead of vermin-infested bunks or in blankets beside the road, we had breakfasted on coffee, eggs, and porridge instead of the customary chicory, “sow-belly,” and prunes, and a feeble sun was doing its best to dry up the rain-soaked roads. Three miles out of Fort Fraser the swollen Nechako lay athwart our path and our troubles once more began, for the ferry was not built to carry three-ton motor-cars, or, indeed, any motor-cars at all, and when it felt the sudden weight of the big machine upon its deck it dipped so alarmingly that for a moment it looked as though the car would end its journey at the bottom of the river. Barring numerous short stretches where the treacherous black mud was up to our hubs, several miles of bone-racking corduroy, two torrential showers, any number of stumps which threatened to rip off our pan and had to be levelled before we could pass, two punctures, a blowout, and a broken spring, the journey from the banks of the Nechako to Burns Lake was uneventful.

Darkness had long since fallen when we zigzagged down the precipitous flank of a forest-clothed mountain, and the beams from our head lamps illumined the cluster of tents, shacks, and cabins which compose the settlement known as Burns Lake. Though the settlement boasted at the time we were there the population of a fair-sized village, notwithstanding the fact that there was not a woman or a child in it, it was nothing more than a railway-construction camp, with its usual concomitants of hash houses, bunk houses, and gambling dens. With the completion of the railway it has doubtless disappeared as suddenly as it arose. Upon inquiring for sleeping quarters, we were taken up a creaking ladder into a loft above an eating-house, where fully twoscore labourers from the south of Europe lay stretched on their backs on piles of filthy straw, snoring or scratching or tossing, in an atmosphere so dense with the mingled odours of garlic, fried pork, wet leather, and perspiration that it could have been removed with a shovel. While we were debating as to whether we should look for less impossible quarters or wrap up in our blankets and spend the night in the car, an American, who, from his air of authority, I gathered to be a foreman, addressed us:

“There’s no place here that’s fit to sleep in,” he said, “but I understand that one of the contracting company’s barges is leaving for Decker Lake at midnight. She’s empty, so they’d probably be willing to carry you and your car. You’d have to sleep in the car, of course, and it’s pretty cold on the water at this time of the year, but, believe me, it’ll be a heap more comfortable than spending the night in one of these bunk houses. There’s no road around the lake anyway, so you’ll have to go by water if you go at all.”

Thanking him for his suggestion, we set out in quest of the manager of the contracting company, whom we found in a log cabin at the entrance to the roughly constructed wharf. It took but a few words to explain our errand and complete arrangements for being transported down the lakes by the barge which was leaving at midnight. Burns and Decker Lakes, which are each approximately ten miles in length and whose shores are lined with almost impenetrable forest, are connected by a shallow and tortuous channel which winds its devious course through a wilderness of swamps, lagoons, and bulrushes known as the Drowned Lands. The firm of Spokane contractors engaged in the construction of the western division of the Grand Trunk Pacific had availed itself of this devious waterway for transporting its men, materials, and supplies to the front, using for the purpose flat-bottomed barges drawing only a few inches of water. Notwithstanding the fact that the pilots frequently lost their way at night and the barges went aground in the shallow channel, the fortunate circumstance of the two lakes being thus connected had saved the company tens of thousands of dollars.

It will be a long time, a very long time, before my recollection of that night journey down those dark and lonely lakes will fade. The deck of the barge was but a few inches wider than the car, so that, as we sat in our accustomed seats, wrapped to the eyes in blankets, it seemed as though the car were floating on the surface of the water. The little gasoline engine that supplied the barge’s motive power was aft of us, and its steady throb, together with the twin swaths of light which our lamps mowed out of the darkness, put the final touch to the illusion. It was an eerie sensation—very. Though a crescent moon shone fitfully through scudding clouds, its feeble light but served to emphasise the darkness and mystery of the forest-covered shores, which were as black as the grave and as silent as the dead. Once some heavy animal—a bear, no doubt—went crashing through the underbrush with a noise that was positively startling in that uncanny stillness. By the time we reached the shallow channel that winds its devious course through the Drowned Lands the moon had disappeared and a thick white fog had fallen on everything, hiding the shores with its impalpable curtain and completely nullifying the effect of our powerful lights. The only sound was the laboured panting of the engine and the scraping of the bulrushes against the bow. How the skipper found his way through that fog-bound channel I can’t imagine, unless he smelt it, for he couldn’t see an object five feet away. Day was breaking above the eastern forest when the barge crunched against the timbers of the wharf at Decker Lake, and I breathed a little prayer of thanksgiving for our safe arrival; for, truth to tell, I had fully expected that the light of morning would find us hard and fast aground in the middle of a swamp. Word of our coming had preceded us and we found that the company’s local manager—an American—had cots and blankets awaiting us in the log shanty that served him as an office. We were shivering with the cold and heavy-eyed from weariness. My word, how we slept! I can’t remember when I have so enjoyed a pillow.

Before leaving Decker Lake we acquired an addition to our party. His name was Duncan and he was an axeman from the forests of Quebec. He had the shoulders of a Clydesdale, the sinews of a mule, and could handle an axe as an artist handles a brush. One of those restless spirits who, with their worldly possessions on their backs, are here to-day and gone to-morrow, he had worked on the railway grade just long enough to earn a little money and, when we arrived, was setting out on foot for New Hazelton, two hundred miles away, to spend it. He was only too glad to work his passage and we were only too glad to have him along—he was so extremely capable that his presence gave us a feeling of reassurance. It was well that we took him along, for before we had left Decker Lake an hour behind us we found ourselves at the beginning of as ugly a stretch of road as I ever expect to set eyes on.

“That’s not a road,” said my companion disgustedly, as he stood looking at the sea of slime. “That’s a lake, and if we once get into it we’ll never see the car again.”